Breaking Good Habits—The Digital Barn

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

Yesterday—11 February, 2012—I gave my first talk ever to the attendees of The Digital Barn, a small independent conference organised by Matt Watson and Kimb Jones.

My talk, Breaking Good Habits, took a look at how we as front-end developers often, and usually with the best of intentions, solve the wrong problems for the wrong people, causing ourselves maintainability nightmares in the name of ‘best practice’.

I looked at common misconceptions and offered more practical and sensible alternatives in the shape of OOCSS, and more.

I’d really like to thank everyone that turned up, but specific thanks go to:

• Nick Payne—moral support (and chauffeur).
• Matt and Kimb—for organising the event and providing me with such a great opportunity.
• Bruce Lawson—for being an absolute gent, easing my nerves before the talk and saying nice things about it afterward.
• Nicole Sullivan—for changing the way I build websites and giving me, indirectly, knowledge I was able to share in my talk.

Slides

My slides and personal notes are available online but if you are going to Front-Trends 2012 I implore you please do not look at them. I shall be reworking/repurposing this talk for my appearance in Warsaw.

• Slides on Speaker Deck
• Notes and original Keynote file on GitHub

Thanks all who turned out, I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and The North needs more mini-conferences!!!

For more info on the conference itself the super-awesome Leanne Buchan did a feature with me on The Culture Vulture.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

By Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.