June 2023 - Bristol 🇬🇧 Pixel Pioneers

The annual dev migration of 2023 led the 5app devs from London, Berlin to conglomerate under sunny June-sky in Bristol. Three missions were assigned to the team: eat as many pancakes as possible, be victorious at the dev pub quiz und sponge up knowledge at the Pixel Pioneers conference.

Whilst the victory at the dev pubquiz was more a victorious display of team-bonding instead of knowledge, the other missions were exceptionally completed.

Pancakes were devoured in form of French galettes, Sri Lankan hoppers and American pancakes and were used as fuel to get the dev brains into optimal learning mode.

Even though Pixel Pioneers is a conference aimed mainly at front-end developers and UX/UI designers, all devs joined and luckily not all talks were purely about frontend development.

AI was a recurring topic and picked up in talks, e.g. in Christian Heilmann's "Web Development in the Times of AI" and Umar Hansa's Modern "CSS Development and Debugging", especially with regards to ways to utilise Github Copilot in a smarter and more efficient ways (whilst not taking it's "knowledge" for being correct).

Some helpful tips for creating PRs with copilot

Note: this feature is currently in the Waitlist stage

copilot:all showcases all the different kinds of content in one go. copilot:summary expands to a one-paragraph summary of the changes in the pull request. copilot:walkthrough expands to a detailed list of changes, including links to the relevant pieces of code. copilot:poem expands to a poem about the changes in the pull request.

Internationalisation and what i18n means outside of merely translating strings into different languages was talked about by Chui Chui Tan in "Designing for Your International Audiences".

Ire Aderinokun spoke about how CSS and JavaScript can contribute, negatively or positively, to accessibility in "CSS, JavaScript and Accessibility".

A few interesting accessibility links

• Frend - A collection of accessible, modern front-end components
• A Dao of Web Design by John Allsopp
• Every layout - Learn to write better, resilient CSS
• Utopia - Elegantly scale type and space without breakpoints
• Inclusive Components - A blog trying to be a pattern library

Design topics were elaborated upon by Jeremy Keith in "Declarative Design" and Morgane Peng in "We’re Not Doing Design Systems Properly and That’s Okay".

Webdesign links

• Why the Traditional Web Design Model is Broken
• Be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager

All in all, as recapped by ChatGPT:

In summary, Pixel Pioneers 2023 in Bristol offered a diverse range of topics, including web development, design, accessibility, and AI's influence on the industry. Attendees enjoyed pancakes, team bonding, and valuable knowledge-sharing.

Participants (left to right): Rob, Jack, Sarah, Andrew, Ben, Mejsun, Dion