Mozilla Developer Roadshow Asia Smashing Magazine

(upbeat music)

Hi everyone, how we doing tonight?

Who wants to go home now?

Oh, nobody. Alright.

Um, yeah, so it's been great for me

to come back to Singapore

I came last time, I think one year ago

so for exactly four hours

so I'm very happy to be back

So thank you so much for having me

Now, this talk (pause) is dirty

Well, it's not THAT dirty

but what I want to show

is a couple of techniques and a couple

of things that we've been working on

that we've been doing, and that maybe you

will be profiting from in your projects.

But it requires me to know

that you feel comfortable with dirty code

Who feels comfortable with dirty code?

Who doesn't feel comfortable with dirty code?

Who just doesn't like to raise hands?

(Audience laughs) Just in general?

OK, a couple of people, alright.

So what you are going to see

you hopefully will not be able to forget

but I don't take any credit or responsibility

Now this is me

this is how things used to look like

back in the day. They change all the time.

I co-founded this little website a while back.

Eleven years ago actually.

This has grown, has become red.

We won't talk about this, that's ok, but

what I want to talk specifically about today

is about techniques which we learn

from building this

And I want to cover half of this talk

being mostly design, so if you are a designer

that's probably going to be for you

and the other half is going to be mostly

about front-end techniques that we learn

Both in performance both CSS, JavaScript

whatever you want, right

so we'll get to that

But we'll start with design

and more specifically visual design

and we had a really remarkable

talk just before us

I feel like this is indeed what is

happening on the web

It feels very similar

It feels very much the same

It lacks a bit of personality

Who could use a bit more personality

But the question is how do we

frame personality into our design

How do we, you know

inject this kind of personality in there

and I think it has to do with

the way of how we perceive design,

how we perceive the workflow,

the design workflow.

Very often you will find

This actually being true.

I have to navigate a little bit

Right, that's better

The design process is weird and

complicated in many ways

because it involves people and systems

and organizations which often are

weird and complicated.

I'm not sure about Asia

or South East Asia, it's totally true

in Europe. Totally true in Europe.

So because why? Well because

many managers tend to think

that this is a creative process

You start somewhere and go

and you're iterate and iterate and

iterate and iterate iterate iterate

and at some point you hit the

finish line and you are done

or you are dead, well why not both

But, most of the time it's not

like that at all. I think that most

of us here sitting in the room

will agree that the creative process

be it design, be it development,

be it design-opment or design-orment

Whatever you want to call it

Because most people are doing both

well we always try to explore,

we explore options.

We try to find the best option

and in the end, we might hit a dead-end, right?

And we need to recover from this dead-end

by continuing somewhere else.

And this can be very time-consuming

and very, very expensive.

So what do we instead?

We tend to rely on patterns.

We tend to rely on generic solutions, right?

How many of these websites are you

designing or building today?

Because there (inaudible) only two, right?

Well, some of them they have a difference