FrontKon Through the Eyes of Superkoders

We put our heads together, and here's a roundup of the talks that caught our attention.

DevTools:
The Swiss Army knife
of developers

Michal Matuška / Superkoders

What's up, folks!
The greeting that kicked off Michal's showcase of tips and tricks for using DevTools.

Quick tips:

• the copy() function, which in the console is used to copy more complex output.
• inline editing and text formatting directly on a website using “document.designMode”.

Vercel:
The all-in-one platform
for your next project

Martin Brychta / Superkoders

The Vercel cloud platform is gaining serious popularity. In his talk, Martin showed how to connect a repo, get a project running, and automate deployment of individual feature branches.

One interesting part was the demo of a preview version of the app that you can comment on online.

Martin also showed us the ins and outs of the pricing model, and what to watch out for so that running it doesn't cost us a fortune. After all, Vercel is a startup backed by VC funds who'll want their money back eventually.
So watch out for that!

From small to big:
How to scale and lead
a developer community

Tomáš Belada

An inspiring talk about leading technology teams across a company's different services.
Have good catering, tell a story, document things, give praise, involve every team member, and be optimists. And above all, never forget to celebrate!

Unfortunately, there's no recording of the talk, but Tomáš shared his slides.

Juniors in IT

A block of talks that offered a really interesting, spot-on look at the challenges of working with junior developers.

How to Land Your First Job in IT?
Yablko (Roman Hraška)

Junior positions don't really exist: companies write requirements into their job postings that even senior specialists sometimes can't meet, or that the junior role doesn't actually need at all.

So what should a junior do if they want to work at their dream company? Above all, make a great first impression.

Want to work with us? Don't send a PDF CV — build a little website, share your GitHub, show off. Tell us why us specifically, what caught your interest, and why you're SUPER?
Anything can be learned.

More on the YouTube channel ROB WEB s yablkom.

This talk was complemented by two more that also focused on juniors:

• Junior as an Investment: Why Have Them on Your Team and How to Train Them by Honza Javorek
• Dev Fiction: Juniors and the Reality of a Development Team by Marta Kirchgessner

Both talks emphasized that what you should really look for in junior people is drive. Honza used a really interesting comparison: Junior = stock, Senior = bond. Are you ready for the risk that comes with much greater potential? Or would you rather stay conservative?

Copilot:
a weapon for
comfort-loving programmers

Hana Klingová

How to use Copilot in practice. One interesting part was the demo of automatic code completion based on surrounding context (it speeds up development significantly, so you could even go for an hour's run afterward), as well as a text explanation of a selected section of code.

Unlike ChatGPT, the model is trained on public GitHub repositories, so when it comes to code, it delivers much better results.

Tips for free alternatives: a VS Code extension - Cody a an AI-first code editor - Cursor.

A look under the hood
of the new INP metric

Zuzana Šumlanská

March 2024. The key date we took away from this talk. That's when Google will replace the FID metric in Core Web Vitals with INP.

What INP actually is, why we should care about it, and above all, how to optimize it — that's what Zuzka's talk was all about.

TIP: Interested in website performance? PageSpeed.one is just launching a new, advanced version of its speed tester.

Project estimates:
why they're always wrong,
and how to make them better?

Martin Macháček

t = (o + 4m + p)/6

A formula worthy of Einstein. An equation that factors in an optimistic, a realistic, and a pessimistic estimate. And the result is… that it still doesn't work out. It's an estimate that gives you direction, not an exact target.

TypeScript
without TypeScript

Riki Fridrich

Do you like Riki? We do, and you should too.
In his talk, Riki showed how you can use types with JsDoc, along with other ways to use types without TypeScript.

We were struck by the option of writing in JsDoc syntax, even within TypeScript, where the main advantage is being able to easily document scripts that can then be compiled with no trouble — which is actually exactly what JsDoc is meant for.

AI: a bubble
or a revolution?

David Grudl

You've probably already heard about this talk. David's reputation precedes him, and the way he managed to explain how a neural network works was genuinely admirable. And thanks to that, we understood that not even AI's own creators fully know how AI works.

React performance
Tips&Tricks

Jakub Miškech

An absolute technical gem among the talks on the partner stage. Memoizing state, callbacks, and entire components is a big topic in React. Using memoization is often debatable, or gets applied at completely the wrong layer of the code.

Jakub covered this topic brilliantly, and during live coding, showed different approaches to handling and preventing unnecessary component re-renders.

We're giving him another round of applause, and it's a shame this talk has no recording.

Design System 1.0

Adam Kudrna

An introduction to semantic versioning, to help us understand why releasing version 1.0.0 is such a big decision — and why we try to put it off at all costs. And also why that's a mistake.

It's better to release your first version as early as possible, since you can't avoid breaking changes anyway, and you'll get feedback for fixing bugs faster.

And that's
far from all

All the recordings will be published on the YouTube channel Frontendisti.cz, so make sure to go check it out.

Animated
transitions

Ahead of FrontKon, we had fun preparing transition sequences between the individual talks. The goal was to introduce the upcoming program, promote our partners, play our frontend jingle, and work in our “Win a Ferrari with Superkoders” competition.

The technology choice was obvious for us — purely frontend. The animations were built with our favorite library, GSAP, which is a joy to work with, and everything went off without a hitch. The final animation came out to exactly 30 lines of code.

Transitions between talks at FrontKon 2023

Finally, we'd like to once again congratulate Ondra Kučera on his new Ferrari. And to everyone who took part in our competition, thank you for joining in, for the great photos, and the wonderful messages.

The conference is behind us. Long live meetups.
We can't wait to meet up together again.