What SmashingConf Freiburg 2023 Was Like

Sunday already had me, Jožko, Radek, and Tomáš getting up early so we'd be ready to leave at 8am. Even though early rising was a bit of a challenge for some of us, we all managed to meet up, and shortly after eight we set off on the nearly 9-hour drive from Brno to Freiburg, Germany.

We made it there, recharged our batteries that evening, and arrived at the conference the next morning full of energy.

Amy Hupe
Systems of Harm

Amy has long focused on improving design systems and making them accessible to as wide a range of people as possible. The talk was mainly about the need for diverse teams. Diversity brings in different perspectives from as broad a group of people as possible, which reduces the risk of your product being designed only for the majority user group.

But diversity in teams alone isn't enough if we don't understand its importance and don't recognize other people's needs. It's important not to see this approach as an obstacle to efficiency, but as a given that improves life for all of us. We recommend her article Building conscious design systems, which the whole talk was based on.

Slava Shestopalov
Accessibility in Practice…

Accessibility testing should be standard practice today. But automated accessibility testing alone isn't enough — you need to involve real people in testing and test against real-world scenarios. Automated tools catch systemic issues like missing image alt text or poorly structured headings, but unfortunately they can't test in context — for instance, they won't catch a bad content sequence or issues with events triggered by user interaction. That's simply not something you can test without real users.

Jecelyn Yeen
Modern Web Debugging

Jecelyn explained how source maps work and how dev tools use them. She also shared several useful debugging tips along the way. These included the Quick-source tab, which lets you view a file's contents without switching to another panel in devtools, and the Emulate a focused page command, which keeps an element open that would otherwise close when it loses focus.

Incidentally, we mentioned this command in last year's second installment of our Around the Frontend World series!

The end
of day one

We ended Monday with a walk through the center of Freiburg. It's a beautiful city, and history lovers especially will find plenty to enjoy. There's a lookout point over the whole city just a short walk from the conference venue. And if you need more motivation to climb those brutal hills than just a nice view, there's a pub on the lookout's first floor where you can wash down a hearty dinner with a hefty beer while watching the sun set over the city.

Day
two

On Tuesday, some of us started the day with a morning run. Jožka was already out running from the city center at 7am, exploring the beauty of Freiburg together with other conference attendees.

Zach Leatherman
Web Components

Zach introduced us to the pros and cons of web components. He talked about different ways of writing them, and also showed us ways to avoid rendering-speed issues, which unfortunately still aren't 100% usable across all browsers.

Christine Vallaure
Design Beyond Breakpoints

An inspiring talk for any graphic designer looking to level up their designs. Christine showed us how to create fluid, responsive designs in Figma. Our developer hearts rejoiced, and we're looking forward to more Figma features that will give developers better design handoffs.

Christophe Porteneuve
Things You Don't Know
about JavaScript in 2023

A great talk for any JavaScript fan. Christophe showed off a bunch of new ES2023 features that came out in July of this year, plus what's coming in ES2024 and ES2025. We're including a link to the slides with examples from the talk.

Elliot Jay Stocks
Better Type for the Web

This talk focused on OpenType font features. Elliot showed us what's already usable today — from variable fonts, through font-optical-sizing, font-feature-settings, and font-variant-numeric, all the way to the most interesting one for us, the new text-box-trim, which solves the problem of text sizing relative to its line-height — anyone who's received a design with spacing that didn't account for line-height will definitely appreciate this one. We're including Elliot's checklist for choosing a font.

Miriam Suzanne
Containers, What Do They Know?

A talk we'd already had the chance to see at CSS Day. Container queries largely replace the media queries we've used until now, which didn't do what we actually needed — query an element's dimensions instead of the viewport's. Miriam showed us the properties and plenty of examples of how to use them, all working in every modern browser, plus properties that for now only work in the latest version of Chrome: container style queries and using @property to check parameters. It's definitely worth starting to use container queries today.

Our take

Overall, we were thrilled with both the conference content and how it was all put together. We also all enjoyed the local specialty — wurst. They even had a vegan version, so I stashed my bag of food from home in the trunk and enjoyed getting to eat with everyone else.

The talks are already available to watch online. They're worth watching for anyone looking to grow in frontend development or graphic design. We're already looking forward to what next year has in store.