Table of Contents
Preface
This week, my workplace sponsored a ticket for myself and a few coworkers to attend the Future of Innovation, Technology and Creativity’s (FITC) Web Unleashed 2025 Conference. I am grateful for the opportunity to have attended the conference.
The online schedule did not offer as many sessions as the in-person conference. I think this may have been due to the logistics of having to set up multiple streams.
That being said, I think FITC did a great job in selecting the talks and panels that would go online. I ended up learning a ton of new things. Let’s dive into a few of them!
Things I Learned
The Importance of Curiosity
The overall theme of this conference was to encourage curiosity and learning. The conference opened up with Curious Findings by Jason Pamental. Jason dove into the importance of building a sense of curiosity when learning new subjects. Being curious in the thing you are trying to learn and allowing yourself to make mistakes is a valuable skill set one must foster on their journey if their goal is to truly understand what they are trying to learn.
You can teach people many skills. However, learning how to be curious and following through on that curiosity is what I find to be a deciding factor between those who are good at something and others who are great.
Curiosity is a skill no one can teach you how to develop. You have to find it within yourself to sit through a topic that is difficult and learn it. It may seem difficult at first, but with the power of curiousity and some perserverance, difficult topics become gradually easier with time and you benefit from a lot of personal growth.
Artificial Intelligence
In a world where Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the buzz word of 2020s, it is easy to rely on the technology to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you when learning new skills. I found myself relying on it more as it exploded in popularity in 2023 & 2024.
I mean, why not?
All I needed to do was to feed services like ChatGPT a prompt, and I would get my solution right then and there. I relied on it extremely heavily when building a business, I believe it did more harm than good.
I say this because as I reflect on the early days of starting my buisness, I relied on AI to write my emails, tell me who to reach out to and how to reach out. It fostered a sense of laziness. I didn’t get involved in the process or the people and I wonder how that affected my personal and business growths.
AI is certainly a hot topic in Tech today. During Web Unleashed question and answer session, you could not get through a single question without someone asking about the implications of AI in the respective subject.
In today’s world, I personally avoid the use of AI, as difficult as that may be. AI is baked into everything you use today on the internet. Everything from your internet searches, to your text messages, emails and beyond is summarized by AI. You are no longer forced to read through mundane documents, threads and blog posts to find your answer on the internet.
Bryan Robinson’s talk on AI titled “Does Our Technology Still Work For Us?” was a complete eye opener for me. Bryan dove into the reasons as to why he was not a fan of AI. He prefaced his presentation saying that he was not going to focus on the ethical or environmental factors of AI, but how AI affected us as people.
As AI makes it easier for us to find solutions and make us rely less on our critical thinking skills, it is negatively impacting our ability to be creative and to create. Our brains work very similarly to our muscles, if you don’t train your brain to do a specific task, you lose the ability to do it.
Bryan shared how his usage of AI to create Notion documents negatively impacted his ability to start documents on his own. After creating many documents with AI and reading over them to edit them and ensure clarity, he tried to start up a document himself and found it much more difficult, citing that he didn’t know how to begin.
He then explained how that experience affects building code bases. Bryan cited a study by METR, where they studied a small sample of open source developers and asked them to build projects using and without using AI. They then asked the developers if they thought they developed faster with or without the help of AI. The developers all believed that they developed faster with the help of the technology. In reality, when the developers relied on the usage of AI, they were on average 19% slower than when they developed without it.
See, Bryan’s argument against the use of AI in your code base is that if AI is the one build your code base, you are always working in someone else’s code base. He also states (I’m sure with evidence I can’t find at the moment) that the process of learning and becoming knowledgeable in a specific topic is in the process of being curious and looking for the solution. When we rely on AI, we cut that process out and are handed the answers almost instantly. So while we may have code that works temporarily, it would be a nightmare to maintain because of our unfamiliarity with the code base.
There is one thing to note about this study, the control group is extremely small. 19 developers is not enough of a sample size to get conclusive evidence. These developers are experts in open source development and can find their solutions effectively. More studies need to be done for us to get a better picture. However, based on personal experiences, I would have to agree with Bryan and the findings of the study.
Adding A Touch Of Whimsy To Your Websites
One of the most entertaining talks of the event was the on hosted by Josh Comeau. Josh built out a heart button that would react to your click differently every time you pressed on the heart.
While the presentation was extremely informative and entertaining, that was not the thing that caught my attention. On Josh’s landing page of his website, there is a rainbow that appears in the hero section. If you play arond with the rainbow for a few seconds, a gear appears. If you press that gear you can alter the rainbow.
The interesting part appears in the text of the modal. It reads “This panel allows you to tweak the art. These changes are applied for all users on the site. There are X other people here right now.” X updates with the number of people concurrently on his website at the time.
That got me thinking. How does he do that? There must be a websocket of sorts. But how do you build out a component like this that updates automatically across other people’s browsers live and still maintain performance. This technology is not new. The implementation of the technology is what has me excited.
Since learning about Josh, I’ve started reading his blog posts, and I hope to learn a thing or two about CSS animations and implement it on my website in an attempt to make things a bit more fun.
Thinking Performance
I really enjoyed learning about improving the performance of your applications by relying more on HTML, CSS and JavaScript and less on frameworks for your web applications. In Simon MacDonald’s talk No Frameworks For Old Devs, Simon demonstrated his implementation of Web Components to do what frameworks abstract for us.
Simon is Performance Engineer. His method to build web applications nowadays starts with building out an index.html and then starts adding CSS and JavaScript when he needs it. Building out multi-page applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript was a big hurdle for myself, until Simon introduced me to the View Transition API.
The View Transition API is a simple mechanism that transforms your single-page applications into a multi-page application, animating the transition from page to page. Using the 3 lines of CSS outlined below, Simon showed us how smooth transitions can be on your web application and keeping it free of bloat.
@view-transition {
navigation: auto;
}Simon’s talk was so encapsulating that I immediately wanted to ditch this website and rebuild it from the ground up, imitating his technique of starting with an index.html file and building up from there.
Fortunately, I quickly realized that I would not benefit from back tracking to rebuild what I already have built. A short conversation with my coworker helped me realize that I can still implement Simon’s learnings of thinking about performance by building on this website while relying less on frameworks and seeking solutions with web components first.
However, if I ever want to test out the view transition api in the futue, I can build out a small application as a side project using the guide in the MDN Documentation.
Accessibility
I was pleasently surprised to learn many of the developers that I mentioned throughout this blog post kept accessibility in the front of mind. Across the board, developers were in agreement that you cannot slap on accessibility at the end of your development cycle and you must consider it when building.
Thinking like a Performance Engineer is accessibility because you reduce load times of your applications and you use up less resources of your user’s devices. Developing CSS animations instead of relying solely on JavaScript also meant users can still interact with your website while your scripts load or if they fail to load.
With regards to animating your website using CSS animations, Josh recommends the prefers-reduced-motion CSS media query and the matchMedia API to check if users have animations turned off on their browsers before introducing animation to your webpage. These two methods can help you respect the way the user chooses to experience the web.
An exmaple of implementing the prefers-reduced-motion media query in CSS:
/* Turn off all animations */
@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce){
* {
animation: none !important;
transition-duration: 0s !important;
}
}An exmaple of implementing the matchMedia API in your JavaScript:
const noAnimations = window.matchMedia(`(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)`)
// Check to see if the user doesn't have animations turned off
if (!noAnimations){
// Insert your animation logic here
}Next Steps
From this point forward, I am going to start baking in some of these ideas in my code as I develop code both personally and professionally. I am excited to see the quality, performance and whimsy of my code improve. Implementing CSS animations is what excites me most. I am currently reading through some of Josh’s blogs and brushing up on my SVG knowledge and hopefully I will have some of his teaching implemented in the upcoming months.
I really enjoyed attending the FITC’s Web Unleashed Online Conference. In the future, I hope to attend more of these events in personto connect with people in person!
