Your Development Speakers for Big Design 2012

We added a stellar line-up of speakers in the Development track for Big Design 2012. You may want to stay and watch them all!

Get your tickets today!

Thomas Phinney. CSS3 Web Typography Changes Everything

Web typography has been changing dramatically thanks to browser support for @font-face and server-based fonts. Web designers now have thousands of font choices where they once had just a dozen. But beyond @font-face, CSS 3 introduces myriad new OpenType typographic controls, being supported by the latest browsers. These OpenType features bring to web design the level of typographic refinement that print designers have enjoyed for the past decade. Beyond that, OpenType can do things you’ve never imagined fonts could do, from translating text to self-censorship, from building charts to predicting the future!

Ken Tabor. Surviving CSS by Thriving with SAS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a core technology of the Internet. All web sites rely on this presentation language for displaying its pages. CSS is incredibly tricky. It’s seemingly built well for no single audience confounding artists and frustrating programmers alike. Without planning a project’s CSS can turn into a proverbial mess of spaghetti code because it has no formal structure as traditional programming languages.

Lovely additions to CSS3 such as drop-shadows and gradient-backgrounds turn ugly given a myriad of browser-specific tags. There are ways to survive and thrive developing CSS. In this talk we introduce SASS, a freely available open-source tool that sits on top of CSS. SASS adds key features to CSS such as reuse, logical structure, inheritance, and functions.

SASS is detailed during this presentation showing how it can help solve significant shortcomings of CSS easily and completely. Best practices earned from real-world use cases are summarized for the audience in illustrative slides and copious demos.

Caleb Jenkins. Practical Automated Testing Steps to Evolve Your UX

Automated Unit Tests are your first line of defense to reducing technical debt, increasing code quality and efficiency. Often the UI layer is never tested through Unit Tests. Come learn practical patterns for testing your UI layer and how to drive a consistent User Experience for your customers with Test Driven Development. We’ll discover that TDD is not a fancy practice for the coding elite, but an understandable, obtainable and practical approach to delivering value for every developer, and how, when done properly, will increase communication and design between the business stake holders and developers.

Come learn practical approaches to Test Driven Development and BDD from the author of Automated Unit Tests in the Wrox Book “Real World .NET, C# and Silverlight – Indispensable Experience from 15 MVPs”.

Michael Woods. Augmented Reality: Utility Beats Hype

Augmented reality has made some bold promises to change our world. While movies and fiction have captured the public’s imagination, the [unaugmented] reality is that augmented reality experiences have varied widely. Using augmented reality as an example, we’ll discuss how to safely ride the roller coaster of hype that accompanies the launch of exciting new technologies like augmented reality and how to gracefully transition a technology from flash-in-the pan to commercially-viable, real-world tool.

By understanding the hype around augmented reality, we can learn to evaluate emerging technologies and plan our projects for the best chance of succeeding in the long-term. As some early adopters have used it, augmented reality bites. But it doesn’t have to. To make good business sense of interactive ideas, emerging technologies should pass the practical sniff test; fail it and you risk producing a mere gimmick, but passing it can yield genuinely useful technology.

Kevin Schumacher. Back to the Drawing Board, Again &Again (with Agile UX)

Adding UX practices inside a fast-moving and strict agile environment is one of the biggest challenges in the development community. Taking into consideration the research and planning, as well as the preliminary testing needed to develop sound foundations for design reasonings for every UI decision, a UX practitioner can seriously slow down the agile process in a well-oiled dev team. In addition Lean Principles and Methodologies like Kanban are being introduced at greater levels at both enterprise and startup making design decisions increasingly more complex.

Aaron Hursman. Pencils Down: Stop Designing, Start Developing

Designers can’t help themselves. We are, by nature, perfectionists. We create, then throw away. We create again, tweak continuously, and fine-tune a design indefinitely. Why can we not stop ourselves? Time passes us by, missing deadlines. In turn, developers anxiously wait for us to finish, so that they can work off of something that has been solidified. During this session, you will learn strategies that will push your design to that “good enough” stage, so you will know “when to say when” and move from designing interfaces to developing them.