Meet our speakers (part 1), Emoji 📅 day, and 128 Kilobytes Later
Latest Event News
Meet our speakers! We are welcoming a Brighton local, Hellen Ward, to talk about "Bias in our products: The case for diversity in tech".
What’s your origin story?
I studied drama, which inevitably led to a series of sparkling roles in admin. Somewhere between playing calendar Tetris and speed typing minutes, I thought: "What if I taught myself to code?"
Somehow this became my new career and I haven't looked back.
For someone who wants to advocate for diversity and inclusion but feels powerless, what’s one small, tangible step they can take?
One of the most impactful things someone can do is be an active ally - especially if you’re someone with influence in a space where others are underrepresented.
Some of the people who helped me most along the way were those who recognised their privilege and used it to support me in my learning, make me feel welcome in their team and and take my perspective seriously.
You don’t need to have all the answers - just the willingness to listen, support, and speak up when it counts.
You can read Hellen's full interview questions and responses in our latest articles.
Join us on 14th November and learn more from Hellen and our other speakers.
From Our Archive
Happy World Emoji Day! 🙄🎂🥳
From the depths of FFConf archive, check out Mariko Kosaka's Power of Emoji talk from 2016.
Mariko brings a wonderful insight into the history and context to a something we use everyday without thinking.
Did you know that emoji means "picture (e çµµ) letter (moji æ–‡å—)" in Japanese?
Community News
We wanted to highlight Mike Hall's excellent account of 128 kilobytes:
The entire application (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts) had to fit within a 128KB page budget. This wasn’t arbitrary, it represented what we could realistically load on an EDGE connection within a reasonable time. Any page requested with a cold cache had to stay within this budget.
It's a worthwhile read. For me, Remy, I've got a lot of similar experiences from the last few decades. Mike touches on a lot of different techniques, some of which still apply today - certainly the approach and thinking does.
Specifically Mike's closing notes are absolutely at the heart of our work:
Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible.