Latest Event News

Just one week left until the early bird price runs out! A reminder that ticket sales close on Friday 31st July and will re-open on Thursday 3rd September at the standard price of £249+VAT.

Welcoming Niels Leenheer to FFConf in the second of our "Meet the Speakers" series who will be talking about how "CSS is Doomed".

Niels's origin story:

I created my first website in 1994. More than 30 years later I am still creating stuff for the web – with slightly more divs and JavaScript, and a bit less tables, frames and image maps. The web has taken an amazing journey and I am so happy to be a part of it.

We asked: You built your first website in 1994: tables, frames and image maps and all. What's something today's CSS lets you do that would have felt like pure magic back then?

The last 30 years on the web have been a constant onslaught of pure magic. If you'd asked me 20 years ago, I would have said absolute and relative positioning. Fifteen years ago, it would have been media queries and flexbox. Then came custom properties, and Grid, and :has(). But right now? I still can't believe we finally have container queries and anchor positioning.

And while we complain about the web being overshadowed by frameworks and held back by the whims of browser vendors, the reality is that developing for the web has never been as amazing as it is today.

Read Niels' full interview and meet Niels and all our speakers on 13th November!

From Our Archive

If you can't wait until November for Niels' talk, then check out Martin Kleppe's talk in 2015 on Code Calligrams

Martin explores "code golf": solving a programming problem in as few characters as possible and the related practice of code calligrams by arranging code into a shape so that the source itself is also an image.

Martin goes on to explain why he does this:

it forces you to go over the limit than you are used to… you set yourself a size limit and once you hit this, you set a new target. It makes you learn the language, use your curiosity and find new aspects to solve the problems. It's fun to set these limits and be creative outside of external pressures, just creating for yourself.

Community News

As the theme of this week's newsletter is mad science/cursed code/what-whaaa!? We thought we'd share a few links from the web that makes us scratch our head and go "oh wow".

• CSS-DOS - a pure CSS implementation of DOS…we think, "morbidly obese 300+ MB of spec-compliant CSS" 🫃
• Tiny Emulators, all running in the browser via canvas, for those of you that love a vintage machine - including raw CPUs of the 6502 and the Z80 (for 11 on the geek dial) 🤓
• A TrueType QR code font because… QR codes are … cool? 🤷