Amazing, inspiring and worth reading!

In the first week of October, I was one of the lucky participants of the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam, 9^th edition. The Fronteers Conference is one of Europe’s largest conferences on front-end web development and took place in the most fantastic venue of Amsterdam: The beautiful Pathé Tuschinski theatre. Close to 600 attendees and many interesting guest speakers created an inspiring event which gave me some major insights in the hot topics of the web development world.

 Here is what you really need to know about what is going on:

* Over the last few years, the way we use the internet has been changing and this change is still going on. Most web content is now accessed via mobile devices. And on those mobile devices, most of the content is found and used via native applications like Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.

* A good alternative for native apps is something called “Progressive Web App” or PWA. A PWA makes use of the latest web technologies such as

• offline browsing (via caching or the Web SQL DB)
• multi-threading (via web workers)
• push notifications

It is also possible now to add a PWA to a user´s home screen. The biggest advantage of PWA, in comparison to a native app, is that you have control over the deployment. There is no need to go via an App Store or Google Store.

* Here is my selection of interesting new features of the web. All well worth the investigation:

• Physical web
• web virtual reality
• web Bluetooth

* Again D3.js proved to be very good in visualizing data.

* Most of the times, security is mainly set up in back-end systems; but handling security on the front-end is just as important.

Two security items – which are not only interesting, but also really easy to set up –  were discussed:

• Content Security Policy (CSP) which can be used against cross-site scripting
• Subresource Integrity (SRI) which prevents hacking via CDN

* A word of advice to all who build web pages which must be accessible all over the globe:

Keep in mind that the internet in lots of countries is not as cheap and fast as it is here, in The Netherlands. In some countries, Opera Mini is the most used mobile browser as it removes a lot of overhead to make pages load faster. When you build web pages for these countries, you need an entirely different way of development.

I really enjoyed this conference and will definitely try to get tickets for next year!