Code & Creativity

Getting feedback from clients, teams, and stakeholders can be terrifying. We’ve all had our designs berated during painful meetings that result in nothing actionable or useful.

This presentation will provide tips and techniques for improving the conversations you have surrounding design with your teams, clients, and organizations.

From the Gigabit Community Fund to events like Maker Party to a buzzing Hive of technologists and educators, there are many moving pieces to Mozilla's growing work in Chattanooga.  Learn how all these parts fit together around one big goal: helping Chattanoogans learn to build, create, and explore  on the web. Find out what's coming next for Mozilla in Chattanooga and how you can join us in empowering Chattanoogans to build the web they want.

I've spent most of my career as part of a team working in an office, making the web a little better each day. When starting my own company, however, one of my goals was to find ways to work with the people I looked up to... who had their own separate offices in different companies spread out all over the world. In order to get started, I had to think differently about a lot of things: my day, my network, my goals, and how I communicate. I've found that working together across the internets has a lot more to do with the ability to share a vision, and a lot less to do with which is the best digital video conference service.

Transforming a government website with 200 content authors, tens of thousands of pages, and close to 100 different content templates into a responsive design system is tricky business. In 2013, we led a project to update and future-proof one of Canada’s fastest-growing municipalities’ main communication channel: Surrey.ca.

The responsive redesign achieved unanimous support from city staff, business stakeholders, council, and the mayor. Mobile traffic has increased by 300% since launch. The improved governance and content workflow processes have facilitated new collaborations between siloed City departments. The Surrey Web Team described this as one of the most positive changes in recent history for the City’s external and internal communication. Most importantly, it created a sense of cohesion through a wholehearted responsive design process.

This project required a new approach. We needed the ability to connect deeply with everyone on our project team: client, vendor, and audience. We needed to get comfortable with imperfection, and fight through difficult moments as a team. We let go of our usual need to protect ourselves and maintain control, and worked together to solve our responsive design and adaptive content problems. Our collaborative creativity was a catalyst for changing the way the City communicates.

Tools are an essential part of our discipline. They afford us the opportunity to execute our work in the ways that we intended. However, the landscape of what is available to carry out our work has changed rapidly over the last decade—from the applications we use to strategize and design, to the frameworks and methodologies we use to build and deploy. These tools have not only influenced our processes, but also the way we approach our discipline. In this presentation, I'll explore the evolution of the design practice and the tools we use to craft our work.

In order to remain relevant in modern societies, libraries need an overhaul. In this talk, Nate Hill will explore the current predicament facing libraries and talk about what they need to do to remain relevant in our fast-paced digital world. He’ll highlight how the Chattanooga Public Library is setting the precedent for libraries nationwide with its move to become an open clearinghouse for municipal data. He’ll also highlight the business and educational opportunities the library is creating for Chattanooga’s tech community.

Lots of designers and developers talk a good game when it comes to designing great user experiences on the web. Sadly, few are aware of the effect poor performance can have on those experiences. In this talk, Daniel will look at a few best practices for increasing front-end user experience used by the Obama 2012 campaign and will bust a few common performance myths along the way.

One of the biggest performance issues facing websites today is the sheer amount of JavaScript needed to power the page. The demand for more interactive and responsive applications has driven JavaScript usage through the roof, and it’s common for large sites to end up with more than 1 MB of JavaScript per page even after minification. But do we really need that much JavaScript? Putting several large websites under the microscope, Nicholas will work his magic and show just how little of that JavaScript is actually necessary. He’ll also discuss JavaScript library design and how some flawed patterns contribute to code bloat and unnecessary memory usage, ultimately wrestling with the dilemma: is it better to write the component yourself rather than using an off-the-shelf one?