Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Can I break my curse?
1.9k Plays1 year ago
This week, I talked about whether or not I can break the curse of every conference that I get invited to being cancelled 😅. So far, I’m four for four, but I have a chance to break it to start off 2024, when I’ll be speaking at THAT Conference in Rolling Rock, Texas!
Also, I'm still a little sick, sorry if I'm talking a bit funny 🤧
What I’ve been up to this week:
- The State of HTML
- 5 tips to getting better at CSS
- Taking on a CSS Battle
- The easy way to make sense of complex selectors
Other awesome stuff around the web:
- Maxi Ferreira’s Astro + View Transitions demo with a 3D model of a person walking that persists across pages
- Codrops article by Igor Penaque exploring the basics of View Transitions with Astro
Find me elsewhere on the web:
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Topic Unveiling
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, my friend and friends, and welcome to my podcast, General Musings. My name is Kevin, and this podcast is an audio version of my weekly Sunday newsletter. This week, I'm going to be talking about my curse, or rather, can I break my curse? And of course, this might make you start wondering, Kevin, what curse are you even talking about?
The 'Curse' of Canceled Conferences
00:00:20
Speaker
Now, this is definitely a little bit in jest, but it is the one where every single conference I get invited to talk to gets canceled.
00:00:27
Speaker
Now I don't get invited to tons of conferences, I haven't really made my mark on the public speaking realm yet, but so far I'm actually four for four. I've actually long thought about getting into public speaking and doing conference talks and things like that, you know, breaking away from just being in my office all day long and actually meeting some people seemed like a
00:00:46
Speaker
something that would be kind of interesting and fun to do.
First Conference: A Virtual Experience
00:00:49
Speaker
But I never really actually put myself out there to do it. And until now, I actually haven't at all. But I have been invited to a few different talks just from people wondering if it would be something I would be interested in. Back in 2020, I actually got my very first invite and it was during the height of the pandemic. So it was going to be a virtual one, but it was still a really exciting opportunity because even though it was a new conference,
00:01:13
Speaker
It was from a group that had been running a successful React conference for a number of years, and now they were trying to break out into something a little bit more broad and just front-end in general. The lineup that they had was just mind-blowing to me. There was people like Andy Bell, Miriam Suzanne, Eric Meyer, and there was others too that I'm not remembering at the moment, but I remember seeing the list of speakers that were there, and my name was on that list, and it was a full-on imposter syndrome for me at the time, and it was something that I was really excited for.
00:01:42
Speaker
and then it all just fell apart. I don't even know really why it fell apart exactly because communication from them dried up a little bit but it was relatively early on in the COVID days and I think that you know the idea of sponsorships for virtual conferences wasn't something that had been worked out maybe as well as they were hoping and I don't think they were able to get the funding that they were expecting to from sponsors and I think the logistics of pulling it off were also something that was a lot more difficult than was initially planned because they'd always done in-person which is
00:02:11
Speaker
The logistics of in-person events is kind of crazy, but if you go from being big in-person events to doing a big virtual one, that's a really big difference. And I think just the combination of different factors led to it not happening. Obviously that sucked, but you know, so be it, life goes on.
The Frontiers Conference Cancellation
00:02:28
Speaker
And then over time since then,
00:02:29
Speaker
I was actually invited to two more conferences. These two were actually for in-person events, but smaller ones that had smaller budgets and without as many big names. But that was actually fine for me because, you know, I've done public speaking in a way before. I used to teach in the classroom to 30 to 40 people, but that's definitely not the same thing as standing up on a stage and talking to an auditorium full of people. So the idea of a smaller event with smaller crowds and things like that seemed like a pretty good idea, especially to get started with.
00:02:59
Speaker
but neither of them worked out in the end either. So neither one of them was an established event and as I said they were smaller in scale so I sort of knew from the get-go that there was a possibility that they wouldn't happen just because it's really hard to get conferences off the ground and up and running and stuff and there's a lot that goes into actually running them but
00:03:18
Speaker
You know, I had high hopes, but of course life happens. And that was at that point three for three. And then there was the one that I thought was actually going to break the curse, because at that point I started feeling like a little bit like, well, everyone that I'm getting invited to here isn't working out. And then the most recent one was Frontiers.
00:03:36
Speaker
which was actually a really well-established conference that invited me to speak. And they've been running since 2008. So it felt, you know, annual ones from 2008, they went virtual during the pandemic, that worked out. They'd actually had one in-person one after that, that was a little bit smaller as the, everything was, you know, changing and going back to normal a little bit. So I had really high hopes for that one as well. And there was other big names associated with it and people that I was looking forward to meeting with. And once again, just being honored to be speaking alongside with.
00:04:05
Speaker
But as you probably know from where this story started and where we've been going this whole time, it invariably had to cancel as well, sadly.
Pandemic's Impact on Conferences
00:04:14
Speaker
And it was a shame. I was really looking forward to it. But I also realized that since the pandemic, the landscape for conferences has shifted and it has changed.
00:04:23
Speaker
And on top of that, they're also really expensive to attend, or that actually might be part of the reason why the landscape has shifted a little bit. Because of the price, most people going to conferences are going on company dollars, right? They're not going on their own dime because it's just expensive to attend. Especially this year with the way the economy is going in 2023, so far a lot of businesses have been cutting expenses in general. Their ad spends are down and
00:04:48
Speaker
any sort of extra things they can cut have been cut and so they're cutting their money for things like going to expensive conferences for some of their employees and there we have it because of that I haven't you know the frontiers got cancelled and it sort of has I think maybe changed the landscape a little bit because there was even something more local to me that had to get cancelled at one point and a few other things that I wasn't directly involved in but that I was sort of looking forward to that just they haven't got off the ground or they're
00:05:14
Speaker
sort of refiguring things out and delaying things. And I've been hearing that a lot with some of the ones that aren't like the top conferences that everybody knows and goes to.
Anticipation for the THAT Conference
00:05:22
Speaker
So despite all of that, I'm wondering if I can break my curse for 2024. And we're going to find out pretty early in the year because I've been invited to speak at that conference. Yes, it's that conference, T-H-A-T. It's the name of the conference, all caps.
00:05:39
Speaker
and it's going to be taking place at the end of January in Round Rock, Texas, which is just outside of Austin. That is a little bit different from the other conferences that I was lined up to speak at than because, well, first of all, it runs over full three days, which means it's like a really big conference in that sense of like the amount of speakers that are there. There's multiple tracks the entire time as well. So there's tons of speaking going on and it's at a pretty large scale in terms of
00:06:04
Speaker
you know, the amount of information that's going to be going on and how long it goes on for. Because a lot of conferences these days are like one, maybe two days. It's also taking place at a resort that's basically a giant indoor water park, which is kind of cool. They have a big Texas barbecue night one time, they have a games night another night, and just a lot of socialization and other things that are planned, which a big part of conferences is the social aspect of it, but they also really, that conference really leans into that idea
00:06:33
Speaker
and tries to organize things around that socialization as well, which is really awesome. So I'm really looking forward to attending that. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm also looking forward to meeting some of the people that I've been interacting with a long time online with, and I finally get to meet them in person. I know James Q. Quick is going to be there, Danny Thompson is going to be there, Shashi Lo, who I've done some live streams with, is going to be there, and a whole bunch of other people.
00:06:56
Speaker
So yeah, I think it's going to be a really fun event.
The Cost of Attending Conferences
00:06:59
Speaker
And if you happen to be going or even if you're just in the Austin area or anything like that, during the time I'm there, it's really like the last couple of days of January and the first couple of days of February, send me a DM. Let me know that you're going to be around and stuff. And I'd love to meet up and say hi. I think that's one of the reasons I'm going is to finally meet people in person after all.
00:07:19
Speaker
But circling back to this idea of conferences and just in general, not specific to any of the ones I'm going to. And before we get to the links that I'll be sharing for this week, when I was invited to the Frontiers conference, I let everybody know that I was going to be going to it. And a lot of people replied mentioning the price. And as I've already alluded to a little bit earlier on,
00:07:38
Speaker
the price of attending a conference can be really expensive to the point of being prohibitive and you know just you can't afford to go and i definitely know the feeling because i've wanted to attend several in the past that i just haven't had the means to actually be able to go and attend of course when the frontiers when we came up people were just saying like how is why is it so expensive or how can they justify a price that's so high
00:08:01
Speaker
And while it's a little bit different from meetups, which are often free or very low ticket prices, and some meetups can be really nice lineups and really big and everything, but the reality is most of the time these conferences, the cost of running them is insanely high. The Frontiers team shared some of their numbers with me and I was just mind-blowing on how expensive it can be from renting the area. You have to pay for the venue itself, which they are not cheap.
00:08:26
Speaker
Then on top of that, you have to have your staff that are going to be there and on hand to help people out. And you probably need more staff than you realize. And just basically for the companies or the people running them, the price gets out of hand insanely fast and they need to be able to pay all of those things to be able to make these happen.
00:08:44
Speaker
So if you do want to attend that conference, it looks like it's something that you'd be interested in that you'd want to go to or maybe you don't want to go to that, but there's other conferences you've heard of or seen about over time that really have piqued your interest and you'd love to be able to go to them. Well, if you currently have a job in the industry, you should find out if your company has a budget for that type of thing.
00:09:03
Speaker
I mentioned that a lot of companies have cut their spending and that is the reality of it but a lot of companies still do support and help support employee training and going to conferences is something that they often are very happy to do to help their employees first of all get to know other people and meet other people within the industry and also to learn from what you learn when you go to a conference.
Exploration of Astro and View Transitions
00:09:24
Speaker
But if you don't ask, you won't find out. So you might as well go and ask. Worst case scenario is they say, you know, maybe we've cut our budget for this year, but we'll have a new one for next year. Ask then or we've already spent our budget for this year, but ask next year. Or sometimes year end is when they have budgets that they need to go through. So this time of year is a good time to ask potentially. But worst case, they just say we don't we don't budget towards those things and nothing changes. But if they do have something, you might as well take advantage of it.
00:09:51
Speaker
And now we're going to completely change topics as we talk about the other awesome stuff from around the web section of this podcast. And for this one, I'm going to be focusing a little bit on Astro because as you might know, if you've been following me for a while, I absolutely love Astro. I think it's a fantastic solution.
00:10:09
Speaker
And in one of their big updates, more recently, they really leaned heavily into view transitions. And if you don't know about view transitions, it's basically a way that we can make a regular web page feel sort of like a single page app where we can actually persist certain things across different pages and have an animation from one page view to another. And they're really, really cool.
00:10:29
Speaker
I've been working on a few demos with them. They're not ready for prime time yet. It's going to be a little while before I publish those demos, but I'm just having a lot of fun building stuff with view transitions and doing some cool stuff with it. And one of the nice things with Astro though, is it comes pre-packaged with a polyfill. So it means that it can work across older browsers as well and they don't get left behind, which can be really nice.
00:10:51
Speaker
And yeah, they've done a lot of stuff. I just encourage you to look into it a little bit more if you want to sort of lean into that side of things because it's really awesome and they've made it really easy to do. And the reason I'm even bringing this up at all is because they've actually been sharing some cool examples of stuff that people have been building using Astro and Vue transitions. And one of them
00:11:12
Speaker
It's gotten a lot of traction on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it. And it's a demo that's been done by Maxi Fieri looking at, he actually used a 3D model of this person walking and they're just like, chilling out, walking. But when you switch to the different pages, it actually keeps, the model keeps on walking, the model's there the entire time, and it actually rotates between the different page views and it's doing its thing.
00:11:35
Speaker
It sort of zooms in and out a little bit. It's really, really awesome. It's this animated 3D model that persists and changes through each page. And it's not something you'd expect to actually be three separate pages. It looks like it should just be a single page app with some JavaScript magic going on. But it's three separate pages that transitions between each. It's just simply incredible.
00:11:56
Speaker
And something like that might feel a little bit advanced, but if you want to learn more about how the view transitions work with Astro, Codrops has put out an article recently. It's by Igor Penak, and it explores how to use view transitions with Astro, and it really starts from the ground up, from the very beginning and walks the way through it, using sort of a shopping cart type of experience. It's a really well done article.
00:12:19
Speaker
So it's a really great example to get started with because it just works really well. And yeah, I definitely start there maybe before you start getting into the more advanced stuff, but it's a nice exploration of
Enhancing CSS Skills and Tools
00:12:29
Speaker
the topic. I will eventually have video tutorials of my own on the topic. Probably the first ones won't be using Astro to just be using the vanilla approach to it all, but I
00:12:38
Speaker
use Astro for a few of my personal projects, and I'm going to be hopefully implementing some of these in the not too distant future, even on probably a very simple way, but just a nice little extra touch that we can add to our websites in it. It just changes the complete feel of things and save the page completely reloading. They're super nice to the view transitions.
00:12:56
Speaker
but speaking of links and speaking of things that i've been doing or i plan on doing this week i did do a video on the state of html survey and actually i did not do that this week i did that last week but i forgot to mention it or i didn't forget i'd already recorded the podcast and then i did the video after and posted it
00:13:13
Speaker
So, you know, I highlighted going through the survey, but you might be saying like a state of HTML survey. Do we really need to know the different parts of HTML? Like what is there to discover there? It's just HTML. But I actually only knew and had used about 50% of the stuff that they asked about in the survey.
00:13:30
Speaker
So not only do I think it's a good idea to take these surveys in general, just so we can get a good idea of the state of where people are in their knowledge and use of a lot of features, whether it's state of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, there's the React one, GraphQL. There's a bunch of them now, but I think they're great initiatives. But I also think they're great learning tools and they have a reading list feature. You can add.
00:13:51
Speaker
things that you haven't heard of to your reading list if you want to know more and then they provide you with a whole bunch of links and other stuff at the end. So anyway, you can check out that video and then do the state of HTML survey. And then moving on to the next video that I did put out this week, it was taking a look at five different tips for getting better at CSS.
00:14:08
Speaker
It's definitely more of a beginner video that just looks at why people struggle with CSS a little bit and talks about five different ideas and approaches and stuff we can do to help get better at it and improve at CSS and our understanding of CSS as well.
00:14:23
Speaker
And near the end of that video, actually, I mentioned explorations and having fun and doing cool stuff. Just, you know, breaking out of your comfort zone and doing sort of CSS experiments and stuff. And sometimes it can be hard to think of good ideas to experiment with. So in my next video, I took on a CSS battle because they're always fun. And that's the main reason I did it. But it also.
00:14:44
Speaker
is one of the things I recommended doing in the previous one because while CSS battles aren't something that you would definitely actually use those skills directly as something you'd put in production. You just create an SVG instead of drawing stuff with CSS.
00:14:59
Speaker
The things you can learn by doing things like CSS Battles is amazing. You use CSS in ways you weren't using it before. You're trying new things. You're using different skills than you would normally use. And you learn lots of little tips and tricks and other stuff along the way. I used sort of one over and over again in that CSS Battle actually for centering something on the screen really quickly. And there's probably a few other little quick tricks and tips that I used in those too. So if you want, you can obviously check out.
00:15:29
Speaker
That video, and if you're into shorter content, my last video of the week was an easy way to make sense of complex selectors using VS Code. And that's just because VS Code actually has a really easy way to visualize CSS selectors. You just hover on top of the selector and it shows you what it's selecting. It's not actually showing you the exact thing in
Conclusion and Additional Resources
00:15:49
Speaker
your HTML that it's selecting, but it's just saying like this selector would actually select anything that sort of falls into this and it gives you a little example.
00:15:56
Speaker
And it can be really useful for understanding what a more complex selector is actually selecting because sometimes you look at something that, you know, maybe you you're working on an existing code base or something that somebody else coded up and you're staring at the selector going, I don't know what the heck this is. So it's a nice little trick. It takes one second for the pop up to come up and then you sort of gives you a rough idea, at least of what it might be selecting.
00:16:19
Speaker
And that's it for this week. If you'd prefer a written version, the link to my newsletter is in the description as well as a link to all of my socials and of course every single thing that I've mentioned along the way during this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome.