Modern Front End Fundamentals

What does a modern front end actually look like? It's one that built using semantic HTML, the layouts are built with modern CSS and no frameworks, is accessible to all users no matter their abilities or how they consume the site and all this is backed up with a completely automated testing pipeline to ensure code changes only affect what we intended.

Unless you're working in the front end on a daily basis, it's hard to keep up to date and ensure that your front end is still modern. This hands on workshop covers modern front end fundamentals, enabling you to create a layout and components without the need for any third party code. You learn core accessibility concepts to make your project more accessible without having to write complex code, take shortcuts or deal with browser specific implementations.

Once that is done, we then move on to testing our application, making sure that our accessibility improvements are there, watching for any unintended changes and making sure that the application works as it's supposed to. Through automated tools that can be implemented as part of a deployment pipeline, to manual tools to check on the fly, there are plenty of options to ensure the front end is being tested as thoroughly as the back end.

After the tests are written, we'll then integrate them as part of an approval and deployment pipeline. Automating the tests for pull requests, running through GitHub actions and ensuring that code is fully tested before it reaches the production branch of your repo.

Topics

Tools

This workshop involves using various testing tools, and involves getting started with the tools from the beginning without any prior experience. Where possible, open source tools are used.

Who Should Attend

This workshop is aimed at anyone who works with front end code on a regular basis and needs to keep up to date with the constantly changing world of front end development. Even if you're just brushing up on your skills, this is the workshop for you.

Pre-requisites

Some experience with front end code desirable, a basic understanding of HTML and CSS as fundamental concepts won't be covered. Some experience with JavaScript is also useful as the tests will be written in JavaScript.

Workshop Details

There are currently no upcoming workshops booked in, but if you're interested in attending one, get in touch and I'll let you know when we book in another workshop and give you first dibs at the tickets.

If you'd like your whole team to attend the workshop, I also run dedicated internal training events, so lets chat!

Still not convinced?

If you're still not sure, check out these testimonials from previous workshop participants:

I attended Amy's CSS workshop, after having seen her speak at NDC London. After only a few hours I already had a much better understanding of modern CSS principles (it isn't all !important tags apparently) and I can now put together a robust CSS framework for my web development. Thanks Amy.

You don't know what you don't know this workshop really opened my eyes to the amount of accessibility we dismiss on the daily. Leant some useful tools and techniques to keep future work accessible for all.

Really great workshop. As someone who isn't the biggest fan of frontend development, this workshop really made me appreciate how easy it could be to design not only responsive layouts without a css framework, but also make them accessible as well which is something I always overlook.