Middlesbrough Frontend 2025

What's up? I've not been very good at keeping this blog up to date but hopefully this is the start of a new routine.

I took a day off work and made the journey up to Middlesbrough (only an hour and a half from where I'm based) to spend the day listening to some really interesting talks. I really appreciated the variety of talks at this conference. A lot of conferences, especially at the moment, have a real AI-centric theme, regardless of the subject matter. It was nice that MFE didn't seem to have this, other than the one AI-specific talk ("When AI leaves the chatbox: designing human-centered web experiences in an AI-first world" by Laura Richards) which was a brief dive into how we should be approaching introducing AI into our products, when appopriate, and the importance of transparency for your users.

One of morning talks ("What has Vue ever done for you?" - Alex Lichter) was focused around the Vue ecosystem and delved into a lot of the other projects that exist within the UnJS umbrella of projects. It was really cool to see some of these projects getting spoken about - I quite often find that a lot of what the Vue team (and related developers) do for the Javascript ecosystem on the whole gets overshadowed by the larger frameworks like React. There's so many important projects being maintained in this space that make up the foundations of so many other projects it's great to see them get recognition.

One of the most useful talks was "Beyond the Spec: Cranking View Transtions up to 11 (Safely, Maybe)" by Bramus Van Damme. This was one of those talks that makes you want to go away and start implementing new stuff in your own projects. In fact, that's exactly what I did with this site. The View Transition API was something that I'd been aware of but never done any further reading about or watched anything longer than a 2-minute explainer. I've been working through his slides and replicating the example that he shared to try and replicate them on this site.

Anyway, that's all for now. Cheers!