Una Kravets is a UI Engineer at DigitalOcean and a technical writer for publications including A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, and Sitepoint. Una also co-hosts the Toolsday podcast, and started both the Washington DC and Austin Sass Meetups. We asked Una how she got her start in all things web, and discovered her passion for front-end development.

How’d you get your start in design, and on the web (if the two are different)?

I got my start in design through fashion illustration, and eventually it led to front-end development, somehow. When I was in high school, I took a digital media design class, which introduced me to the Wacom tablet. While I was okay at art, for some reason I really took to the tablet and never looked back.

I was interested in fashion illustration and design, and eventually that led me to learning Flash and making Flash drag-and-drop paper doll games. I fell in love with the interactivity that Flash allowed, and the ability to write code (ActionScript) to create commands on the screen. By the time I went to college, I knew I wanted to do digital design, and went to school for both computer science and graphic design.

The community in Washington DC—where I went to college—took care of the rest. At a meetup group called Refresh DC, I discovered this field of “front-end development,” which was a brand-new term at the time. It was the perfect blend of design and logic I was looking for! I’d found a name for the mix of things I enjoyed.

You just moved to New York City, we hear.  Congratulations!  What brought you to NYC?

I moved to NYC to be around my awesome coworkers at DigitalOcean. I started at the company a few months ago, but was working remotely, doing a lot of travel, and working from different time zones every other week. It was fun, but exhausting. Now I’m “settling down” somewhere to focus on work and getting to know the awesome tech communities in NYC.

What’s it like working at DigitalOcean, and what are you working on there?

DigitalOcean is uniquely positioned to create a product for developers, by developers. I love that about the place. Ideas around here are validated quickly because we are the audience. Personally, I’m excited for what’s to come in 2017.

I was previously working on rebuilding digitalocean.com, and some of the client-facing pages, and now I’m on a new team focusing on front-end infrastructure. This means ensuring that the product is accessible, performant, and makes it easier for our engineers to produce quality code with less effort. It’s been an interesting challenge.

You’re giving a talk called “The Joy of Optimizing” at AEA.  What’s it about, and what will people take away from it?

The Joy of Optimizing is all about image optimization—since images take up most of the space of the web, and their size is increasingly growing, we need to cut the cruft! The talk discusses the impact of images on performance, goes through a few new, and more performant, media formats and how to use them, and a few pro tips and fun facts about smaller optimizations someone can make. Like, did you know there are two different types of dithering in a gif, and one is more performant than the other? There are many small bits of knowledge that I’m packing into this talk, so both designer and developers can get a lot out of it.

What are some tools, tricks, and/or techniques you can’t work without?

I love iTerm2 — the updates to it in terms of moving and organizing panes are so nice. As a developer, I basically live in this terminal; it’s my home. I also recently tried Visual Studio Code and am very impressed with it. Nice job on that one, Microsoft. Lastly, to mix it up a bit, I’m obsessed with my new mouse, the Logitech MX Master. It has this horizontal scroll wheel that I never thought I needed until I had it.

What has you most excited these days?

I’m excited about the prospect of augmented reality (AR) and WebVR (Web-based virtual reality). There are so many possibilities and it entirely changes the idea of thinking of responsive web design just based on screen sizes. Web APIs, plus emerging hardware that supports these things, has so many possibilities!

Una Kravets will present “The Joy of Optimizing” as part of An Event Apart Seattle, April 5-7, 2017. Don’t miss a chance to learn from Una and eleven other top-notch talks—register today!

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the web community create style tiles, element collages, style guides, pattern libraries, and a slew of other tools in order to break interfaces down to their atomic elements. Our interfaces are going more places than ever before, so this shift is essential to help us better understand what our websites consist of in order for us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs.

In this 60-minute video captured live at An Event Apart Austin, Brad Frost introduces atomic design, a methodology for creating robust design systems. Brad covers how to apply atomic design to implement your very own design system in order to set you, your organization, and your clients up for success.

Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, writer, and consultant located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. He’s passionate about creating web experiences that look and function beautifully on a never-ending stream of connected devices, and loves helping organizations do the same. He’s the author of Atomic Design, and has also helped create several tools and resources for web designers, including This Is Responsive, Pattern Lab, Styleguides.io, WTF Mobile Web, and Mobile Web Best Practices.

Enjoy all the free videos in An Event Apart’s library. And for your free monthly guide to all things web, design, and developer-y, subscribe to The AEA Digest. Subscribers get exclusive access to our latest videos weeks before anyone else!

The 10K Apart contest recently came to an end, and we have to say we were astonished by the response—instead of the hundred or so entries we expected, we ended up with 270 gallery entries for our all-star panel of judges to consider.  After much thought, they rendered their decision.

First, the Honorable Mentions, listed alphabetically:

• 3.5KB Date Calculator — Sunmock Yang with Russell Baylis
• 10 Slides — Hans Sprecher
• Dungeon Wanderer — Paweł Brzeziński
• Bleeding Edge Web APIs — Lubos Belak
• Color Flashcards — Matt Stow
• Conway’s Game of Life — Toby Mackenzie
• Country Hopping — Joke De Winter
• Cryptojam — Triskaideka
• Olympics Results — Bruno Stein with Filipe Guth
• Responsive Book Layout — Carpe Numidium
• Semaphore — Morten Rand-Hendriksen
• Tor Explorer — Luke Childs

Each and every one is as worth exploring as it was difficult to pick.

The prize winners were even harder to choose.  In the end, the judges chose the 10K UK Weather Analyzer & Visualizer by Yash Raj Singh as the Best Technical entry, the 10KB Pixel Art Character creator by Hannah Malcolm for Best Design, and Emil Björklund’s Dashingly Responsive as the Best Overall entry.  As judge Rachel Andrew said about Emil’s work, “Each time I looked I saw another small detail that impressed me, and the use of simple technology in a creative way seemed to sum up the competition for me.”  We couldn’t agree more!

Last but in no way least, the People’s Choice award went to Firstname Basher by Emilien Schneider, Pablo Barral, and Romain Petiot.  Its goal?  To help you pick a child’s name by telling you what’s wrong with your choices.  C’est la façon des choses, non?

Our profound thanks to all the contestants and their fantastically creative work.  Every entry was and is a testament to how much can be done under severe constraints and to the incredible flexibility of the web’s core technologies—a timely reminder today, on Blue Beanie Day 2016.

We have unfortunate news regarding An Event Apart St. Louis. We’ve made the difficult decision to cancel the event. We’ve been trying to work out some major problems with the venue, and have been unable to resolve them in a satisfactory way.  Rather than risk delivering a substandard experience for attendees and speakers alike, we’ve made the choice to call off the show and look for opportunities to try again in the future.

We’re sorry things came to this point, but we’re confident this is the right decision. The next An Event Apart event takes place in Seattle on April 3–5, 2017.

Community

Eventifier: photos, drawings, and tweets from AEASF
@aneventapart Twitter feed
An Event Apart Facebook
An Event Apart Google+
Twitter Search: #aeasf (AEA San Francisco hashtag)
A Groove Apart: Ten Years of AEA in Playlist Form

Attendee Write-ups

An Event Apart: Our Favourite Quotes by Scalable Path
Sketchnotes by Van Shea Sedita
Sketchnotes (on video!) by Carrie Salazar

Speaker Links and Resources

Jeffrey Zeldman

24 ways: Grid, Flexbox, Box Alignment: Our New System for Layout by Rachel Andrew
24 ways: Putting My Patterns Through Their Paces by Ethan Marcotte
A List Apart: Understanding Progressive Enhancement by Aaron Gustafson
Atomic Design (blog post) by Brad Frost
Atomic Design (book, readable online) by Brad Frost
Content Display Patterns by Daniel Mall (danielmall.com)
CSS-Tricks: Complete Guide to Flexbox by Chris Coyier
CSS-Tricks: A Complete Guide to Grid by Chris Coyier
CSS-Tricks: The Debate Around “Do We Even Need CSS Anymore?” by Chris Coyier
Designing With Web Standards (Wikipedia article)
Future-Friendly Manifesto
Fuzzy Notepad: Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript by “eevee”
Of Patterns and Power: Web Standards Then & Now by Jeffrey Zeldman (zeldman.com)
Has Design Become Too Hard?
Position Wanted: Front-End Director

Sarah Parmenter

Krystal Higgins

Guided interaction

New users matter too: Guided interaction
Using Scaffolded Instruction To Optimize Learning
How I got my mom to play plants vs. Zombies
Hopscotch: A framework for user-guided tutorials
Appcues: A platform for user-guided tutorials
Coaching cadence worksheet

Free samples

New users matter too: Free samples
Janrain: Customers who leave a website because of or lie on signup forms
Phillip Kunz’s reciprocity experiment with Christmas cards
Sweetening the Till: The Use of Candy to Increase Restaurant Tipping
The $300 Million Button
Evaluating onboarding experiences

Personal focus

New users matter too: Personal focus
Herbert Simon, scientist and psychologist and his work with attention
CMU Eberly Center Principles of Teaching
How a bot named Dolores Landingham transformed 18F’s onboarding

Jen Simmons

Examples at labs.jensimmons.com
Jen’s on Twitter at @jensimmons
Listen to thewebahead.net, especially episodes 115, 114, 81, & 9 for more on layout
Video of Jen’s talk on how to use new CSS now
Video of Jen’s talk, Modern Layouts: Getting Out of Our Ruts
A blog post by Manuel Rego that gets into the implicit and explicit grid, hinting at just how complicated CSS Grid Layout gets
Using Feature Queries in CSS
Round specification
Firefox Nightly

Rachel Andrew

Code Collection of examples used
Boring CSS
Glish CSS
The Noodle Incident Box Lessons
Fractal
Using Feature Queries in CSS
CSS Grid Specification
Flexbox Specification
Box Alignment Specification
CSS Shapes Specification
Can I Use
Being Where the People Are – a post about vendor prefixes
Grid by Example

Brad Frost

Jeremy Keith

Val Head

The UI Animation Newsletter
Designing Interface Animation
Researching Design Systems
Integrating animation into the UX workflow
Design Doesn’t Scale
Pixar storyboards

Jason Grigsby

Hololens Gestures
Leap Motion Oculus Rift tour
Microsoft Research Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction
You cannot reliably detect a touch screen
Interactive touch laptop experiments
New Rule: Every Desktop Design Has To Go Finger-Friendly
jQuery Pointer Events Polyfill
Pointing the Way Forward
Compass.js
Warby Parker Gyroscope Example
Lightsaber Escape Gyroscope Example
Generic Sensor API Draft
requestAutocomplete
Autofill: What web devs should know, but don’t
Payment Request API
Web Cam Toy
HTML Media Capture and getUserMedia
Web Speech API Demonstration
Web Speech API Translation Demonstration
Web Bluetooth
Physical Web
One amazing video that shows the potential of the physical web
Open Device Labs
Four Truths About Input
ALA: Adapting to Input

Derek Featherstone

Eric Meyer

Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
1959 Chevrolet Bel Air vs. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu IIHS crash test
The World is Designed for Men
Flickr faces complaints over ‘offensive’ auto-tagging for photos
Google Photos labeled black people ‘gorillas’
“Edge case” tweet by Evan Hensleigh
Apple Adds Menstrual Cycle Tracking To HealthKit App
Performing a Project Premortem – Harvard Business Review
Design for Real Life
Patients Like Me
Simple
Voice and Tone
My Favorite Editing Tip: Read It Aloud by Kate Kiefer Lee
Forms That Work
Help, I’m Trapped in Facebook’s Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory

Gerry McGovern

Top Tasks explained (A List Apart)
Customer Carewords Top Tasks Services
Gerry McGovern’s website
Transform: A Rebel’s Guide for Digital Transformation (Gerry’s latest book)