Out & About – FrontFest 2018

Each team member at 93digital has a £1,000 personal development budget each year. In our ‘Out and About’ series, we catch up with the team following their learning adventures at conferences & events.

This time, we chat with our Backend (yet soon-to-be Fullstack) developer David, whilst Out & About in Madrid for FrontFest 2018.

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1. What is your role at 93digital?

I am a backend WordPress developer ( but moving to full stack )

2. What have you attended recently and where?

I have attended Front Fest https://frontfest.es/ in Madrid

3. What’s the premise behind the event?

It is a convention of Front End developers from all around Spain. The premise is to share and discuss the most important and prevalent topics in Front End delivery, development approaches and opinions from people that are well respected within the community. Despite everyone there being Front-end developers, they all have different core backgrounds ( HTML/ CSS devs, JS devs, JS Framework devs like angular, react, vue). Most of the speakers were among the most well-regarded Front End developers in Spain. Some of the talks were really good. I would highlight “Improving as a developer” from Belén Albeza, “WebGL and shaders: programming light effects” from Vicente Lucendo and “Practical JS testing” from Ramon Guijarro.

4. What did you learn that you can take into your work day-to-day?

Plenty of things actually. Considering I do mostly Backend at 93Digital, most of the topics they talked about were new to me. I did learn about how to improve as a developer, by keeping a good work/life balance, how to approach the development of proper non-intrusive and accessible popups, what are the advantages / disadvantages of using one Framework or another in JS (Yes Vue is the best), what the main loop event in a browser is, how to user WebGL to create light effects, how to use automate testing tools in JS … And more, a lot more.

In learning terms, this has been so far the best event I have ever attended.

5. What did you learn from a more long-term perspective?

I learnt which JS framework I will work towards in the future and which Front End skills I really want to include in my skill set. Definitely, JS has grabbed my attention, which means I will become a full stack which strong JS skills rather than a CSS maniac.

6. What other events that reflect your role in the agency would you like to participate in?

Conferences and mainly workshops are the most effective ways a developer can improve skills. I usually attend events and meetups in London every month. I would like to spend more time doing official courses but unfortunately, it’s not something I can commit to right now.

7. What made you decide to go to this event?

This is the real target for me. I am progressively moving from back-end to full-stack development. From my perspective, my experience as a backend gives some advantages to quickly pick up the skills to work mainly with programming languages like JS and the related frameworks. Sharing and learning from experienced and seasoned front-end developers has given me a very good idea about which path I need to follow to become a real competent Full Stack JS developer, which is my midterm target this year.