Leeds front-end design and development event

Forefront Leeds has been running less than a year, and is already an exceptionally popular meetup on the digital scene. This is largely due to the quality of the speakers which attend, and also due to the amazing pace at which front-end development and design is evolving.

The venue was Belgrave music hall, which has a fantastic selection of drinks (essential for any event), plus a most excellent pizza stall near the front entrance which is operated by Dough Boys.

Yet again, Forefront Leeds had a sell-out event (within hours of the tickets going on sale). After grabbing a beer we headed up to the cool roof terrace atop Belgrave, then back down again to the snug for the sessions.

We had some really engaging talks from James Thomas, Dan Donald, John Staveley, and Ian Thomas. The highlight for us was the last talk from Ian on connecting design and development using an innovative blend of tools and techniques to provide designers in BSkyB’s Leeds team with accessible tools that enable them to easily build consistent responsive sites in an agile way, with no coding.

It is great to see how many regular technology meetups and digital events are sprouting up throughout Leeds and wider Yorkshire community. It is also inspiring and exciting to watch an increasing number of people share their knowledge with others, for free. This open-source way of thinking (and working) will help us all keep innovating and making the digital world a better, more usable place.

We look forward to the next Forefront!

Here are a bunch of resources we collated from last night:

Front-end automation via @DannyMeldrum
http://www.wearejh.com/development/frontend-automation-with-grunt-sass-browsersync

Responsive bookmarklet tool
http://lab.maltewassermann.com/viewport-resizer/

Open device labs (@odl)
http://opendevicelab.com/

@numiko's browser support matrix
http://server1.numiko.com/browsersupport/

@webaim's WAVE Accessibility Tool
wave.webaim.org/

@browserstack
http://www.browserstack.com/

BrowserSync
http://www.browsersync.io/

@StuRobson's test suite database
http://mytestsuite.tumblr.com/

Last but not least: James Thomas's slides from last night: Web Testing Whilstlestop (Powerpoint)

I may have missed a few links here, so check out Forefront Leeds on Twitter for more, and also to be first to find out about the next event.