The SassConf Experience

This weekend I went to SassConf 2014 which was absolutely amazing. Great speakers gave insightful talks, there was free tshirts, Nutella, stickers and SO MANY cool people. I had some really interesting conversations about best practices and the future of Sass and even the future of CSS and how it might affect our tooling in a few years. I thought I'd do a brief writeup about my experience there to hopefully encourage other cool people to go next year.

Notable Moments

Building an Artful Web by Smith Schwartz

Smith talked about the challenges that face us in trying to become an 'ordinary artist' and bring art into everything that you create. She had some brilliant tips on how to be creative in different aspects of your life. Takeaways: If you don't try you'll never succeed. So get out there and make stuff!

Keynote by Tab Atkins

Tab gave a really cool talk about the future of CSS which should include variables, extensible properties, custom properties and all sorts of really cool style goodness.

Spreading the Sass Love by Una Kravets

Una gave a really inspiring talk about how to get involved, be a meetup starter and gently teach and debug with people who might not know things you know. Takeaways: Be nice, converse and be awesome!

A quick interlude with Hampton Catlin

Hampton popped in to tell us about the work he's been doing on libsass. Almost all of the specs are passing now, some awesome people surprised him with a pull request fixing all sorts of issues and libsass(as of two days ago) supports @extends and Sass maps!

Maintaining Style Across Multiple Websites by Shay Howe

In a very short talk, Shay conveyed more about style guide development than you've ever thought about in your life. He touched briefly on the idea that sometimes you get a lot more done when you write things the long/verbose/inideal way first and then refactor it to be perfect later.

UI Regression Testing Workshop by Keving Lamping

We did an in-person coding exercise learning to use Wraith, PhantomJS and Diffux! Kevin even open-sourced his exercise notes. We set up example sites, broke them and then watched our tests run and find the breaking changes we made. Super useful tools!

Boat Party

We wrapped up the official conference with catered snacks, an open bar and a lot of cool people all on a HUGE party boat tour around lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

I had an awesome time this weekend and can't wait to do it again next year. All of the presentations were filmed so keep an eye on the official SassConf website to check them out when they get uploaded.