Resilient Web Systems

A fantastic speaker, with wonderful teaching skills, and highly praised by attendees of the conference and the workshop alike.

—Vitaly Friedman, Founder of Smashing Magazine & Conference

Join Miriam for a deep-dive into the heart of CSS: how it works, what makes it special, and how we can harness it for resilient and maintainable design systems that scale. Rather than learning a single convention or toolkit, you’ll learn the fundamentals that all conventions share – how to think with CSS, and make smart decisions for your own project.

Since it was first proposed in 1994, CSS has attempted to solve two important problems:

• How can we design with systems that keep our work consistent, performant, and maintainable?
• How can we design with resilience across a wide range of interfaces – past, present, and future?

Now we’re building full mobile and desktop-style applications on the web, and those core CSS questions are more essential than ever. We need systems that scale, with resilience across an ever-growing range of bowsers and devices. Can we write CSS that’s up to the task?

Together, we’ll explore:

• Why CSS works the way it does: from cascade and inheritance to normal flow and formatting contexts
• Modern and “intrinsic” web layout in-depth: putting flexbox, grid, floats, alignment, writing modes, media queries and display in context
• Moving past “browser support” to write modern and resilient CSS everywhere, without duplicating your efforts and driving up budgets
• CSS architectures at the foundation of every naming convention, from OOCSS to BEM and ITCSS and beyond
• Building meaningful and maintainable design systems with modern CSS and Sass
• Integrating documentation and cross-team communication
• What’s new in both CSS and Sass, and how you can get involved in where they go next