Bulgaria Web Summit

The Bulgaria Web Summit happened on 7 and 8 April 2017 at the Inter Expo Center in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Thanks to Alexander Todorov the talk videos are now available. Boyan Yordanov has posted a great review of his experience of the conference.

Day 1

Aral Balkan: The Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights

The year is 2017, 8 men hold half of the world’s wealth between them and preside over a digital panopticon that enslaves and farms the world’s population. Fellow cyborgs, it is time to rise up, reclaim our rights, and start paving the path forward toward a more egalitarian and sustainable future.

Harry Roberts: Refactoring CSS Without Losing Your Mind

Working with CSS is tricky enough as it is; working with legacy CSS can be nightmarish. In this talk, we’ll look at how we decide what to refactor and when; how we can refactor code whilst still shipping features; how to avoid regressions when adding new CSS; how we can avoid the dreaded refactoring tunnels; running new and legacy code in tandem; and a bunch of other neat little tips and tricks.

Matt Stow: Building A Better, Accessible Web.

Detailing why accessibility matters, the types of disabilities there are/how to cater for them, and how to write good, semantic HTML and utilise ARIA to create accessible, robust web applications.

Ada Rose Edwards: Virtual Reality and the Future of the Web.

New Virtual Reality browsers means we need to consider how the web platform is going to need evolve to take advantage of the benefits that Virtual Reality can bring.

Borislav Kiprin: Travelling With The User.

Are your UX and IA efforts up to the current content consumption trends? Can they travel with the user wherever she goes? Are you leading or are you following?

In my talk, I will be focusing on historical user journey patterns, content touch points and how we organize and present content on platforms and devices. I will be providing tips and tricks on making content transportable. The audience will be presented with examples and look into near the future.

Fabio Benedetti: We are designers. We make things.

1) Introduction: Design the world around us. Everyone is a designer, design means to make something, not only taking care of the form but of the function too.
2) Visual Design versus UX design. Why so many names? (e.g. Senior designer, web designer, ui designer, ux designer, web graphic designer, lead designer, senior ui designer, digital designer, interactive designer, digital artist… and so on) This world wants us to be very specific, but in the end we are all designers.
3) The importance of Icon Design in 2017. We’re going Towards a world without words. One of my areas of expertise. Brief talk on where the visual language is going. People use more and more icons and symbols, less words to communicate.
4) Tools: Photoshop and others tools - such as FW, Sketch and Adobe XD. Ideas matters. Tools not as much. Based on my personal experience, an overview on how the tools can help you but they MUST not limit you.

Lara Hanlon: Great Design Facilitation Builds Better Designed Solutions.

Imagine the most fulfilling, collaborative design meeting you’ve ever had. Hours seemed to fly by, and those hours were productive. Political and mental barriers melted away and in their place were innovative ideas, or realistic solutions for complex problems. For several shining moments the team worked as one; the conversation or the activity was equally fun and productive, and you left the room feeling smart and empowered. It’s highly likely that someone in that meeting was a facilitator, either by design or by accident. If you can’t identify the facilitator, chances are it was you.

Day 2

Burak Can: Monorepo workflows for JavaScript projects.

Monorepos are gaining popularity at a very high rate. This is a fully practical talk which explains why and how to use monorepo project structures in our JavaScript codebases.
I'll explain how it can help to improve our workflows and productivity when working with highly modular codebases. The audience of this talk is dailiy users to experts.

Mathias Buus Madsen: Going offline with append-only logs.

A talk about a great p2p data structure called an "append only log". It's a fancy word for a list you are only allowed to append to and read from. The talk will show case why this data structure works great over p2p networks and how you can use it to make your websites and node applications work offline using a bunch of npm modules.

Krasimir Tsonev: React.js in patterns.

Long time I was searching for a good front-end framework. Framework that will help me write scalable and easy to maintain UI. Even though React is just a library for rendering it comes with so many benefits that I can easily say “I found it”. And like every thing that I use a lot I started seeing some patterns. Techniques that are applied over and over again and I see in the code of other developers. I will show and talk about those patterns.

Stefan Kanev: A simple introduction to D3.js.

D3 seems daunting, but that's an illusion. While very powerful, it's quite simple to get started with and get some pretty neat results. The talk will be an introduction to what D3 is all about and how you can use it. By the end, you will have a good understanding of how it works and be able to start creating visualizations with it.

Andrew Collier: Diagnosing the Long Distance Runner with Django, D3 and R.

TL;DR Building the ultimate runners' portal using Django, D3 and R.
Runners enjoy running. Obviously! They're also somewhat obsessed with statistics: weekly mileage, marathon times, resting heart rate, medal count... Back in the day these would be recorded by hand in a dog-eared logbook. But we're too sophisticated for that now.
Services like Strava allow a runner to track their training statistics online and easily make comparisons with their running mates. However, the ultimate test of a runner is the race. And race statistics are distributed across a variety of sites on the internet. There's no single resource.
Wouldn't it be handy if all of those results were aggregated in one place? A runner could then see a consolidated picture of their racing prowess. It'd be cool if it was augmented with responsive visualisations and predictive models.
I'll be talking about an ambitious project to carefully synthesise those distributed race statistics, using R for scraping and modeling, Django for data management and presentation, and D3 for visualisation.
I'll also discuss the models that I've built using this meticulously validated set of data and the intriguing things that they've revealed about that curious animal, the Long Distance Runner.

Marian Marinov: Practical MySQL Performance Optimization.

I will share my practical experience from the last few years. No bulshit, real optimization only.

Elena Kolevska: How to create Redis modules - unleashed.

Hands-on experience on creating Redis modules. Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. Let's hack it!

Henri Bergius: Flow-Based Programming for JavaScript.

NoFlo is a flow-based programming environment for JavaScript. Originally built for Node.js systems automation, the same visual development tools can also be used for developing full-stack applications from the browser to microcontrollers like Arduino. With NoFlo developers build their applications by wiring data streams together between different pre-built or custom components. The NoFlo environment is fully browser-based and can connect to NoFlo instances running on remote servers, allowing inspection and rewiring of running software.