Steve Barnett - Progressive Enhancement
Making things for the web is hard: it's a hostile environment with lots of variation in things like browsers, network speed and quality, and disabilities of our users. I'll be talking about Progressive Enhancement (PE): a way of thinking about and building web apps that puts our users first. Building with PE gives us ways to handle our smörgåsbord of unknowns, using Human-Centered Design thinking.
I'll talk about what PE is, why it's important, and how to get the rest of your team (and the boss) on board. We'll discuss the assumptions and choices that we developers make, and how the cost of that gets passed on to our users. I'll also touch briefly on how PE links up with Responsive Web Design, modern Front-end Performance best practices, and JavaScript frameworks (like Meteor).
About Steve Barnett
Steve Barnett works as a code mentor at Project codeX, and as a freelance Front-end developer and User Experience person. He’s a bit addicted to meetups: you can find him helping out with RailsBridge Cape Town or Cape Town Front-End Developers. If he’s not there, he’s probably crouched in an awkward position in front of something funny-looking, taking pictures of it.
You can find him on Twitter as @maxbarners, on GitHub as SteveBarnett, and on his own site Naga (which really, really, needs a redesign) as, erm, himself.
Sponsor Nona Creative (Venue, AV & Beer)
Nona Creative is an ambitious digital studio in Cape Town, South Africa, with a small team, a big heart and clients on five continents.
Topic Speakers Welcome - We're Always on the hunt for speakers, if you'd like to talk at this meetup or another, let us know and we'll set it up.