Pre-Conference Workshops
Sunday, September 25
We are thrilled to be offering workshops for the first time at CSSConf. They will take place the day before the conference on Sunday, September 25th, 2016 from 10am - 5pm.
You may notice that the workshops are not "about" CSS – and that's intentional. We've got plenty of time for that during the conference! Instead, we've assembled workshops aimed at giving you practical experience with skills that will make you a more well-rounded developer or designer.
Tickets for the workshops are available in conjunction with your CSSConf ticket, or standalone if you aren't attending the conference.
All workshops will be held at the Bocoup Boston Office, 201 South Street, Floor 1 Boston, MA 02111 .
Visual Design Strategy
Too often, solutions to design problems are based on intuition and assumption, leading to a long-winded process with a result that doesn't reflect the vision and values of the team that worked on it. The Visual Design Strategy workshop
provides a collaborative, open workflow for translating a team's thoughts and feelings about a design project into a relatable and effective visual vocabulary.
In the context of a real-world social design project for a nonprofit organization, you'll own the visual design process and learn how to conduct productive activities that lead to a shared understanding of the problem space. You will
brainstorm ideas and conduct visual research to create Moodboards, translate these into Style Tiles and later on into high fidelity Mockups. By the end of the day, you'll have the skills and tools to guide a visual design conversation
on your own projects.
Intended Audience
This workshop is for makers who want to improve their design process while working in a more open and collaborative environment. Some design experience is required.
Topics Covered
- Generate effective conversations to understand the project’s goals
- Conduct Visual research and translate that into Moodboards
- Develop key design vocabulary
- Learn how to give and receive actionable feedback
- Translate your ideas into Style Tiles and Mockups
Instructor
Isaac Durazo
Isaac develops new visual and aesthetic directions for the web and interprets them for clients at Bocoup. Isaac also leads the execution of the Open Web technology brands we develop. His contributions include branding for Grunt.js, Roost, and the jQuery Developer Summit, in addition to making the websites for Learn CSS Layout and Bocoup prettier places to visit.
User Research
Great design is made possible by developing a strong understanding of potential and current stakeholders. In this workshop we will walk participants through the user research phase of a project. We will interview core project stakeholders, develop user personas, identify user goals to ultimately develop journey maps.
Intended Audience
This workshop is for you if you are a thinker, a dreamer, a doer, a designer, a developer, a project manager—anyone who wants to learn about the user experience design process by doing rather than listening. No prior design experience is required.
Topics Covered
- Learn how to conduct effective interviews
- Author and use tools such as personas and journey maps
- Gain an understanding of the concept of empathy
- Develop key design vocabulary
- Incorporate open and human centered design into your practice
- Hone your design-thinking skills
Instructor
Mat 'Wilto' Marquis
Mat “Wilto” Marquis makes websites for a living at Bocoup and curses at his broken-down motorcycle for free on the streets of North Cambridge. Mat is Chair of the Responsive Issues Community Group, technical editor at A List Apart, a former member of the jQuery Mobile team, and editor of the W3C HTML5 specification. All this considered, Mat is most proud of having finished Mega Man 2—on difficult—without losing a single life.
Command the Command Line
Whether you know it as the command line, Terminal, Linux, git bash, or "that black box I copy and paste things into", it seems that lurking behind any technical project is an understanding of how to use Unix-like, non-graphical user interfaces.
With a focus on streamlining the development of web projects, Command the Command Line will take you from orienting yourself in the environment, to enhancing your workflow, to understanding the role of a system administrator.
As teams integrate version control, continuous deployment, and test automation, familiarity with the tools involved is a necessity. We'll demystify tools like package managers, Bash, grep, curl, and Vagrant, so that you can understand
what to expect when collaborating on a web project. You won't be a "sysasdmin" when we're done, but you will have the fluency you need to apply the power of the command line wherever it will be the most effective.
Intended Audience
This workshop is for designers, developers and any technology-adjacent folks who hestitate upon encountering the bizarre incantations that seem to start off every GitHub "readme" file. It's for people who hear "git" and think, "maybe tomorrow." It's for anyone pained by every click-and-drag in their workflow and envious of colleagues whose productivity seems rooted in their understanding of these systems.
Topics Covered
- Orienting yourself using the minimal UI of a text terminal
- Making sense of commands like
rm -rf out && npm run build - Coordinating permissions in a world of
chmods andsudos - Scripting your workflow to cut down on repetetive tasks
- Relating to your system administrators and DevOps team
Instructor
Mike Pennisi
Mike Pennisi is a contributor to a number of open source projects, including JSHint, test262, Socket.io, and Backbone.LayoutManager. Mike's primary interests at Bocoup are user interface design, privacy and peer to peer networking on the Open Web. Mike also writes articles on and develops tools for third party JavaScript development such as DressUp and srcdoc polyfill).