Jones kicked off the conference by discussing how ownership and quality of your work is so important. You can’t give up on the fundamentals and let the brain rot consume you in this Age of Slopware.

Rackis spent the core of the talk looking at execution plans. These are good skills to have so make sure to watch the video. This talk also pairs well with Jerason Banes talk on using pure SQL in general.

This was my talk which focused entirely on CSS View Transitions using htmx and Ruby. The slides and ePaper devices (passed out to the audience) were completely rendered live via Terminus. You can find the slides here: htmx View Transitions.

At the end of the talk, I suggested an improvement to the htmx library where you could provide a callback into the View Transitions API for more granular control and Carson Gross mentioned this Michael West who folded the change into htmx 4.0.0!

This is the second time seeing Anthony speak. This time he had interesting insights into how you can use Tailwind to programmatically control behavior by using the :has and :is pseudo-classes along with the if() function.

I would never recommend Tailwind since the output always looks like someone barfed all over your source code. That said, using CSS to conditionally style a site based on which classes are present is worth knowing about. Alternative ways to tackle this would be via data attributes, hidden check boxes, and so forth. For example, this site uses a hidden checkbox to toggle a collapsed main menu when viewing on smaller devices. All using CSS, no JavaScript!

Morrison closed out the day by discussing his HypeApps project which provides enhanced HTML elements for building applications that can run on multiple platforms. Without having a chance to play with this more, this seems like a highly tailored, custom collection of web components without all of the JavaScript setup. The framework is built upon Flutter and pairs well with Marcus Twichel’s talk who also uses Flutter.

Alexander kicked off the day by first mentioning the book Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka which tied in well with the staggering numbers of government waste related to software development. Having tackled several government contracts in the past, I know this only too well. This is also a talk about software bloat and love that he emphasized the following:

Perhaps one of the only speakers who traveled the farthest distance by coming from Stuttgart, Germany to speak. This talk was entirely focused on AI automation via these four steps:

He also mentioned checking out Grill with Docs for further tweaking of your agents. Check out his site and slides for further details.

This talk was all about using Flutter to run on iOS, macOS, Android, web, and other platforms with real-time communication and synchronization. This included a live demo which focused on a fake coffee store scenario where an audience member would order a beverage and we’d watch the transaction process in real-time across multiple platforms.

This was a good demo and definitely can see why folks would be attracted to using Flutter. The problem is Flutter is Google’s solution for this much like React is for Facebook and we all know how awful that has become especially for those that cargo cult these platforms — without thinking through the ramifications — by using a big hammer to solve the wrong problem.

This is why checking out Alexander Petros' talk is well worth your time because focusing on modern HTML and CSS can get you a long way including leaning into Progressive Web Apps. Minimizing your stack, reducing your dependencies, and avoiding complicated builds in order to release new versions of your software reduces your maintenance burdens. Not saying this is always the right solution but should definitely be the first thing you consider before going down the Flutter/React path.

During the speakers dinner I ended up driving Ronan home despite both of us staying at opposite ends of the city so was a chance to chat. His talk ended up being a self deprecating talk on entrepreneurship especially the failures and mistakes. This makes the talk unique since people don’t always share the missteps of success.

A couple insights worth noting from his talk:

Check out Ronan’s writings and open source to learn more.

Insightful talk on running code in Space with limited hardware, resources, and connectivity. This talk focuses on the Cambrian Works Gig Router and lessons learned such as:

Ended up talking to Mike a bit afterwards because I was curious about the structured logging hurdles they faced especially since I maintain the Cogger gem which supports structured logging.

This was a humorous talk, plus clever engineering, which focused on messing with pre-trained models by removing layers, duplicating them, injecting gibberish, and more. The results were rendered live producing ridiculous results in order to illustrate how the models function.

Worth checking out when the video for more.

This was the only talk that didn’t land for me. The entire presentation was a lot like a marketing demo that had been given multiple times to companies and/or engineering teams. This would add up since Sandhya is a developer advocate which means traveling all over and talking about the same thing. Anyway, the talk was focused on using Strands Agents as an open source solution for building production agents.

This was a good talk about ditching the use of Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs), using functional transformer pipelines to manipulate key/value pars to produce the results you need, and streaming content from the database.

This also planted a seed for further exploration because I’d like to rip out Hanami's use of Ruby Object Mapper and explore pure SQL as well since there’s been very little progress with the Ruby Object Mapper stack for years.

Good talk — along with helpful visuals — on different compression techniques such as gzip, brotli and others. Worth checking out the video especially if you have an interest in the different compression algorithms.

Christian is a member of the htmx Core team and traveled from Romania to speak so was a bit jet lagged. The talk was also a bit discombobulated as a result. That said, I loved learning about the multipart/mixed HTTP Content-Type header which allows you to stream mixed data via a single connection! This has been part of the HTML spec since 1992 but I’ve never seen anyone talk about this before.

Use of multipart/mixed is also more versatile than Server Sent Events, which I recently wrote about, so plan to explore and write about this more in the future.

By the way, Christian’s work is folded into the hx-multipart extension which you can use in htmx 4.0.0.

Carson closed out the conference with an overview of htmx 4.0.0 features. Here’s a few highlights:

The best part — and epic ending to the entire conference — was when Carson mentioned the Gameboy game for htmx 4.0.0 and then handed the mic to Stephen Mitchell to explain the development of the game, the design, levels, and access to the source code. Even better, as conference attendees, we all got a copy of the game!

The only bad aspect of this is that the game is labeled as a Golden Master but — for all us that lived through that era and knows what this means — this isn’t a Golden Master, only a Beta. Use of Golden Master is incorrect and misleading.

Both Carson and Stephen were channeling a Steve Jobs kind of vibe with the release of the htmx 4.0.0 and the corresponding game (watch). Loved it and definitely made the conference special.

Stephen closed with "Don’t stop caring and love your craft". This resonates deeply because this site and my entire career has been focused on the Joy of the Craft. This also coincides with another great quote, above a bench, while walking the Montana State University campus:

In the Age of Slopware, don’t forget what it means to create high quality, well architected, and maintainable code. Sweating the details of good quality software — both inside and outside — is important. Don’t lose that!