Frontend ❤️ OpenAPI

As a front end developer, building projects with RESTful API dependencies ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. Security implications, parallel development, time or budget restrictions for writing documentation, …, in an enterprise you might not always have the ability to rely on your RESTful API dependencies for development, let alone for an automated testing environment.

The OpenAPI ecosystem offers us solutions in the form of virtually complete independence from a REST API during development and testing.

Maarten will guide you through a high-level overview of what the OpenAPI spec. is, but most of all, show you how it can benefit front end development by doing lots of work for you.

Container Queries: The next step towards a truly modular CSS

Modular, componentized frameworks and libraries are more popular than ever, but currently screen size is the only dimensional constraint to which a web design can adapt to. Luckily for us, great things are a foot.

Container Queries, which allow you to style elements based on their ancestors dimensions, a feature requested by many since the advent of component-based front-end architectures met the principles of responsive web design, has landed in all major browser engines!

In this talk, Maarten will explain what Container Queries are and show you how each component can adapt its design to the dimensions of its container. Join us on our journey towards a more modular CSS.

Sustain your supply chain

Our current digitalized society is built upon thousands of pieces of Open Source software. What starts out as a fun hobby project has more than often led to an industry standard. How can the companies of today sustain their Open Source supply chain, make sure that resources are divided equitably?

In this talk Maarten Van Hoof, Developer Advocate and co-author of iO's Open Source Manifesto, will give you insights into research on how the current Open Source funding landscape looks like, what problems we face and what possible solutions could pave the way forward.

Explain like I'm your boss: digital accessibility.

Are you building digital services aimed towards European consumers? Have you already heard about the European Accessibility Act? Are you aware that in June 2025, you are probably, by law, obligated to deliver accessible features?

Developing inclusive user experiences is a challenge when accessibility doest not have the right priority. It isn't just about inclusiveness—it's about potential Return on Investment (ROI) that is too significant to ignore.

Statistics show that 1 out of 4 European adults has some form of disability. Imagine being able to tap into a roughly 25% bigger market reach. Accessible web services perform better in search engine results because web semantics are key. They enable users to accomplish their goals more efficiently, as the focus is on inclusive user experience.

With the European Accessibility Act coming into effect, the awareness around digital accessibility will shift. I predict digital accessibility will land on the company's radar from 2024 onward.

At the end of this session, you will have the fundaments to pitch digital accessibility to your boss(es).

We'll cover what digital accessibility is, how a company will reap the benefits of investing in it and what a mature accessibility program could look like, so with it, you can kickstart your company's accessibility program.

✌️

The session is preferably 30 minutes.
Able to dim the lights at the beginning of the session, if in a lit room.
Need to be able to share audio from laptop.

Cascade Solves Styling

To some CSS is the most beautiful language they have ever written. Like a gentle stream, flowing over your markup and letting it burst into invigorating, saturated life. To others, CSS is the bane of their existence. An impossible game of whack-a-mole where changing one thing inevitably leads to unwanted side effects on totally unrelated places.

Failing not to sound cliché, with great power comes great responsibility. Understandably, something that those with little to no affiliation with CSS are not eager to take.

At its basis, the Cascade, the C in CSS, together with specificity and inheritance, enables a very powerful system for styling the web. But it has become kind of the odd one out this last decade.

We've seen the rise of conventions and frameworks that try to abstract away the complexity of authoring or work around the constraints that CSS laid upon us. But things have changed. Browser vendors are now working together for better styling cross-compatibility and CSS governance, and there are all sorts of amazing new features planned and already added to the CSS language in the last 2 years.

With the advent of the Golden Era of CSS & Web UI, we have the unique opportunity to rethink how we should author CSS.

I'm here to share with you where we, Web Artisans, have been, where we are and where we might be heading in terms of CSS architectures.

Ability to transmit audio from laptop to audience.