Schalk Venter
Interaction Design and Software Engineering
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Schalk is a software engineer and product design consultant working on various personal, commercial, and open-source projects. He usually finds himself at the intersection of interaction design and software engineering, having done contract work for National Treasury, The Google Foundation, Replit, Sea Monster Entertainment, CSS-Tricks, and various others. He has lectured in a senior capacity at the Academy of Digital Arts, codeX, Open Window, and the University of Pretoria, and co-created the Interaction Design degree at Cape Town Creative Academy. He also co-founded, and currently serves as administrative director, of Frontend Engineering and Design South Africa (FEDSA).
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Mental Illness and Vulnerability in Tech
In his seminal “Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression”, Andrew Solomon remarked that there is an entire world of silent “agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts". It is becoming increasingly apparent that the tech sector is no exception. In the recent “Mental Health in Tech Survey" only 30.7% of respondents indicated that they “feel comfortable discussing mental health with coworkers”. This seems unsurprising, given that when mental health was discussed only 33.6% of respondents “experienced or observed a supportive or well-handled response”. As someone with a history of mental illness myself, I spent the last year conducting interviews with individuals struggling with mental health in the tech sector. In addition, I also interviewed legal and therapeutic practitioners to create a list of avenues of support you are legally entitled to as a South African citizen. In this talk, I hope to share some insights uncovered during this personal investigation.
CSS View Transitions: The Future of Animation on the Web
Since the early days of Macromedia Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, developers sought solutions to create animated user interactions on the web to rival those found within native software.
While the eventual move away from these proprietary tooling towards open-source browser technologies (as advocated by the Web Standards movement) should be celebrated, developers were provided with very little native tooling for animation.
Initial attempts at animation mostly relied on JavaScript. However, due to its single-threaded nature (and the rise mobile devices, with less computing power) the results were often subpar.
Fortunately, over the last decade the W3C has slowly been iterating over the built-in browser tooling for animation.
In this talk we will explore the next evolution in CSS animation, being shipped right now, called "CSS View Transitions". We'll look at how this new API provide the means to not only author the types of animations users have come to expect from native software - but in some cases even surpass it.
CSS-in-JS: The Good, Bad and Undefined
According to the last annual "State of CSS" survey, the majority of CSS-in-JS tools experienced a massive drop in retention amongst developers in 2023.
While tools like Styled Components and Stitches saw a rise in usage during 2021 and 2022, the latest 2023 report paints a different story. There is a significant drop of 11% for "Styled Components" and 21% for "Stitches". Likewise, others like "Emotion" and "Vanilla Extract" fell by 4.5% and 5%.
Yet, alternatives approaches such as CSS Modules (amongst others) have been holding steady with mere variation of less than 1% annually since the start of the survey in 2019.
This talk attempts to make sense of this decline and understand the implications for those currently using (or considering the usage of) modern CSS-in-JS tools. It presents the speaker's own understanding of the landscape, as well as summaries of recorded interviews with a range of South African developers whom have been using CSS-in-JS for several years.
Schalk Venter
Interaction Design and Software Engineering
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