Click here to watch My Brain is Full: Keeping Pace with Front-End & UX Innovations

As Front-enders, we are expected to know and do more with our sites than ever before.

In the four years since the Drupal 7 beta launched, the Front-ender's toolkit has exploded with a multitude of tools, frameworks, (meta-)languages, and techniques, as well as a new set of expectations for what the Front-end ought to do: responsive grids and media, HTML5, Web Components, the list goes on and on.

Similarly, UX considerations have greatly expanded beyond simply 'styling markup'. We now have to consider user context, device capabilities, physical interfaces, performance, personalization... where does it stop? And how can we stay on top of things, even as they rapidly evolve?

This presentation will cover the following topics:

- What's happened? An overview and history of Front-end practice from shortly before D7's launch to present: what's changed, what's fallen out of style (remember Blueprintcss?), what was a flash in the pan, and what's rapidly become standard practice.

- Since Front-end practice has massively changed, but Drupal core essentially hasn't, how can we keep up? How might this change with Drupal 8?

- How can I as a Front-end/UX person stay on top of this and expand my personal suite of tools and skills?