Maciej Korsan

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Frontend is an art

a Front-Trends 2016 lightning talk sung on ukulele instead of slides; later a full talk built on demos

  • live,
  • sound,
  • web,
  • talk
Silhouette of a man holding a ukulele on the dark Front-Trends stage, with “an ukulele song” on the screen behind him

“Frontend is an art” started as a comeback to a joke. People liked to say frontend isn’t real programming, so I’d agree: right, frontend is an art, so you can call me an artist. The line ended up on stickers and T-shirts, and in May 2016 on the stage of Front-Trends in Warsaw, one of Europe’s biggest frontend conferences.

It was a lightning talk, but instead of slides I brought a ukulele and sang a song called “Frontend is an art”. The whole thing took about three minutes.

The talk with demos

Over time the slogan grew into a full talk. It opened with etymology: the Latin for “art” is ars and the Greek is téchnē, so “technical” and “artistic” share a root. Then came demos of my projects where JavaScript does things that aren’t necessarily useful:

  • the Up To Date festival’s 404 page, playing Roland TR-808 samples
  • DiscoJS – the Web Audio API and Web MIDI API played from a Launchkey Mini keyboard
  • Checkbox Unicorn – a browser extension (with sound) meant to stop you from mindlessly agreeing to newsletters
  • a LEGO Millennium Falcon and a LEGO Macintosh 128K with Raspberry Pis inside
  • experiments with the Web Speech API and AR (A-Frame, AR.js)

I closed with the claim that people who build websites are rock stars, because the audience for their work is bigger than the crowd at a typical concert. In 2018 I gave the talk at, among others, meet.js Summer Special in Białystok (August) and 4Developers in Katowice (November).

Sources