Beer City Code 2025

Posted 3 days ago

Over the weekend, I attended my first in-person conference in 12 years. I traveled up to Grand Rapids, Michigan to attend Beer City Code with several of my teammates. Most of my team lives in Michigan and my team leader had heard good things about the conference so we decided to attend it as a team.

I attended an all-day workshop on Friday on crafting web visuals of graphs and charts. The bulk of our time was spent learning to use ChartJS. Our instructor also talked through the different use cases for each different type of chart that you can build in ChartJS. We started the morning looking at some poorly designed charts. It made me think about reading How Charts Lie with my LGND teammates several years ago.

We used Codepen through the day to build our different charts. Here is my personal collection.

This conference was very different from the conferences I have attended in the past. First of all, there were no keynote presentations. The entire day on Saturday were different breakout sessions on a variety of different topics. Second, it was much more back-end focused than the conferences I have attended in the past. As someone who is a “front of the front-end” developer, it was a much different experience than the Front-End Design Conference I attended in Florida or the Breaking Development Conference in Nashville, which was my last in-person conference.

I enjoyed the first session I attended on accessibility. I enjoyed hearing Max Ivey tell stories and share his personal experience as a blind person. It was not a lot of new information for me but it was impactful to hear it from someone with first-hand experience. I appreciated his perspective and his encouragement that what disabled people need is people who are willing to give sincere continuous effort to help improve the Web for everyone. He also encouraged us to involve disabled people in a collaborative process.

I was excited going into the second session about ditching your JavaScript for CSS. I thought it would be more about modern CSS techniques like scroll animations, view transitions, or other ways that CSS in the past 3 years can replace JavaScript. But the talk was more about some obscure solutions where the speaker had used JavaScript in the past. He also talked about solutions for equal height columns using CSS Grid and using position: sticky instead of scripting. Those are both good examples but felt very dated in the fact that we have been able to do that for several years. I did have a chance to give some input with someone asked a question and he was not as familiar–container queries and put in a plug for view transitions and scroll animations, which I am the most excited about.

I enjoyed the third session about going from a developer to a trusted advisor. The speaker focused on building trust with those we work with and those we work for. He showed how we can build that trust through our attitudes, our work ethic, and through our character. Humility plays a huge role in that. I walked away encouraged that I have been able to build that trust in my different work relationships in the past and in my new role at Revive Our Hearts. I look forward to reviewing his slides once they are posted on the conference website.

After lunch, I enjoyed hearing Laura Blersch talk about championing neurodiversity. I am glad that she was given a platform to share her experiences and make us aware of the different experiences of others so that we can support them to be successful in the workplace. It was also very personal to me as some people close in my life who are not neurotypical. I appreciated this introduction to neurodiversity and has whet my appetite to learn more about it so that I can support others and apply that knowledge in my work as a web developer. Most of my accessibility knowledge is more toward visual impairment. I want to understand more about how I can create better experiences for those with cognitive impairments as well.

I went to only one other session in the afternoon. It was not very good and I left early because I could not handle listening to it any longer. I was feeling a bit worn out at that point after an all-day workshop on Friday. And I was not that interested in any of the other sessions in the afternoon. Part of me wishes that I had attended one of the sessions after hearing from my team leader but it was a lot of the things that I am already practicing. It might have been nice to hear and nod along. I ended up hanging out in a comfortable chair in the lobby and doing some personal things on my laptop while conversations were going on around me. I did enjoy that someone I had met at lunch came over and talked with me for the last 15 minutes of the day.

The greatest value I got out of the weekend was spending time with my remote teammates. Nothing beats in-person time together to better to get to know them and understand their personalities better. We ate several meals together, grabbed breakfast together, and all went over to the conference venue in the same vehicle. And I roomed with my team leader. It was great to have a lot of informal conversations together through the course of the weekend. It think it builds a better team experience. I was bummed that my other teammate who started with me back in April was unable to attend.

It was good to get away and be exposed to different topics and different people. I came away with new energy and motivation to make time to learn about front-end things that I am interested in like web components and scroll animations. It also made me think about preparing some talks for the future. If I go back next year, I would like like to submit some talks that would appeal to others who are more front-of-the-front-end oriented or to back-end developers that are interested to improve their front-end skills. I feel challenged to consider different ways that I can continue to grow and to contribute to the community.

• We shared the Bone Fire at Smokey Bones the first night
• I had Indian food for the first time on the trip
• I had Shish Kabob at a Middle Eastern restaurant my last night