Garden Bird Themes
All Posts

All Day Hey! 2025

Published by Maureen Holland

I left home at 5h30 and got back around 22h. A seven-hour round trip transit for eight hours of the All Day Hey! 2025 Conference. Worth it? Yes. Would I do it again? Dear god, not like that. Some Leeds-based accommodation would have to be involved.

To top it all off, I was recovering from a cold and seriously considered not going at all. My travel plans looked more punishing than ambitious as the day approached. But a bit of Advil and a mask and not enough time between waking up and getting on the train to talk myself out of it did the trick.

Huge thanks to the folks at Glean for creating this quiet space at the venue:

A large sheet of soft blobby shapes. A white dot with black text in middle reads: Need a quiet moment? Take a break here. In smaller print at the bottom of the dot, Neurodiverse by design. In the top left corner of the sheet, the Glean logo

Immediately overwhelmed by the sounds and sights of the crowd, I was grateful to take a moment alone at a table in the corner behind this sign. A small, but much appreciated moment.

Then it was time for the main event:

What do you see?, Lola Odelola

Challenging in a good way. There were two audience exercises! We were asked to approach alt text as art, as poetry, as something more equitable to the visual experience than a bland description of elements in the frame. What if there was a prefers-alt-text query? How much more evocative and vivid would our alt text become? A brief visit to Alt Text Selfies is a reminder we could get a lot more creative here. (p.s. This is the second talk I’ve seen this year to give a shout-out to Alt Text Selfies, the first being Sara Joy’s Whimsica11y at State of the Browser. I’m hoping anyone reading this is already mentally crafting their own text-based selfie.)

The good news or the bad news? Directing a narrative as it happens using AI, Thalita Vergilio

AI has entered the chat. Literally.

Thalita demo-ed how Stanford CoreNLP fared against GPT-4 in analyzing the prevailing sentiment of Slack messages during a simulated All Hands meeting (Spoiler: GPT provided better analysis). Notably, there are off-the-shelf products for much more than text analysis available, including facial expression detection, body language and posture analysis, gaze and attention monitoring, and biometric feedback. I appreciated that Thalita emphasized there are major ethical issues with this sort of AI use in addition to legal restrictions from the AI Act and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But the whole thing left me feeling like 2025 is the new 1984.

No signal, no service: digital exclusion and how to change it, Sareh Heidari

Digital-first should not mean digital only

One of my favourite things to do as a front-end developer is try to break things. But my attempts are mostly limited to the devices I test with. This is a decent start. It’s important to test with older devices and assistive technology. But the brilliant point made here was to take a more holistic approach. How can you get help if you can’t understand the information on the page? How can you fill in a required post code when you have no fixed address? How can you even load the form when you live in an area with poor network connections?

Looking at a digital experience beyond the technical requirements creates a user-centred approach rather than a product-centred one. A couple of practical takeaways:

Do Repeat Yourself. How to move from development into leadership, Luke Stringer

The reality of leadership work is that you lose a lot of “hands-on” coding time. But instead of being fully hands-off, you can aim for “hands warm.” This means staying involved in code reviews, keeping on top of the overall architecture, and attending meet-ups and conferences. Not having as intimate a knowledge of the codebase as before, you get to ask all the questions!

I absolutely love when someone in a more senior position asks a lot of questions. It normalizes the practice for more junior folks and creates shared understanding for the whole team. Go ahead and repeat yourself. And never set a meeting without an agenda.

No agenda, no attenda!

What every technologist needs to know about security, Ali Farooqui

Okay, I’ve learned there’s a security poverty line and if you’re below that, you’re in real trouble. I could have used a few more details on what exactly that line entailed. But my overall takeaway from this talk was the reinforcement that “good security is a byproduct of simple design.” All the things that are considered hallmarks of better engineering decisions (modularity, testability, automated deployment) are better security decisions as well.

In addition, it’s important to consider how quickly your remediation pathways could resolve a critical alert. Alarmingly, the average for cloud-based critical alerts is 128 days.

With great community comes great responsibility, Imran Hussain

Communities! “A group of people brought together through shared values.” Sounds a lot like why I’m attending this conference in the first place. Imran highlighted the importance of transparency, being open about how long you plan to support the community and what goals you are pursuing during that time. Very thoughtful attention to the power relations at play. To avoid an unhealthy power dynamic, choose distributed decision-making structures and co-design with your audience as much as possible.

Get the core right and the resilient code will follow, Andy Bell

I’m a huge fan of Andy Bell’s web development philosophy, having worked through both Every Layout and Eleventy From Scratch. Genuinely changed the course of my career in the best possible way. For me, so much of a productive work environment is based around whether issues are framed as “me vs. you” or “us vs the problem.” Andy’s tips for async communication make it a lot easier to focus on solving the problem:

This felt like a great extension of the talk about communities, because it’s really about building solid relationships. Once you have that foundation of trust, everything gets faster and higher quality. If that sounds good to you, I have great news: Andy’s most recent course, Complete CSS is available now!

Around the wwworld: Web MIDI, Web AUDIO and what the web does best, Katie Fenn

Katie recreated Daft Punk’s “Around the World” with Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and Audio web APIs. It was the most technical talk of the day, which is difficult to pull off in the final slot, but blasting loud electronic music through the theatre speakers is a sure-fire way to keep everyone’s attention (see a video clip). As someone who knows nothing about audio technology or the history of electronic music, I found this fascinating. I also really enjoyed the use of snippets to share each step of the build. The general pattern was: input — effects — destination. At the end, Katie made the point that this hobbyist/amateur pursuit was possible because the web provides such fertile ground for experimentation and learning. I couldn't agree more.

Free and open standards create wealth for us all.

Wrapping Up

I was running on fumes at this point and couldn’t attend the social, so headed out to wait for my train. But I had been lucky enough to meet a bunch of cool people during the breaks and over lunch, which is a huge part of the joy of these conferences. I hope to stick around for the social next year. Any recommendations for accommodation?

More community conferences! (Buy tickets early)

And bonus (free!) meet-ups