Final FEN 2016 lineup

Full-day conference, Friday September 30th, 2016 at Sheffield City Hall

FrontEndNorth is an event for front-end developers, designers and people who make things for the web taking place on September 30th, 2016 at Sheffield City Hall.

The selection process

Choosing speakers for FEN 2016 was a tough job. I had a lot of help from Dave and Matt in forming a selection that was as diverse as we could possibly hope but also had enough experienced and well known speakers to help sell tickets.

We closed our speaker applications on July 15th – before this we had already approached a few speaker contacts to speak, this way we could launch the website and generate buzz early without having to wait for applications to finish.

We had a LOT of applications in the end. This led us to add-in the Lightning Speaker sessions which meant we were able to shift around the schedule and add in an extra 8 speakers.

Overall I’m incredibly happy with the final selection. We worked hard to weed out talks that weren’t practical or had been done before at other conferences and also tried to cover all aspects of front-end development without getting bogged down on stuff like tooling or more theoretical subjects.

If we do FEN next year, I’d seriously think about either having 2-tracks or possibly even a 2-day event. It’s really difficult to fit all aspects of front-end into a single day, even with 14 speakers!