Kimb Jones

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!

Our final speakers for FEN 2016

We’ve got 14 wonderful speakers signed up for FrontEndNorth event:

Harry Roberts
Consultant Front-end Architect
@csswizardry

Lea Verou
Front-end Developer and Author
@LeaVerou

Stuart Robson
Front-end Developer and Author
@StuRobson

Tammie Lister
Theme Wrangler at Automattic
@karmatosed

Robin Whittleton
Head of Front-endfor the GDS Team
@robinwhittleton

Chris Hutchinson
Newsroom Developer at The Times
@chrishutchinson

Charlotte Jackson
Front-end Developer at Clearleft
@lottejackson

Kirsty Burgoine
Front-end & WordPressDeveloper at Fisheye
@kirstyburgoine

Katie Fenn
Senior Software Engineerat Canonical
@katie_fenn

Phil Lennon
Freelance Frontend &WordPress Developer
@frontendphil

Daniel Furze
Senior FE Developerat Code Computerlove
@furzeface

Graeme Robinson
Freelance Web Designer& University Student
@grobiwebdesign

Adam Onishi
Web Developer atThe Financial Times
@onishiweb

Graham Armfield
Accessibility Consultant& Web Developer
@coolfields

Early bird tickets sold out!

Early bird tickets are all gone sorry! But we have plenty of our standard delegate tickets which are priced £120.

Head to the website: frontendnorth.com to get your tickets (via Eventbrite).

Sponsor the event

See the FEN Sponsor Pack (Google Drive Document) for details of sponsorship and support opportunities.

It’s almost 2 years since we had the previous FrontEndNorth in Manchester (sadly the only record of the event is the Lanyrd and Eventbrite pages). The event is now back in a new BIGGER and BETTER location of Sheffield City Hall on Friday the 29th of September 2016.

Why Sheffield?

We chose Manchester in 2014 because we had a wonderful offer of a free venue from the people at MMU. For this reason we were able to bootstrap a low-cost weekend conference together relatively quickly while still keeping the event a high quality experience.

Sadly, I don’t live in Manchester and scoping out a venue there that was large enough to fulfil our needs for a more progressive event proved difficult. There was also the uprising of the excellent UpFront Conference which replaced the need for another front-end focused web conference in that region.

Sheffield City Hall

Also, remember this – the event is called FrontEndNorth – our plan with this conference was always to grow the web community in the North of England and Sheffield is seriously lacking in ANY sort of conference of this size for the sector I run my business in. It made a lot of sense to move to somewhere new that we feel needs an event like this to help shine a light on this wonderful city.

Who’s speaking?

We’ve got 12 speakers planned for the event, with 4 confirmed, 2 in the pipeline and over 20 applications to filter through before we announce the rest. The following lovely people are already confirmed:

Get tickets while you can!

Early bird tickets start from £85 (limited). Students pay just £45! The standard delegate price is £120 – we’re releasing a few 100 now and then more in the coming months.

Head to the website: frontendnorth.com to get your tickets (via Eventbrite).

We need HELP!

The event really needs some awesome sponsors to help make it happen. We have a number of sponsor packages available – just check out the Sponsor Pack (Google Drive Document) and get in touch with us via [email protected] if you see anything you like!