Web Deep Dive

​The web is the doorway to the world Understanding it at a deep level is critical to building on it There are over five billion people connected to the internet. Whether you're building an online presence for your business, a personal blog, an e-commerce site, or anything in between, having a solid understanding of the fundamentals of the web is critical to creating the kind of user experience software developers expect. Most people getting into web development in recent years naturally breeze through (or plain skip over) web fundamentals in their pursuit of their first dev job. Unfortunately, this results in the substandard reinvention of wheels which means lots of work for sub-optimal results. Frustrated devs. Frustrated customers. In this workshop we're diving deep into important bits of the web platform you need to be successful building web applications

​At the end of this workshop you'll be able to do all of these things yourself.

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• ​Understand HTTP
  Your web app starts with the HTTP request/response cycle. We'll look at this in depth from both the browser and server perspective. In particular through the lense of the Web Fetch standard.

• ​Implement efficient caching
  Not just assets, but any resource accessed via HTTP can be cached via proper use of Cache-Control header directives. We'll learn how to take advantage of these directives for in-browser caching as well as shared caching on a CDN.

• ​Speed up your site with prefetching
  Eliminate pending states by taking advantage of the platform's <link> tag for preloading and prefetching resources and even preconnecting to other domains to easily speed up your app.

• ​Explain how links and forms work
  If you joined the web dev industry in recent years, you were probably taught that your onSubmit handler for a form should start with the line event.preventDefault(). We're going to get you to the point that you understand what the browser actually does if you don't prevent this behavior. You'll also understand important browser behavior regarding links and what happens when the user changes their mind.

• ​Use Semantic HTML
  HTML is a relatively simple markup language that includes a great deal of built-in capabilities. Just like any tool, it works best when you hold it right, and using semantic HTML is how you ensure the browser can do it's job with your app. We'll also briefly talk about the role of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) has in this.

​Required experience

​This is not an introduction to programming course. You should have some experience with coding. You will be expected to have and be comfortable with a coding editor. You will need to have modern versions of git, npm, and Node.js installed on your computer. It will be guided and appropriate for beginners looking to get a better understanding of the web platform as well as experienced developers who want to level-up with a deep dive of the web platform.

​Important Note

​Depending on the questions asked during the workshop, or necessary changes in the material, the actual content of the workshop could differ from the above mentioned topics.

​At the end of this workshop you'll be able to do all of these things yourself.