Polymer Summit

This was a chance to head down to London and hear some talk from the team behind Polymer and Chrome as well as business that have used it in their products and a chance to network with the community behind Polymer too.

It was the first ever summit/conference of this type I had been to, I’d already read up on the docs and had a play around with it myself and become a bit of a fan already, so was really excited to go and see what other companies had used it for and what else I could learn and pick up.

Oh, before I forget here’s a link to the site which had all the details.

I’m not going to go into detail about all the talks as there we’re too many to cover and there all available on YouTube anyway, for you to watch at your heart’s content.

There we’re a few however that I would like to just mention.

The first one is from the guys over at ING, here a link to it and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Having not done too much web dev as part of a company before but having heard from friends and colleagues what its like, his messages really hit home, that unlike frameworks that come and go often with the developers who are part of the team, Polymer wasn’t isn’t a framework, it just wraps a little bit of magic and sugar around what everyone who does anything on the web already uses.
It also really drilled home to me how just because something’s been done a certain way, doesn’t mean there aren’t new and better ways of trying something.

There we’re also some really good talks from the Polymer team, one of my favourites was from these two, link here, talking about performance of web pages.
Now I know for a fact that you’ll have tried some if not most of these, I know i have before! It was really refreshing to see a different approach to it and to actually use some data and facts in it, rather than just finger in the air guesses.

It also along with most of the talks hammered home the PRPL pattern, which is the way Polymer approach's website loading, which basically comes down to **be lazy**.
— Don’t try and load everything up front when the user loads you’re page
— Don’t pull in anything more than what's absolutely needed for your front page to work
— Only load up stuff when the user needs it
— Never block the main thread
— And yes just **be lazy**

Which I personally really like as a moto for when it comes to website dev, as you don’t have to really think about it, you just have to get yourself into that mind-set and off you go.

I thoroughly enjoyed the summit, it helped reinforce the Polymer mind set when it came to web development, solidified my understanding of Polymer generally and really got me on-board as a fan and part of the community where I’m currently developing some elements of my own.
Oh and of course I left with fist fulls of stickers!