’No Bulls*it Freelancer’ by Tomislav Kozačinski
What it's like to work for the worst boss in the whole world - your self?
In this talk Tomislav will speak about personal growth while managing two parallel and completely opposite careers. He'll draw from his own experience and tell all about the good and the bad, moments of being broke, sleepless and away from family and friends for weeks + a bunch of stuff in between and in the end - is it all worth it?
Tomislav is a Digital Product Designer, a hyper-organized artist & a problem solver. With over 10 years of freelancing experience, I've been involved in all types of projects. I started out in print and transitioned to web where I kicked some serious HTML and CSS butt for some time. As smart phones came to play I switched my focus to mobile apps, and latley I've been working on B2B and SaaS web and mobile apps and managing digital products as a User Experience designer and creative team lead. Also - UX UI designer, Speaker, Entrepreneur, Stand Up Comedian, Freelancer, World Traveler, Biker, Gamer, No Bullshit Bro, and some other buzz words as well...
’Geo-distributed Development Teams in Practice’ by Luka Kladarić
"Oh yeah, you must be way cheaper for them!", "But... how do they know you're actually working when you're remote?", "Oh I could never do that, my productivity tanks when I work from home."
These are just some of the things I regularly hear when the topic of telecommuting, "remoting", "working from home" or similar comes up. After over a decade of working and hiring remotely, let me take you on a retrospective of my experiences; what works, what definitely doesn’t, the pros and cons, how to hire remotely and how to get hired.
"What if everyone is in one office, and you're all alone on the other side of the planet?", "But I *like* hanging out with the people in my office, why would I give that up?"
Can you go all-in with geo-distributed development and have no developers in the office? Can you go a step further and not even have an office? Do hybrid setups work at all? Oh, we have much to talk about.
Luka has been doing computer stuff professionally for over a decade. Despises frontend, likes doing talks. Currently Senior Software Engineer & SRE at Noom, formerly CTO and cofounder at Hitlist and developer at deviantART. Ran a small web studio in Croatia with a dozen happy customers. Splits time between Zagreb and New York. Dreams in matrixcode.
’Make Informed Design Decisions By Understanding Your Audience’ by Lucijan Blagonić
Our design and development approach is often guided by our experience and personal preferences. We often set technical expectations of the project but neglect the user or the client ones. Whether you are doing a redesign or building a website from scratch — you can’t start the project without knowing about your target audiences and defining project outcomes.
What makes a project successful? Is the redesign meant to improve user engagement and how? Do we want to increase the number of visits from mobile devices? Or reduce bounce rate? Defining clear goals up front helps you do the best possible work within these constraints.
In this talk, you'll learn tips and tricks on how to supercharge your design process by utilizing questionnaires, tools like HotJar, Google Analytics, and others to help you better understand your surroundings and make informed decisions.
Lucijan is a designer from Zagreb helping businesses and startups make informed design decisions, and deliver easy–to–use interfaces to their audience. Over the years, Lucijan helped dozens of clients plan and prototype their idea into a full–featured product or a website — guiding them from the initial phase of defining project goals to information architecture, design, and ultimately delivering clickable prototypes to developers. With a thorough understanding of HTML and CSS, he can build living style guides and design systems that are quickly adopted by developers, thus making some decisions directly in the browser — which benefits clients, developers and users alike. Lucijan is focused on applying various User Experience techniques in his work. By building design systems, he is also empowering others on the team to follow best design practices. He is engaged in the design community — speaking at conferences and sharing his knowledge — determined to do his part and help make the internet a better place for everyone.
’A Story About Web Accessibility’ by Emanuel Blagonić
We often don’t think about people with disabilities when designing websites. They are the minority of our visitors and our budget is not that big, right? In this talk I will explore how people with disabilities use the web and will give you some guidelines that will help you create better user experiences for everyone.
Emanuel has more than 13 years of experience and more than 500 different projects with worldwide clients on his back. From designing websites to designing touch–screen applications, he worked with small and big clients, startups and global projects. As one of the pioneers of the web standards movement in Croatia he is active in community where he works on building a better understanding for design process and educates clients as much as possible.