Hosted by Made by Many every last Thursday of the month Front-end London (FEL) brings together a diverse crowd of people passionate about design, development and all things Web.

Kicking off the evening, we heard a talk from Layla Porter, developer evangelist at Twilio, who showed us the benefits of Javascript templating, especially when dealing with legacy code bases that you can’t rewrite. JS templating libraries are lightweight and allow you to clean up messy code. Porter demonstrated this in a neat live coding session.

Next up was Germain Souquet, lead developer at Grabyo, who took the audience on a journey through the past, present and future of video on the web. We heard about approaches to process video and how to utilise Media Source Extensions, an API to vary the video source based on the user’s device and connection, for example serving a smaller sized video to mobile devices. I was especially interested in learning more about the pending new browser APIs to help control and cast playback to remote devices. Another thing to look forward to is AV1, a royalty-free codec that can make videos 50% smaller than current H.264 videos.

Finally, Dave Cooper, developer at OVO Energy, gave a talk on how to mock data — test your applications locally without hitting external or separately running API instances. Speaking with humour and energy, Cooper expounded on approaches you should avoid, gave an overview of a few of the data mocking libraries available, and finally demonstrated how to use data-mocks (a library that Cooper has created) through live coding.

Front-end London is a free monthly meet-up hosted by Made By Many about front-end development and design. Stay tuned either on our website or Twitter (@frontendlondon) for news of the next event. We’re always looking for new speakers and talks — if you have an idea for a talk, do email fel@madebymany.co.uk.