Conference talk "Houdini's Magic Trick for the Enterprise" about the eminent problem-solving utility of little web components that do one thing, but do it well.

I tried to loosely follow https://nathanbrixius.wordpress.com/2020/01/29/how-i-create-presentation-content/.

However, preparing the short essay mutated into full-blown word-by-word speaker notes eventually.

And I decided to make the slides as conventional, individual HTML web pages. This turned out to be a good decision, because it allowed me to embed live demos right inside presentation slides — avoiding all the usual hassle with switching tabs or even applications for demoing stuff.

I did not have time to share styling between slides, which is one thing I would improve. I would also standardize a skeleton of slides, use a static site generator to share fragments across pages, and use the newfangled view transitions for page-to-page animation.

I presented this talk at AXA DevCon 2024, an internal developer conference of AXA Switzerland held on June 4, 2024, in Winterthur.

1. Install bun.
2. bun install
3. bun start
4. Point your browser at http:https://localhost:8080
5. Press SPACE to advance to next slide.
6. Slides 20 and 33 benefit from switching languages by way of the language selector in the top right corner.

I got an interesting question that expressed curiousity or even doubt about slide 33. The audience member asked to see the page source.

Using View Page Source on that very slide I could demonstrate that, indeed, there was no hidden magic or precompilation involved, just composition of few custom elements and normal HTML tags.

I also showed that in the Elements tab of Chrome Developer Tools one can see that both the <sig-nal> and <trans-late> web components are of the self-vanishing type, as explained in the speaker notes.