What's a better way to start a conference talk than "Uh... okay, so I guess it's time to get started?"

Sean McPherson — Sat, 12 Oct 2019 01:47:16 +0000

I'm giving my first conference talk at CONNECT.TECH 2019 in Atlanta, GA next week, and I am excited!

Over the past few months, I've spent a lot of time studying the subject, fine tuning my slides, and working through the talk itself. But there is one thing that is hanging me up: the kick-off.

I have seen a bunch of talks at different conferences, and it seems like the default "start" is a diffusing question or statement like: "Alright, so I guess I'll begin."

There has got to be a better way!

What are some of the great talk kick-offs that you've heard? What do you like and what do you dislike? How would you start your tech talk?

Access head, body without document queries

Sean McPherson — Fri, 10 May 2019 11:07:05 +0000

When I needed to add an element to the head or body of a document, I used to reach for document.querySelector(), the Swiss-Army knife of document methods:

const headNode = document.querySelector('head')
const bodyNode = document.querySelector('body')

console.log(`I'm the head:`, headNode)
console.log(`I'm the body:`, bodyNode)

This works and is a familiar pattern for finding DOM elements.

Today I learned about document.head and document.body, which provide query-free references to the head and body elements of the document, respectively!

Which these handy references, we can replace the previous code block with:

console.log(`I'm the head:`, document.head)
console.log(`I'm the body:`, document.body)

No more creating variables to reference body and head; they're always available on the document object.

document.head and document.body are available in all browsers after IE8: checkout the availability chart on CanIUse.com.

Happy coding!

DEV Community: Sean McPherson

What's a better way to start a conference talk than "Uh... okay, so I guess it's time to get started?"

Access head, body without document queries