Zain Afzal
Obsessed with the web and over engineering simple problems, I've worked for 5+ years on various complicated frontend engineering problems and have lived to tell the tale, including a multi year project to launch dynamic colors across the chromeOS operating system.
Currently a software engineer at Qwilr, previously a software engineer at Google, before that a computer science student, tutor & lecturer at UNSW and before that a high school student who didn't appreciate the lack of lower back pain.
He/Him
Session
It's impossible to do software without the power of fonts and text rendering. They underpin the terminal we use to run our code, the browsers we use to run our web apps and the emails we get paid too much to write.
But for many they are a black box of standards and code that seems to effortlessly click together, until they don't. This talk explores how this works from font file structures, internationalization issues and font stack management. Finally we use the knowledge we've gained together to poke at some non standard use cases for fonts which pull back the curtain to show a font file for what it is, arbitrary instructions on how to render a shape on the screen. Cats are involved.