It’s April! And as the German saying goes, April does whatever it wants. We, on the other hand, will do exactly what you expect us to do, which is organise our 66th meetup. But the line-up is still a secret. With sunglasses and a fake beard. Stay tuned, all will be revealed in time!

March madness? Maybe! Much merriment, my mates! Marcus, Melanie, Matteo: marvellous, methinks! Many meticulously made monologues! (Please attend our upcoming meetup for the opportunity to watch us trying to do the entire introduction like this. It will be fun, and we are very much looking forward to see you on March 8th when we kick off at 8pm sharp at co.up).

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  Matteo Cavucci Better User Stories

  One of the biggest challenges of building things together is communicating your idea to others. Considering that humans are not so great at telepathy, the only tool we have is language. For years, the solution was struggling to collect all the requirements in big spec books that noone wanted to read. Until we discovered another way: telling stories. This talk is taking a familiar format, the "user story", and will explore it from an unusual point of view. We’re going to see how to use it, how to avoid common pitfalls and how to make real sense of "user stories".

  ​Matteo is a true web-midfielder. Developer at heart, his passion is bridging engineering, design and digital strategy. He’s motivated by both product and technical challenges, getting excited by discovering new features as well as Agile practices. After more than ten years in the web industry, he’s currently working at Edenspiekermann, where he’s helping clients and teammates to build great products and services.

  • @matteomced
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  Marcus Blättermann Resolution-Independent Illustrations in Pure JavaScript

  Marcus will present a system for creating fully responsive illustrations that can adapt to any resolution. In his talk he’ll point out new approaches to responsive, resolution-independent design.

  ​Marcus Blättermann studied communication design at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany. While always into illustration and graphic-design he focuses more and more on web design and web development with a focus on responsive, resolution-independent design solutions.

  • @essenmitsosse
  • essenmitsosse.de
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  Melanie Daveid Creating Your Personal Website Without Going Nuts

  It’s one of the most challenging topics creative people face in their career - the process of developing a personal website that represents professional skills on one hand but also reflects their personality and mindset on the other. It is an important experience in decision making and this talk will offer a basic guideline to approach this challenge.

  Melanie is a UX Designer and Art Director from Austria who is currently working as a Senior Product Designer at Onefootball. She calls herself enfant terrible of the digital avantgarde and enjoys nothing more than a decent "high-five".

  • @melaniedaveid
  • melaniedaveid.com

Up.front happens every month (except durin our summer and winter breaks), usually on the second Tuesday of the month. The next Up.front meetups are scheduled for:

• #66 Tue, Apr 12 2016
• #67 Tue, May 10 2016
• #68 Tue, Jun 14 2016
• #69 Tue, Sept 13 2016

We are always looking for interesting topics and new perspectives. If you are interested in speaking at Up.front, you are welcome to submit a talk.