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Schalk Venter

Schalk Venter avatar

First Name: Schalk

Last Name: Venter

Bio

Schalk is a product design and engineering consultant working on various personal, commercial, and open-source projects. He usually finds himself at the intersection of interaction design and software engineering, having done contract work for National Treasury, The Google Foundation, The Coca Cola Company, Replit, and various others. He has lectured in a senior capacity at the Academy of Digital Arts, Open Window, University of Pretoria and co-created the Interaction Design degree at Cape Town Creative Academy. He also co-founded, and currently serves as administrative director, of Frontend Engineering and Design South Africa (FEDSA).

Accepted Talks:

Suprise! It's Server Rendering!

For years, building software that feels smooth, animated, and app-like has often meant reaching for a JavaScript-driven Single Page App (SPA) architecture. But over the last couple of years, the web platform has quietly changed that assumption.


Using the browser’s built-in CSS View Transitions API, server-rendered applications can now create seamless visual continuity between page navigations: fading, sliding, morphing, and preserving context during navigation without taking over routing, data fetching, or rendering in the browser. And it can do this without a single line of JavaScript!


This talk explores how Django developers can use the native View Transitions API to make classic multi-page applications feel like a modern SPA, while maintaining all app and routing logic on the server.


We will look at an example of a modern, multi-tenant project management tool, exclusively using server-side rendering. Along the way, we’ll discuss where View Transitions shine, where they fall short, and how to design interactions that feel modern without rebuilding your app as a frontend monolith.


By the end, attendees will understand how to add polished, app-like transitions to Django applications using mostly HTML and CSS.

Our sponsors

Thinkst
NITheCS
OfferZen
Afrolabs CoderLevelUp ESP Isazi Consulting Naughty Bean
SerpApi