My closing keynote at Awwwards NYC 2016: A New Hope – the web strikes back
Monday, June 20th, 2016Last week I was lucky enough to give the closing keynote at the Awwwards Conference in New York.
Following my current fascination, I wanted to cover the topic of Progressive Web Apps for an audience that is not too technical, and also very focused on delivering high-fidelity, exciting and bleeding edge experiences on the web.
Getting slightly too excited about my Star Wars based title, I got a bit overboard with bastardising Star Wars quotes in the slides, but I managed to cover a lot of the why of progressive web apps and how it is a great opportunity right now.
I covered:
- The web as an idea and its inception: independent, distributed and based on open protocols
- The power of links
- The horrible environment that was the first browser wars
- The rise of standards as a means to build predictable, future-proof products
- How we became too dogmatic about standards
- How this lead to rebelling developer using JavaScript to build everything
- Why this is a brittle environment and a massive bet on things working flawlessly on our users’ computers
- How we never experience this as our environments are high-end and we’re well connected
- How we defined best practices for JavaScript, like Unobtrusive JavaScript and defensive coding
- How libraries and frameworks promise to fix all our issues and we’ve become dependent on them
- How a whole new generation of developers learned development by copying and pasting library-dependent code on Stackoverflow
- How this, among other factors, lead to a terribly bloated web full of multi-megabyte web sites littered with third party JavaScript and library code
- How to rise of mobile and its limitations is very much a terrible environment for those to run in
- How native apps were heralded as the solution to that
- How we retaliated by constantly repeating that the web will win out in the end
- How we failed to retaliate by building web-standard based apps that played by the rules of native – an environment where the deck was stacked against browsers
- How right now our predictions partly came true – the native environments and closed marketplaces are failing to deliver right now. Users on mobile use 5 apps and download on average not a single new one per month
- How users are sick of having to jump through hoops to try out some new app and having to lock themselves in a certain environment
- How the current state of supporting mobile hardware access in browsers is a great opportunity to build immersive experiences with web technology
- How ServiceWorker is a great opportunity to offer offline capable solutions and have notifications to re-engage users and allow solutions to hibernate
- How Progressive Web Apps are a massive opportunity to show native how software distribution should happen in 2016
Yes, I got all that in. See for yourself :).
The slides are available on SlideShare