My closing keynote at Awwwards NYC 2016: A New Hope – the web strikes back

Last 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

You can watch the screencast of the video on YouTube.