I just had an interesting experience after adding a German SIM card to my phone. The Android version I have told the phone to automatically switch all apps into a German mode. This can be handy, but I found it annoying.

Where it got really odd is in the Twitter Lite PWA-ish app. As it runs in a Chrome WebView the browser tries to be extra helpful and translates the interface back to English. That way I ended up with a “consequences” button, which made me do a double-take:

I thought it is a new way to deal with lots of answers and that you can vote answers up and down. I also was impressed that now tweets can like people, but no. “Follow” in German is “Folgen. And as a noun instead of a verb, “Folgen” in German are “Consequences” in English.

One more thing to worry about when a webview gets too clever for its own good.

I just made an announcement on Twitter on something I’ve been doing for a while. Something I’d love more people with the same privilege as I enjoy doing:

Standing offer to any event: instead of paying me to speak, I am very happy for you to offer diversity tickets of the same value instead.
That way I don't under-bid people who need to get paid to present and the community benefits.

— Chris Heilmann codepo8@toot.cafe (@codepo8) February 16, 2018

It is a wonderful situation to be in a full-time employment and get the chance to present at events. It also is a tricky one. Your work contract often doesn’t allow any extra income. And even if that is the case, you need to deal with taxes and paperwork coming from that. You also don’t want to be the person taking a speaking slot away from someone who does it for a living and is great at it. Or someone who starts out and needs the pay to be able to afford it in the first place. You also don’t want to be a speaker because you are a freebie for the conference organisers.

Conference organisers are under a lot of pressure these days. They are rightfully asked to offer a diverse line-up and be open to lots of people to attend. Elitism and gatherings of the privileged are things to avoid. Sometimes it is hard for a small to medium conference to budget for that. It is not enough to offer free tickets. Often people who could benefit from an event and bring a different point of view can’t even afford getting there.

To help making this easier, I’ve been forfeiting my speaker fees for quite a while. Instead I ask conference organisers to put the money into efforts that bring people who can’t afford it to the event. It means no paperwork for me, no worries about annoying my employer and yet it means I am not a freebie presenter.

I hope that this helps a bit making what we have here even better than it is now. Thanks to all the conference organisers who put effort into this.

Photo by Neubie

Last Friday I presented about Progressive Web Apps (PWA) at the awwwards conference in Berlin.

Deep dive into Progressive Web Apps with Chris Heilman @codepo8, Developer & Evangelist who's creating a PWA Builder @microsoft #PWA #webdevelopment #AwwwardsBerlin pic.twitter.com/t1PANtKEQk

— Awwwards Digital Thinkers Conference (@AwwwardsConf) February 9, 2018

I was pretty lucky as @DasSurma also covered the same topic later in the evening with a more WordPress focused approach.

I am sorry that I couldn’t stay for the whole event, but we got booted out by security as my partner and me had brought our dog. We had asked upfront but there was a miscommunication between the organisers and the event staff. So we had to leave early.

The talk I gave was “Minding the P in PWA” and I covered the idea that we talk too much about the nuts and bolts of PWAs instead of seeing their benefits.

If your product is not really indexable and has no content without JavaScript you are kind of taking the P out of #PWA.

— Chris Heilmann codepo8@toot.cafe (@codepo8) January 19, 2018

The slides are available at SlideShare

I am pretty sure that awwwards will soon release the video. Until then you can also watch the longer version of this talk at Skillsmatter which I gave last month at the London PWA Meetup.

The resources I covered:

• What the web can do – a dashboard of extended features of the web like sensor access checking if your current browser supports it or not
• Mozilla ServiceWorker Cookbook – recipes of different ways to use ServiceWorkers.
• Google Workbox – an abstraction library to ease the work with the moving ServiceWorker spec
• Google Lighthouse – an audit extension to the Chrome developer tools that lints and checks the quality of a PWA opened in the browser
• PWA Builder – an open source project by Microsoft that allows you to pre-seed a manifest from an existing URL and create a ServiceWorker for you. You enter a URL, and you get a PWA and binary fallbacks for the PWA in the end.
• Details on the support for ServiceWorkers and WebManifest in Apple Safari/Webkit – including some interesting facts about how Safari deals with defunct and old caches
• PWA Stats – a resource by Cloud Four showcasing PWA success stories. This is great if you need to convince business owners to go the PWA route
• PWA on Windows 10 – an in-depth article showing what Windows 10 offers to PWAs, including Service Worker support in Edge and web indexing of PWAs and automatic ingestion into the Windows store. There’s also a great tweet by @kirupa, showing “what a PWA would look like on Windows 10:

Just for kicks, here is @davatron5000's @godaytrip as a #PWA on a preview build of Windows 10! ?(inspired by: https://t.co/Flm63mmu6K) pic.twitter.com/t2Kr5MlTOX

— ? KIRUPA (@kirupa) February 1, 2018

Again sorry for having to bail early, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have more PWA questions.