TL;DR: I am going on holiday for a week and don’t take any computer with me. When I’m back I will cut down on my travels, social media and conference participation and focus more on coaching others, writing and developing with a real production focus.

You won’t hear much from me in the next week or so as I am taking a well-deserved vacation. I’m off to take my partner to the Cayman Islands to visit friends who have a house with a spare room as hotels started to feel like work for me. I’m also making the conscious decision to not take any computer with me as I will be tempted to do work whilst I am there. Which would be silly.

Having just been in a lot of meetings with other DevRel people and a great event about it I found a pattern: we all have no idea how to measure our success and feel oddly unsatisfied if not worried about this. And we are all worried about keeping up to do date in a daily changing market.

I’m doing OK on both of these, but I also suffer from the same worries. Furthermore, I am disturbed about the gap between what we talk about at events and workshops and what gets released in the market afterwards.

The huge gap between publication and application

We have all the information what not to do to create engaging, fast and reliable solutions. We have all the information how to even automate some of these to not disrupt fast development processes. And yet I feel a massive lack of longevity or maintainability in all the products I see and use. I even see a really disturbing re-emergence of “this only needs to work on browser $x and platform $y” thinking. As if the last decade hadn’t happened. Business decisions dictate what goes into production, less so what we get excited about.

Even more worrying is security. We use a lot of third party code, give it full access to machines and fail to keep it up-to-date. We also happily use new and untested code in production even when the original developers state categorically that it shouldn’t be used in that manner.

When it comes to following the tech news I see us tumbling in loops. Where in the past there was a monthly cadence of interesting things to come out, more readily available publication channels and a “stream of news” mentality makes it a full-time job just to keep up with what’s happening.

Many thoughtpieces show up in several newsletters and get repurposed even if the original authors admitted in commentary that they were wrong. A lot is about being new and fast, not about being right.

There is also a weird premature productisation happening. When JavaScript, Browsers and the web weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now, we showed and explained coding tricks and workarounds in blog posts. Now we find a solution, wrap it in a package or a library and release it for people to use. This is a natural progression in any software, but I miss the re-use and mulling around of the original thought. And I am also pretty sure that the usage numbers and stars on GitHub are pretty inflated.

My new (old) work modus

Instead of speaking at a high amount of conferences, I will be much pickier with where I go. My time is more limited now, and I want to use my talents to have a more direct impact. This is due to a few reasons:

• I want to be able to measure more directly what I do – it is a good feeling to be told that you were inspiring and great. But it fails to stay a good feeling when you don’t directly see something coming out of it. That’s why instead of going from event to event I will spend more time developing tools and working directly with people who build products.
• I joined a new team that is much more data driven – our job is to ensure people can build great apps and help them by fixing our platform and help them apply best practices instead of just hearing about them. This is exciting – I will be able to see just how applicable what we talk about really is and collect data of its impact. Just like any good trainer should ensure that the course attendees really learned what you talked about this is a full feedback loop for cool technologies like ServiceWorker and Push Nofifications.
• We just hired a truckload of talented people to coach – and I do want to see other people on stage than the usual suspects. It is great to see people grow with help you can give.
• I just had a cancer growth removed from my face – it was benign but it is kind of a wake-up call to take more care about myself and have my body looked after better on an ongoing basis
• I am moving to Berlin to exclusively live there with my partner and our dog – I’ve lived out of suitcases for years now and while this is great it is fun to have a proper home with people you care about to look after. I will very much miss London, but I am done with the politics there and I don’t want to maintain two places any longer.
• I will spend more time coding – I am taking over some of the work on PWAbuilder and other helper tools and try them out directly with partners. Working in the open is great, but there is a huge difference between what Twitter wants and what people really need
• I will write more – both articles and blog posts. I will also have a massive stab at refreshing the Developer Evangelism Handbook
• I will work more with my employer and its partners – there is a huge group of gifted, but very busy developers out there that would love to use more state-of-the-art technology but have no time to try it out or to go to conferences.

What this means for events and meetups

Simple.

• I will attend less – instead I will connect conferences and meetups with other people who are not as in demand but great at what they do. I am also helping and mentoring people inside and outside the company to be invited instead of me. A lot of times a recommendation is all that is needed. And a helping hand in getting over the fear of “not being good enough”.
• I will stay shorter – I want to still give keynotes and will consider more workshops. But I won’t be booking conferences back-to-back and will not take part in a lot of the social activities. Unless my partner is also coming along. Even better when the dog is allowed, too.
• I am offering to help others – to review their work to get picked and help conference organisers to pick new, more diverse, talent.

I have a lot of friends who do events and I will keep supporting those I know have their full heart in them. I will also try to be supportive for others that need a boost for their new event. But I think it is a good time to help others step up. As my colleague Charles Morris just said at DevRelConf, “not all conferences need a Chris Heilmann”. It is easy to get overly excited about the demand you create. But it is as important to not let it take over your life.

Last week I was in Seattle to attend a few meetings and I was lucky to attend DevRelSummit in the Galvanize space. I was invited to cover an “Ask me anything” slot about Developer Outreach in Microsoft and help out Charles Morris of the Edge team who gave a presentation a similar matter.

https://twitter.com/angelmbanks/status/896119273340379136

It feels weird to have a conference that is pretty meta about the subject of Developer relations (and there is even a ConfConf for conference organisers), but I can wholeheartedly recommend DevRelSummit for people who already work in this field and those who want to.

The line-up and presentations were full of people who know their job and shared real information from the trenches instead of advertising products to help you. This is a very common worry when a new field in our job market gains traction. Anyone who runs events or outreach programs drowns in daily offers of “the turn-key solution to devrel success” or similar snake oil.

In short, the presentations were:

• Bear Douglas of Slack (formerly Twitter and Facebook) sharing wins and fails of developer outreach
• Charles Morris of Microsoft showing how he scaled from 3 people on the Edge team to a whole group, aligning engineering and outreach
• Kyle Paul showing how to grow a community in spaces that are not technical cool spots and how to measure DevFest success
• AJ Glasser of Unity explaining how to deal with and harvest feedback you get showing some traps to avoid
• Damon Hernandez of Samsung talking about building community around hackathons
• Linda Xie of Sourcegraph showing the product and growth cycle of a new software product
• Robert Nyman of Google showing how he got into DevRel and what can be done to stay safe and sound on the road
• Angel Banks and Beth Laing sharing the road to and the way to deliver an inclusive conference with their “We Rise” event as the example
• Jessica Tremblay and Sam Richard showing how IBM scaled their developer community

In between the presentations there were breakout discussions, lightning talks and general space and time to network and share information.

As expected, the huge topics of the event were increasing diversity, running events smoothly, scaling developer outreach and measuring devrel success. Also, as expected, there were dozens of ways and ideas how to do these things with consensus and agreeable discourse.

All in all, DevRelSummit was a very well executed event and a superb networking opportunity without any commercial overhead. There was a significant lack of grandstanding and it was exciting to have a clear and open information exchange amongst people who should be in competition but know that when it comes to building communities, this is not helpful. There is a finite amount of people we want to reach doing Developer Relations. There is no point in trying to subdivide this group even further.

Cheers to another successful @DevRelSummit, Sandra & Barry! ?@SandraPersing @bteiger pic.twitter.com/aPVfpvRe9w

— Tia Over (@tiaover) August 12, 2017

I want to thank everyone involved about the flawless execution and the willingness to share. Having a invite-only slack group with pre-set channels for each talk and session was incredibly helpful and means the conversations are going on right now.

DevRelSummit showed that when you get a dedicated group of people together who know their jobs and are willing to share that you can get an event to be highly educational without any of the drama that plights other events. We have a lot of problems to solve and many of them are very human issues. A common consensus of the event was that we have to deal with humans and relate to them. Numbers and products are good and useful, but not burning out or burning bridges even with the best of intentions are even more important.

It is incredible how far we’ve come in the coverage of events. In the past, I recorded my own talks as audio as not many conferences offered video recordings (and wrote about this as a good idea in the developer evangelism handbook). These days I find myself having not having to do this as most conferences and even meetups record talks. Faster upload speeds and simple, free hosting on YouTube and others made that possible.

And yet it is expensive and a lot of work to record and publish videos of your conference. And if you don’t make any money with them it is a bit of advertising for your event with a lot of overhead. That’s why it is a shame to see just how low the viewing numbers of some great conference videos are. When talking to conference organisers, I heard some astonishingly low numbers. The only thing to boost them seems to be to deliver them one after the other with dedicated social media promotion. Which, again, is a lot of extra effort.

In order to see what would make people watch more conference talks, I took a quick Twitter poll:

Poll time: what would make you watch more conference videos?

— Chris Heilmann codepo8@toot.cafe (@codepo8) July 11, 2017

Here are the quick results of 344 votes:

• 29% chose shorter videos without Q&A
• 37% would like transcripts with timestamps
• 22% would like to have videos offline
• 12% wanted captions.

I love watching conference talk videos. I watch them offline, on an iPod in the gym or on planes and trains. Basically when I am not able to do anything else, they are a great way to spend your time and learn something. There are a few things to consider to make this worth my while though:

• The talk needs to make sense to watch on a small screen. Lots of live code in a terminal with a 12px font isn’t. That is not to say these aren’t good talks. They are just not working as a video.
• The talk needs to be available offline (I use YouTube DL to download YouTube videos, some publishers on Vimeo offer downloads, Channel 9 always has the videos to download)
• The talk needs to be contained in itself – it is frustrating to hear references to things I should know or bits that happened at the same event I wasn’t part of. It is even more annoying to see a Q&A session where you wait for the mic to arrive for ages or the presenter answering without me knowing what the question is.

I’ve written about the Q&A part of videos in detail before and I strongly believe that cutting a standard Q&A will result in more viewers and happier presenters. For starters, the videos will be shorter and it feels like less of an effort to watch the talk when it is 25 minutes instead of 45-50.

At technical events I am OK with some of these annoyances. After all, it is more important to entertain the audience at the event. And it is amazing when presenters take the time and effort to see other talks and reference them. However, there is a lot of benefit to consider the quality and consumption of a recording, too.

Having recordings of conference talks is an amazing gift to the community. People who can’t afford to go to events or even can’t afford to travel can still stay up-to-date and learn about topics to deep dive into by watching videos. Easy to consume, short and to the point videos can be a great way to increase the diversity of our market.

“You are here to talk to the online audience”

When I spoke at some TEDx events, this was the advice of the speaking coaches and organisers. TED is a known brand to have high quality online content. And it is almost unaffordable to go to the main TED events. Which makes this advice kind of odd, but their success online shows that there are on to something.

TED talks are much shorter than the average conference talk. They are more performance than presentation. And they come with transcripts and are downloadable.

Now, we can’t have only these kind of talks at events. But maybe it is a good plan to do some editing on the recordings and turn them into more of an experience than a record of what happened on stage that gets delivered as soon as possible. This means extra work and is some overhead, for sure. But I wonder how much of it could be automated already.

In addition to the poll results there were some other good points in the comments on Twitter and Facebook.

Less of the speaker upper body and more of the slides. Or slides to download. Also, speakers who pace themselves to sound good at 1.5x speed.

It seems to be pretty common by people who spend time watching talks to speed them up. This is an interesting concept. Good editing between slides and presenter was a wish a lot of people had. It shouldn’t be hard to publish the slides along with the video, and something presenters should consider doing more.

Not on the list but “editing” plus a solid couple of paragraphs of what the talk covers and why I should or shouldn’t watch it.

This is another easy thing for presenters to do. We’re always asked to offer a description and title of the talk that should zing and get people excited. Providing a second one that is more descriptive to use with the video isn’t that much overhead.

For English spokers, most of the conferences, no problem. But for non English spokers, massive failure. Reading is really more easy trying to listen and understand. Some guys speaks really fast. So I can’t understand talks.

This is a common problem and a presenter skill to work on. Being understandable by non-native speakers is a huge opportunity. So, some pacing and avoiding slang references are always a good idea.

The possibility to download the videos on tablets, smartphones and laptops so I can see them during commuting time

Offering videos to download should be not too hard. If you’re not planning to sell them anyways, why not?

Also offline availabilty with chapter marks/timestamps. I’ll vote for transcripts for skim reading to get to the gold nuggets. But sometimes a good speaker is an enjoyable 50min experience. I’d rather read transcripts. I never get blocks of quiet. Links to slides to follow along, or (even better) closed captions so I can play them muted If they were shorter and had a PowerPoint with main points to download after

This, of course, is the big one. A lot of people asked for transcripts, chapters and time stamps. Either for accessibility reasons or just because it is easier to skim and jump to what is important to you. This costs time and effort.

And here we have a Catch-22: if not many people watch the recordings of an event, conference organisers and companies don’t want to spend that time and effort. Manual transcription, editing and captioning isn’t cheap.

The good news is that automated transcription has gone leaps and bounds in the last years. With the need to have voice commands on mobiles and home appliances a lot of companies concentrated on getting this much better than it used to be.

YouTube has automated captions with editing functionality for free. Most cloud providers offer video insights.

One service that blew me away is VideoIndexer.

(Yes, this is by the company I work for, but it came as a surprise to me that this offer brings together many machine learning APIs in a simple interface.)

Using VideoIndexer, you not only generate an editable time-stamped transcript, but you also get emotion recognition, image to text conversion of video content, speaker recognition and keyword extraction. That way you to offer an interface that allows people to jump where they want to without having to scrub through the video. I’d love to see more offers like these and I am sure there are quite a few out there already in use by big TV companies and sports broadcasters.

Summary

All in all I am grateful to have the opportunity to watch talks of events I couldn’t be at and I’m making an effort to be a better online citizen by providing better descriptions and be more aware of how what I am saying can be consumed as a video afterwards.

My favourite quote in the comments was from Tessa Mero:

Would be fun watching it with someone so we can discuss the content during/after the video. Need social engagement to make learning more fun.

Videos of talks are a great opportunity to learn something and have fun with your colleagues in the office. Pick a room, set up a machine connected to the beamer, get some snacks in, watch the talk and discuss how it applies to your work afterwards. Conference organisers spend a lot of effort to record talks, presenters put a lot in to make the talk exciting and educational. And you can benefit from all of that for free.

Also published on Medium

The last two days I ran a poll on Twitter asking people what they use to debug JavaScript.

• console.log() which means you debug in your editor and add and remove debugging steps there
• watches which means you instruct the (browser) developer tools to log automatically when changes happen
• debugger; which means you debug in your editor but jump into the (browser) developer tools
• breakpoints which means you debug in your (browser) developer tools

The reason was that having worked with editors and developer tools in browsers, I was curious how much either are used. I also wanted to challenge my own impression of being a terrible developer for not using the great tools we have to the fullest. Frankly, I feel overwhelmed with the offerings and choices we have and I felt that I am pretty much set in my ways of developing.

Developer tools for the web have been going leaps and bounds in the last years and a lot of effort of browser makers goes into them. They are seen as a sign of how important the browser is. The overall impression is that when you get the inner circle of technically savvy people excited about your product, the others will follow. Furthermore, making it easier to build for your browser and giving developers insights as to what is going on should lead to better products running in your browser.

I love the offerings we have in browser developer tools these days, but I don’t quite find myself using all the functionality. Turns out, I am not alone:

The results of 3970 votes in my survey where overwhelmingly in favour of console.log() as a debugging mechanism.

Both the Twitter poll and its correlating Facebook post had some interesting reactions.

• As with any too simple poll about programming, a lot of them argued with the questioning and rightfully pointed out that people use a combination of all of them.
• There was also a lot of questioning why alert() wasn’t an option as this is even easier than console().
• There was quite some confusion about debugger; – seems it isn’t that common
• There was only a small amount of trolling – thanks.
• There was also quite a few mentions of how tests and test driven development makes debugging unimportant.

There is no doubt that TDD and tests make for less surprises and are good development practice, but this wasn’t quite the question here. I also happily discard the numerous mentions of “I don’t make mistakes”. I was pretty happy to have had only one mention of document.write() although you do still see it a lot in JavaScript introduction courses.

What this shows me is a few things I’ve encountered myself doing:

• Developers who’ve been developing in a browser world have largely been conditioned to use simple editors, not IDEs. We’ve been conditioned to use a simple alert() or console.log() in our code to find out that something went wrong. In a lot of cases, this is “good enough”
• With browser developer tools becoming more sophisticated, we use breakpoints and step-by-step debugging when there are more baffling things to figure out. After all, console.log() doesn’t scale when you need to track various changes. It is, however, not our first go-to. This is still adding something in our code, rather than moving away from the editor to the debugger
• I sincerely hope that most of the demands for alert() were in a joking fashion. Alert had its merits, as it halted the execution of JavaScript in a browser. But all it gives you is a string and a display of [object object] is not the most helpful.

Why aren’t we using breakpoint debugging?

There should not be any question that breakpoint debugging in vastly superior to simply writing values into the console from our code:

• You get proper inspection of the whole state and environment instead of one value
• You get all the other insights proper debuggers give you like memory consumption, performance and so on
• It is a cleaner way of development. All that goes in your code is what is needed for execution. You don’t mix debugging and functionality. A stray console.log() can give out information that could be used as an attack vector. A forgotten alert() is a terrible experience for our end users. A forgotten “debugger;” or breakpoint is a lot less likely to happen as it does pause execution of our code. I also remember that in the past, console.log() in loops had quite a performance impact of our code.

Developers who are used to an IDE to create their work are much more likely to know their way around breakpoint debugging and use it instead of extra code. I’ve been encountering a lot of people in my job that would never touch a console.log() or an alert() since I started working in Microsoft. As one response of the poll rightfully pointed out it is simpler:

It's even longer to write console.log than to put a breakpoint...

— Chen Eshchar (@cheneshchar) July 6, 2017

So, why do we then keep using console logging in our code rather than the much more superior way of debugging code that our browser tooling gives us?

I think it boils down to a few things:

• Convenience and conditioning – we’ve been doing this for years, and it is easy. We don’t need to change and we feel familiar with this kind of back and forth between editor and browser
• Staying in one context – we write our code in our editors, and we spent a lot of time customising and understanding that one. We don’t want to spend the same amount of work on learning debuggers when logging is good enough
• Inconvenience of differences in implementation – whilst most debuggers work the same there are differences in their interfaces. It feels taxing to start finding your way around these.
• Simplicity and low barrier of entry – the web became the big success it is by being independent of platform and development environment. It is simple to show a person how to use a text editor and debug by putting console.log() statements in your JavaScript. We don’t want to overwhelm new developers by overloading them with debugger information or tell them that they need a certain debugging environment to start developing for the web.

The latter is the big one that stops people embracing the concept of more sophisticated debugging workflows. Developers who are used to start with IDEs are much more used to breakpoint debugging. The reason is that it is built into their development tools rather than requiring a switch of context. The downsides of IDEs is that they have a high barrier to entry. They are much more complex tools than text editors, many are expensive and above all they are huge. It is not fun to download a few Gigabyte for each update and frankly for some developers it is not even possible.

How I started embracing breakpoint debugging

One thing that made it much easier for me to embrace breakpoint debugging is switching to Visual Studio Code as my main editor. It is still a light-weight editor and not a full IDE (Visual Studio, Android Studio and XCode are also on my machine, but I dread using them as my main development tool) but it has in-built breakpoint debugging. That way I have the convenience of staying in my editor and I get the insights right where I code.

For a node.js environment, you can see this in action in this video:

Are hackable editors, linters and headless browsers the answer?

I get the feeling that this is the future and it is great that we have tools like Electron that allow us to write light-weight, hackable and extensible editors in TypeScript or just plain JavaScript. Whilst in the past the editor you use was black arts for web developers we can now actively take part in adding features to them.

I’m even more a fan of linters in editors. I like that Word tells me I wrote terrible grammar by showing me squiggly green or red underlines. I like that an editor flags up problems with your code whilst you code it. It seems a better way to teach than having people make mistakes, load the results in a browser and then see what went wrong in the browser tools. It is true that it is a good way to get accustomed to using those and – let’s be honest – our work is much more debugging than coding. But by teaching new developers about environments that tell them things are wrong before they even save them we might turn this ratio around.

I’m looking forward to more movement in the editor space and I love that we are able to run code in a browser and get results back without having to switch the user context to that browser. There’s a lot of good things happening and I want to embrace them more.

We build more complex products these days – for good or for worse. It may be time to reconsider our development practices and – more importantly – how we condition newcomers when we tell them to work like we learned it.

Over on his blog, I just go a ding from Jeremy.

Literally any website can—and should—be a progressive web app. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I was at an event last year where I heard Chris Heilmann say that you shouldn’t make your blog into a progressive web app. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He repeats that message in this video chat: “When somebody, for example, turns their blog into a PWA, I don’t see the point. I don’t want to have that icon on my homepage. This doesn’t make any sense to me” Excuse me!? Just because you don’t want to have someone’s icon on your home screen, that person shouldn’t be using state-of-the-art technologies!? Excuse my French, but Fuck. That. Shit!
Our imaginations have become so limited by what native mobile apps currently do that we can’t see past merely imitating the status quo like a sad cargo cult.
I don’t want the web to equal native; I want the web to surpass it. I, for one, would prefer a reality where my home screen isn’t filled with the icons of startups and companies that have fulfilled the criteria of the gatekeepers. But a home screen filled with the faces of people who didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to publish? That’s what I want!

Suffice to say, I am not telling anyone not to use great, modern technologies to the benefit of their end users and their own publishing convenience. And the stack that make up PWA are great to make either more successful than it is now.

I want us to do more. I want modern web technologies not to be a personal thing to use. I want it to be what we do at work, not to bring to work or point to at some amazing web person’s web presence or a showcase of a large web company.

All power to us for using whatever great technology in the environment we control, but we need to aim higher. We need to go where mistakes happen and bring the convenience and sensible upgrades to hacky old solutions. I don’t have the power to tell anyone not to use something on their blog. But I also don’t want to have a lot of things out there touted as “PWAs” that are a terrible experience. We’ve done that over and over with all kind of packaging formats. We need to get it right this time as our tools have never been better.

I publicly spoke out over and over again against stores in the current form as they are a barrier to access. A barrier that seems artificial, when we have the web, right?

Maybe. Fact is that a whole new generation of people know apps. Not the web. They know the web as something riddled with ads and malware you need blockers for. In some places where the web is not as conveniently available as it is where we are people even consider Facebook the web. As it is made available to people easier than the bloated web.

When I say that I don’t see the point of turning a blog into a PWA it hits exactly the confusion point of the “app” part. To me, an app is a “do” thing, not a “read” thing. I see no point in having the Wired, the Guardian, The Rolling Stone, The Times etc… app. Icons on a crammed desktop don’t scale. I use a news reader to read news items. I use an RSS aggregator to read blogs. I use an ebook reader to read books (or a browser). I use Spotify or iTunes to listen to music. I don’t have an app for each band or movie.

I’ve been publishing for donkey’s years on the web. And I choose to use a blog as I have no idea how you consume it. And I like that. I don’t think there should be a “Chris Heilmann” icon on your desktop. It should be in the contacts, it should maybe show up as a post or a bookmark. You can’t do anything on this blog except for reading it. Use what makes you most happy to do that.

I very much agree with Jeremy:

I don’t want the web to equal native; I want the web to surpass it.

And that’s exactly what I mean when I don’t want a blog as an app – no matter what format of app. I want people to create PWAs that are more than bookmarks – even offline working ones that give me a notification when new content is available.

Does this mean I say that you shouldn’t use a manifest and service worker to improve web pages or your blog? Hell, no. Go wild – do the right thing. Especially do the one thing that PWAs require: stop publishing over HTTP and secure your servers. Man in the middle attacks need to stop, especially with various governments happily being that man in the middle.

I want the web to succeed where it matters. I want native apps to go away. I don’t want to download an app to get tickets to the subway in Berlin. I don’t want an app for each airport I go to. I very much don’t want an app for each event I attend. I don’t want an app for each restaurant I frequent. I don’t need those relationships and having to give them a part of the limited space on my phone. Or on my desktop/launch bar.

We need the web to beat native where it is terrible: distribution and convenience. I want people to do things without having to go to a store, download and install an app and run it. I want people to get access to free content without a credit card. You need a credit card to access free stuff on app stores – this is a huge barrier. I want people to find the next train, book restaurants, get a doctor and find things regardless of connection and device. I want people to take pictures and sharing them. I don’t want people to use insecure, outdated versions of their apps as it is too much to get 50MB updates every day. I don’t want people to use what comes on the phone and use the browser as the last resort. And for this, we need great PWAs of known entities and great new players.

I want people to understand that they are in control. As I said last week in Poland, PWA is proper try before you buy. You go to a URL, you like what you see. With later visits you promote it to get more access, work offline and even give you notifications.

A PWA has to earn that right. And this is where we need kick-ass examples. I have no native Twitter any more, Twitter Lite does the trick and saves me a lot of data and space. I go around showing this to people and I see them kick out native Twitter. That’s what we need.

Every time we promote the web as the cool thing it is we repeat the same points.

• It is easy to publish
• it is available for everyone
• it is not beholden to anyone
• It is independent of platform, form factor and generally inviting.

When you see the web that millions of people use every day the story is very different.

It is that bad that every browser maker has a department of cross-browser compliance. We all approach big companies pointing out how their products break and what can be done to fix them. We even offer developer resources to not rely on that webkit prefix. In almost all cases we get asked what the business benefit of that is.

Sure, we have a lot of small victories, but it is grim to show someone the web these days. In our bubble, things are great and amazing.

How did that happen? We have the technology. We have the knowledge. We have the information out there in hundreds of talks, books and posts. Who do we reach is the question. Who builds this horrible web? Or who builds great stuff at home and gets mostly frustrated at work because things are beyond repair?

When I say that I don’t want a blog as an app I am not saying that you shouldn’t supercharge your blog. I am not forbidding anyone to publish and use technology.

But, I don’t think that is enough. We need commercial successes. We need to beat the marketing of native apps. We need to debunk myths of native convenience by building better, web based, solutions.

We’ve proven the web works well for self-publishing. Now we need to go where people build an iOS and Android app to have an online presence for their company with higher functionality. We need these people to understand that the web is a great way to publish and get users that do things with your product. We think this is common sense, but it isn’t. We have to remind people again about how great the web is. And how much easier it is using web technology.

For this, we need first and foremost find out how to make money on the web on a huge scale. We need to find a way that people pay for content instead of publishers showing a lot of ads as the simpler way. We need to show numbers and successes of commercial, existing products. Google is spending a lot of money on that with PWA roadshows. Every big web company does. I also all work directly with partners to fix their web products across browsers and turn them into PWAs. And there are some great first case studies available. We need more of those.

I want developers not to have to use their spare time and learn new web technologies on their personal projects. I want companies to understand the value of PWA and – most importantly – fix the broken nonsense they have on the web and keep in maintenance mode.

If you think these and other PWA case studies are by chance and because people involved just love the web – think again. A lot of effort goes into convincing companies to do the “very obvious” thing. A lot of cost of time and money is involved. A lot of internal developers put their career on the line to tell their superiors that there is another way instead of delivering what’s wanted. We want this to work, and we need to remind people that quality means effort. Not adding a manifest and a service worker to an existing product that has been in maintenance hell for years.

Jeremy wants a certain world:

I, for one, would prefer a reality where my home screen isn’t filled with the icons of startups and companies that have fulfilled the criteria of the gatekeepers. But a home screen filled with the faces of people who didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to publish? That’s what I want!

I want more. I want the commercial world and the marketing hype of “online” not to be about native apps and closed stores. I don’t want people to think it is OK to demand an iPhone to access their content. I don’t want companies to waste money trying to show up in an app store when they could easily be found on the web. I think we already have the world Jeremy describes. And – to repeat – I don’t want anyone not to embrace this if they want to or they think it is a good idea.

Nothing necessary to turn your current web product into a PWA is a waste. All steps are beneficial to the health and quality of your product. That is the great part. But it does mean certain quality goals should be met to avoid users with an “app” expectation not getting what they want. We have to discuss these quality goals and right now quite a few companies roll out their ideas. This doesn’t mean we censor the web or lock out people (there are other people working on that outside of companies). It means we don’t want another “HTML5 Apps are a bad experience” on our hands.

I’ve been running this blog for ages. I learned a lot. That’s great. But I don’t want the web to be a thing for people already believing in it. I want everyone to use it instead of silos like app stores – especially commercial companies. We’ve been shirking away from the responsibility of making the enterprise and products people use day to day embrace the web for too long. The current demise of the native/app store model is a great opportunity to do this. I want everyone with the interest and knowledge to be part of this.

I can’t see myself ever having a phone full with the faces of people. This is what the address book is for. The same way my ebook reader (which is my browser) is what I use to read books. I don’t have an app for each author.

I like the concept of having a feed reader to check in bulk what people that inspire me are up to. I like reading aggregators that do the searching for me. And if I want to talk to the people behind those publications I contact them and talk to them. Or – even better – meet them.

An app – to me – is a thing I do something with. This blog is an app for me, but not for others. You can’t edit. I even turned off comments as I spent more time moderating than answering. That’s why it isn’t a PWA. I could turn it into one, but then I would feel that I should publish a lot more once you promoted me to be on your home screen.

So when I talk about personal blogs not being PWAs to me, this is what I mean. Apps to me are things to do things with. If I can’t do anything with it except for reading and sharing I don’t stop you from publishing it as a PWA. But I am not likely to install it. The same way I don’t download the Kim Kardashian app or apps of bands.

This is not about your right to publish. It is about earning the space in the limited environment that is our user’s home screens, docks and desktops. If you’re happy to have that full of friend’s blogs or people you like – great. I’d rather soon see phones in shops that out-of-the-box come with PWAs for people to do things. Not native apps that need a 200MB update the first time you connect and won’t get that upgrade and become a security risk. I want web access to be front and centre on new devices. And to do that, we need to aim higher and do better.