Jeremy Keith

Every front-end developer at Clearleft went to FFConf last Friday: me, Mark, Graham, Charlotte, and Danielle. We weren’t about to pass up the opportunity to attend a world-class dev conference right here in our home base of Brighton.

The day was unsurprisingly excellent. All the speakers brought their A-game on a wide range of topics. Of course JavaScript was covered, but there was also plenty of mindfood on CSS, accessibility, progressive enhancement, dev tools, creative coding, and even emoji.

Normally FFConf would be a good opportunity to catch up with some Pauls from the Google devrel team, but because of an unfortunate scheduling clash this year, all the Pauls were at Chrome Dev Summit 2016 on the other side of the Atlantic.

I’ve been catching up on the videos from the event. There’s plenty of tech-related stuff: dev tools, web components, and plenty of talk about progressive web apps. But there was also a very, very heavy focus on performance. I don’t just mean performance at the shallow scale of file size and optimisation, but a genuine questioning of the impact of our developer workflows and tools.

In his talk on service workers (what else?), Jake makes the point that not everything needs to be a single page app, echoing Ada’s talk at FFConf.

He makes the point that if you really want fast rendering, nothing on the client side quite beats a server render.

They’ve written a lot of JavaScript to make this quite slow.

Unfortunately, all too often, I hear people say that a progressive web app must be a single page app. And I am not so sure. You might not need a single page app. A single page app can end up being a lot of work and slower. There’s a lot of cargo-culting around single page apps.

Alex followed up his barnstorming talk from the Polymer Summit with some more uncomfortable truths about how mobile phones work.

Cell networks are basically kryptonite to the protocols and assumptions that the web was built on.

And JavaScript frameworks aren’t helping. Quite the opposite.

But make no mistake: if you’re using one of today’s more popular JavaScript frameworks in the most naive way, you are failing by default. There is no sugarcoating this.

Today’s frameworks are mostly a sign of ignorance, or privilege, or both. The good news is that we can fix the ignorance.

I spoke at the GOTO conference in Berlin this week. It was the final outing of a talk I’ve been giving for about a year now called Resilience.

Looking back over my speaking engagements, I reckon I must have given this talk—in one form or another—about sixteen times. If by some statistical fluke or through skilled avoidance strategies you managed not to see the talk, you can still have it rammed down your throat by reading a transcript of the presentation.

That particular outing is from Beyond Tellerrand earlier this year in Düsseldorf. That’s one of the events that recorded a video of the talk. Here are all the videos of it I could find:

• Coldfront
• Render
• Beyond Tellerrand
• Nordic.js
• View Source
• Smashing Conference

Or, if you prefer, here’s an audio file. And here are the slides but they won’t make much sense by themselves.

Resilience is a mixture of history lesson and design strategy. The history lesson is about the origins of the internet and the World Wide Web. The design strategy is a three-pronged approach:

1. Identify core functionality.
2. Make that functionality available using the simplest technology.
3. Enhance!

And if you like that tweet-sized strategy, you can get it on a poster. Oh, and check this out: Belgian student Sébastian Seghers published a school project on the talk.

Now, you might be thinking that the three-headed strategy sounds an awful lot like progressive enhancement, and you’d be right. I think every talk I’ve ever given has been about progressive enhancement to some degree. But with this presentation I set myself a challenge: to talk about progressive enhancement without ever using the phrase “progressive enhancement”. This is something I wrote about last year—if the term “progressive enhancement” is commonly misunderstood by the very people who would benefit from hearing this message, maybe it’s best to not mention that term and talk about the benefits of progressive enhancement instead: robustness, resilience, and technical credit. I think that little semantic experiment was pretty successful.

While the time has definitely come to retire the presentation, I’m pretty pleased with it, and I feel like it got better with time as I adjusted the material. The most common format for the talk was 40 to 45 minutes long, but there was an extended hour-long “director’s cut” that only appeared at An Event Apart. That included an entire subplot about Arthur C. Clarke and the invention of the telegraph (I’m still pretty pleased with the segue I found to weave those particular threads together).

Anyway, with the Resilience talk behind me, my mind is now occupied with the sequel: Evaluating Technology. I recently shared my research material for this one and, as you may have gathered, it takes me a loooong time to put a presentation like this together (which, by the same token, is one of the reasons why I end up giving the same talk multiple times within a year).

This new talk had its debut at An Event Apart in San Francisco two weeks ago. Jeffrey wrote about it and I’m happy to say he liked it. This bodes well—I’m already booked in for An Event Apart Seattle in April. I’ll also be giving an abridged version of this new talk at next year’s Render conference.

But that’s it for my speaking schedule for now. 2016 is all done and dusted, and 2017 is looking wide open. I hope I’ll get some more opportunities to refine and adjust the Evaluating Technology talk at some more events. If you’re a conference organiser and it sounds like something you’d be interested in, get in touch.

In the meantime, it’s time for me to pack away the Resilience talk, and wheel down into the archives, just like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The music swells. The credits roll. The image fades to black.