Research on evaluating technology

I’ve spent the past few months preparing a new talk for An Event Apart San Francisco (and hopefully some more AEAs after that). As always happens, I spent the whole time vacillating between thinking “this is good!” and thinking “this is awful!” I’m still bouncing between those poles. I won’t really know whether the talk is up to snuff until I actually give it to a live audience.

Over the past few years, my presentations have built upon one another. Two years ago, my talk was called Enhance! and it set the groundwork for using a layered approach to web design and development. My 2016 talk, Resilience, follows on with a process and examples for that approach (I also set myself the challenge of delivering a talk about progressive enhancement without ever using the phrase “progressive enhancement”).

My new talk goes a bit meta, but in my mind, it’s very much building on the previous talks. The talk is all about evaluating technology. I haven’t settled on a final title, but I was thinking about something obtuse, like …Evaluating Technology.

Here’s my hastily scribbled description:

We work with technology every day. And every day it seems like there’s more and more technology to understand: graphic design tools, build tools, frameworks and libraries, not to mention new HTML, CSS and JavaScript features landing in browsers. How should we best choose which technologies to invest our time in? When we decide to weigh up the technology choices that confront us, what are the best criteria for doing that? This talk will help you evaluate tools and technologies in a way that best benefits the people who use the websites that we are designing and developing. Let’s take a look at some of the hottest new web technologies like service workers and web components. Together we will dig beneath the hype to find out whether they will really change life on the web for the better.

As ever, I’ll begin and end with a long-zoom pretentious arc of history, but I’ll dive into practical stuff in the middle. That’s become a bit of a cliché for my presentations, but the formula works as a sort of microcosm of a good conference—a mixture of the inspirational and the practical, trying to keep a good balance of both.

For this new talk, the practical focus will be on some web technologies that are riding high on the hype cycle right now: service workers, web components, progressive web apps. I’ll use them as a lens for applying broader questions about how we make decisions about the technologies we embrace, and the technologies we reject.

Technology. Now there’s a big subject. It’s literally the entirety of human history. I had to be careful not to go down too many rabbit holes. I’m still not sure if I’ve succeeded, but I’ve already had to ruthlessly cull some darlings.

One of the nice things that the An Event Apart crew started doing was to provide link lists for each talk to attendees. That gives me an opportunity to touch briefly on a topic in the talk itself, but allow any interested attendees to dive deeper at their leisure.

For this talk on evaluating technology, I’ve put together this list of hyperlinks for further reading, watching, listening, and researching…

Links

• Design Principles
• The Extensible Web Manifesto
• Developer Fallacies

• Service Workers

  • My First Service Worker
  • Making A Service Worker: A Case Study by Lyza Danger Garnder
  • The Service Worker Lifecycle by Ire Aderinokun
  • An Offline Experience With Service Workers by Brandon Rozek
  • Offline Content With Service Workers by Mike Riethmuller

• Web Components

  • Web Components
  • Responsible Web Components
  • Extensible Web Components
  • Uncomfortably Excited by Alex Russell
  • My Lightning Talk On Web Components by Soledad Penadés
  • Practical Questions Around Web Components by Ian Feather
  • Web Components And Progressive Enhancement by Adam Onishi

• Progressive Web Apps

  • Home Screen
  • Regressive Web Apps
  • The Progressive Web App Dev Summit
  • The Imitation Game
  • Progressive Web Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul by Alex Russell
  • The Building Blocks of Progressive Web Apps by Ada Rose Edwards
  • Progressive Web Apps: The Long Game by Remy Sharp
  • What, Exactly, Makes Something A Progressive Web App? by Alex Russell

People

• Rosalind Franklin, 1920–1958
• Margaret Hamilton, 1936–
• Tim Berners-Lee, 1955–
• Grace Hopper, 1906–1992
• Hedy Lamarr, 1914–2000
• Ada Lovelace, 1815–1852
• James Burke, 1936–
• Kevin Kelly, 1952–

Papers

• Reports and Working Notes on DNA by Rosalind Franklin
• I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read
• HTML Design Principles edited by Anne van Kesteren and Maciej Stachowiak
• Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage by L. F. Menabrea with notes upon the memoir by the translator Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace
• The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era by Vernor Vinge

Presentations

• The Real World of Technology by Ursula M. Franklin @ the CBC Massey Lectures, 1989
• The Triumph Of Technology by Lord Sir Alec Broers @ the BBC Reith Lectures, 2005
• How Technology Evolves by Kevin Kelly @ TED, 2005
• When Ideas Have Sex by Matt Ridley @ TED, 2010
• How I Built A Toaster—From Scratch by Thomas Thwaites @ TED, 2010
• Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll by James Burke @ dConstruct, 2012
• Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area by Dan Williams @ dConstruct, 2013
• Hypertext As An Agent Of Change by Mandy Brown @ dConstruct 2014
• The Humane Representation Of Thought by Bret Victor @ the UIST and SPLASH conferences, 2014
• Our Comrade The Electron by Maciej Cegłowski @ Webstock, 2014
• Step Off This Hurtling Machine by Alex Feyerke @ JSConf.au, 2014
• The Moral Economy of Tech by Maciej Cegłowski @ the Society For The Advancement Of Socio-Economics, 2016

Books

• The Real World Of Technology by Ursula M. Franklin
• The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
• What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
• The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly
• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
• How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made The Modern World by Steven Johnson
• 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions: The Art of Chindogu by Kenji Kawakami
• The Toaster Project (Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch) by Thomas Thwaites
• Connections by James Burke