Links from a talk

In two weeks time, I’ll be in Seattle for An Event Apart. I’ll be giving a brand new talk. The title is The Way Of The Web (although perhaps a more accurate title would be The Layers Of The Web).

Here’s the description:

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the ever-changing nature of web design and development? Exhausting, isn’t it? How are you supposed to know which technologies and tools you should invest your time in? Will they stick around or will you just have to relearn everything in another few months? Join Jeremy as he takes a tour of the past, present, and future of working on the web. From the building blocks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript through to frameworks and libraries right up to the latest and greatest Progressive Web Apps, this talk will examine our collective assumptions with a critical eye. By learning from the past, we can make sensible design decisions today to build the web of tomorrow.

There’s a direct evolution line from my previous talks—Resilence and Evaluating Technology—to this new one. (Spoiler: everything I talk about is in some way related to progressive enhancement …even if I never use the words “progressive" or “enhancement" in the talks.)

I’ve been preparing this new talk for months. It started with a mind map—an A3 sheet of paper with disconnected thoughts, like something from the scene in the crime movie where they enter the lair of the serial killer and find a crazy wall.

Then I set it aside and began procrastinating. But it was the good kind of procrastinating, right? I mean, I had made a start and all those thoughts were now bubbling around in my head.

Eventually I forced myself to put things in some sort of order and started creating slides. That’s the beginning of the horrible process bouncing between thinking “this is pretty good!” and “this is absolute crap!” To be honest, I never actually know if a talk is any good until I give it in front of an audience (practice runs at work are great for getting feedback but they’re not the same as doing the talk for real).

Anyway, I think the talk is ready to roll. If you see me giving this talk and you’re interested in diving deeper into the topics raised, I’ve gathered together some of sources I used.

Further Reading

• Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning by Stewart Brand
• The Human Computer’s Dreams Of The Future (PDF) by Ida Rhodes
• 3D Glasses On Reality by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Rule of Least Power by Tim Berners-Lee and Noah Mendelsohn
• Everything Easy Is Hard Again by Frank Chimero
• Over-engineering is under-engineering by Baldur Bjarnason
• The Burden of Precision by Daniel Eden
• The work I like by Ethan Marcotte
• A Sound Of Thunder (PDF) by Ray Bradbury

Related posts on adactio.com

• 02018-03-06 Minimal viable service worker
• 02017-12-23 Ubiquity and consistency
• 02017-11-02 The dConstruct Audio Archive works offline
• 02017-03-15 Progressive Web App questions
• 02017-01-11 Making Resilient Web Design work offline
• 02016-10-18 Choice
• 02015-11-15 Home Screen

Progressive Web Apps

• Huffduffer
• Trivago
• Resilient Web Design
• Adactio
• The dConstruct Archive

Books

• Make It So by Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel
• How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
• Time Travel by James Gleick

Films

• Plan Nine From Outer Space, 1959, directed by Ed Wood
• 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, directed by Stanley Kubrick
• Blade Runner, 1982, directed by Ridley Scott
• Brazil, 1985, directed by Terry Gilliam
• Southland Tales, 2006, directed by Richard Kelly