Link tags: presentation

Speakers | State of the Browser 2021

All the talks from this year’s State Of The Browser event are online, and they’re all worth watching.

I laughed out loud at multiple points during Heydon’s talk.

The State Of The Web on Vimeo

Here’s the video of my latest conference talk—I really like how it turned out.

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.

I’ve also published a transcript.

HTML with Superpowers - daverupert.com

A great talk from Dave on web components:

I think if you were using Web Components before 2020 you were an early adopter and you probably have some scars to show for it. But in 2021, now that all modern browsers support Web Components, I think they’re worth investigating. They have one superpower that no other JavaScript framework offers called the Shadow DOM which is both powerful but frustrating. But another superpower — the power I’m most excited about — is that you can use them standalone without any frameworks, build tools, or package managers.

The talk makes a callback to my talk Building from a few years back. I like that. It feels like a long thoughtful converstation.

Getting Started with PWAs [Workshop]

The slides from Aaron’s workshop at today’s PWA Summit. I really like the idea of checking navigator.connection.downlink and navigator.connection.saveData inside a service worker to serve different or fewer assets!

Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? | Transitional Apps with Rich Harris, NYTimes - YouTube

This is a terrific and nuanced talk that packs a lot into less than twenty minutes.

I heartily concur with Rich’s assessment that most websites aren’t apps or documents but something in between. It’s a continuum. And I really like Rich’s proposed approach: transitional web apps.

(The secret sauce in transitional web apps is progressive enhancement.)

Representation and what happened to women in Tech

Men specialized in hardware while software development was seen as an exciting alternative to secretarial work. In 1967, Cosmopolitan published an article titled The Computer Girls, encouraging young women to pursue careers in computer science. So the curve went up, and continued to do so up until 1984. That’s when personal computers appeared.

Marketing matters:

When Apple released the Macintosh 128K and the Commodore 64 was introduced to the market, they were presented as toys. And, as toys were gendered, they were targeted at boys. We can look at advertisements from that time and quickly find a pattern: fathers and sons, young men, even one where a man is being undressed by two women with the motto Two bytes are better than one. It’s more evident with the ads for computer games; if women appear, they do so sexualized and half-naked. Not that appealing for young girls, one could imagine.

Browsers and Representation - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

It feels like the web we’re making now is a web designed for commercial interests.

If the web is “for everyone”, how and where are “everyone’s” interested being represented?

Browsers are not an enterprise of the people. We do not elect our browser representatives who decide what a browser is and is not.

Sci-Fi & Me – Jeremy Keith – Stay Curious Café by beyond tellerrand - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave on Wednesday evening all about my relationship with reading science fiction. There are handy chapter markers if you want to jump around.

UXLondon 2021

Here’s a great write-up (with sketch notes) of last week’s conference portion of UX Fest:

There was a through-line of ethics through the whole conference that I enjoyed. The “design is the underdog” is tired and no longer true. I think that asking ourselves “now that we are here, how do we avoid causing harm?” is a much more mature conversation.

The Layers of the Web - Jeremy Keith - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave at the Web Stories conference back in February.

You’re on mute: the art of presenting in a Zoom era. | by Hana Stevenson | Feb, 2021 | Medium

Hana recounts the preparation she did for an online presentation, including some advice from me. I’m right in the middle of preparing my own online presentation right now, and I should really heed that advice. But I fear what I told Hana was “do as I say, not as I do.”

axe-con Digital Accessibility Conference | Deque

This looks like it’ll be a good event: a keynote from Vint Cerf and talks from Val Head, Rachel Andrew, Sara Soueidan, and others.

Best of all, it’s free!

The Long Now Foundation: “Nadia Eghbal Talk”

This is a great talk by Nadia Eghbal on software, open source, maintenance, and of course, long-term thinking.

Chris Ferdinandi: The Lean Web – WordPress.tv

This video of Chris’s presentation is well worth watching:

The web in 2020 is a bloated and over-engineered mess! Many modern web development “best practices” are making the web worse. This thought-provoking talk shares ideas on how to fix the problem as it explores an alternate set of best practices.

SydCSS 7th Birthday with Ethan Marcotte - YouTube

A great talk by Ethan called The Design Systems Between Us.

Uniting the team with Jamstack | Trys Mudford

This is a superb twenty minute presentation by Trys! It’s got everything: a great narrative, technical know-how, and a slick presentation style.

Conference organisers: you should get Trys to speak at your event!

Chris Ferdinandi: The Lean Web | July 2020 - YouTube

A great presentation on taking a sensible approach to web development. Great advice, as always, from the blogging machine that is Chris Ferdinandi.

The web is a bloated, over-engineered mess. And, according to developer and educator Chris Ferdinandi, many of our modern “best practices” are actually making the web worse. In this talk, Chris explores The Lean Web, a set of principles for a simpler, faster world-wide web.

The web we left behind by Kyle Jacobson (ESNEXT 2020) - YouTube

This is such an excellent presentation! It really resonates with me.

Kyle Jacobson is a developer who’s been working with the web for over 10 years, and he talks about lessons from the past that can make the future of the web not only easier to develop using battle-tested technologies, but also one friendlier for humans.

Schedule / Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) 17 September 2020

No matter what time zone you’re in, you can tune in to some excellent-sounding talks tomorrow.

No sign-up. No registration. All sessions are streamed live and publicly on the Inclusive Design 24 YouTube channel.

On the origin of cascades

This is a great talk by Hidde, looking at the history and evolution of cascading style sheets. Right up my alley!