Tags: 2016

I was having a think back over 2016, trying to remember which books I had read during the year. To the best of my recollection, I think that this is the final tally…

Non-fiction

• Endurance by Alfred Lansing
• The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
• The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin
• Design For Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher
• Practical SVG by Chris Coyier
• Demystifying Public Speaking by Lara Hogan
• Working The Command Line by Remy Sharp

Fiction

• The Revenant by Michael Punke
• The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
• Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss
• High Rise by J.G. Ballard
• The Affirmation by Christopher Priest
• Brodeck’s Report by Philippe Claudel
• Greybeard by Brian Aldiss
• Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
• The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
• Death’s End by Cixin Liu
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

Seems kinda meagre to me. Either I need to read more books or I need to keep better track of what books I’m reading when. Starting now.

When I took a look at back at 2015, it was to remark on how nicely uneventful it was. I wish I could say the same about 2016. Instead, this was the year that too damned much kept happening.

The big picture was dominated by Brexit and Trump, disasters that are sure to shape events for years to come. I try to keep the even bigger picture in perspective and remind myself that our species is doing well, and that we’re successfully battling poverty, illiteracy, violence, pollution, and disease. But it’s so hard sometimes. I still think the overall trend for this decade will be two steps forward, but the closing half is almost certain to be one step back.

Some people close to me have had a really shitty year. More than anything, I wish I could do more to help them.

Right now I’m thinking that one of the best things I could wish for 2017 is for it to be an uneventful year. I’d really like it if the end-of-year round-up in 365 days time had no world-changing events.

But for me personally? 2016 was fine. I didn’t accomplish any big goals—although I’m very proud to have published Resilient Web Design—but I’ve had fun at work, and as always, I’m very grateful for all the opportunities that came my way.

I ate some delicious food…

I went to beautiful places…

And I got to hang out with some lovely doggies…

Have a happy—and uneventful—new year!

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.