Tags: resources

In just over a week, I’ll be giving the opening talk at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I’ll be giving a workshop the day before too. There are still tickets available for both.

I have to admit, I’m kind of nervous about this talk. It’s been quite a while since the last New Adventures, but it’s always had quite the cachet. I think I went to most of them. It’s quite strange—and quite an honour—to shift gears from attendee to speaker.

The talk I’ll be giving is called Building. That might be a noun. That might be a verb. You decide:

Every new medium looks to what has come before for guidance. Web design has taken cues from centuries of typography and graphic design. Web development has borrowed metaphors and ideas from the world of architecture. Let’s take a tour of some of the most influential ideas from architecture that have crossed over into the web, from pattern languages to responsive design. Together we’ll uncover how to build resilient, performant, accessible and beautiful structures that work with the grain of the materials of the web.

This talk builds upon the talk I gave at last year’s An Event Apart called The Way Of The Web. It also reflects many of the ideas in Resilient Web Design. When I gave a run-through of the talk at Clearleft last week, Andy called it a “greatest hits.” For a while there, I was feeling guilty about retreading some ground I’ve covered in previous talks and writings. Then I realised it was pretty arrogant of me to think that anyone in the audience would be familiar with any of it.

Besides, I’ve got a whole new avenue of exploration in this talk. It’s about language and metaphor—how we talk about what we do on the web. I’ve just finished giving another run-through at the Clearleft studio and I’m feeling pretty good about it. That’s good, because I find that giving a talk in a small room to a handful of colleagues is way more stressful than giving a talk to hundreds of people at a conference.

Just as I put together links related to last year’s talk, I figured I’d provide some hyperlinks for anyone interested in the topics raised in this new talk…

Books

• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
• Creating Killer Websites by David Siegel
• Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockman
• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick
• Architectural Intelligence by Molly Wright Steenson
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein with Ingrid King, Shlomo Angel and Max Jacobsen
• How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
• The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand

Articles

• A Dao Of Web Design by John Allsopp
• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
• Device Agnostic by Trent Walton
• The Work I Like by Ethan Marcotte

Audio

• Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language on Studio 360
• Molly Wright Steenson on Design Notes
• Quebec Bridge Collapse on the Brady Heywood Podcast

At the end of my new book, Going Offline, I have a little collection of resources relating to service workers. Here’s how I introduce them:

If this book were a podcast, then this would be the point at which I would be imploring you to rate me on iTunes (or I’d be telling you about a really good mattress). Instead, I’d like to give you some hyperlinks so that you can explore some of the topics in this brief book in more detail.

It always feels a little strange to publish a list of hyperlinks in a physical book, so I figured I’d republish them here for easy access…

Explanations

• Mariko Kosaka wrote and illustrated an explanation of service workers in a post on her site called “Service Worker, what are you?” (https://kosamari.com/notes/Service-Worker-what-are-you).
• Mariko also wrote and illustrated an explanation of promises called “The Promise of a Burger Party” (https://kosamari.com/notes/the-promise-of-a-burger-party).
• Ire Aderinokun wrote a clear guide to “The Service Worker Lifecycle” (https://bitsofco.de/the-service-worker-lifecycle/).
• Yoav Weiss has an explanation of different kinds of caching in “A Tale of Four Caches” (https://blog.yoav.ws/tale-of-four-caches/).

Guides

• Lyza Gardner wrote a step-by-step guide for Smashing Magazine on “Making A Service Worker: A Case Study” (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/making-a-service-worker/).
• Jake Archibald has collected a series of service worker strategies into an “offline cookbook” (https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/).
• Jake also recorded an excellent online video series that you can enjoy for free (https://www.udacity.com/course/offline-web-applications—ud899).

Examples

• Mike Riethmuller has on offline page on his site that shows articles you’ve previously visited (https://madebymike.com.au/writing/service-workers/).
• Ethan Marcotte has a similar offline page, but he also shows metadata for each article (https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/going-offline/).
• Una Kravets allows you to choose which pages on her site you want to save for reading offline (https://una.im/save-offline/).

Progressive web apps

• Alex Russell answers the question “What, Exactly, Makes Something A Progressive Web App?” (https://infrequently.org/2016/09/what-exactly-makes-something-a-progressive-web-app/).
• Ada Rose Cannon goes into the details of “The Building Blocks Of Progressive Web Apps” (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/09/the-building-blocks-of-progressive-web-apps/).
• Aaron Gustafson quite rightly points out that “Yes, That Web Project Should Be a PWA” (https://alistapart.com/article/yes-that-web-project-should-be-a-pwa).
• Jason Grigsby outlines “The Business Case for Progressive Web Apps” (https://cloudfour.com/thinks/the-business-case-for-progressive-web-apps/).

Tools

• Google released a collection of scripts and tools for going offline called Workbox (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/workbox/).
• To get started with your manifest and service worker, you can paste your website’s URL into PWA Builder (http://preview.pwabuilder.com/).
• Lighthouse is a great testing tool for progressive web apps that’s now bundled into Chrome’s Developer Tools under the Audits panel (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/).

Documentation

• Over at the website of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) you can dig into the details of the Web App Manifest specification (https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/).
• The ever-evolving service worker specification is on the W3C’s Github account (https://w3c.github.io/ServiceWorker/).

I had a really enjoyable time at Codebar Brighton last week, not least because Morty came along.

I particularly enjoy teaching people who have zero previous experience of making a web page. There’s something about explaining HTML and CSS from first principles that appeals to me. I especially love it when people ask lots of questions. “What does this element do?”, “Why do some elements have closing tags and others don’t?”, “Why is it textarea and not input type="textarea"?” The answer usually involves me going down a rabbit-hole of web archeology, so I’m in my happy place.

But there’s only so much time at Codebar each week, so it’s nice to be able to point people to other resources that they can peruse at their leisure. It turns out that’s it’s actually kind of tricky to find resources at that level. There are lots of great articles and tutorials out there for professional web developers—Smashing Magazine, A List Apart, CSS Tricks, etc.—but no so much for complete beginners.

Here are some of the resources I’ve found:

• MarkSheet by Jeremy Thomas is a free HTML and CSS tutorial. It starts with an explanation of the internet, then the World Wide Web, and then web browsers, before diving into HTML syntax. Jeremy is the same guy who recently made CSS Reference.
• Learn to Code HTML & CSS by Shay Howe is another free online book. You can buy a paper copy too. It’s filled with good, clear explanations.
• Zero to Hero Coding by Vera Deák is an ongoing series. She’s starting out on her career as a front-end developer, so her perspective is particularly valuable.

If I find any more handy resources, I’ll link to them and tag them with “learning”.