I wrote this song while my colleague Tim Berners-Lee was inventing something called “The World Wide Web” a few offices away. The song was published in 1993, when less that 100 websites existed.
The first image ever published on the web was of this band, Les Horribles Cernettes …LHC.
A great short talk by Tim. It’s about performance, but so much more too.
If you’ve never been to UX London, this short video communicates the flavour of the event nicely.
The first of Neil Bomkamp’s series of short films—testbeds for potential feature films.
The following film describes an unusual motion picture now being produced in London for release all over the world, starting in early 1967.
Charlie conducts an experiment by living without JavaScript for a day.
So how was it? Well, with just a few minutes of sans-javascript life under my belt, my first impression was “Holy shit, things are fast without javascript”. There’s no ads. There’s no video loading at random times. There’s no sudden interrupts by “DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE?” modals.
As you might expect, lots of sites just don’t work, but there are plenty of sites that work just fine—Google search, Amazon, Wikipedia, BBC News, The New York Times. Not bad!
This has made me appreciate the number of large sites that make the effort to build robust sites that work for everybody. But even on those sites that are progressively enhanced, it’s a sad indictment of things that they can be so slow on the multi-core hyperpowerful Mac that I use every day, but immediately become fast when JavaScript is disabled.
Here’s the opening keynote I gave at the Render Conference in Oxford. The talk is called Evaluating Technology:
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 and together we will dig beneath the hype to find out whether they will really change life on the web for the better.
There’s something very endearing about this docudrama retelling of the story of the web.
Here’s the panel I was on at the AMP conference. It was an honour and a pleasure to share the stage with Nicole, Sarah, Gina, and Mike.
This is beautifully intimate. Your role is that of an anthropologist in orbit around Earth observing the everyday moments on the planet below through uploaded videos that have never been viewed by another human.
Spoiler: the answer is “Yes!”.
It’s a way of building web applications that’s very similar to making a sandwich.
This talk is itself a tasty sandwich of good stuff.
Here’s the video of the talk I gave in Berlin recently. I had a lot to squeeze into a short time slot so I just went for it, and I got bit carried away …but people seemed to like that.
I’m just back from a little mini 3-conference tour of Europe where I was delivering my talk on resilience. The first stop was Stockholm for Nordic.js and the video is already online.
Here’s the video of the panel I moderated yesterday at the Progressive Web App Dev Summit. I had to get a bit Paxman at times with some of the more media-trained panelists.
Seems like ages since I’ve seen Saqib. He’s been working on something very nifty indeed:
…Seeing AI, a research project that helps people who are visually impaired or blind to better understand who and what is around them. The app is built using intelligence APIs from Microsoft Cognitive Services…
Come for the videos of EnhanceConf. Stay for the skateboarding beagle.
The videos from EnhanceConf are started to go up already. Stefan’s talk really struck me—all the talks were great but this one had the most unexpected insight for me. It really clarifies a lot of ideas that I’ve been trying to articulate, but which Stefan crystalises by taking the long-zoom view.
Harry packs a lot of great tips and tricks into one short video about performance troubleshooting. It’s also a great lesson in unlocking some handy features in Chrome’s developer tools.
Great stuff!
A look at detecting, pinpointing, measuring, and fixing rendering performance issues.
This was one of favourite talks at this year’s FF Conf. But I will readily admit there’s a hefty dollop of confirmation bias in my enjoyment.
Gavin Rothery’s wonderfully grim and atmospheric short film.