Tagged with: featured

  • Managing a core service so people don’t hate it

    If you work for a company with more than a few hundred employees, there will probably be some standardised process or system that you’re expected to use, is widely reviled, and yet never improves. Often it’s a design system, template, hosting platform or scheduling tool. Why is it so hard to make these things work well?

  • Cake or death: AMP and the worrying power dynamics of the web

    AMP continues to be a large part of the way people view web content on mobile devices. Following AMP Letter, what we’ve seen from Google is largely nice sentiments accompanied by business as usual, and the web ecosystem is suffering for it.

  • Re-running for the TAG

    For the last two years, I have been serving on the W3C Technical Architecture Group, which is responsible for stewardship of the architecture of the World Wide Web. I’d like to be re-elected to that position, and you can help!

  • Better developer conferences

    Between 2013 and 2015, I organised and ran five iterations of a developer conference called Edge conf. It was my attempt to fix some of the things I felt were wrong with the way conferences worked. Life moved on and there was never an Edge conf 6, but some of the things we pioneered have inspired other events. This post is the long-overdue Edge conf playbook.

  • AMP: breaking news

    Google has made much of their Accelerated Mobile Pages project as a solution to bloated websites and frustrated users. But could AMP actually be bad news for the web, bad news for news, and part of a trend of news distribution that is bad for society in general?

  • Browsers in things

    Web browsers are now more consistent and evergreen than ever before. Or are they? While developers celebrate hard-won interoperability and availability of better and better tools, a new front is opening with browsers increasingly appearing in unconventional devices, and these browsers… aren’t very good. The W3C’s Technical Architecture group has issued a finding to try and encourage better practice.

  • Leaving the FT, joining Fastly

    In April 2017 I’ll be leaving the FT and joining Fastly. I’ve had a wonderful time at the pink’un, made some lifelong friends and become a devout believer in the importance of independent, trustworthy and well informed journalism to a fair and democratic society. But it’s time to try something new.

  • The best of Google I/O 2016

    Serviceworker step by step, CSS containment, credentials and payment APIs, animation techniques, devtools improvements… Google I/O dropped so much web content this year I took a full month to catch up with even a fraction of it. If anything this shows just how fast the web is flying today. I put together some highlights.

  • Progressively less progressive

    At Google I/O the Washington Post launched a new so-called Progressive Web App, which helps to demonstrate that the “Progressive Web Apps” strategy is spreading and successfully competing with native apps on their turf. But also that it can be hard to see how the word ‘progressive’ can be justified by some of the many things that now lay claim to that term.

  • On ads and ad blocking

    Ad blocking is going mainstream, and this is not a good thing. Inflated, intrusive ads result from advertisers having bad incentives, and ad blocking technology can actually make those incentives even worse. The only solution is one that advertisers can be on board with as well.