My closing keynote at Awwwards NYC 2016: A New Hope – the web strikes back Monday, June 20th, 2016 at 5:13 pm

Last week I was lucky enough to give the closing keynote at the Awwwards Conference in New York.

Following my current fascination, I wanted to cover the topic of Progressive Web Apps for an audience that is not too technical, and also very focused on delivering high-fidelity, exciting and bleeding edge experiences on the web.

Getting slightly too excited about my Star Wars based title, I got a bit overboard with bastardising Star Wars quotes in the slides, but I managed to cover a lot of the why of progressive web apps and how it is a great opportunity right now.

I covered:

The web as an idea and its inception: independent, distributed and based on open protocols

The power of links

The horrible environment that was the first browser wars

The rise of standards as a means to build predictable, future-proof products

How we became too dogmatic about standards

How this lead to rebelling developer using JavaScript to build everything

Why this is a brittle environment and a massive bet on things working flawlessly on our users’ computers

How we never experience this as our environments are high-end and we’re well connected

How we defined best practices for JavaScript, like Unobtrusive JavaScript and defensive coding

How libraries and frameworks promise to fix all our issues and we’ve become dependent on them

How a whole new generation of developers learned development by copying and pasting library-dependent code on Stackoverflow

How this, among other factors, lead to a terribly bloated web full of multi-megabyte web sites littered with third party JavaScript and library code

How to rise of mobile and its limitations is very much a terrible environment for those to run in

How native apps were heralded as the solution to that

How we retaliated by constantly repeating that the web will win out in the end

How we failed to retaliate by building web-standard based apps that played by the rules of native – an environment where the deck was stacked against browsers

How right now our predictions partly came true – the native environments and closed marketplaces are failing to deliver right now. Users on mobile use 5 apps and download on average not a single new one per month

How users are sick of having to jump through hoops to try out some new app and having to lock themselves in a certain environment

How the current state of supporting mobile hardware access in browsers is a great opportunity to build immersive experiences with web technology

How ServiceWorker is a great opportunity to offer offline capable solutions and have notifications to re-engage users and allow solutions to hibernate

How Progressive Web Apps are a massive opportunity to show native how software distribution should happen in 2016

Yes, I got all that in. See for yourself :).

The slides are available on SlideShare

You can watch the screencast of the video on YouTube.