I don’t remember the class or the year, but back in high school I remember being asked to choose one from a selection of books to read and write a report on. That was my first exposure to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and my first glimpse into the realities of racism as seen from the perspective of a black man in America.
Dispatches From the Internets
Why Oscar’s Middle Name Is “Ellison”
PWA Q&A
Over the past few months, I’ve been running a series of question and answer sessions regarding progressive web apps. Some are videos, others are threads on Twitter. Given how much content there is at this point, I thought I’d roll it up into a post so you can see it all at once.
Mentorship 2018
If you follow my work, you may recall that I started a formal mentorship program last year. I had the great privilege of working with two incredibly talented people—Amberley Romo and Manuel Matuzović—for a little over a year and enjoyed the hell out of the experience.
I had hoped to kick off a new mentorship session in January, but (as often happens) life got in the way. Now that I’m settled into a new city and a new routine, I’m itching to get things going again. And so I ask: How can I help you develop or further your career on the web?
Going Offline
As you’ve probably gathered if you’ve been following my work for the last few years, I’m super-jazzed about Progressive Web Apps. I think they have the potential to improve user experience, performance, access, and so much more for so many people. So I was stoked when Jeremy Keith asked me to write the foreword for his latest book, Going Offline, which tackles the complex topic of Service Workers with aplomb.
With his permission (and A Book Apart’s), I’m reprinting the foreword here.
Performance as User Experience
Last Tuesday, I gave a relatively new talk on web performance and optimization at An Event Apart in Seattle. The response to this talk has been tremendous both times I gave it, so I wanted to share the deck and relevant links here.
We Can Truly Transform People’s Lives
Kelly, Oscar, and I are getting ready to head out for a long weekend up in Gatlinburg, TN to take a break from house selling insanity and kick off the celebration of our 16-year anniversary. We love the Fall, but not everyone is equipped to take in the awesome beauty of Fall foliage. Thankfully, Tennessee is doing something about that.
Web Form Conundrum: disabled
or readonly
?
Web forms are complex beasts. There are a lot of field types to remember, each with dozens of attributes. It’s hard to know which is the right way to go, especially when presented with a choice between two seemingly similar options for disallowing a field to be edited: disabled
and readonly
.
TL;DR: If you really need it, which you probably don’t, readonly
is what you want.
A Different Kind of Intolerance
Nearly two decades ago, Kelly unravelled the mystery of my digestive tract that had eluded me for a number of years. It had become commonplace for me to get an upset stomach after eating. I didn’t think much of it really, but Kelly noticed a pattern: it only happened after meals that involved milk of some kind. “I bet you’re lactose intolerant.” Turns out she was right. Kind of.
Categories Land in the Web App Manifest
Starting in early May, Rob Dolin began advocating for adding a categories
member to the Web App Manifest spec. It was something we’d been discussing for a while now. It’s a feature that will be incredibly useful to users, especially as it relates to PWAs in the Windows Store, other app stores, and in catalogs. This weekend, our hard work paid off and it was added to the spec!
Your Site—Any Site—Should Be a PWA
The other day, Frances Berriman—who coined the term “Progressive Web App”—wrote a bit about how she came up with that name. In it she clearly points out that the name has become a little problematic in dev circles