The other day I got a message from someone I’ve been mentoring via email. His question was one I think a lot of folks in our industry struggle with:

Can you please tell what are keys to success and what should I do to become a successful programmer and software engineer? Anything is appreciated.

I had the great pleasure of delivering the following talk at the Edge Web Summit on April 4th. The talk is largely about accessibility with a push for thinking about the future of the interface and how considering accessibility now will help us prepare for a world of “headless UIs”.

Earlier this week, my colleagues on the Microsoft Edge team put on the second of what has now become an annual event: the Edge Web Summit. The format was a little different this year, with team members from across the organization delivering quick, punchy 30-minute talks on topics ranging from standard implementations to the user experience of a browser to real-time communications. I live-tweeted quite a few of the talks, but I thought I’d provide a bit of a round-up of what was revealed, discussed, and more so you can read it all in one place.

Back in 2014, I had the great pleasure of listening to Ola Gasidlo of Hood.ie discuss the importance of offline at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her excellent talk was my introduction to the “Offline First” movement and, while I can get behind the idea, I’ve had some serious issues with the name. And with the rise of Service Workers as a simple, usable means of making our content available offline, I thought it worth revisiting the idea of “offline first”, if only to address its core fallacy.

Unfortunately, I was unable to spend Tuesday in Nashville for An Event Apart (for reasons that will be revealed in about a month), but I did catch Monday and it was amazing.

I had the great pleasure of delivering the closing keynote for the first EnhanceConf. I wanted to talk about voice and the future of “headless” user interfaces. Here’s what I had to say.

For the last few years I’ve been running a workshop alternately titled “Planning Adaptive Interfaces” or “Beyond Responsive”, depending on the conference. It’s been one of my favorite workshops to run for a number of reasons, but before I get into that, let me explain what it is and how it works.

On March 4th, I’ll be in London to give the closing talk at EnhanceConf, the first conference dedicated progressive enhancement. Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to the conference’s organizer, Simon McManus, quite a lot. He’s put a lot of thought into the conference and I thought it might be interesting to interview him so he could share his motivations and hopes for the event.

My iPhone fell clumsily out of my pocket when I was sitting down in the kitchen the other day. Thwack! It fell face-first onto the tile from my seated position a mere 18 inches up. Of course the screen cracked. Protective case be damned, the cracks spread across the screen like a spider web cast from razor blades.

I was crestfallen.

“Checkbox” form controls have long been a part of software. They enable users to provide a simple binary response—yes or no. On the Web, we often see them in two scenarios: confirmations and multiple choice.