Ice cold in Copenhagen

I went to Copenhagen last week for the Coldfront conference. It was lovely to be back in Denmark’s capital. I used to go over there ever year when the Reboot conference was running, but that wrapped up a few year’s back so it’s been quite a while since I had the opportunity to savour Copenhagen’s architecture, culture, coffee, food, and beer.

Coldfront was fun. Kenneth has modelled the format of the event on Remy’s Full Frontal conference—one day of a single track of front-end dev talks in a comfy cinema.

Going to a focused conference like this is a great way of getting a short sharp shock of what’s hot—like a State of the Union address for the web. At Coldfront there were some very clear themes around building for resilience, and specifically routing around the damage of inconsistent connectivity. There was a very clear message—from Paul, Alex, and Patrick (blog imminent)—that the network is not always on our side. Making our sites work offline should be much more of a priority than it currently is.

On a related note, the technology that was mentioned the most was Service Workers …and Jake wasn’t even there! Heck, even I mentioned it in glowing terms in my own little presentation. I was admiring the way it has been designed specifically to be used in a progressive enhancement kind of way.

So if I were Mr. McGuire in The Graduate, my line to a web developer equivalent of Dustin Hoffman would be “I want to say one word to you, just one word. Are you listening? …Service Workers.”

Every website and web app should have a service worker | Go Make Things

Needless to say, I agree with this sentiment.

I’ve worked with a lot of browser technology over the years. Service workers are pretty mind-blowing.

minimum interesting service worker

An interesting idea from Tantek for an offline page that links off to an archived copy of the URL you’re trying to reach—useful for when you’re site goes down (though not for when the user’s internet connection is down).

Add a Service Worker to Your Site | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Damn, I wish I had thought of giving this answer to the prompt, “What is one thing people can do to make their website better?”

If you do nothing else, this will be a huge boost to your site in 2022.

Chris’s piece is a self-contained tutorial!

Getting Started with PWAs [Workshop]

The slides from Aaron’s workshop at today’s PWA Summit. I really like the idea of checking navigator.connection.downlink and navigator.connection.saveData inside a service worker to serve different or fewer assets!

Progressier | Make your website a PWA in 42 seconds

This in an intriguing promise (there’s no code yet):

A PWA typically requires writing a service worker, an app manifest and a ton of custom code. Progressier flattens the learning curve. Just add it to your html template — you’re done.

I worry that this one line of code will pull in many, many, many, many lines of JavaScript.