Make it Boring - Jeremy Wagner - NDC Oslo 2020

Don't forget to check out our links below!

A good case can be made for why boring is preferable to exciting in many aspects of our lives. Yet, we're reluctant to apply this sentiment to the web. Rather, we're in a relentless pursuit of the exciting in this increasingly JavaScript-centric world of web development. A pursuit that, despite our best efforts, litters the landscape of the web with excruciatingly slow and inaccessible pages. As division brews over the roles of HTML, CSS, and indeed JavaScript itself, we need to ask if it's worth making the web boring again.

But why make the web more boring? Because boring is fast, resilient, fault tolerant, and accessible. Boring is the essence of unobtrusive designs that facilitate interactions rather than hinder them. When we rely wholesale on JavaScript to build for the web, we're inevitably reinventing things—things that can hinder or even fail people in unexpected ways despite our best intentions. In this session, you'll learn why building for the web with a greater emphasis on core technologies is far from boring, but truly rewarding and exciting work that makes the web more inclusive.

[ChadGeidel]

Thanks! This is a great talk, and a great perspective. It's time web developers get out of the navel-gazing "framework of the week" perspective that has ruined the modern web. I've seen these frameworks come and go, and every version is worse than the last.

Scratch your developer itch on your own time. When you do your job, do it for everyone. That's what an ACTUAL ENGINEER does. Not poseur software programmers self-inflating their importance.

[rngesus]

internet access is a Right or SHOULD BE a right?

[victornoagbodji]

🙏 🙏 😊
sending thanks and appreciations your way!
as you can see, in the comments, and the dislikes, it is a long road for minorities, isn't it? 😅 😅

[DJosh-csvx]

I am black but tuned out immediately I heard about politics and also gave a dislike while stopping to listen.

[WorstDeveloper]

No, everything is not political. You are trying to make everything political.
We come here to listen about tech. There's already a million other videos talking about US issues.

[farpsy]

Oh shit, political things in a presentation...

[SimGunther]

Separate the lesson of "software minimalism" from your politics. Would've been a great talk if you focused just on the minimalism and how we can get that minimalism. I get it, the web & software as a whole has so much bloat, but I just find it ironic that this lesson/talk has political bloat that distracts from the main issue. Build a better culture that embraces the pragmatic mantra of "be respectful and focus on the issue. Just solve the issue pragmatically with no bloat in the middle, political or emotional".

I'm all for separating HTML documents from web pages that act as applications. This is really a two prong approach: making web browsers easy to swap between document mode and "interactive/app" mode while also making web devs aware that javascript was only designed to bring an "ounce of spice" to web pages. Separating "essential JS" (minimal JS that doesn't have a billion light dog & pony show) from "flashy/gaudy JS" would be great. Basically use "suckless" utilities like surf/lynx/w3m/other terminal web browsers and you shouldn't have too much trouble using web browsers as originally advertised: document browsers!