We Need to Do as Little as Possible – Over the Air 2013 – So glad to be back

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We Need to Do as Little as Possible – Over the Air 2013 – So glad to be back

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ota-2013

Over the Air 2013

On Github lyzadanger / ota-2013

We Need to Do as Little as Possible

Over the Air 2013

Made by Lyza Danger Gardner / @lyzadanger

So glad to be back

Thank you

This is more of a story, an adventure

...than a lecture

So settle in and relax

for this last talk of the day

The mobile web was the future

The mobile web was the future
We saw the signs
Capable devices proliferated
Statistics of the web changed
We couldn't predict everything that was coming
The old web wasn't ready for the mobile web
We had made too many assumptions
We hustled, bustled, invented and worked

In our brave new world

We found we had to make our own rules
We hashed out new approaches and ideas
Hoping for a serene landscape
We found complexity
We longed for clarity but faced a constellation of detail
We battled the complexity and made things work
Already we were at the limit of the complexity we could deal with
As we're going round and round on this whirling machine

Mobile is not the end of the road

There's so much more road ahead
The future of the web holds more
Our ability to conquer the complexity cannot scale

We need to do as little as possible

To build the future web

What was our path?

We were battling complexity
As we leaned in and acclimated to the new landscape, we faced the same things we always face in the commercial reality of building the web.
Under pressure, and we cared
Did not have the luxury of time to reflect
Hacks, workarounds, polyfills, magic: because we cared
User-agents multiplied
Tablets happened
Branching and forking
We raced to catch up

Trying to tame the wild

We found and promoted patterns
We looked for similarity and repetition
And extrapolated on them
We found we had to become experts
Specialized and experienced
We found ourselves extremely focused
Were we in danger of losing track of the bigger picture?
There is no mobile web

—Jeremy Keith

Let's think about that for a minute
It was an exhausting and confusing thing to work through
What is the mobile web?
What is the web, anyway?
Staring into the fire, ruminating
Re-evaluating what the web is
...
We were quite focused on specifics
There were signs
Responsive Web Design
An awkward balancing act
We'd created some dead ends
We'd have to toss out some of the mistakes we'd made

Welcome back to the World-wide Web

Mobile is a waypoint
But it is not incidental
Merging mobile into the web

It's too hard

We'd just started really wrangling the multi-device reality
At the time, I was just gaining confidence
We'd pulled something off and were feeling triumphant
Scott told me how it was
Had I not done a good job?
The tasks required to get a working web site out the door are smothering
It's like we were falling off the edge of what was humanly possible

Everything felt hard and sad

Again, saving the web by doing as little as possible
This isn’t a rationalization for laziness or shirking responsibility—those characteristics are arguably not ones you’d find in successful web devs.
Nor it is a suggestion that we build bland, homogeneous sites and apps that sacrifice all nuance or spark to the Greater Good of total compatibility.
Instead it is an appeal for simplicity and elegance: putting commonality first, approaching differentiation carefully...
...and advocating for consistency in the creation and application of web standards.

Five things

Thing 1

Integration

Mobile web trends represent the future of the web
Mobile- or constraints-first design
Progressive enhancement, RWD...
The fluidity of content as it flows in designs
These ideas are seminal and will be part of the future core of the web
We can help out by serving in leadership, guidance, teaching roles
...and by thinking about how to apply what we've invented on a wider scope ourselves
Liberating techniques from constraints to make them applicable to the entire web.
And where possible, reaching for commonality and simplicity.

Thing 2

Details vs. Minutiae

Discerning between attention to detail and soul-crushing minutiae
Nuance versus nitpick: and not getting buried
To learn to catch ourselves when we're in the weeds
Pushing too much detail or overthinking can warp the simplicity available to us.
When we try to force too much detail, it can be awkward and point at a broken process.
Lifting ourselves out before we get inundated
When instead what we want is a freer, stabler product
It's one of those cases where going with the flow may be wise

Thing 3

Managing Risk

Every workaround, hack and enhancement introduces risk
Risk of bugs now, and later
Will it work later?
We need to take caution with what we add (polyfills, hacks)
And to avoid creating a jungle of complexity we don't understand
To avoid accidentally, arbitrarily caging our content and making it rigid.
My unscientific notion that the more "mobile-optimized" a site is, the more delicate it is.
The more likely to shatter.

Thing 4

Advocating for Standards

Asking for what we need
Knowing how to navigate and communicate feels like code
Understanding what we need
If we're asking for the moon, we should be able to handle the moon
We have reading and learning to do
Because these standards are the gears of the web; we need them

Thing 5

Letting Go

We are the front lines
Not taking responsibility for everything
Shaping a manageable burden
Recognizing that we're not the only ones who can make it go
It can be unclear and confusing whose responsibility it is

Five things

(That are hard)

Dealing with the loss of "mobile" in our web

It's not exactly losing face, but it's a pride thing a bit
It's part of our identity
But we will get past this and bloom again!
But beyond ourselves, there is this notion of all that specialized miscellany
We don't want that knowledge and specialization to rot
And I don't want to lose all the specialness that comes with mobile devices.
Instead, we want to nurture what we've learned and bring it to bear on the wider web

We can't know the whole future

We have some sense of some patterns
We have some good guesses about what it bodes
And we want to go boldly on, but without hubris
Making sure to step back, get the bigger picture, reassess
Making sure not to lose focus, make assumptions, make the same mistakes

Our vocabulary trips us up

The words and terms we have are old and busted
Instead of illuminating and elucidating
They trip us up and tangle
Take the word "device"...
I don't know what my advice is, short of making up nonsense words
What ideas I have are fishy and stinky

We have to make things work

Sometimes that means making unusual or unorthodox tools
This creativity and flexibility is essential; the alternative is to be frozen
But it sure can stand in the way of making a change or a turn
And can obscure the clarity of the beautiful future

We risk dumbing down the web

Blanketing it with the average murk of overgeneralization
Finding the right mix of commonality and differentiation is no mean feat
Too much lowest-common demoninator and the world starts looking mighty grey.
Skew too far the other way and risk drowning in intricate detail

Lest that seem a bit bleak

I have some belief that the web will rise to meet us
The state of things is somewhat complex and confusing
But there is an underlying rhythm to the web, and it is self-correcting
And just as it can swing toward specialization or complexity, I think it can swing back again
At the risk of using a "too-big-to-fail" argument, the market may help to force its hand
Yep, when I think about it...
Yep, when I think about it...
Yep, when I think about it...
Yep! I can't help it. I think it's going to be great.

 

Lyza Danger Gardner / @lyzadanger

Designed with Reveal.js with lovely help from @tylersticka on the Cloud Four theme. Every photo in this presentation was taken by me, with the single exception of the photo of Jason Grigsby and me holding a tablet, which was taken by Lisa Teso.

Read the A List Apart column that inspired this talk at http://alistapart.com/column/do-as-little-as-possible