Kyle Simpson and Tammy Everts on the challenges of the modern web

The O’Reilly Programming Podcast: Rising barriers to entry, the complexity of the modern web, and a preview of upcoming Fluent sessions.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with two of the program chairs for the upcoming O’Reilly Fluent Conference (July 11-14 in San Jose), Kyle Simpson and Tammy Everts. Simpson is co-author of the HTML 5 Cookbook, and the author of the You Don’t Know JS series of books. Everts is the chief experience officer at SpeedCurve and the author of Time is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance.

Discussion points:

• Simpson says that one of the biggest challenges facing JavaScript developers is that the previously low barrier to entry has been raised significantly: “JavaScript developers are facing a monumental task of juggling a vast ecosystem of tools and processes that go around, and on top of, and in front of, what used to just be opening a text file and typing JavaScript.”
• Everts talks about the challenges of designing for the modern web: “The web has become so complex, and the user base and the types of devices and bandwidths that people are experiencing are so incredibly diverse,” she says. “Developers and designers are somehow magically expected to take all these assets, all these scripts and make them perform reliably and consistently on everything from a smartphone over a 2G connection to someone who has blazingly fast internet.”
• Simpson and Everts preview numerous Fluent sessions and presentations.

Other links:

• Everts’ recent O’Reilly blog post “Building for the modern web is really, really hard”
• Simpson’s free ebook JavaScript and HTML5 Now
• Everts co-curates WPO Stats, a collection of performance case studies
• Redux, the open source JavaScript library often used with the React JavaScript library
• The W3C’s list of web accessibility evaluation tools
• Simpson's recent post Fluent: Trainings To Further The Web