Weeknotes #14: many travels, much talking
Once again it’s been a bit since I last put together a Weeknotes post, and for good reason: I spent the past nearly-three weeks traveling outside of the U.S. I've never been gone from home for this long of a stretch, as evidenced by feeling homesick about a week and a half in. Much respect to the constant travelers among us in the web industry! Regardless, it was a productive couple of weeks in which I got to chat with many web friends, old and new.
TPAC: Fukuoka, Japan
TPAC is the annual, week-long conference for standards groups at the W3C. It’s essentially 5 days of meetings, and provides the opportunity for different groups to cross-pollinate and share new ideas. The longer I spend working on the web platform, the more this entails scheduling conflicts at TPAC, which was especially the case this year. The flip side is that this community feels more and more like home; there are so many fantastic people working on the open web, and I feel lucky to know more of them with each passing year.
W3C Developer Meetup
Photo via Travis Leithead
Alongside standards body meetings, the W3C holds a developer meetup to connect local developers with the standards community. I gave a talk at the meetup this year on new standards for styling in forced color modes (e.g. Windows High Contrast); “Finessing forced-colors” slides and resources are online. Incidentally, this was my first international presentation.
View Source conference: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Zaanse Schaans is very windy. Turns out the Dutch knew what they were doing.
After spending some personal time exploring Japan and avoiding too much time-zone yoyo’ing, I hopped on over to the Netherlands for View Source. I’ve never been to the country before, so naturally had to squeeze in just a bit of tourism time at the Rijksmuseum and the windmills of Zaanse Schaans.
Resting speaker face? Photo via View Source
At View Source I gave a longer version of my inclusive color and contrast talk: incorporating some guidance on styling for dark mode alongside styling for forced color modes, and touching briefly on future prefers-contrast standards. The recording is not yet online, but I’ve uploaded slides and other resources for “The Tailored Web”. I’m eager for those recordings to come online, as there’s lots of great content on the roster: like a framework for perf culture from Sharell Bryant and a focus on privacy from Selena Deckelmann and a couple of my Microsoft colleagues Lillian Kravitz and Ryan Cropp (who gave their first talk!).
Curious what Dees was saying at this point in the panel. Photo via MSDev NL
Also at the conference, I spoke on a panel about commitments to the web platform. I’d never participated in a panel before, so I’m grateful to Daniel Appelquist’s inclusive and considerate moderation style. I have to say I was a bit nervous about said panel—I feel more comfortable with public speaking the more I can “prepare”—but felt richly rewarded by getting to know my fellow participants. In general, meeting people is what I love most about conferences, and View Source was an excellent venue in which to do so.
Home again
Took a couple days off at the end of last week to recuperate, which—against better judgement—swiftly turns into me working on side projects instead of lazing around on the couch…
Draft Jam
Two of my recent personal goals are to write more blog posts, and to encourage more folks to likewise share their thoughts. A lot of us filter ourselves out of the conversation (“this has already been blogged about before”, “is this even interesting to anybody but me?”), but I believe everyone has something to share, and the web industry needs to hear from more voices. To this end, I think it might be fun to hold “draft jams”: weekend-long, mostly-online events where folks collectively focus on turning their draft ideas into publishable blog posts.
So far I’ve got a couple domains registered, a site map sketched out, and a bit of copy written. But stay tuned! I'm thinking January 2020 will be a great time for the first draft jam.
Reading
Design and development
- An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle
- An HTML Element Potentially Worth $18M to Indiegogo Campaigns
- How a designer makes background patterns to push her creativity: gotta add that color palette plugin to my repertoire!
- Is Using Coil to Monetize Prompts Gonna Work?
- 5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe
