Mobile web consultant, developer, and speaker
Capabilities. That's what The Web needs. Things like: Face or other biometric logins for websites USB connectivity TCP and UDP sockets clients / servers Serial connections Geofencing and background location tracking Screen lock / screen brightness Barcode scanning / generation Contacts API. etc., etc., etc. If a native app can do it, the web should be able to do also! Progress! As it turns out the…
TLDR: Turning Redux state into a JavaScript string you can parse with JSON.parse() instead of an object literal, or inert script tag, appears to be significantly faster than other approaches for sending Redux store state to the browser. For my case making this one change shaved TTI (Time To Interactive) from an already pretty good 4.04s to 3.3s , a .74s or ~18% improvement. It increased the…
Techniques for keeping your app code under control even when requirements shift dramatically. I've had this pinned on my twitter for just about as long as "tweet pinning" has been a thing: If you don't actively fight for simplicity in software, complexity will win... and it will suck. It's a nice, pithy little quip, perhaps... but how do you actually accomplish this? The way I see it, broadly…
This is a chapter from my new book Human Redux which is now available! Chapter 11: Reliable apps As a user, nothing will more quickly sour me on a piece of software than flakiness. When we try to get someone to use our software, to some degree, we're asking them to trust us. If they're going to enter their data, spend their precious time, or hope to get some value out of the app we've built, they…
TLDR; The ability to build apps with web technology isn't just another way to build the same thing. It enables a whole new category of services that didn't make financial sense previously. As proof, I also introduce a real service that I've built for non-profits called Speedy that generates PWAs on the fly and is built on these ideas. If you've seen any of my writing about PWAs (Progressive Web…
Note: I just spoke at Coldfront 2017 about why I’m such a big proponent of the Web. What follows is essentially that talk as a blog post (I’ll add a link to the video once it is published). Also: the Starbucks PWA mentioned in the talk has shipped! 🎉 I’m not going to tell you what to do. Instead, I’m going to explain why I’ve chosen to bet my whole career on this crazy Web thing. "Betting" sounds…
If you're building for the web, you've likely heard the term "Progressive Web App" by now. Its definition is a bit vague and somewhat contentious perhaps, but generally the idea is that it's a web page that has "taken all the right vitamins" so it can behave more like an app you installed from the app store. It starts as a normal tab in your browser and if it has all the right stuff the browser…
Monday of last week I was all excited. I had just gotten the green light to start prototyping a new Progressive Web App for a client I've been working with. I pulled out an older Android phone that I keep around for development. Then I also got my sleek, new, shiny iPhone 6s out of my pocket, with its smooth curves and speedy OS. But as I looked at my iPhone I was kind of bummed out. I realized…
Whether I like it or not, not everyone using my web apps will be running iOS 9 on an iPhone 6S or a Nexus 6P and connecting via super-speedy wifi. The reality is often anything but that. 3G connections and older hardware is often the norm. Google reports that there are 1.4 billion active Android users . Many of them, will no doubt, be running less-than-top-of-the-line hardware. And, if you read…
The term “reactive programming” may sound a bit cryptic, but if you’ve ever used a spreadsheet, you’re already quite familiar with the concept. When you’re simply viewing a spreadsheet, each cell isn’t necessarily showing you what was actually typed into the cell. Sure, some cells may contain simple values, but others actually contain formulas . The formula may, for example, describe that the cell…
It’s official, next Monday (Aug 24, 2015) my five and a half year tenure at &yet is over (Gulp!). What’s wrong? What happened?! Nothing. Seriously. It’s just been five and a half years and it feels like its time for new adventures. Things are and will continue to be great at &yet, with lots of interesting clients, lots of cool stuff coming up and I will always highly recommend them as a consulting…
What follows is an actual SMS conversation I had this evening with Marc Grabanski (with only a few minor edits). Marc Now we can finally write GWT natively and get the performance Henrik Greater Web Together™. It’s finally living up to its name. Marc RxJS is basically making Objective C into Swift that runs in the browser it’s great Imagine a bootstrap that runs Ruby – mind…
Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends and spirit – and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be…
I had a blast at Future Insights Live in Vegas this week where I led a 1-day workshop on Building a Modular Front-end Application and gave a talk about Optimizing for Change (by using modular architectures). The event was a great mix of content and people, excellently curated and executed. Big props to Sarah Robinson and Ellie Robinson who produced the conference. Happy to have gotten to hang out…
Discussing: Native Web Apps Web apps with deeper OS integration Pre-rendering static HTML for NWAs Surge.sh
A Single Page Story My talk from FFConf in Brighton, UK. Covering: Should we build apps that require JavaScript to run What is a “native web app”? What about progressive enhancement? Performance implications of clientside apps What about Twitter’s move away from clientside back to server-rendered? The two classes of web apps User expectations of modern applications Installable web apps…
https://speakerdeck.com/henrikjoreteg/making-webrtc-awesome-cascadiajs-2013#stargazers My talk from CascadiaJS 2013 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=velmlLKmIA8
Good morning. (at Hollywood Beach)
The best things in life are not simple to explain. Even if you’re able to summarize a “best thing” in a short sentence, the full reasoning behind it is likely far more nuanced. For example, if you’re fortunate enough to be married to someone whom you feel is the best thing in your life, you may say: “my spouse is the best thing, because they make me a better person.” While this may be true, if…
Crazy, random thought: Just think if you could serve a JS file with a content type of “application/javascript” and just have the browser treat it as the the equivalent of doing this: <!DOCTYPE html> <script src="/the_application.js" type="text/javascript"></script> That would certainly help clarify the distinction between a clientside app and a server side one.