Research on evaluating technology

I��ve spent the past few months preparing a new talk for An Event Apart San Francisco (and hopefully some more AEAs after that). As always happens, I spent the whole time vacillating between thinking ��this is good!�� and thinking ��this is awful!�� I��m still bouncing between those poles. I won��t really know whether the talk is up to snuff until I actually give it to a live audience.

Over the past few years, my presentations have been upon one another. Two years ago, my talk was called Enhance! and it set the groundwork for using a layered approach to web design and development. My 2016 talk, Resilience, follows on with a process and examples for that approach (I also set myself the challenge of delivering a talk about progressive enhancement without ever using the phrase ��progressive enhancement��).

My new talk goes a bit meta, but in my mind, it��s very much building on the previous talks. The talk is all about evaluating technology. I haven��t settled on a final title, but I was thinking about something obtuse, like ��Evaluating Technology.

Here��s my hastily scribbled description:

We work with technology every day. And every day it seems like there��s more and more technology to understand: graphic design tools, build tools, frameworks and libraries, not to mention new HTML, CSS and JavaScript features landing in browsers. How should we best choose which technologies to invest our time in? When we decide to weigh up the technology choices that confront us, what are the best criteria for doing that? This talk will help you evaluate tools and technologies in a way that best benefits the people who use the websites that we are designing and developing. Let��s take a look at some of the hottest new web technologies like service workers and web components. Together we will dig beneath the hype to find out whether they will really change life on the web for the better.

As ever, I��ll begin and end with a long-zoom pretentious arc of history, but I��ll dive into practical stuff in the middle. That��s become a bit of a clich�� for my presentations, but the formula works as a sort of microcosm of a good conference��a mixture of the inspirational and the practical, trying to keep a good balance of both.

For this new talk, the practical focus will be on some web technologies that are riding high on the hype cycle right now: service workers, web components, progressive web apps. I��ll use them as a lens for applying broader questions about how we make decisions about the technologies we embrace, and the technologies we reject.

Technology. Now there��s a big subject. It��s literally the entirety of human history. I had to be careful not to go down too many rabbit holes. I��m still not sure if I��ve succeeded, but I��ve already had to ruthlessly cull some darlings.

One of the nice things that the An Event Apart crew started doing was to provide link lists for each talk to attendees. That gives me an opportunity to touch briefly on a topic in the talk itself, but allow any interested attendees to dive deeper at their leisure.

For this talk on evaluating technology, I��ve put together this list of hyperlinks for further reading, watching, listening, and researching��