First, as a regular person, operate under the assumption that nothing you do online (and perhaps in public) is private. To be fair, we should have been doing that even before this latest leak. I guarantee the US government is not the only state doing this. Likely any foreign government with sufficient resources is already doing the same things. As developers, I second what @maruru has said. Focus on security first. If possible this should involve a subject matter expert. If not, focus on securing your data at every step of the process, from client to server and back. Also, as a community we can support advocates for encryption and fight the constant attempts to weaken or demonize encryption by our various governments.

This is true, although I would say with web workers and the notifications API gaining wider support on mobile, this is becoming less of an issue. I generally look at what most apps truly need, and it seems that native is necessary less and less. I suppose it is a balance of investing time into a separate, native application vs. simply improving the mobile site and which gives you more bang for your code buck, as it were. (All of this being said, of course if a mobile app comes out, I will be installing it, so label me a bit hypocritical.)

I guess I don't see the point. The mobile web interface works great. I have it saved to my phone's homescreen. It uses the fav icon as the app icon. If I were to give this to most users, they would not realize it was NOT a native app. What would we gain with a native app that we don't currently have? Thoughts?

To add to what @lichtjaeger said, also keep in mind that webpack, grunt, etc. are not just used for bundling. We also use them heavily for transpiling these days. HTTP2 won't help with that. So I think they will still be relevant at least as long as we are transpiling code to use features not widely supported in all browsers.

I will be the devil's advocate on this one. While I agree that things have definitely got out of hand in front-end dev, these days, I also think it comes down to how you implement your stack. For example, if you just use React/Redux and something like Babel for transpiring, this is still a fairly simple stack. However , what kills me is when developers then tack on a plugin/library/dependency for every problem they have in their app. Form validation, routing, formatting, responsive, AJAX, etc, etc. I think if we stick as closely to the core of the stacks we choose to employ, then this becomes manageable. You may have to do more work, but there is less to keep track of and fewer opportunities for random changes to a package wrecking your project.

I don't know. Seems more like an issue of how it is usually implemented by the developer. Though, I do wish they would remove the jQuery dependency at this point. Anyway, any recommendations for alternatives you feel is more current?