You are too kind <3

I think you are being purposely inflammatory here. We have been working hard on bringing capabilities to the web platform, together with the other browser vendors. I’m curious what makes you think we’d waste this amount of resources, money and time on “throwing a bone”.

The misspelling of Referer. In all honesty, though: It would probably be the removal of “synchronous <anything>”.

Pretty much all of the podcasting, tweeting, presenting is definitely part of my job although only useful to varying degrees career-wise (like shitposting on Twitter). And yes, care is definitely important when making public statements, as we do not run every tweet by our legal team (even when we tweet from @ChromiumDev. Our team is given a lot of trust, which makes our job so much easier. For a while now we have been trying to embrace “Walk the walk, then talk the talk” as our motto, meaning that we should behave like real web developers. No cheating. Use the same tools, build apps from start to finish. Just that along the way we take notes about what is painful or difficult, where is DevTools lacking, what bugs did we find etc and feed that back to the appropriate people. And then we turn our lessons learned into (hopefully) useful articles, guidances and talks. Squoosh is a product of that process and we are quite happy with the results and the reception :)

I don’t think TypeScript “takes over” JavaScript :D It’s synergetic, not adversarial. But that just as side note. It’s hard to pick favorites, honestly. Wasm is definitely exciting and very fun. I am also looking forward to WHATWG streams being universally available. They are so versatile and flexible. WebGPU is also cool. SO MUCH IS HAPPENING.

No. Never. All my talks were absolutely flawless.

For the record, C++ is not my least favorite language.

I have no hard data to support this, but I don’t think WebAssembly will help much. The problems we see are big monolithic chunks of JavaScript, forced layouts and forced paints. JavaScript is extraordinarily fast considering it’s a weakly typed, originally interpreted language. In V8, JavaScript and WebAssembly have the same peak performance. Sometimes it’s harder to get there with JavaScript, though. So WebAssembly might make some cases faster, but the biggest problem is that there’s no easy way to break up work into smaller chunks and yielding to the browser in between these chunks. Additionally, all of this is still happening on the main thread, when a lot of the work web apps do could be happening in a worker to keep rendering much more responsive.

Both, really. Houdini, for me, is more of a “power-user” feature. I expect a couple of well-versed people to build modules for Houdini that everyone can then use. That doesn’t mean that the average web developer can’t write Houdini modules, they just might not get the same mileage out of it. It’s practically impossible for one person to know every API browsers offer nowadays, so you need to know where your interest lies and what problems you encounter on a day-by-day basis.

I suffered through a burnout while working at my own company (which failed miserably), so I know my signs of burn out. My alarm bells go off when topics that should be exciting are not and I am more nihilistic (than usual). But these signs are different from person to person. If I notice these things, I know I need to take a break and “do one for the soul”, as Paul Lewis says. Find a project that I want to do, with no connection to my day job. Sometimes it’s even better to put away the technology and enjoy some sports, the outside, and other non-technology hobbies (currently that’s photography). In general keeping an eye on work/life balance has proven quite effective for me at preventing burnout.