Web Directions Summit

Frontend's Lost Decade & The Market for Lemons

Microsoft is on parallel journeys: our flagship applications are moving to the web, in whole or in part. At the same time, our internal stacks have been evolving, starting with in-house tools, through Angular, to React. This trajectory mirrors the larger frontend ecosystem's acceptance of SPA technologies, appropriate or not, over the past decade. The bad news is that none of this has gone well for users. But why? How did our community gain huge funding and put on an endless parade of self-congratulatory conferences if the results haven't stacked up?

This talk is a look into how Microsoft is beginning to turn a very large ship, and how lessons from a decade of consulting with teams building on the web can help you avoid the now-common pratfalls of an ecosystem that's only just starting to step into the stark sunlight of P&L; accountability.

Alex Russell

Alex Russell is a Microsoft Partner PM on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. It is his professional mission to build a web that works for everyone.

From 2008-2021, Alex was a software engineer at Google working on Chrome, Blink, and the web platform. He served as the first Web Standards Tech Lead for Chrome (2015-2021) and was a three-time elected member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (2013-2019) and a representative to TC39 for a decade.

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