Travel management tips

Scott Davis: I optimize less. I used to be really aggressive about it, saying, "Alright, my first talk is Monday morning at 9 a.m. I'm going to get in on Sunday at midnight because that is the least amount of time I need."

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn't leave any margin for error, as all professional travelers learn. Nowadays, I try to give myself a full 24 hour buffer coming in.

When traveling to India from the U.S., that 24 hour buffer is almost a requirement. There's a 12 and a half hour time difference between the two countries and around 18 hours of flight time depending on how many hops it takes to get there. At that point, night is day, left is right, and up is down. That kind of time shift can be brutal if you don't anticipate it and make accommodations.

Whether I'm traveling across the world or just to one of the coasts in the U.S., what helps me best adjust to the new time zone is simply eating breakfast when the clock on the wall tells me I should, instead of when my internal clock tells me I should. Trying to live in one time zone while being physically located in another is a recipe for disaster. If I can get one solid "wake up when the sun comes up, go to bed when the sun goes down" cycle in, that's typically enough to get me through the next day of presentations.

Geertjan Wielenga: With these topics we're discussing now, coupled with the passion of this profession, do you think that there's a risk of burnout?

Scott Davis: Sustainability is a really important topic that we don't often talk about. Here's one way to think about it: an introvert is someone who can interact with other people—and maybe even enjoy it—but it drains their battery. It's crucial that they get some quiet/alone time to recharge.

I know a number of conference speakers who have this great, outgoing stage persona, but they self-identify as introverts. They are absolutely wrecked once they get off the stage and need time to recuperate.

I'm an extrovert, so I find that being on stage is what actually charges my battery. If I haven't been on stage in a while, if I'm not giving presentations, wildly gesticulating with my hands, or talking loudly and passionately about something, that drains my battery. I almost always come off the stage with more energy than when I started.

Whichever camp you fall into, be sure that you take care of yourself. It's far too easy to plan for your presentation and forget to plan for your recovery.

Geertjan Wielenga: When you're at a party or speaking to people who are not at all in the tech field, how do you explain what you do?

Scott Davis: Rather than saying, "I do responsive web design," "I write progressive web apps," or "I'm really into offline-first web development," I say, "I make sure that websites look good on your iPhone or Android."

I might also ask, "Have you heard of Alexa? Have you heard of Siri? Cortana? That's what I do: I do conversational UIs. I do my best to make sure that your devices make sense when they talk to you."

I think that it's far too easy for us to focus on the tools we use rather than the people who use our apps. Step one in design thinking is "empathy"—put yourself in the shoes of your end users for a moment and view your app through their eyes. I'm fairly sure that if you ask a typical software developer what step one is, they'll say, "Download a framework or set up a code repository."

Mozart wrote symphonies. If you asked him what he did for a living, I doubt that he would have said, "I write notes on a musical staff with a quill pen."

Many times, when I'm talking to a customs agent or someone in passport control, saying that I'm an author helps. I'll say, "I'm speaking at a software conference about this book that I've written." It establishes what you do in a common language that everyone understands.

Geertjan Wielenga: What talks are you working on right now?

Scott Davis: I'm working on a keynote called "The Ship of Theseus." It's an ancient Greek paradox about a wooden ship that belonged to one of the first kings of Athens.

Theseus sailed over to the island of Crete and killed a vicious monster called the Minotaur. When he returned, the citizens of Athens preserved his ship out in the harbor as a memorial to this momentous victory. Every year, they'd take Theseus' ship out for a victory lap to commemorate the event. According to the story, this went on for centuries after Theseus' death.

Here's the paradox: as you'd expect, various wooden parts of the ship rotted away over years. The citizens of Athens dutifully kept the ship in working order, replacing all of the parts necessary to keep the vessel seaworthy. Therein lies the question: since the ship was no longer made up of the original wood from Theseus' time, was it still truly Theseus' ship? If not, when did it cease being Theseus' ship? Is there a specific percentage, threshold, or milestone that we can point to and say, "There! Right there! That's when this thing technically stopped being the Ship of Theseus."?

Isn't that a lovely thought experiment? It really forces you to consider what the true essence of something is versus the raw materials used to build it. What a perfect metaphor for web development!

If you did an archeological dig on my website, you'd find 30 years of then-current, now-abandoned web technologies: ASP pages; JSP pages; Prototype and Scriptaculous; Groovy and Grails; jQuery; Backbone; Angular; Node.js; and Express. And yet, despite all of that churn, not once have I ever considered it anything other than "my website."

When you ask a typical web developer what they do, they'll often say, "I'm a React developer. I'm an Angular developer. I'm a VueJS developer." As far as I'm concerned, that's like saying, "I'm a spoon chef," or "I'm a hammer carpenter."

These tools that feel so important to us right now—that define us—are, in fact, ephemeral. The average lifespan of a website's design is typically less than two or three years. So, all of our efforts are spent on the surface of the water, being buffeted by the waves and dodging the flotsam and jetsam of last year's "gotta-have-it" framework.

Did you know that the original web page that Tim Berners-Lee published is still available on the web today? It still renders in 100% of modern browsers. Talk about the Ship of Theseus, right?

This is why I'm really focusing my efforts these days on standards-based techs like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Their longevity is measured in decades, not years or months. The deeper you go into the water, the slower the currents run, and the longer you can reap the benefits of your return on investment.

Geertjan Wielenga: We've established that you're not a traditional developer advocate, but you do promote particular techs. There's a whole range of people who one year are promoting tech A and then a couple of years later are promoting tech B. How do you feel about that? Should we look kindly upon that and be forgiving or be harsh and questioning?