What's Good?

I think this is a question worth asking, let me explain why…

A few times a year, every developer advocate will ask developers about what developing features they're interested in or what pain points they experience most. That is a good thing. We should keep doing that.

While we don't often present it in this light, one thing this does is inform prioritization. The simple truth is that resources are way too finite, so we have to look for good signals about what should be prioritized.

I think it's similarly important to have feedback on the other end too: What's your satisfaction like on the web features you've gotten in the last few years? Can you name any that you use all the time? Can you name some that you over-estimated your need for? Something that you thought you needed/wanted but then ultimately didn't end up using so much? Something that you had high hopes for, but failed you?

But why ask that?

Well, it seems quite probable that there are things we can learn from that.

Maybe we can look at where we should have listened more, or pushed more. Maybe we can learn things about the processes that successful things took that unsuccessful things didn't (did they go through WICG? Were there polyfills? Origin trials? Did they stay in experimental builds behind a flag for a long time? Were they done at roughly the same time in all browsers?). Can we compare the amount of resources and time required between them? Maybe those things could also inform prioritization somehow?

Normally, around this time, I'd have wrapped up working on the latest Web Almanac and there would be lots of data flying at me which scratches a little bit of the kind of itch I've got - but this year we didn't do one, so I find myself wondering: How are people getting along with all of those things we've been delivering since 2019 or so?

So, let me know!