We’ve watched Google I/O webdev talks and chose the best ones, here’s the list!

Every May is a developers’ talks feast. Google is publishing hundreds of amazing talks from its annual Google I/O conference. This year we have binge-watched a lot of them and chose the best ones related to web development. Here’s the list. Enjoy!

Google I/O Keynote

This year’s keynote was a blast. The Machine Learning-focused speeches showed futuristic vision which Google have been pursuing for a long time. Although there were not that many web platform news on the keynote itself, it is still worth a watch as it shines new light on what the Internet and human-computer interactions might look like in the near future.

Watch if:

• You want to see which emojis were fixed by Google this year 😉
• You want to see Google Duplex demo which might revolutionise the way we make appointments
• Want to see newest highlights of Google’s self-driving car

Skip if:

• You are not interested in the newest technologies

Introducing .app domain names and how to secure them

.app is the first top level domain designed with security in mind. Starting with history of HTTPS, the talk overviews the .app domain and some security measures which are enabled by default for .app domain space. Even if you’re not interested in buying .app domain now, it is still worth watching for the description of lesser-known security headers like HSTS. Also, a bunch of great advice about how to setup your dev environment properly and what common issues you might run into.

Watch if:

• You want to see new approach to security enforcement
• You want to learn more about how the domain registries are working (open source code available!)
• You don’t want for page to be marked as Not Secure in the upcoming release of Chrome.

Skip if:

• You don’t care about security of your websites

The web: state of the union

Service Workers, Progressive Web Apps, Web Media API, WebAssembly and much, much more. This talk walks us through the most important changes and how the big players are using them to provide much better experience on the web. The talk also mentions Google Workbox - great tool for adding progressive web app features to your project with just few lines of code.

Watch if:

• You want to see what’s trending this year in web development
• You want to learn about new cool methods to make offline cache easily

Skip if:

• You want to create webpages like it’s still 1999

The power of Headless Chrome and browser automation

Great talk about Puppeteer and how to use it to automate your workflow. The talk shows many examples of how to use puppeteer in task-driven way - from taking screenshots of the pages to creating server side rendering for SPA pages. No matter if you are a frontend or backend developer, these solutions can save you days of development.

Watch if:

• You want to automate your workflow
• You want to A/B test
• You want to build better apps

Skip if:

• You want to repeat mundane tasks
• You don’t want to improve your workflow

What’s new in Chrome DevTools

This is probably one of the most awaited talks. For many of us, Chrome DevTools is one of the main tools we use every day. It is still being improved with features like local overrides, improvements in search and color picker and new accessibility check features. Also, the new View Trace Lighthouse / DevTools is an amazing way to help you with page optimisation. For those of us who love to prototype in Chrome console, Eager Evaluation is the new, feature we soon won’t be able to work without. To learn about these changes, and much more, watch the talk!

Watch if:

• You can’t live without Chrome DevTools anymore
• You want to improve your day-to-day workflow
• You want to see cool on-stage live coding
• You want to find out how a self-diving car looks like

Skip if:

• You’ve never used Google DevTools in your life
• You want to develop and debug your apps the old way

Build the future of the web with modern JavaScript

What’s new in JavaScript and V8? In this talk developers from V8 team at Google show new functionalities like JavaScript modules, improvements to numeric literals, BigInts, async for iterators and generators, name capture groups in regular expressions and more. Great talk for both frontend and backend developers!

Watch if:

• You want to see what new features of JavaScript you can already use
• You want to see cutting-edge JavaScript features

Skip if:

• You are not interested in JavaScript at all