The web is the most important platform for individual empowerment and creative expression that mankind has ever invented. What was once a meager collection of a handful of scientific documents linked together, is now an expansive graph of billions of people interacting to exchange trillions of interconnected ideas. Getting to be even a small part of building that should be tremendously exciting.
But, even as great as it is, the web faces myriad existential threats. And it's up to us, the builders of the web, to confront them head on. Privacy, security, and accessibility are the obvious big ones, but less obvious are some far deeper problems at the core of the web and how we design/build it.
Should the web go all-HTTPS? Most think so, but uncacheable HTTPS alienates 1/3 of the world's population. We can all probably imagine how bad the web is on slow connections, or even how much it costs on expensive metered-data plans. But worse than slow connection is spotty/intermittent connection or