A Diservice to Service Workers
وقل ربي زدني علما
'and say: O lord increase me in knowledge’ (20:114)
Post-Mortem: Using Service Workers for Offline-first Web Apps
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Not too long ago I was visiting a local mosque (and community center) that I frequent often and noticed that the slideshow display wasn’t working. After some discussion with one of the admins, we jointly proposed a new slideshow display to replace the defunct display they had at the time. The new display would be a web application which achieves feature-parity with the previous display and adds some extra conveniences.
As per the usual, I underestimated the amount of time it takes to create a ‘simple’ slideshow which is resilient and robust. After all, slideshows are expected to run for months (even perhaps years) without stopping or crashing, ideally without any intervention from my side.
The first version of the slideshow was live and deployed to the center a couple of days after the proposal. About 16 hours later I received my first complaint: