My differentiation topic involves deepening an understanding of Progressive Web Apps. I'm drawn to PWAs for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that they represent a sort of natural extension for projects that I've already established. The responsiveness is already in place, and many of the projects in question rely on initial caching of data from a 'foundational' fetch call on the loading of the homepage. Given that PWAs offer some offline functionality, I'm curious to see how well my applications will work in the situation where the initial data is retrieved but the online connection is then subsequently severed. As I see it, my Rancid Tomatilloes project (among others) is already structured as a proto-PWA. Other convenient factors involve the one-size-fits-all utility of progressive web applications as well as the experience of 'crossing-the-aisle' from prior work with React Native. Getting my hands dirty with both progressive web & native applications will contribute to a more nuanced juxtaposition of the approaches.

My current understanding of PWAs is that they allow for the construction of responsive applications that operate well enough on mobile, though with some minor drawbacks in comparison to native applications. There are some compatibitility issues across browsers and IOS devices seem less prepared to receive a PWA than android, and I'm curious to personally assess the magnitude of these concerns. Aside from these considerations, I'll need to further acquaint myself with other idiosyncracies that come along with buiding a PWA: the use of service workers, the manifest file, and working with https.

As to how playing with PWAs will apply towards career development, I consider it part of a broader focus on building accessible technology. I'd like to develop a set of optimized go-to approaches for building applications that are available to the broadest possible audience. The first steps here involve refactoring what I've already built, and creating a more 'perfect' product with regard to hitting all the checkpoints for accessibility. My aim is to create a substrate of habits where everything I build in my own time is minimal & available to the widest audience. From that foundation, I'd then like to branch out into other spheres of optimization: security, speed of operation, etc. PWAs, with their ability to work on slower network speeds and overall flexbility, fit exactly into the paradigm of 'two-birds-one-stone' efficiency that I envision.