Futuristic Progressive Enhancement

Imagine someone came to you in a time machine and said, “In the future we will write software that becomes more capable as time passes without any effort on our part.”

Wouldn’t that be amazing? Surely you’d want to know what sorcery makes this possible, right?

Well the future is here. You can do that now. It’s called progressive enhancement.

Here’s Jeremy in his piece “Baseline progressive enhancement”:

Code you’ve already written starts working from one day to the next.

Wait, what? You write code and, without any effort on your part, it becomes more capable from one day to the next?

What an antidote to so much of today’s fatigue.

We’re all tired of: write some code, come back to it in six months, try to make it do more, and find the whole project is broken until you upgrade everything.

Progressive enhancement allows you to do the opposite: write some code, come back to it in six months, and it’s doing more than the day you wrote it!