Finally managed to complete a run through of our session within the 40 minute time limit! Nearly..
getting the least out of your images
Can’t wait for tomorrow!
Category Archives: Conference
#velocityconf notes part 3: network performance amazingness
An absolutely brain melting session from Ilya Grigorik , talking about the intricacies of tcp, http (0.9-1.1-2.0), the speed of light, how the internet instructure works, how mobile network browsing works, how http 1.1 doesn’t support the current use cases, and most fascinating for me: what mobile browsers actually do under the hood.
Amazing how an analytics beacon on a webpage or app could cause your entire battery to be zapped in a matter of hours.
It’s going to take me a few days to decompress this information in my fuzzy brain, so why not check the slides yourself here: http://bit.ly/hpbn-talk
#velocityconf notes part 2
Yoav Weiss did a great session on responsive images and techniques; this scared me a little as he’s covering a lot of content that could contradict the talk I’m doing later in the week!
He’s mentioned some great pertinent points that I’ll reference back to.
Other things he talked about:
LQIP, which sounds like a reintroduction of the ancient lowsrc attribute.
He’s really having a pop at Mobify and their image loading hack script, which he calls Bat-Shit-Loco-Insane ™. Nice. Explaining how it works feels like the whole room has just facepalmed.
He also talks about compressive images. Luckily nothing that completely ruins my stuff.. whew. I’ll just have to update my notes a little bit.
Each session I’m going to gives me ideas on changes I should make to our Friday session!
Velocity conf notes
First session over, and my brain is already straining from Jon Cowie’s talk on how Etsy manage to make sense of a quarter of a million metric to understand anomalies in almost real time.
I also managed to have a full on geek moment when I rocked up to the speaker lounge and parked myself on the same table as Steve Souders and Yoav Weiss whilst they discussed CSS render times and blocking.
Plus I’m so dammed happy to be wearing the green emblazoned “speaker” lanyard!
So, I’m speaking at Velocity Conference EU!
This week is an amazing one for web performance & operations and culture professionals; Monday & Tuesday is Devopsdays and Weds to Fri is Velocity Conference EU. If you’re concerned with web performance and the devops process, tooling, and culture (and if not, why the heck not?!) then get along (or get your company to get you a ticket) to one or even both events!
This coming Friday 13th November I have the pleasure of co-presenting a session called Getting The LEAST Out Of Your Images with my cohort, Dean Hume at this years Velocity Conference EU!
Velocity Conference is three days of presentations, events, and discussions along Web Performance and Operation & Culture. It’s been going for several years already and sees such big names in the web perf field as John Allspaw and Steve Souders, Ilya Grigorik, Yoav Weiss, and Paul Lewis, as well as well known faces from the Ops world.
I’ve already chosen most of the sessions I’ll be attending and I’m really looking forwards to it.
If you’re attending and aren’t sure where to head on Friday afternoon, I recommend popping into the Palace Suite at 4.15pm to see some slick slides and almost as slick presenters (*ahem*) in our session:
Getting The LEAST Out Of Your Images
Come say hi if you spot me! Let me know what concerns you have with image optimisation on your (or your company’s) site (and buy me an espresso :P) and we’ll have a chat.
DevOpsDays
My thoughts from the recent #devopsdays conference in London; notes, inspiration, todos, ahas, and OMGs.
(Since my handwriting was so poor on the first day and my name badge was illegible, this was the badge for day #2!)
Wow. There’s a lot to learn about this whole DevOps movement, but I actually feel that I can contribute to it having a pretty broad range of experience; I’m mainly development, but over the past decade or so have turned my hand to basic sysadmin-ing, DBA-ing, QA-ing, BA-ing, dev managing – almost all of the areas that need to be covered. I like to think of myself and a catalyst for implementation 🙂
I had initially been concerned that I lacked depth in skills like virtualisation and automation, but I’ve realise that those systems like Puppet, Chef, and Vagrant are potential solutions to a problem of configuration management (CM) and automation. Understanding the need for these tools is half the battle; being a specialist in them isn’t completely necessary, but an understanding to a level of basic implementation would be useful.
I’m already enrolled on a bunch of puppet webinars so will be getting stuck into that more soon.
Even though I’m pretty new to this, chatting with some key people did validate my thoughts that people shouldn’t be referring to “devops” as a person or a role in their presentations instead of an approach/framework/culture.
Intro
What happened at #devopsdays?
After being drawn in to the Basho booth by a raspberrypi/arduino/riak mars-rover-esque robot and chatting with John Clapham, who I didn’t realise was about to do the second presentation of the day (!), I end up deciding to sit right at the front (like a swot).
This turned out to be a great move as I ended up chatting with the organisers and even one of the founders of the DevOps movement, Gene Kim. Really nice guy, looks exactly like his twitter avatar (unlike some of us.. ahem..), and he even took a picture of the two of us together and let me know how to get onto the book review group for the long awaited DevOps Cookbook – bloody nice chap.
Chris Little, from BMC, is a really interesting guy to talk to as well – gave me a great overview of the background to DevOps, its “founders”, and helped me understand both its role in a company and in the future of the industry.
A pic Chris took from the stage
Try to play Where’s Wally and find lil old meeee…!
Presentations
Each day there were four main presentations to start with, then some “ignite” talks.
I’m not going to try to go into the details of these presentations as 1) I’m lazy, 2) I tried to take notes on my phone and the battery died, and 3) other people have done it much better than I would have anyway!
Essentially, I found several of the presentations difficult to really grasp as I felt I was lacking a frame of reference. Perhaps this was just me not having enough of a Ops background, but I felt that the presentations could have benefited from a slide or two at the start laying the foundation for the remainder of the talk.
I was very glad to see at least one full presentation being completely non-technical, and instead focussing on the culture side of DevOps.
OpenSpaces
The afternoon of each day was put aside to OpenSpaces: everyone has the opportunity to propose a discussion topic, pop it on a post-it, people who want to vote can take a marker and add a dot on the post-its that they’re interested in. Those with the most dots get allocated a room and a time, and the discussions commence.
I initially thought this was a bit of a cop-out: I paid to attend a conference and half of it is the other people who paid talking to each other?! Rip off!
However, the discussions that I chose to attend helped me understand much more about monitoring, logging, database CI, puppet/chef/CF Engine/vagrant basics than I could have got from the main presentations, so I’m a convert.
Summary
DevOps is an exciting opportunity to technically innovate around CI, automation, delivery pipelines etc, and also to work with the business to introduce concepts like Impact Mapping.
This is where I’ll be focussing my professional efforts for the near future. I think there’s a lot of potential to help relieve stress on development teams and operations teams and relieve frustration from the business teams that define the work.