Tag Archives: conference

MVP led TechDays Online: Videos!

As part of Microsoft’s recent Tech Days Online, I was very pleased to be able to record a couple of short videos about botframework, LUIS, the QnA Maker, and how I have been working with JustEat to use these technologies in their Customer Help chatbot solution.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the live TechDays sessions, so instead of an hour or two of my dulcet tones you only have the pleasure of ten minutes; feel free to replay those minutes as many times as you like!

First up, a ten minute session on the JustEat Customer Care chatbot implementation:

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I’ll Be Speaking At OSCON EU

OSCON

I’m lucky enough to have been allowed to speak at OSCON EU this year, with – as per usual – the awesome Dean “Wrote The Book On Web Performance” Hume (that’s his legal full name, thanks to him having actually written a book on web performance).

OSCON – the Open Source Conference – “celebrates, defines, and demonstrates the best that open source has to offer.” From small businesses to the enterprise, open source is the first choice for engineers around the world, and OSCON is the place to celebrate that.

The workshop we’ll be presenting is Automating Web Performance – first thing on Wednesday morning.

As regular readers may notice, I do like my web performance optimisation – in fact, I’ve spoken about it once or twice.

What’s different this year is that .Net is finally open source, so, as long time .net-ers, we felt it was time to spread the .Net love amongst the open source community! I’m really excited for this conference – a different focus (I’m used to almost everyone at the conference talking about a similar thing to me – i.e., web performance optimisation – and the line up at OSCON is exceptionally diverse), a different location (the wonderful city of Amsterdam) and a different format for us (a 90 minute workshop instead of a 40 minute presentation).

We’ll be talking about tech that, although not specific to .Net, can be applied to such web projects – and to pretty much any other tech stack too – in order to reap the benefits of automated web performance optimisation.

We’ll go through automating the optimisation of images, css, javascript, and html, as well as introducing WebP images, critical css, unused css, and ultimately automating the continual testing of these optimisations.

It’s going to be a great start to the third day of the conference; if you’re attending, and you’re looking for something fun to start your last day with, then come and sit in with us – you won’t regret it!

If you’re not already attending and I’ve managed to convince you how wrong you are, then perhaps you’d also like to get 25% discount off of your ticket? How does that sound? And a cookie? Just use the code SPEAKER25 when you buy your ticket for that discount, and come find me at the conference for that cookie. *

(* cookie may not exist; the cookie is a lie)

My face is in a video! Velocity Conference Interview

As part of my appearance at this year’s Velocity Conference NYC, I have been interviewed for the O’Reilly youtube channel and also the podcast.

In it I’m covering the contents of the upcoming talk that I’m doing with Dean, such as the HTTP Archive and Google’s Big Query and how people should approach these in order to get the most out of it.

I also mention some of the common pitfalls that poorly performing sites are doing, as well as what the good and the great are doing – some of their sneaky tricks.

If you’re attending Velocity Conf in NYC right now, then why not have a little look and get a sneak peak before attending the full session on Wednesday at 5pm

What I’m looking forwards to at VelocityConf NYC 2014

There’s a good mixture of Performance and Mobile sessions in my list, and a couple of Operations and Culture ones too. However, there are so many conflicting sessions that are awesome, so please let me know your thoughts to help me decide!

Day One

I saw Tammy Everts‘ vconf session last year, Understanding the neurological impact of poor performance, which was fascinating. Her tweets are great resources for web performance.

As such, I’ll start the conference with Everything You Wanted to Know About Web Performance (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Then I’ve got to decide between Colin Bendell’s (Akamai) Responsive & Fast: Iterating Live on Modern RWD Sites and Patrick Meenan’s (Google) Deploying and Using WebPagetest Private Instances

Unfortunately, then my ability to make a decision completely fails! I can’t decide between these three:

Finding Signal in the Monitoring Noise with Flapjack, RUM: Getting Beyond Page Level Metrics, and an Etsy-powered mobile session – Building a Device Lab. Help!

I’m planning to finish day 1 with W3C Web Performance APIs in Practice

Day Two

Following the ever-impressive opening sessions, I’ll head over to see a Twitter session: Mitigating User Experience from ‘Breaking Bad’: The Twitter Approach, then it’s decision time again: either The Surprising Path to a Faster NYTimes.com or A Practical Guide to Systems Testing.

Following that, how could I miss Yoav Weiss talking about how Responsive Images are Coming to a Browser Near You?!

Then I’m deciding between another Etsy session – It’s 3AM, Do You Know Why You Got Paged? – and another Tammy Everts (and Kent Alstad, also of Radware) session – Progressive Image Rendering: Good or Evil?.

I’ll finish the day with another session from Yoav – Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Preloader? – and Etsy’s Journey to Building a Continuous Integration Infrastructure for Mobile Apps, probably.

Day Three

After some more kickass sessions opening the day, I’ll head over to see Signal Through the Noise: Best Practices for Alerting from David Josephsen (Librato).

After that will be Handling The Rush, then another descision between How The Huffington Post Stays Just Fast Enough and Creating a Culture of Quality: How to Sell Web Performance to Your Organization

During the break there will be a couple of jokers talking about the Http Archive, Big Query, and Performance using .Net and Azure! I’ll not miss that for the world! They’re amazing! And ridiculously handsome. kof
Office Hour with Dean Hume (hirespace.com) and Robin Osborne (Mailcloud)

The afternoon will be made up of Test Driven Mobile Development with Appium, Just Like Selenium, Making HTTP/2 Operable and Performant, AND THE AMAZING LOOKING HTTPARCHIVE+BIGQUERY SESSION The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive (which is going to be AMAZINGLY EPIC)

DONE!

Then beers, chatting with other like-minded nerds, and a spare day to wander around NYC before an overnight (I believe the term is “red eye”) return flight.

My schedule

You can check my full schedule here, should you want to be creepy and stalk me.

I’ll be speaking at Velocity Conference New York 2014!


Velocity New York 2014

For the second year running I’ve been invited to speak at the fantastic web performance, optimisation, dev ops, web ops, and culture conference VelocityConf; in fact, it has become the essential training event and source of information for web professionals over the years it has been running.

Last year was the Europe leg of the conference, in London. This year I’ll be jetting off (via the cheapest possible flights known to google..) to New York City!

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive

I’ll be speaking once again with Dean Hume (who has literally written the book on website performancee) about The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive; we’ll be talking about technologies like the HTTP Archive and Google’s Big Query, but mainly about the secrets learned from some of the great sites and their dev teams, as well as some of the traps from some of the not so great sites. In most cases we’ll look at one small change which could help those no so great sites become a bit more great!

Where? When?

  • 09/17/2014 5:00pm
  • Room: Sutton South

Come and see us!

Venue

New York Hilton Midtown
1335 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10019
map

Office hours

Dean and I will also be hosting an Office Hours session where you’re invited to come and say hello, and talk to us about your Windows, .Net, Azure, EC2, web performance concerns or ideas; we’d love to have the opportunity to meet and speak with you, so please come and say hi!

Where? When?

  • 09/17/2014 2:45pm
  • Table 1 (Sponsor Pavilion)

DISCOUNTS!

There’s never been a better year to attend Velocity Conference; the line up is amazing, the contents are incredible, and the opportunity to talk with experts and passionate developers is priceless.

If you’re not sure how to convince your manager to send you – try the official Convince your Manager steps!

Once you’ve sorted that out, register and use the code given to you by your speaker friend (me!), for a whopping 20% discount: SPKRFRIEND.

You want more?


Velocity New York 2014

Velocity Conference EU 2013

The 3 day conference of web performance and operations & culture wrapped up recently, and having had the honour of presenting a session with my partner in crime Dean Hume called Getting The LEAST Out Of Your Images, and wandering around with the green underscored “Speaker” lanyard, here’s a brief summary of the event and some of my personal highlights.

Keynotes

First up, here are all of the keynote videos over on youtube; there were some really great keynotes including several from various sections of the BBC; some highlights for me were Addy Osmani’s UnCSS demo, Ilya Grigorik’s Big Query lightning demo, and the fantastic Code Club session from John Wards.

Presentations

There were a large number of sessions across three streams (web perf, mobile, and devops) covering all manner of topics from extreme anomaly detection in a vast torrent of data, through to optimising animation within a browser.

Some of the stand out sessions for me were:

Making sense of a quarter of a million metrics

Jon Cowie gave a brain melting 90 minute session taking us through how Etsy make sense of all of their monitoring data; given that they graph everything possible, this is no easy task.

Understanding the neurological impact of poor performance

Tammy Everts not only gives us an insight into the poor aeroplane connectivity where she lives, but also how people react emotionally to a poor performing website.

Rendering Performance Case Studies

Unfortunately this session clashed with the Etsy metrics one, but from what I heard it sounds like Addy Osmani had one of the best sessions at the whole conference.

High Performance Browser Networking

Another brain-melt session; Ilya gave an incredible insight into the complexities of fine tuning performance when taking into account what HTTP over TCP (and also over 3G) actually does.

Other Resources

All of slide decks are here, all of the keynotes are here, and there’s even a free online version of Ilya Grigorik’s High Performance Browser Networking book.

Summary

I probably enjoyed the 90 minute tutorial session on Wednesday more than the rest of the conference, but the Thurs and Fri were really jam packed with excellent sessions and impressive keynotes.

I loved speaking there and will certainly be pitching for more such conferences next year!

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!

image

So, I’m speaking at Velocity Conference EU!


Velocity EU Conference 2013

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

rposbo_m
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.


Velocity EU Conference 2013