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
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!
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.
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 literallywritten 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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!
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:
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.
