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!