Talks

• Shift Left

  It’s easy to think that performance is someone else’s responsibility. However, when we think about apps at scale, it becomes clear that performance, like accessibility, is everyone’s responsibility. So how do we help change this mindset, especially for front-end developers? We do it by adopting a “shift-left” mindset, and take another look at how we both learn and teach web development. Blazing fast sounds nice as a sound byte and can even perhaps serves as a true north, but the journey to delivering that kind of business value is something that requires thinking at every level. In this talk, we’ll look what we mean by “shift left” and how we can take that journey— together.

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  About Melanie Sumner

  Melanie is a decorated, disabled military veteran who works as a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn with a focus on accessibility in open source software. She is an active member of the Ember.js core team and organizer for the Ember Chicago Meetup.

• Javascript Performance in Extreme Environments

  Building web applications to power the refugee aid movement results in some interesting performance considerations. Will it load on a refugee camp’s wifi, shared by 500 people and beamed in from a town 4km away? Can it work offline, so that aid workers in the field can still get their job done even if they lose cell signal? Will it run on anything from a decade old donated laptop running Windows Vista to a brand new iPhone X? This talk will discuss performance considerations, explore tradeoffs, and describe our current solutions. It will focus on javascript, but also touch on other web technologies or organizational considerations where appropriate.

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  About Taylor Fairbank

  Taylor likes building ethical technology and operational planning, which is what he is lucky enough to do every day at Distribute Aid. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois, and has previously founded a startup which was accepted into Y Combinator. When he is not coding or organizing, he enjoys hiking and learning to cook new vegetarian dishes.

• Building for Budgets

  A personal story of living in a low income family. With tips on how modern web technologies, like WebAssembly and Web Workers, can bring new experiences to the web for budget devices that struggled to run these experiences before.

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  About Aaron Turner

  Aaron is a skateboarder, musician, and a developer doing WebAssembly, JavaScript, and Rust. Aaron is also an AssemblyScript team member.

• Observability for Web Perf

  Within the observability community, there’s a saying, “nines don’t matter if users aren’t happy,” meaning that 99.999% server uptime is a pointless goal if our customers aren’t having a fast, smooth, productive experience. But how do we know if users *are* happy? As members of the web performance community, we’ve been thinking about the best ways to answer that question for years. Now the observability community is asking the same questions, but coming at them from the opposite side of the stack. What can we learn from each other?

  Emily will talk about how approaching web performance through the lens of observability has changed the way her team thinks about performance instrumentation and optimization. She’ll cover the nuts & bolts of how Honeycomb instrumented its customer-facing web app, and she’ll show how the Honeycomb team is using this data to find and fix some of its trickiest performance issues, optimize customer productivity, and drive the design of new features.

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  About Emily Nakashima

  Emily manages the engineering & design teams at Honeycomb.io. In the past, she’s worked on javascript, web perf and client-side monitoring & telemetry at other developer tools companies like Bugsnag & GitHub. In her free time, she organizes an unconference called AndConf, makes many checklists, and likes to talk about disaster preparedness.

• When JavaScript Bytes

  JavaScript is, byte-for-byte, the most expensive resource on the web and we’re using more of it than ever in our sites. You can optimize the delivery, the parsing and the execution until you’re blue in the face but you’ll never make it as performant as simply not using it in the first place.

  But what do you do if you’re already staring down a pile of scripts?

  In this talk, we’ll discuss practical ways to reduce the amount of JavaScript we’re sending down to the people using our sites. We’ll look at techniques for shaving excess bytes off our bundles and, just as critically, tools and approaches we can use to make sure those bytes stay off.

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  About Tim Kadlec

  Tim is an independent web performance consultant and trainer focused on building a web everyone can use. He is the author of High Performance Images (O'Reilly, 2016) and Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web (New Riders, 2012). He also hosts Chasing Waterfalls, a podcast featuring conversations with the people working to make the web faster. He writes about all things web at timkadlec.com. You can find him sharing his thoughts in a briefer format on Twitter at @tkadlec.

• The Secrets of High Performing Technology Organizations

  How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years, we’ve been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn’t matter―that it can’,t provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through six years of groundbreaking research, the DORA team set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance―and what drives it―using rigorous statistical methods. This talk presents the findings of that research, including how to measure the performance of software teams, what capabilities organizations should invest in to drive higher performance, and how software leaders can apply these findings in their own organizations.

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  About Jez Humble

  Jez Humble is co-author of several books on software including Shingo Publication Award winner Accelerate and Jolt Award winner Continuous Delivery. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents. He works for Google Cloud as a technology advocate, and teaches at UC Berkeley.

• Responsive Images for the Web

  Images account for 50% of the bytes downloaded to load a website. How can you make sure that your users only download the smallest image necessary while preserving image quality? In this talk, we'll focus on the underlying concepts in HTML and CSS for serving responsive images, which you can take with you no matter which tool you use. Which file formats suit which image types best? How can you use art direction in images to show the best image for a viewport layout? Come learn about this and more!

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  About Sia Karamalegos

  Sia Karamalegos is a developer, international conference speaker, and writer. She is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies and a Women Techmakers ambassador. She co-organizes GDG New Orleans and its marquee event, DevFest New Orleans. She is the founder and lead developer for Clio + Calliope Web Development and was recognized in the Silicon Bayou 100, the 100 most influential and active people in tech and entrepreneurship in Louisiana. When she's not coding, speaking, or consulting, Sia likes to write short stories and dabble in charcoal figure drawing. She's also an avid endurance athlete.

• Understanding Cumulative Layout Shift

  Unexpected movement of web page content is a huge source of irritation on the web. The new Cumulative Layout Shift metric helps developers understand the impact of this problem on their pages. Come learn how it was developed and how you can monitor and debug it.

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  About Annie Sullivan

  Annie is a software engineer with Google. She is passionate about building a better performing web for users across the globe. Her tenure as a Googler spans 15 years, with experience on the toolbar, docs, web search, and chrome teams. Annie currently leads performance metric development on Chrome. She lives in Michigan with her husband Doug and two sons, and enjoys tinkering with laser cutters, metal etching, and new cooking techniques.

• FMP, TTI, WTF? Making Sense of Web Performance

  We all know that web performance is important; faster websites are beneficial for all users, no matter the country or the internet speed. But making websites more performant can be a daunting task. With a plethora of acronyms, it can be difficult to know where to start. This talk will cover how to make sense of the confusing world of web performance.

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  About Ire Aderinokun

  Ire Aderinokun is a self-taught Frontend Developer and User Interface Designer from Lagos, Nigeria. She is currently the cofounder, COO, and VP Engineering of BuyCoins (YC S2018), a cryptocurrency exchange for Africa, and previously worked with eyeo, the company behind products like Adblock Plus and Flattr Plus, building open source software to make a better internet. Ire is a Google Expert, specialising in the core frontend technologies HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but is passionate about all aspects of technology. She has written over 100 articles on these topics on her blog, bitsofco.de, and regularly shares her knowledge through speaking at conferences around Africa and the world.

• Creating Performant Virtual Reality Experiences for the Web

  WebXR brings a new approach and a suite of tools designed to take full advantage of the modern web to deliver virtual experiences in the browser. Under the hood, WebGL's hardware acceleration provides considerable performance gains. But as today's virtual reality applications continue to push the limits for what's possible on the web, we must find additional performance optimizations to create the most immersive experiences. In this session, we'll explore recent performance enhancements to WebXR that we can include in our applications today. We'll also take a look at common best practices to improve performance in virtual reality applications.

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  About Erica Stanley

  Erica Stanley is a software engineer, entrepreneur and tech diversity & inclusion advocate. She is a Sr. Research Engineering Manager at Mozilla working with the Firefox Reality team. In her 20-year career, she’s worked in Fortune 500 companies, early-stage startups, and academia. Active in the Atlanta technology community, she helps develop and teach youth coding programs, speaks at local conferences, and user groups and mentors entrepreneurs for various incubators and accelerators. She also founded the Atlanta network of Women Who Code, where she organizes conferences, hackathons, developer workshops, monthly tech talks and networking events for women technologists.

• Largest Contentful Paint (TBD)

  Juggling. And something about largest contentful paint. But you sold me at juggling.

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  About Paul Irish

  Juggler and performance engineeer on the Google Chrome team.

• 'Getting Out Of Users' Way: Less Jank With Web Workers

  Does your web app make lots of data requests? Have you ever dealt with large datasets or slow data processing in your app? If so, you’re not alone.

  These issues, and others like them, often lead to poor user experiences as our applications frequently show loading spinners, jank, or even freeze completely. These experiences are all too common on the web, but we have a solution: Web Workers.

  Web Workers promise to help us build fast, responsive, and robust applications by getting heavy, JavaScript-intensive work off the main thread of the browser. But, the APIs for working with them leave much to be desired. In this talk, we’ll learn useful patterns for working with Web Workers and discover effective ways to communicate between workers, handle complex data processing off the main thread, and test and debug them, so that we can stop getting in our users' way!

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  About Trent Willis

  Trent Willis is a Senior UI Engineer at Netflix, where he builds tools and applications to give other engineers insight into their products. He previously worked at LinkedIn and Grooveshark where he helped build products that reached millions of daily users. Additionally, Trent is a regular conference speaker, project lead for the open source QUnit JavaScript testing framework, and a self-professed music junkie.

• Why we can’t have nice things

  Performant web sites are critical for your user’s experience. No doubt about that. But keeping our users’ information private and secure is similarly critical to maintain their trust in the web platform and keep them around. Those two requirements are somewhat at odds.

  There are many cases where performance optimizations ended up creating security or privacy holes. There are also many cases where privacy and security restrictions introduce significant performance overhead, or prevent us from getting access to performance-critical information in the wild.

  In this talk, we’ll discuss different examples outlining this tension, dig deeper into them, understand the underlying principles behind the web’s security model, and hopefully agree that we need both a performant and safe web to keep our users happy.

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  About Yoav Weiss

  Yoav Weiss has been working on mobile web performance for longer than he cares to admit, on the server side as well as in browsers. He now works as part of Google Chrome developer relations team, helping to fix web performance once and for all.

• One Number, Multiple Metrics: A Multidimensional Approach to Performance

  Users experience the speed of your site at multiple points. Whether it’s loading the site, interacting with content, or completing a multi-page flow, performance is a journey and each step needs to be recorded. We have the tools to capture all of this information, but then what? How do you turn this treasure trove of data into a comprehensive and digestible story that answers the age-old question “is my site fast?” At Airbnb we’ve answered this question with a new approach to performance measurement, the Page Performance Score.

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  About Andrew Scheuermann

  Andrew is a Senior Software Engineer at Airbnb, where he manages Airbnb’s web performance measurement initiatives and works on various product teams.

• Turbocharging Walmart.com: Speed without compromise

  eCommerce market is highly competitive and site speed plays a major role in improving overall buying experience and fulfilling user needs. In most companies there is always a constant push and pull towards spending time adding new features vs improving performance. There are also constraints around 3rd party integrations, ads & making changes happen across various teams can also be a challenge. In this talk we're going to look into ways by which you can smartly improve performance without cutting down on features and without changing much of the user's experience. We'll talk about different modern techniques that helped improve Walmart.com's cart & checkout experience and how understanding user behavior can go a long way in optimizing performance.

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  About Vasanth Krishnamoorthy

  Vasanth leads a front end platform team at WalmartLabs, driving efforts related to site speed, improving developer productivity and solving for common problems spread over multiple teams. Outside of web, Vasanth loves his crossfit WODs, is a film enthusiast, comedy fan and chess aficionado.

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  About Duretti Hirpa

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  About Laurie Voss

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• Don’t let GDPR hurt performance

  The commonly adapted implementations of GDPR and other privacy regulations have put a lot of pressure on web performance. Many compliance approaches are outsourced to vendors who have less stake in the performance of their solutions. In this talk we’ll look into the potential downsides of these approaches, as well as potential open-source alternatives.

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  About Thomas Corthouts

  Thomas is a Software Engineer, with experience within the infrastructure side of the stack. He's really passionate about performance and new trends like the JAMstack in going towards a performant internet.

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  About Jeff Lembeck

  Jeff Lembeck is an Engineering Manager with Eaze. He thinks about code and how people write it, talks a lot, and is the former organizer of SeattleJS. When far away from a computer, Jeff seeks out oyster happy hours and longs for a hot tub boat to call home.

• Betting on boring: Getting ahead with oldskool tech

  It is an exciting time to be a web developer. New tools, technologies and opportunities are everywhere.

  Sophisticated frameworks and libraries regularly promise "blazing fast" sites and incredible developer experience. How tempting! But wait a moment. Are we reinventing some things which already work beautifully? Are we solving problems which weren’t there until we created them?

  Sometimes the best solution is the most boring one. This talk will explore the possibilities of embracing long established fundamentals of the web platform, and compare their application to that of advanced new technologies. We’ll compare the results in terms of developer and user experience, functionality, and performance from a variety of approaches. And show how betting on boring (perhaps, sometimes with a new twist), can deliver the most exciting and performant results.

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  About Phil Hawksworth

  Phil is Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. With a passion for browser technologies and the empowering properties of the web, he loves seeking out ingenuity and simplicity, especially in places where over-engineering is common. After more than 20 years of building web applications for companies such as Google, Apple, Nike, R/GA, and The London Stock Exchange, Phil has worked to challenge traditional technical architectures in favour of simplicity and effectiveness. Phil is co-author of \"Modern Web Development on the JAMstack\" (O’Reilly, 2019). He tweets at @philhawksworth and blogs at hawksworx.com.

• The art of predictive prefetch

  Browser hints like prefetch enable you to get critical resources in advance and save valuable (next) render time. These speculative optimizations integrate the developers assumptions about the users route. Speculative pre-fetching can be wasteful due to incidences of fetching resources that will never be used. Leaning on advances in machine learning and analytics data allows us to significantly increase the efficacy of our fetches. Let’s explore techniques that move predictive prefetching from idea to reality.

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  About Divya Tagtachian

  Divya is a web developer who is passionate about open source and the web. She is currently a developer experience engineer at Netlify, and believes that there is a better workflow for building and deploying sites that doesn’t require a server—ask her about the JAMstack. You will most likely find her in the sunniest spot in the room with a cup of tea in hand.