Recordings: The Web Optimization Summit - The online Web Site Optimization...
Event Information
Description
Why an Online Summit?
- Online Summits mean no travel hassle!
- Bring the experts live to your desktop!
- Time spent on the road is better spent instead with family, friends or in the office!
- Sessions are developed to dive deeper into the material!
- Ask questions directly to the speakers!
- Can't make it the day of the conference? Watch the recordings whenever you want!
About The Web Optimization Summit
High performance sites mean better experiences for visitors and fewer headaches for Designers and Developers. Sure, your style sheets are tidy and your code validates, but you know that your load times could
be better, your files could be leaner, and that the whole site could be faster and more reliable.
Enter the experts! Discover the tools and techniques used every day to optimize some of the biggest, most high-traffic sites on the web. Learn solutions for everything from optimal scripts and loading patterns to caching and mobile platform considerations.
Registration for The Web Optimization Summit is now open! The following experts are scheduled to appear— speaking times (set in Central Time Zone) and topics:
- 8:55 a.m. CT: Steve Souders - The State of Web Optimization
- 9:00 a.m. (-ish) CT: Billy Hoffman - Implementing a Web Performance Program (Without Killing Yourself)
- 10:00 a.m. CT: John David Dalton - Coding for Performance
- 11:00 a.m CT: Stoyan Stefanov
CSS and Image Optimization - 12:00 p.m.
LUNCH BREAK - 1:30 p.m. CT: Alex Sexton of YayQuery! in an interview with Kyle Simpson
- 2:00 p.m. CT: Kyle Simpson - No More SCRIPT Tag Soup
- 3:00 p.m. CT: Tom Hughes-Croucher - I Made a Map of the Internet
- 4:00 p.m. CT: Brian LeRoux - Mobile Web Performance Sucks (and What You Can Do About It)
NOTE that all times are in Central Time. (Time zone converter)
The Summit Series lets you build your skill set without having to leave your computer. Each Summit is a virtual conference—all you need is a computer and internet connection to attend. A new presentation begins at the top of every hour, and attendees can chat with each other and ask questions of the presenters throughout the day.
All times CT, schedule subject to change. All presentations will be roughly 45 minutes long with an additional ten minutes for questions and answers, then a five-minute break while we get ready for the next speaker. We will break at 1:00 p.m. CT for an hour-long lunch break.
How Does a Virtual Conference Work?
Once you are registered, you will receive a follow-up email with a reminder about the conference schedule and other helpful details.
On the day of the conference, you will receive an email invitation about 45 minutes before everything starts. Click on the enclosed link to sign in and enter the virtual meeting space. Once you are signed in, you’ll be able to see and hear the presentations as they happen, ask questions as needed and chat with the other attendees if you like!
Technical Specifications: to attend The Summit, you will need a modern web browser (Firefox 1.5, IE 6 & Safari 2 or newer, for example) and a recent version of the Adobe Flash Player. Follow this link to run our system diagnostic (opens in a new window). It will let you know right away which plug-ins, if any, you will need to update before the event.
Still have questions? We don’t blame you. Contact us at e4h@heatvision.com if there’s anything else you’d like to know.
About Our Speakers
Steve Souders
Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book, High Performance Web Sites, explains his best practices for performance; it reached the top of the Amazon computer and Internet bestseller list.
His follow-up book, Even Faster Web Sites, provides performance tips for today's Web 2.0 applications.
Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug, with over 1.7 million downloads. He also created Cuzillion, SpriteMe, and Browserscope.
Stoyan Stefanov
Stoyan Stefanov is a front-end performance engineer at Yahoo! Search, author of Object-Oriented JavaScript and contributor to Even Faster Web Sites, High-Performance JavaScript, co-creator of the smush.it image optimizer, YSlow 2.0 architect, beach bum and guitar virtuoso wannabe.
John Dalton
His first JavaScript project was a Super Mario Bros. game engine that he made in high school.
'Nuff said.
Billy Hoffman
Billy Hoffman is founder and CEO of Zoompf, a leading web performance services company. He first became interested in web performance on November 5th, 1955 when he was standing on the edge of a toilet hanging a clock. The porcelain was wet, he slipped, and hit his head on the edge of the sink. When he came to he had a picture in his head of optimizing web apps and of the flux capacitor, which is what makes time travel possible.
Tom Hughes-Croucher
Tom Hughes-Croucher is an Evangelist and Senior Developer in Yahoo's Open Strategy Group, focusing on Yahoo's Web Services and Cloud Platform. Tom has contributed to a number of Web standards for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the British Standards Institute (BSI). Previously he helped build the online music stores for Tesco, Three telecom and Channel 4.
Brian LeRoux
Brian LeRoux is the chief software architect at Nitobi Inc. where he focuses on delivering apps. The lengthy list of his accomplishments is lengthy and the acronyms to sufficiently annotate his dizzying array of skills is dizzying. Spearheading projects such as PhoneGap, XUI and Lawnchair, suffice to say, Brian believes that the future of the internets is mobile and will rely on web standards, open source and hackers like you.
Kyle Simpson
Kyle Simpson is a UI architect from Austin, TX. He is passionate about user experience, specifically optimizing the UI to be as responsive, efficient, secure, and scalable as possible. He considers JavaScript the ultimate language and is constantly tinkering with how to push it further. If something can't be done in JavaScript or web technology, he's bored by it. He has a number of open-source projects, including flXHR, LABjs, mpAjax, and jXHR, and he also is a core contributor to SWFObject.
Christopher Schmitt (your emcee)
The founder of Heat Vision, a small new media publishing and design firm, Christopher is an award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993. As a sought-after speaker and trainer, Christopher regularly demonstrates the use and benefits of practical standards-based designs. He is Co-Lead of the Adobe Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in addition to being a contributing member of its Education Task Force
Author of numerous Web design and digital imaging books, including Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites and CSS Cookbook, Christopher has also written for New Architect Magazine, A List Apart, Digital Web, and Web Reference.
Online: christopherschmitt.com | twitter | facebook | flickr
About The Sessions
Web Optimization Summit sessions run the gamut from beginner through more intermediate/advanced content.
No More SCRIPT Tag Soup
by Kyle Simpson
Chances are, your site suffers from "SCRIPT tag soup". No matter what amazing experience you can dream up to deliver on your web page, how you load the JavaScript makes a world of difference in the page-load performance. For well over a decade of web technology, the landscape of JavaScript loading has remained relatively unchanged. Practically every web site on the planet still loads their scripts exactly the same way -- the old, faithful SCRIPT tag.
Even though newer generation browsers are finally starting to address these issues, too little too late is being done to help the widespread page-load performance for the broader internet viewing audience. Why hang our hats only on new browser releases, passively waiting for old browsers to just phase out "some day", when we could start attacking poor performance patterns today!?
I believe we need to rethink some of the most widely-held "truths" about the best ways to prepare and load JavaScript resources onto pages. In this talk, I will challenge your beliefs and approaches regarding:
- How to integrate build-time processing into JavaScript resource preparation (file concat'ing, resource dependency management, etc)
- How to profile sites and web applications for page-load and run-time performance
- How to squeeze every last unnecessary byte out of your script resources
- What you can and cannot do with the browser cache
- How to optimize script loading to occur in parallel with other scripts and page resources (LABjs, etc)
- Creative new ways to get script code onto the page, optimizing for both desktop and mobile devices
- Bonus Coverage: http://2static.it (for improving loading efficiency of static assets like JavaScript) andIdleator (cross-browser plugin for improving web browsing performance of CDN loading and DNS latency).
It's high time we start tackling one of the biggest hurdles to better web site loading performance -- the script load. This talk will take the SCRIPT tag head on, and your site will never load the same (slow) way again!
CSS and Image Optimization
by Stoyan Stefanov
This session is about speeding up your web site without sacrificing the looks of it. The aim is to produce the same design with less code. We'll explore:
- Optimizing the CSS' size and robustness by focusing on reusability
- Adopting CSS3's exciting features that allow us to build lighter sites with fewer images
- Running the images through some easily automated tools that will losslessly strip 10-30% of the file sizes
Coding for Performance
by John Dalton
During presenter's John Dalton's talk, he will cover the following topics:
- Coding for performance by utilizing feature testing, method forking, lazy method defining, and avoiding unnecessary abstraction.
- Optimizing CSS selectors and passing context parameters to CSS selector engines to optimize performance (can be applied to jQuery, Prototype, as well as vanilla JavaScript).
- Program for better code minification, give a brief overview of some of the popular JS minifiers, and identify minification anti-patterns to avoid.
Mobile Web Performance Sucks (and What You Can Do About It)
by Brian LeRoux
The future of the web is unquestionably going to be viewed on mobile devices and, to be very kind, lets just say these devices are nothing like their desktop counterparts. The mobile web will be viewed on smaller screens, by way of underpowered CPUs, with very little memory, weak to no local storage, at best sketchy connectivity, and not to mention the disparity of capabilities between the various device platforms. As if the device performance wasn't bad enough we are also faced with understanding developer performance with the very ppor world of tooling such as emulators, debuggers, profilers and general IDEs. Truly an entertaining mess!
In this talk Brian will review the good, bad and outright ugly aspects of mobile web performance and outline the strategies to make use of what works and how to fix what does not.
I Made a Map of the Internet
by Tom Hughes-Croucher
How do we choose which part of our system to optimize? Stanford algorithms legend Donald Knuth is famously quoted as saying "Premature Optimization is the root of all evil". And yet where is the research showing where we should optimize our sites? Steve Souders made a groundbreaking discovery at Yahoo! when he realized that the most critical, and under-examined, part of web site optimization was the front-end. However while there is lots of great performance research, we still make plenty of assumption about what to optimize.
I have made a map of everything involved in getting from your computer, via your ISP, to a web site and back to your eye balls. It's exhaustive, but that's the point. Where the heck should we optimize?
This talk will take the audience on a journey through the guts of the internet. They will learn:
- Hidden dangers in wifi
- How they really connect to their ISP
- The mysteries of DNS
- The hop-skip-and-jump of navigating the Internet to request a web page
- Exactly how CDNs speed up getting images and other files
- Some basics about page rendering and display
After we've taken a good hard look how the internet really works we'll try to figure out what we can about where we should be focusing our attempts to improve performance. This will look at how we can test things like:
- Remote Caches (ISP, etc)
- DNS response times for users
- Wifi reliability
- Does latency matter?
- Which parts of the browser do we really test?
- Do different rendering engines matter?
Finally we are going to examine some of the existing research, both practical and experimental, that targets specific areas of the map we've been exploring. This may include tools technologies that the participants can apply to their sites to improve performance from old favorites like YSlow and Page Speed to new techniques like:
- MHTML and iframes
- HTTP pipelining
- JavaScript Loading patterns
- DNS prefetching
- The SPDY protocol
- Multi-flushing
- Optimizing CSS
- Google Speed Tracer
Implementing a Web Performance Program (Without Killing Yourself)
by Billy Hoffman
An enormous number of front-end web performance optimization techniques have been discovered in the last few years that can drastically reduce page load times and server load. Unfortunately all the techniques in the world won’t help you without a plan. Time and time again we have seen individuals or groups in a company start to optimize a website without any kind of plan. Suddenly the app stops working because IT implemented HTTP caching without having proper changing control or file versioning. Or all the JavaScript and CSS in the development branch has been minified. Or the design cannot be modified because all the original images have been crunched and indexed. Worse the optimizations are hap hazard and not repeatable so site performance whips violently from fast to slow with each new publish.
This talk answers the simple question “I know 100 ways to optimize performance, how do I start?” Or, using fancy words: How do you add a performance program into your website development process that is beneficial ,painless, and repeatable? In this talk we will show how and where to phase in well known web performance techniques. We will use real life case studies from our clients to show what works and what doesn't work and leave attendees with the knowledge and tools to start improving the performance of their web applications regardless of their situation.
