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

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.

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.

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

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.

Buy your ticket now!