SpeedGeeks L.A. is a Southern California meetup focused on delivering high performance web sites. As it turns out, time is Money. From large eCommerce sites like Shopzilla, to major search engines such as Google and Bing, the industry has proven that faster web sites result in a better consumer experience, deeper engagement, and ultimately a boost to the bottom line. Co-hosted by Google’s Steve Souders, the half-day SpeedGeeks L.A. meetup provides an opportunity for the L.A. web development community to network and collaborate with some of the top leaders in web site performance including Google, MySpace, Shopzilla and more.
9:05 – 9:50 Steve Souders (Google): Even Faster Web Sites Presentation | Presentation + Media Files | Video
Web 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript and CSS, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge.
Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He created YSlow, the performance analysis plug-in for Firefox. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He recently taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford University.
9:55 – 10:15 Phil Dixon (Shopzilla): You Get What You MeasurePresentation | Video
In the summer of 2007, Shopzilla took on a two-year initiative to completely redesign its site and content delivery infrastructure. After our initial launch during the 2008 holiday shopping season, Shopzilla has continued to expand its investment in its global delivery platform. In this session, Shopzilla will share our lessons learned – the good, bad and a bit of the ugly:
- Time really is money – The real business benefit of a faster site
- The platform is bigger than the software – it includes the infrastructure, people and leadership
- Entropy will have its day – what happens when you don’t keep your eye on the ball
- Shopzilla’s tech stack, tools and techniques
10:20 – 10:40 Paddy Hannon (Edmunds): A Holistic Approach to Building a High Performance Web SitePresentation | Video
Building a high-performance web site requires a new way of thinking – from the design of your teams through the process and metrics you use to guide your path. After spending more than 18 months on a redesign of their web site, content management and delivery stack, Edmunds will share their perspective on a holistic approach to building a high performance website. This talk will cover: process, a focus on metrics, their approach to risk management, 3rd-party isolation, their technology choices, the team and the technology.
10:45 – 11:10 Gavin Doughtie and members of the PicasaWeb team (Google): Latency Improvements for PicasaWeb Presentation | Video
As Google’s Picasa Web Albums acquired more and more AJAX functionality in the first two years after its initial launch, user-visible performance degraded unacceptably. In 2008 and 2009, Google’s Picasa Web Albums team directed much of its engineering effort to reducing user-visible latency in page load and image display time.
We used nearly every trick in the book Even Faster Web Sites and a few more besides. This talk provides an overview of the techniques used to greatly improve the speed of key user actions like initial page load, list to one-up view, and full screen photo-to-photo navigation.
11:15 – 11:30 Morten Begai (Heroku): Performance-as-a-service Presentation | Demo | Video
The key to building high performance web applications is designing for it. The design patterns – from caching to measurability – are well established, but too often only the largest and most highly trafficked web properties take advantage of them because of the cost and complexity of provisioning resources.
In this talk, we’ll show you how the cloud-based Heroku platform enables you to easily benefit from essential, performance-enhancing technologies in even the smallest app, from the very first line of code.
11:30 – 11:40 Break
11:40 – 11:55 Jeremy Custenborder, Yadid Ramot, Chris Bissell (MySpace): MSFast Video
MySpace will share an open-source project that, while relevant for developers, has a broader application for everyone. Like many of you, MySpace is constantly trying to figure out the best way to profile and track the performance of its pages. After extensive market research, they realized that the market for profiling tools lacked key features and capabilities essential for efficient page optimization. These conclusions inspired the development of a new homebrew tool, MSFast, which will hopefully cover all of these missing pieces.
12:00 – 12:15 Andreas Grabner (dynaTrace): Trace Down JavaScript & AJAX Performance in IEPresentation | Video
Wondering what is really going on in your browser with respect to JavaScript execution, AJAX calls, DOM access and Browser Rendering time? What is really happening in those “blank spots” that you see in your network download breakdown chart? Who is accessing DOM how often and what is the performance impact? What is actually triggering browser rendering activity and how it can be improved? In this session we will learn how to analyze web site performance problems with the free dynaTrace AJAX Edition for IE and will answer the questions raised.
12:15 – 12:30 Randy Stafford (Oracle): Application Architecture Determines Application PerformancePresentation | Video
Unenlightened personnel in IT management may believe that simply switching from one brand of software infrastructure to another will be sufficient to solve an application’s performance challenges. Other groups of people – vendor support departments, and authors of application performance management literature – may recommend simply “tuning” the software infrastructure. But if an application is insufficiently architected, or too inefficient in its use of computing resources, then no amount of “tuning” will bring about the desired performance characteristics. This talk will demonstrate the effect of architecture on performance with numerous case studies, and discuss performance-oriented patterns of architecture at both macro- and micro- scopes.
12:30 – 1:30 Networking Lunch & Raffle Drawing (sponsored by Oracle)
