Tag Archive for conference

Follow-up 3rd party footprint

The following post outlines the links, tools and articles I mentioned in my 3rd party footprint talk

Main Slides

Slides (Webdirections, Melbourne) and Slides (Velocity NYC 2014) and Web Rebels in Oslo

Shared Links and Articles

Tools and Tricks

WebPagetest Results

Follow-up on my talk “Embracing Performance in Today’s Multi-Platform Macrocosm”

Hello everyone, this is a follow-up blog post on my talk presented at BDConf in San Diego and WebExpo in Prague.

If you landed here because you’ve typed in the URL after attending my talk, great! Thanks for making it all the way here. I hope you enjoyed my talk.

If you landed here via Google, Twitter or any other sites, I welcome you too, of course! You might want to first have a look at my slides (see link below) before clicking on any of the other links below.

Either way, feel free to leave a comment or contact me via twitter with my handle @bbinto.

Enjoy!

Slides

Slides available on SlideShare

Links and articles, recommended content

Maven Tools

Continuos Integration Tools (<3)

General Links

Image Credits

Warming up for Velocity 2013 in Santa Clara

I have attended several conferences in the last few years. The first one that really changed my “developer life” was the Velocity 2011 conference in Santa Clara. I have always been interested in optimizing and being diligent about the web, however, my learning during those three days in Santa Clara has influenced my every day life and the way I see performance.

I truly admire each and every speaker and attendee at the conference because they all share the same passion: Optimizing the web and making performance count. I am honoured to announce that it is my turn this year to give back to that same community of people and share what I have learned over the last few years and what I have been applying at Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC.

Our talk “The Canadian Public Broadcaster On A Diet: Slimming Down For A Whole Nation“ will focus on (mobile) web fitness and how to “slim down”. Tips and tricks will be shared about how to stay in shape when developing (mobile) sites for millions of people.

My talented co-worker Blake and I will be talking about how we apply performance optimization at the CBC, one of Canada’s largest web properties with over 5 million pages. As a publicly funded organization, all Canadian eyes are on us making sure we stay on budget and deliver quality and optimized content to users.

While Blake will be talking more about the backend, server and CDN aspects of performance optimization and tips, I will be sharing information about how we optimize and tweak performance from a frontend development and automated deployment perspective, basically – how to get and stay in shape.

Don’t worry; this definitely will not be your typical boring and horrifying boot-camp experience! Our talk will utilize fun and catchy analogies to explain the weight and performance of pages. I will be your honest CBC “fitness trainer”, telling the audience about the page weight of our sites on multiple platforms, how we measure performance and set budgets. However, putting our content on a scale will tell the truth: a content breakdown of our pages will help the audience understand how content is structured and where we can “slim down”, but also where a fitness routine cannot help.

Keep us company while we share some insights about setting up our own HTTP Archive instance as a tool – or how I would describe it: the BMI of web sites – to compare our own weight to the public HTTP Archive instance. We will share some queries from our HTTP Archive database to help identify bottlenecks, and we will tell you about how we discovered problems with some unnecessary weight that we thought we didn’t have.

Additionally, sweet and dangerous temptations will be placed in front of your eyes, the kinds that we all have to deal with when creating high traffic sites, including, 3rd party scripts that could significantly harm the performance of our sites when not properly implemented. We compare client-side versus server-side 3rd party implementation. We will also reveal the amount of improvement we saw in load time once we turned off all ads on our mobile touch site for a weekend.

During our talk, you will also hear about our fitness stack regarding how we monitor our fitness level, and why it is so important to stay on a strict exercise schedule and avoid gaining too much unwanted weight, which can happen without even knowing it. If you want to exercise and stay in shape, there are tons of great tools out there to help you achieve that. We will cover how we organize and optimize our sites, our releases and deployment and how easily you can include tools in your deployment process to automate performance optimization.

If you want to know how we use RUM in combination with synthetic testing, and what our RUM numbers reveal, then you shouldn’t miss out on our talk.

Lastly, we will explain the challenges that we have faced, as the national news broadcaster in a world of ever changing news, with the potential for a breaking news story at any moment, that could drive our traffic to the roof, and how we need to respond to that.

Come join our talk and if you like, wear your favorite running shoes because you never know, you might want to start exercising right after.

We look forward to meeting you all!

More details to our scheduled talk and location: http://velocityconf.com/velocity2013/public/schedule/detail/27973

My contribution as a female tech speaker – Living the minority

I love talking about, and listening to the things I am passionate about (who doesn’t?). I love sharing my knowledge and learning about others. I love conferences. It’s a great place to learn new things, validate your knowledge, connect with like-minded and come back home with a bunch of things you want to try out and work on.

So it happens that one of the things on “my list of things to do in life” is/was to present at a conference. I happily and proudly checked this off last weekend.

I had the pleasure to speak with a smart colleague at FITC’s “Web Performance and Optimization” conference in Toronto, this past weekend.

Our topic was similar to the one we submitted (and got accepted) to the O’Reilly’s Velocity conference in San Clara this summer. I’m so beyond excitement to be presenting similar things (and more) to all those great and talented web performance enthusiasts in a few months.

Allow me to give a brief recap of the presentation from last Saturday – the way I experienced it.

It was a small conference, around 70 people attending, probably ~7 of those attendees were women – that’s it, not more! Well, not a huge surprise to me, I’m used to that from my time as a Computer Science student 10 years ago. But is the ratio still so drastic? Oh, and in addition, I was the only female speaker that day.

While I was listening first (and later presenting myself), I noticed that most male presenters had a very specific way of selling and promoting themselves – They all were very confident (Not jealous, good for you, boys!). A supportive and beautiful person on my side that day, full of great constructive criticism, noted something after I was done presenting. She confirmed something that I had honestly (and secretly) already felt, she said I could have been more promoting myself “..like the guys did”. It’s true, as the only woman speaking that day, I could have represented the female minority better by maybe emphasizing my successful web performance results to those 63 men and 7 women that day. Well, it’s not that I wasn’t passionate about my topic – Maybe it’s just that women share their success in a different, less self-selling way and/or are less confident.

I’d like to quote something from Geek Feminism now:

So! Getting women to submit content: easy? Um. When I’d talk to men about the conference and ask if they felt like they had an idea to submit for a talk, they’d *always* start brainstorming on the spot. I’m not generalizing — every guy I talked to about speaking was able to come up with an idea, or multiple ideas, right away…and yet, overwhelmingly the women I talked to with the same pitch deferred with a, “well, but I’m not an expert on anything,” or “I wouldn’t know what to submit,” or “yes but I’m not a *lead* [title], so you should talk to my boss and see if he’d want to present.”

Ok! So I guess I am not imagining all of this. It really seems to be true that men are generally more confident than women when it comes to work related areas where they can promote themselves.

The beautiful thing about life is that you (can) always learn and get better.

And to be honest, my observation at FITC’s conference has even more encouraged me to submit call for speakers forms! I enjoyed presenting! Like a lot – You ain’t stoppin’ me now.

Below the slides from our talk on Saturday

[slideshare id=17289690&w=427&h=356&sc=no]

Additional resources in regards to women in tech and female speakers

  • https://plus.google.com/communities/101818001236662563704/stream/02ee47c3-6a09-4925-8467-e503c684c4ce
  • https://twitter.com/callbackwomen
  • http://www.facebook.com/ShePlusPlus
  • http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got-25-percent-women-speakers.html
  • http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at-my-tech-conference/