Tag Archive for Santa Clara

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