Tim Kadlec

Web Performance Consultant, @tkadlec

Tim Kadlec is a performance consultant and trainer focused on building a web everyone can use. He is the author of High Performance Images (O’Reilly, 2016) and Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web (New Riders, 2012), and was a contributing author for Smashing Book #4: New Perspectives on Web Design (Smashing Magazine, 2013), and the Web Performance Daybook Volume 2 (O’Reilly, 2012). He writes about all things web at timkadlec.com. You can find him sharing his thoughts in a briefer format on Twitter at @tkadlec.

In the Blink of an Eye

Video

Tammy Everts

Chief Experience Officer, SpeedCurve, @tameverts

Tammy Everts is chief experience officer at SpeedCurve, where she helps companies understand how visitors use their websites, and a co-chair of performance.now(). Tammy has spent the past two decades studying how people use the web. Since 2009, she’s focused on the intersection between web performance, user experience, and business metrics. Her book, Time Is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance from O’Reilly, is a distillation of much of this research. She also cocurates (with Tim Kadlec) WPO Stats, a collection of performance case studies.

The Web Performance Landscape in 2024

Setting the stage for day 1, Tammy’s keynote will catch you up on the current performance landscape. She’ll be covering:

• Global web usage and performance stats
• The performance (in)equality gap
• Page bloat – how much bigger can web pages get?!
• Metrics – what they can tell us (and what they can’t)
• Common optimization mistakes
• And more!

Video, slides

Harry Roberts

Consultant Web Performance Engineer, @csswizardry

Harry Roberts is an independent Consultant Web Performance Engineer from the UK. He helps some of the world’s largest and most respected organisations find and fix their site-speed issues.

He is both a Google- and a Cloudinary Media-Developer Expert, and has consulted for clients from the United Nations to the BBC, General Electric to the Financial Times, and a whole host more. He is also co-chair of performance.now(), the web performance conference for professionals.

When not doing client work, he writes, teaches, and speaks about the entire gamut of front-end performance. When not doing work at all, he’s probably out on his bike.

Site-Speed That Sticks

Video, slides

Eric Bailey

Senior Accessibility Designer, GitHub, @eric@social.ericwbailey.website

Eric is an accessibility advocate, writer, developer, and speaker. He is a senior accessibility designer at GitHub, with a focus on making its design system more inclusive and accessible.

Accessible is Performant

Accessibility is a holistic practice, essential to some but useful to all. It is a practice that touches on many aspects of good web design and development, especially performance. This talk will highlight opportunities and techniques to improve your website or web app’s performance by embracing an accessible, inclusive mindset.

Video, slides

Paul Calvano

Performance Architect, Etsy, @paulcalvano@webperf.social

Paul is a Performance Architect at Etsy, where he helps optimize the performance of their marketplace. Prior to that he worked as a web performance consultant at Akamai and Keynote (now Dynatrace), helping websites optimize their performance since as early as 2000. Paul is a co-maintainer of the HTTP Archive, a really cool open source project that has been tracking the evolution of the web since 2010. He’s an author of various chapters of the 2019 Web Almanac and also a co-organizer of the NY Web Performance Meetup group. He writes about web performance and shares HTTP archive research at paulcalvano.com.

Performance Mistakes

Web performance is a complicated topic, but over the years it’s become easier to articulate thanks to incredible advancements in performance features, browser adoption and tooling. However, all too often a feature is implemented incorrectly, resulting in a lost opportunity for performance improvement. During this talk I’ll explore a few commonly implemented web performance techniques - some that you may be familiar with and use already. We’ll look at HTTP Archive data to show how prevalent some of these mistakes are and explore the potential benefits of fixing them.

Video, slides

Anna Migas

Lead UI Developer, Field Intelligence, @szynszyliszys

Anna works as a Lead UI Developer at Field Intelligence helping to bring healthcare to the fastest emerging markets in the world. She is always trying to find ways to make people fall in love with coding and has a long history of organizing coding workshops for WebMuses and Rails Girls. She has been passionate about web performance since she learned about FLIP technique in 2015 and started her speaking career right after. In her spare time she is practicing Pilates, playing Hearthstone and traveling.

Thinking Beyond Core Web Vitals

Small web performance tweaks and optimisations might not make a difference for some of the users: there can be physical barriers that will make it impossible to achieve the fast page load and the smooth browsing. After working for over a year on a project directed towards emerging markets (namely Nigeria and Kenya), I came to realise that the popular web performance metrics are all centred around a specific type of person: someone who is used to the fast and reliable connection. But when the conditions are not ideal on daily basis, what are our choices? In my talk we will chat about the improvements that will have real impact on the user experience for users browsing the web in the harsh conditions. I will also share details about the background of users in Africa and how their perception might differ from the users we typically develop for.

Video, slides

Jason Grigsby

Cofounder, Cloud Four, @grigs@front-end.social

Jason is cofounder of Cloud Four, a small web consultancy with big aspirations. Since cofounding Cloud Four, he has had the good fortune to work on many fantastic projects, including the Obama ’08 iOS app. He was founder and president of Mobile Portland, where he helped start the world’s first community device lab. He is the author of Progressive Web Apps (A Book Apart, 2018), coauthor of Head First Mobile Web (O’Reilly 2011), and one of the signatories of the Future Friendly web manifesto. He participated in the Responsive Images Community Group, which helped define the new web standard for responsive images. You can find him blogging at cloudfour.com; on his less frequently-updated personal site, userfirstweb.com, and on Mastodon.

Third Party Woes

Third-party scripts represent one of the most vexing challenges in web performance. In this talk, we’ll look at how to identify third-party script issues, some potential ways to mitigate their impact, and what the larger performance community needs to do to tackle these problems.

Video, slides

Alex Russell

Partner Program Manager, Microsoft, @slightlyoff@toot.cafe

Alex is Partner Program Manager on the Microsoft Edge team and Blink API OWNER. Before joining Edge in 2021, he worked on Chrome’s Web Platform team for a dozen years where he helped design many new features. He served as overall Tech Lead for Chromium’s Project Fugu, lead Chrome’s Standards work, and acted as a platform strategist for the web. He also served as a member of ECMA TC39 for more than a decade and was elected to three terms on the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group.

His technical projects have included Fugu, Progressive Web Apps, Service Workers, and Web Components, along with ES6 features like Classes and Promises. Previously he helped build Google Chrome Frame and led the Dojo Toolkit project. Alex plays for Team Web.

Reckoning: Frontend's Lost Decade

Platforms are competitions and, today, the web is losing. Yes, mobile OS duopolists have suppressed the web, but that's not the only reason users spend an increasing fraction of their time in native apps.

Over the past decade, frontend failed to mark its priors and practices to market, making sites harder to use for many. For the web to win, we have to snap out of it and make clear-headed choices about what really works.

Video

Katie Sylor-Miller

Principal Frontend Engineer, Square, @ksylor@front-end.social

Katie specializes in web performance, design systems, accessibility, frontend architecture, and leading as a Staff+ Engineer. She’s spoken about her multitude of specialities at conferences like performance.now(), Lead Dev Staff+, Smashing, PerfMatters, and JSConf US (to name a few). Beyond her day job, her website ohshitgit.com (and the swear-free version dangitgit.com) has helped millions of people worldwide get out of their Git messes (and has been translated into 28 different languages and counting), and led to a collaboration with Julia Evans of Wizard Zines on an Oh Shit Git!?! Zine.

Jack Franklin

Senior Software Engineer, Google, @jackf@indieweb.social

Jack is a senior software engineer at Google where he works on performance tooling on the web including the DevTools performance panel.

DevTools Deep Dive

The Performance Panel in Chrome DevTools contains a wealth of information to help you diagnose your site’s performance. In this session we’ll explore all its capabilities and look at new features that have recently shipped or are coming soon to DevTools to enhance your performance debugging and optimising workflows.

Video, slides

Mandy Michael

Lead Software Engineer, Octopus Deploy, @mandymichael@front-end.social

Mandy is an award-winning Front-End Developer, previously Engineering Manager for major news organisation Seven West Media, and a Staff Software Engineer at Hireup Australia, an online disability support services provider. She speaks at conferences and events locally and internationally sharing her work, experiments, and love of creating for the web. Mandy is an avid supporter of local communities and a strong advocate for women in technology, volunteering at events across Australia. She is the Founder and Organiser of Fenders a local Perth meetup for Front End Developers, previously Director of Mixin Conf, a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, a Microsoft Regional Director (MVP Program) and in its inaugural year, in 2018, was named one of the Top 20 Women in Tech in Western Australia.

Font Performance Strategies

With ~84% of websites using custom web fonts, they’ve become a standard on most websites. But ensuring they don’t negatively impact web performance and user experience can be challenging. From loading techniques to font formats, we’ll explore key strategies and tools to improve font optimisation, loading and performance, helping you strike the right balance.

Video, resources

Karlijn Löwik

CEO, RUMvision

Karlijn is the CEO and co-founder of RUMvision, which offers real-time user monitoring to visualize and compare Core Web Vitals and other user experiences. Her mission is to make everyone understand the importance of site speed and UX, and to explain it in plain English rather than becoming overly technical. With her husband (who happens to be co-speaker Erwin) and 3-year-old daughter, she lives in Groningen, the Netherlands. Additionally, she is a board member of Mage-OS Nederland and advocates for accessibility and women in technology.

INP Case Studies

2024, a big year for Interaction to Next Paint (INP)! In this interactive talk, we’ll explore use cases and how websites boosted INP from 69.38% to 78.29%. What strategies and tools worked? What challenges remain? Let’s review the year and IN(P)crease user happiness together!

Video, slides and resources

Erwin Hofman

Web Performance Consultant, RUMvision, @blue2blond

Started developing in 2001, Erwin gained performance knowledge and best practices via trial & error within his own agency and reading many (Google) docs. At the end of the last decade, Erwin started sharing his learnings. Both during public events and privately with merchants & development + SEO agencies via audits & training sessions to help them saving trial & error hours and allowing them to improve decision making with performance in mind. He shares best practices and (case) insights on regular basis via LinkedIn and co-founded a real monitoring solution (RUMvision).

INP Case Studies

2024, a big year for Interaction to Next Paint (INP)! In this interactive talk, we’ll explore use cases and how websites boosted INP from 69.38% to 78.29%. What strategies and tools worked? What challenges remain? Let’s review the year and IN(P)crease user happiness together!

Video, slides and resources

Paul Williams

Head of Terminal Experience, Bloomberg London

Paul co-founded the Engineering Department within Bloomberg’s London office, which has now grown to 1,600 developers. He built the previous UI stack for the Bloomberg Terminal, and has been very closely involved in the transformation to embedding Chromium for the entire UI and application execution engine.

Bloomberg Becomes Browser

Over the years, the Bloomberg Terminal has evolved from one of the first computer-based desktop products running on custom hardware, through completely proprietary software running on Windows, to fully adopting the embedded web browser tech stack for the UI, and JavaScript/TypeScript for applications and infrastructure services.

This talk will cover our approach to making Chromium and the V8 JavaScript engine the central core of the Bloomberg Terminal, and how we have been able to understand its architecture and performance characteristics in order to deliver the kind of near-real-time responsive UI the Financial Sector demands.

Video

Jason Williams

Senior Developer, Cross Terminal Performance team, Bloomberg London, @Jason_williams

Jason has extensive web development experience and now focuses on performance challenges within the browser. He gave a lightning talk at the Performance.now() pre-event last year, and is active in the W3C Web Performance Working group.

Bloomberg Becomes Browser

Over the years, the Bloomberg Terminal has evolved from one of the first computer-based desktop products running on custom hardware, through completely proprietary software running on Windows, to fully adopting the embedded web browser tech stack for the UI, and JavaScript/TypeScript for applications and infrastructure services.

This talk will cover our approach to making Chromium and the V8 JavaScript engine the central core of the Bloomberg Terminal, and how we have been able to understand its architecture and performance characteristics in order to deliver the kind of near-real-time responsive UI the Financial Sector demands.

Video

Daniel Roe

Lead Core Team, Nuxt, @danielcroe

Daniel leads the Nuxt core team – previously CTO of a SaaS startup and founder of a creative agency focusing on clarity of vision and message. His open-source work has a focus in the TypeScript and Vue ecosystems and he’s involved in consultancy with companies around the world, particularly around JAMstack, serverless, and software architecture. He’s based in Scotland where he lives with his family and cat.

Unpacking Bundling

JavaScript represents a bit part of page weight - and optimising for performance often requires trimming or optimising the bundle - albeit imperfectly. At the same time, bundlers have never been more important in full-stack JS frameworks. In this session we’ll be rethinking how bundlers can optimise JS, if we let go of some of our previous assumptions about what bundling means.

Video, slides

Annie Sullivan

Software Engineer, Google, @anniesullie

Annie is a software engineer on the Chrome Web Platform at Google, where she leads the team developing Core Web Vitals and web performance APIs. She is passionate about building a better performing web for users across the globe. Her tenure as a Googler spans 19 years, with experience on the toolbar, docs, web search, and chrome teams. When not optimizing the web, Annie can be found in Michigan with her husband Doug and two sons, where they train to be ninja warriors (and sometimes just enjoy a good home cooked pizza).

Aiming for the Stars

Lessons Learned from Some of the Best Web Performance Teams. Over the past 20 years, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside some of the best web and browser performance teams in the industry, including those behind some of the fastest sites on the web. In this session, I’ll share key lessons learned from these high-performing teams. Join me to gain insights that will help you elevate your web performance strategy and strive for the stars, even if you can’t reach them all at once.