Velocity Conference '08 Notes
Velocity Conference was great!
Takeaway
I think the greatest takeaway is how seriously the Firefox and IE8 team are taking client performance. In particular, the work of Steve Souders, the Yahoo! performance team, others who are writing about Ajax performance is the playlist for what to optimize. As Eric Lawrence of Microsoft said to Steve, "Our mission is to make your book on performance be out of date."
This is a very different picture from a few years back.
I still find it very disappointing that the Safari team is always absent at these discussions. I realize that Safari is kicking butt in performance (I will post examples from our round trip stats to show that) but it really is important that they are approachable by the community. But this seems to be the way of Apple unfortunately.
Some Great Talks
There were a lot of good talks, but here are the ones that stood out to me (I did miss both mornings).
- Building Faster Pages in Firefox and Internet Explorer - This is not the same presentation as was presented & Mozilla's is missing, hopefully they will post their slides.
- Even Faster Web Sites - This is the start of Steve's next book on Web Site performance.
- High Performance Ajax Applications - Julien's in depth look at tuning the world of DHTML.
- Hotmail's Performance Tuning Best Practices - This has some great material. Great lessons learned takeaways. A favorite for me.
- IE 8 What's Coming - Takeaway... its not Javascript engine that is slowing things down... it is rendering and layout.
- Image Optimization: How Many of These 7 Mistakes Are You Making - Crush those PNGs and more.
- Lessons Learned in Live Search Moving to and then Away from Ajax - Eric Shurman is a great speaker and full of experience. Great lessons here.
- Keynote Systems Launches KITE - Performance Analysis Tool (Free)
- Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation - Scott & Whitepage's team announcing Jiffy. See also my firebug tool.
- AOL Page Test - Kind of like a yslow. It runs stand alone as well as from a URL. But it generates network graphs, etc. Looks nice.