jQuery Conference and The Ajax Experience
I’m heading out on the red-eye tonight for Boston. I’ll be there for three action-packed days!
Sunday morning I’m speaking at jQuery Conference ’09. Monday afternoon I’m doing a talk at The Ajax Experience. Both conferences look great. I’m excited to share what I know and talk with other web developers to find out their latest discoveries and also pain points, especially with regard to web performance. I’ll be giving away free copies of Even Faster Web Sites and will be announcing two new open source projects.
If you’re at either conference, please say “hi”.
OSCON and Page Responsiveness videos
I had a great time at OSCON a few weeks back. It was in San Jose this year. (Pro: I don’t have to travel and my wife can go to the parties. Con: I miss Portland.) Just as I wrote about last year, Gregg Pollack was there asking speakers to summarize their talks in 30 seconds. He published the results in the video series 5 Days of OSCON. I’m in the video for Day 3.
Gregg also pointed me to his Page Responsiveness webcast/video, where he talks about YSlow and the Google Ajax Libraries API. I really like this video. It’s informative, engaging, and short. They remind me of Aza Raskin’s webcasts on Ubiquity and Jetpack. These two guys are very talented in how they convey complex information in a hands-on way. I encourage you to take a look.
Fronteers 2009
I’m psyched to be speaking at Fronteers in November – and not just because it’s one of the best conference names ever. And not just because it’s in Amsterdam – although that is a huge plus. The main reason I’m psyched is because I missed last year’s conference and regretted it. The feedback I got was that the speakers were great and so were the attendees. PPK is active in his advocacy for frontend engineering, and (from what I heard) that was apparent in the level of knowledge and participation shown throughout the talks.
Last year’s speakers included Stuart Langridge, Christian Heilmann, and Pete LePage (check out the links to their talks on YDN). PPK has announced myself and Nate Koechley as speakers for 2009, and some other web gurus I know have said they’re speaking there as well. It’s going to be another great set of speakers and sessions. I’m so glad that I’ll be there to experience it, and I hope you can make it, too.
CS193H video preview
My class at Stanford, CS193H High Performance Web Sites, was videotaped. Stanford does this so that people enrolled through the Stanford Center for Professional Development, who work fulltime, can watch the class at offhours. SCPD also makes some of the class videos available to the public. I’m currently talking with SCPD about releasing my videos, but in the meantime they’ve released the video of my first class. This lecture covers the logistics of the class (syllabus, mailing list, etc.). I’ve released all the slides from the class. You can find links to the slides in the class schedule. Anyone going through the slides should watch this intro video to get a flavor for how the class was conducted.
If you would be interested in watching the videos from this class, please add a comment below. The more interest there is, the more likely SCPD will be to make the videos available.
Update: The videos are now available! Thanks for all the positive feedback. You can watch the first three lectures for free. The entire 25 lectures have a tuition of $600. The videos are offered as XCS193H on SCPD.
CS193H: High Performance Web Sites
This week I start teaching CS193H, “High Performance Web Sites”, at Stanford. I’ve evangelized fast web pages at conferences and tech companies, most recently Twitter and LinkedIn. Teaching at the university level is a natural progression in evangelizing what I’ve learned (and continue to learn) about web performance.
I’ve always thought the format of my book lent itself to a lecture series, where each lecture would cover one of the performance best practices. I’ve done 3 hour workshops before, but this class meets three days a week for 50 minutes from now through December 5. Do I really have enough material to fill that much time?
I laid out the class schedule and feel comfortable that there is enough content – I actually had to cut a few classes to allow room for the class projects. I’ll post my slides on the class schedule so others can follow along. I’m planning two projects. Web 100 Performance Profile will be a record of the performance traits of the top web sites in the world. Students will pick five web sites and fill in the performance traits by running YSlow. We’ll gather stats at the beginning and end of the quarter, and compare them to see how (if?) the industry is improving. Improving a Top 100 Web Site is the class project that runs through the entire quarter. Students adopt one web site and implement each performance improvement to a local copy of the static code. We’ll track how much impact each individual improvement has on load time as well as other performance characteristics (total size, number of requests, etc.). At the end of the quarter I’ll share the results from both projects.
So tomorrow’s my first day of school! I need to get to bed and get a good night’s sleep. I’ll post an update after I have a few classes under my belt and let you know how it’s going. Wish me luck!
SXSW: get out the vote
I submitted a proposal for SXSW Interactive: Even Faster Web Sites. SXSW is in Austin, March 13-17, 2009. It’s a great conference with a wide variety of content. John Resig recently announced two talk proposals. Both look great. In the same way, I hope to add a bit more technical content to the conference. I did a book reading last year that was very well attended, so I think there are a significant number of developers attending the conference. This year I hope to relay more techniques for making web pages (especially Web 2.0 pages) faster. The way SXSW works, talks are selected based on votes. If you think it would be good for SXSW, please add a comment by August 29 in support of my talk.
See You at OSCON
I’ll be up at OSCON in Portland this week. I’m speaking Thursday 2:35pm on Even Faster Web Sites, the next set of performance best practices I’m working on. I’m signing books Thursday 12:20pm at the Powells table, and I’ll be in the Google booth Thursday 4pm. At the Google booth I’ll be doing performance consulting – anyone can stop by and ask questions about their web site’s performance, or we can just fire up a packet sniffer and YSlow to see what jumps out.
There are a lot of great talks this year. Here are a few I’ve earmarked:
- Full-stack Introspection Crash Course by Theo Schlossnagle
- An Open Source Project Called “Failure:” with Josh Berkus. Shane Warden, Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Karl Fogel
- Barely Legal XXX Perl by Jos Boumans (entertaining speaker)
- Experience-driven Development: Designers and Developers Working in Harmony by Chris Shiflett and Jon Tan
- Do You Believe in the Users? by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick
- CSS for High Performance JavaScript UI by Gavin Doughtie (this looks really good)
- Using Puppet: Real World Configuration Management by James Turnbull and Luke Kanies (this is at the same time as my talk, but if you’re more interested in ops Luke is doing great stuff)
If you’re going to OSCON please come by and say Hi.