Announcing my focus on mobile
For over a year I’ve been saying that I want to focus 100% of my time on mobile performance. I’m finally there. It might not be literally 100% of my time, but I hope to spend most of my research cycles investigating mobile.
My approach to building a practice around mobile performance will follow a similar path as what I did for desktop web:
- Measure
- Identify what to measure wrt performance and services to measure that.
- Profile
- Gather a set of tools that provide visibility into performance issues. Since there’s a lack of tools in this space we’ll have to build them.
- Research
- Analyze mobile performance problems using the identified tools and metrics.
- Best practices
- As a result of this research gather the tips & tricks that have the biggest impact on improving mobile performance.
- Evangelize
- Get the word out! Write case studies, blog posts, and books(?). Speak at conferences
- Lint
- Build tools that spot the performance problems that are most important to fix.
- Automate
- Provide services that automatically apply the performance fixes.
My initial focus is mobile devices over wifi. This allows me to nail down the behavior of mobile browsers independent of the wrinkles introduced by the mobile network. Once the mobile browser variables are well understood I’ll look at the idiosyncrasies of the mobile networks themselves. I’m especially excited to build an archive of transcoding behaviors that harm performance. I’ll dig into the performance of native apps once the behavior of mobile web performance is well understood.
I have a slightly ulterior motive for this announcement. I really want to speak at Mobilism May 12-13 in Amsterdam. (If you do mobile development make sure to register early.) Unfortunately, the speaker schedule is full so I have to convince the organizers I have enough good stuff to present that they need to somehow fit me into the schedule.
Tune back here tomorrow for my first announcement on mobile tools. (Assuming I finish it tonight.)