Joining SpeedCurve

March 23, 2015 11:46 am | 8 Comments

I’m excited to announce that I’m joining SpeedCurve!

SpeedCurve provides insight into the interaction between performance and design to help companies deliver fast and engaging user experiences. I’ll be joining Mark Zeman, who launched the company in 2013. We make a great team. I’ve been working on web performance since 2002. Mark has a strong design background including running a design agency and lecturing at New Zealand’s best design school. At SpeedCurve, Mark has pioneered the intersection of performance and design. I’m looking forward to working together to increase the visibility developers and designers have into how their pages perform.

During the past decade+ of evangelizing performance, I’ve been fortunate to work at two of the world’s largest web companies as Chief Performance Yahoo! and Google’s Head Performance Engineer. This work provided me with the opportunity to conduct research, evaluate new technologies, and help the performance community grow.

One aspect that I missed was having deeper engagements with individual companies. That was a big reason why I joined Fastly as Chief Performance Officer. Over the past year I’ve been able to sit down with Fastly customers and help them understand how to speed up their websites and applications. These companies were able to succeed not only because Fastly has built a powerful CDN, but also because they have an inspiring team. I will continue to be a close friend and advisor to Fastly.

During these engagements, I’ve seen that many of these companies don’t have the necessary tools to help them identify how performance is impacting (hurting) the user experience on their websites. There is even less information about ways to improve performance. The standard performance metric is page load time, but there’s often no correlation between page load time and the user’s experience.

We need to shift from network-based metrics to user experience metrics that focus on rendering and when content becomes available. That’s exactly what Mark is doing at SpeedCurve, and why I’m excited to join him. The shift toward focusing on both performance and design is an emerging trend highlighted by Lara Hogan’s book Designing for Performance and Mark’s Velocity speaking appearances. SpeedCurve is at the forefront of this movement.

We (mostly Mark) just launched a redesign of SpeedCurve that includes many new, powerful features such as responsive design analysis, performance budgets, and APIs for continuous deployment. Check it out and let us know what you think.

8 Responses to Joining SpeedCurve

  1. Congrats!

  2. Awesome news! Very interested to see how SpeedCurve is progressing.

  3. Congratulations Steve!

  4. Congrats Steve. Looking forward to the next chapter of your career improving the industry and technology for users across the globe.

  5. Congratulations!

  6. Congrats Steve…eager to see how things progress!

  7. Congratulations Steve! It sounds like a promising venture.

  8. Hi Steve,

    Congrats to you to join a speedcurve.

    I have read some of your blog posts and found technical stuff which is useful to me as a website optimizer.

    your raise the great point of user experience and load time which is absolutely correct.Mostly loading time is the great measure of user experience but there are other factors which we don’t care about.

    Hope that your blog will pave my way.

    Regards,
    John
    thinsquare.com