Steve Souders

Steve is Chief Performance Officer at Fastly, developing web performance services. He previously served as Google’s Head Performance Engineer and Chief Performance Yahoo!. Prior to that, Steve worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos, and co-founded Helix Systems and CoolSync.

Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites.

He is the creator of many performance tools and services, including YSlow, the HTTP Archive, Cuzillion, JdropControlJS, and Browserscope.

He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford.

Velocity highlights (video bonus!)

A collection of must-see keynotes from Velocity Santa Clara, with bonus videos of some of the best sessions.

Editor’s note: this post originally appeared on Steve Souders’ blog; it is published here with permission.

We’re in the quiet period between Velocity Santa Clara and Velocity New York. It’s a good time to look back at what we saw and look forward to what we’ll see this September 15-17 in NYC.

Velocity Santa Clara was our biggest show to date. There was more activity across the attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors than I’d experienced at any previous Velocity. A primary measure of Velocity is the quality of the speakers. As always, the keynotes were livestreamed — the people who tuned in were not disappointed. I recommend reviewing all of the keynotes from the Velocity YouTube Playlist. All of them were great, but here’s a collection of some of my favorites.

Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler

Start. Here. Scott Hanselman’s walk through the evolution of the web and cloud computing is informative and hilarious:

Read more…

Six themes from Velocity Europe

Cultural shifts and handling large-scale growth among the emerging trends in the WPO and DevOps communities

By Steve Souders and John Allspaw

More than 700 performance and operations engineers were in London last week for Velocity Europe 2012. Below, Velocity co-chairs Steve Souders and John Allspaw note high-level themes from across the various tracks (especially the hallway track) that are emerging for the WPO and DevOps communities.

Velocity Europe 2012 in London

Performance themes from Steve Souders

I was in awe of the speaker and exhibitor lineup going into Velocity Europe. It was filled with knowledgeable gurus and industry leaders. As Velocity Europe unfolded a few themes kept recurring, and I wanted to share those with you.

Performance matters more — The places and ways that web performance matters keeps growing. The talks at Velocity covered desktop, mobile (native, web, and hybrid), tablet, TV, DSL, cable, FiOS, 3G, 4G, LTE, and WiMAX across social, financial, ecommerce, media, games, sports, video, search, analytics, advertising, and enterprise. Although all of the speakers were technical, they talked about how the focus on performance extends to other departments in their companies as well as the impact performance has on their users. Web performance has permeated all aspects of the web and has become a primary focus for web companies. Read more…

What's on the agenda for Velocity Europe

Steve Souders previews Velocity Europe 2011.

Velocity co-chair Steve Souders highlights a number of Velocity Europe speakers and sessions that caught his attention.

What’s on the agenda for Velocity Europe

Steve Souders previews Velocity Europe 2011.

Velocity co-chair Steve Souders highlights a number of Velocity Europe speakers and sessions that caught his attention.

Velocity 2011 debrief

Steve Souders weighs in on Velocity 2011 and looks ahead to upcoming Velocity events.

This was Velocity's fourth year, and while every year has seen significant growth, the 2011 conference felt like a tremendous step forward in all areas.

Velocity grows with more tracks, more topics and … bath products?

The state of the Velocity Conference.

Over its three-year history, the Velocity Conference has expanded to include mobile performance, "Velocity Culture," and a new line of bath products (that last one might not be the best fit).

Velocity and the Bottom Line

Velocity 2009 took place last week in San Jose, with Jesse Robbins
and I serving as co-chairs. Back in
November 2008, while we were planning Velocity, I said I wanted to highlight “best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line.” Much of my work focuses on the how of improving performance – tips developers use to create even faster web sites. What’s been missing is the why. Why is it important for companies to focus on performance?