"speed" entries
Signals from the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara
Key insights from DevOps, Web operations, and performance.
People from across the Web operations and performance worlds are coming together this week for the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara. Below, we’ve assembled notable keynotes, interviews, and insights from the event.
Think like a villain
Laura Bell outlines a three-step approach to securing organizations — by putting yourself in the bad guy’s shoes (without committing actual crime, she stresses):
- Think like a villain and be objective: identify why and how someone would attack your company; what is the core value they’d come to steal?
- Create a safe place to create a little chaos: don’t do it live, but find a safe place without restriction and without fear to break things, to practice creative chaos.
- Play like you’ve never read the the rule book: Not everyone plays by the same rules as you, so to protect yourself and your company, you have to think more like the person willing to break the rules.
It’s time for a web page diet
Site speed is essential to business success, yet many pages are getting bigger and slower.
Earlier this year, I was researching online consumer preferences for a client and discovered, somewhat unsurprisingly, that people expect web sites to be fast and responsive, particularly when they’re shopping. What did surprised me, however, were findings in Radware’s “State of the Union Report Spring 2014” (registration required) that showed web sites, on average, were becoming bigger in bytes and slower in response time every year. In fact, the average Alexa 1000 web page has grown from around 780KB and 86 resources in 2011 to more than 1.4MB and 99 resources by the time of the early “2014 State of the Union Winter Report.”
As an experiment, I measured the resources loaded for Amazon.com on my own computer: 2.6MB loaded with 252 requests!
This seemed so odd. Faster is more profitable, yet companies were actually building fatter and slower web sites. What was behind all these bytes? Had web development become so sophisticated that all the technology would bust the seams of the browser window? 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.
To the end of bloated code and broken websites
Nicole Sullivan on how CSS is evolving to meet performance and device needs.
Velocity speaker and CSS expert Nicole Sullivan discusses the state of CSS — how it’s adapting to mobile, how it’s improving performance, and how some CSS best practices have led to “bloated code and broken websites.”
Why speed matters
"Faster is better" applies almost everywhere, not just in the tech domain.
We live in an ever-accelerating world and the competitive terms of business are built upon achieving speed for many reasons. Here's a look at how speed shapes a variety of domains and experiences.
Operations: The secret sauce revisited
The forces of "technical debt" apply to computational infrastructure.
An investment in web operations can yield big returns, both financially and competitively. But a lack of understanding prevents many companies from taking appropriate steps. Guest blogger Andrew Clay Shafer makes a case for web ops as the "secret sauce" by examining the forces of technical debt.
How Facebook satisfied a need for speed
Facebook boosted speed 2x. Director of engineering Robert Johnson explains how.
Robert Johnson, Facebook's director of engineering and a speaker at the upcoming Velocity and OSCON conferences, discusses an in-depth optimization and rewrite project that boosted Facebook's speed 2x.