"webperformance" entries

Tailoring CSS for performance

Rethinking CSS delivery

In my last article, I demonstrated how improved performance and a lower PageSpeed Insights score were accomplished by removing unnecessary external JavaScript and CSS requests. YepNope was also used to manage the asynchronous loading of external requests.

After the improvements, I thought it was time to move on but PageSpeed Insights advised there was more work to do.

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Early-Warning Is an Unknown Unknown

Velocity 2013 Speaker Series

In 2002, US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld told a reporter that not only don’t we know everything important, but sometimes we don’t even know what knowledge we lack:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

One of the purposes of monitoring is to build early-warning systems to alert of problems before they become serious. But how can we recognize a failure in its early stages? It’s a thorny question.

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Velocity Report: Building a DevOps Culture

DevOps is as much about culture as it is about tools.

Operations professionals live in a wind tunnel. If you can imagine one of those game show glass boxes, where a contestant stands inside, the door shuts, and money blows around in a whirlwind, you’ve got a good idea of what Operations feels like much of the time. While you’re trying to grab one technology, another has forced itself across your eyes demanding attention.

The incredible growth of an industry that didn’t really even exist fifteen years ago has provided us with endless opportunity and innovations. It’s also required us to be on the forefront of many new technologies in a way other professions aren’t. The constant drive towards the next technology, the next platform, and the next idea has stratified our organizations, creating specializations in areas like networking, storage, security, data sciences, and a myriad of other functions that challenge our ability to work with our colleagues as a cohesive team.

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Steve Souders asks: “How green is your web page?”

Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis: How green is your web page? Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too. Intrigued by an article on…