« Practical intro to web performance »
11:15 - 12:05
Conference 2 [Amphi 137]

Web performance is a hot and heavily evangelized topic those days, though still not always incorporated into daily work of the web development teams. (By "web performance", I loosely mean making sure that the experience is faster and feels faster and more smooth to the user.)

There are many reasons for that:

  • shipping features having a higher priority than the performance
  • web performance might be perceived as an overwhelming and mysterious topic, with lots of knowledge required to get started
  • it might not be clear what tools are available, and how to use them to debug the performance problems
  • web browsers, web APIs and the way the web applications are built are changing fast, and it's hard to catch up with all of that

The idea of the talk is to:

  • show what are the available tools (WebPageTest, Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools) and browser APIs to investigate web performance, how to use them, and what are the gotchas
  • present how to read and interpret the network waterfall, including differences between HTTP/1 and HTTP/2
  • outline techniques and best practices on how to approach the performance problems
  • apply scientific approach: how to measure whether the work done has resulted in improvements
  • briefly talk about how to use JavaScript tooling (webpack, babel, bundlephobia etc.) to improve on some perf problems

Thing I will not talk about:

  • digging into the details of all the possible performance improvements

I.e.: giving the fishing rod, not the fish.