Web 2.0 Notes: Optimizing the Frontend
This was the one-year follow-up after Steve Souders did his first presentation (at last year’s Web 2.0) on optimizing the performance of frontends. He’s done some amazing work collecting best practices, including a whole decision tree on the best methods to inject script into a page, based on browsers, the need to access scripts cross-domain, etc.
As far as immediate applicability to my work at Instructables, this was by far the most interesting talk of the conference for me. Rough notes after the jump.
Even Faster Web Sites
Focus on Web Operations, room 2002, Friday 1:30 PM
Steve Souders (Google)
Here’s a link to the slides. As a preview, below is the money shot: a full decision tree for how and when to use any one of six different methods for dynamic script inclusion:
In addition, I had a very interesting conversation with badass engineer/analyst Artur Bergman who has suggested some ninja moves to get us past the the external script loading problems that we’re having at Instructables. I’d previously been stumped, so this may be something of a coup.
