Ajax Performance

TAE Wrapup

It’s been a week since returning from The Ajax Experience West, so I’m overdue to write up some thoughts. First: it was a blast. The first conference I ever attended or presented at was TAE East last year, and the several shows I’ve been to since have showed me just how lucky I was to start with the best. This was no different — a great collection of people, excellent presentations, and feisty panel discussions (Crockford. Eich. Fight!).

My presentation was the first day, and I was quite surprised to see that I was scheduled for the Plaza Ballroom, the big venue at the show. At my first TAE, my performance presentation was on the last day in one of the smaller rooms, and I’m certain that the upgraded slot I received this year is indicative of the increasing focus on performance and optimization in the community. Hell, there was a full track about performance this year, and Dylan’s wrapup went so far as to say “I believe this year’s theme was all about performance.” That’s great to hear, and that’s how it felt to me.

Patrick’s Selenium throwdown was right before mine on the same stage. Even though he completely failed to promo my session, it was really cool for little Gomez to have such strong representation on testing and optimization.

The nice thing about getting your presentation out of the way is that you get to spend the rest of the time enjoying the show and meeting people. It was great to see Brad again, and his presentation on Dojo Offline was awesome. Brent Ashley and Doug Crockford came to my presentation and both said they didn’t hate it. I also met Kris Zyp who, despite being alphabetically cursed to be called last in pretty much any situation, gave a very interesting talk on continuations and cooperative multi-threading in JS.

I also had a nice chat with John Resig about performance testing, and he explained the ins and outs of the CSS selector benchmark rat race. John was on stage almost constantly, and in his down time he was busy working, but he still made time to talk about his performance approach and his grudging involvement in the somewhat masturbatory (my words) micro-benchmark wars.

The last session of the week was Steve Souders, who I’ve mentioned before, introducing YSlow, an interesting Firebug integration that analyzes and grades your application performance. It’s a cool approach, and a nice way to make optimization strategies measurable and actionable.

OK, so this reads very much like a hyper kid writing in his diary after returning from summer camp, but to hell with it. It was a great week, performance was in the air, and the Ajax community is as vibrant as ever. Many, many thanks to Ben and Dion for allowing me to be involved. Can’t wait for Boston!