Ajax Performance

Dear Diary, I very much enjoyed The Rich Web Experience

I’m back from a whirl-wind west coast trip that involved the first 2 days of The Rich Web Experience and ended with a weekend in Vegas, at the wedding of one of my co-Gomezians. So, while he’s in Hawaii Twittering away, I’m doing both of our work and trying to get caught up on things. That lucky so and so.

Some brief words about the conference. First, Jay Zimmerman puts on a great show, and I was honored to be involved. It was a sweet venue, the presenters were top notch, and the interaction with the attendees was really gratifying. I’m disappointed I wasn’t able to stick around for the Saturday session, especially to see the performance tutorial by the esteemed Steve Souders and Tenni Theurer of Yahoo!

As with the Ajax Experience in July, performance was a hot topic. I was fortunate enough to sit on the opening panel discussion of the show, and I was thrilled to see how much of the discussion was driven by ‘yeah, but how do we manage these applications?’ type questions. That’s a challenge that we in the tools and developer evangelism spaces need to rise to, but it’s great to see the demand for solutions.

The first day of the show, I attended an excellent performance talk by Ron Bodkin, founder of New Aspects and creator of Glassbox. Ron spent a fair bit of time discussion operational management concerns (even giving a shout-out to Gomez, making him my new best friend). That evening, Ron and I chaired a BoF on performance and had a pleasant hour long chat with an interesting group of developers who are tackling Ajax development and management problems every day. It was heaven for a performance geek.

My presentation was the second day of the show, Friday. Another great thing about Jay’s NoFluffJustStuff shows is that he gives presenters plenty of time to work with. An hour is really not enough to cover a lot of ground — I hit 58 minutes during my last hour long show, leaving 120 seconds for Q&A. At RWE, Jay gave us 90 whole minutes of time to work with and rope to hang ourselves. It’s a cool format.

I got some great feedback from the attendees, including one that I want to pass along. Luke of iParadigms, who sat through all 90 minutes of my presentation and claims to be one of my 5 readers, pointed me to this presentation by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo at Yahoo! Again, Yahoo! is doing awesome work in the performance space, and their contributions to developer education and evangelism are legion.

You want more proof? I leave you with Steve’s “High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules For Faster Pages”.