Ajax Performance

At the Velocity Conference

I’m at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference in San Francisco today and will be sitting on a panel with Bill Scott, Ernest Mueller, and Scott Ruthfield. Steve Souders is moderating.

Bill is kicking off the show with something really exciting — the Jiffy plugin for Firebug. Jiffy relies on Scott Ruthfield’s Jiffy-Web open source analysis suite to track the performance of an application from both the client and server side. Client side performance tracking is something I’ve been a fan of for a while (I used a similar technique for the Dojo Charts benchmark last year).

This looks like a great new tool to make this type of analysis more accessible, and I’ll be attending Bill’s sessions today to get more information.

The Ajax Experience wrap-up, and October is over!

As I mentioned previously, the Ajax Experience Boston ‘06 was the first conference at which I ever presented, so it was nice to celebrate that anniversary last week. As always, it was a great show with excellent presentations from the Ajax community’s best and brightest. Also a nice opportunity to catch up with Kris, John, Brent, and the other Ajax rock stars I’ve had the pleasure to meet in the past year. I gave my normal performance overview presentation (slides) on the first day to a refreshingly inquisitive crowd who hit me with a number of great questions at the end, a few of which I could answer.

On another note, TAE and the Gomez offsite that took up the rest of the week were the end of my hellish October (which included flying this itinerary in 9 days), so I can rededicate myself to nerdly pursuits. Hopefully that means more posts here at the ‘Perf.

Finally, it wasn’t all crazy travel this month. I found time to write an article for AJAXWorld Magazine which should be available online this week and in print probably 01/08. It serves as a companion piece to my TAE deck.

Busy October

I’ve been traveling more than usual this month, having just returned to Boston after visiting London and Portland, Oregon in the past 4 days. So I’m very excited that one of my favorite conferences, the Ajax Experience, is coming to my home town next week. A great show, no travel. Also, my first conference presentation ever was at the Ajax Experience in Boston last year, so this is a big anniversary for me. I hope to see you all there!

But before I can enjoy Ajax@Home, I have one more trip to make, this one to San Antonio for the Rackspace Customer Conference where I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on SaaS.

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”.

Upcoming Presentation: The Rich Web Experience, September 6-8

I will be presenting at the Rich Web Experience in San Jose in less than a month, and I’m really looking forward to this show. I had to drop a number of slides from my TAE presentation as I was running long in my practice sessions — that shouldn’t be a problem here as I’ll have 90 minutes to work with. Also, every attendee gets a Wii or an iPod Video. That’s just nuts.

If you are interested, and you definitely should be, use the code rwe2007speaker200 to get yourself a $200 discount. It’s on me.

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!

Upcoming Presentation: The Ajax Experience, Boston

The first presentation I ever gave was at TAE Boston last year, and I’ll be there when it returns October 24-26 of this year. I live in Boston, so this is certainly the easiest for me to attend, and the Ajaxian guys bring in a great crowd.