Along with technical guidance, I’m a big fan of including the answers to two questions on any ticket related to performance:
Not only is knowing the answer to these questions critical to ensure the team is all on the same page, but the process of thinking about the answers to these questions ahead of time helps to ensure that we’re thinking critically about how a potential optimization may apply in our specific situations.
I wrote a post where I go into more detail about what goes into these two sections, and why it’s an important thing for any company to do if they want to get to a point where the outcome of their optimizations is more predictable.
I’ve been doing this a long time and one thing remains consistent: companies and teams that have long-term, meaningful success with performance don’t just focus on the technical aspects of performance—they focus on building up the culture internally through little techniques like this.
It’s that time of year again! Tickets are on sale for performance.now() in Amsterdam on November 14-15th. The line-up for 2024 is very strong, with some incredible talks and topics announced, and some we haven’t announced yet.
This is our fifth edition (we took one year off for COVID) and I’m really proud to see this event, concocted over dinner with a friend, has cemented itself as the event for the web performance community. Along with the main event, there are several side events in the works before and potentially after the event.
The caliber of attendee at the event is incredible and the hallway conversations alone are worth the entire trip (as LeVar Burton used to say, “but you don’t have to take my word for it”). It’s awesome to look up at any point and find the group of people you’re talking with includes a mix people involved with standards, browsers, large e-commerce sites, smaller agencies and consultants—all with the same goal of making the web faster.
We’re actually trying to emphasize those conversations a bit more this year. We’ve seen how much people enjoy the conversations between talks, so we’re shuffling a little bit of the schedule to make sure it’s easy for folks to have time for those.
We flew through early-bird tickets and the regular tickets are moving pretty quickly—we’ve been fortunate enough to sell out the event every year, and it looks like that’s going to be the case again this year so if you’re thinking about going, I’d recommend moving quickly.
Register for performance.now() 2024
The past decade of JavaScript frameworks has, with very few exceptions, been really bad for performance. At this point I feel there’s enough data out there that this isn’t really a controversial take.
But the experimentation that we get from them does play a critical role in driving innovation on the web—we need that experimentation to help figure. Vendors and standards bodies look at that experimentation and use it to help them figure out what sort of features and functionality should be added to the web next.
I’m excited for some of the recent improvements we’ve seen. View transitions is are game-changer.
Invokers look like they could be as well. Brecht De Ruyte’s post from the other week gives a great overview, but the gist is that a few new HTML attributes (command, commandfor) could enable us to ditch a LOT of JavaScript by letting us declare functionality (like open, toggle and close) that the browser itself would recognize and handle. There’s also the idea of custom commands which will make it easy to tap into the lower level primitives for additional functionality.
Ryan Townsend posted a video walking through why he’s excited about the Invoker Commands API, and I share his excitement for all the legacy JavaScript solutions this could let us eliminate.