Chasing Waterfalls

Welcome to Chasing Waterfalls, a podcast featuring conversations with the people working to make the web faster for everyone. Every two weeks, a new episode will drop exploring how different people and organizations are approaching web performance, from a technical, organizational and cultural perspective.

In this trailer, Tim introduces the podcast and provides a sneak peek at some of the upcoming episodes.

How do you not only establish a culture of performance, but nurture it and scale it across a large organization? That's the question we try to answer in this week's discussion with Malek Hakim, a performance engineer at Priceline. We talk about what Priceline has been doing to cement a culture of performance across the organization, touching on everything from tooling and metrics, to education and experimentation.

We started small at first. We were actually working on trying to find small tasks that we can do that we can test and try to show the impact. And yeah. You iterate and you do different tests, and some of them show up to be beneficial and sometimes surprising. And I guess that gets the ball rolling.—Malek Hakim

A full transcript is available at: https://chasingwaterfalls.io/episodes/episode-one-with-malek-hakim/

Links:

• Malek Hakim on Twitter
• New York Web Performance Meetup
• London Web Performance Meetup
• Sergey Chernyshev on Twitter
• Boomerang
• Lighthouse

Rarely do we get to start with a fresh slate when it comes to performance, more often, we have to figure out how to make a performance transformation after the fact. In this episode, Sharell Bryant talks about Teachers Pay Teachers journey to a performance-focused organization.

Luckily there were people in the company who had kind of had similar experiences in terms of being able and having the freedom to like run an A/B test where maybe it's not a product change, it's just a performance optimization change and being able to see like test out whether that improved various metrics. I was able to do that and felt empowered to do that. Especially when we are looking for different opportunities for how to improve the experience. If I can say, "Hey, I can make a quick performance change and let's just see if it affects these other metrics and you know, it won't involve design, it won't involve product and it'll take this much resourcing and then we'll measure it", I think was a great way to kind of advocate at first and loop it into another objective.

A full transcript is available at: https://chasingwaterfalls.io/episodes/episode-six-with-sharell-bryant/

Links

• Sharell Bryant on Twitter
• Compassionate action over empathy
• Alonzo Felix on Twitter
• Alonzo Felix's Anti-Racism Guide
• Teachers Pay Teachers
• Catchpoint
• Datadog
• SpeedCurve
• Sharell Bryant's 'Is the Site Fast Yet' talk

Performance is always important, but that's especially true for anyone providing essential services over a wide range of connections and devices. In this episode, Matt Hobbs talks about the challenges of building sites that perform well for the entirety of the UK.

Everything that we do in terms of accessibility, in terms of web performance, in terms of content design, we have to be catering to the largest number of people possible because one thing that we can't, we can't just say, well we're not going to support X or you're not going to support Y. Because in doing so we may just be excluding a certain demographic of the UK.

A full transcript is available at: https://chasingwaterfalls.io/episodes/episode-five-with-matt-hobbs/

Links

• Matt Hobbs on Twitter
• Matt Hobbs' site
• SpeedCurve Page Speed Benchmarks
• Tammy's post on SpeedCurve's Benchmarks
• Government Digital Service
• GOV.UK Design System
• Polyfill.io
• Chrome User Experience Report
• Lighthouse
• WebPageTest
• SiteSpeed.io
• From Hackathon to Foundational Performance with Reefath Rajali
• GDS Blog
• Technology in Government blog

You can do all the work to make your own code as fast as possible, but a few ill-performing third-party scripts can still bring your site to a crawl. In this episode, Karolina Szczur talks all about third-parties: how big of an issue they really how, how to identify which ones are the most problematic, and what you can do about it.

So it's not necessarily a binary choice—in some cases, sure. But there are strategies that you can use to mitigate that performance that you just have to be aware of them and you have to start with having that conversation. The responsibility is actually on us, not necessarily on the vendor that's providing the service.

A full transcript is available at: https://chasingwaterfalls.io/episodes/episode-four-with-karolina-szczur/

Links:

• Karolina Szczur on Twitter
• Karolina Szczur's site
• Patrick Hulce on Twitter
• Calibre
• The State of the Web
• Addy Osmani on Twitter
• Third Party Web
• Lighthouse
• Firefox Focus
• How We Improved the Performance of Our Live Chat by 30%
• Netlify
• Heroku
• Google found a 400ms delay resulted in less engagement
• Reducing the Intercom Messenger Bundle Size by 65%
• Harry Roberts' tweet showing a performance waterfall with and without third-parties
• Ben Schwarz on Twitter
• Performance Email Newsletter
• Calibre on Twitter