
Reaching the Entire UK with Matt Hobbs
04/30/20 • 48 min
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
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
Previous Episode

Dealing with Third Parties with Karolina Szczur
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
Next Episode

Undergoing a Performance Transformation with Sharell Bryant
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
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