Last week I posted the first part of reviewing the architecture aspects of Front-End Optimization, and their impact. The purpose of that post (and this one) is to give you better insight into how FEO tools work, so you can make a more informed decision when considering using one.
HTTP Pipelining is an old optimization technique that’s been getting some renewed interest recently. I’ve written in the past about how pipelining is broadly used in Mobile, and recently Chrome & Firefox have been considering enabling it by default.
Update:The follow-up post after reading this one (Part 2) is now posted here.
I had the pleasure of writing a small contribution to Tim Kadlec‘s awesome upcoming book “Implementing Responsive Design”. The book is a great pragmatic guide for how to build a responsively designed website, including the basics, advanced use-cases and practical advice on how to overcome the challenges RWD faces today. You can read more about it and pre-order it today here.
Possibly the best part of working on Web performance is the community. It always amazes me how users, vendors, and even competitors work together to make the Web faster. Akamai does its best to support this community, through actions like sponsoring Web performance meetups and open-sourcing tools like Mobitest.
The SPDY benchmark I posted last week got some pretty heavy traffic, and I was happy to see it also sparked a lot of conversation and comments. Some of the comments were just trolls looking for attention (don’t feed them!). Others, however, held good ideas for follow up tests or suggestions for how to address the lack of acceleration.
SPDY is awesome. It’s the first real upgrade to HTTP in 10+ years, it tackles high latency mobile networks performance issues and it makes the web more secure. SPDY is different than HTTP in many ways, but its primary value comes from being able to multiplex many requests/responses from client to server over a single (or few) TCP connections.
Guy Podjarny, or Guypo for short, is a web performance researcher and evangelist, constantly chasing the elusive instant web. Guy is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Akamai’s Web Experience business unit, dealing with everything fast browsing and mobile. Guy was previously the co-founder and CTO of blaze.io, acquired by Akamai in 2012.