So lunch was ‘so-so’ – the dauphinoise were undercooked, the duck sauce was too strong and overpowered the duck (probably good as they were rather cheap legs.)
“Optimising your front end performance” was a very mixed talk. There were some generalisations that were seriously poor such as “80% of access to sites by end users is spent on the front end” – both vague and unfounded. However things like CSS/JS optimisation – specifically 304 Not-Modified headers and forcing caching but needed more expansion – this is a PHP conference afterall so implementation methods would be useful – so I’m going to blog about that later based on my personal experience. It’s something I’m rather passionate about and have wrote scripts to deal with this type of stuff that have worked extremely well.
The entire room seemed to be very much “uum” -ing and “aah” -ing about the whole talk, he did something that turns every programmers head in the other direction – talked from his experience without considering other situations that arise, the “I’ve not seem that problem so it can’t be a problem” situation.
Sorry to hear that. The 80% was the result from the Yahoo team (and matched my personal experience), I should have said that.
Of course it’s only a single perspective. Optimisation is always. You need to profile before do any of it and after it.
Regards
Thomas
I’ve worked on a lot of customer focused web sites and the 80% doesn’t seem to fit any statistics that I can recall. I’m sure you recall there being a lot of talk from the far back of the room, from what I overheard a lot of it was a result of some things you said were text-book generalisations – and a room full of developers will tear that apart like a pack of hyenas when their pray hits the ground.
As I said though, you hit on some good points, some people seemed to genuinely have no idea about things like using 304’s and combining files. Also simple things like the guy who asked about why it’s a bad idea to have styles and scripts in-line rather than included, missing the point about it being there on every page as a result so it’s wasted download time! Please don’t think I thought your speech was bad overall, I am a strong advocate of front-end optimisation and love things like CSS sprite sheets. I just think it needs a few tweaks here and there to ensure people take the entire thing more seriously as it’s a topic a lot of developers need help with! I just re-read my blog post and realised it came across far more unpleasant than I expected it to; I think I was in “twitter mode” – keeping it short.