Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

There’s little doubt that every aspect of front end development has become more complex–but perhaps none more so, more quickly, than performance.

Less than a decade ago, when developers first started to pay real attention to performance we’d minify, concatenate, then gzip all our assets, to minimise the number of files to download, perhaps play around with the quality of JPGs to reduce the size of images, maybe even use SVG and vector images. That was about it.

These days, as the weight of web pages increases (JavaScript, images, and now fonts), and the number of third party scripts on a page explodes, we also face the reality that performance matters as a quality signal for search engine algorithms. It’s no longer a nice to have, it’s a business imperative.

Well, it always has been, now it’s just easier to make the case, and harder to avoid the reality.

At our conferences we’ve focussed a lot on performance, going back many many years. There’s nearly 100 performance focussed presentations on Conffab (many you can watch with a free membership, so why not sign up!) and at Code in Melbourne in June we’re diving more deeply than ever into performance.

• Luke Denton will explore patterns and techniques that he uses day-to-day, to help improve a user’s perceived performance. These can’t really be measured–it’s a perception, it’s a feeling of performance. But in the context of a website, perception is reality as Luke will show.
• Nishu Goel will look at long tasks that block user interaction (and negatively impact our Core Web Vital’s ‘Interaction to Next Paint (INP)’ score), and how to manage them.
• Alexander Karan looks at Edge Computing, an emerging architecture that aids performance. Just as CDNs move content closer to your user, Edge Computing brings where your computation happens closer to the user, reducing roundtrip times and increasing performance. Best of all, JavaScript developers are well placed to take advantage as edge solutions typically use APIs (like the fetch and worker APIs) that are familiar with, as well as JavaScript!
• Meanwhile, Aliaksei Kuncevic brings us Push-based Front-end Architectures, an approach that brings several benefits including faster data delivery, reduced network traffic, and improved user experience–what’s not to like?
• And performance legend Mark Zeman, pulls apart the idea of a “page” and explores a design and development pipeline that focuses on islands of content to help us push pixels faster.

There’s much much more, over 2 dozen talks in total, covering CSS, JavaScript, Web Assembly, security, browser APIs, and debugging.

So to keep you and your team up to speed with the latest in front end engineering, don’t miss Code–returning to Melbourne June 8 and 9.