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If there’s one area of front end engineering where efforts today can pay almost immediate dividends, it’s improving performance.

And often even small, focused efforts can bring outsized returns.

And today we’re launching the full program for the second of our 6 in-depth front end developer focussed conferences in 2022, Lazy Load–a conference all about front end performance. 

Now what’s Lazy Load about?

Front end performance used to be a relatively simple task–minifying, concatenating and gzipping, a bit of smushing images, and all done.

But in 2022 it’s far more than that, and only getting more complex. That’s where lazy load comes in. A conference dedicated to front end performance, we’ll cover what you need to know now, and what’s coming next.

Programmed with Henri Helvetica, we’ll be covering everything you need you know about front end performance right now–from the latest on Core Web Vitals, to everything you need to know about edge computing.

Who and What are on the program?

Most conferences might have at most one or two sessions focussing on performance–Lazy Load is over two dozen sessions–all tailored for the online experience. But let’s get specific–

• Annie Sullivan is a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, who leads performance metric development on Chrome. That means she’s as responsible as anyone for Core Web Vitals. Last year at Lazy Load she introduced these then brand new performance metrics. This year she looks at the Event Timing API and how it can be used to measure interaction timings in RUM analytics and lab tooling
• Speaking of Core Web Vitals, Simon Hearne, web performance consultant with years of experience, looks at optimising for Core Web Vitals on SPAs. What particular challenges does this very common architectural pattern pose when it comes to CWV? And how can we address them?
• You now what’s great about other people’s mistakes? Not so much that they aren’t ours, more that we can learn from them without paying the price. Paul Calvano is a Performance Architect at Etsy, and one of the pioneers of Web performance. At Lazy Load, he dives into HTTP Archive data to find some examples of sites that are using them incorrectly, and explores the impact and potential benefits of fixing them
• Web fonts have transformed web design. But they can have huge impacts on web page performance. Ifeoma Nwosu addresses how web fonts can be rendered and used on web applications without affecting page size and load times.

But there’s much much more–Tammy Everts covers performance budgets, Andrea Verlicchi looks at responsive image automation, Fershad Irani looks at the connection between performance and the impact on the planet our sites and apps are having. And there’s still more!

Performance at The Edge

Over the last couple of years at our events we’ve covered a couple of different, though related technologies–Web Assembly at the Edge being championed by Fastly, and CloudFlare Workers, essentially cloud based Web Workers from CloudFlare.

And only this week Deno, CloudFlare and others announced the Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group–not so exciting a name, a very exciting idea, which “looks to promote runtimes supporting a comprehensive unified API surface that JavaScript developers can rely on regardless of the runtime they are using: be it browsers, servers, embedded applications, or edge runtimes”.

Over the last few years a whole new approach to application architectures has been emerging, one in which front end capabilities, in particular JavaScript and traditionally browser-based APIs like Workers and Fetch are now available “at the edge” bringing incredible potential performance benefits over more traditional server-based architectures.

So at Lazy Load, we have what you might think of as a “conference within a conference” focussed on this new architecture and the enabling technologies.

We’ll have 3 presentations, giving a broad overview of the emerging landscape, as well as focussing on architectures and tooling, then we have a number of lightning overviews of several solutions in this space, including AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Compute@Edge, and Akamai EdgeWorkers.

So, to get a head start of the technologies, tooling and practices around what we believe will be an incredibly important new architecture, one in which your front end capabilities with JavaScript and Web Platform APIs will give you a tremendous leg-up, don’t miss Lazy Load!

In 2022 we have a whole series of events for Front End Developers

Across 2022 Web Directions is presenting our series of online conferences for front end designers and developers. Focussed deep dives, they go far beyond what you might expect from conference programs.

Learn more and register now

Priced individually from $195, or attend all 6, plus get access to our conference presentation platform Conffab for just $595, or $59 a month.