Web Directions lazy load 2021

Global, OnlineJune 11 & 18 2021

A conference all about front end performance

Lazy Load '21 is now over

But that doesn't mean you can't benefit from this and other of our events. The videos will soon be available on Conffab, our platform for conference presentations. Sign up and you'll get access to them as soon as they arrive.

And why not check out all the front end focussed events we have planned for 2021, covering performance, JavaScript, web platform APIs, Accessibility, security, and more, from the perspective of front end development.

Keep up to date with Announcements

Want to know when Lazy Load '22 is announced, and tickets go on sale? Let us know below and we'll email you when the program is announced. And why not follow us on Twitter?

About lazy load

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

But in 2021 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.

Who's it for?

If you build front ends, lazy load is for you.

In depth knowledge

All Web Directions conferences feature in-depth knowledge from real world experts. Some you'll know, many you won't, but all bring a world of experience and knowledge.

speakers and audience
  • 12+ Transformational speakers
  • 8+ Hours of content
  • 2 Deep sessions
  • 1 Extraordinary Conference

Your Convenor

We've invited Henri Helvetica to help ensure the best possible, most relevant content for lazy load.

Henri is a freelance developer who has turned his interests to a passionate mix of site performance engineering and pinches of user experience. When not reading the deluge of daily research docs and case studies, or auditing sites in devtools, Henri can be found contributing back to the community: Toronto Web Performance Group meetup + Jamstack TORONTO organizer + curating conference content or volunteering his time for lunch and learns at various bootcamps.

Henri Helvetica

Extraordinary speakers

We've assembled a world–class lineup of experts for you, going in-depth on web perfromance.

Covering

  • core web vitals
  • Server Side Rendering
  • waterfall charts
  • 3rd party dependencies
  • lazyload
  • web assembly
  • web workers
  • HTTP/3
  • QUIC
  • PWA performance
  • Synthetic Metrics
  • Real User Metrics (RUM)
  • W3C WebPerf Working Group
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • First Input Delay (FID)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
  • Performance Culture
  • Caching
  • Case Studies

Featuring

Patrick Meenan

Patrick Meenan Engineering Fellow Catchpoint

The Latest on Measuring Web Performance

Patrick is going to explore the current state of web performance measurement, both in a lab (synthetic) environment and from real users (RUM). There has been a lot of exciting advancement in this space with Google's Core Web Vitals and evolving of other metrics over the years.

We will also explore how synthetic and RUM data complement each other and when each is most appropriate to use.

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Annie Sullivan

Annie Sullivan Staff Software Engineer Google

Overview of the Core Web Vitals metrics

The Core Web Vitals provide unified guidance that is essential to delivering a great user experience. Annie will talk about why and how these metrics were developed, how you can measure them on your site, and how they fit into the bigger picture of a product's user experience.

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Claire Tran

Claire Tran Software Engineering Manager, Director SafetyCulture, Women Who Code Sydney

Building a Performance Culture

A great user experience often ties into the performance of an application. The user’s first impression of the site they are visiting can be a make or break scenario, and if the performance is slow that can have an impact on the growth of a business. Behind the scenes, there are teams working on an application, performance is sometimes an afterthought and becomes a focus later on. In this talk, I will cover what performance culture looks like, how this starts and some ways to communicate the value of performance, as well as ways to drive engagement.

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Abdurrachman Mappuji

Abdurrachman Mappuji Lead Software Engineer Mekari

How Russian Doll Caching Can Improve Server Side Rendering

Are you implementing SSR for your web application? Do you know we can implement multiple layers of caching so that your caching is like an onion 🧅 or Russian Doll🪆?

That's the essence of this talk, we'll demonstrate how we can implement Russian Doll Caching to create layers of caching so that we get data from databases as small as we possibly can.

Hopefully, after this talk, you'll not ask about Russian Mall what? Russian %^&*() caching?

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Anton Ball

Anton Ball Front End Developer Doist

Native Lazy Loading

A conference called Lazy Loading must feature a talk on lazy loading! With native lazy loading introduced in Chrome 77 and other browsers following suite, now is a fantastic time to refresh on what's available today.

We are going to look at how and where native lazy loading can be used, potential gotchas and how it can help improve your site performance both with images and JavaScript alike. You'll come away from this talk with more knowledge on lazy loading even though the property appears deceptively simple at first glance.

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Erin Wild and Javier Moreno

Erin Wild and Javier Moreno Performance Engineering Shopify

Web Performance at Scale–The Shopify Experience

Shopify has a large and detailed view into the operations and evolution of e-commerce worldwide. In this talk we will present the work we have done in the last year to put speed at the front and centre of development culture at the company, as well as our strategy for performance data collection and analysis. We will share some of our findings and what we have learned on our way to making Shopify faster every day.

Read More

Matt Hobbs

Matt Hobbs Head of Frontend UK Government Digital Service

How to read a WebPageTest waterfall chart

WebPageTest is one of the most well known and important tools in the web performance community. It's been actively developed by Pat Meenan since he worked at AOL in 2008. It has become the go to tool for both very simple to very advanced debugging of the web performance of a website. One of its most well known charts is the waterfall chart.

In this talk I'm going to introduce the waterfall chart and also go into detail on how you can examine and read it. The more you understand about the chart, the the more WebPageTest as a whole will be able to help you fix a slow performing website.

Read More

Laura Morinigo

Laura Morinigo Developer Advocate/Principal Engineeer Samsung Internet

Is your Progressive Web App Lazy? How to read and improve your PWA Performance

A progressive web app is a way to bring a native app experience into the browser, therefore the idea is to have a progressive enhancement of your app but during our development process, we have to keep in mind a few factors in order to make it. During this talk, we are going to discuss possible how to read and test our PWA performance and which are the tools that can help us to deliver web apps that are fast and progressive (for real!).

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Katie Hempenius

Katie Hempenius Front End Software Engineer Google

Optimizing the performance of third-party dependencies

Third-party dependencies play an important role on most websites. This talk will discuss techniques that you can use to better understand, measure, and optimize your usage of third-party code.

Read More

Aaron Turner

Aaron Turner Senior Software Engineer Fastly

Performance Upgrades with WebAssembly and the Edge

This talk will be taking a look at how WebAssembly and Edge Computing can improve your front end performance of your Application. We will take a look at what WebAssembly is, how it can be used to replace hot paths in your JavaScript Application. What Edge Computing is, and how it can be used to provide additional performance to low end devices. Lastly, we will look at how they can be used together for portable and performant applications.

Read More

Rita Kozlov

Rita Kozlov Product Manager, Workers Cloudflare

On the Cutting Edge: a Glimpse into the Future of Web Performance

Cloudflare Workers enables deploying a serverless application instantly, from a developer's computer to the edge - as close as possible (tens of milliseconds!) to every internet user around the world.

This is made possible by running V8 isolates - the same engines powering Chrome, on Cloudflare's global CDN network, spanning 194+ data centers around the world. For end users this means blazing fast, always available applications due to the reduced latency of requests traveling around the globe, and no cold starts, due to the lightweight nature of isolates, as compared to containers. For developers this means more time spent writing code, and building features, rather than scaling and optimizing cloud configurations.

This talk will cover the landscape of what platforms offer at the edge today, and how edge-based serverless is changing the web stack: from incremental dynamism at the edge, to the evolution of JAMstack on the edge and beyond!

Read More

Nic Jansma, Nicolás Peña Moreno

Nic Jansma, Nicolás Peña Moreno Senior Principal Lead Software Engineer, Engineer Akamai, Google Chrome

What's New at the W3C Web Performance Working Group?

We'll discuss what the goals of the W3C WebPerf Working Group are, the browser standards we help design, the latest proposals / incubations for the future, and how you can participate!

Read More

Jana Iyengar

Jana Iyengar Distinguished Engineer Fastly

HTTP/3 and QUIC: What, Why, and What's Next

An overview of HTTP/3 and QUIC efforts, and their current state at the IETF and in the world

Read More

Our family of world leading front end developer conferences

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The conference CSS deserves

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Web Directions lazy load 2022

a conference on front end performance

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a conference all about JavaScript

Online, globallyJuly 2022

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Web Directions Code 2023

a conference on progressive web apps and web platform

Online, globallyearly 2023

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Web Directions aaa 2023

accessibility engineering for front end developers

Online, globallyearly 2023

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Web Directions Safe 2023

privacy, security, identity for front end developers

Online, globallyearly 2023

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Web Directions remixed 2023

The best of 2022, remixed, and free!

Online, globally 2023

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Web Directions Conffab

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Keep up to date with Announcements

Want to know when Lazy Load '22 is announced, and tickets go on sale? Let us know below and we'll email you when the program is announced. And why not follow us on Twitter?

Diversity Scholarships

We have diversity scholarships available for all our events. These provide full attendance just like any other attendee. We don't draw attention to those who have received a scholarship, but do look to make connections between them, and with our diversity sponsors, to help ensure the most valuable possible experience.

Our Scholarships focus on people who are unemployed, under-employed, self employed or in the early stages (up to 3 years) of their careers who identify as belonging to a group or groups under-represented at events like ours, and who might otherwise find it difficult to afford to attend.

Read more and apply at our diversity page.

Partners

We work closely with our partners and their technologies to deliver world leading online conferences.

Contact us for more on how we work can work with you to help you be even more awesome.

Platform.sh logo
Twilio logo
catchpoint logo
Lookahead Search logo
Media Devs logo
w3c logo
REA logo

Community Partners

Our venue

Lazy Load 2021 will take place across 2 Fridays in June wherever it's most convenient for you. With three sessions for each day, wherever you are, it'll be convenient for you.

Getting there:

Get out of bed, make a coffee, wander to your desk, and start right in. Or just watch from the comfort of your bed. If conditions allow watch in your office, or grab a team pass and watch together as a team.

No expensive flights, or long commutes, be part of it wherever you feel like.

Accommodation:

No need for hotel rooms or airbnbs!

Praise for past Web Directions events

Phil Whitehouse
Web Directions is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development.

Phil Whitehouse,
Innovation Lead DigitasLBi

Ethan Marcotte
I’ve been admiring the Web Directions events for years, and was honored to be part… What a fantastic event!

Ethan Marcotte,
inventor "responsive Web design"

Dave Greiner
Out of any conference, Web Directions is far and away our favourite

Dave Greiner,
founder Campaign Monitor

About Us

Co-founded and now run by John Allsopp, Web Directions has for nearly 20 years brought together leading developers, engineers, visual, IxD, UX and product designers, Art and Creative Directors, product managers indeed everyone involved in producing web and digital products to learn from one another, and the World's leading experts across this vast field.

We spend our lives thinking about what comes next, keeping up with trends in technology, practices and processes, and filtering the hype, to make sure you don't miss trends that matter, and don't waste time on hype that doesn't.

We promise attending one of our events will leave you significantly better versed in the challenges you face day to day, and in solutions for addressing them.

vignettes from our events, social, speakers and more. Includes Hannah Donovan skylarking.

John Allsopp

John Allsopp has been working on the Web for nearly 30 years. He's been responsible for innovative developer tools such as Style Master, X-Ray and many more. He's spoken at numerous conferences around the World and delivered dozens of workshops in that time as well.

His writing includes two books, including Developing With Web Standards and countless articles and tutorials in print and online publications.

His "A Dao of Web Design" published in 2000 is cited by Ethan Marcotte as a key influence in the development of Responsive Web Design, who's acclaimed article in 2010 begins by quoting John in detail, and by Jeremy Keith as "a manifesto for anyone working on the Web".

Code of Conduct

For over a decade, we've worked hard to create inclusive, fun, inspring and safe events for the Web Industry.

As part of our commitment to these values, we've adopted a code of conduct for all involved: ourselves, our speakers, our partners and our audience.

If you have any concern or feedback, please don't hesitate to contact us.