My favorite Talks on Web Performance

This post was originally published here: https://community.akamai.com/community/web-performance/blog/2015/11/16/web-performance-collection-1-interesting-talks?sr=stream

A few days ago, I was teaching at an Akamai University class. During the session, I was referring to a few Velocity conference talks. I thought it would make sense to collate them all and to share it with the community. The purpose of the talks is to help you get started with a thought process of web performance, its importance and the methodology to help make your website load faster!

In a follow up post, I'd like to write about the other available presentations and tools that may not have a video.

My follow-up post focuses on interesting presentations: Web Performance Collection 2 - Interesting Presentations

Hope it helps. If you have other videos that were on the same lines, please do add the link in the comments.

Absolute Beginner

If you are brand new to website performance measurement, then please consider the following 2 webinar and training course.

1. Free course on Website performance optimization by Ilya Grigorik at Udacity: Website Performance Optimization Testing Course - Udacity. This takes you through the "how" of browser render process and the concept of critical render path. He did a talk on the same topic at Velocity as well: Optimizing the Critical Rendering Path for Instant Mobile Websites - Velocity SC - 2013.
2. The Business Value of Web Performance | SOASTA: In this webinar, Tammy Everts takes you through a historical study on why performance matters and it's impact on your RoI. 

Internet Fundamentals

• TCP and The Lower Bound of Web Performance: A very loving and emotionally done presentation on the inception and evolution of modern day internet. It talks about how the TCP protocol evolved, the concept of Request for Comments (RFCs) with all the human drama that went in during the early days of the internet.
• HTTP/2 - Overview and progress: Mark Nottingham's talk at New York Web Performance meetup providing a detailed overview of the new protocol and the implementation details.
• Velocity Conference 2014: Making HTTP2 Operable & Performant: Mark Nottingham's talk at Velocity and how HTTP2 evolved and the "unknown unknowns" about the protocol.
• Is TLS Fast Yet? - Velocity EU 2014: Ilya Grigorik's talk about the evolution of TLS. I am adding it here since it is the foundation to adoption of HTTP2.
• Yesterday's perf best-practices are today's HTTP/2 anti-patterns - Velocity 2015 (Santa Clara): A very well presented talk by Ilya Grigorik on things that are changing with HTTP2 and the new design approach to get your site to be fast. 

WebpageTest

• Velocity 2014 - WebPagetest Power Users - Part 1: Pat Meenan's lab on his baby, the WebPageTest.
• Velocity 2014 - WebPagetest Power Users - Part 2: Part 2 of the talk that dwells into scripting and other fun stuff.

Images

• Optimizing images and type on the web by Lara Hogan: A very nice talk on using the right kind of images and fonts on the website.
• Mobile Image Processing at Velocity SC, 2015: Timothy Kadlec's talk on the complexity involved in decoding and rendering images on mobile devices. aka. why should care about your end users!
• Velocity Conference 2013: A Picture Costs A Thousand Words - Part 1: Guy Podjarny's talk about images
• Velocity Conference 2013: A Picture Costs A Thousand Words - Part 2: The second part of the talk.
• Responsive images are coming to a browser near you: Yoav Weiss's talk from Velocity NYC, 2014.

Reaching new audience

• Ensuring a Performant Web for the Next Billion People - Bruce Lawson (Velocity SC): Bruce Lawson talks about the issues of internet in less developed parts of the world and the importance of proxy browsers like Opera. It's a very enlightening keynote speech on how important these markets.
• Better By Proxy at Velocity NY 2015: A more in-depth talk by Timothy Kadlec that explains the issues of different proxy browsers and introduces the challenges and things to keep in mind when addressing markets that are still far from reaching the speeds of 4G and fibre-optic broadband. 

Design + Performance

• Velocity 2015 Design+Performance by Steve Souders: A nice talk about how to reconcile the fight of performance v/s design.
• Metrics, Metrics Everywhere, Part 1 of 2 (Velocity SC 2015): A nice talk on how to approach performance measurement using RUM and other tools - by Tammy Everts & Cliff Crocker.
• Metrics, Metrics Everywhere, Part 2 of 2 (Velocity SC 2015): Second part of the talk on metrics - by Tammy Everts & Cliff Crocker.
• Web Performance Series: Akamai's short video collection with some cool animations!

3rd Party Performance issues

• What are third party components doing to your site? - Andy Davies, Simon Hearne: An eye opener of a presentation on the kind of impact that third parties can have on your site.
• Velocity Conference 2014: Third Party Performance - Don't Let Others Get You Down: Guy Po walks you through the issues and fixes for 3rd party problems 

I hope to put up a list of other material that does not have videos in the second part of the post soon. So stay tuned!