Skip to main content

Ryan Townsend

Ryan Townsend

With 20 years of experience developing for the web, 8 of those years being as a CTO, Ryan Townsend has driven ecommerce growth for his clients measured in the hundreds of millions and now operates a Fractional CTO consultancy under his brand, TWNSND.

He cares deeply about user experience, particularly web performance, and his pragmatic outlook means that—on the rare occasion that he does wear a shirt—his sleeves stay firmly rolled up: even as an exec, he enjoys getting into the thick of things with product managers and developers.

Outside of the office, you’ll usually find him in the gym, recording video content for ‘Lessons of a CTO’ and trying not to get too many more points on his driving licence.

Ryan Townsend's Talk

Our Websites Need A Lifestyle Change, Not A Diet

Monday, 9th – 15:50

We’ve spent a decade over-indulging in JavaScript, bingeing on NPM packages, and routinely being mis-sold that this week’s new framework or library is the remedy to all our performance and productivity woes. Attempting shortcuts only makes this a constant battle – we need to make a change.

Thankfully, the reality of poor performing solutions can no longer be hidden. With the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP) this March, the trio of Core Web Vitals is now truly useful for measuring any kind of website or web application.

Let’s find out how INP identifies our bottlenecks, what it means to design for performance, and how the Web Platform can help us leave the hype cycle of in-vogue ‘solutions’ behind and focus on building longer-term skills that allow us to deliver better experiences for our users.

Ryan will also be running a workshop on Web Performance!