Web Performance Masterclass

Your instructor: Harry Roberts

Full-day workshop • Monday, June 20, 2022.
Back by popular demand, Harry will take you on a journey to help you become a Web Performance expert. Over the course of several sessions, he’s going to share some of his closest secrets, going from the back-end to the front, auditing the performance of real websites.

You’ll be plotting data and findings, making it compelling to clients and non-technical stakeholders; drawing up backlogs and hit-lists; hacking on fixes, improvements, and experiments; and learning a whole lot of forensic, detailed, and often completely obscure performance information on the way.

This Front-End Web Performance Workshop starts on the server and make it’s way to the user, looking at what parts of the journey can slow us down, and what we can do to mitigate this. CDN configurations, TLS performance, protocols, network utilisation, resource scheduling, critical path optimization, asset delivery and optimization, CSS performance, runtime and rendering, caching, and a whole lot more.

What Will This Workshop Cover?

The workshop begins with lessons on how to capture rich and insightful data, and subsequent lessons will be spent with the tooling needed to dissect and analyse it. The workshop ends with discussions around performance culture and monitoring, as well as ideas on how best to present findings and improvements back to the business.

Everything in between will be intensive, practical learning, as we tear down and rebuild your own sites with performance in mind! There is no script — we’re just gonna get busy. You’ll leave armed with a wealth of knowledge and tools, meaning you can do the whole lot again by yourself, anytime you want.

Who Is This Workshop For?

Attendees should have basic to intermediate familiarity with web performance concepts (e.g. minification, compression, image optimisation, etc.) but do not need in-depth knowledge of anything advanced. By the end of the workshop, you’ll all be experts.

What Hardware/software Do I Need To Bring?

A laptop with an up-to-date version of Chrome.
A live, public-facing website that you’re going to audit and fix.
Access to its Google Analytics account (optional but advised).
User accounts with several online tools. Harry will email you links to these ahead of time but rest assured, they’re all free and safe.

About Harry Roberts

Harry is an independent Consultant Web Performance Engineer from the UK. He helps some of the world’s largest and most respected organisations find and fix their site-speed issues.

He is both a Google- and a Cloudinary Media- Developer Expert, and has consulted for clients from the United Nations to the BBC, General Electric to the Financial Times, and a whole host more.

When not doing client work, he writes, teaches, and speaks about the entire gamut of front-end performance. When not doing work at all, he’s probably out on his bike.

Time & Location

This full-day workshop will be hosted at the Fort Mason and will take place the day before SmashingConf. The workshop will be running from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM on Monday, June 20.

Schedule for Monday, June 20

9:00 AM – Doors open, Registration
9:30 AM – Introduction & Kick-off
11:00 AM – Coffee Break
1:00 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – Afternoon Session
3:30 PM – Coffee Break
5:30 PM – The End

Save 100 USD when signing up for the conference and a workshop!