Performance is about people
Hey, you! 👋🏽 Yeah, you… the person who just clicked the link to get here and read this. Thanks for clicking, and thanks for giving this node a fraction of your attention.
Today, SpeedCurve joins Embrace. It’s going to be awesome and exciting. You can read all the details in the press release and Andrew's blog post or join us for a chat on Dec 9th.
I want to take this moment to remind you, and ourselves, why the web matters.
At its heart, the web is about humanity. It’s about how we choose to evolve ourselves. That’s why user experience, speed and curiosity are interlinked and matter so much.
I’ll keep it succinct: each moment is precious.
TLDR: Faster speed = faster evolution. We need to keep pushing for the future we want.
WWW
When the World Wide Web became accessible to everyday people in the mid-1990s, it fundamentally changed our relationship with information. The sum of all human knowledge began its transition into digital formats, making it available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Encode all the things!
Mosaic, the first popular web browser, 1997
I graduated from design school at the very start of that transformation, designing my first website in Mosaic with the newly released <img> tag. My entire career and every business I’ve run has been tangled up in the web. I was — and am — completely enthralled by the unlimited access to information, to search and satisfy any curiosity as profoundly as I choose to go. I can jack my cyberpunk brain directly into the planet!
Speed
As a culture, we chase speed. Why is that? It feels evolutionary to me with you and me as nodes on the interplanetary network.
Gutta-Percha transatlantic cable, 1857
Like the good old days of Morse code and those first transatlantic telegraph cables, we’re now more and more intertwined in each other's lives with each new connection. That device you hold, the WiFi signal, the ethernet cable - hold one end of that connection, and you’re now physically connected to billions of other people less than 160ms away. It’s palpable, hard to ignore, often uncomfortable, and moves us forward.
Evolution
I know this stuff is kooky. But take a moment to glance around. Digital technology and the web have fundamentally changed everything around you in the last 30 years. Some good, some bad, but at a consistently rapid pace.
It’s hard to hold on as the planet rewires all the nodes and springs to consciousness, but the signs of accelerating change are everywhere. The information we consume and the choices we make based on that information matter. It’s how we evolve.
Each of us is on a speed curve.
SpeedCurve
At its simplest, SpeedCurve has always been about facilitating the flow of information for web users. As curators of the web experience and guardians of how it feels to access “all the things”, speed is a fundamental tenet. Faster is better. Faster is more.
We’ve focused on bringing the worlds of web design and engineering together in the service of a better, faster user experience for people on the planet.
SpeedCurve appears to be a collection of charts, but it’s actually a tool designed to facilitate conversation — a conversation about the value your organisation creates and how each transaction with a user is expressed in a happy or unhappy experience. We provide the tools to interrogate that transaction, diagnose blockages, and keep the arteries of information flowing as open and as smooth as possible.
The SpeedCurve team at one of our many Hawaiian off-sites.
I’m immensely proud of the people who work at SpeedCurve and the nature of the conversations we have with our community. We like to do things for the right reasons and in the right way. It’s transformative when principles and profit align. Faster site, happier users.
We’re also just one node in the network. All of us here at SpeedCurve have found the web performance community to be deeply rewarding and driven by a shared sense of responsibility for the quality of the web experience. Velocity, Smashing, Performance Calendar, WPOStats, WebPerf Days, W3C groups, Web Perf Meetups and Performance.now(). The connections and commitment remain as we hop from company to company, topic to topic, and location to location, all while stewarding the web. Hat tip 🎩 perf people!
By caring about the flow and rendering of our web pages, we increase how quickly curiosity can be satiated, and how quickly our minds evolve. As we code and architect, we piece together an information experience that moves us along humanity's journey more quickly. Code as craft, code as convergence, code as compassion.
It may not feel like much at the time, but every line of code contributes. The care you take to shape that code and the experience it embodies matters. The choices we make, the empathy we have for our users and their access to information matter. Keep it evolving. Keep it speedy!
SpeedCurve + Embrace
Today, SpeedCurve takes its own evolutionary step and joins Embrace. Embrace and SpeedCurve both share a deep commitment to putting user experience at the heart of our tools. By joining forces, we can accelerate the evolution of the web performance and observability landscape, bringing a focus on user experience to a broader range of organisations and across a broader range of interactions.
SpeedCurve's new Vitals Overview dashboard with heatmaps that quickly surface where performance issues are hiding.
Evolution is fun and important!
For now though, you get to keep using SpeedCurve in exactly the same way, and we'll continue to add more great features.
So what kind of node on the interplanetary network are you? And can we help you evolve your tooling and conversations around user experience?
Reach out. There’s dial tone, Neo...
