Hello from Europe!
I’m delighted to be joining some of my favourite web performance people at SpeedCurve!
Who am I?
I’ve been a full-time web performance consultant for around nine years. For about half that time I worked freelance, and the other half for Site Confidence / NCC Group in the UK.
My journey into performance started in the late 1990s, while I was working for an elearning provider and discovering the challenges of delivering rich content over the internet. To overcome some of these challenges, we built our own Java-based player, complete with caching, content compression, and even bandwidth detection so it could switch between video, audio, and text versions of a course depending on network speed.
Ultimately the business didn’t survive the dotcom bust, but it lit a spark...
Joining the SpeedCurve team
After all the twists and turns of 2020, the unprecedented year ended up with the pleasure of joining the SpeedCurve team and helping to build the tool trusted by so many brands around the world that are striving to improve their customer experience.
As a developer I've always been fascinated by the web and how it enriches people's lives, and now I am jumping into the very essence of it – how it renders, performs and behaves! Thanks to SpeedCurve for this opportunity, I am so excited to work along with the veterans of the web performance industry (and just plain talented people), as well as to be closer to the performance community.
The SpeedCurve family grows
I’m really excited to have become the latest member of the SpeedCurve family. I’ve known Mark for 20 years, since he started lecturing in design here in New Zealand. I was one of his first students and we’ve always kept in touch. Our careers have overlapped at various points, it’s the nature of a small country with an even smaller web design industry. I remember attending the Webstock conference where Mark first presented SpeedCurve in the Start-Up Alley competition. He won, netting the prize money and a trip to the USA to present his new startup. We all know how relevant and useful his startup has become and I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to get involved in its development.
A long time coming...
I’ve joined SpeedCurve! I’m thrilled to share this news and have never been more excited about a career change than I am today. I’ve known this cast of characters for a while and am humbled that they have brought me onto the team. As Tammy put it when she joined, if this crew invited you to work with them, “what would you say?”
Tammy, Steve and Cliff at Velocity Conference circa 2015
Who am I?
As a veteran in the performance industry, I’ve spent a large part of my career helping to build performance culture. I’ve been in countless rooms and discussions defending the case for performance and helping to educate cross-functional teams about the impact of performance on the user experience and ultimately the health of the business.
My journey has taken me to both sides – as a product leader focused on building tools and solutions for customers, and as a practitioner focused on creating a culture of performance for one the world’s largest brands.
Woohoo! I'm helping build SpeedCurve
I’m super excited to be able to say that I’ve joined Mark, Steve, and Tammy at SpeedCurve!
I’ve watched how Mark has shown over the last couple of years that performance monitoring doesn’t have to be dry and data-heavy; it can be insightful, interactive, and actionable. I’ve also been a follower of Steve’s work for many years. In fact, I should probably thank Steve for providing me with the knowledge that got me interested in web performance in the first place! Tammy’s work has been really interesting to follow, too - her focus on real people and how web performance impacts the way they use our websites is something that resonates strongly with me.
Joseph making BBC News way faster for all users.
I've joined SpeedCurve! Here's why
TL;DR
If Mark and Steve invited you to work with them, what would you say? Exactly.
Long version
Okay, I have to elaborate a bit more about why I’m ridiculously excited about working with Mark and Steve. My first foray into the performance space was at the Velocity Conference in 2009. If you had told me then that someday I’d be working with that tall guy rocking the main stage, I would’ve thanked you for the kind words… while secretly thinking you were nuts. But here I am!
Tammy at International Women's Day Tech Talks in Toronto
Multiple teams and multiple users
This week we added support for organizations with multiple teams and multiple users.
One of the toughest challenges was simply working out what to call the different layers within the SpeedCurve app. Developers can spend years buried inside a data model but at the end of the day the UI has to be intuitive and easy to use! I hope we’ve done that and if not we’d love your feedback.
Mark+Steve, Performance+Design
I'm excited to announce that I've joined SpeedCurve!
When SpeedCurve was just a twinkle in Mark's eye, he contacted me about the concept and I encouraged him that a commercial version of WebPageTest was needed. When I saw the early versions of SpeedCurve, I was blown away. Mark presents traditional performance data in a way that is more compelling, revealing his strong design background.
Mark has pioneered this new territory where performance and design overlap. It's exciting to say "overlap". Many times there's little interaction between designers and performance engineers. When there is interaction, it can feel adversarial with no one wanting to give any ground. And yet, designers and performance engineers are after the same thing: creating a great user experience!
Design and performance are connected, like the yin and yang. They aren't opposing forces, but instead complement each other. Users want an experience that is rich and fast. The trick is figuring out how to do that. That's where SpeedCurve comes in.
