Jonathan Klein: Upgrading the Web

For our first meetup at Wayfair's new location, a 10 minute walk from the old one, Jonathan Klein of Etsy, the former organizer of the meetup, is going to reprise his recent talk at Velocity Santa Clara. I saw it in California, and it's great! His title is "Upgrading the Web - Driving Support For New Standards", and the talk has a lot of practical suggestions for getting the most out of state-of-the-art technologies.

There are two classes of improvements that this talk will cover:

1. Server side changes, like SPDY and HTTP Origin/Hop Hints

2. Browser changes, like support for WebP, Client Hints, and pre-fetching

The talk will go over each technology briefly, and cover the current state of support. Then Jonathan will take a real world example of a typical site and show what the performance improvement would be if all of these technologies were leveraged to the maximum and supported fully by all browsers that visited the page. We’ll compare before and after views with WebPagetest, and put some bounds on the opportunity that we are missing out on because of delays in support for new standards.

Finally, the talk will close with a call to action – encouraging people to reach out to CDNs, standards bodies, and browser vendors to ask for support. The primary purpose of this talk is to raise awareness about these options and push the industry and the web forward by getting more people talking about and asking for adoption.

Time: Pizza at 6:30, talk at 7:15

Directions details: Once inside the mall, find the escalators near the waterfall to the 3rd floor of the mall. If those are not working, you can take the elevators behind the waterfall to the 3rd floor. Ask for Wayfair at the desk. There will be a greeter to send you into 4 Copley Place and up to the 7th floor inside Wayfair.