Front End Sheffield: March 2019

Join us on the last Thursday of March for Front End Sheffield at Sheffield Technology Parks. This month: Ryan Townsend (@ryantownsend) and Harry Roberts (@csswizardry) will talk on performance topics.

Our event is free and inclusive; we welcome people of all backgrounds and experience levels to join. We will be checking in people at the door so be sure to sign up online.

Before you attend, please read our code of conduct: https://github.com/amyvbenson/FrontEndSheffCoC

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This month we'll be welcoming two speakers from Shift Commerce talking about performance:

Harry Roberts (@csswizardry)
Consultant Front-end Architect: @google, @UN, @Etsy, @kickstarter, @BBC, @Unilever, @Deloitte, and more • Speaker • Author: @cssguidelines

TALK: It’s My (Third) Party, and I’ll Cry if I Want To

Like it or not, a huge part of modern web development involves the use of third-party providers: fonts, analytics, ads, tracking, and more all have an impact of performance, and can leave us (or, more worryingly, our visitors) susceptible to performance degradation.

In this talk, we’ll take a look at unruly or uninvited (third-)party guests: how to detect them, how to audit them, and how to manage them. We’ll also look at the different tools available to help us stress-test and quantify the overhead these third parties bring, and what that means for users and businesses alike.

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Ryan Townsend (@ryantownsend)
With over 15 years experience developing for the web, and an undying passion for web performance, Ryan Townsend is the CTO of Shift Commerce – a SaaS e-commerce platform bringing agility to mid-to-enterprise retailers. His pragmatic and performance-led outlook means that—on the rare occasion that he does wear a shirt—his sleeves stay firmly rolled up: even as an exec, his favourite place is right there in the thick of things with his team. Outside of the office, you’ll usually find him picking up heavy objects in the gym or falling off his mountain bike down the side of a hill.

TALK: Chaperones and curfews: minimising 3rd party impact

Every year websites get heavier – but the majority of growth isn’t coming from code written at the organisations running them... it’s coming from 3rd parties.

Long gone are the days when it was viable to build everything internally, but their impact on performance is already getting a little out-of-hand. We don’t want to be the fun police throwing everyone out, but we can start to moderate the party.

In this talk we won’t be looking to remove 3rd parties altogether – nobody likes having their toys taken away; instead we’ll be taking the practical approach of accepting that 3rd parties aren’t going anywhere and look at what strategies we can employ for maintaining performance and safeguarding against slowdowns, outages and abuse.

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Post-meetup social
Location to be confirmed

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Running order
6:15pm - Doors open (please sign in at reception)
6:30pm - Welcome
6:40pm - Ryan Townsend
7:00pm - Break
7: 10pm - Harry Roberts
7:40pm – Open mic
7:45pm – Social