A Performance Bookmarklet (Tutorial) & How to use ImageMagick

Hello #towebperf friends,

here is the excellent lineup for our March meetup with two of our loyal members speaking:

1. Tutorial: How to build a handy performance bookmarklet

Ever found yourself in a meeting having to quickly pull some performance characteristics of a website or web-app? Or do you go through the same manual steps to get specific data out of the browser every single time??In this tutorial, you will learn ways to solve this by writing your own small (or larger) tools and discuss the simplest yet powerful approach "Bookmarklets" in detail. As part of this journey we will also dive deeper into some of the most useful APIs to analyze loading characteristics: namely the Navigation, User and Resource timing API.

About the speaker:

Michael (https://github.com/micmro) (@MicMro (https://twitter.com/micmro)) is a globe-trotting web-developing aficionado with a soft spot for architecture, performance and accessibility. After leaving his native Germany he worked as front and backend developer in Ireland and Korea before he found his current home as Senior Frontend Dev at Nurun (http://www.nurun.com/en/careers/toronto) (Razorfish Global) Toronto, were he helped to rebuild walmart.ca (http://walmart.ca/).In his spare (tech) time he maintains several open source pet projects like stylifyme (http://stylifyme.com/) or the performance-bookmarklet (https://github.com/nurun/performance-bookmarklet).

2. How to use ImageMagick

Responsive images may be a hot trend in web dev, but they come with a scary problem: the need to efficiently, automatically resize hundreds or thousands of assets. In this talk I’ll show you how to use ImageMagick — an open-source command-line graphics editor — to quickly resize your images, while maintaining visual quality and a small filesize. I’ll go step-by-step to cover everything you need from installation, to selecting the appropriate options, to integrating with your task-runner or CMS. By the end of this talk you’ll be ready to serve beautiful and fast images to all your users.

About the speaker:

David Newton [1] is a full-stack web developer, currently working in a research program at St. Michael’s Hospital, who strongly believes in making web content accessible and usable. This goal has made Dave passionate about web standards, responsive design, progressive enhancement, accessibility guidelines, and web performance. Since October 2012 he has been a member of the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group [2], and is a co-editor of their Use Cases and Requirements for Standardizing Responsive Images [3].

[1] http://twitter.com/newtron/

[2] http://responsiveimages.org/

[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/respimg-usecases/