*Beer and Pizza* - A Baseline for Web Performance with PhantomJS

• Beer and Pizza Provided *

(Update: If you haven't RSVP'd yet, please do so soon so we can get an accurate food count. Should be a great talk!).

We have a treat in store for the next meetup! Come join us as Wesley Hales from Apigee (and organizer of the HTML5 meetup) and Ryan Bridges from CNN give an encore presentation of their Velocity 2013 talk: A Baseline for Web Performance with PhantomJS (http://velocityconf.com/velocity2013/public/schedule/detail/28175).

To accommodate schedules, we'll be meeting instead on Wednesday, October 16th down in the basement of the Biltmore in the Hypepotamus suite at A-110. We'll post signs by the elevators directing you where to go.

Hope to see you all there for what should be a great talk!

Overview

HTTP requests, heavy/unminified resources, and UI thread blocking should be on the mind of every front-end developer. These are just a few issues that can cause serious bottlenecks in page load times. Having a faster load time equals better search engine rankings, higher conversion rates, and an overall reduction in bandwidth costs. How do we measure all the aforementioned performance killers? How can we bring these measurements into our automated build process to ensure that our site is getting better, and not worse?

PhantomJS, a headless WebKit with JavaScript API, gives us the ability to create lightweight performance measurement tools with JavaScript (and so much more). In this talk we’ll review how PhantomJS has influenced some of the web’s top ranking sites and how it can be put into any automated build to produce reporting on performance. We’ll look at how other open source projects such as WebPageTest.org measure up to this approach and see when one might be better over the other.

About the Speakers

Wesley Hales

Wesley Hales is a User Interface architect from Atlanta, GA. He has been involved in UI and User Experience roles for over a decade in both startup and enterprise environments. Wesley co-founded several enterprise frameworks during his 4.5 years at Red Hat and served as a co-founder of a recently acquired startup. He is now employed by Apigee as a software developer mainly focused on UI. Overall, Wesley enjoys creating world-class user interfaces and experiences that people fall in love with. You can see him speak at the occasional conference, read his posts on wesleyhales.com, or follow him on twitter @wesleyhales.

Ryan Bridges

Industry veteran with more than 12 years of experience in a variety of roles. Currently employed by Turner Broadcasting as a Senior Web Application Developer, serving as the Tech Lead for CNN Digital’s Video Products group.