UX and SPA Performance Techniques and Measuring

Performance will be the focus of the next BayJax event, hosted at Intuit’s Mountain View campus. This event coincides with Intuit’s internal Front End Engineering Summit, so there will be loads of people to meet, food to eat, and demo stations.

5:30pm-6:30pm :Pizza, Networking, demo stations, recruiting announcements (please come see me if you have any).

6:30pm - 7:30pm : James Jennings, TurboTax - User Experience Latency & TTO Finish and File

A description of the tooling and processes put in place by the TTO Finish and File team in an effort to own our experience performance.

James Jennings Bio:

James works at Intuit as a Development Manager for the Finish and File team within TurboTax. In a previous life, James was a pretty darn good mobile developer, and an OK entrepreneur. His passion these days is making awesome experiences with great people, great ideas, and great data

7:30pm - 9:00pm : Philip Tellis, SOASTA - Measuring the performance of Single Page Web Applications

Single Page Applications are a problem for RUM tools because there aren’t easy ways to tell when a new page component has been requested asynchronously as a result of an intentional user action.

Many network requests are back end service calls initiated periodically by the app. For example, a ping to check if content has been updated or to check if the current user should still be signed in to their account.

Even with requests that are initiated by a user action, not all may fit into the definition of a “page view”. For example, a user typing into a search box that has auto-complete capabilities will often result in network requests, but these requests result in very small amounts of data transfer, happen very frequently, and do not count towards page-views.

The scene is further complicated by SPA frameworks like Angular, Backbone and others.

In this talk, we’ll learn about some of the tricks used by boomerang to measure the performance of single page applications, going as far as capturing errors and waterfall information across browsers.

Philip Tellis Bio: Philip Tellis is a geek who likes to make the computer do his work for him. As Chief Architect at SOASTA, he analyses the impact of various design decisions on web application performance, scalability and security. He is the lead developer of "boomerang" -- a JavaScript based web performance testing tool.