Web Performance for People and Planet

Two tech thought-leaders zoom out to show how to achieve big performance wins whilst protecting the environment! These fascinating talks will speak to commerciad, technology and enviornmental interests alike.
We spend much of our lives in the cloud: the collection of hosted applications and infrastructure that power our mobile, online lives. Yet, many are unaware of the impact of their online presence on the enviornment. How are obvious performance and environmental gains being missed by some of the smartest dev brains on the planet? We reveal some simple, but powerful, answers as to how to optimise web performance for people and planet.
This evening is by no means for techies only; the talks will appeal to all levels of technical expertise and are geared towards the real-world business implications of web performance.
Please stay for a glass of wine and some nibbles afterwards!
1/ Nick Mailer: Performance pitfalls and possibilities: optimising cloud for the real world
Big, faster, wider: everyone’s chasing performance in the cloud; but too often, we can end up chasing our own tails.
Sometimes DevOps culture gets lost in the weeds, where it cannot see the wood for the trees when it comes to performance gains.
This talk shows how we can zoom out, and find big performance wins before we start sweating the small stuff. Sometimes, a solution to performance requires technical ingenuity.
At other times, just a simple pull in business focus. Nick distils two decades of performance-wrangling into a 20 minute tour of best practice, telling examples and take-home points that will save aeons of cumulative wasted time, energy and resources in the cloud!
2/ Tom Greenwod: A greener web is better for everyone.
The internet has huge potential to move us towards a sustainable future through dematerialising products and streamlining industries. Despite its many benefits though, it is not perfect. The storage, processing and transmission of data consumes electricity and that has an impact on the environment. The web may appear clean, but it has a real impact on climate change and its impact is growing as our hunger for data accelerates.
The good news is that there are simple things that we can do about it, and contrary to what some may think, a green website can actually be a better website for everyone. Tom explains how approaching web projects through the lens of sustainability can have benefits not just for the environment, but also in terms of improved SEO, accessibility, user experience and even cost savings. We’ll look at some practical steps to green the web and the benefits that they bring.
About the speakers
Nick Mailer is founder and Global CTO at Positive.
Positive founder and Global CTO, Nick Mailer, is an industry veteran. He has spent over two decades innovating the technologies that now form the basis of global e-commerce and cloud computing.
In the 1990’s, Mailer co-authored the first Internet–in–education book to be published in the UK and ran a number of early tech conferences introducing the power of the Internet to educators and contributed to the Times Education Supplement.
As well as his business leadership, Mailer is an accomplished software engineer, who believes that it is vitally important for senior technical leaders to continue at the coalface.
Mailer continues to publish academic works about technology and philosophy - the area in which he trained. A much in-demand speaker, he speaks at conferences around the world.
Tom Greenwood is co-founder and Managing Director at Wholegrain Digital, founded in 2007 as London’s first WordPress agency and a specialist in web performance and sustainability.
Tom has a background in design and sustainability, having created the first online guide to sustainable product design back in 2004 and won the UK government’s Business Leader of Tomorrow Award for his forward thinking approach to business and sustainability.
He is passionate about business, design and web technology being part of the solution to environmental issues and was lead author of the Sustainable Web Manifesto and led the project to create the first carbon calculator for websites. In his spare time he has an unhealthy obsession with natural health and likes to run barefoot around the woods