Stubbornella - Nicole Sullivan

A marked change has occurred since the first Velocity Conference a year ago, and while the effects are not yet obvious, they will be. The web is still slow, but we have something now, that we didn’t a year ago: business metrics. This was the year we quantified the impact of performance choices on our businesses, and the results were astounding.

For those of you who couldn’t attend, this article summarizes results from AOL, Shopzilla, Google, Bing, Hotmail, and Chrome and gives pointers to highlights of Velocity Conference 2009.

Yahoo! Developer Network has released a video of my Object Oriented CSS talk at Web Directions North just in time for Ada Lovelace day. I’ve also been included in a feature on Women in Technology. I’m absolutely flattered to be included among these fantastic technical women. Wow.

Object Oriented CSS: for high performance websites and web applications.

Find out more about object oriented css

1. Open source project on github (GIT is having some DNS issues, be patient)
2. Follow along with the slides on slideshare
3. Join the OOCSS google group

My Object Oriented CSS grids and templates are open sourced on github. They have all the functionality of YUI grids plus some important features.

• Only 4kb, half the size of YUI grids. (I was totally happy when I checked the final size!)
• They allow infinite nesting and stacking.
• The only change required to use any of the objects is to place it in the HTML, there are no changes to other places in the DOM and no location dependent styling. Eases back-end development and makes it a lot easier to manage for newbies.
• Solution for sub-pixel rounding errors.

http://wiki.github.com/stubbornella/oocss

template.css and grids.css

…My prediction is that you’ll be writing complex layouts in less than 24 hours without adding a line to the CSS file.

I’m at Ajax Experience this week with my teammate, Stoyan Stefanov. This morning we did a demo of our new tool SmushIt.com. Smush it allows you to automate image optimization by using the best of open source algorithms to achieve the smallest, high performance images possible.

Smush it comes in different flavors:

• You can upload a bunch of pictures in your browser
• You can provide us with a list of image urls or
• You can get a Firefox Extension to optimize the images found on any web page

The Web Standards Curriculum published by Opera is a great place to start. It will give you the basics of Front-end Engineering from the ground up. The second wave of articles was recently published including a background image and sprites how-to by yours truly.

Time to board a plane, so I can’t tell you more just now, but check it out. It is a great place to get started or brush up on your understanding of web standards.

Website performance is still very much in it’s infancy. Most performance experts come from a traditional engineering background and yet, as Steve Souders showed in his book, the front end is responsible for more than 80% of end user response time.

I was excited when Ed Eliot asked me to be a part of a SXSW web performance experts panel, not only because he and I always have really excellent conversations, but also because of the quality of the people who are on board for the panel. The panelists are uniquely positioned to speak to the concerns of web developers. In addition to being performance experts, we are front-end engineers — as yet a rare combination. In our day to day work, we have experienced the pain points we’ll discuss on the panel.

Who will be on the panel?

Ed Eliot, Stoyan Stefanov, Stuart Colville, and I will join forces to talk about website performance including practical solutions to common problems. These guys are brilliant, and the panel should be really fun.

VOTE FOR US!

My Treo stopped syncing in January and I immediately started missing all my meetings. I need the device to ring every few seconds to remind me to blink and breathe, so life without a properly synced agenda was awful — just ask my colleagues. Guppy brain.

A Palm user for the past eight years, I made the switch to an iPhone 3G a few weeks ago. I’ve had one palm or another since I was gifted an S300 and became (shockingly) a productive member of society. I vaguely want to give the iPhone a fair shot, aware that my bias toward familiarity is inevitable, however there are a few things about the iPhone that totally and completely suck.

I spoke to audiences in four countries and got a little sick from eating street food along the way.

I just got back from a whirlwind 13 day performance tour of four countries. With only two days to present in each country I had to maximize impact as much as possible.

I was supposed to do two sessions the first day, and one the second. Instead it was more like four sessions the first day and three the next. Every two days I began the whole thing again. By the end, I couldn’t stand the sound of my own voice and I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. It was awesome.

No, seriously! I really liked it. It allowed me greater insight into the parts of my talk that work well, and others that are less fabulous. I think it has made me a better speaker, though my audience might disagree!

Well, not quite. But I am pleased with the results. Who would have thought that the shy girl who almost failed a public speaking course at university would turn out to really enjoy presenting. Turns out I only like speaking about geeky things, preferably to geeks. A limitation perhaps, but far less limiting than nearly peeing myself with fear in college. No, not literally.

Anyway, check it out. It is jam packed with brand new performance ideas to make your site fly.

It is hard to remember not to make any mention of pants, even if I know what it means in British English. Beyond telling Murray Rowen that I liked his underwear in front of a crowd of people, I recently went to London to speak at the Front-end Summit being held there. I gave two talks. The first was High Performance Websites in particular the impact of choices made by front-end engineers. The second talk was about Architecting High Performance CSS.

Today was my first day at Yahoo. I spent most of the day in orientation but I am already impressed with the culture. People seem genuinely happy and able to make working hard a part of living well. And damn they’re smart! Fabulous well-rounded geeks. I know, I know, it sounds like I’ve been drinking the kool-aide.

I’ve wanted to try one for years, and i finally got the opportunity today. It rocked every bit as much as I thought it might. Hugo noticed that the “turtle” speed was indicated. I found that it was pretty zippy, which makes me wonder what it would be like on the normal setting.

I’ve been offered a chance to manage my team during a transition, so I am heading back to Paris temporarily. Having previously been principally a project manager rather than team manager I’m excited for both the new challenge and, of course, the chance to reconnect with my excellent team.

And in honor of that I have added a new category “An American in California”, though I go back and forth about how much Parisian is in there after four years of proving Darwin was wrong about me. I leave there knowing how to speak French, push in the subway, dance salsa, build enormous [...]

Youssef promised that if I tried salsa dancing for one month twice a week by the end of the month I would be able to dance more or less. And he was right. Who would have thought? I’m so maladroit I don’t think I really believed him, but its so much fun [...]

Hier soir, je suis allee a la Coupole pour faire deux cours du salsa avec Seve et Mouaze. Le premier etait un vrai cours debutant. Nous avons passes une heure entier sur les pates base. A la dernier minute il a rajoute un tourne super simple s’appelle la “Dile que no !“, [...]

I tried salsa dancing for the first time last sunday at L’Atelier.

I finally got my results from the slightly broken (only test 6 and the results section) BBC brain sexID test. It turns out I am 50% male, 50% female. Not that much of a surprise, I may be a carpenter, but I still love pink.

I’m soaked, the bathroom is soaked, several towels are soaked. Yes, my bichon has had a bath. I’ve learned to wash him without wearing any pants because I end up so wet that my clothes are unsalvageable.
He is a bichon fortement type. Which means he really looks like a bichon frise. [...]

Some very funny poetry set to an even more entertaining flash movie. Well worth a look. Dance, Monkeys, Dance

Update: I discovered that, the very funny spoken word artist featured in this animation, has a website, with even more recordings of his performances. His name is Ernest Cline. He is excellent, check it out.