Category: Latest Happenings

  • Welcoming Nicholas Zakas to the Team

    I am so very pleased to announce that Nicholas Zakas and I are joining forces to form a consulting duo. Nicholas has spent the last five years defining what it meant to to be a client-side engineer at Yahoo!. He consistently raised the client-side glass ceiling with his commitment to good code and practical solutions.…

  • The Year of Business Metrics – Don’t make your users run away!

    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…

  • Object Oriented CSS video on YDN

    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…

  • Object Oriented CSS, Grids on Github

    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…

  • New tool: Easy image optimization with Smush it

    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…

  • So you wanna be a web dev?

    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…

  • Vote for me at SXSW! – performance panel

    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…

  • iPhone, the morning after

    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…

  • Website Performance Bootcamps in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore

    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…

  • Video, Yahoo!s latest performance breakthroughs, or — I’m famous!

    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…