We made it to the end of the decade! The web is in a challenging place in many ways, and for our end of year special we wanted to celebrate the ways in which the web can bring people together, create galvanise political movements and get help to people who need it.
Several times in the last couple of years we’ve seen what happens when a petition posted on the government e-petitions website goes viral, and signatures flood in at a phenomenal rate. Learn from Andrew White, CTO of Unboxed, the team that built the petition site, about how the signing rate has increased as the petitions system has captured the public imagination, and how the site handles it.
When we’ve been able to, London Web Performance has supported Crisis, a UK charity working to end homelessness on our streets. Unfortunately they are busier than ever and the annual Crisis at Christmas event is for many people who visit the Christmas centres a rare wonderful experience, and some welcome respite from the reality of homelessness. Crisis at Christmas is a logistical marvel, depending on a team of specialist volunteers, including technology professionals who do everything from organising internet access for guests to creating back-office systems for volunteers.
Ticket revenue (less Eventbrite fees) for this month’s event will be donated to Crisis.
This month we take a particularly narrow focus on a couple of specific performance methods: network throttling, and custom audits in Lighthouse. Matt Zeunert, founder of DebugBear, will talk about creating the network conditions that you need for proper testing of your site, and we’re pleased to bring Aymen Loukil to London from France for a talk on using custom audits in Lighthouse to monitor business performance metrics.
We’re continuing our nomadic tour of London’s tech scene – this month we’re thankful to Akamai for hosting us in the heart of the West End. Due to the small size of the venue there will be fewer tickets available than normal. Food and drink will be provided.
Autumn has arrived and as we desperately wind the clocks back an hour in the hopes of a bit more summer (and a bit more sleep), London Web Performance brings you two solid web performance talks to warm your hearts and cool your CPUs.
Ivan Akulov, a performance consultant making his speaking debut in the UK, has selflessly reviewed hundreds of Webpack plugins so you don’t have to, and will be presenting his findings. We’re bringing Ivan from Belarus exclusively to speak for us for LWP.
Closer to home, Matt Hobbs, head of Frontend development at the Government Digital Service, will help us understand the importance of performance in government services, and what GDS’s approach is like.
Bring your best free conference socks and prepare for another exciting LWP lineup.
This month LWP returns to its second-tuesday slot with two visiting speakers. Tim Vereecke, a web performance consultant at Akamai and scale-modelling enthusiast, will discuss data saver mode, and what it means for your website. Lydia Hallie is also making a special trip to join us from Sweden to present her web performance trivia quiz. I came across Lydia’s advanced JavaScript questions repo when it was featured in JavaScript Weekly and am delighted she’s able to bring that content to LWP.
The Cloudflare office is in County Hall, Belvedere Rd. The entrance is in front of Forum Magnum Square on Belvedere Road. Once inside, walk to the elevators foyer on the left of the central staircase and press “6” on the keypad. Use the elevator shown on the display (A, B or C). Once on floor 6, go left to get into the office.
This month we welcome two big hitters from browser implementors: Google and Samsung both work hard to deliver the best possible performance in their browsers, and are keen to encourage developers to take advantage of the best features to create smooth and responsive user experiences.
Ada Rose Canon will help us make the jump to Web Workers, with real world use cases, and libraries to make it easier to use workers when you can.
Yoav Weiss will ask what fast really means, and share the results of Google’s research which attempts to zero-in on the key metrics that relate most closely to user experience and satisfaction.
Join us at London Web Performance in July for a special guest all the way from Manchester, Darren Hall, talking to us about image performance, and the FT’s Katie Koschland on the topic of load testing.
Join us in June for an evening of talks on the theme of scaling up. We have Adam Braimbridge from the FT’s technology team explaining how they maintain control and effective management of 1000s of repos. And Edd Read, a co-founder of Graze and childcare start-up Tiney, will talk about the way starting a tech business has changed over time and how that helps us scale organisations with fewer risks and less investment.
Drinks and food will be provided. We’re grateful to the Financial Times for hosting us in their brand new Bracken House offices this month. Because our venue this month is a newly refurbished building, we are still working out the details of how we can best run LWP in this space. As a result, food and drink options may be different to our usual options, and childcare will be provided off-site (but close by!)
Remember London Web Performance events are ticketed, and funds raised from tickets are used exclusively for running the events. Get yours on eventbrite now!
For our first 2019 series event, we’re bringing you Terrence Eden with buckets of stuff you probably didn’t know about SVG, and Hadley Beeman will tell us all about the new NHS Digital plan and how it will help bring better technology and use of the web into government (and more specifically health) services.
We’re grateful to the Telegraph for hosting us this month, and even more so for agreeing to provide food and drinks for us.
Remember London Web Performance events are ticketed, and funds raised from tickets are used exclusively for running the events. Get yours on eventbrite now!