Introduction to Web Performance

[00:00:03]
>> Steve Kinney: Hello, we're gonna talk about web performance. [COUGH] First thing's first. My name is Steve, and I am a principal frontend engineer at SendGrid. We do a bunch of things at SendGrid, the main business is sending out a billion emails a day. So if you've ever taken an Uber and gotten an email receipt, we sent that to you.

[00:00:27]
Or lost a bid on eBay, we informed you of that unfortunate loss. Spotify, Pandora, all of those kind of emails basically go through SendGrid to get to your inboxes. Easy way to think about it is something like Twillio but for email. I don't work on that part, I work on a rich client side application for building emails.

[00:00:50]
Which is really great, you get all the advantages of getting to work in React in the modern web and then build emails that should render in ala 2007. Which is a lot of fun, just a fun trivia fact is that Outlook, you're like, yeah that probably uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine.

[00:01:08]
No no, it uses Microsoft Word. So that's something we can talk about later if you're interested. But yeah, and the thing about a large client set up, cuz this is effectively a desktop app that we're building the browser, right. And you come across some interesting problems. I did a workshop a few months ago on managing state, how do you manage all the things that are happening in this application?

[00:01:34]
The other question, and kind of the theme of today, is how do you do it in a way that actually stays performant for users both on a $3,000 MacBook as well as an older PC? How do you have it working for people who are a stone's throw from the data center that it's hosted from in Chicago as well as across the world, right?

[00:01:56]
And also how does the application stay performant as it's alive for a long period of time? So we're gonna look at performance and figure out how do we think about performance and what are the trade offs that we are going to make? There are some totally do this thing and performance is gonna be great, right.

[00:02:15]
But a lot of times you have to make a trade off or you have to give up something to get something. And depending on the kind of application that you're building, the answer to those trade offs is different. So we'll kind of talk a little bit about the theory, the trade offs, how stuff works under the hood.

[00:02:31]
Because a lot of the performance advise that you'll just read on the Internet could very well be outdated. And if you just kinda follow all those things, just mandates that you have to do in your application, it's likely that they're either not helping, or worse, hurting the performance of your application.