Summary about High Performance Mobile Meetup

This Tuesday (Aug 30, 2011) I attended the SF web performance meetup at LinkedIn (Mountain View). Steve Souders presented a great talk "High Performance Mobile". Apart from this year Velocity conference HttpArchive lighting demo, this is the second time I joined his session. I read twice his previous talk slide "High Performance HTML5" at SF performance meet up, but could not join in person. Of course, I borrowed and read his two famous books.

The event started at 6:30pm, welcomed attendees with portable plastic water bottle and Mexican food. Steve began his talk around 7pm after some introduction from meetup organizer (Aaron Kulick) and LinkedIn performance lead (they are hiring performance engineers). The talk consisted of 4 parts, you can find details from http://www.slideshare.net/souders/high-performance-mobile-sfsv-web-perf

Part 1: WPO
Nothing new, but he reiterated the importance and role of WPO. The Web Is Dead (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1), will this be true and what is the fate of WPO? It might be too early to conclude "The web is dead". One thing is true, the web is evolving with HTML5.

Benefits of WPO

1. drives traffic
2. improves UX
3. increases revenue
4. reduces costs

Part 2: Why Mobile
Data and analysis show that Mobile is very important, but slow. Also the "Road is not clear" for performance optimization

Part 3: Mobile Best practices
Most desktop Web performance rules still apply. Steve mainly shared 5 items to which he thinks Web performance engineers need pay more attention.

1. Reduce Http request (sprite/dataURI/CSS3/Canvas) - this should be the golden rule
2. Responsive images (sencha.io src/DeviceAtlas/adaptive-images.com) - previously read an article tweeted by Stoyan, have some general idea about this
3. script async & defer (execute when available, execute when parsing finished. He also mentioned his controlJS) - heard this many times, are all new browsers supporting them? should we include javascript using async & defer
4. Appcache (5M+ limit) - from HTML5
5. Local storage (window.localStorage) - from HTML5

Part 4: Mobile tools
The impressive one of this part was his demo after he briefed following 4 tools. Steve also mentioned his bookmarklet for mobile performance but he didn't add into his deck.

1. pacpperf
2. jdrop
3. blaze.io
4. weinre (WEb INspector REmote)

After that, there was book giveaway and e-book lottery. Somehow I didn't have a number, so left before venue was clear up. (I hope I can get a signed copy of his book)

Key takeaways

1. Mobile is important but very slow
2. There are challenges to make mobile fast
3. There are tools to assist mobile performance
4. Mobile winners will be fast

Thanks Steve/Aaron/Sponsors to make this meetup so successful. Looking forward to next meetup in south bay area.