Zoompf is giving away a free ticket to the Web Performance Summit 2011. This is one day conference focused on web performance which is broadcast online around the world. It is a excellent event with lots of direct access to speakers, rich discussion with other attendees, and it covers a wide range of topics. There is an amazing lineup of speakers including: Mathias Bynens, Kyle Simpson, Joshua Bixby, and Aaron Peters. I will be giving a talk on lossy image optimization.

Zoompf has a free ticket and will be giving it away tonight at 9pm EDT. Want a change to get it? Here is what you need to do to be in the drawing:

1. Follow @zoompf on Twitter.
2. Retreet this tweet (also shown below)

That’s it! Simply follow @zoompf on Twitter, retweet our message, and you’re name will be in our drawing. We announce the winner tonight! Good luck and I hope to you can attend the Web Performance Summit 2011.

Its been a very busy time recently for the crew at Zoompf. We will be a silver sponsor at Velocity 2010 so if you are attending please make sure to stop by and say hello. We always love to meet users and get their feedback about our offerings. You can reach us at @zoompf on Twitter is a quick way to find out whats going on and where we are at Velocity. We also have a number of exciting announcements coming out during Velocity so stay tuned! Its going to be a very exciting month!

I’ll be presenting tomorrow Saturday April 3rd at the DevNation conference in Atlanta. DevNation is a travel conference that puts on intimate, one day conferences about web and software development in cities around the US . My presentation is entitled “Making the Web Fast!” and serves as an introduction to frontend performance with a twist. Instead of just explaining optimizations such as caching, domain sharding, or image crunching we are going to do some live performance autopsies of real sites. We’ll see what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong and how much they could save by implementing some front-end optimization techniques.

I’m excited about this talk. I’ve given presentations all over the world: from the steel and glass skyscrapers of Hong Kong and Tokyo, to the rain drizzled streets of London and Munich, to the faux glitz of Las Vegas, to the sunny California campuses of Silicon Valley, and even to the blandly painted government walls of an FBI field office. However there is something fun and special about presenting in my home town of Atlanta. Perhaps it is because I know where all the great restaurants and bars are to go socialize with all the attendees! Actually it is because there is a vibrant technology and entrepreneurial culture in Atlanta and I enjoy contributing to that whenever possible.

DevNation is only $50 for a whole day of technology, talks, food, and drinks. If you are in the area you should definitely attend. As an added bonus, anyone who comes up to me at DevNation and says the magical phrase “Zombie Apocalypse“ will get free PageBurner performance assessment. Unlike a free performance assessment through our website, our PageBurner performance assessment will analyze you entire website and contains full details and remediation advice for all the issues we find.

Hope to see you there.

Front-end Web performance is a growing space and several conferences are providing a forum for presentations and discussions about making the web fast. I’m excited to be a part of this trend and I’ll be presenting at a number of very cool conferences over the next two months. While two of these are physical conferences held in the United States one conference is an online conference that anyone can in the world can attend. Here is some information about upcoming conferences where I am presenting:

DevNation Atlanta

I’m be giving a great presentation at the touring DevNation conference’s stop in Atlanta on April 3rd entitled “Making the Web Fast.” It will serve as an introduction to frontend performance with a twist. Instead of just explaining optimizations such as caching, domain sharding, or image crunching we are going to do some live performance autopsies of real sites. We’ll see what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong and how much they could save by implementing some front-end optimization techniques. I will also reference some free tools and services, such as Zoompf’s free web performance scanning service, that attendees can use to speed up their own websites.

DevNation is a day long conference with some other great speakers focusing on web development. The conference’s venue is the Georgia Tech Research Institute at just off of Georgia Tech’s campus, which happens to be my alma mater. DevNation is an intimate conference with extremely cheap prices and it highly recommended to anyone in the Atlanta area who design, develops, or maintains web applications.

JSConf US 2010

For reasons I don’t entirely understand the awesome folks at JSConf asked me to present at JSConf 2010 about all the nasty stuff you can do with JavaScript. I will be sharing the stage with luminaries like Douglas Crockford (whose window.onerror is always defined, because nobody throws anything at Douglas Crockford and lives), Steve Souders, and John Resig. While they are all going to talk about important stuff I am there to talk about how to destroy the Internet using the evil side of JavaScript.

JSconf runs from April 17th and 18th with a hefty dose of partying and a whole other conference, ScurvyCon, on April 16th. The speaker line up is literally the best of the best. JSconf is already sold out and the tickets for ScurvyCon go on sale on April 4th. If you can’t make it JSConf is nice enough to post videos of all the talks after the conference so anyone can learn and enjoy.

Web Optimization Summit

The Web Optimization Summit is an especially cool conference. It physically takes place in Austin Texas on May 12th where you can attend and watch the speakers. But it is also a virtual conference, so anyone in the world can connect and attend the conference! I’ll be speaking on more advanced performance topic with a presentation entitled: Implementing a Web Performance Program without killing yourself. It addresses a problem we see time and time again at Zoompf: A developer or IT admin reads on of Steve’s performance books, or downloads YSlow, and takes it upon themselves, (and only themselves) to start optimizing website. Suddenly the app stops working because IT implemented HTTP caching without having proper changing control or file versioning. Or all the JavaScript and CSS in the development branch of source control has been minified. Or the design cannot be modified because all the original images have been crunched and indexed. Even worse these optimizations are hap hazard and not repeatable so site performance whips violently from fast to slow with each new publish. The talk explores how to add performance optimizations into your existing web development and deployment process. This allows for automated, repeatable performance optimizations that don’t add time to your development cycles.

The Web Optimization Summit has some other excellent speakers, such as Paul Irish and Kyle Simpson from Getify. The conference all takes place over a single day, is reasonably priced, and can be virtually attend from around the global.

Bribery

I’m very happy to be presenting at these conferences. If you are attending please stop on by and say hello. In fact, anyone who meets me and shows me a printed copy of their free Zoompf Web Performance Report with some feedback about the findings will get a special gift. More details on this soon. Hope to see you all at the conferences!

Phreaknic was a blast this past weekend! I’ve been attending and speaking there for 8 years now and while Halloween certainly cut into attendance this year there were some awesome presentations. Famulus‘s talk complete with pictures and video of his quest to build a functional Bussard fusion reactor was amazing. Adrian Crenshaw gave a great overview of the various anonymizing networks and darknets out there including some of the work Matt Wood and I did on Veiled. Finally Azureus‘s Tyler Pitchford gave a highly entertaining talk on reverse engineering. His best line? “And now you are on the NOP sled! Wheeeee!”

I spoke last on Friday night and presented on web performance. As usually I ran long but I was getting some excellent questions from the audience. You can download the slides from my presentation, Optimizing Web Performance, on Zoompf.com.