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Mike Loukides: Well, Steve, you're one of the co-chairs for Velocity this year.
What's Velocity about?
Steve Souders: Velocity is our 4th year
and it's really two camps that have come together,
web performance and operations.
And so I co-chair the web performance part.
That's really about making things faster,
mostly in terms of the user experience.
So how long does, is the user left waiting for what they asked for?
And then the operations side is chaired by Jesse Robbins
and that's about performance and speed
but more from the scalability efficiency perspective.
If I have 500,000or 500 million requests or users,
how am I gonna build a database for that that doesn't fall over?
How am I going to serve up a website
that can take that kind of load without getting buried?
And so there are two,
a lot of the stuff I'm talkin' about,
we have Nicole Sullivan talking about CSS
and Yehuda Katz talking about Javascript.
And then we have folks from Rapspace and Cisco talking about hardware
and then also kind of everything in between
in that app layer in between.
Talking about like Sequel and faster databases and Hadoop
you know, and HTP headers and networking protocols.
And so it's a wide range
and these two groups are kind of from different backgrounds
but it's a really good combination
because everyone is like an optimization geek.
Like how do we get the most efficiency we can out of what we're building?
And there's something about these attendees
where wanting to optimize stuff is just part of their nature.
And so even though some of the techniques and technologies
are different,
everyone has the same kind of mindset.
Mike Loukides: And you've got a really great program this year
but what are the new elements in it?
Steve Souders: Well, the main new thing,
I guess there's two new things this year,
the one that I'm really excited about is we added a mobile track
and I guess technically it's like a half track.
We have a third ballroom and on Thursday afternoon,
that's going to be about Velocity Culture.
But on Wednesday afternoon,
so half of that track is on mobile performance.
And so that's something that I've been focusing on
for the last six months or so,
six or eight months.
And I think,
to me it's very exciting because
most of the time,
six years ago, when I started working on desktop web performance,
everything was pretty bad.
So if you talked to someone about
'Don't you think that web is slow?',
everyone was 'Oh yes. Oh my gosh.
It's way too slow.'
Well now especially in the top 100 sites in the world,
a lot of people are paying attention to performance
and what they deliver to the desktop
but we're still not getting that same level of optimization,
of performance best practices on mobile.
So we're back.
So for me I'm back,
I'm like starting where I did six years ago on desktop.
I'm doing that on mobile.
Mike Loukides: The world wide web is now a mobile phenomenon.
Steve Souders: Yeah.
Everyone I talk to, there's almost no,
in I don't know maybe a dozen,
in all the talks, the last dozen talks I've done at conferences,
I always ask 'Who here is happy with the speed of their mobile experience?'
And only once has one guy raised his hand and said,
'I'm happy".
I'm all, "Thanks for ruining a the talk.'
In general, 99.99% of the people out there,
'It's just too slow.
And anything you can do to help these content providers,
these companies,
make what they're delivering faster,
oh please do it.'
Mike Loukides: So what's the difference?
Is it the wireless pipe to the mobile device versus--
versus the wired pipe to your desktop
or is the problem elsewhere?
Steve Souders: Well I think certainly the network connection
is a much bigger problem than it was on desktop.
On desktop without changing,
it took, back when I started, people were still doing dial-up.
Back then, six years ago, and even today,
you can take a typical website
and in three months, make it twice as fast.
And in three months, we're not seeing any significant shift
in user's desktop bandwidth speeds.
Connection speeds.
So we're able to work around that.
It's gonna be a lot harder on mobile to work around how slow the network is
but it's still poss,
the network performance,
the carrier network you're using is still going to be a significant issue,
bigger than it was on desktop.
But there's still things we can do.
Like if you use App Cache, you know, manifest files,
then you don't have to use the network to request 50 resources.
You only need, the second time the user goes to the site,
you only need a handful of requests.
So again, even though the connection is going to be slower,
there are techniques we can use to work around that.
Mike Loukides: So basically you're caching,
you're capturing everything on the device.
Steve Souders: Yeah. And it's certainly a big thing I've been evangelizing
in the last couple of years has been Javascript and CSS performance,
certainly especially Javascript performance.
And that applies,
those techniques are even more important on the mobile device
where you have less memory, weaker CPU typically.
So the more we can get, and it's still the same thing as,
pretty much now across the top websites in the world,
you're going to see compression and caching headers
and I'm looking at mobile versions of these top websites.
And the stuff that they learn for desktop,
it seems like they've unlearned it for mobile.
Mike Loukides: Oh that's interesting.
Steve Souders: Yeah. So I'm seeing mobile websites from these top destinations
and they're not caching anything.
It's like, it's even more important here.
Let's please turn that on.
Mike Loukides: Okay.
Well, I've just one more question.
I've heard a little bit about expanding Velocity overseas.
Can you say anything about that?
Steve Souders: Yeah.
Well last year, we did,
so this year's Velocity program in the US is 50% bigger.
We're up to about 1800 people this year, I think.
I don't have the final numbers yet because it actually hasn't started.
But it's gonna be big.
It's gonna be significantly bigger than last year and that's exciting
but we also can't expect everyone in the world to come to this one event.
That's, that would be unmanageable.
So last year we did the first O'Reilly Conference in China.
We did Velocity China in Beijing in December.
That sold out.
We're gonna do that again this December and
we're also looking at doing a Velocity in Europe.
But we don't have any definite news yet
but I know Gina Blaber,
the head of Conferences here from O'Reilly,
has been talking to some venues over there.
So I hope pretty soon we'll have an announcement about that.
Mike Loukides: Okay. That sounds really exciting.
Steve Souders: Yeah.
I think the people,
I just got back from a couple mobile conferences in Europe
and people were asking 'Could you bring Velocity to the EEU?'
So hopefully we'll have some good news on that pretty soon.
Mike Loukides: Okay. That's great.
Thanks a lot.
Steve Souders: Thanks.