As usual, the technical talks were outstanding. But I found some of the non-technical talks of particular interest.

So many of the challenges we face (performance-related, or otherwise) often have roots in cultural or organizational issues rather than technical issues. Several presentations explored this, and offered suggestions. These were my favorites:

- Creating Cultural Change by John Rauser (Amazon), Video

- Excerpts from Choose your own adventure by Adam Jacob (OpsCode), Video 1, Video 2

- Moving Fast by Bobby Johnson (Facebook), Video

You can watch them all in less than an hour. Go get some popcorn…

Since then, others have provided even more evidence. Like Every Millisecond Counts and Making Facebook 2x Faster, from the engineers at Facebook. And Proof that speeding up websites improves online business, from the guys at Strangeloop Networks and Watching Websites.

More recently, the folks at Mozilla shared interesting results on the impact of page load speed and conversion rates in a series of posts (part I and part II).

Oh, and the groundbreaking news that Google will now include page speed as a factor in search ranking.

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Stoyan Stefanov came up with the idea of a Performance Advent Calendar, and is posting an article each day on Web performance. I have the honor of contributing this guest post, repeated below.

-Eric

When trying to quantify the performance of a Web site, we most commonly mean the response time. The two most common methods of gathering response time data are from Field Metrics and Synthetic Measurement.

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And metrics provide a great deal of insight. But sometimes we get lost in the metrics. Sometimes metrics alone don’t tell the whole story. What we need is a picture.

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Steve’s first book, High Performance Web Sites, was one of the first of its kind to assemble and codify the best-practices for improving Web site front-end performance. His latest book, Even Faster Web Sites, picks up where the first left off, and dives even deeper into performance optimization techniques.

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A focus this year was the impact of Web site performance on business metrics, such as revenue - putting some teeth into why performance matters.

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The webpagetest.org site (powered by AOL PageTest) has been active for nearly a year now, and has collected performance metrics for more then 20,000 Web pages.

Pat Meenan recently reviewed those results, looking at the cummulative distributions of various metrics and optimization scores. The results are pretty eye-opening.

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Web Performance & Operations is an emerging discipline which requires incredible breadth, focusing less on specific technologies and more on how the entire system works together. While people often specialize on particular components, great engineers always think of that component in relation to the whole. The best engineers are able to fly to the 50,000 foot view and see the entire system in motion and then zoom in to microscopic levels and examine the tiny movements of an individual part.

Spot on.

More goodness in the rest of his post.

Last year’s Velocity Conference was fantastic! More than 600 folks attended, from all corners of the Web Performance and Operations community. It was the epicenter of knowledge for making things faster and more reliable on the Web.

This year’s conference program looks even better. I’ll be attending and presenting again this year. If you’re a performance or operations geek, and looking for like-minded individuals, you need to be there.

Pssst. Use this top-secret code during registration to receive a 15% discount: vel09cmb. But you didn’t get it from me.