Summary of Chris Heilmanns Talks
As I’ve mentioned earlier Chris Heilmann from Yahoo came here last week and talked.
Last Thursday Chris talked at the GeekMeet here in Stockholm and the day after he came to the bwin Games office. He did essentially do the same talks here as he had done at the GeekMeet but I reckon the talks with us where a bit more intimate considering we were about 20 and at the GeekMeet there were about 150 in the audience.
The first talk was a high-level talk about the web. Chris hadn’t really prepared for it so he had no slides but instead he seemed very relaxed and just kept on about the the web, especially 2.0 but also what’s coming in 3.0.
He showed a lot things that’s been done recently in 2.0. Since we had business people attending the first talk he didn’t go into details, instead he showed Firefox plug-ins such as Greasemonkey.
The second talk was about performance on the web. This time he drilled further down and got technical. It was really interesting.
Basically he discussed the major pit falls in web development, especially when you are using a lot of JavaScript, and how you can work your way around them.
He also showed us a lot of useful tools such as smush.it for image optimizing, YSlow for web site load debugging and a couple of simple techniques like minifying and bundling JavaScript includes via APIs. You can find the slides here.
All in all it was two very good talks and it gave me a lot of ideas and tools that I’ll use to improve my sites in the future.
