How to think like a performance engineer with Harry Roberts
Jan 2, 2025
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Harry Roberts, a Google Developer Expert and web performance consultant, shares his insights on thinking like a performance engineer. He emphasizes prioritizing user experience over technical details and discusses the importance of Core Web Vitals in assessing site performance. Harry debunks misconceptions about JavaScript, advocates for effective performance testing tools, and introduces 'containment' strategies for optimization. Tune in for practical tips to enhance website speed and user journeys!
Understanding performance engineering requires a focus on holistic user experience and practical metrics influencing customer engagement.
Core Web Vitals, while useful, are not definitive measures of quality, highlighting the need for both synthetic and real user monitoring.
Deep dives
The Importance of Performance Engineering
Performance engineering plays a crucial role in ensuring that web applications operate efficiently and provide a positive user experience. Harry Roberts discusses his journey from being a front-end engineer to becoming a web performance consultant, highlighting that his early experiences with real-time applications made it clear that speed was essential. Collaborating with performance engineers allowed him to deepen his understanding of how front-end performance aligns with infrastructure efforts. As a result, he emphasizes that performance engineering is not merely a technical requirement but a vital aspect of delivering effective user experiences.
Thinking Like a Performance Engineer
To think like a performance engineer, one must prioritize user experience by focusing on practical metrics that influence customer engagement. Roberts suggests that web performance should be approached holistically, implying that factors beyond speed contribute to a better user experience, such as ease of payment methods like Apple Pay. He argues that while increasing site speed is essential, understanding the root causes of user behavior and designing based on customer needs can offer greater benefits. This perspective encourages developers to think beyond traditional performance metrics and consider the entire journey of the user.
Core Web Vitals and Their Application
Core Web Vitals are essential metrics that gauge a website's performance, specifically in terms of user experience and site speed. Roberts describes them as useful indicators but not definitive measures of quality, as a site could have good Core Web Vitals but still provide a poor user experience. He highlights three main metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), all of which serve to assess different aspects of user interaction with web pages. By using these metrics, performance engineers can gain insights that help improve website usability effectively.
The Role of Synthetic and Real User Monitoring
Differentiating between synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring is crucial for accurately assessing website performance. Roberts insists that synthetic monitoring is insufficient on its own, as it often fails to reflect the variability and complexity of real-world user experiences. Instead, he emphasizes the need to use synthetic tests for targeted evaluations while employing real user data to understand how actual users are interacting with the site. By combining both approaches, engineers can obtain a clearer picture of performance issues and implement more effective solutions.
Harry Roberts, Google Developer Expert and web performance consultant, about thinking like a performance engineer. Learn about Core Web Vitals, user journey testing, and practical tips for optimizing website speed and user experience.
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Special Guest: Harry Roberts.
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