Office Hours

In addition to discussing diversity in technology, Laine is happy to talk databases, open source, and other topics, especially the following:

• MySQL
• Scaling Databases in AWS
• Diversity in Technology

Steve is here to talk to you about new ways of thinking about systems in your work: human, social, technical, and so on. Bring him your questions about:

• How to apply these concepts in practice
• What are the basic concepts you need to understand
• Where do you begin in your organization?

Are you ready to go beyond waterfall charts for visualizing data? Come talk to Mark about new techniques for viewing performance data and making responsive sites fast, including:

• Making responsive design fast
• Synthetic vs RUM and how to combine them for great insights
• Front-end performance tools

Bring all of your security-related questions to Stephen. He’ll be glad to help you with them, and talk about the following:

• How to perform continuous automated security tests of web applications
• How does security testing differ from quality testing
• Using the BDD-Security testing framework

Tammy and Kent are happy to talk to you about any of your performance-related quesstions, including:

• Image optimization challenges and best practices
• Advanced optimization techniques
• The business value of performance

Ask her anything. Mandi will field any and all of your questions about Chef and a broad range of topics (anything, really), including:

• Organizational and cultural change
• DevOps
• Design reviews and operational readiness of web applications

If you’ve ever wondered how you can maximize the performance of your apps without sacrificing user experience, then come chat with Abel about the following:

• The range of critical data provided by synthetic testing and real user navigation timing
• The art of comparative benchmarking
• Examples of open APIs bringing it all together

RWD may (or may not) be the answer. If you’re still trying to work it out, come chat with Estelle about:

• Mobile performance in general
• The pros and cons of RWD
• Modern web standards

Michael and James are happy share their experiences about working with government. They’ll discuss the following, and more:

• How to get stuff done in a civil service environment that is perceived to be slow and digitally illiterate
• What’s next for government digital strategies, when is a platform appropriate, and what does the term even mean?
• Microservices and architecture: why this is good fit for government services, including the advantages and disadvantages

Stop in and chat with Tobias about web performance measurement. He’s happy to talk with you about the following and anything else you care to ask:

• Image optimization & saliency detection
• Front end performance best practices
• Akamai Intelligent Platform & CDN offerings

Kornel is here to answer your questions about image compression pipeline: encoding, serving, and responsive images. He’s ready to chat about the following:

• Encoding images for the best filesize/quality ratio
• Guidelines for content negotiation, transcoding proxies, caching and offline storage
• The srcset attribute and the picture element. Dealing with high-DPI (“Retina”) images

If you are trying to instigate change for the better in your organization, then Andy has hands-on experience to share. Come talk about:

• Performance culture
• Performance in agile process
• Performance best practice

If you’re interested in building a device lab similar to Etsy’s, then join Lara and Destiny for an Office Hours discussion. They’ll cover all aspects of device labs, including:

• Nuts and bolts, from choosing devices to troubleshooting power
• Device management solutions
• The user experience of your lab

Yavor welcomes any discussions related to his talk, including uilding software cleanly and in a reproducible way and why this matters, as well as:

• The fastest way to bake an AMI and some considerations
• How do you deploy docker containers?
• The key benefits of being able to declaratively define and provision infrastructure as code

Dvir will be glad to answer any of your questions about moving applications to the cloud, but he’s also looking forward to chatting with you about:

• DDoS Trends
• Website Security
• Performance Tips

Andrew is here to chat with you about emerging web technologies, especially on mobile. He’ll discuss solutions for managing complex front-end data like color palettes, SASS magic, and any of the following:

• Preparing for web components
• Package management for front-end dependencies
• Front-end automation and build

Are you ready for an intense, exciting, and rewarding exploration of the jungle of startups? Adam will head you in the right direction. Come talk about any of the following and more:

• Organizational structure of engineering teams
• Efficiently integration and operating a partially remote team, benefits and challenges
• Hiring, recruiting, community management

WebPageTest is a great tool for ad hoc monitoring, but if you’re looking for continuous monitoring of your web apps, come talk to Uwe and Nils about:

• How to leverage your private performance-monitoring infrastructure with OpenSpeedMonitor.
• Multistep measurements with WebpageTest
• Any other related questions you have on the subject

Want to use your skills to benefit society? Come talk to Vanessa about strategies related to the following topics:

• Cultures of continuous
• Social impact technology
• Diversity in technology

Do you want to talk about the challenges of delivering optimal images in a multi-device world? You’ll want to talk to Joshua about these topics and others:

• Delivering images for phones and tablets
• Topics related to PageSpeed
• Web Performance Optimization

Mobile web performance is the topic of the day with Max. Come for a lively discussion on this subject, including:

• Responsive Web Design
• Tools for mobile web
• Mobile browsers

If you’re interested in running CoreOS and managing a distributed platform in production, bring Kelsey your questions about CoreOS, etcd, Docker, and cluster management using tools like Fleet and Kubernetes, including:

• Managing Docker containers at scale with Fleet, flannel, and Kubernetes
• Distributed configuration and locking with etcd
• How to manage CoreOS in production: updates, monitoring, and logging

Do you want to know how BBC Sport addresses architectural and performance challenges when engineering solutions for major online sporting events? Keith is happy to share experience and discuss any relevant topic, including but not limited to:

• The application of software engineering practices to building infrastructure to create flexible, scalable and reliable distributed systems
• Automated testing and tooling
• Challenges around establishing an open and collaborative culture

Is there an ideal way to teach programming? What are the pros and cons of online education? Pamela is happy to discuss these issues and talk with you about any of the following:

• K-12 CS education
• Good engineering culture practices inside companies.
• Front-end web development, including JavaScript & front-end tips

If you’ve got questions about Java and web performance, then you’ll want to bring them to Ben. Ask him about:

• Java 8
• Production Monitoring of JVM applications
• Performance Analysis

Ryan is here to chat with folks about how they can improve their monitoring systems’ alert notifications. He’s excited to talk about:

• Alert design
• Appropriate sources of context for alerts
• Ways to use Nagios to augment the on-call engineer

You’re looking to get started with performance testing. Ian has plenty of experience to share. Come chat with him about:

• Creating and adapting an effective approach
• Setting realistic targets
• Interpreting results

If DevOps seems like the right solution for your enterprise, you’ll want to stop by and talk to Yuval about a realistic vision for your organization, including:

• What are my options for moving towards DevOps/Continuous Delivery?
• What makes Kanban & DevOps such best buddies?
• What would using the Kanban Method mean for me?

You have Chef questions. Jon is the person to answer them. Come by and talk shop with him. He’ll cover the following and more:

• Customizing Chef
• The “Customizing Chef” book
• Chef workflow questions