Every year websites get heavier – but the majority of growth isn’t coming from code written at the organisations running them… it’s coming from 3rd parties. Long gone are the days when it was viable to build everything internally, but their impact on performance is already getting a little out-of-hand. We don’t want to be the fun police throwing everyone out, but we can start to moderate the party. In this talk we won’t be looking to remove 3rd parties altogether – nobody likes having their toys taken away; instead we’ll be taking the practical approach of accepting that 3rd parties aren’t going anywhere and look at what strategies we can employ for maintaining performance and safeguarding against slowdowns, outages and abuse.
With over 15 years experience developing for the web, and an undying passion for web performance, Ryan Townsend is the CTO of Shift Commerce – a SaaS e-commerce platform for ambitious retailers.
His pragmatic and performance-led outlook means that—on the rare occasion that he does wear a shirt—his sleeves stay firmly rolled up: even as an exec, his favourite place is right there in the thick of things with his team.
Outside of the office, you’ll usually find him picking up heavy objects in the gym or falling off his mountain bike down the side of a hill.
Ryan Townsend