I am Paul, on the left there.

I work on Google's Developer Relations team

where I spend my time looking at performance, design, and UX

and normally where the three of those meet.

LARA: And I am Lara Swanson.

I work at Etsy and I'm the Engineering Manager

for the Performance team.

We help all of the feature teams who

are building products or features or experiments,

make sure that whatever they're shipping

is as fast as humanly possible.

PAUL: Alright so, I guess the opening question is, why are we

even talking about performance cultures?

Why does this session even exist?

And I think to answer that we need

to understand a little bit about where our industry is

and what we are seeing and where we think it's going to go.

And it's really about this.

The multi-device web.

We've seen more devices than ever before come online

and I think really the one that stands out

for me the most is this one.

It's the smartphone.

It represents the most performance constrained device

that we have.

Whether that is in terms of the screen size,

or the GPU, the CPU, or its connection to the network.

And the thing is more and more people are using smartphones.

In fact, one study suggests that just over a third

of American adults use their smartphone

as the primary means of accessing the internet.

Which means for those people their first experience

of you, your site, your brand is going

to be through their smartphone.

And that is something that we need to be thinking through.

In fact, it's not just in the States it's also globally.

So, here we have the percentage of total global internet

traffic according to Stat Counter

and you can see that the trend is pretty clear upwards.

And it looks I think sort of the middle of next year,

if the trend line is correct, that well

cross that 50% marker.

So the thing about this is--

LARA: Mobile networks can add a tremendous amount of latency.

So, before a mobile device can transmit or receive data

it has to establish a radio channel with the network.

And this can take several seconds over a 3G connection.

After the device talks to a radio tower

to negotiate when it can transmit data,

the network carrier then must transmit that data

to its internal network, and then to the public internet.

So, the combination of these steps

can add up to tens of thousands of milliseconds

of extra latency.

So, the most important question I

hear when I say this is, well what about 4G?

4G is awesome right?

Our networks are improving.

But you have to remember the new device and fast network

with an excellent connection that you have in your pocket

right now is not a good representation of what your end

users are really experiencing.

So, while it's true that networks are getting better

you need to remember that your users are

on a variety of connections, with various levels

of connectivity, and latency.

It's also important to remember that if you're a site is slow

people will go elsewhere.

In fact, one study suggests that as many as 40% of people

will leave a site when it takes longer than three seconds

to load.

So, we have some options.

In the face of the stuff that's a little bit

scary what can we do about it?

The first option is to ignore it.

You can certainly say, you know what we just

saw those awesome stats.

We say that we're actually-- we're trying,

but we don't think it's that important.

Maybe mobile isn't the future, maybe that trend line is going

to lie to us, maybe networks will be better immediately,

I don't think that this is true.

PAUL: No, I tend to think-- no.

LARA: I think that we can't just ignore it.

PAUL: I'd like to.

LARA: Yeah, it'd be really cool, but I

think the other option is to assign performance cops.

Right?

Who in here would identified as a performance cop or janitor

within their organization?

PAUL: Anybody ever been one of those?

LARA: Yeah, somebody who comes in afterwards cleans up.

PAUL: Look at these hands.

Look at this. [DEEP VOICE] Yes that's me, I don't know.

LARA: So, performance cops, right?

We come in and we say, hey designer, hey developer here's

some better ways you can do this.

You come in cleaning up after people,

you try to make your site better,

but the responsibility solely rests on you.

And this can often lead to a tremendous amount of burnout

and frankly, it's not sustainable.

There's always going to be new people joining

your organization, your site will continue to get slower,

it'll continue to be iterated upon,

the hardware age, being a performance cop

is not a sustainable thing, so that's

why we're here to talk about building performance cultures.

PAUL: Wow, I wonder which one we'll choose from that list?

[LAUGH]

PAUL: So, we're all set to build a performance culture, super.

But we have to ask the question what

do we even mean by a culture.

Well I guess you could come up with your own definitions

goodness knows there's probably a bunch of them

that you could think up, but for us today,

at least in this conversation, here's the things

that we actually have in mind.

Firstly, it's a way of saying, I belong to this group,

I get them, hopefully they get me,

I understand this particular group.

So, for example being British, I would

identify with British culture.

LARA: You're British?

I know right it's a relief for anybody in the room going,

where is he from?

His American accent is really strange.

LARA: [LAUGH]

Yeah, I know.

So, it's that first and foremost is just saying,

yep this is my kind of people.

It's also about how you think and how

you reason and rationalize the world around you

and the kind of social cues that you

look for or the slightly strange obsession with green liquids

you may or may not have, but it's

that sense of the world around you.

It's also how you do things.

Whether that's the side of the road

you drive on maybe the wrong side, the words

that you use for things or perhaps

in our case how we go about crafting the code.

And then lastly, it's how you celebrate things,

the things that are important to you,

the things that you celebrate and how

you go about celebrating it is unique to your culture.

And we see cultures at the highest level

internationally, nationally, all the way down to our homes

and so forth, and actually of course, our workplaces,

which brings us back to that whole performance culture

thing.

LARA: Yeah, we were joking when we

were talking about earlier that performance cultures are

kind of a team sport.

It's important to remember that everybody has to play.

And as you say about sports there is no "I" in performance.

PAUL: That is true, but if you're willing to look hard

enough you'll find there is "prance-for-me".

You can stop the slide now.

LARA: Alright, alright.

So, thank you for that.

So, culture change is scary and it's hard

and I can understand especially for those of us in this room,

we don't know necessarily how to approach it.

How do we start to create or enact performance culture

within our environments?

I'm going to go through some real things that

have been said to me as I've gone

on this journey within the organizations I've worked in.

Lara, "I don't want to think about mobile."

Right.

PAUL: So whiney!

LARA: Yeah.

"Lara, I'm a project manager or a product manager

and I've look at the deadlines, I've got some resources

and frankly building for both desktop and mobile is going

to take twice as long." [WHISPER] It's a lie.

"Lara, you at the performance Manager,

don't you know responsive web design is

inherently bad for performance?"

Or my personal favorite, "everything changes too fast!"

So, here's the thing we've been through this before

and when it comes to web development

we've gone through these kinds of change the past.

Who here has built sites with tables for layout?

Yes.

PAUL: Yes!

Look at all these guilty hands.

[DEEP VOICE] I don't do it any more.

LARA: It was a pain.

So, at probably every job I worked at between 2006

and 2010 I remember these arguments,

do we have to move to a CSS based layout?

In fact, we did.

We did it pretty successfully.

This is more like what we would use today,

as is actually said to change again with web components.

Who has heard this from a very important person, excuse me,

the important part is not above the fold.

When the EP's would have to scroll to see content.

Yeah.

This is again what we're seeing today.

We used to worry about 800 by 600 pixel monitors,

now we're worrying about the spectrum of screen sizes.

This graphic represents all the devices

that come to ETSY.com that have more than 1,000,000 visits

per month in traffic.

We're no longer seeing just handsets and tablets

and desktops we're seeing a spectrum of screen sizes.

You may also think about how we've

changed developing for different browsers over time.

I remember back in the day we would talk about cross browser

compatibility or making things look the same across browsers.

Browser hacks, prefixes, et cetera and this

is again what we're seeing today.

We have to start thinking about mobile web browsers

in addition to just our desktop clients.

But this is all to say that change is scary,

but it's also constant in our industry and it's good.

This is a good part of our jobs.

We've lost crazy table layouts and now we

have semantic markup and more people than ever

before can use our sights on our apps.

This is good for us as developers

and it's really good for users.

PAUL: So, we need to embrace change, good, fine.

So, where do we start when we want

to create one of these performance cultures?

Well, the first step for us is to actually gather some data

because essentially you don't know where you're

going if you don't know where you are

and you need to understand how real people use

your site, like what devices are they on?

Where are they in the world?

What journey did they take through your site?

Which pages did they arrive on and which ones

did they leave on?

You need to understand your own situation

and if you don't know today you can't

start telling that story to the people around you

and get them on board to build this culture with you.

So, the immediate thing that springs to mind

is just going and have a look at your analytics.

Go and look at Google Analytics.