Planet Performance Podcast

Interviews with people from the Web Performance community

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Episode 4: John Allsopp and Henri Helvetica

This episode is a conversation over video (first not-in-person interview for the podcast) with John and Henri about the upcoming LazyLoad conference. About the program, about the past, present and future of the conferences as such. Henri provides some highlights in the program and John discusses the business, the joys and sorrows of running an event, online or off.

The conference is happening in June and you can use code perfplanet for a discount.


Download file | Duration: 1:22:08 | Published on May 27, 2021

Episode 3: Tammy Everts

Hello web speed people, this episode is an interview with Tammy Everts. She's very active in the web performance community, among other things, she's curating wpostats.com and co-chairs the conference performance.now. She is the Chief Experience Officer at SpeedCurve. She's given a lot of talks and written tons of articles, mostly on the User Experience as well as the business side of the web performance discipline. She also wrote a book: Time Is Money, The Business Value of Web Performance.

This is a short chat we had during the 2019 performance.now conference in Amsterdam. Short because we had to do it during one of the breaks between the sessions. Tammy talked about the conference, about Speed Curve, how to pick the right metrics, about remote work and much much more. Surprising actually how much she covered during the limited time we had.

You'll notice the music sprinkled here and there in the interview is a little different from the usual ukulele bits. It's just something a friend and I jammed on while I was in Amsterdam for the conference, so I thought, if nothing else, it makes some geographical sense. Hopefully it's not too spooky.

But that's enough intro, ladies and gentlemen, Tammy!


Download file | Duration: 19:11 | Published on Dec 29, 2019

Episode 2: Patrick Meenan

Hello web perf enthusiasts! Welcome to espisode 2 of the planet performance podcast. This is an interview with Patrick Meenan. Pat is amazing, he's probably most known for WebPageTest but he has worked on Chrome too, he knows browsers, networks, CDNs, protocols, the list goes on. He has done so much to make the Web faster, and at the same time he's also one of the nicest people I've met.

It was a thrill to sit down and catch up with him during his visit to the Facebook office in Menlo Park, CA. He had just recently joined Facebook to work on web speed, which is also the team I am part of, so naturally I am beyond excited about this.

So we talked about WebPageTest and its origins, about HTTP2 prioritizations and about a whole lot more. Enjoy!


Download file | Duration: 37:26 | Published on Nov 19, 2019

Episode 1: Steve Souders

Hello fellow Web Performance enthusiasts! Just like in the song, this podcast has been coming for some time. Quite some time. In fact, this first episode was recorded about a year ago. So please add 1 year to any time-sensitive bits you hear.

The first guest is Steve Souders. I think Steve has done more than any other living person when it comes to raising awareness about Web Performance and how important it is to both users and companies. He also showed us the way to enlightenment with his books High-Performance Web Sites and its follow up Even Faster Web Sites. He was the brains behind the YSlow browser extension. Some of you younger folks may have not used YSlow, since you have all these powerful dev tools shipped with modern browsers. But in my opinion YSlow is right there after Firebug in terms of influence and showing the browser vendors what tools they should be providing.

I'm lucky enough to have worked with Steve at Yahoo on YSlow and other stuff. He then moved on to do his magic at Google, and is now at SpeedCurve. But we talk about all of this in the interview so I'll just shut up now and let the man speak.

Oh, one thing people don't know about Steve is that he plays ukulele. We jammed a bit after recording this podcast and then I thought I should cut up some of these sounds and mix them with the interview. Enjoy!


Download file | Duration: 49:43 | Published on Oct 27, 2019

Episode 0: Trailer

Welcome to the Planet Performance podcast!


Download file | Duration: 0:51 | Recorded on June 30, 2019

Planet Performance Podcast is a project by Stoyan Stefanov. See also the Perfplanet Calendar.