Samuel Goff: Impatience is a virtue

foreign [Music] my name is Sam Goff and I'm a senior engineer at hpe where I lead UI development for Green Lake bare metal team I've worked on Enterprise apps and e-commerce sites I've focused on real-time data security and accessibility but my real passion is for

performance optimization so what's the big deal why is performance optimization so important to me well in my experience we always think we'll have more time to do something important until we don't when I was 17 I was in a head-on collision with a semi truck at highway speeds I was able to walk away from that experience but it gave me kind of a new perspective on life it was sort of a shakabuku moment as they would say

it really puts into perspective what's important in life I feel incredibly fortunate because I haven't just walked away from one major car accident I actually walked away from eight major car accidents every single one of them could have turned out very differently but every single time I found myself very powerfully reminded that every

moment is precious and you have no guarantees that there will be more of them so as developers we can have a powerful impact on hundreds of thousands or even millions of users so if we can make our app or our website radically faster not just a few percentage points faster but 10 20 100 200 or more times faster

if we can do that for our users imagine all of those moments we can give them back to paraphrase Mark Rober the beautiful thing about being an engineer is that when you see something in the world that you aren't happy with you can invent a way to make it better so for that reason I think impatience is a virtue so this is how I discovered next.js in my previous life I was a professional photographer among other things and I

was creating High dynamic range images before all the cool kids were doing it I even wrote some software that made it easier to create some HDR panoramics 20 plus years ago so I've always been struck with the Sophie's Choice that we're put in you can have either image quality or speed but you can never have both so I obsessively profiled different file formats with different encodings various

noise reduction and other pre-processing techniques and I figured out how to produce the best image quality with the smallest file size for various types of images so what I've found is that images are often the pain point for web and app performance and they also provide a tremendous opportunity for massive Improvement in performance with a fairly achievable set of techniques

at various roles I've built image processing optimization and CDN pipelines I've also implemented lazy loading on the client side with a responsive image component that I built in react at multiple roles um and I took advantage of this new thing back in the day called Source set and sizes which everybody knows about these days but back in the day it was brand