Talks

As part of working in Acquia’s Office of the CTO, I’ve been working on the API-First Initiative for the past year. Where are we at? Find out :)

Preview:

In my job at Acquia, I’ve been working almost exclusively on Drupal 8 core. In 2012–2013 I worked on authoring experience (in-place editing, CKEditor, and more). In 2014–2015, I worked on performance, cacheability, rendering and generally the stabilizing of Drupal 8. Drupal 8.0.0 shipped on November 19, 2015.

Hasselt University Professor Frank Neven asked me to come and talk a bit about my experience in open source, and how it helped me. It helped me during my studies, in my career and even in life :)

Preview:

Did you know that often the majority of the time spent generating a HTML page is spent on a few dynamic/uncacheable/personalized parts? Pages are only sent to the client after everything is rendered. Well, what if Drupal could start sending a page before it’s fully finished? What if Drupal could let the browser start downloading CSS, JS, and images, and even make the majority of the page available for interaction while Drupal generates those uncacheable parts? Good news — it can!

This talk covers everything in BigPipe (the webinar I did a few weeks ago was only an introduction).

I’ll let the webinar summary speak for itself:

Acquia frequently does webinars and given my work on BigPipe, I was asked to present with Fabien Potencier (of Symfony fame). Fabien covered back-end performance in the form of profiling, I covered front-end performance, and really the intersection between front-end and back-end performance in the form of BigPipe.

Together with Fabian Franz from Tag1 Consulting, I had a session about Big Pipe in Drupal 8, as well as related performance/cacheability improvements.

I’ll let the session description speak for itself:

Drupal 8 has comprehensive knowledge about the cacheability of the things it renders. This opens new doors. Did you know Drupal 8 will be able to cache everything at the edge?

For sites with many mobile users (high latency due to network), global audiences (high latency due to distance) and performance-sensitive sites (e-commerce), Drupal 8 will be a huge leap forward.

We’ll be showing how easy and powerful it is using the CloudFlare and Fastly CDNs.

Update September 24, 2015: the fastest Drupal ever is no longer near, it is here!

Together with Fabian Franz from Tag1 Consulting, I had a session about Big Pipe in Drupal 8, as well as related performance/cacheability improvements. Fabian’s demo of BigPipe and other render strategies in the first ten minutes are especially worth watching :)

I’ll let Fabian’s session description speak for itself:

In Drupal 8, we’ve significantly improved the way pages are rendered. This talk explains the entire render pipeline, in some detail.

But it also covers: