Measuring Performance

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. He is also co-chair of Velocity, the first web performance conference sponsored by O’Reilly. He frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.

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Ryan Breen is the vice president of technology at Gomez, a provider of Internet application performance information. After graduating from Duke University with degrees in computer science and economics in 2000, he led a team creating a suite of Web performance management technologies, including a Java-based, Web browser emulation platform. Using these tools, Ryan has worked with hundreds of top Internet companies to measure and manage the performance of their Web applications. As more customers have moved to Ajax technologies, Ryan has helped them define performance best practices applicable to the new development style.

Bill Scott recently joined Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service, as the Director of UI Engineering.

Previously, Bill led engineering for Yahoo! Teachers, a web 2.0 community allowing teachers to gather, organize & share web resources and lesson planning. In addition, as an Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! he focused on spreading the goodness of “rich and sane” Ajax design & development. Bill is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops discussing the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering. At Yahoo! Bill was also the Design Pattern curator where he launched the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns).

Before Yahoo! Bill led User Experience at Sabre Airline Solutions and co-founded Rico (an open source Ajax framework, openrico.org.) For 20 years Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering projects, creating products in areas as diverse as video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management and Web consumer sites. His musings can be found at http://looksgoodworkswell.com.

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Ernest graduated from Rice University with a BS in electrical engineering in 1993. He went to work for FedEx corporate IT in Memphis, TN, performing programming, systems administration, and analysis work. Eventually he became FedEx’ Webmaster, and co-wrote the first internationally enabled version of the fedex.com shipping application.

After five years, he left to become IT director of Towery Publishing, a print and Internet publishing company specializing in local city resources. There, I developed the technical architecture behind a line of Java-based Web sites.

Unfortunately, the popping of the Internet bubble took Towery with it, and Ernest moved to National Instruments in Austin, TX, where he manages a team of Web systems administrators and develops the architecture of the award-winning ni.com Web site.

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Scott Ruthfield is VP of Engineering & Technology at WhitePages.com, the world’s most popular people search engine, with >2 Billion searches/year across sites we own (WhitePages.com, 411.com, WhitePages.ca, etc.) and sites we power (people search for Dex.com, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, etc.). Since joining WhitePages in 2007, Scott’s led software development and site operations through a site redesign, the introduction of user-added listings, and development of a Web Service API.

Before joining WhitePages, Scott was at Amazon.com, where he led technology and business strategy in areas ranging from customer reviews to employee blogs to e-mail marketing to the (current) Gold Box. Before Amazon, he spent five years at Microsoft, working on various failed projects and cost sinks.

He graduated from Rice University with a BA in Computer Science & Sociology and an MCS in Computer Science. He (rarely) blogs at www.scottru.com and devblog.whitepages.com.

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