Performance Hero: Michelle Vu
Tammy Everts - Jun 26, 2024
Michelle Vu is one of the most knowledgeable, helpful, kind people you could ever hope to meet. As a founding member of Pinterest's performance team, she has created an incredibly strong culture of performance throughout Pinterest. She's also pioneered important custom metrics and practices, like Pinner Wait Time and performance budgets. We are super excited to share that Michelle is this month's Performance Hero!
Michelle is a web performance industry veteran who has spent the last seven years making Pinterest fast and reliable. She was a founding member of Pinterest's performance team, establishing foundations of their program by setting up its synthetic and real user metrics, proactive alerts, and performance analysis tools, while fostering a culture of performance across teams.
Michelle and her team at Pinterest pioneered the use of custom metrics when they introduced Pinner Wait Time (PWT). This metric measured the slowest loading time for content they considered critical for the user experience on a page.
As the web performance tech lead at Pinterest, Michelle focuses on large optimizations to the Core Web Vital and Pinner Wait Time metrics for key features. She also aids in performance issues from platform migrations and product feature launches. When she's not working on optimizations, Michelle tackles performance regressions and develops tooling to analyze performance and prevent regressions.
Most recently, Michelle presented on tooling to catch and prevent regressions due to increases in JavaScript bundle sizes. She's also in the midst of releasing a three-part series of articles –
Web Performance Regression Detection – on the Pinterest Engineering Blog.
Loved seeing Michelle use SpeedCurve visuals on stage to share how they help make Pinterest fast!
Here are a few ways you can find Michelle and learn more about the great work she does in our community:
Please join us in celebrating Michelle Vu, a true Performance Hero!
Do you have someone you'd like to recognize as a Performance Hero? Let us know!
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