Performance Hero: Annie Sullivan
Let's kick off the new year by celebrating someone who has not just had a huge impact on web performance over the past few years, but who has even more exciting stuff in the works for the future: Annie Sullivan!
Annie leads the Chrome Speed Metrics team at Google, which has arguably had the most significant impact on web performance of the past decade. We've gotten to know Annie through frequent discussions, feedback sessions, and hallway talks at various events. Most recently we caught her closing keynote at performance.now() in November.
Speaking from experience, driving change at scale from within a large organization can be very challenging. Annie and her team navigate this arduous task with true passion for web performance and for improving the user experience. Read on for a great recap of a recent discussion with Annie and just a few of the highlights that make her a true performance hero.
Performance Hero: Pat Meenan
This month, we celebrate everything that OG performance hero Pat Meenan has done – and continues to do – for the web performance community.
When we started the Performance Hero series earlier this year, we had an idea of the types of folks in our community we wanted to acknowledge:
- People who are making a difference in web performance
- People who are humble
- People who give without expectation
- People who don't necessarily crave the spotlight
When looking at these attributes – for a lot of us who have been around this space for more years than we care to mention – it's hard not to think about everyone's favorite web performance OG: Pat Meenan. This month, we celebrate all that Pat has done and continues to do for web performance.
Performance Hero: Sia Karamalegos
Sia Karamalegos is a web performance diva we've come to know through her many articles, workshops, conference talks, and her stint as an MC at performance.now() last year – not to mention her role in speeding up a pretty big slice of the internet!
Sia is kind, funny, smart as heck, and always down to talk web performance (especially if you have a Shopify site). For those reasons and many more, we are excited to share that Sia is this month's Performance Hero!
Performance Hero: Michelle Vu
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.
Performance Hero: Estela Franco
Continuing our series of Performance Heroes, this month we celebrate Estela Franco! Estela is a passionate web performance and technical SEO specialist with more than ten years of contributing to our community. She loves to talk and share about web performance optimization, technical SEO, JavaScript, and Jamstack whenever she can.
Performance Hero: Paul Calvano
Celebrating performance wins is critical to a healthy, well-supported, high-performing team. This isn't a new idea. In fact, it's something that started in the early days of web performance when Lara Hogan, who was an engineering manager at Etsy at the time, discussed the practice of empowering people across the organization by celebrating 'performance heroes'.
In that spirit, we're reigniting the tradition of spotlighting Performance Heroes from our awesome community. It seems appropriate that we'd start with someone who is currently focused on keeping Etsy's site as fast as possible: Paul Calvano
Not only has Paul had a long career dedicated to making the web faster for some of the largest and most popular sites in the world, he is humble, incredibly talented, and one of the kindest people you'll ever meet.
