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.

I've known Paul since I got started in web performance, back in the days of load and performance testing at Keynote Systems (now part of Dynatrace). Paul took me under his wing and quickly showed me the art of breaking websites to prepare them for large influxes of traffic like Black Friday.

Paul recently spoke about font performance at the NY WebPerf Meetup Group, which he co-chairs. Sharing insights from Etsy and how they use performance budgets continues the spirit of transparency and accountability that started at Etsy so many years ago.

Paul's list of accomplishments include (but are certainly not limited to):

• Speaking at multiple conferences
• Co-chair of the New York UX Speed and Web Performance Meetup
• Co-maintainer of the HTTP Archive
• Multi-year contributor to the Web Performance Almanac
• Author of many tools aimed at helping people optimize their websites

Paul is one of the most intelligent and humble people I know. He's given a lot to our community and continues to evangelize performance at every turn. Thank you for everything you've done for our community, Paul. It wouldn't be the same without you!

Do you have someone you'd like to recognize as a Performance Hero? Let us know!