Woohoo! I'm helping build SpeedCurve

I’m super excited to be able to say that I’ve joined Mark, Steve, and Tammy at SpeedCurve!

I’ve watched how Mark has shown over the last couple of years that performance monitoring doesn’t have to be dry and data-heavy; it can be insightful, interactive, and actionable. I’ve also been a follower of Steve’s work for many years. In fact, I should probably thank Steve for providing me with the knowledge that got me interested in web performance in the first place! Tammy’s work has been really interesting to follow, too - her focus on real people and how web performance impacts the way they use our websites is something that resonates strongly with me.

Joseph making BBC News way faster for all users.

For the last 3 years I worked at BBC News as a Principal Software Engineer. The BBC News website is accessed by 10 million people every day - people from all around the world using every conceivable device on all sorts of network connections. I always felt that it was important to understand whether or not all of those people were having a good experience when they visited our website.

I got a glimpse of what sort of experiences people were having every time I went travelling. In rural Scotland, BBC News pages would take up to a minute to load. When I visited Morocco the connection would time out before I saw any content. In New Zealand the pages would initially load quickly but then the content would jump around while adverts were being loaded. But this was all anecdotal and I had no way to back it up empirically.

We trialled several performance monitoring tools at the BBC, but I was always frustrated that they were unable to give a simple answer to questions like: How fast are our pages? Are they getting faster or slower? What should we work on next to improve performance? When I was introduced to SpeedCurve, this all changed. The important data is presented in a way that’s easy to understand and -more importantly- easy to communicate to non-technical stakeholders.

I’ve always believed that performance is not a technical problem - that the hardest part of making a website fast is educating other people about the impact that performance has on users and on the business. That’s why I’m really excited to help build what I think is the best tool available for doing that.