Jonathan is a Senior Software Engineer at Wayfair. He leads the Web Performance team, which focuses on performance and scalability projects. In his free time he likes to play Ultimate, travel, and read web performance blogs (yeah, really). You can find him on Twitter @jonathanklein, and if you are in the Boston area be sure to check out the Boston Web Performance Meetup group that Jonathan started!
Last weekend was the inaugural run of the Northeast PHP Conference in Boston. Wayfair was a gold sponsor, so we bought t-shirts, paid for apps and beer at the Saturday night event, and also sent about 15 engineers to the event. I gave a talk on High Performance PHP, and…
A couple of weeks ago I ran a test with WebPagetest that was designed to quantify how much a CDN improves performance for users that are far from your origin. Unfortunately, the test indicated that there was no material performance benefit to having a CDN in place. This conclusion sparked…
It’s a new year and it’s time for another report on how fast (or slow) our sites are. If you are new here, our previous report looked at the average load time for our four major types of pages, as well as the 95th percentile load time. The inspiration for…
As we have mentioned before, the main source control system we use at Wayfair is SVN, with TortoiseSVN as our client. One of the things we love about SVN is the ability to add commit hooks, or checks that run when someone tries to commit a file to source control….
Progressive Enhancement is often described as an alternate approach to “Graceful Degradation” – it encourages focusing on the most basic functionality first and then building out from there. It also forms the core of the Yahoo! Graded Browser Support model, which we use as a guide for our own rules…
One of the big changes at Wayfair recently was moving all of our storefront code (well, almost all…we’re still working on our sessioned code) from Classic ASP (VBScript) to PHP. The company was started in 2002 and at that time ASP was a common technology on the web, and one…
I recently saw this post on Etsy’s blog and found it inspiring – you don’t typically see retailers (or any companies for that matter) sharing performance data. Even more impressive is the fact that they posted this on their primary blog as opposed to their engineering blog. To me this…
