Feed - Simon Hearne

Fast typeahead search with Milvus 🔗

Website visitors and application owners alike expect near-instant feedback, especially when typing in a search bar and receiving recommendations. Type [...]

The RAG Cost Curve 🔗

My abstract promised a number. Measuring it changed the claim. About the talkPermalink to this heading# "Just use RAG" and "RAG is dead" are both answ [...]

Migrating to Milvus: Tooling, Deployment Choices and Lessons from Real Migrations 🔗

This is the follow-up to Milvus 3.0: Closing the Search Gap. If you are moving self-managed Milvus rather than Elasticsearch, see Migrating Self-manag [...]

Milvus 3.0: Closing the Search Gap 🔗

The follow-up webinar, Migrating to Milvus, moves from comparison to migration: tooling, deployment choices and lessons from real migrations. About th [...]

Migrating Self-managed Milvus to Managed Milvus to gain >99% Performance 🔗

So you've built an application using Milvus as the vector database, using Standalone or Distributed. You've reached a point where the application is [...]

Vector Search, Visualised 🔗

About the talkPermalink to this heading# SQL makes sense. But when it breaks, you reach for EXPLAIN. Vector search offers no such comfort. Multi-thous [...]

Adding site search to Netlify sites using Elasticsearch 🔗

Static site generators (SSGs) such as 11ty allow us to build super-fast websites with great developer experience. Hosting platforms like Netlify allow [...]

WebPageTest Live: Third Parties and Request Map with Simon Hearne 🔗

Most WebPageTest walkthroughs stop at the waterfall. This session was about what you do next. About the talkPermalink to this heading# A live WebPageT [...]

Optimising Core Web Vitals on SPAs 🔗

Approximately 40% of my clients have single-page applications (SPAs), and approximately 100% of my clients care about core web vitals - the key perfor [...]

Fixing empty responses from Cloudflare Workers Sites 🔗

I'm currently working on a client project using Cloudflare Workers Sites. Mostly development has been a joy, the wrangler CLI is easy to use and produ [...]

Survivorship Bias in Web Performance 🔗

IntroductionPermalink to this heading# Way back in 2010, an engineer at YouTube kicked off Project Feather: the goal was to reduce the weight of the p [...]

The value of an independent web performance consultant 🔗

I have been employed in web performance roles for about a decade. From load testing and synthetic monitoring to CDN configuration and true consultancy [...]

Caching Header Best Practices 🔗

.key { border-radius: 5px; border: 1px solid var(--border); padding: 1px 2px; font-size: var(--font-size-small); font-family: var( [...]

Fast and Responsive Hero Videos for Great UX 🔗

Landing page hero videos are increasingly popular, especially in high fashion and luxury goods. Hero videos can have a detrimental effect on user expe [...]

An Inclusive Web is Fast by Default 🔗

Performance is not an average, it is a distribution — and the people at the far end of it are being quietly excluded. About the talkPermalink to this [...]

Slow site speed is still the biggest cause of web stress 🔗

Back in 2010 Foviance ran an EEG study [1] which showed that participants had to concentrate 50% harder when websites were slow, as measured by alpha [...]

Everything we know about Core Web Vitals and SEO 🔗

June 15th 2021: Multiple updates from Google I/O 2021, a Web Vitals Q&A session and another Google blog post. April 19th 2021: Google have announced [...]

How to avoid layout shifts caused by web fonts 🔗

One of the outcomes of the release of Core Web Vitals (and subsequent inclusion in Google's page ranking algorithm) is that we have been paying more a [...]

Optimistic UI Patterns for Improved Perceived Performance 🔗

IntroductionPermalink to this heading# Web performance is often seen as a technical discipline, arranging bits and bytes to shave off milliseconds of [...]

Alternatives to Spinners on the Web 🔗

Animated spinners are one of the lingering legacies of the 1990's web. In this post I will use an insurance quote service as an example, but these tec [...]

Web Performance Predictions for 2021 🔗

I wrote an article in 2019 where I predicted five top technologies for 2020. Well, 2020 was a strange year! Some things were correct though, for examp [...]

The Impact of Let's Encrypt Changes on Android Users 🔗

Let's Encrypt recently announced that it is moving to using its own root certificate on January 11, 2021. This will reduce operating costs and complex [...]

The Performance Cost of EV Certificates 🔗

IntroductionPermalink to this heading# Extended Validation or EV Certificates were once prized for their impression of increased security. Sites with [...]

Getting Fast and Staying There 🔗

If you've ever trained for a big sporting event: a marathon, bike race or similar, you'll know how tough it is to train to get to your peak performanc [...]

What is the best page speed metric? 🔗

The recent updates from Google on Core Web Vitals are a great effort to find universal speed metrics that reflect quality of user experience. Google's [...]

Four Charts That Prove the Value of Site Speed 🔗

Site speed is an important but often-overlooked component in user experience. We know intuitively that slow experiences are unpleasant and make us mor [...]

How to Improve Core Web Vitals 🔗

10 Nov update: Google has announced that the Page Experience update will go live in May 2021! IntroductionPermalink to this heading# Google announced [...]

The Psychology of Speed 🔗

Feeling fast and being fast are different problems. This talk is about the gap between them. About the talkPermalink to this heading# Performance work [...]

Giving Great (Remote) Software Demos 🔗

.key { border-radius: 5px; border: 1px solid var(--border); padding: 1px 2px; font-size: var(--font-size-small); font-family: var( [...]

Who Opts-in to Save-data? 🔗

In SummaryPermalink to this heading# Save-data is a client hint which indicates that your users want you to send less content to them. It is an option [...]

Measuring Performance behind consent popups 🔗

IntroductionPermalink to this heading# Cookie consent has given users control over the data that is shared with websites and third-parties, but it has [...]

When Network is Faster than Cache 🔗

IntroductionPermalink to this heading# I recently discovered that Firefox introduced a feature called RCWN (Race Cache With Network) in 2017. This fea [...]

Is it time for a Web Performance rebrand? 🔗

Web performance has been a hot topic in web development and browser engineering since the first public web pages. The first book on the topic, Web Per [...]

Collecting SmartThings data in InfluxDB on Raspberry Pi 🔗

Now that you've got your Pi set up with Influx & Grafana, you're collecting some system stats, and measuring network performance, it's time to collect [...]

Collecting SpeedTest results in Influx on Raspberry Pi 🔗

Now that you've got your Pi set up with Influx & Grafana and you're collecting some system stats, it's time to measure network performance! SpeedTest. [...]

Reporting Raspberry Pi System Metrics to InfluxDB 🔗

Now that you've got your Pi set up with Influx & Grafana, it's time to start collecting some data! We will use a simple Python script to collect syste [...]

Installing InfluxDB & Grafana on Raspberry Pi 🔗

Step 0: Initial SetupPermalink to this heading# Follow these steps first if you have a brand new rPi: Download the latest lite Raspbian image from ras [...]

HTTP Headers for fast & secure static sites 🔗

This website is powered by Netlify, it also has Content-Security-Policy and cache-control HTTP response headers to improve client security and perform [...]

Six Web Performance Technologies to Watch in 2020 🔗

IntroductionPermalink to this heading# Reading the technical press you would be forgiven for thinking that 2020 is going to be a great year for web pe [...]

Deep dive into third-party performance 🔗

Every third-party tag is someone else's code, running on your users' devices, with your name on it. This talk is seven times that went wrong. About th [...]

Native image lazy loading has landed in Chrome, maybe don't use it 🔗

Lazy Loading ImagesPermalink to this heading# Web browsers are complex pieces of software, but still treat images relatively naïvely. See, for example [...]

WebPageTest Private - 'no successful results' 🔗

I recently configured a new private WebPageTest instance on AWS to use SSL provided by Let's Encrypt, using EFF's awesome CertBot. When running my fir [...]

Why Site Speed is Critical for Online Publishers 🔗

It has been well documented that site speed is a major factor in business success for e-commerce websites. If you can demonstrate that improving page [...]

Lead Developer Conference (London) - Day 1! 🔗

Alice Goldfuss - The Container Operator’s ManualPermalink to this heading# Containers are generally presented in theory, Alice tells us how they work [...]

Delta V Conference - Day 2! 🔗

Tammy Everts - Hunting the UnicornPermalink to this heading# Tammy started researching user experience on the web in a laboratory setting - measuring [...]

Delta V Conference - Day 1! 🔗

Tim Kadlec - Redefining Web PerformancePermalink to this heading# There is a lot of under-appreciated creativity in technical work. Definitions change [...]

Third-Party Content - the weak link? 🔗

The Resource Timing API allows site owners to measure how third-parties perform for every single pageview. Combining this data with business intellige [...]

Twitter Lite isn't as good as the app, and that's okay 🔗

The promise of PWAsPermalink to this heading# Progressive Web Apps bring a native-like application experience to websites. This is achieved through a [...]

Your Analytics Lies to You 🔗

The site speed fallacyPermalink to this heading# In a recent webinar, Andy Davies and I asked a poll of the attendees: where do you get your site spee [...]

How to Optimise CSS Image Sprites 🔗

CSS image sprites can provide a performance benefit for most sites. A sprite combines multiple small images into one file and CSS slices out the relev [...]

Three WebPerf Takeaways from Velocity Europe 🔗

1) Performance KPIs are brokenPermalink to this heading# This was one of the themes that ran like an undercurrent through the whole conference, starti [...]

Too hot to handle - optimizing for low powered devices 🔗

The phone in a developer's pocket is not the phone in a user's pocket. Everything in this talk follows from that gap. About the talkPermalink to this [...]

Beyond the Waterfall - Meaningful Web Performance Visualizations 🔗

A waterfall chart is a tool for people who already know what they are looking at. This talk is about everyone else. About the talkPermalink to this he [...]

Velocity NY 2016 - Wrap-up 🔗

(p.s., the video of my talk on performance for low powered devices is up!) Real User Monitoring is getting exciting, but has gapsPermalink to this hea [...]

Blocking requests in webpagetest? Don't use Chrome. 🔗

Note: this issue has since been resolved by the Chrome team, please proceed with caution! TL;DR: Blocking third-party requests in webpagetest shows y [...]

How fast is fast enough? 🔗

Do you know when your website's speed starts to impact your customers' behaviour? The speed of your site affects how your visitors behave: how many pa [...]

Getting Reliable Visual Performance Metrics 🔗

Visual metrics such as Speed Index, render start and visual complete are the best proxies we have for user experience. Unfortunately two of these are [...]

Render Conf 2016 🔗

Bruce Lawson - web.nextPermalink to this heading# Description | Slides | VideoPermalink to this heading# I had assumed that Bruce's talk would be iden [...]

Prioritising Site Speed Recommendations 🔗

One of my favourite tasks as a consultant is to provide reports to clients which make recommendations for improving site speed. Often these reports ar [...]

Velocity Europe 2015 - The Good Ones! 🔗

Another post lists the talks that got five stars from me! Continuous Performance - Stijn Polfliet (CoScale)Permalink to this heading# Description | Vi [...]

Velocity Europe 2015 - My Allstars 🔗

Another post lists the talks that didn't quite get five stars from me! The Physical Web is a Speed Issue - Scott Jenson (Google)Permalink to this head [...]

Measuring Webpage Jank 🔗

Here's the bookmarklet: =0;n--)try%7Bdocument.body.removeChild(e%5Bn%5D)%7Dcatch(r)%7Bcontinue%7Dvar r=document.getElementById("fpser");r&&r.parentNod [...]

Be Mindful With Modernizr 🔗

According to Modernizr.com, Modernizr is a JavaScript library that detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the user's browser. This framework tests for fea [...]

Simon Hearne