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In the Spotlight - Steve Souders

Steve Souders

Author of "High Performance Web Sites"

Steve works at Google on Web performance and open source initiatives. His book, High Performance Web Sites, explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about Web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!.

Prior to Yahoo!, Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos. In the early 80's, Steve caught the Artificial Intelligence bug and worked at a few companies doing research on Machine Learning, including several publications and conference appearances. He received a B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

















Presentations by Steve Souders

Workshop #1: High Performance Web Sites

Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team has identified 14 best practices for making web pages faster through a series of research studies on Yahoo!'s properties. These guidelines focus on the front end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. We focus on the front end because that's where 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent. This "80-90% front end" phenomenon is not isolated to just Yahoo!. It holds true for most web sites, including the ten most-visited U.S. web sites.

Even Faster Web Sites

Steve's book, High Performance Web Sites, describes the 14 best practices he developed while working as the Chief Performance Yahoo!. YSlow, the Firebug extension he created, codified those best practices.