Guest speaker for 22 July 2010

Speaker: Billy Hoffman

Title: Making the Web Fast

Synopsis:

Speed is essential when it comes to websites. Study after study has shown that faster websites lead to more traffic, more ad impressions, more engaged users, higher conversation rates, lower abandonment rates, and more revenue. And yet despite internet connections 100 times faster than a decade ago websites continue to be horribly slow. In this talk, we will show methods that will drop seconds off the page load time for your website and will not cost you a dime, We'll discuss different optimizations techniques that can be done by the web developer, web designer, or even the IT operations staff to dramatically speed up your website while reducing operational costs. We will use live examples of real sites to show how much these techniques would save as well as provide references to free tools and resources to help you speed up your websites.

Bio:

Billy Hoffman is the founder and CEO of the web performance company Zoompf and a recognized expert on the web and web security. Billy was the lead researcher at web security firm SPI Dynamics and served as the manager for Hewlett-Packard's Web Security Research Group following Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of SPI in 2007. Billy's research has focused on Web 2.0 technology and security threats, automated discovery of web application vulnerabilities, and web crawling technologies. His work has been featured in Wired, Make magazine, Slashdot, G4TechTV, and in various other journals and Web sites. Billy has presented his work internationally and is a regular presenter at security conferences including RSA, Black Hat, AJAXWorld, and Shmoocon. Billy is also the author of the book Ajax Security, published by Addison Wesley in December 2007.

As Billy conducted web security analysis throughout the globe, he consistently noted that the performance of most websites was suboptimal. He also noted that this lack of optimization resulted in both poor user experiences and lost revenue for website providers. Recognizing an opportunity to apply his extensive web development skills in this exciting new area, Billy founded Zoompf to develop technology and services specifically designed to optimize website performance.