Random Thoughts Over Coffee at Port City Java

Today’s set of random thoughts are brought to you while sipping a coffee and sitting outside at Port City Java cafe in Eastern Market in Washington, DC.

1. I’m realizing the importance of having Web sites which can come up quickly. You click that link or type in that URL and you want it to be there. You shouldn’t have to wait. There are so many things which you can do to improve your site’s performance.
2. I’m really excited to get my hands on Steve Sounders’s new book “High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers.” It’s supposed to give really good guidance on how you can improve your site’s speed through tweaking your HTML & CSS. Apparently, it’s done a ton of great work for Yahoo (where Sounders works).
3. The guidance Sounders has worked so well that Yahoo has developed a tool around it. YSlow is a Firebug plug-in that you can use to test web sites. It’s amazing how poorly a lot of really popular Web sites do. I wanna write about this soon.
4. One of the Web sites which is the fastest to load is Google. I know speed and performance is a big thing for them.
5. Something that’s funny is when you try the Mahalo Challenge, which allows you to pit Mahalo’s search engine against Google, Mahalo loads so slowly that I’ve usually clicked on my result in Google before the Mahalo page has even loaded yet.
6. I’m constantly giving Facebook a hard time but there is one thing I have to say… It’s awesome the level of success that CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg has reached at such a young age…. he’s like a month older then me. He’s created a company that’s potentially worth $10 billion dollars. That’s crazy.