SPEAKER 1: One of the things
I've been thinking about is we haven't
discussed what we're going to call this series. SPEAKER 2: I would
just say HTTP203. SPEAKER 1: But it's different
because we've got people. EVA: Yeah. People-- like real people,
not like humanoids. [MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 2: Welcome. Who are you and why? EVA: Oh. Can I start with
the "why" question? [LAUGHS] SPEAKER 1: Yeah. Go on then. Go on then. EVA: No. So I'm Eva, and I work at
developer relations for Chrome. And I'm here at I/O to
enjoy the beautiful weather and other participants and
also to give talks and interact with people-- a lot interact with people. SPEAKER 2: I know. It's a lot of
interaction, isn't it? EVA: Yeah, yeah. By the end of the
day, my introvert self tries to hide inside. But actually, it's
very worthy as well. It's critical. SPEAKER 2: It's like
I really enjoy it. But I also need to recuperate
a lot afterwards usually. SPEAKER 1: It's a weird
part of this job, isn't it, that we take people who are
traditionally introverted-- I think we'd all include
ourselves in that-- and we go, what are we
going to do for a living? Oh, we'll go on stage. SPEAKER 2: Talk to
people all the time. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. And it's just all of the energy
just sapped away at once, and then we have to go
and lie in a coffin. SPEAKER 2: Fetal position, yeah. SPEAKER 1: Fetal
position in a coffin. SPEAKER 2: [LAUGHS] EVA: Like you see,
it's a bit difficult-- totally different if you
talk to a group of extroverts and you hang out
with extroverts. With introverts, it's different. Like, we just say hi, hi, and
everybody goes their own way. And everybody is OK with that. SPEAKER 2: Yeah. That's the thing, like you
said in the circle, all looking at you. EVA: But people
understand, you know? SPEAKER 1: So one of the things
that I encounter at these kind of events-- because I walk past
people I sort of vaguely know or have met before-- and we'll walk past
each other and go, hey, Mike, and hey, Jake. And now we're locked in. And it's that sort of thing. It's like, do you want
to go for a picnic? [LAUGHTER] What's the next step? SPEAKER 2: I thought
it was the thing where you pretend you haven't seen
the other person-- you just keep walking. You just look at your
feet, and you're like-- SPEAKER 1: Oh. So you're trying
to avoid people. That works too. SPEAKER 2: I have
been guilty of that. Some days when I'm too
low energy, and I'm like, oh, that's a person. SPEAKER 1: No. I'm happy with the
meeting and the talking. But it's when to break it off,
and what's the rule there? Like you would say-- EVA: Oh, just say,
oh, I have a thing. SPEAKER 2: Oh, a thing. SPEAKER 1: That's really good. EVA: The magical thing, yeah. SPEAKER 1: I've got a thing. SPEAKER 2: With a thing. EVA: And I'm so glad that
Googlers go ahead of our needs. Have you seen the demo with
the phone call, where the AI is doing a phone call for you? SPEAKER 2: In the
future, we can just send that to the conference. SPEAKER 1: [LAUGHS] EVA: One thing is that all
this technology behind it is so amazing and everything. But what amazes me the
most is that [GASPS] there must be so many
introverts in the world if they made a technology
for people like me. I finally feel
included, you know? SPEAKER 2: So what
have you been doing? What, why-- what have
you've been talking about? SPEAKER 1: What, what, why? SPEAKER 2: What, why-- well, we already had
one why question. SPEAKER 1: What, what, why? EVA: Well, it started that
we built an app with Adi, and it was crap. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER 1: But that
was Adi's fault. That was Adi's fault, right? EVA: No. It was an amazing app. You could go and
check Google doodles, and you could play
them, and it was all super interactive and nice. But it was just not performant. And when you do stuff
with Adi and folks, it needs to be performant. So they made us fix it, and
we learned quite a bit out of that. So we've been sharing
that throughout the talk. It's actually much easier to
run into performance troubles than we originally thought. So yeah. SPEAKER 2: [LAUGHS] Oh,
that's a different one. EVA: Ta-da. SPEAKER 2: Well, we
definitely mention your talk in the description. EVA: It's pretty
easy to make a-- SPEAKER 1: What kind
of performance problems were you hitting then? EVA: Well, a lot of
stuff comes from the fact that when you develop things, it
lasts over some period of time. And after some time,
you don't remember what you did before, and so on. So things accumulate, right? And then you just forget. And we've been working with some
tools that help you remind-- SPEAKER 2: There's your mistake. EVA: --what might go wrong. Yeah, if there were no
tools, everybody was happy. Nobody had any scores, right? But now, there are tools
that can reminds you of-- for example, I don't
know, the library you forgot to kick out because
you're not using it anymore-- about the images that are
twice as big because you said, OK, I'll optimize them
later, and this later just never happened. So it's all about process. It's less about the
code, and the samples, and the techniques
you use in the code. It's more about the
process, like how to fit your performance
habits into your overall-- SPEAKER 2: So how big of a role
does Lighthouse play in that? Is that something
where you think triaging if Lighthouse reminds
you of everything that it needs to remind you of. EVA: There are
new audits running each quarter in
lighthouse, and it's getting better and better job
of giving you just an overview of what you could be improving. And that's pretty neat,
because usually you don't want to improve everything. You just need to
pick and choose. So if you have a
whole list, you can go and say, OK, apparently, this
one, this one, and this one is cheap. So I'll do it now. And this one and this
one are important. So I do it now. And these are expensive
and not so important. So I just ignore them. So it's getting better. And it's really a good guidance. It can lead you
through that process. SPEAKER 1: So what
were the issues that you punted until later on? What was the stuff
that was going to be really complex to
solve versus the stuff that was really easy? EVA: Well generally, you
want to add a feature, like you want to have
some images on the page, and you want to land
it as soon as possible. So you add the feature, and
you forget to optimize it at the same time. So it's like the stuff-- if you don't do it, great at
the beginning, straight away. You say, OK, I'll do it first
initial version, agile style, and then I'll come back
later and make it better. This later might never happen
because, for example, you're preparing for a Goggle I/O
or something like that. SPEAKER 1: Oh, yes. So is there a difference
between working towards performance
stuff versus working on features because you've
been doing sort of both, right? EVA: Yeah, that's the thing. So we decided to write this
app without taking performance much into consideration and see
how it is to retroactively go back and fix those things. That was the kind of exercise. SPEAKER 2: It's
probably very realistic, because I think most teams
work and, like, let's get the functionality
first and optimize later. SPEAKER 1: Oh, but
then it puts you in danger of not
doing that last step. SPEAKER 2: I know but-- SPEAKER 1: It's like, oh, we'll
do accessibility at the end, and then people go, oh,
the project's over-running. Let's cut it there. SPEAKER 2: But also that's
people throwing around the whole thing-- you know,
premature optimization is the root of all evil. So you have people
actually trying to follow all this
conflicting advice. EVA: I mean, of course
it's really good to start with designing
for performance first. And it really leads
to great results. But I mean, sometimes
it does not happen. If you have a lot of
[INAUDIBLE] in your project-- you have your boss, you
have your marketing team, you have other folks, and
you need to juggle that. And sometimes you are
realistically in this state where you have an
app, and you want to make it more
performant, and you need to do retroactive work. So we just wanted to
explore that a little bit and see if Lighthouse is a
really good tool that can lead you to some gains there. And apparently it is. SPEAKER 2: So when you
were developing this app, did you basically give
feedback to the Lighthouse team and saying, "this did not get
caught by Lighthouse, fix it," kind of thing? EVA: Yeah. So there were some areas
where we were appointing stuff like this. And fortunately, most
of the time the answer was wait a quarter or two. It's in progress. We're getting there. We know it will be there soon. So it's a very dynamically
developed tool. SPEAKER 1: So you've been
in the Sandbox as well. EVA: Oh yeah. SPEAKER 1: The area of I/O
where we've got all of the apps. EVA: They have speakers there. SPEAKER 2: Why is
it called a Sandbox, because it's not like-- when I think of
"sandbox," either it's an actual box of sand. Or it's like a metaphor for
where you go to build things. But that's also not happening. EVA: No, no. It's about faces. Have you seen kids going
into the sandbox and the face they make at that
point, like pure joy. SPEAKER 2: Oh. SPEAKER 1: Well, in
England we call it a sandpit, which sounds like-- it sounds like
where you might die. It's a different between-- EVA: It's like arena? SPEAKER 1: --put your kid in the
sandpit [HISSING] kid's gone. Never mind. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER 2: Well,
it's not quicksand. SPEAKER 1: No. Well, do you know? SPEAKER 2: A quicksand pit. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. Well, I had a
sandpit growing up. But we also had cats. So the sandpit was
not a fun place to be. EVA: Ooh. SPEAKER 1: So when people
are saying the sandbox, that's all I'm thinking of is
oh, it's going to be full of-- EVA: It depends on your
definition of fun, I guess. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER 1: In the
north of England, we'll take any fun we get. Like, oh, modeling clay-- no. [LAUGHTER] So who have you
been meeting there? What kind of things
have you been doing? EVA: I've met quite a few
of Google developer experts. And it's pretty cool, because
they have so much passion, and they usually specialize
in some narrow area. I can't know about every
single nook of web. So it's always very enlightening
to see all this passion. SPEAKER 1: But
knowing all about all of the web, that's something I
remember having to let go of. We're talking 15
years ago, I kind of felt like I knew a
reasonable amount of the web. This was kind of
in the IE6 days, when the web had
essentially stalled. But then new things
we're being added. So then we started to
get IndexedDB, WebGL and that sort of thing. And I panicked at
first thinking, how am I going to
learn all of this? EVA: I feel young now. SPEAKER 1: Right. But you don't have to
learn all of this, right? EVA: Yeah. That's why a lot of people are
choosing their specialization path these days, I think. Web performance is
one possibility. Other people focus more on
the back end side of things. I mean, the web is
broad, and there's space for all types of
specialists, I guess. SPEAKER 2: I mean, that's
where I see part of our job most, to try and
figure out which APIs are relevant to everyone. Stuff like, for
example, CSS Grid is probably useful to
everyone, and everybody should take a look at that. SPEAKER 1: It is so useful, and
I feel I only know 1% of it. And it's so powerful. SPEAKER 2: That's probably
enough for most of the time. And then there is the niches-- do you really need to
know WebGL or WebUSB. You don't if you
don't have a use case. SPEAKER 1: Good,
because I don't know either of those two things. Thank you for
validating my skills. [LAUGHS] SPEAKER 2: And that's
something where we have been trying to also get better at-- and with projects like these,
because in these projects you figure out Grit
was useful here, and I can see it being
useful in more use cases. Or you find out I had
to resort to feature x, even though I don't
think it should be the case. Can we do something to make
it easier for developers? EVA: I think what is
cool about the web is there is a lot of community
around different areas. And it's not a matter
of being a specialist in every single area, so that
you can have a cool project. It's when you have
a project, and you have a particular problem
to solve on that project, you can go out and
find information that is relevant
to you on a given particular moment in time. So as long as this information
is findable, you'll be fine. You just need to know
how to look for it. SPEAKER 2: I mean, it's
good, though, that we're keeping an eye out-- to have people like you actually
field test this stuff so that it doesn't-- it gets sooner than later. English is hard today. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. EVA: Yeah, told you. SPEAKER 1: It's getting late. EVA: It is-- these
type of things, yeah.
That introduction was too painful to sit through