Node-js Performance and Render ATL

Episode Description

JavaScript Jam covers Node.js performance benchmarks across versions, Bun 0.6's new bundler, performance budgets for web apps, and Render ATL preview.

Episode Summary

This episode of JavaScript Jam Live opens with Anthony Campolo breaking down a comprehensive benchmark study from a Node.js Technical Steering Committee member comparing performance across Node versions 16, 18, and 20, revealing both improvements and surprising regressions in areas like file system operations, HTTP handling, and streams. The conversation naturally flows into Bun 0.6, which introduces a built-in bundler supporting Node, browser, and Bun targets, along with experimental React Server Components support. Ishan Anand joins to explain the concept of performance budgets—automated thresholds integrated into CI/CD pipelines that detect when site performance regresses—and ties them to Google's Core Web Vitals as a practical starting point, arguing that the real challenge is organizational rather than technical. The second half shifts to an enthusiastic preview of Render ATL, covering the newly announced ATL Tech Week, workshop offerings spanning AI, Vue, TypeScript, and React, themed dress-up days, and the conference's strong networking and career opportunities. Nick Taylor drops in to share his excitement about meeting online connections in person for the first time. The episode wraps with Anthony teasing his work getting LangChain running on Edgio.

Chapters

Scott Steinlage welcomes listeners to JavaScript Jam Live, the weekly Wednesday show covering web development and JavaScript topics. He encourages audience participation, whether live or listening to the recording, and emphasizes that listener contributions add value for everyone involved.

The hosts introduce themselves—Scott as technical community manager at Edgio and Anthony Campolo as developer advocate—before teasing the day's topics. Scott promotes the JavaScript Jam newsletter as a way to stay ahead of what the show will cover each week and plugs it as a free resource curated by Anthony.

00:03:53 - State of Node.js Performance Benchmarks

Anthony walks through a major blog post from a Node.js Technical Steering Committee member that benchmarks performance across Node versions 16, 18, and 20. The study covers internal benchmarks like file system events, HTTP parsing, streams, buffers, and startup time, with all results published in a public repository. While most metrics improve across versions, some notable regressions surfaced between releases.

The hosts discuss how the study was run on a single AWS Linux instance and note that a follow-up article focusing on Express and Fastify HTTP server benchmarks is forthcoming. They explore how the benchmarking could expand to compare against non-Node runtimes like Cloudflare Workers, though API differences make one-to-one comparisons tricky. Anthony relates to the practical reality of switching Node versions just to get projects running.

00:10:05 - Bun 0.6 and the New Bun Bundler

Anthony introduces Bun version 0.6, which ships with a built-in bundler aimed at creating a unified developer experience. The bundler supports multiple targets—Node, browser, and Bun—and can produce single executables that don't require the Bun dependency to run. They speculate the Bun target will be most relevant once Oven, Bun's hosting platform, launches.

The discussion turns to Bun's experimental support for React Server Components, which Anthony highlights as significant given the broader ecosystem's struggles to implement them. Scott riffs on Dan Abramov's tweets about missing React documentation and humorously suggests building an AI tool that scrapes Twitter threads to generate docs, leading to a lighthearted exchange about the feasibility of such a project.

00:13:35 - Personal Catch-Up and Twitter Bookmarks

The conversation takes a casual detour as Anthony shares that he's back in St. Louis after visiting Colorado, where he met his nieces and connected with Jen. Scott and Anthony joke about Twitter bookmarking habits after someone bookmarked a tweet about their meetup.

Scott reflects on the psychology of bookmarking—saving informative tweets with the intention of returning to them but rarely doing so. He draws a playful connection between heavy bookmarkers and people who keep too many browser tabs open, admitting he currently has around twenty tabs open himself. The banter provides a natural breather before the show moves into its next segments.

00:16:15 - Render ATL Preview and ATL Tech Week

Scott launches into an enthusiastic preview of Render ATL, the upcoming conference in Atlanta he and Anthony will attend. He covers the conference's scale—over eighty speakers across three simultaneous stages—and mentions the newly announced ATL Tech Week, modeled after Miami's Tech Week, complete with a rooftop kickoff event sponsored by Pronghorn.

The workshop lineup for May 31st gets detailed coverage, spanning topics like design systems, AI in React, TensorFlow for JavaScript, Vue reactivity, TypeScript, and Shopify with React. Scott highlights notable speakers including Evan You and Chance Strickland, and explains the themed dress days like Jersey Day and cosplay, which have become part of Render's distinctive culture.

00:24:08 - Performance Budgets with Ishan Anand

Ishan Anand joins to explain performance budgets—automated thresholds typically built into CI/CD pipelines that detect when a site's performance regresses beyond acceptable limits. He recommends starting by baselining against your worst metrics from the past two to four weeks, then gradually tightening targets over time. The concept is practical rather than aspirational, designed to catch problems before they compound.

Ishan connects performance budgets to Google's Core Web Vitals—LCP, first input delay, cumulative layout shift, and the upcoming INP metric—arguing these provide a ready-made performance budget for the web. He frames the real challenge as organizational rather than technical, describing performance as a "tragedy of the commons" where incremental additions erode speed until Google's search ranking consequences force teams to care. The discussion underscores how competitor analysis through Core Web Vitals data can motivate action.

00:31:50 - Midshow Recap and Render Logistics

Scott recaps the episode's topics so far and reminds listeners about the newsletter before pivoting to deeper Render ATL logistics. He and Anthony discuss the conference venue setup—workshops at the Westin hotel, main events at AmericasMart connected by an underground tunnel—and VIP perks like a glamorous dinner at the Sundial Restaurant.

The conversation covers the conference's career-focused features, including resume submission systems and an impressive sponsor roster spanning Delta Airlines, AWS, Uber, Netflix, GitHub, and many more across tech, fintech, retail, and developer tools. Scott emphasizes that Render offers valuable networking and job opportunities beyond just technical talks.

00:43:49 - Nick Taylor Joins and Conference Excitement

Nick Taylor comes up to share his excitement about Render ATL, explaining it was originally supposed to be his first in-person conference before Remix Conf came together last minute through his work on the Remix-Netlify integration. He used his employer's education stipend to offset the ticket cost and notes his main motivation is meeting people he's only known through Twitter and Twitch.

Nick shares a funny anecdote about going from zero interactions with Colby Fayock to suddenly doing a Twitch stream, attending Render, and joining a panel together at Front End Test Fest. The group plans to grab a meal together at the conference, and the conversation captures the genuine community spirit that draws people to in-person developer events.

00:49:05 - LangChain on Edgio and Closing

The episode winds down with Anthony teasing that he got LangChain, the OpenAI meta-framework, running on Edgio. Scott expresses enthusiasm for Anthony's growing AI work and looks forward to upcoming streams and content exploring the intersection of AI and edge computing.

Scott wraps up by encouraging listeners to find the hosts and Nick at Render ATL, subscribe to the JavaScript Jam newsletter, and join next week's special live episode from the conference floor featuring Render speakers. The sign-off captures the show's community-first energy, with plans already set for an open-mic format at the Atlanta event.

Transcript

00:00:01 - Scott Steinlage

Yo, welcome everybody. And there's Anthony. Bringing you up here, bro. Invited, bro. Nifty. What's happening, man?

00:00:21 - Nick Taylor

Yo, yo.

00:00:21 - Scott Steinlage

All right, everybody. Yo, yo. Welcome to JavaScript Jam Live. We do this every Wednesday at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, this is how we do it. Okay, so hope you all are ready. Today we're gonna be talking about some fun stuff. I'll let Anthony get into that here in a minute, but I just want to start by saying, if you're listening to this recording, thank you. If you're here live, thank you. And whether you're a beginner or advanced at web development, or anything development-related, thank you so much. We want to hear from everybody.

00:01:12 - Anthony Campolo

Okay?

00:01:13 - Scott Steinlage

You are a part of this too, all right? So, in all seriousness, please request to come on up. We would love to hear from you. Whether it's a fact, statement, question, concern, or an opinion, it doesn't matter. We want to hear from you. So come on up.

00:01:36 - Ishan Anand

Okay.

00:01:38 - Scott Steinlage

In fact, that very often increases the value that we all get to experience and receive from these lives when you all participate and have fun with us, not only for those listening, but also for those here talking. So appreciate you. All right, moving forward, let's get started with State of Node.js Performance and Bun version 0.6. Look at that exciting stuff here. If you all don't know what I'm talking about, then maybe you should be getting our newsletter. That's a good segue. Check out our newsletter. Go to JavaScriptJam.com and sign up right now so that you can get all the nitty-gritty details about the amazing things in JavaScript world and web development from our dear awesome homie Anthony, who spends so much time contributing to it, putting this together to give y'all some extra free value. That's right. We're not charging for this newsletter. It's all for you guys. Cool. Go get it. Don't miss out. And that way you can join us every week and know what we're going to be talking about ahead of time so you can have some fun, contribute to the conversation, or just know what the heck we're talking about when we're talking about it and be able to check out links and stuff.

00:03:30 - Scott Steinlage

Cool. All right. My name is Scott Steinlage, and I am the technical community manager at Edgio and co-host of this here awesome JavaScript Jam podcast. And Anthony, who are you?

00:03:47 - Anthony Campolo

My name is Anthony Campolo, and I am a developer advocate at Edgio. Awesome.

00:03:53 - Scott Steinlage

Sweet. What are we gonna talk about today, dude?

00:03:59 - Anthony Campolo

Well, I just replied with the newsletter, and now it's pinned. Yeah, we had two very performance-focused stories for this week. I always find benchmarking pretty interesting. And someone on what's called the Node Technical Steering Committee, it's like the official team that works on it, put together this really huge blog post and benchmark of all the different things you do in Node and how they compare across versions 16, 18, and 20. So those are each of the long-term releases, and the idea is, you know, we hopefully get faster and improvements from one version to another. And for the most part that's true, but there are actually some places where there are regressions from 16 to 18 to 20. So it's both good to let developers know kind of where some bottlenecks are and then also identify potential bottlenecks for the core team themselves to fix. So hopefully some of the regressions that they identified will be handled. But yeah, it was interesting for me because it gets really into the guts of all the little things you do with Node because, you know, people use Node as a CLI, they use it as an HTTP server, they use it for lots of different things, and this really breaks down each individual method or function you would do.

00:05:38 - Anthony Campolo

And I thought this went along well with Bun because the whole idea with Bun is that the creator, Jared, did a similar thing where he maniacally benchmarked all of these different things you can do with Node and then found ways to optimize them using a different runtime. So there's lots of benchmarks you can now run across Node, across Node versus Bun, or across Node versus Bun versus Deno. So there's no shortage of fun metrics to get into.

00:06:12 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, that's awesome. There are a lot of similarities there. That's interesting. Yeah, and so there are these internal benchmarks that are used, it looks like, right? There are things like FS events, HTTP, miscellaneous modules, streams, URL, buffers, utility. So that's pretty cool. So it's based on file system, the event classes, server and parser, startup time, streams, creation, buffer operations, all that good stuff. And it looks like all the results were published in the main repository of State of Node.js Performance 2023. So there is a repo on all this. You can find it on that link that was shared above there in the Jumbotron, like we call it. That's pretty cool. Then they talk about why. Sorry, go ahead.

00:07:12 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, and it's not even the full thing. There's going to be a follow-up article specifically for things like Express and Fastify. So when you're actually running a Node server to take HTTP traffic, that's its own kind of separate benchmarking. So I'll be curious to see once that gets published. It's also worth noting that this was run on a single AWS instance. So you could even get into optimizing different machines, virtual machines, and different ways of seeing different clouds and their performance. You could do a whole matrix of different things, but this kind of controls for, just imagine we're running a Node server on a Linux box, which I think is a nice general baseline.

00:08:06 - Scott Steinlage

That's interesting. So I wonder if they're going to even more so go wider, because it sounds like that's deeper, well, it's also wider at the same time, I don't know, excuse me, with Express and stuff like that. But comparing it not only against itself in the years following, but also to other things out there would be cool to see.

00:08:40 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Because you could have, like, you want to test Node libraries on top, and then you want to test non-Node runtimes against it. So things like edge runtimes, Cloudflare Workers, or that type of stuff.

00:08:55 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, that would be cool to see for sure.

00:08:58 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. That's where it gets confusing, though, because there's not always a one-to-one mapping of APIs to those other ones.

00:09:06 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, then it gets confusing, then you introduce other perf issues potentially and whatever.

00:09:12 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, yeah. But the main thing for this is it was really about comparing across different versions of Node. And I always find this stuff interesting because I'm constantly switching between different versions of Node just to get projects to run on my computer.

00:09:26 - Scott Steinlage

Right.

00:09:26 - Anthony Campolo

And it would be nice to even be at a point where I could actually decide to use one for a performance benefit. But usually it's just like, this one doesn't run, so I'm going to switch...

00:09:37 - Scott Steinlage

...to this version, now it runs. Yep, yep, very true. Go back to version eight. What? That's the only way it works. I don't know. Cool, man. Yeah, this is very informative. Pretty awesome.

00:10:05 - Anthony Campolo

And then for Bun version 0.6, there is now the Bun bundler. So the point of Bun is to have a unified dev experience, kind of like Deno or Rome. So having a bundler built in, which allows you to just bundle your projects, has been one of the big things that they've been missing. And so now you can actually just bundle it as a single executable, and you don't even necessarily need to have the Bun dependency to run it.

00:10:51 - Scott Steinlage

That's pretty cool.

00:10:55 - Anthony Campolo

It gives you different targets. You can set it for a Node target or a browser target. Node APIs aren't always in more native JavaScript runtimes. And then there's a Bun target. So I'm assuming that's going to be for when Oven comes out, which is like Bun's hosting platform.

00:11:18 - Scott Steinlage

That would only make sense. Yeah.

00:11:24 - Anthony Campolo

Because I don't know where else you would even run Bun's runtime unless you just put it in a Docker container.

00:11:31 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah. And for what? For what use case? Yeah, yeah. Interesting. That's pretty cool. I'm just reading through what you put in the newsletter here.

00:11:49 - Anthony Campolo

And also, the Bun bundler includes experimental support for React Server Components. So that's pretty interesting because that's something that everyone's trying to figure out how to get to work in their projects right now.

00:12:05 - Scott Steinlage

Yep. Yeah. I saw Dan talking about something the other day. "I know. I'm sorry we don't have docs yet. This sucks. But I've written many things on Twitter and Threads, so maybe I could just compile those. What do you guys like most?" Yeah, right. Yep. That's what you should create. You should create an AI scraper that scrapes Twitter threads that have keywords or particular things and then formulates documentation from the thread.

00:12:55 - Anthony Campolo

That'd be pretty sweet.

00:12:58 - Scott Steinlage

It sounds like a lot of work, but yeah, I've always got ideas. I mean, you gotta just...

00:13:04 - Anthony Campolo

You gotta just get the tweets and then feed those into the chat, so...

00:13:10 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, I mean, it could be done for sure. I'm just not sure how relevant the threads are, though. Yeah, you'd have to figure out a way to pick the most relevant threads, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yes, sir. So, Anthony, where are you at nowadays?

00:13:35 - Anthony Campolo

Where am I at now? Yeah, like physically?

00:13:38 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, physically. Are you still out and about?

00:13:44 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, yeah, I got back from Colorado. I'm in St. Louis now.

00:13:47 - Scott Steinlage

Awesome. Cool. Yep.

00:13:50 - Anthony Campolo

I got to meet my nieces.

00:13:51 - Scott Steinlage

That's good.

00:13:54 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. And I met Jen. Jen.

00:13:56 - Scott Steinlage

I saw that. That's exciting. Somebody bookmarked y'all, from what I hear.

00:14:03 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:14:05 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah.

00:14:06 - Anthony Campolo

They ended up removing it after we tweeted about it.

00:14:09 - Scott Steinlage

Did they really? I almost bookmarked your tweet saying something about it just to see what you would say. Anyway, cool. Sounds like a good time, man. Yeah, Jen. Jen's...

00:14:24 - Anthony Campolo

Do you ever bookmark tweets?

00:14:26 - Scott Steinlage

Oh yeah, I do. And somebody said something about it the other day, just in general, about, okay, do you bookmark tweets? Okay, why do you do it? Have you ever actually gone back and looked at them? Right. And I'm actually guilty of doing this. Anything that's informative or something that's teaching me something, I'll bookmark it, something that I think I need to recall, right? But if I've already got the picture and don't need to recall it, then I don't bookmark it. But if I'm like, oh, I know I'm going to need to follow back up on that, you know, or refer back to that, then I will bookmark it. And the funny thing is, I think I've only referred to something maybe twice in my bookmarks, and I have so many of them, I'm sure. So yeah, it's almost like, and I bet you this is something that is so true, I bet that people who have lots of tabs on their browser are people that bookmark. I just have an inkling. Anybody? Yeah, probably, because I have lots of tabs open on my browser. I don't know how many, like 20 right now.

00:15:42 - Scott Steinlage

Too many.

00:15:46 - Anthony Campolo

Too many tabs.

00:15:48 - Scott Steinlage

Is there ever too many tabs? All right, exciting stuff. By the way, speaking of exciting stuff, obviously we're talking a little bit about State of Node here. You can check out, if you're just joining us, the links we have up there on the Jumbotron, is what we call it. But if you scroll up, see all the links there, there is one right there for our newsletter. Don't forget to subscribe. And we talked about Bun version 0.6 and the bundler in Bun, probably for Oven later on. But yeah, lots of cool things there. But another cool thing coming up next week, Anthony and myself are going to be in Atlanta. Yes, Atlanta. Why Atlanta, Anthony? Do you know why?

00:16:48 - Anthony Campolo

Because it's a super sweet place with stuff and things.

00:16:53 - Scott Steinlage

Yes. Like the biggest aquarium, I think, in the United States is there, I believe.

00:16:59 - Anthony Campolo

Really?

00:17:01 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, I walked by it last time I was there and I never went in. No time. No time for that, swimming with the fishes. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. Things and places like Render ATL. That's where we're going to be. That's what we're going to be doing, hanging out at Render ATL with all your favorite people, at least a lot of them. I'm sure there are like 80-plus speakers there, which is insane. There's like three stages going at once. Pretty slick. A lot happening. Yes, like every hour, three stages, three talks going at one time. It's gonna be sweet. Last year they had something similar. I think they had two or three stages last year, I remember, right? They had one outside and two in, I think. Yeah. Pretty sure it was three. Excuse me. Anyway, might have been two. No, they did have three. I remember now. Yep. But yeah, there's also going to be lots of awesome activities after the main speaking events, so that'll be fun too. But we're going to be doing a live there as well, just like we do at every event we go to. So we're going to do a JavaScript Jam Live and we're going to get some of the speakers on.

00:18:26 - Scott Steinlage

Right now we for sure have James Q. Quick going to be joining us. Y'all know him. It's going to be a good time. And we've got several other people we're going to be doing podcasts with too. And Nick, Nicky T, just joined us. He probably just got off a stream not that long ago, I'm assuming. Come up and join us, bro, unless you're just done talking. Like, "I just streamed for three hours. Are you kidding me?" But yeah, Render is going to be fun. Nick, are you going to Render? I think you are, right? Maybe.

00:19:13 - Anthony Campolo

I think he is.

00:19:14 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah. But Nick will probably join us, I'm sure, talk with us. Maybe not holding you to it, bro, but if you want to, you can join us on our live at Render over there. Should be a good time. May 31, Wednesday, 12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, as always. Yeah Nick, quick question. Maybe you can't answer, maybe you can just type in the comments. "I can't chat at the moment. Might be free in a bit. Yes, going to Render ATL." Awesome. Do you listen to Spaces on desktop or are you constantly on mobile? Or do you have to make the shift when you want to talk and go back to mobile? Yeah, I'm usually on mobile because it just makes sense. Awesome. Well, I'm sure he's got a couple things going on. He's just listening in the background, I'm sure, on mobile at the moment, even when listening. Awesome. Yeah, I guess it makes it easier when you want to jump in and say something. That's what I do. Anthony, what about you? Are you normally listening to Spaces on desktop and then just jump over later if you want to, or what?

00:20:49 - Anthony Campolo

I usually listen on mobile.

00:20:52 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, it's...

00:20:54 - Anthony Campolo

I mean, partly. It used to be just because it had easier discovery, like you'd see Spaces while you were on your phone, but now they're actually pushing Spaces on the desktop.

00:21:03 - Scott Steinlage

Right.

00:21:03 - Anthony Campolo

Which is pretty sweet.

00:21:04 - Scott Steinlage

That's true. Now they just need to make it to where you can talk from there. There are ways around it. There are ways around it. All right, so hold on one second here. Anthony, did you have anything else that you wanted to bring up about things going on that you've seen today on Twitter or anything like that?

00:21:37 - Anthony Campolo

Well, we should mention that also in the newsletter is the interview I did with Glauber at Remix Conf.

00:21:46 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:46 - Anthony Campolo

So that was super fun. We chatted about the edge and databases and frameworks because Glauber is the CEO of ChiselStrike slash Turso, and they are running SQLite at the edge. And then Igor works at Cloudflare, which is obviously another very big edge platform. Hey, we got Ishan. And yeah, it was a really fun conversation. We talked a little bit about the history of where they started out. Glauber worked on the Linux kernel originally, which is pretty fascinating. And yeah, just chatting about edge stuff. So it was a good conversation to be in.

00:22:31 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, that's awesome. I'll go ahead and post a link to that so people can go listen to it. It'll be in the Jumbotron and in the comments of this, if you're listening to the recording.

00:22:45 - Anthony Campolo

What's up, Ishan?

00:22:46 - Scott Steinlage

What up?

00:22:47 - Ishan Anand

Hey guys. Sorry, I usually am able to keep this time very well protected from the slings and arrows of outrageous calendar invites, but I failed today. So I'm only here for a brief bit. But this is my favorite meeting of the week, right? Well, it's because it's external-facing. It's where we get to talk to the market and hear what's going on and what's top of mind and be really connected to the ecosystem. So that's what I love about it. So I don't know what point I came in. Anthony, it sounds like you're describing either an episode of FSJam or a recording we'd done for JavaScript Jam. What was it?

00:23:33 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I was talking about the interview I did at Remix Conf with Glauber and Igor.

00:23:39 - Ishan Anand

Oh yeah.

00:23:40 - Anthony Campolo

Okay.

00:23:41 - Ishan Anand

Yeah, that was great. I don't know where you guys were going next, but...

00:23:49 - Anthony Campolo

Well, I was curious if you, because the newsletter was very performance-focused.

00:23:54 - Scott Steinlage

It was.

00:23:54 - Anthony Campolo

I don't know if you checked out the Node benchmark thing. I thought you would find that interesting.

00:23:59 - Ishan Anand

Well, I was gonna say, I don't know if you guys are getting to the newsletter, but I thought it was like you wrote it just for me. It's like, you don't have to, you...

00:24:08 - Scott Steinlage

...don't have to do that. Probably did.

00:24:13 - Ishan Anand

Or I'm rubbing off on you. But yeah, there was a bunch of stuff. So there was the Node performance, which was really great, but there was also the SpeedCurve thing on performance budgets. I think it's one of those simple concepts people just need to internalize and use and kind of make sense of, but they don't do them. It's like working out.

00:24:37 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. That was the first time I had heard that term before, and it seemed like a pretty comprehensive article. Do you want to talk about what that is?

00:24:44 - Ishan Anand

Yeah. So performance budgets are really this idea that, just like you have a budget in your company for what you spend on various departments, you have a budget for how much you're going to use up your compute or your load time on different types of things. And sometimes some things may go over budget. Like you might put in a third-party tag and now you're over budget. So it's a way that you build into your CI/CD tool, an automated test. Usually it's in your CI/CD. It could also be based on your RUM data that says we're going to be below some certain target. Like, we want our LCP below two and a half seconds, right? And then you basically are automating detection if you regress, and then it sends you an alert and you're like, okay, we got to go look into this. And then you know you're over budget. One thing that's important to understand is it's not an aspirational target, like you should be hitting it, and it's designed to detect regressions. And I really like that. I think that was written by Tammy, who...

00:25:51 - Ishan Anand

Yeah, it was, who works at SpeedCurve. And so you should look at it as a reasonable, achievable target. It's probably what you're doing now. I think she had a heuristic that was, look at what you're doing in the last two to four weeks of data, yeah, here it is, and then identify your worst number and then just start by setting your performance budget for that number. And, you know, gradually over time, as you improve your performance, you can move that number and squeeze it lower, but it's a good place to start. The one thing I would say, and augment to that, is you should probably have performance budgets around your Core Web Vitals. So, you know, Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift, and soon to be INP, which we talked about last week, which will be a new Core Web Vital coming out in about a year. And you should just baseline your performance budgets to those hard limits of where Google says that's bad. So in the case of LCP, two and a half seconds. If you're already meeting that, then obviously set that budget even lower.

00:26:55 - Ishan Anand

But I would just start by saying Google basically gave the web a whole performance budget for those metrics and you should tackle those. And then as you mature in your speed journey, or the speed maturity of your organization, then you can start adding performance budgets around other metrics that are directly relevant to your particular experience, whether they're timings on specific elements or specific flows. You can add those. But I think it's really important because what often happens is people are like, the site's slow. You spend a sprint making the site faster, and then it's faster. But then a quarter later somebody's like, the site's slow again. And it's like, how did this happen? Well, if you had performance budgets, you'd know when you crossed that threshold and you'd spring back into action. That's kind of like, it's a solution to actually an organizational problem more than it's really a technical thing. So I'll stop there, but hopefully that was helpful.

00:27:57 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, definitely. How often do you see these actually like used in the wild?

00:28:06 - Ishan Anand

It's a great question. There are a lot of people who will have it set up, but I don't know how much priority they put around it. So prior to Core Web Vitals, I'll answer it in a roundabout way, and I said this at a conference about 18 months ago, the problem with performance is somewhat technical, but it's also social. It's people's lack of caring. Performance can be the tragedy of the commons. And people are like, okay, one extra millisecond. Like, imagine somebody adds a third-party tag to the website and suddenly it got slower. And, you know, marketing says this needs to be there. It goes up the chain of command and somebody's like, okay, let's move the budget to allow it. And then you have a slippery slope the next time another tag comes in, and, you know, your performance budget goes the other way. And what I think Google really has done, and I said it's given the whole web a performance budget, is they've found a great leverage point, which is your search engine ranking, which for some sites is 50 or even 70% of their traffic. If it comes from Google, it will be affected by the speed of your website.

00:29:23 - Ishan Anand

So now you have to care.

00:29:25 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, well, you know what? I'm just going to use ChatGPT for searching from now on and through Google. Well, I don't know, it's not there yet. I'm just kidding.

00:29:38 - Ishan Anand

It might [unclear], but yeah. So what I find, honestly, is that people care about Core Web Vitals, I would say, more. In fact, they will use that as a de facto performance budget. And the other great thing about performance budgets, sorry, Core Web Vitals as the basis, like the first baseline of it, is you can see how you rank against your competitors. So you can search for the keywords that are important for your business and then you can see who's ranking, and then you can go look: are they faster than you? That might be why they're ranking above you. You can make a very informed decision and get full transparency into the market. And so that's why it tends to get a lot of attention. I actually have to drop for another meeting, but that's my quick take.

00:30:33 - Anthony Campolo

Sweet. Thanks for the nugget.

00:30:37 - Ishan Anand

And I look forward to seeing you guys next week when you are live at Render ATL. Highly encourage everyone to tune in for that. I am so excited and I'm looking forward to that.

00:30:49 - Scott Steinlage

Awesome. Thanks, Ishan.

00:30:51 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, thanks, guys.

00:30:53 - Scott Steinlage

Good luck. Appreciate it. So I think we should just have a bunch of small micro-sites that are very minimalistic and then just have the best performance ever and be very specific to what the need is, like niche down on every single page. Super niche. I don't know. That's kind of a thing nowadays anyway when it comes to creating courses and things like that, being very niche, right? Maybe we just put a very specific topic on one page and only dig into those things and not make it super fancy. I don't know. Maybe it's like forums back in the day. That's what Google wants.

00:31:50 - Anthony Campolo

Bare-bones information.

00:31:51 - Scott Steinlage

Google just wants forums. Just bare-bones forum information. Anyway, cool. Well, that was fun. Thanks for joining us there for a minute, Ishan. Well, we're about the halfway mark here. Thank you so much for joining us. This is what we do every Wednesday, 12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. We get on here and talk about web development, JavaScript stuff, all related topics. You can check out our newsletter, javascriptjam.com. Go ahead and sign up for it, and you will see the things we'll be talking about that week and also into the future. Don't miss out on it. Good stuff. Anthony put some time into it to give you some value there. What's next? What's next on the...

00:32:39 - Anthony Campolo

You want to talk about more Render stuff? Are there satellite events or things that we're going to be looking at or potentially going to?

00:32:47 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of stuff, man. Whenever I went last year, I usually kind of just feel out what, I don't know, I'll start to connect with some people on there. Obviously, I already know some people, but then there are also some people I don't, so I make new connections. And it all depends on what those connections turn into or what I'm trying to do with them. If I'm just trying to continue growing relationships I already have or building new ones, or both at the same time, maybe you all go to the same place. But after events, man, there's usually too many things to choose from. So you just need to really hone in on what everybody else is doing and say, okay, these people are going this place and these people are in that place. Which one do I want to do? You know, pros and cons of everything, just... yeah. But as far as what's going on, I mean, holy cow. I'm not gonna go through the entire schedule, but there is an ATL Tech Week now, actually.

00:34:02 - Scott Steinlage

So they kind of made this official a week or so ago. I can't remember exactly when, but I think it was a week or so ago. So there is now, just like Miami, right, when we were at React Miami, Miami had a Tech Week going on that week, you know, and there was that huge tech conference with 20,000 people. ATL now has this Tech Week. They're going to be doing more things all over the place. In fact, actually, they're kind of kicking off something. It's sponsored by Pronghorn, it looks like, in the evening of the 30th, which is kind of like the night before the actual event starts on the 31st. And it's a rooftop thing, which actually, it's kind of funny because one of the big things they did is this ATV roof. I don't know what that means, but, oh, Atlanta Tech Village rooftop. I'm not sure where that is, but there was this place where they did this big old rooftop party last time that was pretty cool. So it's kind of like a standing tradition at this point, I think, where they kind of kick things off with this.

00:35:26 - Scott Steinlage

But this is for Tech Week, which, by the way, they have gone through and done something with the mayor and all kinds of stuff to make that a reality for Atlanta. So it's pretty legit. And let's see, workshops are on the 31st, and there are a lot of them, by the way. Lots of workshops, all things from making design systems, AI in React, AI for JavaScript using TensorFlow, blah, blah, blah. I mean, there are so many different things. Reactivity deep dive with Vue, TypeScript, of course, that would be in there somewhere, decentralized stuff, so some Web3 things. There's React apps again, but with Shopify stuff. And no, that is not from Kent C. Dodds or Remix. It's actually... well, I guess it could be using Remix, and they're just not talking about it because it says Hussein [unclear]. I think I'm pronouncing that wrong. But anyway, it's sponsored by Shopify, and so, interesting. We'll see what they talk about in that workshop. But all these are on the 31st and they all go from like 10 to 5, so you got to kind of choose which one you want to go to.

00:37:13 - Scott Steinlage

And I think the first thousand people who purchased a ticket are going to be able to access these workshops for free. They didn't have to buy a workshop ticket. But if you were after the first thousand, you have to buy a workshop ticket to get into these workshops, and you probably already know that if you're going. So, but yeah, lots of good names here. You know Evan You, right? He's doing Vue.js stuff. Adam Rackis, Kevin Jones. Yeah. Chance Strickland's there. So yeah, lots of cool things for the workshops. And then there's lots of other things that, if you're part of VIP or this scholarship program that they had or whatever, then they have other networking and brunch things and things like that. There's another thing for VIP. I think there was a VIP dinner or something, which is at the Westin in ATL, which is the official hotel for this whole thing. And actually they're doing the workshops in the hotel, but the actual event is happening at AmericasMart. So that'll be, which, by the way, there's an underground tunnel to get from the Westin to AmericasMart.

00:38:44 - Scott Steinlage

Should be kind of cool. I don't know. This is interesting. Should be pretty neat. But yeah, there's a VIP thing at the Sundial Restaurant, which is on the night of the 31st, so after workshops, for VIP folks and stuff like that. I don't know if that's supposed to be, like, it says "Night of Glamour Celebration." Glamour. I don't know. Do I have to wear a tux for that? I don't know. But that's one other thing is they love, at Render, they've really created this kind of culture around things to wear too. So they have themes for each day. Like the first day, I'd have to look at it again, I don't recall what they are, but I know the second day is cosplay. Oh, first day is Jersey Day. And actually Render has their own jersey that they, I don't know if they had it the first year they did it, but they had it last year, which was super cool. And you can actually buy the jersey on their site, but it's like 100 bucks. But anywho.

00:40:00 - Scott Steinlage

So you can wear a jersey or whatever you want to do, and you don't have to participate in any of it. But it's an interesting culture that they've created around it. So there's also a big kind of thing with dressing up, looking nice for these events afterward sometimes. Yeah, it doesn't have to be. There are plenty of people that just go in cargo shorts and T-shirts, but who cares? But it's fun to partake in if you like doing that kind of thing. There's lots of talks and things. This one's actually going to be interesting, I think: Generative AI, A Builder's Guide. So I'm not sure exactly what he's going to be using. So this is Banjo, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, [unclear], I think. But he's with AWS. I met him actually at Render last year. Super nice guy. And so he's going to be going into generative AI, kind of going through the history of generative AI, exploring key concepts such as word embeddings, language models, et cetera. Lots of cool things there. But if you want to find out more, just go to renderatl.com/schedule and you can see all the awesome things going on over those three days.

00:41:31 - Scott Steinlage

31st, 1st, and 2nd, coming up very soon here. If you haven't gotten a ticket, I would suggest it because honestly, this is one of the biggest tech events of the year and they have so much going on there. Even if you maybe recently lost your job or are looking for a new job or whatever, they have things about that too. It's not just going there to hear talks and learn some things. And, you know, obviously I'm always a big proponent of these events as networking. And that could be for your job, that could be for you personally, it could be many different things. And one of those things is the ability to potentially have the opportunity to meet an employer. And they actually do have a decent focus on this. They have the ability for you to submit a resume into their system and stuff like that. And if you want, when you buy your ticket, I think they have that availability to say whether you're interested or not. And if you are, you can put in a resume or whatever and they'll push it out to different people there.

00:42:46 - Scott Steinlage

And the reason why I say this is I think it would behoove you to do so if you are interested and are looking, because they have huge sponsors, right? And so many of them, so many of the names that we all know or love and have grown to know over the years. I mean, it's insane how many logos they get going to this event. It's pretty impressive, to say the least. I mean, they've got Delta Air Lines, they've got AWS, Uber, Wix, Dropbox, CircleCI, Google Fiber, Capital One, Zillow, Home Depot, Intuit, Netflix, GitHub, Carrot. So they got everything from tech to fintech to retail to real estate, banking, you know, fintech, right? Yeah. And more, and even dev tools. Right. It's crazy, the amount of logos they have, so it would definitely be a great opportunity.

00:43:49 - Anthony Campolo

We got Nicky T up here, by the way.

00:43:51 - Scott Steinlage

Yes, I heard the ding. Nicky T, what's up, man? How are you doing, brother? What are you looking forward to at Render? What have you been up to? You don't have to answer that last part first yet. Whatever you want to do. How's it going?

00:44:04 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty excited for Render. I saw both of you at Remix Conf.

00:44:13 - Scott Steinlage

[unclear].

00:44:13 - Nick Taylor

That kind of came together last minute for me, just because I'd worked on the Remix integration with Netlify. So work sent me there, which was great. That was my first in-person conference. So originally my first in-person conference was going to be Render, but I'm totally cool with that. But yeah, the reason why I signed up for Render was because I knew there would be a lot of people there that I've only ever really interacted with on Twitter, or some of them I might have done Twitch streams with. But basically our education stipend at work allows us to use it toward one conference a year, if you want to, for part of it. So I used that to do that because, I won't lie, the ticket is a little pricey.

00:45:04 - Scott Steinlage

So true.

00:45:06 - Nick Taylor

But basically I was just banking on this is the one conference I'm going to this year. And it was, I mean, I'm sure there'll be great talks and stuff, for sure, but I'm really most excited just to meet a lot of people who I've only ever met in the Matrix.

00:45:26 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, totally. I understand that. I mean, everybody who's anybody, everybody who's not anybody, it's gonna be there. I mean, it's a huge event and they've done a really good job at organizing it and really creating an atmosphere for networking and growth and just a good time. So I'm excited for it too, man. And I'm excited we get to see you again. So yeah, yeah, yeah, two for two.

00:45:52 - Nick Taylor

It's like I'd never met either of you, and now it's like I've seen you twice. Yeah, it's kind of funny too, because Colby Fayock, who I was doing the Twitch stream with before, I've only ever spoken to him on Twitter.

00:46:09 - Scott Steinlage

[unclear].

00:46:10 - Nick Taylor

We did the Twitch stream today and then I was laughing because I'm like, we're doing a Twitch stream today, I'm going to see you next week at Render, and then there's also Front End Test Fest, which is a front-end testing online conference, and we're both on a panel there. So it's like I went from zero Colby to like 100% Colby in my life.

00:46:32 - Scott Steinlage

That's awesome. Yeah, that's so cool. It's like once you kind of get in on doing events and more things, it's like you just start bumping into a lot of similar faces. But also there are plenty of new ones to continue to meet as well. So yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, I'm excited for it, man. Yeah, we should all figure out a time where we can go grab a bite or something during the busyness of Render. Should be fun.

00:47:02 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, no, no, no, for sure. I'm sure we can figure something out.

00:47:06 - Scott Steinlage

Awesome.

00:47:07 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:47:08 - Scott Steinlage

Cool. Well, folks, if you haven't decided at this point, you're probably not going. But after all that talk in there of me pushing it out there, obviously, yes, we're doing a media collaboration, I like to call it, with Render. We had a couple people on talking on the live, and we're gonna do a live there with some of the other speakers and stuff like that, but we're not doing it, you know, they're not paying us to do it, per se, right? But we are doing this with events that we really enjoy going to anyway. Right? Like, I went to Render last year, paid full price to go there and everything. In fact, paid for a FOMO ticket last second, which was super expensive. But, you know, we paid to go to Remix last year and all that stuff, right? So all these things that we've been doing with events over the last couple months now, with Anthony and me, it's all been because we really do enjoy those events that we've gone to and we have a lot to do with them and stuff.

00:48:20 - Scott Steinlage

So I'm really excited for the relationship that we have built with them and how we've kind of become a little bit of a thread in the fabric. So excited for that.

00:48:34 - Nick Taylor

And I heard you're giving out free potato chips. So if you need another reason to go to Render, you know, get those chips.

00:48:40 - Scott Steinlage

Get those chips. Free potato chips. Now I gotta find potato chips somewhere. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, potato chips, y'all. You heard it. Nicky T. is going to be giving to our fund for that. Thanks for being the first one. The first one to give to that. Appreciate it.

00:49:05 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, well, I got good connections with the potato mafia or the tuber mafia.

00:49:10 - Scott Steinlage

Awesome. Yes, sir. Cool, man. Well, folks, Anthony, do you have anything else you want to wrap up, talk about Render, or anything that you're excited about?

00:49:28 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I think that probably covers it. Something totally unrelated, though, I just got LangChain, which is an OpenAI kind of meta-framework, running on Edgio. That's super cool.

00:49:41 - Scott Steinlage

Nice. You'll have to do some cool stuff, man. You'll have to do a stream on that or something, or at least record it.

00:49:50 - Anthony Campolo

Oh yeah, there will be many a content.

00:49:53 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, I'm excited for it. I know you've been digging a lot into AI lately, so I'm really excited to see the things you've got coming forward, just as far as streaming goes and everything that's gonna happen with that. Because, I don't know, me personally, anything I see AI-wise, I'm just really excited for. I'm ready to see some cool things happen, which a lot of cool things are happening and have happened, but I can't wait to see more from people that I know that are doing it right. So really looking forward to seeing what you've got going on there, bro. Oh yeah, yeah. Awesome. All right, y'all, well, if you do go to Render, be sure to find myself and Anthony and Nick T there, and we'll be more than happy to say hey and chat for a bit and, yeah, you know, whatever. Whatever you want to do. So, all right, y'all, thank you so much. We love y'all. Appreciate everything. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter, javascriptjam.com, and next week be sure to join us because we will be live at Render ATL with several speakers from Render.

00:51:12 - Scott Steinlage

So if you got questions, if you got comments, if you got things you want to say to the speakers, ask them. Be sure to join us because we will be doing this open-mic atmosphere as always. All right, love y'all, and we'll see you next week. Can't believe it, already in Atlanta. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Thank y'all. We love you, and we'll see you in the next one. Peace.