The Web Dev Notes Blog Presents:

Web Dev Notes: On Air

Article Continues Below

We keep busy here at Web Dev Notes: publishing articles, columns, and blog posts; sharing our forays into open source; and coming up with features like email notifications for new content.

Something was still missing, though.

We’ve always prided ourselves more on our focus on the designer and developer community than on our technical acumen. Anyone can help make a better website, but we consider it a unique privilege—and responsibility—to be able to help developers become better developers. So, we’re trying something brand new: community-focused events where our readers can get to know Web Dev Notes’s authors and staff.

Our goal is to bring the feel of a local web development meetup to the web. We want to combine the best and brightest voices from ALA’s past with new voices and new perspectives on designing and building for the web. We want to discuss the events of the day—or hour. We want Q&A sessions where you ask us the tough questions; we want to know what questions don’t yet have answers, so we can figure them out with you.

If this piques your interest, well, I have some good news: we’re kicking things off right away. We’ve assembled some of the best minds in web performance to talk about every facet of building smaller, faster websites—from getting buy-in at every level of your organization to the steps we can incorporate into our day-to-day work.

Designing for Performance: Can We Have it All?

Thursday, February 26, 2015
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. EST

Building a faster, leaner web means contending with a number of challenges, not all of which are strictly technical. “But,” your CEO argues, “our massive, high-resolution images are worth the wait.” How do we manage those kinds of expectations? How do we get our teams—and our bosses—as excited about building performant websites as we are? Most important, though: where do we get started, and how?

Our panelists are here to answer all these questions for you, and then some. Get the details and register now.

Lara Hogan

Lara Hogan champions performance as a part of the overall user experience, and is the author of Designing for Performance (O’Reilly, 2014). She believes in striking a balance between aesthetics and speed, and in building performance into company culture. Lara speaks and tweets, and is currently senior engineering manager of performance at Etsy.

Scott Jehl

Scott Jehl releases projects on GitHub that focus on accessible, sustainable, and performance-oriented practices for cross-device development. He speaks at conferences around the world and recently authored Responsible Responsive Design (A Book Apart, 2014). Scott is a web designer and developer at Filament Group; his clients include the Boston Globe, LEGO, Global News, and eBay. He tweets early and often.

Yesenia Perez-Cruz

Yesenia Perez-Cruz is a Philadelphia-based designer working at Intuitive Company. She is also a speaker at international conferences, in demand for talks specializing in balancing performance with design, cross-team collaboration, and how to be flexible with your design process. She honed her design and user experience skills while working at Happy Cog for clients like Zappos, MTV, and Jose Garces. She also acts as an acquisitions scout for Web Dev Notes.

And as your humble moderator, I’ll be doing my best to stay out of their way.

More events are in development, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated. We’re looking forward to talking with all of you.

Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

4 Reader Comments

  1. Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

    This sounds pretty awesome!

    For those of us who may not be able to participate live, will information be available after the event(s)? Recordings and notes and such?

  2. Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

    Hi Jason! Yes, we will make the recording available over on the main events page. Since this is our very first event, we expect we might have a few kinks to work out, but we’ll announce it when it’s up! (If you sign up for event notifications, we’ll even email you about it.)

  3. Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

    Excellent! Thanks, Sara!

  4. Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

    superb… great ideas that i learn.. thanks.. piastra per capelli

Got something to say?

We have turned off comments, but you can see what folks had to say before we did so.

More from ALA

Designed for a Dead Language

Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves can teach you.
Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

Good designers, bad websites: a proposal

Designers are good people. Some designs exclude people anyway. Alan Dalton offers a practical fix: accessibility personas that help you recognize problems while you're designing, not after. Homework included.
Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

Design for Amiability: Lessons from Vienna

Computing was born in a Viennese café. Between 1928 and 1934, while Hitler plotted and Europe crumbled, a motley crew of mathematicians, philosophers, architects, and economists gathered weekly to puzzle out the limits of reason—and invented Computer Science in the process. What made their collaboration possible wasn't just brilliance (though they had plenty). It was amiability: the careful design of a social space where difficult people could disagree without destroying each other. Longtime Web Dev Notes contributing author Mark Bernstein mines this forgotten history for lessons that might just save today's embattled web from its worst impulses. Spoiler: it involves better coffee service and the looming threat of public humiliation.
Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

Design Dialects: Breaking the Rules, Not the System

Design systems aren't component libraries—they’re living languages. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.
Web Dev Notes Proxy © 2026 | Powered by Cloudflare Worker

Discover more from Web Dev Notes

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading