Performance is a journey

Our industry has spent a couple of decades being confident about things that turned out to be wrong – and that's okay. The gap between what we expected and what the data actually shows is one of the subjects of this talk. Underneath every metric, protocol, and best practice we've ever chased is the same challenge: performance is a proxy for how people experience software, and people are not simple enough to sum up in a few metrics.

That's the starting point, not the destination. Harder questions are ahead of us. Questions like what does "fast" even mean when an interface starts answering before it's finished thinking, how much uncertainty will people tolerate from software that's probabilistic instead of deterministic, and why nothing in our observability tooling can tell us when a user is confused instead of content. We don't know what we don't know. This talk is an argument for why that's exciting.

Tammy Everts

Palo Alto

Tammy is a digital experience strategist at Palo Alto Networks, where she explores the intersection of technology, human experience, and business outcomes. She has spent more than two decades studying how people use the web, with a particular focus on web performance, UX, and the ways technology shapes human behaviour.

Since 2010, Tammy has researched the relationship between digital experiences and business metrics, helping organizations understand why performance matters – not just as a technical concern, but as a fundamental part of how people experience technology in their everyday lives.

She is the author of Time Is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance (O’Reilly), a distillation of much of her research. She is also co-curator of WPO Stats, a collection of real-world web performance case studies. Tammy is a longtime conference speaker, writer, and researcher who brings a human-centred perspective to complex technology questions.