John Bristowe

Yesterday, after a long day of preparing resources for Microsoft TechDays Canada, I grabbed my iPod and I took my dog, Hugo for a walk. During times like these, I like to unwind by listening to some of my favourite podcasts. As I've stated many times in the past, podcasts provide a great way to keep your mind and body busy at the same time; they allow you to multitask during your brain's "off-peak hours", such as performing chores around the house or, in my case, walking the dog.

Last night I listened to show #175 of Hanselminutes entitled, Optimizing Your Website with Jeff Atwood and Stack Overflow. In this interview, Scott Hanselman spoke to Jeff Atwood about website optimization and what his team at Stack Overflow has done to provide the best experience possible for its end users. By the end of the recording, I concluded that this interview was the best podcast recording of the summer (for technical content). It's a great introduction to the topic of website optimization and should be considered required listening by all Web developers, irrespective of experience or technology stack preference. Below, I've summarized some of the resources that were cited during this interview for your reference:

• Firebug
• Performance analysis tools: YSlow, Google Page Speed
• Minification tools: YUI Compressor, Packer for .NET, MvcScriptManager
• jQuery
• Content distribution network (CDN)
• Gravatar (globally recognized avatar)
• App_Offline for ASP.NET
• reCAPTCHA
• DotNetOpenAuth

Some additional resources around the topic of website optimization include the following: 

• Developer Toolbar in Internet Explorer 8
• .NET Rocks! show #390 - YSlow! Steve Souders finds Website Bottlenecks
• Exceptional Performance
• "Even Faster Websites" by Steve Sounders at Google I/O 2009

Hopefully, some of these resources will help you address your needs for website optimization. Going forward, I encourage you to listen to Hanselminutes, visit Stack Overflow, and register for Microsoft TechDays Canada - we'll have a session dedicated to helping you with website optimization entitled, "Practical Web Testing". I hope to see you there!

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.