WPO

This year, Performance Planet did an advent calendar again, just like the last few years. I also contributed an article — what follows is a verbatim copy of my “The real challenge: making the entire web fast” article for the 2013 Performance Calendar.

Probably many — if not most — of us speed freaks work for big companies that are optimizing top 1,000 websites.
Some companies have the budgets to hire people who work on WPO full time. Those companies are able to do that thanks to huge revenues — otherwise it would not be financially justifiable. In other words: they’re probably a top 1,000 website. The percentages of page speed improvements those people bring must translate into sufficient additional revenue to cover their wages.
Other companies have people who get to spend part of their time on WPO, and maybe pay for the services of one of the several WPO companies out there. But even in this case, a sizeable revenue is a requirement to justify it.

So what about the millions of other websites?

Speed up your Drupal site with a CDN in a few minutes.

The fun part: it’s nice to learn how to make any Drupal site significantly faster in a few minutes. The profit part: faster websites lead to more users and more revenue.

This article covers the common case: you have a small to medium size (≤1M page views per month), without massive amounts of large images, you’re using Drupal 7¹ and you only want to spend a few euros or (U.S.) dollars per month on a CDN. (You already know what a CDN is, right?)
So, you want your Drupal site to be faster, only spend a few minutes doing so, don’t want to deal with infrastructure and want to keep the costs very minimal. You’ve come to the right place.

Also: don’t worry about the cost: this little experiment will only cost you a few cents.

On January 2, I announced that I was looking for a job. Since that announcement, I’ve talked with >65 companies. I’ve had actual interviews with >30 of them. Most of them are based out of Belgium, some were remote. Many were Drupal shops, several were start-ups (some of which from Belgium, but most of which from the U.S.) but there were also many different types of companies. From very small to very big. So much choice!

(Also see The Paradox of Choice.)

Startup

Whenever I felt that a company was interested in possibly pursuing the start-up idea that I have had for a long time, I pitched it. The few times that I did this, there was a lot of enthusiasm. But only one company really pushed forward in pursuing this: Nascom. Funny enough, this also happened to be the company that offered me the most interesting, versatile and challenging job. This made me realize that a start-up (in Belgium!) might not be as unrealistic as I had first thought.

The time has finally come.

I’m looking for a job!

After ±5 years of hard work at Hasselt University, I will graduate as a master in computer science next month. I finished my master thesis and courses in June 2011 and have just completed my internship at Facebook a few weeks ago (on December 16). I’ve received an awesome job offer to work full-time at Facebook.

But my super-duper awesome girlfriend, Anneleen, is studying medicine here in Belgium. If she’d continue to study medicine in the U.S., she’d have to start all over, so that’s not really an option (not to mention the ridiculous costs). This summer, we’ll move in together in a (yet to be found) apartment in Leuven, Belgium.
Also, I just like Europe better than the United States.

I’ve already talked to several companies, months ago and more recently, but since there are so many interesting companies, projects and challenges out there, I decided to write this blog post.

My main interests (and areas of expertise) are:

• WPO (Web Performance Optimization): making websites faster
• Drupal
• data mining

Want to talk to me? Contact me at http://wimleers.com/contact.

Orientation at Facebook

While I obviously can’t publish the details here, the orientation was very cool. The guy who was doing orientation was very energetic and enthusiastic, and this definitely had a positive effect. He explained how the company functions (flatness for the win!), the rationale behind some of its core technologies and products.

What’s also very amazing, is that he’d only been there for 4 months!
In fact, as you talk to more and more Facebook employees, you’ll learn that most of them have actually joined in the past year or so. It’s amazing. It’s also very strange if you’re not used to the start-up culture and the optimistic atmosphere that’s seemingly inherent to Silicon Valley.

In the afternoon, we got our laptops (either MacBook Pros or Lenovo Thinkpads) and phones (iPhones, although you can request an Android device later on). Quite impressive, seeing dozens of new devices lined up in rows and waiting to be used productively.

After the orientation was wrapped up (which included a tour of the headquarters), there was a Happy Hour (i.e. beer), which I skipped to go and meet my manager, Okay Zed, and the rest of the Site Speed team.