I'm a freelance Developer advocate and performance engineer. I'm also a digital nomad, traveling with my family through Europe. Ask me anything!
Doug Sillars
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I’m a digital nomad and author of High Performance Android Apps, ask me anything!
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Latest comments (47)
Do you think creating a reusable UI module is a good idea? The module would return views to display.
How did you get to the point at where you could make a living being a digital nomad?
I'm a Software Developer and I've thought many, many times in becoming a digital nomad and for the same reason like you. My wife and I loved to travel and we would like to do it as often as possible and as young as possible. The maximum we have achieved is to live in three different countries so far. But with "traditional" jobs.
But honestly, I don't know where to start with man :-D Any suggestions and recommendations, from your experience, for all of us who would like to have a life like that but we have no idea where to start :-)
Good q. I've been remote working for years, and been really successful. It isn't for everyone, and I tend to put in more hours than perhaps in the office (but I have no commute!)
I think getting building a reputation for good work, and then working to line up remote friendly work - be it a full time gig, or putting together a mix of work. I also try to use traveling to my advantage- offer to speak at meetups as you travel... so you can promote the company/your work/you as an integral part of your travel.
Then comes the scary part. Setting a deadline, and going. Putting everything in storage, renting the house and booking the flights :)
What do you suggest for serving videos in mobile apps? Any tips and tricks to keep them as light as possible?
Thanks so much!
Keep them as short as possible. Do what you can to optimize them to the screen size of the device. We know that resizing images can be very costly on the CPU - video is the same.
Adaptive bitrate streaming is great for serving videos as it does accommodate for the screen size, and the available network - serving the 'best' quality stream it can to the player. But there are many tricks to streaming - making sure that the bitrates you are serving are the proper ones for the devices/networks your customers are using. In general - start with a lower quality bitrate to lower the startup time.
I'm really excited about the NetInfo API but haven't found too many uses for it, in production work. What's the coolest use case you've seen for the NetInfo API?
I haven't seen alot of use of it in production either (I should probably look in the HTTPArchive for that...)
However, I see a great possibility for images or video - if the browser is telling you the average download speed - you can customize the content for the network your customers are on.
In the news the last week is that mobile Chrome users with data saver mode on - if the effective connection is 2G - the browser will no longer download JS. Tim Kadlec has a good write up on that: timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-09-06...
What are the current best practices for responsive video? I know <video><source media> was deprecated a while ago...
Here's where client hints would be really helpful, but they are currently turned off in Chrome. I think the best way is to use JS to define the screen size and format and make the correct request (and while you are at it - look at the netInfo too - perhaps you can further optimize the content based on the network speed.
What would be the first item to work on when Optimizing you website of mobile app?
Step one is to understand what is going on. Use WebPageTest, or Lighthouse (or any other tool) to figure out where the pain points might be. Some sites might suffer from JS bloat, others on images.
Use monitoring tools like SpeedCurve or RUM tools to understand where your customer's pain points might be.
Then, once you understand the problems...you can roll up your sleeves and start fixing the code.
Also, test on low powered devices, and slow connections. Get an Android Go device. Slow down the network speed to 1.6 MBPS. Then test. As devs, we tend to have fast devices and top notch internet connections, but not everyone does.
Hey, I have a question regarding ads, Advertisers are slowing down websites with excess JavaScript. What are some ways to improve page speed w/o removing ads?
This is super important. I don't think ad networks are doing as much towards JS performance (or even image resizing!) that they could be doing. Audit the ads being added to your site. Defer the ad JS as much as you can to later n the load sequence.
If you find really horrible behaviour - talk to the ad provider. If possible switch to one that optimizes content. I'd love to think that the market can push ad providers to optimize their content - but we will see.
Wow! A digital nomad with a big family. Amazing!
Hi Doug, my questions are entirely non technical :D
How do you and your family fare with moving around? How often do you pack up? Europe is pretty big so there's plenty of places and countries to explore. Any favorites so far? Favorites in general and more apt to a "digital nomad family" :-)
I read you're in France right now, nice!
Sorry, I'm very fascinated by the digital nomad lifestyle :-)
On this trip we brought the dog too!! Max is an 11 year old Golden Retriever. On the first year, we went a bit frenetic - 67 different AirBnbs in 1 year.. often less than a week per city. But that was too much, so we have slowed down- and are doing around a week minimum per stop. We just did 4 months in Ireland (1 month in West Cork, and 3 in Dublin - with a few shorter road trips interspersed.). We just took the driving route to France - long days in the car... but now will be doing week or more stops.
We try to minimize our "stuff" but I also think you fill your space - we did only suitcases and trains/planes for years, but we just bought a van... and now that is chock full :)
Truly amazing! I think the stuff we all accumulate staying years in the same place is more than the space in your van :-)
There's a joke about how I'm not actually in Nice, France here somewhere :)
I am amazed at how much of my high school french (many many years ago), is coming back.
Ah ah please tell me the joke in French :D
my kids love the joke about one-two-three cat and un-deux-trois cat swimming the english channel.
Of course one-two-three made it.. but unfortunately un-deux-trois quatre cinq.
Ahahhaahah 😂😂😂
To what extent knowledge of optimizing content assets (in order to achieve high-performance) should be the concern of designated developers on a team vs being a general topic that every developer on the team should be knowledgeable about?
Great Question,
I am a real big fan of everyone focusing on performance.
One on the top ways to improve customer retention and sales is to improve performance - so having budgets and goals for your site/apps speed is really important - and the whole team should be focused on that - and weigh the pros and cons of adding new features when they slow everything down.
Perhaps one leads on images, or another has expertise on Javascript perf... but I think it should be something the whole team is united on.