I decided to take what I do right now and see how low I could take it. What does my career boil down to?

It came down to three simple words: Educate, Guide, and Solve.

Each of these describes a facet of my career that provides a profound sense of personal satisfaction. Each of these is unique in that they give me the chance to share what I know with others, while still gaining new experiences in the process.

These three things are simultaneously selfish and selfless. I believe that in order to have a successful, productive, and fulfilling career, these three things need to serve as the foundation of everything I do.

Educate

I work in a small community of Web performance analysts. I have spent years training myself to see the world through the eyes of a Web site and how it presents to the outside world. As I taught myself to see the world this way, I was asked to share what I knew with others.

At first I did this through technical support and a training course I helped develop. Then I moved into consulting. I began to blog and comment on Web performance.

I needed to share what I knew with others, because it is meaningless to hoard all of your knowledge. While I am paid well as a consultant, it is also important that as many people as possible learn from me; and that doesn’t always need to sold to the highest bidder.

Guide

While some may say that there is no difference between Guide and Educate, I see a profound chasm between the two.

We have all been educated at some point. We have sat through classes and lectures and labs that convey information to us, and have provided the foundation for what we know.

But we have also encountered people who have shown us how to step beyond the information. They place the information that they are giving us in a larger context, allow us to see problems as a component of the whole.

That is what I strive to do. Not only do I want to give people the functional tools they need to interpret the data, I want them to then take that data and see the patterns in the data. I work closely with colleagues and customers, helping them see the patterns, understand how they tie to the things I say everyday, and then be able to solve this type of problem on their own the next time.

A guide is only useful when the path is not known. Once I have showed someone the path, I can return to my place, in the knowledge that they are as experienced on the path as I am.

Solve

Once you have shown someone what the data can do, how to see the patterns, it is critical that they have an understand how to take that pattern and change it for the better. Seeing a pattern and understanding its cause are only the beginning.

I can share my experiences, share how others have solved problems similar to this one, help them fix the problem.

And then be able to show that the problem is solved. An unmeasured, yet resolved problem, is meaningless.

Summary

This is the skeletal description of what I want to achieve in my career. I could expand these topics for a lot longer, but the question I propose is: What three concepts can you boil your career down to?

It’s your Web site.

Its complex. Abstract. Lots of conflicting ideas and forces are involved. Everyone says they now the best thing for it. Finger-pointing. Door slamming. Screaming.

Am I describing your Web site and the team that supports it? Or your teenager?

If you think of your Web site as a teenager, you begin to realize the problems that your facing. Like a teenager, it has grown physically and mentally, and, as a result, thinks its an experienced adult, ready to take on the world. However, let’s think of your site as a teenager, and think back to how we, as teenagers (yeah, I’m old), saw the world.

MOM! This doesn’t fit anymore!

Your Web site has grown as all of your marketing and customer service programs bear fruit. Traffic is increasing. Revenue is up. Everyone is smiling.

Then you wake up and realize that your Web site is too small for your business. This could mean that the infrastructure is overloaded, the network is tapped out, your connectivity is maxed, and your sysadmins, designers, and network teams are spending most of your day just firefighting.

Now, how can you grow a successful business, or be the hip kid in school, when your clothes don’t fit anymore?

But, you can’t buy an entire wardrobe every six months, so plan, consider your goals and destinations, and shop smart.

DAD! Everyone has one! I need to have one to be cool!

Shiny.

It’s a word that has been around for a long time, and was revived (with new meaning) by Firefly. It means reflective, bright, and new. It’s what attracts people to gold, mirrors, and highly polished vintage cars. In the context of Web sites, it’s the eye-candy that you encounter in your browsing, and go “Our site needs that”.

Now step back and ask yourself what purpose this new eye-candy will serve.

And this is where Web designers and marketing people laugh, because it’s all about being new and improved.

But can you be new and improved, when your site is old and broken?

Get your Web performance in order with what you, then add the stuff that makes your site pop.

But those aren’t the cool kids. I don’t hang with them.

Everyone is attracted to the gleam of the cool new Web sites out there that offer to do the same old thing as your site. The promise of new approaches to old problems, lower cost, and greater efficiencies in our daily lives are what prompt many of us to switch.

As a parent, we may scoff, realizing that maybe the cool kids never amounted to much outside of High School. But, sometimes you have to step back and wonder what makes a cool kid cool.

You have to step back and say, why are they attracting so much attention and we’re seen as the old-guard? What can we learn from the cool kids? Is your way the very best way? And says who?

And once you ask these questions, maybe you agree that some of what the cool kids do is, in fact, cool.

Can I borrow the car?

Trust is a powerful thing to someone, or to a group. Your instinctive response depends on who you are, and what your experiences with others have been like in the past.

Trust is something often found lacking when it comes to a Web site. Not between your organization and your customers, but between the various factions within your organization who are trying to interfere or create or revamp or manage the site.

Not everyone has the same goals. But sometimes asking a few questions of other people and listening to their reasons for doing something will lead to a discussion that will improve the Web site in a way that improves the business in the long run.

Sometimes asking why a teenager wants to borrow the car will help you see things from their perspective for a little while. You may not agree, but at least now it’s not a yes/no answer.

YOU: How was school today? - THEM: Ok.

Within growing organizations, open and clear communication tends to gradually shrivel and degenerate. Communications become more formal, with what is not said being as important as what is. Trying to find out what another department is doing becomes a lot like determining the state of the Soviet Union’s leadership based on who attends parades in Red Square.

Abstract communication is one of the things that separates humans from a large portion of the rest of the animal kingdom. There is nothing more abstract than a Web site, where physical devices and programming code produce an output that can only be seen and heard.

The need for communication is critical in order to understand what is happening in another department. And sometimes that means pushing harder, making the other person or team answer hard questions that they think you’re not interested in, or that you is non of your business.

If you are in the same company, it’s everyone’s business. So push for an answer, because working to create an abstract deliverable that determines the success or failure of the entire firm can’t be based on a grunt and a nod.

Summary

There are no easy answers to Web performance. But if you consider your Web site and your teams as a teenager, you will be able to see that the problems that we all deal with in our daily interactions with teens crop up over an over when dealing with Web design, content, infrastructure, networks and performance.

Managing all the components of a Web site and getting best performance out of it often requires you to have the patience of Job. But it is also good to carry a small pinch of faith in these same teams, faith  that everyone, whether they say it or not, wants to have the best Web site possible.

The blame of bad performance or memory consumption no longer lies with the browser but with the site.

Coming to the discussion from the realm of Web performance measurement, I realize that the firms I have worked with and for have not done a good job of analyzing this , and, in the name of science have tried to eliminate the variability of Web page processing from the equation.

The company I currently work for has realized that this is a gap and has released a product that measures the performance of a page in the browser.

But all of this misses the point, and goes to one of the reasons why I gave up on Chrome on my older, personal-use computer: Chrome exposes the individual load that a page places on a Web browser.

Resig highlights that browser that make use of shared resources shift the blame about poor performance out to the browser and away from the design of the page. Technologies that modern designers lean on (Flash, AJAX, etc.) all require substantially greater resource-consumption in a browser. Chrome, for good or ill, exposes this load to the user be instantiating a separate, sand-boxed process for each tab, clearing indicating which page is the culprit.

It will be interesting if designers take note of this, or ignore in pursuit of the latest shiny toy that gets released. While designers assume that all visitors run the cutting edge of machine, I can show them that a laptop that is still plenty useful is completely locked up when their page is handled in isolation.

I can say that I put Chrome through its paces, on a wide-variety of sites, from the simple to the extremely content-rich. From the mainstream, to the questionable.

This morning I migrated back to Firefox, albeit the latest Minefield/Firefox 3.1alpha.

The reasons listed below are mine. Switching back is a personal decision and everyone is likely to have their own reasons to do it, or to stay.

Advertising

I mentioned a few times during my initial use of Chrome that I was having to become used to the re-appearance of advertising in my browsing experience [here and here]. From their early release as extensions to Firefox, I have used AdBlock and AdBlock Plus to remove the annoyance and distraction of online ads from my browsing experience.

When I moved to Chrome, I had to accept that I would see ads. I mean, we were dealing with a browser distributed by one of the largest online advertising agencies. It could only be expected that they were not going to allow people to block ads out of the gate, if ever.

As the week progressed, I realized that I was finding the ads to be a distraction from my browsing experience. Ads impede my ability to find the information I need quickly.

Older Machines

My primary machine for online experiences at home is a Latitude D610. This is a 3-4 year-old laptop, with a single core. It is still far more computing power than most people actually need to enjoy the Web.

While cruising with Chrome, I found that Flash locked up the entire machine on a very regular basis. Made it unsuable. This doesn’t happen on my much more powerful Latitude D630, provided by my work. However, as I have a personal laptop, I am not going to use my work computer for my personal stuff, especially at home.

I cannot have a browser that locks up a machine when I simply close a tab. It appears that the vaunted QA division at Google overlooked the fact that people don’t all run the latest and greatest machines in the real world.

Auto-Complete

I am completely reliant on form auto-completes. Firefox has been doing this for me for a long time, and it is very handy to simply start typing and have Firefox say “Hey! This form element is called email. Here are some of the other things you have put into form elements called email.”

If you can build something as complex as the OmniBox, surely you can add form auto-completes.

The OmniBox

I hate it. I really do. I like having my search and addresses separate. I also like an address bar that remembers complete URLs (including those pesky parameters!), rather than simply the top-level domain name.

It is a cool idea, but it needs some refining, and some customer-satisfaction focus groups.

I Don’t Use Desktop-replacing Web Applications

I do almost all of my real work in desktop-installed Web applications. I have not made the migration to Web applications. I may in the future. But until then, I do not need a completely clean browsing experience. I mentioned that the battle between Chrome and Firefox will come down to the Container v. the Desktop - a web application container, or a desktop-replacing Web experience application.

In the last 48 hours, I have fallen back into the Web-desktop camp.

Summary

In the future, I will continue to use Chrome to see how newer builds advance, and how it evolves as more people begin dictating the features that should be available to it.

For my personal use, Chrome takes away too much from, and injects too much noise into, my daily Web experience to continue to use as the default browser. To quote more than a few skeptics of Chrome when it was relased - “It’s just another browser”.

Yesterday, it appears that the large anti-virus and security firm Sophos discovered this lesson the hard way.

Of course hindsight is perfect, so I won’t dwell for too long on this single incident. The lesson to be learned here is that DNS is complex and critical, yet is sometimes overlooked when considered the core issues of Web performance and end-user experience.

This complexity means that if an organization is not comfortable managing their own DNS, or want to broaden and deepen their DNS infrastructure, there are a large number of firms who will assist with this process. These firms whose entire business is based on managing large-scale DNS implementations for organizations.

DNS is critical. Never take it for granted.

When you listen to a business report, the stock market indices are an aggregated metric used to represent the performance of a set group of stocks.

When you read about economic indicators, these values are the aggregated representations of complex populations of data, collected from around the country, or the world.

Sport scores are the final tally of an event, but they may not always represent how well each team performed during the match.

The problem with single metrics lies in their simplicity. When a single metric is created, it usually attempts to factor in all of the possible and relevant data to produce an aggregated value that can represent a whole population of results.

These single metrics are then portrayed as a complete representation of this complex calculation. The presentation of this single metric is usually done in such a way that their compelling simplicity is accepted as the truth, rather than as a representation of a truth.

In the area of Web performance, organizations have fallen prey to this need for the compelling single metric. The need to represent a very complex process in terms that can be quickly absorbed and understand by as large a group of people as possible.

The single metrics most commonly found in the Web performance management field are performance (end-to-end response time of the tested business process) and availability (success rate of the tested business process). These numbers are then merged and transformed by data from a number of sources (external measurements, hit counts, conversions, internal server metrics, packet loss), and this information is bubbled up in an organization. By the time senior management and decision-makers receive the Web performance results, that are likely several steps removed from the raw measurement data.

An executive will tell you that information is a blessing, but only when it speeds, rather than hinders, the decision-making process. A Web performance consultant (such as myself) will tell that basing your decisions on a single metric that has been created out of a complex population of data is madness.

So, where does the middle-ground lie between the data wonks and the senior leaders? The rest of this post is dedicated to introducing a few of the metrics that will, in a small subset of metrics, give a senior leaders better information to work from when deciding what to do next.

A great place to start this process is to examine the percentile distribution of measurement results. Percentiles are known to anyone who has children. After a visit to the pediatrician, someone will likely state that “My son/daughter is in the XXth percentile of his/her age group for height/weight/tantrums/etc”. This means that XX% of the population of children that age, as recorded by pediatricians, report values at or below the same value for this same metric.

Percentiles are great for a population of results like Web performance measurement data. Using only a small set of values, anyone can quickly see how many visitors to a site could be experiencing poor performance.

If at the median (50th percentile), the measured business process is 3.0 seconds, this means that 50% of all of the measurements looked at are being completed in 3.0 seconds or less.

If the executive then looks up to the 90th percentile and sees that it’s at 16.0 seconds, it can be quickly determined that something very bad has happened to affect the response times collected for the 40% of the population between these two points. Immediately, everyone knows that for some reason, an unacceptable number of visitors are likely experiencing degraded and unpredictable performance when they visit the site.

A suggestion for enhancing averages with percentiles is to use the 90th percentile value as a trim ceiling for the average. Then side-by-side comparisons of the untrimmed and trimmed averages can be compared. For sites with a larger number of response time outliers, the average will decrease dramatically when it is trimmed, while sites with more consistent measurement results will find their average response time is similar with and without the trimmed data.

It is also critical to examine the application’s response times and success rates throughout defined business cycles. A single response time or success rate value eliminates

• variations by time of day
• variations by day of week
• variations by month
• variations caused by advertising and marketing

An average is just an average. If at peak buiness hours, response times are 5.0 seconds slower than the average, then the average is meaningless, as business is being lost to poor performance which has been lost in the focus on the single metric.

All of these items have also fallen prey to their own curse of the single metric. All of the items discussed above aggregate the response time of the business process into a single metric. The process of purchasing items online is broken down into discrete steps, and different parts of this process likely take longer than others. And one step beyond the discrete steps are the objects and data that appear to the customer during these steps.

It is critical to isolate the performance for each step of the process to find the bottlenecks to performance. Then the components in those steps that cause the greatest response time or success rate degradations must be identified and targeted for performance improvement initiatives. If there are one or two poorly performing steps in a business process, focusing performance improvement efforts on these is critical, otherwise precious resources are being wasted in trying to fix parts of the application that are working well.

In summary, a single metric provides a sense of false confidence, the sense that the application can be counted on to deliver response times and success rates that are nearly the same as those simple, single metrics.

The average provides a middle ground, a line that says that is the approximate mid-point of the measurement population. There are measurements above and below this average, and you have to plan around the peaks and valleys, not the open plains. It is critical never to fall victim to the attractive charms that come with the curse of the single metric.

Over the history of ther service, we have been steadily increasing the number of measurements we take each day.

The large leap occurred when a very large number of tests were added to the system on a single day. But based on this data, the system is gathering more than 900,000 measurements every day.

Thanks to all of the people who volunteer their machines and bandwidths to support this effort!

These applications, that on the surface seem to serve the same purpose, have taken very different paths to this point. Much has been made about Firefox growing out of the ashes of Netscape, while Chrome is the Web re-imagined.

It’s not just that.

Firefox, through the use of extensions and helper applications, has grown to become a Desktop replacement. Back when Windows for Workgroups was the primary end-user OS (and it wasn’t even an OS), Norton Desktop arrived to provide all of the tools that didn’t ship with the OS. It extended and improved on what was there, and made WFW a better place.

Firefox serves that purpose in the browser world. With its massive collections of extensions, it adds the ability to customize and modify the Web workspace. These extensions even allow the incoming content to be modified and reformatted in unique ways to suit the preferences of each individual. These features allowed the person using Firefox to feel in control, empowered.

You look at the Firefox installs of the tech elite, and no two installed versions will be configured in the same way. Firefox extends the browser into an aggregator of Web data and information customization.

But it does it at the Desktop.

Chrome is a simple container. There is (currently) no way to customize the look and feel, extend the capabilities, or modify the incoming or outgoing content. It is a simple shell designed to perform two key functions: search for content and interact with Web applications.

There are, of course, the hidden geeky functions that they have built into the app. But those don’t change what it’s core function is: request, receive, and render Web pages as quickly and efficiently as possible. Unlike Firefox’s approach, which places the app being the center of the Web, Chrome places the Web at the center of the Web.

There is no right or wrong approach. As with all things in this complicated world we are in, it depends. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish and how you want to get there.

The conflict that I see appearing over the next few months is not between IE and Firefox and Safari and Opera and Chrome. It is a conflict over what the people want from an application that they use all the time. Do they want a Web desktop or a Web container?

Stephen Noble, in a post on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals, seems to discover that Chrome will be a source for injecting greater personalization and targeting into the online advertising market.

This is the key reason Chrome exists, right now.

While their may be discussions about the online platform and hosted applications, there are only a small percentage of Internet users who rely on hosted desktop-like applications, excluding email, in their daily work and life.

However, Google’s biggest money-making ventures are advertising and search. With control of AdSense and DoubleClick, there is no doubt that Google controls a vast majority of the targeted and contextual advertising market, around the world.

One of the greatest threats to this money-making is a lack of control of the platform through which ads are delivered. There is talk of IE8 blocking ads (well, non-Microsoft ads anyway), and one of the more popular extensions for Firefox is Adblock Plus. While Safari doesn’t have this ability natively built in, it can be supported by any number of applications that, in the name of Internet security, filter and block online advertisers using end-user proxies.

This threat to Google’s core revenue source was not ignored in the development of Chrome. One of the options is the use of DNS pre-fetching. Now I haven’t thrown up a packet sniffer, but what’s to prevent a part of the pre-fetching algorithm to go beyond DNS for certain content, and pre-fetch the whole object, so that the ads load really fast, and in that way are seen as less intrusive.

Ok, so I am noted for having a paraoid streak.

However, using the fastest rendering engine and a rocket-ship fast Javascript VM is not only good for the new generation of online Web applications, but plays right into the hands of improved ad-delivery.

So, while Chrome is being hailed as the first Web application environment, it is very much a context Web advertising environment as well.

It’s how it was built.

One thing I have been able to determine is that the use of WebKit will effectively rule out (to the best of my knowledge) the availability of HTTP Pipelining in the browser.

HTTP Pipelining is the ability, defined in RFC 2616, to request multiple HTTP objects simultaneously across an open TCP connection, and then handle their downloads using the features built into the HTTP/1.1 specifications.

I had an Apple employee in a class I taught a few months back confirm that Safari (which is built on WebKit) cannot use HTTP Pipeling for reason that are known only to the OS and TCP stack developers at Apple.

Now, if the team at Google has found a way to circumvent this problem, I will be impressed.