So, like most early startups, Quala (where I currently work) bought into a Wordpress site to sell our product, probably before it really existed. Flash forward, we have customers, and we're on a path to building a platform to change the game on customer management. The Wordpress site was terrible for performance, and core web vitals. None of us know Wordpress, and barely know any php. We had huge drive to rebrand ourselves, but to do that we needed to edit the Wordpress theme 😬 or use something else.

I've been working at CarGurus.com for the last 2 years or so. One of the biggest journeys we've been undertaking is to take accessibility far more seriously. However with an engineering team way into the triple digits it gets harder and harder to scale accessibility knowledge.

In the battle of performance one tool constantly rains supreme, the all powerful profiler! In javascript land chrome has a pretty awesome profiler, but every-time I looked into our react perf issues I was always hit by a slow function called anonymous function

Back in August of this year Microsoft announced static websites for azure blob storage. So this is the same feature AWS' S3 has had for years. Essentially make a blob storage folder public, and redirect / paths to /index.html internally. Also, register 404 pages. Before we had this we use to deploy our files to App Service or do some weirdness with functions to rewrite urls. For static pages this can really bring costs down in the cloud

So incase you havn't been following me. I joined Cargurus in July. At cargurus we're currently working on our mobile web experience written in react, redux and reselect. As our implementation grew so did our time to first paint.

Ok so recently I was chatting on a slack, mostly sharing cat pictures, when I realized the CarGurus slack account did not have a /cat command. I knew immediately, this had to change!

For a while now I have been playing with rails, and rack webapps. If you are not familiar with these, they are webservers created in ruby. One of the features I ran into during my journey into ruby land is Turbolinks. Incase you are not familiar, Turbolinks is basically a simplified pjax, with a lot of flexibility. When you click on a link in a page with turbolinks, the link action is hijacked and the target page is loaded via ajax. The result of the ajax call (which is presumed to be html) will replace the document of the body tag. At the end of the day its a technology to load your server side pages via ajax.

So recently I have thought about build tools. We have many tools including cake, sake, albacore, and even MSBUILD. Most of these tools work well, infact they work flawlessly. I am a web developer, and I work on a team of web developers. Most of our work is in JavaScript land, with tools like React, backbone, etc. We love ES6, and we want to use things like babel. This ultimately causes us to have 2 build engines. The first being a proprietary version of albacore, and the second being gulp.

In this last year I have done much more JavaScript development than I have before. The landscape, and tools have exploded over the last few years. Gone are the days of JQuery widgets, and come forth have advanced virtual dom libraries, JavaScript servers, and multiple package managers. Along with new language features.

• Day Two

I am here in lovely Portland Oregon attending Monitorama. Monitorama is a 3 day open source monitoring convention.

Monitorama had catered food, and drink. The food was plentiful and delicious, and the drinks were amazing.

There were 10 talks, I have made a quick summarization below. I don't have time to write in detail about each one, but I am sure you will get the gist from the basic summary.