I help companies find and fix site-speed issues. Performance audits, training, consultancy, and more.
Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.
N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…
When Keith Mitchell, Engineering Manager at BBC Sport, emailed me asking if I’d like to run a workshop for some of the BBC’s developers, I almost bit his hand off. The BBC had always been very high up on my ‘client bucket list’, and to host a workshop for them seemed perfect.
The BBC, like BSkyB, are a huge media organisation with many products sitting under one umbrella brand/company. The kinds of problems their developers would likely come up against would be the exact same ones I’d been working on for three years at Sky, and with my own clients thereafter:
The single day on-site was broken into two halves: a morning session and an afternoon session.
In the morning, developers from the wider BBC departments gathered in a really great creative space at the BBC’s MediaCity campus where I ran a workshop covering things like:
This session kicked off with the attendees building a simple UI component, before we shared and critiqued volunteers’ results with the group. Dissecting and rationalising the rationale behind various techniques people had used to build the component in question really helped show the team that, even though they all work together day-in, day-out, everyone has a subtly different way of building the same, innocuous little pieces of UI. Using this exercise as a base, the rest of the workshop talked about how we could all work in a more standardised manner to try and make team-working more seamless.
I help companies find and fix site-speed issues. Performance audits, training, consultancy, and more.
In the afternoon, I joined a much smaller team of just BBC Sport developers for a Q&A session, looking at, and reviewing, the work they were already doing, and how they might improve or adjust it. A group code review of sorts.
The day ended with a brief hacking session, experimenting with creating UI components as discrete packages, and managing them with Bower.
Next: Hear about how I changed and improved front-end process for BSkyB.
N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…
Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.
Hi there, I’m Harry Roberts. I am an award-winning Consultant Web Performance Engineer, designer, developer, writer, and speaker from the UK. I write, Tweet, speak, and share code about measuring and improving site-speed. You should hire me.
You can now find me on Mastodon.
I help teams achieve class-leading web performance, providing consultancy, guidance, and hands-on expertise.
I specialise in tackling complex, large-scale projects where speed, scalability, and reliability are critical to success.