Tag: development

Performance Series: Render-Blocking

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to present to the development team at my job to talk about addressing render-blocking issues that affected our client sites. I found the presentation to be a real standout during my time there and wanted to be able to share this with a wider audience.

The presentation explains why we need to fix certain SEO issues, how a browser displays a page, and some WordPress solutions implemented. Since the majority of the websites we had worked on were built using WordPress, the solutions presented are specifically tailored to WordPress sites. To understand what is render-blocking, I go over the basics of how browsers work and how it connects to the tests we can run which is also true for sites not running WordPress.

This was during a time when I was going through development performance audits of sites and dived into performance and learning a portion of Technical SEO. I learned a lot not just about SEO but about where that line between a seasoned Technical SEO expert and a development team. This was just one of the ways to try and bridge that gap in knowledge to make fixes more efficient.

This only scratches the surface, especially with the official rollout of INP in Core Web Vitals. Let me know what parts were helpful! Was there something missing? Let me know that too! I’d like to make this into a series diving into general web performance.

2024-Render-Blocking_PresentationDownload

Digital Skills for Women Talk Resources

A reference for career topics I talked about when invited to chat with the 2023 Winter cohort of Digital Skills for Women. Most of my general advice has stayed consistent over the years so I’d like to share! The sections below will follow the questions I was given as a panelist.

Introduction:

I did a quick overview of my history from graduating Dalhousie to the various full time positions I’ve had over the years – but I’ll share what got me started into programming ;p https://www.neopets.com/help/html1.phtml
(plus I borrowed my Dad’s HTML book from his time at CompuCollege when I was about 11 🙂 )

But to recap – at the time I did this presentation, I had been with resulta as a Software Developer. I moved around multiple different teams including WordPress site maintenance, Research and Development’s web expert and connection to the dev team, Development Technical SEO taking a look into site performance and Core Web Vitals, then our Drupal team doing site maintenance and assisting on TSEO goals in collaboration with the TSEO team. (And while editing this, was back to WordPress for a while before being effected by layoffs – any references to layoffs below were previous ones. My career journey has had a lot twists and turns!)

What was one of the biggest challenges you’ve overcome on your career path to date?

  • Layoffs and not feeling good enough, as well as an ADHD diagnosis. This begun with accepting a position as a Junior and not believing I could do the coding test and the journey to move up from there. And the mental toll it took in feeling like my skills are at one level, but struggling to meet output expectations due to not knowing how best to work with my brain.

What actions and/or decisions do you feel were key to achieving your current role?

  • Doing scary things.
  • Taking on extra – Frontend Tech Group, presentations for our department
  • I worked hard to make myself visible and have had neat opportunities because of it. Especially in the days of remote work, it’s often helpful to get visibility in front of the decision makers either through work doing presentations or taking on responsibility, or socially enough to stand out.

My General Advice

  • Have some trust in your abilities. You’re are going to be your biggest advocate for career progression. I can’t underline this enough. If you’re lucky you’ll have supportive network in your employment but this won’t always be the case – and it will still be on you to figure out what you even want out of your career.
  • Create a portfolio of work, even if it just stays internal. It can be useful for creating a case for promotion or raises
  • Ask for feedback or ask your manager to get feedback from the people you’ve worked with.
  • Support System – for processing, for a hype team,

Resources