3x Performance: A Humbling Journey

Abstract

When I was asked to fix a slow mobile component, I was skeptical. The metrics were bad, nearly double our target, and the problem seemed to be a chain of slow API calls. As a frontend engineer, I felt stuck and figured there wasn’t much I could do from the client side.

This talk is the story of the four month investigation that proved me wrong. It’s an honest look at how we tackled a complex performance issue in a large application, not just by optimizing code, but by learning how to think about systems and communicate better as a team. I’ll share how “boring” topics like CORS and network handshakes can lead to huge wins, why your own analytics might be lying to you, and how to navigate the human side of engineering to make real change happen across the stack. It’s a story about the messy, frustrating, and rewarding process of making things fast.