Living on the Edge: Boosting Your Site's Performance with Edge Computing

Interview:

What's the focus of your work these days?

These days I work on the integration team at Netlify, so I'm mainly working on creating more integrations that work on the Netlify platform or improving existing integrations. Prior to that, I was working on the Frameworks team, which was focusing on adding first-class support for a wide array of frameworks. It's through that team that I was introduced to edge functions. I learned a lot more since joining Netlify and that's how I became really interested in it. That's what eventually ended up leading to being interested in giving a talk about it.

How would you describe your main persona and target audience for this session?

The persona that this talk would probably benefit most is more senior engineers, folks that are making architectural decisions on what they want their website or certain pieces of core functionality to live on, if they're especially using a cloud provider like AWS or GCP. I think that this talk could benefit folks that are more at the junior and intermediate level so they're aware of it. But I think folks that are most likely able to take what I'm talking about in this talk and go and do something in their day-to-day work would be more senior engineers in a position where they are making those decisions.

Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?

At the minimum, I hope that they see edge computing as something that is ready for production functionality. I think that that is somewhat known for folks that are familiar with it, but for those that are less familiar with it and they're looking at the cost of hosting stuff at the edge versus hosting stuff in standard servers, I think that it's worth their time to evaluate it as something that can really help with the traditional performance challenges and bottlenecks that we sometimes encounter as web developers.