While broadcasting live from Velocity Conference 2013 in Santa Clara, John Furrier, theCUBE host, caught up with Steve Souders, Web Performer Engineer at Google. Souders works on web performance and open source initiatives and he is the creator of YSlow, one of the top 25 of 2 billion Firefox add-ons.

The variety of topics on this Velocity Conference comes from the ideas bounced at the organizers in terms of topics of interests and problems that need to be solved.

Furrier started by asking Souders what were the new performance variable that people need to be thinking right now. Souders believes that thing is mobile. And not only that. In a year or two it’s going to be TV screens, playstations, player screens, definitely tablets, etc. It’s weird that people would say things completely opposed about mobile, and they would all be true. “We’ve been doing mobile for years but we’re still learning our way,” points out Souders.

Best practices for mobile can learn from web

A lot of the best practices for mobile overlap with those intended originally for desktop. That is true. But isn’t mobile totally different than desktop? This is true as well. “Even though we’ve been doing mobile for years now, we still haven’t figured out all the variables that go into a good mobile experience – with good meaning fast and reliable,” said Souders. “We’re still learning our way, and that’s why it’s good to have conferences like Velocity.” Furrier agrees with this description of Velocity. To him this conference is a confluence of many things.

Furrier is particularly impressed with the HTTP Archive initiative. The blog post written about this subject is the most shared item in Twitter. The project is certainly well received, but Furrier wanted to talk a bit about its inception.

The project started three years ago by talking to various development teams, and by discovering that no one was tracking the metrics that were really important for their website’s performance. Souders checked in with them regularly and inquired on the websites’ performance and progress, only to discover that the developers were stumped the sites were suddenly slow, and that they couldn’t answer whether or not more domains or more Javascript was added recently. To his dismay, these were people working for huge websites, and they didn’t know the amount of Javascript being pushed in the world with their pages. Souders saw the need for a tool that would track these metrics. Besides generating these data reports, HTML Archive also helps in identifying new trends.