Joseph Smarr

I spent the weekend in SF at OpenIDDevCamp, hosted at SixApart’s offices. In the style of BarCamp and iPhoneDevCamp, the idea was just to get a lot of people together who were interested in OpenID, provide the space and amenities for them to work together, and let them loose. About 30-40 people showed up, including [...]

Wow, I’m exhausted, but incredibly happy! I’ve been working insane hours all week to get Google’s just-announced OpenSocial APIs implemented in Plaxo Pulse and launched live by the time of their announcement. And we did it! We released full support Thursday night, making Plaxo the first site to publicly implement OpenSocial. Yay! I only found [...]

Advanced JavaScript Widget Summit 2007 San Francisco, CA October 16, 2007 Download PPT (2.8MB) Niall Kennedy asked me to speak at his second annual Widget Summit about “Advanced JavaScript” to a audience with a mix of business, product manager, and engineer types. Since I wasn’t sure how to target the talk, I decided to keep [...]

When I gave my talk on High-Performance JavaScript at OSCON in July, I found out that I was speaking right before “Chief Performance Yahoo!” Steve Souders. To be honest, I was a bit nervous–we read everything Steve writes at Plaxo, and he runs a whole group at Yahoo that does nothing but focus on web [...]

I like twitter, and I use it a lot (I even a twitter widget on my web site). A lot of my friends use it too, some more regularly than others. I use Bloglines to keep up with the stream of status updates from my twitter friends so I can check in periodically and pick [...]

High-Performance JavaScript: Why Everything You’ve Been Taught is Wrong O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2007 Portland, OR July 25, 2007 Download PPT (7.3MB) This talk describes many of the counterintuitive lessons we learned at Plaxo while building Plaxo Online 3.0 and trying to make it fast.  In addition to sharing technical tricks and gotchas, I [...]

BTW, I’ve added my current twitter status (using Twit-Twoo) and events I’m attending (via upcoming.org) to the left sidebar of my blog. It’s cool how easy it is these days to integrate data from third-party sites without having to write any API client code. Like we found with Plaxo’s widget, when you can just give [...]

We just discovered at Plaxo that redirecting using meta-refresh tags has a surprising performance penalty as a side-effect: it causes all cached resources on the redirected-to page to be re-requested (as if the user had hit the “refresh” button). Even though most of them should return 304s (if you’re caching them properly), this still results [...]

As f8 would have it, I was in San Francisco yesterday for Facebook’s platform launch and hackathon. What a day it was! The event itself quite a spectacle (they filled the SF Design Center with about 800 people, Mark gave a Jobs-esque keynote, and the hackathon was set up with tons of couches, tray-passed hors d’oeuvres, [...]

Now that the OSCON 07 site is up, I guess it’s official–for the second year in a row, I’ve been selected to give a talk at O’Reilly’s annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, OR from July 23-27. The title of my talk this year is “High-Performance JavaScript: Why Everything You’ve Been Taught is Wrong“. [...]