Long Overdue

May 08 2015

I owe you fine folks a blog post.

I recently tidied up my blog and moved it to a new backend and in the process realized that I haven't blogged in over 18 months. (!!!)

# Where did I disappear?

A lot have happened during that time:

The markup based responsive images solutions, which seemed to be facing a dead-end in September 2013, were revived and significantly improved. In order to defuse initial resistance from the Blink project, I started implementing required infrastructure in order to implement the features there.

After a while when I realized that this would take me a long while unless I did that full time, I went to the community (With the help of wonderful RICG folks - particular shout out to Mat and Geri) and asked for your help.

The contributions from the community did not disappoint, and I started what I thought would be a 1-2 months project, but actually turned out to be more than that. The features landed in Blink around 3 months after the campaign started, and shipped in the fall.

The work in WebKit was next, and srcset and sizes made it in, but as far as picture goes, there was some missing infrastructure that made it difficult to implement. I'm still working on it.

On top of that, I wrote articles, gave talks and even wrote a chapter for the upcoming (and totally awesome!) Smashing Book. But I just didn't blog, partly because my writing energy was spent on the above commitments, and partly because of dumb technical reasons - my blog was in poor shape, and I wanted to overhaul it, but didn't get to it. So I procrastinated. Writing code is easier :)

# Employment

As some of you may know, I started working at Akamai at the beginning of the year. I wish I did a blog post announcement on that at the time, but for all the poor excuses reasons I stated above, I didn't. So this is my attempt at making up for it.

What do I do at Akamai, you ask?

I'm a Principal Architect at the Front End Optimization team, with two distinct responsibilities. On the one hand, I make sure that our front-end optimizations are as awesome as they can be, and squeeze everything they can from customer sites' performance. On the other hand, I'm still doing the same thing I did as part of the RICG - Making sure that performance sensitive standards are promoted and implemented in browsers.

I'm now over four months in, and I couldn't be happier. I'm working with an awesome bunch of smart people, pushing some great features both inside the organization and as part of the Web platform. And yes, I'm still remote :)

# What's next

As far as my Web platform work goes, I'm currently working on three different issues:

• Responsive images - push in WebKit and improve the implementation in Blink
• Client Hints - Enable a server-side based responsive images solution
• Resource Hints - Enable Web sites to clue the browser in on things they know are going to happen in the near future

Work is under way for all the above subjects, and I'm hoping that some of it will be able to ship soon. Stay tuned.

# So, I'm back!

Sorry again for disappearing. I'll do my best to make sure that future posts won't be 18 months from now :D

In fact, I have a few blog posts I've been itching to write for a while. So

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