Steve Souders - Google

Steve was the creator of Y-slow at yahoo prior to joining google and as such knows a lot about how to optimise websites. He admitted that he has spent the majority of his time trying to optimise the Server (backend) to speed up the delivery of content but has subsequently realised through testing that this generally amounts to less than 10% of load time.

The tips that he ran through to trick browser in to loading multiple elements at once, currently browsers will request 2 files per domain at a time, and getting round javascript locking up the browser could easily save us 50% of our front-end load time. This coupled with the financial figures of how big players have felt the impact of this made this a very powerful talk and one that will impact our development processes from the day we return to the office.

For more info read the following presentation by Steve : http://www.stevesouders.com/docs/sxsw-20090314.ppt