Transforming front-end Disaster Code™ into a Maintainable Masterpiece - Dan Gribbin
Channel: jquery
Date: 2014-04-25

Presented at jQuery Conference San Diego February 12-13, 2014 
http://events.jquery.org/2014/san-diego/

February 12, 2014 at 5:00PM PST in the Fundamentals Track

Description
For 5 weeks, I worked with a small team of developers to refactor the front-end of a moderately trafficked website for a ubiquitous international brand. The project's initial launch deadlines were tight, and sacrifices were made to get the site out the door. Months down the road as features were added and changed, performance began taking a major hit, with page load times reaching 15 seconds. Some of this was attributed to poor front-end practices. Implementing new features became a somewhat of a nightmare, and morale on the team dropped. Given the opportunity to refactor and rework a portion of the site, we planned and worked for several weeks. In the end, we shaved 75% off page load times, eliminated a ton of technical debt, and set future work up for success by modularizing our code. This talk will cover some of that process. What worked for us, what didn't, how schedules and priorities between developers and clients can conflict, and how to make that better. We'll also cover several things you can do right now to clean up your front-end code and optimize for performance.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/dangribbin/transforming-frontend-disaster-code