I went to a few other session this afternoon that were interesting and informative, but they did not evoke much in the way of a coherent response. Some talk about DBA roles in the DevOps world and talk about Yahoo's issues with their homepage were interesting. In all, I wouldn't say that there was a lot of really new information there for me.

I did want to hit on the short session I attended before calling it a day. I got to see some more of the new features on WebPageTest. The more I see, the more I want this set up at work. The first feature that is only available on private instances (not on webpagetest.org) allows you to determine when the page stops changing. It will even create a weird picture that highlights the area of the page that changes last. With highly dynamic web apps, this could be a really interesting way to determine what is really going on as the page loads. I think you can combine this with the video capture capability and have a reasonable view that can be shown to people without using the tool. I find that one of the biggest issues with training people on these highly dynamic apps is that screenshots in documentation cannot convey the true dynamic nature of the application. These videos can.

The second really cool feature is called replay. You can have the system perform the request(s) you want. Then, you can actually set it up so that it replays the request without actually making any network requests. That way, you can measure the pure browser-side latency impact of the JavaScript, CSS, and DOM structures on your page. This is really cool and will do a lot to help get rid of that network jitter.