I’m Cameron Pittman and I love helping you make better websites. A few weeks ago I launched my first Udacity course, Website Performance Optimization, powered by the expertise of Ilya Grigorik from Google.
Today, I want to celebrate my amazing students and the awesome portfolio projects they’ve been optimizing.
I taught high school physics and chemistry for four years and I miss being a high school teacher. There’s an intimacy in the classroom that isn’t possible online. I loved watching my students’ faces light up when new ideas clicked, and I loved seeing their scrunched faces tilt sideways when concepts didn’t make sense. I miss the immediate feedback. If (or rather when) I screwed up a lesson, I had a chance to make changes and try again a few minutes later.
Online? It’s not quite the same (yet!).
But! This is why I love Website Performance Optimization. I purposefully inserted a few questions that ask you to post your answer on the forums even though your answers could have been graded programmatically. I wanted to regain a bit of that sense of immediate classroom feedback. I wanted to dissect and probe your thinking. And the response has been tremendous! So many great answers and conversations. One of my favorites is the Optimized Portfolios discussion where students are showcasing the websites they’ve made lightning fast.
A few projects really stand out.
First of all, special recognition to students Md. Chowdhury and WojciechJ for reaching perfect scores on PageSpeed Insights for their portfolios! This was not an easy task and it took quite a bit of creativity to work around some of the limitations of GitHub Pages.
Next up, students Aliaksei, Nikita Pecasa, Nitish, julesflwr, Tamas_2713, Geoffrey-63, Hayden Pierce, Cloud-5, Daniel Magro, stefan–, Jan Sedlak, deepix, and Leyu Sisay all deserve credit for going above and beyond the project’s requirements and reaching at least an average of 95 on PageSpeed Insights! Awesome job everyone!
Lastly, I want to recognize student gosukiwi for a few reasons. (1) He was the first to post his optimized website, (2) he improved his personal portfolio’s PageSpeed scores to a strong 87 on mobile and an impressive 93 on desktop, and (3) he provided clear, step-by-step explanations of his improvements alongside the Timeline data that informed his optimizations. Great job gosukiwi!
Do you see any potential optimizations in the portfolio source code?Thanks to everyone else who’s taken the effort to improve their page’s performance! I can’t wait to see what you do next 🙂
