Harry Roberts

A man with short hair and some stubble wearing a pale shirt talking on stage in front of a brightly-coloured purple background.

Harry is an independent Consultant Web Performance Engineer from the UK. He helps some of the world’s largest and most respected organisations find and fix their site-speed issues.

He is both a Google- and a Cloudinary Media-Developer Expert, and has consulted for clients from the United Nations to the BBC, General Electric to the Financial Times, and a whole host more. He is also co-chair of performance.now(), the web performance conference for professionals.

When not doing client work, he writes, teaches, and speaks about the entire gamut of front-end performance. When not doing work at all, he’s probably out on his bike.

Build for the web, build on the web, build with the web

Every layer of abstraction made in the browser moves you further from the platform, ties you further into framework lock-in, and moves you further away from fast.

By using progressive enhancement, you can opt into browser-native features that are usually faster, more accessible, more secure, and—perhaps most importantly to the business—maintained by someone else.

The beauty of opting into web platform features as they become available is that your site becomes contextual. The same codebase adapts into its environment, playing to its strengths, rather than trying to build and ship your own environment from the ground up. Meet your users where they are.