About Charles
About me
I’m the Web Lead on the Product Development team at MavTek. I have the privilege of guiding all the web pods deliver value to their customers. Helping the teams find new ways of gathering and understanding the behavior of customers on the platform while continuously improving our ways of working.
How I start my day
My day begins with a two kilometer walk with Roscoe getting my daughter to elementary school. Every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow we’re out there exploring the trails surrounding l'Anse-à-l'Orme.
Roscoe
Hidden talent
I have a passion for baking but think more along the lines of a “nailed it” contestant.
If I could only eat one meal for the rest of your life
Only one single dish - this is excruciatingly difficult. I’d probably settle on a homemade burger off the grill, slightly charred, covered with melted Swiss cheese, topped by some fresh arugula, and pickled ginger on a brioche bun. Coupled with a side of fresh salad - no tomatoes! - and paired with a generic red ale, nothing too fancy.
Favorite way to unwind after a workday
Pre-pandemic I spent most nights being humbled in full contact martial arts. A lot can be said about the resilience and stress relief benefits of pushing your limits on a regular basis.
Favorite trip ever taken
That’s a tough question, each one has been great in its own way, even more so since I haven’t taken one in almost 2 years now. Honestly hiking in the Canadian Rockies would probably be #1. Experiencing the amazement and wonder of my kids at the underwater walkway in the Toronto aquarium ranks up there.
What got me into performance
Fun fact I was dead set against working on the web when I finished my studies. An internship in the dungeons of an IBM chip plant cured me of that way of thinking and a newspaper ad landed me my first job within ecommerce. It’s been an almost non-stop ride since then.
I have been curious about web performance ever since integrating my first website in 1997 – hello Geocities. Up until 2010 most of my focus surrounded eliminating any parsing errors at the client and reducing rendering latency at the server. Reducing request counts, caching everything in memory, and stripping out any unnecessary markup and packages was painstaking work that yielded gains. Attending Velocity in 2010 at the insistence of my mentor at the time was a game changer. From the focus on true Devops and understanding the request chain to the progressive deployment dark launch techniques run at Facebook to the talks given by Steve Souders – whose books I had been studying and were heavily thumbed over the years.
Initially the quest for speed was a means of influencing user experience without altering UI or product behavior. Over time this has evolved into an expectation on the part of users. In our current age of instant gratification users expect content to load nearly instantaneously; anything less is at best a disappointment and at worst a lost potential customer.
Ricky Bobby encapsulated it best: If you ain't first you're last