Low-Hanging Fruit vs. Micro-optimization - Creative Techniques for Loading Web Pages Faster

Web site optimization has historically been focused on server performance, and more recently on resource compression and caching. Some have even resorted to clever JavaScript packing manuevers, extreme image spriting and even micro-optimization of CSS selectors. Unfortunately nearly all of these performance improvements come at the cost of reducing development efficiency. Puling from practical experience implementing and deploying a variety of features for Wikipedia, Trevor and Roan have applied creative ideas to fundamental problems and came up with a set of techniques that have proven themselves to significantly improve performance.