Hello, I'm Aaron.
My career with the web began in 1998 with a small, family-run hotel,
a website that wasn't getting built, and a book I bought because I
wondered if I could do it myself...
Turns out I could.
That book still sits on my shelf, but I've come a long way from that first website.
Along the way I've worked as a Developer, Tech Lead, CTO, and Performance Architect across media, SaaS, agency, nonprofit, finance, and global e-commerce environments.
But I've never really stopped being the person who sees something on a website and thinks:
I wonder if there's a better way...
Focusing on Performance
That's probably why I ended up focusing on performance.
I like figuring out why something isn't working as well as it could.
- A page is slow. Why?
- A Core Web Vital is red. Why?
- We're sending a lot of JavaScript. Do we actually need it?
- A problem keeps coming back. What is the system producing it?
Those questions are usually more interesting to me than simply fixing the immediate problem.
Performance isn't a metric. It's a user experience.
A metric can tell us something important about what users are experiencing. But if we're optimizing the metric instead of the experience, we've probably lost the plot somewhere along the way.
I like finding the thing underneath the thing
Over the years, my work has moved increasingly from writing individual pieces of code toward understanding the systems that produce them.
- Architecture.
- Development practices.
- Performance budgets.
- Monitoring.
- Deployment processes.
- Browser capabilities.
- The people making the decisions.
- The people implementing them.
- The people ultimately using what we build.
I don't want to optimize the symptom.
I want to optimize the system producing that symptom.
That often means looking for ways to make the right behavior easier.
And sometimes that means doing less.
I don't believe every problem needs JavaScript
Of course, some do.
JavaScript enables experiences that simply aren't possible with HTML and CSS alone. But when the browser can already provide the behavior we need, shipping JavaScript to recreate it adds unnecessary work for developers, reviewers, QA, build systems, users, and browsers.
I'm fascinated by the capabilities that have gradually appeared in the platform, especially when they allow us to replace an old assumption with something simpler.
The goal isn't to eliminate JavaScript.
It's to eliminate unnecessary JavaScript.
I also really like working with people
One of the things I enjoy most about this work is that the web is never just a developer problem.
I've spent my career working alongside designers, backend developers, editors, project managers, leadership, clients, and third-party vendors. I've mentored developers everywhere I've worked, and I've led lunch-and-learns, presentations, workshops, and other knowledge-sharing efforts throughout my career.
I genuinely enjoy the exchange.
I might know something you don't.
You certainly know something I don't.
That's usually where the interesting stuff happens.
I'm still addicted to "what's new"
The web changes constantly, and I like that.
Something that once required JavaScript may now be possible with HTML and CSS.
Something that once required a custom solution may now be built into the browser.
Something hat once seemed unavoidable may turn out to have been an assumption we simply stopped questioning.
Those moments are fun.
They're also opportunities to make the web a little simpler, faster, and more resilient.
When I'm not noodling with code...
I'm usually hiking, biking, gardening, traveling, reading, or generally hanging out and enjoying life with my wife, friends, and family.
So, what am I looking for?
These days, I'm particularly interested in organizations with complicated, high-traffic, multi-site web ecosystems where performance is more than a collection of individual bugs.
I want to help teams understand what's happening, identify the systems producing those problems, and make better performance part of how they build.
Not just:
How do we make this page faster?
But:
How do we build things so they don't become slow in the first place?
That's the work I want to keep doing.
Have any questions? Care to chat?
I'm happy to take any questions, perform project work, or consider a full-time gig.
You can even just say hi, if you like.