about.md

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title	About Harry Roberts
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meta	Harry Roberts is an independent web performance consultant based in Leeds, UK. He helps teams improve site speed, front-end performance, and Core Web Vitals.
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lux	About

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Hi, I’m Harry. I’m an independent web performance consultant based in Leeds, UK. I help teams understand how site-speed affects their business, improve Core Web Vitals, and work out where the real bottlenecks are.

I’m an invited Google Developer Expert, a Cloudinary Media Developer Expert, an international speaker, and co-chair of performance.now(), the web performance conference for professionals.

Alongside client work, I have published over 240 articles on CSS Wizardry and delivered over 150 conference talks on web performance, site-speed, and front-end engineering. Since 2009, my writing and teaching have informed and improved the work of individuals and teams around the world.

Workshopping at Digital Labin, 2022. Photograph by Ivica Džambo.

• About
• Colophon
• Why CSS Wizardry?
• Interviews

With many years of professional experience, and more than a decade working independently, I’ve been trusted by the likes of the United Nations, Google, the BBC, General Electric, and many more.

<script> const currentYear = new Date().getFullYear(); const yearsOfExperience = currentYear - 2008; document.querySelector('.js-date').textContent = yearsOfExperience; </script>

My work tends to sit somewhere between engineering, troubleshooting, and enablement. In practice, that can mean auditing a site to uncover what is really holding it back, working alongside a team to get fixes shipped, or helping leadership understand what performance is costing them and where the strongest returns are likely to come from. More often than not, it means some mixture of all three.

Through combinations of consultancy, performance audits, implementation support, and training, I help teams build faster, more resilient websites and stronger web performance practices around them.

There is a short list of people I whole-heartedly recommend for detailed performance work and Harry is right there at the top.

Tim Kadlec

The two things I care most about are practicality and outcomes. Fast websites are good, but they are not the end in themselves. What matters is what that speed unlocks: better experiences, healthier conversion rates, stronger Core Web Vitals, and more confidence in the product itself.

I work with companies of all shapes and sizes, across a range of industries, countries, and team structures. Sometimes that means a forensic performance audit; sometimes it means help fixing a specific issue, training for engineers, or a longer-term partnership that helps a team build performance thinking into the way it works. All of that is squarely in my wheelhouse.

If you need a faster website, better Core Web Vitals, a detailed performance audit, or simply a clearer understanding of where your biggest opportunities lie, I can help. I’m comfortable in the weeds with engineers, and just as comfortable helping stakeholders understand the commercial side of web performance work.

If that sounds useful, say hello. I’m professional, but pretty laid back, and I’m always happy to see whether there’s a good fit.

Hire me.

• About
• Colophon
• Why CSS Wizardry?
• Interviews

Colophon

CSS Wizardry makes use of many great tools and services; tools and services that make my life as a developer much, much simpler.

CSS Wizardry is built on Jekyll, an open source static site generator. This is hosted using GitHub Pages and served via Cloudflare.

The CSS is written in Sass, and built on top of inuitcss. inuitcss is a free, open-source, Sass-based, OOCSS framework with a strong focus on performance, scalability, and a small footprint. This is then built into ITCSS, a CSS architecture of mine which is designed to aid the growth and maintainability of CSS projects.

The site is intentionally fairly lean. Your system font is used to give a familiar feel and to help improve performance. SpeedCurve and Treo help keep CSS Wizardry fast.

The photograph used on the homepage’s masthead is of me speaking at Digital Labin, and was taken by Marin Cuk Vurnek of EVENTography.

CSS Wizardry’s roadmap and task list are viewable on a public Trello board, and all of the code that powers it can be found on GitHub. Feel free to take a look round, but please don’t steal anything.

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• About
• Colophon
• Why CSS Wizardry?
• Interviews

Why CSS Wizardry?

I chose the name CSS Wizardry when I was 17 years old. I had read Andy Budd’s CSS Mastery, become mildly obsessed, and then very unoriginally registered csswizardry.com.

I would not necessarily recommend letting teenagers pick their own domain names.

While my early career really was rooted in CSS architecture and design systems—and so for a long time the name made perfect sense—my work has been much more squarely focused on web performance for the best part of a decade now. The name has stuck, and at this point I suspect it probably always will.

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• About
• Colophon
• Why CSS Wizardry?
• Interviews

Interviews and Podcasts

1. Podcast

   2017-06-13: ScriptCast

2. Podcast

   2017-06-13: Non Breaking Space Show

3. Podcast

   2016-11-10: Hacking UI

4. AMA

   2016-10-20: Hashnode

5. Podcast

   2016-09-14: The Web Platform Podcast

6. Interview

   2016-09-14: Honeypot

7. Podcast

   2016-08-23: Toolsday.io – Travel Tools

8. Interview

   2015-03-10: CSSConf Australia

9. Podcast

   2015-02-10: Being Freelance – CSS Wizard Harry Roberts – Developing Consultant Magic

10. Podcast

    2015-02-07: Unfinished Business – Two old farts looking at their calendars

11. Interview

    2014-12-04: ColourSpaces

12. Video interview

    2014-11-09: DaFED

13. Interview

    2014-10-02: PSDtoWP – 3 beloved front-end development tools

14. Podcast

    2014-09-29: Unfinished Business – A cage full of hungry dogs

15. Podcast

    2014-06-05: CDNify – An Interview with CSS Expert Harry Roberts

16. Interview

    2014-05-20: Insurance By Jack – How To Get Started With Public Speaking

17. Video interview

    2014-04-24: FOWD – 10 Minutes ’til the Future – Live from FOWD edition

18. Interview

    2014-04-04: Workspiration

19. Interview

    2014-04-03: Sitepoint – CSS Framework Fortunes and Failures with Harry Roberts

20. Interview

    2014-03-14: Responsive Design Weekly – Responsive Interview with Harry Roberts

21. Interview

    2014-02-15: net mag – Harry Roberts on big CSS, working for Sky, and being a home bird

22. Interview

    2014-01-06: Alex Carpenter — Harry Roberts of CSS Wizardry

23. Podcast

    2013-11-08: Web Payload – Why not to use IDS? The tipping point, inuitcss, and frameworks

24. Podcast

    2013-08-10: Unfinished Business – Almost as controversial as putting the milk in first

25. Interview

    2013-05-15: Steer – An interview with Harry Roberts

26. Interview

    2013-04-26: Web Courses Bangkok – An Interview With Harry Roberts – Front-end Architect and Speaker

27. Interview

    2013-04-25: net mag – Use shame.css to house hacks

28. Podcast

    2013-03-22: Up Front Podcast – CSS with Harry Roberts

29. Podcast

    2012-11-29: Shop Talk Show

30. Interview

    2012-10-15: Martin Wolf – Interview with CSS wizard Harry Roberts

31. Podcast

    2012-08-30: Young Guns Show – Scalable CSS with Harry Roberts

32. Interview

    2012-03-06: Nu Blue – Off to see the Wizard