To kick off Front End Center for the new year we're going back to the fundamentals of web performance, and in particular the effect of latency on the speed of your site. Depending on where you live and the devices you use, high-latency internet access might be a totally foreign concept or an everyday reality, so in this episode we look at some concrete numbers to get a sense of just how much it can change someone's experience.

This is the first in a new series building up pithy.af, a side-project of mine that we'll use as a base to dive into lots of topics throughout the year. In this episode we look at the results of an experiment that I've been running, the TCP design decisions that cause connections to "slow start", and why it's worth adding a CDN to our architecture right at the beginning of the project.