Ryan Townsend

@twnsnd.com

871 Followers 260 Following

Principal Product Manager @ Cloudflare • Public Speaker • 20+ YOE in Tech, 10 as CTO • LessonsofaCTO.com

Screenshot from w3tech.com. Read Bluesky post for breakdown.
A group of lovable idiots taking photos
Cyd presenting an example conference website with scroll driven animations
Cyd showing Chrome DevTools with animation paused and the view-transition pseudo element in the inspector
Cyd presenting her website
View of the hills surrounding Cluj with clear blue skies and lush greenery
Everyman Cinema. All Day Hey 2026: The Last One
A table of data
Wroclaw city centre with churches and buildings on the river
A Magic Mouse connected via cable attached to its underneath
I've joined Cloudflare to help build a better internet
“Performance is accessibility” on Mike’s slide
Zach showing the impact of SPAs on the delay of interactivity
Zach on stage describing the time between rendering and JavaScript arriving for interactivity
Zach on stage showing GitHub search results for ‘MM_swapImage’
Bramus presenting on stage
Shakshouka with baked eggs, harissa and saffron spiced tomato, labneh, avo and flatbread. Plus an extra side of Cumberland sausage 😉
Article entry entitled "Introducing the HTML element"
A paragraph from the article
AI Insight. Executive summary for this report: Our website's Core Web Vitals show a strong positive trend, with LCP improving by 0.227 seconds to an excellent 0.981 seconds since the last report. This significant load speed enhancement directly improves user experience, bolstering engagement and conversion rates. Our CLS and TBT metrics remain perfectly optimized, maintaining an exceptional overall performance. Sustaining these top-tier speeds ensures a competitive advantage and reinforces user trust for continued business growth.
Google Chrome screenshot showing the Keychron keyboard configuration application
Custom keycaps including a duck, thumbs up, wave, fist bump and peace sign.
The box of the Keychron Q16 HE 8K keyboard
Git commit with the message "wtf"
Ryan holding his snowboard on the Les Deux Alpes glacier with Mont Blanc in the background
Rise&Fall Instagram advert starting with “We’re Sorry”
An iPhone screenshot showing nothing more than a blue gradient.
Andy on stage with a slide reading “Need a refresher on the Event Loop” and citing Jake’s 2018 talk.
Andy on stage with a slide showing JavaScript code that blocks the main thread for 500ms every time the mouse moves
Michael on stage at Perf Now 2025. His slide shows a workflow diagram of steps in the rendering process.
A presentation slide with the title "Millions on Rails: a two-decade retrospective on scaling with Rails"
Me looking out over a Swiss mountain range
Two ragdolls resting on my right arm on my desk
The “Screen Unknown Callers” settings in iOS 26, options being “Never”, “Ask Reason for Calling” and “Silence”
Red Bull liveried electric Ford with a smoke-filled cabin and the door open.
A screenshot from VSCode showing Copilot responding to a prompt saying "My name is GitHub Copilot"
Blue point ragdoll cat (Sidney) sitting in a cardboard box
Screenshot of Apple Photos albums, with Goodwood 2025 having 406 photos
An edited XKCD cartoon based on https://xkcd.com/927/ The title is "How JavaScript Proliferates", with the first slide stating "Situation: there are 14 competing libraries", the middle slide saying "14?! I should definitely make a better one from scratch rather than putting in effort to patch an existing one" and the final slide stating "Soon: Situation: there are 15 competing libraries"
Dua Lipa in her Porsche GT3RS
Porsche GT4 course car on the Goodwood hill climb track
Rear of the Pagani Utopia
Nils presenting a slide with a SpongeBob meme showing the text ‘Boring’, surrounded by the logos for Figma, Tailwind and ChatGPT
Andy Bell presenting a slide for an imaginary website. The copy reads “World class accounting, our accountants will help you avoid paying fair levels of tax.” and “we are a corporation, we’re not like the others, we promise.”
Pouring an espresso tonic using a cocktail muddle to retain the separation
Four performance.now lanyards laid on a wood table
A web server report for traffic on a redacted domain name.
A pie chart illustrating HTTP response file sizes broken into buckets of 'Zero', '11-100 bytes', '101 bytes to 1 kilobyte', '1-10 kilobytes' and 'Other'.
Forbes website in a browser, showing an error "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."
A lifeguard hut on Bondi Beach (Sydney, Australia) in the early morning sunshine
Our ragdoll, Ivan, laying peacefully on a blanket in the vet clinic, having been put to sleep.
Our ragdoll Ivan, cradled in my arms on my study desk. Where he’d be at least an hour of every day for the past almost-four years. Purring, snuggling and sleeping while I work.
Web Performance Ryan often breaks down complex web concepts as easily as he breaks into a brunch buffet. His love for performance is only rivaled by his love for second breakfast. Food Culture From steak and eggs to midnight snacking, Ryan's culinary passion is woven into his identity, proving that good meals are just as critical as good code.
Consider going higher. A chromium study found that everyone experiences 99th percentile sometimes.
Jason Williams introducing Container Timing on stage
Slide demonstrating 661ms blocking JavaScript on interaction due to non-yielding GTM events
5% on low-end Android, 14% mid-range Android, 22% high-end Android, 27% iPhone 15+, 27% iPhone 12-14 and 6% other iPhones.
Fonts are only downloaded if it’s referenced by styling on the page.
Reducing the range of Roboto Flex’s axis resulting in a 7.3% reduction in file size
Mandy’s Roslindale font was reduced 91% from 754kb variable to 67kb bold-only because she wasn’t using any other weights/axis!