Featuring 3.7 million customers across 140 locations with 300 Million pounds in finances in addition to being an online pioneer in betting exchanges, Betfair is a sizeable contender in the world of online betting and gambling.  With products ranging across a variety of desktop and mobile platforms coupled with user activity that at times reached 30,000 bets a minute, the company found itself handicapped by a defining part of the user experience: a slow website.  Inspired by no less than un-forgivingly honest customer comments and an acknowledgement of their website’s failings, Tim Morrow takes us along Betfair’s journey on the promise of high performance, and the incremental challenges that marked the way forward.  

Morrow begins the chronicle with Betfair’s customer-commitment goal, and proceeds to share with listeners and customers website stats that illustrate the formidable challenge that lay ahead.  In realizing their customer-commitment of three-second page load times, he describes not just the mechanics of the process involved, but goes beyond to showcase the cross-section of cultural introspection, technological innovation and the variety of tools needed to tie them together.  Basing his approach on a tailored version of Maslow’s Hierarchy, Morrow illustrates the importance of a fundamental approach that emphasizes necessity before frills, and functionality before style.  

In keeping with the ongoing nature of such an endeavor, Morrow also shares his insights on what he envisions the paradigm of ‘Continuous Delivery’ to be, the elements that make for a successful delivery pipeline and just as important, those that detract from it. Key performance enhancing techniques such as reducing the number of HTTP requests, reducing DNS lookups, minification, flushing the buffer early, using cookie-free domains for components & optimizing CSS sprites are discussed and their impact on Betfair’s website experience are explored.  

By linking developers to not just testing outcomes but rather the entire cycle, Morrow brings to life a core idea of Betfair’s website redesign process.  In tying these various ideas together, listeners are given an insightful view into how Betfair defines, measures, collects, and analyzes key performance indicators with a variety of customizable tools and novel approaches.  

Contrasting Betfair’s progress with their initial challenges, Morrow outlines not just a strategic approach that has furthered the realization of their customer-service commitment but rather a vision that builds on a promise of excellence and driven by a never-ending process of self-reflection.