Wikimedia Performance Team/Web Perf Hero award

The Performance Team has been giving the Web Perf Hero award since mid-2020, to individuals who have gone above and beyond to improve the performance of Wikimedia Foundation sites. It's awarded once a quarter (or less), and takes the form of a Phabricator badge.

Below are past recipients and why they've been given the Web Perf Hero award. Beyond specific recent projects that led to the award, they've all demonstrated repeated care, focus and discipline around performance.

Umherirrender
Umherirrender has initiated and carried out significant improvements to the performance of MediaWiki user preferences (T278650, T58633, and T291748). The impact is felt widely and throughout Wikimedia sites. For example, when switching languages via the ULS selector, or exploring Beta Features and Gadgets, or switching skins. These are all powered by the MediaWiki "Preferences" component.

The work included implementing support for deferred message parsing in more HTMLForm classes, and applying this to the Echo and Gadgets extensions. This cut API latency by over 50%, from 0.7s to 0.3s at the median, and 1.2s to 0.5s at p95. (See graphs at T278650#7130951).

Kunal Mehta
Kunal's work investigating and fixing performance differences during the Debian Buster upgrade was critical in understanding and mitigating the performance impact of that migration. If it wasn't for his initiative, that issue might have gone unnoticed or underestimated for some time and been much harder to understand and deal with.

Giuseppe Lavagetto
Giuseppe's in-depth blog post about Envoy and PHP and all the underlying work that he did shows that he's willing to go the extra mile to improve the performance of our systems.

Nick Ray
Nick's in-depth analysis of the DOM order impact on performance was excellent and shows that how much work he does to ensure that he's building performant features.

Jon Robson
We hereby recognise the excellence of Jon's work converting image lazy loading to use IntersectionObserver, one of many projects he had the initiative of starting to improve the performance of our sites.