Yahoo Archives - Femgineer

Timeline: Mint.com – 2009

This is the last installment of the Mint.com Timeline. As many of you already know Mint was acquired by competitor Intuit in September of 2009. Mint will continue to live on as a product that helps its users do more with their money. I myself have enjoyed the experience tremendously, 2009 was indeed an interesting and eventful year. Today Aaron reviewed the goals and accomplishments from 2009: increase customer acquisition, delivery a quality product, and improve revenue numbers. I’d say we’ve met those goals, but here’s a more intimate look as to what unfolded at Mint.com in 2009:

January 2009 – On the 14th Mint.com is announced on Yahoo’s homepage resulting in the largest number of registered users in a single day. An iPhone floor model is released that contains a demo version of Mint.com. On the 22nd rival QuickenOnline challenges Mint with a legal letter demanding to know how we measure our active and registered user count and user growth rate.

March 2009 – Mint.com adds its millionth user! The team goes on a wine-tasting trip to Napa to celebrate their success.

May 2009 – The Minter Sprinters begins, an attempt to keep the Minters in shape just in time for bathing suit season 😀

June 2009 – A new summer tradition of burritos in the park and field day begins.

July 2009 – Mint launches MintLife the new and improved Mint blog.

August 2009 – Mint accepts a Series C round of funding from DAG ventures.

September 2009 – On the night of the 13th, after months of a clandestine courtship, Intuit proposes to Mint.com and TechCrunch leaks the story. On the morning of the 14th, for the first time in Mint history all the employees show up to work before 10am! The Minters enjoy drinks at Stephen’s Green in down town Mountain View, along the way they are greeted by locals who quietly whisper, “Dude those guys just made bank!”

Mint turns two on the 18th, and the Minters enjoy a night of cruising on the SF bay.

Despite the deepening recession 2009 was a great year for Mint. Its success should be attributed to every team: engineering, product, marketing, and business development. And every Minter played their part in contributing to the the product’s success.

This is my last week at Mint, Friday will be my last day. Mint was my first startup, and I was its first and only femgineer. I feel blessed to have had such a positive first experience. In my heart I will always be a Minter, and I hope to continue to “Mint my money.” 🙂

15 Ways to Speed Up Your Front-End

Last week I attend the Percona conference in Santa Clara. The purpose of this conference was to talk about performance related to databases specifically mySQL. Most of the talks went over my head. However, there was one talk I attended “Website on Speed” by Philip Tellis from Yahoo! that I thought was outstanding. In his 20 minute presentation he covered some key optimization techniques to speed up website and improve latency for users, that don’t require time-consuming back-end database restructuring. Here are some of the ideas I found useful:

1. Reduce the number of domains your site has. Having numerous domains requires a lot of DNS lookups, which makes the site seem slow to users.

2. Avoid redirects or point to a load balancer. Redirects cause the site loading to slow down user experience. Load balancers handle request processing by distributing them based on the current capacity of each server.

3. Combine CSS and JavaScript into a single file. Having a file for each increases the time it takes to download the site content.

4. Combine decorative images into sprites.

5. Cache aggressively. This of course depends on the content of your site, and how much data is being manipulated by users. But I would recommend caching static data for as long as possible, which will speed up download time and improve the user’s experience.

6. gZip content over the wire.

7. Minify CSS and JavaScript using a YUI compressor.

8. Reduce cookie size.

9. Post-load components after on-load.

10. Put CSS on top so the browser will download it first, and page has rendered. This improves user experience, because they can at least start to view the page, even if they can’t interact with it yet.

11. The corollary to #11 is to put JavaScript at the bottom so that it doesn’t block rendering.

12. Avoid using tables for layout in HTML, because you have to wait for the entire table to download before the page can be loaded.

13. Attach events on a container rather than on each element.

14. Use specific HTML elements e.g. unordered list (ul) vs. many divs, this reduces the number of elements that need to be loaded.

15. Profile your JavaScript using YUI profiler, there is also another new profiler called YSlow.