Below is an article originally written by Jane Li, Garima Agarwal, Nancy Huang, Alex Usova, and Neha Koul of PowerToFly Partner Audible, and published on June 11, 2018. Go to Audible's page on PowerToFly to see their open positions and learn more.
Despite a dreary morning sky, the boxed coffee and bustling energy kept all the volunteers in warm spirits. The outdoor Propelify conference on Hoboken's waterfront had been set up like a farmer's market—booth after booth showcasing cool tech ideas and enthusiastic young startups.
Audible's tent was fashioned into a swanky living room, with couches and a huge fuzzy carpet, a perfect invitation for attendees to come listen to five software developers from Audible's Consumer Domains, the full-stack engineering teams behind Audible's website.
Second, was an enlightening talk on Web App Security by Garima. The talk highlighted the importance of serving sites over https for several trust and security reasons. There was emphasis on https becoming a requirement for leveraging http/2 and future PWA (Progressive Web App) technologies. The talk demonstrated two security vulnerabilities on sites today—XSS and Clickjacking. This was followed by leveraging http security headers to tighten up the security of web apps, typically just by adding a few lines of code. Garima called out several other security headers used by Audible today and encouraged the audience to research and use them.
Alex followed with a speech about a resource hint called Preconnect. The preconnect link relation type is used to indicate an origin that will be used to fetch required resources. Initiating an early connection, which includes the DNS lookup, TCP handshake, and optional TLS negotiation, allows the user agent to mask the high latency costs of establishing a connection. Alex provided examples of pages with and without preconnect and compared their loading time, demonstrating that usage of preconnect gives performance improvement, as well as giving a convincing argument for why every millisecond counts in the web world. She also demonstrated how preconnect is used in Audible.
The talks concluded with time for questions from the audience. After thanking everyone for a hugely successful round of Tech Talks, the tent once again turned into a mingling of inquisitive conference attendees, Audible employees, and the chilly morning air.