welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Performance Engineering in Practice. To get the most from this book, you should have shipped production code in at least one platform (web, backend, mobile, or desktop) and have experienced the frustration of performance issues surfacing only after your code reaches production. You do not need deep performance expertise, but you should be comfortable reading code and curious about making user-facing software fast without constant firefighting.
For 25 years, I watched the same pattern repeat across every company I worked at: performance problems surfaced only after users complained, teams would panic and drop planned work, someone would rush a fix, and a while later a different regression would appear. Nobody was intentionally building slow systems; the problems just accumulated because there was no systematic way to catch them early.
When I stepped into tech lead roles, I started experimenting. What if performance was not something we fixed reactively but built in from the start? What if the whole team shared responsibility, not just the one developer most interested in performance? Through trial and error across multiple teams and organizations, I developed what I now call Fast by Default: a framework for embedding performance into every stage of development so that speed becomes the natural outcome rather than something you chase after delivery.