Steve Souders is Yahoo’s chief guru in the art and science of web performance and the author of the YSlow plugin for Firebug; he is the author of High Performance Web Sites, a forthcoming title from O’Reilly (bonus points if you can guess which animal O’Reilly’s editors chose for the cover of this one…). For the past three years, Steve has led a team investigating the root causes of poor page performance and applying the lessons learned to Yahoo!’s high-traffic, media-rich properties.