25 Jul Behind the Scenes of NitroPack: Insights from Dean & Simeon
Behind the Scenes of NitroPack: Insights from Dean & Simeon
25th July, 2022
As a proud media partner of WordCamp Europe 2022, we had the chance to sit down with Dean and Simeon for an insightful conversation about their journey in Nitropack, their ideas, and the future of WordPress. This episode captures the moments, thoughts, and stories that stood out. Here’s our full chat – enjoy reading!
All right, ladies and gentlemen, this is your host, Vineet Talwar, back again, live and exclusive from WordCamp Europe in Porto. We are almost at the end of the day, and now we have two guests from Nitropec, Dean. And Simeon. These are the co-founders of Nitro Pack. Let’s talk to them and get to know them. So, Dean and Simeon, we can go on and on and talk about you. We’d like you to introduce yourself to our listeners.
Awesome. Well, Venice, first of all, thank you for inviting us. Great to speak, especially after such a cool work camp. What a great experience. So, my name is Dean. I’m one of the co-founders of Nitro Pack, and I’m currently CEO of the company. We do performance optimization. And we do performance optimization in the cloud, which is a new way of doing that, very powerful and with great results. So this is our first work camp. We founded the company in around 2018, and it was a pandemic then, so we couldn’t really make it, but now we’re here, and we’re happy.
And what about you, Simeon?
First of all, thank you for having us today for this lovely interview. I am also a co-founder of Nitropack, and I apologize for my voice. So, I, Nitropack, actually have a long history, and I have been with the product since its very beginning. It was back in 2012. Back then we were a simple plug-in for OpenCart, which is an e-commerce platform, and gradually as the product grew so that we added new and new features, I have always loved the product, and it has always been really close to my heart. And in 2018 I was really fortunate to meet Dean. Actually, it sounds like I’ve met it myself, but actually there were two of us. My other colleague is Ivalo; shout out to him. He’s not here today at the World Camp, but he has also put his heart and soul into the product. And today we are a software as a service. I am a chief software engineer at the company. And I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved. We have achieved, and I really love the product and our team. I think we’re doing great, and it’s been a pleasure being here at this world camp. It’s actually my first, and, yeah, absolutely, but people are so nice. I feel like I’m at home.
All right. So, when was it that you guys entered the world of WordPress, and what motivated you?
So this was around 2019, I think. Yeah. Well, it all comes down to what we do as a company. This is speed optimization, but unlike traditional approaches where people would usually do that locally on the server and they’ll try to do optimization there, we actually wanted to try out doing this in the cloud because we said, “What? It kind of makes sense to pull the heavy lifting away from the origin server and do that.” In the cloud and free up resources or make it really lightweight for the server. And this is a new approach. So we said, What’s a very good testing ground for this to really validate that it works very well? Well, WordPress is great because you have all those different possibilities, all these different plugins, and different potential setups, and if you can get this SAS approach to work in WordPress, that’s going to be fantastic traction for that fantastic proof that it works. Yeah, and also from a technological standpoint, if we are able to make Nature Pack work for so many use cases and for so many different scenarios, then, first of all, by heart I’m a developer, and I find this is an amazing challenge. And second of all, I think that this is some great value that we can bring to the world. I think that it’s been a great learning experience working with WordPress.
All right. So our next question would be, what is your one day? At Nitropac’s office.
Well, this is the master of all questions, I think. I get to help as CEO right now, so I don’t have any two days that are the same. It’s super exciting because we have all sorts of problems to solve. I try to help with everything from making sure that we as an organization are focused on customer problems so that we are solving them really well and that we’re solving them in an efficient manner and that we as a product are growing, and so our teams are ever so growing. I mean, we recently hired quite a few folks, and we’re looking to expand even more. So from my point of view, it’s about, Hey, how do we bring more value to our customers? How do we make this an even more awesome place for our teams to work at and collaborate? So yeah, they’re not two days that are the same, but it’s super exciting.
All right. What about you, Simeon?
Yeah, I can confirm the same. Like, I’ve been with the product for so long; I would say that a lot of, a lot of things are in my head, so my day-to-day work revolves around giving out information to colleagues and also helping out with the engineering side of things. So I work closely, mostly with the developer team. But I also do my best to help out with any kind of product-related questions or engineering-related questions. So, for me as well, there are two days that are the same, but I find this exciting. This kind of unpredictability is something that drives me, and I really enjoy it.
All right. All right. So my next question is for you, Dean. So you guys decided to sponsor WordCamp Europe this year. How has that worked out for you so far?
With one word, amazing. We’ve been super happy. I mean, we were super excited to be able to meet everyone in person, especially with this being our first work camp since the pandemic, and we’re like, Hey, this is a no-brainer. We want to do OR or help with the support we can right now, and we think it has been one of the most interesting and also useful uses of our time recently. It was so great to meet all those people. We had so many amazing people at the booth. We had people with fantastic questions, people who are really curious to learn new things. We got some amazing feedback. So the exposure and just talking to the community was awesome. Yes. And how was the response of those people? I mean, did you get some new business and stuff like that? Yes. So there are more things that we’re going to be following up on when we get back home. We literally just spoke to customers 5 minutes ago, or prospective customers, but we think, I think we really learned a lot. We also have a few super exciting potential partnerships in the making with other plug-in developers and service developers in the community. So, yeah, I think it’s going to be pretty, pretty good. Anything new that you guys are planning at Nitro Pack? Basically, what are your future plans? Well. We are primarily looking at performance optimization, and also we see Nitro Pack as the place where you can get all the types of performance optimization you would need for your property and for your use case. So we started off as an all-in-one solution, and we think that’s very powerful, especially for non-tech because it’s very easy to use, but there are many amazing things that we’re excited to try out and many things that we are bringing to market right now. For example, we just recently launched 24/7 support for our customers, so not only do you get performance, but you also always get someone who can help if you need that. We’re launching new types of features, like super exciting optimization features that no one has ever done as far as we’re aware. So this means fantastic performance for your website, and very well measurably so. Also in terms of things like page speed insights and core web vitals, so real-world improvements that you can see very quickly.
One thing that I would like to understand, I mean, OK, you’re handling performance at the server level or at your local site. And you guys are handling it at your site, basically at the SAS level. How different is that? Do you see any lag in the performance optimization there? I don’t know; I’m just kind of trying to digest how it works, basically. Maybe you can tell us a bit about that?
Yeah, I’d love to. So what Nitro Pack does is it has, in the case of WordPress, a small plug-in that acts as a connector between the site. And our API. The idea here is we proactively take away the heavy lifting from the server. We do the optimization on our end, which is HTML, CSX, and JavaScript optimization. We work with images, we do DNS prefetching, and we have a built-in CDN, so really many, many, many things are happening in terms of different optimization techniques, and the end result is something that you can then serve easily from your origin server. This means that you have It’s very light on your server. It’s meant to be very lightweight, and we are able to do changes and updates to our server, so you don’t have to proactively do much about that. Dean, do you know what I’m up to if I’m missing something? Yeah, you can hear most of it, but on your question on how this is, isn’t it lagging behind? In effect, not really, although we do the optimization on our end. When the optimization is done, it usually finishes in about a few seconds. We then send the webhook back to the web server, notifying it that the optimization is ready, and then the web server just pulls the optimized content, and it’s ready to serve it for future clients. So, in reality, usually, and this is the case with every optimization plug-in, the first visit to the page will be unoptimized, then any future visits will be optimized, so we achieve the same effect. And actually we have this feature that even eliminates that. We call it cache warm-up. So we have this supportive subservice that, in a way, crawls your website pretending it’s a regular user. And then this causes the natural pack plugin to request optimizations for your public pages. So in effect, even your first clients will see optimized content, which is blank, which is a game changer in most cases.
So, but since you guys are doing the optimization, since you guys are doing optimization at the reward server, is it affecting, affected by GDPR somehow? I mean, does the customer’s gonna have GDPR problems?
I wouldn’t think so. well, by customers, if we mean our customers, like the store owners, they do have to be GDPR compliant in the sense that they need to inform their users that, for example, we have, that they use the Natural Pack CDN and these users need to be aware about this third party domain that to which they will be making a request. And but that’s generally that’s that’s on the information like the informative side of things. So informing the clients where this data is going, but on the CDN level we don’t collect the personal information, so we don’t store any end user IP addresses or anything that would be able to identify any person. And when it comes, for example, the any information stored on the website. we don’t cache, personal information that is protected in any way. But for example, if you have a page which on which you have stated your name and shown your photo, and this is a public page, I mean not password protected, then you are in a way giving, you’re giving this page to the public, so there should be no issues with that. In, in a nutshell, if, if you’re a customer of a website using Natural Pack, you are 100% protected. Your information doesn’t go to Natural Pack servers. We only store public, publicly available resources which don’t contain personal information.
All right. And would you like to add something to it, Dean?
He is a person in the company who is so elaborative. I don’t even know if that’s a word that I very rarely hear things to add, but yeah, long story short, there is nothing that is to our awareness that would be relevant to GDPR and problematic in any way.
All right, so let’s move on to our next segment of this episode, which is talking about the WordPress style. So, what is that one thing you love about WordPress? Let’s start with you, dean.
Yeah. I really like how much stuff you can do with WordPress because if, especially if you’re a beginner and you just want to quickly achieve something, I think it’s really awesome that you have so much functionality and so many things you can achieve really easily. so that’s something I really like. Also, I really love the energy. there aren’t many communities that I know of that have such a positive and constructive vibe. And if it comes at a work camp, we can really feel it. Absolutely. I mean, we saw the active participations of a lot of people. Specifically, a contributor today, approximately 800 people contributed to the future of the web.
So you would like to add anything to it, Sameon?
It will mostly, it would, it would, it would mostly be similar to what they said, but my take on it is that, I like that there are so many different plug-ins and so many different requirements, so many different challenges, and this by the community is what makes it so like in a way magical. So you can always have a productive discussion and try to find a solution to to any issue. Everyone is really helpful and it’s, it’s just an amazing place to be in terms of community.
Absolutely. And is there any message you would like to give to the people who are just starting? In the world of WordPress, let’s start with you, Simeon.
Be careful with regular expressions when you do caching. This comes from developer to developer. so I’ve seen this rookie mistake where you have like a caching plug-in that does regular expression replacements. We’ve been there. It hurts in the long run. Don’t do it. Or rather, if you do it, be careful.
All right, and would you like to add something to it?
How do I add after this? This was so fun. Well, I would say especially if you’re a beginner, make sure that two things. One, you have a safe environment to really play around with stuff, and second, play around with stuff. Try out things and see what really works because there’s so much you can achieve that there’s a lot of joy in playing around with different pieces and see the amazing results you can get out of them. OK. Makes sense. So, let’s move on to our last segment of this episode. I hope you guys have fun so far. Yeah, absolutely.
All right. So the last segment of the show is called Life Outside WordPress. So, what is it that you guys like to do things outside WordPress?
Wow, this is such a hard question. It is we co-founded the company and we’ve been working so much on Nitro Park. I, outside of WordPress spend a lot of time with a puppy we adopted with my fiance, so I really like spending time with our dog. It’s one of the best things. If you don’t have a dog, you should adopt one. It changes your life. Yes, it’s amazing. having a puppy in the home is a game changer. You get so much joy and so much, love from the dog. It’s, it’s amazing. Basically, it’s something to look forward to when you’re going to go home. Absolutely every day and it’s a great, it’s a member of the family, really gives you a lot of joy, but also there’s a lot of satisfaction you get from having such an amazing family member.
Alright, what about you, Simoen?
Well, I love exploring things and, up until the recent past I still am, but I used to be a big science nerd. now I still love science, but I have found some new hobbies. I especially love dancing. I go to Lindyhop dances and blues dances, it’s amazing. And I also started baking.
OK, baking, what do you bake, cakes. I’m really good. We have to try that.
I’m, I’m gonna make a special vanilla cake.
Awesome. I’m looking forward for it. Alright, and how do you guys de-stress yourselves, because I, I believe running a company can be stressful sometimes.
Oh, I pay quite a lot of attention to this. So first of all, it’s physical activity. I recently got a coach to make sure that I’m really working out the way I should be. I also meditate quite a lot, so mindfulness is super important, and what really helps me is having dedicated time for reflection is one of the things that really helped me the most to go through your day, see what went well, what didn’t go so well, and the biggest one of all is my family, my dog and my fiance, and it’s really great to spend time with them.
All right, nice, nice,
so, for me it’s all about stress management. by that I mean that, in 2019 and 2020 when Nat pack was really like early starting as a SARS, I didn’t, I didn’t spend any like, personal time outside of work, and I used to do so much overtime which really caused me to burn out. And and in in on my New Year’s resolution on during 2021, and I still keep it, is to work 8 hours a day and don’t do any overtime. And this actually helps me a lot because during these 8 hours I know I can focus. I know that the work will never end and work is never ending. There is no such thing as having your work done. And it’s just all about time management and stress management. So having this, knowing this, that I have 8 hours of work, then I have my free time, it’s, it helps me keep balance in my life and it helps me being productive in the long run, as Dian likes to say it, like we’re not running a sprint, we’re doing a marathon.
so, OK, we are almost at the end of the interview. So the last question of the interview, as we call it, is an Easter egg. So, and nobody would expect it. And let’s see, are you ready? Let’s do it. what is your favorite song, Dean?
Oh, favorite song. It’s actually tattooed on my arm. It’s Let Me Entertain You. Yeah, this is Let Me Entertain You by Robbie Williams, Williams, and this is a reference to back when I was younger, I used to do hotel entertainment. So we would do regularly shows each night. There would be like 1000 guests in the hotel and we would do like dance shows, comedy and whatnot, and this would be the song that I will start each of my shows with. So when you hear Let Me Entertain You by Bobby Williams, that the show is starting.
Alright, so we’re gonna put the link of this song in the description so you guys can listen to it. Nice. Alright, what about you simeon?
My favorite song. Well, it’s, it’s gonna change in 5 days from now because I really love music and I can’t say I have a favorite song, but recently I’ve been listening to the group called Metric, they’re recently one of my favorite bands, and my favorite song from them is Give Me Sympathy. but yeah, as I said, I’m gonna have a new favorite song in, in a few days from now, so that’s the cost of the changes.
Yeah and it happens with all of us. So we’re gonna put that link as well in the description, so people can listen to it. Alright guys, thank you for being part of the show. It was lovely hosting you. Thank you.
Thank you very much vineet.
Alright, until next time.
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Meet the Host
Vineet Talwar is the founder of Some Tech Work, a Germany-based digital consulting studio, and the creator of Jump.ac, an AI-powered EV fleet charging platform built through the Carbon13 accelerator. When he’s not building products or fixing websites at scale, he’s usually experimenting with new tech ideas or polishing his next WordPress talk.
Meet the Guest
Dean and Simeon are part of the team behind NitroPack, one of the most widely adopted performance optimization tools for WordPress and modern websites. With deep expertise in speed engineering, caching, and front-end performance, they focus on simplifying the complex world of optimization so site owners can achieve fast, reliable user experiences without technical headaches. Their work blends technical precision with a strong product mindset, helping millions improve Core Web Vitals and overall site performance. Passionate about accessible, high-impact performance solutions, Dean and Simeon continue to shape how the web gets faster — one site at a time.
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