Today is the birthday of one of the creepiest prognosticators ever. Nostradamus was born in 1503 in France and became a physician and astrologer who dabbled in prophecy. He wrote vague and often cataclysmic predictions that brought him quite a bit of notoriety in his day, and he still spawns History Channel specials about how "amazing" he was. Sorry, I just think that he wrote some brilliant predictions that could apply to anything.

If you think that he successfully predicted the World Trade Center attack in September of 2001, then please get out of the load and performance testing industry. Do some research and you will find that many of the "predictions" attributed to Nostradamus were not even written by him at all.

Web performance was NOT predicted by Nostradomus, but here are some of my predictions about how web performance will affect the world as we know it:

• Load testing of web applications will become a mandatory practice by all developers.
• CEOs will have weekly reports delivered to their phone showing their site's average response time
• The performance of websites will become more valuable than graphic design and SEO.
• Stress testing metrics indicating the upper limit of a site will be known by 95% of marketing managers before a launch.
• Fortune 1000 companies will have an executive with the title of EVP of Web Performance.
• Advertising agencies will have a team of performance engineers.
• Microsoft's Internet Explorer 73 will be the fastest browser known to mankind. This browser will be the result of Microsoft's acquisition of Google in 2034.
• Bloody brawls will break out at New Zealand rugby matches over whose team has the fastest web site.
• Congress will pass a law requiring all web sites to have a sub-second response time on 80% of all pages. $2.2 trillion will be allocated from the general fund to load testing-ready sites. Federal government sites will be exempt, although they will receive double the funding to make improvements.
• GE will produce a jet-powered Internet appliance that will increase overall site performance by 2,400,000%.
• The beer brand "Performance Pale Ale" will surpass $10B Euros in sales by 2015.
• Mark Zuckerberg will be elected President of the United States on a campaign platform of "Free Internet for Everyone" and "Faster Web Applications are an Inalienable Right".
• Lady Gaga will put "web performance" into a new context and spawn several new Wikipedia entries that lead to confusion by load testing newbies.
• North Korea will claim that South Korea has been conducting web performance testing in order to provoke war.
• Millions of teenagers all around the world will organize virtual protests against the Twitter Fail Whale by playing video games for 24 straight hours.
• Web Performance Testing will replace Warp Core Engineering as the most sought after degree at Star Fleet Academy.

Now, let's see Nostradomus top that.