Tell me about a time you had to learn something entirely new to solve a problem.

Situation: Our team was tasked with reducing page load time by 40% for our e-commerce platform. The main bottleneck was identified as the image loading pipeline, but nobody on the team had experience with image optimization at scale or CDN configuration. Task: As the frontend lead, I owned the page performance initiative. I needed to learn CDN caching strategies, image format optimization (WebP/AVIF), and lazy loading patterns well enough to architect and implement a solution within a 4-week sprint. Action: I took a structured learning approach. Week 1: I studied the documentation for Cloudflare Images and AWS CloudFront, ran benchmarks with different image formats, and read three case studies from companies that had solved similar problems. Week 2: I built a proof of concept with automatic WebP conversion and progressive loading. I also found an open-source library that handled responsive image generation and adapted it to our needs. Weeks 3-4: I implemented the full solution with the team, including a build-time image pipeline and runtime lazy loading with blur-up placeholders. Result: Page load time dropped by 52%, exceeding our 40% target. Largest Contentful Paint improved from 3.8s to 1.6s. The approach became our standard for all new features. I documented the architecture and ran a knowledge-sharing session for the broader engineering team.