Jamstack Conf 2021 Highlights
The conf took place on October 6-7, 2021. The theme of this year’s event is "Jamstack: How it started, how it’s going". The speakers explore how far the ecosystem and community have come in the last 5+ years, and why it’s such a fun time to be a frontend developer!
You’ll hear from community members who have built Jamstack apps at incredible scale and complexity, be the first to see new technology launches, and learn directly from the creators and makers in our community who are at the top of their game. You’ll also learn what’s next for the Jamstack ecosystem, including bleeding-edge frameworks and new tech at the data layer.
Here's our selection of the conference's highlights. Please enjoy!
Netlify's annual survey to understand the Jamstack community of developers
To get a better picture of the full developer landscape, Netlify surveyed people who build websites in general, regardless of whether they build Jamstack sites, though the analysis focuses on active Jamstack developers. They ran this year’s survey from June 23 to August 10 and received over 7,000 responses, more than twice as many as last year’s survey.
This year, the developers told Netlify that content management systems Sanity and Strapi are having a moment. They shared that security is a rising priority for all devs. Also, the community offered a lot of insight about new developers, from which specific devs have moved to remote work to the (obvious and less obvious) reasons why.
Presentation of Alex Riviere's of MURAL joke site: https://css-trickz.com
Bad idea, good implementation. Watch Alex Riviere, Software Engineer for the DX team at MURAL and an organizer for the Atlanta Vue.js Meetup, build a (really performant) joke site: https://css-trickz.com. This talk is about how that site went from being a static page with a jsonp callback to a serverless function, to a serverless function that gets cached with Netlify's On-Demand Builders. Also, lots of bad font choices, loud colors, lots of mayhem.
Gatsby 4: what's happened over the past year
Ward Peeters of Gatsby goes over all that's happened in Gatsby over the past year, from Gatsby Image to Gatsby Functions and more. Gatsby 4, now in Beta, combines the control and scalability of server-side rendering with the performance of static-site generation, creating a whole new web of possibilities.
Single-page apps have ruined the web. Can we rescue it without going backwards?
JavaScript failing is a fact of life. So what’s a developer to do? SPAs solve problems to the traditional approach, but are still problematic. Rich Harris presents a new framework for thinking about how we can get the best of both the MPA and SPA worlds: transitional apps.
Transitional apps samples elements from both traditional and modern architecture. The term is borrowed from interior design’s framing of “transitional design.” Transitional apps are, like multi-page apps, server-side rendered for fast initial loads, resilient since they work without JS by default, and provide a consistent experience with accessibility features built in. But like a single-page application, they also have a single codebase, fast navigation, persistent elements, and client-side state management.
Jamstack Project of the year: Twilio Console!
Twilio migrated their legacy Console in search of an improved developer experience utilizing Jamstack architecture for their frontend platform. The new Console follows the Jamstack architecture and pulls the UI into a frontend monolithic repo. The navigation components (sidebar and masthead) are loaded from static assets from the CDN and allow customers to navigate between products. Not only did the migration lead to faster page load times, but it also means the Twilio team can make more frequent updates since the new approach decreases development time and streamlines deployments for engineering teams.
Other category finalists:
- Unilever, Planet & Society
- Gemini, gemini.com
- KiwiSprout, Goulburn Physiotherapy Site
Modern frameworks: performance, how the next wave of approaches work, and what this all means for the future of Jamstack
Page load performance directly impacts the bottom line, and with Google's ranking algorithm rolling out Core Web Vitals in 2021, performance is now more critical than ever. However, the current generation of frameworks — including the most-used static site generators of today — have inherent limitations preventing optimal performance. There is now a resurgence of activity in new frameworks (and features for existing frameworks) focused on delivering maximum performance.
Presented at Jamstack Conf 2021 by Yang Zhang, co-founder of Plasmic.
Thanks for watching, and see you soon!