On the way home from JamstackConf 2022

My head is still reeling

Reeling, I say! - from two days of talks, discussions, and laughs while attending Netlify’s JamStackConf 2022. I got to meet and say hi to a bunch of brilliant people like Jo Franchetti, Alex Trost, Matt Biillman, Sara Viera, Ben Hong,  Brian Douglas, Chris Bach, Jem Young, and so, so many others! A few major themes could be seen across the whole of the conference:

Collaboration

So many new and neat tools are trying to solve creative problems not just for developers, but for the team members that work with developers. Content management tools that provide both strong DX and UX, visual design tools letting developers prototype logic where the layout design lives, database tools that let non-technical users manage stored procedures, and companies trying to use the Jamstack for the greater good.

Abstraction

Those aforementioned tools exhibited the power of low-code/no-code tooling in today’s ecosystem. In my discussions and in several talks and panels, speakers highlighted how using reliable services for concerns like authentication, payments, form submission, user registration, and more paid more dividends than just “building it ourselves.”

Access

As more and more users connect to the Internet, the advent of serverless technologies is allowing for more of the application stack these users see to not just exist on someone else’s metal, but closer to the user by putting it “on the edge.” Effectively this means hosting as many copies of an application as possible as close as possible to the user, leveraging distributed servers to make responses to their browser and app requests faster. We’ve successfully managed this with storage, as well as app logic by way of edge functions. The next step of this movement is now moving data to the edge, and finding ways to reliably provide accurate copies of databases and changes made to them to users around the globe as quickly as possible.

I plan on writing a blog post in the coming days to further discuss what all happened and some personal thoughts, but the future really is bright for the Jamstack. I’m here for it!