Me, Shobana and Baldeep had the opportunity to attend the JAMStack conference held in San Francisco on October 30th. I wanted to take this time to write up what my experience was attending this conference.
- I always had the idea that I had to attend lots of conferences, listen to all the talks, learn everything from the all the speakers and take notes all the time, in order to keep up as a competent Front-end developer. I think people call this FOMO (fear of missing out).
- Over the years, I learnt that this approach is not only a recipe for disaster, it just is completely un-necessary. I also looked back and found myself not having built anything (outside of my work projects).
- I have come to the conclusion that the best way to learn is by picking a particular area (library or framework), and building something using that.
- If you need to know details about stuff, there are lots of places online where you can get information that are better than conferences: Youtube, Wes Bos courses, Oracle-sponsored Lynda.com, Level-up tutorials, the list is endless.
- I also learnt that JOMO (Joy of missing out) is a thing.
- With these thoughts in mind, I went to this conference to get a feel for what people are thinking in the front-end world and to just enjoy myself.
- And I am so glad I did. Because, JAMstack was a single day of just the right amount of fun.
- It was a single track conference, meaning the schedule was fixed. I had no choice over the speakers or the sessions which is a wonderful thing, especially if you have FOMO.
- The speaker line-up was a good mix of men and women, who are well known in the industry. I didn’t get to hear them speak before, but many of them were super engaging in their content and delivery.
- It was local and only an hour’s train ride away. It would have been a shame to miss out on small conferences like this.
Glad you asked. It stands for JavaScript, APIs and Markup. This abbreviation is totally made up by the founder of Netlify. It provides an answer to a real and legitimate problem: how do we make really fast websites?
They were the sponsors of this conference (along with GitHub, Contentful and GatsbyJS). Netlify is a platform for managing modern Front-end projects. To call them a glorified CDN (Content Delivery Network) would be a very crude analogy. They do that as well as many things on top of it. Check them out at netlify.com.
The following is the list of talks and my thoughts on them.
The conference was kicked off by the CEO of Netlify, Matt Biilmann. It was interesting to hear his experience of how he started Netlify and how the term JAMStack was even coined. I really liked his vision of enabling developers to make Web applications that loaded and worked really fast.
If I had to pick just one talk in the entire conference that I enjoyed the most, it would be this one. Monica made the case that why you think you need a server to run your website, but you actually do not. She was funny, her content was really useful and she delivered it in such an engaging way. I thoroughly enjoyed her talk.
Here are some of the funny but informative pieces from her talk.
Find more about Monica here
This was an interesting talk about how a team in Google is making a CLI tool that helps developers to analyze and the performance of their web applications. Prateek went into the details of what makes Preact-CLI so special. 100% lighthouse score for all 4 pillars - out of the box and ‘Terser’ an alternative for uglify-es were interesting to know.
Find more about Prateek here
Jessica made the case that our front-end ecosystem has matured and grown to be accommodating everyone. UI development need not be limited only to Computer Science graduates, but to anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort to learn. It was awesome to learn that it was she that was responsible for the creation of the ElectronJS project inside GitHub. She also made the case for spreadsheets as a way of storing data in web applications and using Sheetsee.js for connecting Google spreadsheets to websites and visualize them.
Find more about Jessica here
If you have done anything in CSS, it is almost a guarantee that you have visited css-tricks.com. And surely you have seen a Codepen or two, right? He made that thing.
Chris was also an energetic and wonderful speaker making the case for how front-end developers are so empowered today with awesome tools to do pretty much anything in the browser. His enthusiasm for building stuff was contagious as he continued to make the case for the server less architecture.
Some interesting links from his talk:
Find more about Chris here
Simona followed Chris and continued to explain about the Serverless shift. She also provided an introduction to GraphQL as an alternative to REST-API based web applications. It remains to be seen how this will take off.
Find more about Simona here
Quincy Larson explained how FreeCodeCamp was a website made by volunteers (much like Wikipedia) and how it continues to help people learn to code. It was inspiring to see not just how much they get done by people who volunteer, but also to know that they also made software-architecture mistakes along the way.
Find more about Quincy here
Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski are awesome Web developers who make a living by teaching developers about Web concepts. They run a podcast called https://syntax.fm which you should totally subscribe to using Overcast (it is free)
For the conference, instead of a talk, they conducted a live episode of their podcast in front of the conference audience. And it was a ton of fun. The best parts were ‘This, that or both’ where they put up random gibberish on the screen and asked the audience if it was
- A web-development related library
- A pop culture reference from 1960s
- Both
The audience got to vote using their phones and it was hilarious.
You can listen to the audio recording of the talk here.
Be sure to follow them on Twitter at Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski
The slides and videos from the talk will soon be available on @jamstackconf