We attended JAMstack Conf NYC last week and there is a lot we would need to share.
JAMstack Conf is an event focused on the design, development, and deployment of fast, modern web projects. Unlike most conferences about the web, it covers the entire stack from the browser to the backend. If you’re into JavaScript, APIs, serverless, or performance, you should check it out.
It started in San Francisco founded by Netlify. They are a company that offers hosting and serverless backends for static websites. The content and session topics at this event were a perfect fit for their customers and developers using this approach.
Simply put, it was a great time. It was comfortable, friendly, diverse, and energetic. There was a mix of knowledgeable engineers, front-end developers, and designers in attendance. It could have felt overwhelming but everyone we met was very approachable and had a lot to share.
We attended JAMstack Conf to speak with the Netlify team about Shifter’s new webhook features and our mission to bring JAMstack to the WordPress community. For us, WordPress has a place in the JAMstack community and that was one step toward making it easier to connect them both
Shifter Webhooks and Netlify
Introducing Shifter webhooks, a release that brings Netlify integrations back to Shifter in a whole new way.
During the development of Shifter’s Version 1 API, we had the opportunity to present an idea to Netlify co-founders Mathias Biilmann and Chris Bach. We said, let’s deploy static WordPress sites to Netlify, and we did exactly that!
We built an integration for Shifter users to create static sites and deploy them to Netlify. Then we rewrote our entire API and that super cool feature went away.
Now they are back and much improved. This feature allows users to create static WordPress sites and triggering actions outside of Shifter. Webhooks are based on lifecycle events such as when an artifact is complete. They are now more flexible too, so if you want to use it on a service other than Netlify you can do that.
We were super excited to attend JAMstack Conf and run these ideas past the engineers in person. We got a ton of great feedback and ideas to go work on we’re looking forward to the next release. There’s a ton of potential for static WordPress sites on Netlify. Thanks again to the entire team!
Sessions Recap
JAMstack Conf was a single track event with an amazing lineup of speakers. Here’s a recap and a few personal takeaways from each.
Keynote
Matt Biilmann · Netlify
Matt started by putting the state of the JAMstack ecosystem into content followed by a heavy mic-drop which we can now call Netlify Dev.
Netlify Dev brings edge logic and features for developing locally with teams for local teams all available through CLI. It’s probably the most significant release for any business or team using Netlify.
Action packed JAMstack
Brian Douglas · GitHub
You may remember Brian from an interview I did on JAMstack radio. He presented ideas on how to better leverage the rich API that GitHub whether to improve the quality and insight into your project or for fun because that’s one of the best ways to learn.
React Static and progressive static site generation
Tanner Linsley · Nozzle
There were a few moments during Tanner’s talk that really made us think. He talked about his experience developing React Static and best practices for optimizing site performance. He opened us up to the power of prefetch and we’ll be forever thankful.
Panel discussion on E-Commerce
Moderated by Phil Hawksworth
E-commerce for days! While e-commerce is an iffy topic for static WordPress sites this talk gave us a few ideas worth exploring. We’ve started testing a few of these concepts and hope we can bring some exciting news very soon.
Delivering more to customers with less overhead
Beth Pollock and Luis Ugarte · Citrix
The great part about this talk was transparency into the process. Citrix had a problem and not only did they solve it, but they also shared their story at JAMstack Conf.
What’s your JAM(stack)?
Amberley Romo · Gatsby
As a front-end dev, there’s a lot out there right now. Amberley presented ideas on how to cut through the noise and how to select what works for you and your team.
Get better at JavaScript with just JavaScript
Wes Bos · Syntax FM, Reactforbeginners.com
This was part variety show, part crash course. Wes delivered a talk that scrambled our brains in a very good way and we’ll never think about JavaScript the same again.