With engineers from Netlify, Microsoft, Google, Contentful, and more, the first annual JAMstack Conf featured talks and workshops on building real-world applications with the JAMstack. 

JAMstack Conf

What is the JAMstack?

Keynote

Building a modern web app is pretty complicated! You need to make pretty things! That are fast! But also useful! Ideally offline! And can accommodate many users!

Building a modern web app is pretty complicated! You need to make pretty things! That are fast! But also useful! Ideally offline! And can accommodate many users!

One way you can simplify this mountain of requirements is to think of your app as a static site, and build it like one. With things like Service Workers, serverless architectures and Firebase authentication, a lot of the features that used to need a server can live entirely on the client side, leaving you with one less thing you need to worry about. Let's do some myth busting and see that static sites can do more than you expect!

Bet You Didn't Think Your Browser Could do That

Every PWA built or started with preact-cli so far has been promised with a perfect 💯lighthouse score. This talk shows how the next version will improve performance even further.

This talk will be about Preact-cli’s third major release. Every PWA built or started with preact-cli so far has been promised with a perfect 💯lighthouse score. This talk will be about how the next version will improve the perf of the web apps even further.

In the next version, preact-cli will give you much more than perfect 💯 lighthouse score. It will do this by boosting all the existing high-scoring metrics like TTI, first paint time etc by adding a bunch of features.

In this talk Prateek will demo how does cli enables stuff like modern js delivery, better compression, asset inlings and bunch of more advanced web techniques with simple steps. Also how does it safeguard you from making most common mistakes in web dev.

This talk will also showcase how preact-cli is not only a bootstrap tool but prevents the dev from using any anti perf practices throughout the development.

Supercharged PWAs With Preact CLI

Development isn't just for professionals, it's for learners, tinkerers, and activists, too. Discover ways to lower the barrier to entry and overhead of maintenance on projects of all shapes and sizes. 

Development isn't just for professionals, it's for learners, tinkerers, and activists, too. Using tools that are more approachable not only empowers a broader group of people, it also improves the potential for working teams.

In this talk, we'll cover ways to lower the barrier to entry and overhead of maintenance on projects of all shapes and sizes. We'll talk tools, some of which you might take for granted—like spreadsheets, and ideas, sharing examples in action, that you can use in your projects at work and on weekends.

Everyone is a Developer

We can now do things on the front-end that used to require a back end. When we do need a back end, our front-end skills can be put to work, giving us some surprisingly powerful new abilities. 

The internet is, without metaphor, just a bunch of servers tied together with wires. Without servers, we'd have no way to share our creations with the world.

Yet, in a bit of a paradox, servers are less essential to our work than they've ever been. We can now do things on the front-end that used to require a back end. When we do need a back end, our front-end skills can be put to work, giving us some surprisingly powerful new abilities. 

Join Chris on a whirlwind tour of the tools, tech, and code that puts more power than ever into our front-end hands.

The All Powerful Front End Developer

One of the latest developments in the past couple of years has been the advent of Serverless + GraphQL which allows you to run applications in very cost effective ephemeral services.

Current trends in software and backend architecture have been evolving towards a more loosely coupled more granular design. I am sure most of you have heard of microservice based architectures.

The latest development on that front in the past couple of years has been the advent of serverless which allows you to run applications in very cost effective ephemeral services. This is why it is important to have a proper gateway for your API that is able to route all your requests to the designated endpoint. GraphQL stands out in that respect as being a mature open sourced standard started at Facebook.

Build Scalable APIs Using GraphQL and Serverless

freeCodeCamp.org started out as a traditional Node/Express web app. But as our nonprofit's community grew, speed and reliability became more important.

freeCodeCamp.org started out as a traditional Node/Express web app. But as our nonprofit's community grew, speed and reliability became more important.

This was especially important for learners in countries without reliable internet access. I'll show how we used tools like Gatsby.js to turn our interactive coding platform into a JAMstack web app. I'll also demo some of the optimizations that help make freeCodeCamp.org so fast.

How freeCodeCamp Serves Millions of Learners Using the JAMstack

Get Ready for a jam packed hour of tasty web development treats. Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski recorded a live version of their weekly podcast including audience participation, web development trivia, terrible jokes and prizes to be won.

Syntax FM Live!

How often have you stared at a sketch file and thought geez how the heck will my colleagues and I going to build this complicated thing?

How often have you stared at a sketch file and thought geez how the heck will my colleagues and I going to build this complicated thing? Where do we even begin and how should we split things up to work the most efficiently? And will we be back at square one if the design changes in the next iteration? 

I'll show you how we do it at Chroma using component driven development -- a process we refined whilst running an web app development studio for the last 5 years.

Turning Design into Code the Painless Way

By ditching proprietary “digital publishing” software in favor of the open-source tools of the JAM stack, we can best serve authors and readers, while still providing a dynamic and engaging reading experience for users right now.

Three decades ago, the Web was invented as a tool for academic publishing. But in spite of these origins, “digital publishing” has long struggled to catch up to the feature-set of the printed books and journals that came before — especially in the academic world, where long-term persistence and cite-ability are crucial. Scholarly research unfolds over years, sometimes decades — but the average website is lucky to last 5 years. How much of what we create on the web today will exist in any form 10, 20, or 50 years in the future? In a web full of clickbait, ad-tracking, and proprietary “solutions”, is it still possible to create works of lasting value?

In this talk, I'd like to share my experience of escaping this paradox with the technology of the “JAM stack”.

Between 2014 and 2018, I worked as a software developer at the J. Paul Getty Museum – a major art museum in Los Angeles. As part of the museum's digital publications team, one of our main projects was to develop a plan to publish the museum’s collection catalogues in a digital format. After a few bad experiences trying to shoe-horn academic publications into a traditional CMS, we decided to take a different approach: we would develop our digital books with static site generator technology, but provide compelling interactive features on the client-side using Javascript. By utilizing CSS3's paged-media module and print-on-demand technology, we were able to come full-circle by automatically generating printed books from the same markdown files which powered the website.

By ditching proprietary “digital publishing” software in favor of the open-source tools of the JAM stack, I believe we can best serve authors and readers (both today and in future generations), while still providing a dynamic and engaging reading experience for users right now.

Building Books From Static Sites

In 15 minutes, you will be witness to the raw awesomeness of having the flexibility of a dynamic website backed by a database with performance and scalability of a static website.

We will build and deploy a static site that is backed by content on Postgres. We will also setup serverless automation so that whenever content changes on Postgres, we will re-render the site and deploy again with a maximum of one deploy every 5mins.

In 15 minutes, you will be witness to the raw awesomeness of having the flexibility of a dynamic website backed by a database with performance and scalability of a static website.

How to Setup Production

With hundreds of choices, why is Hugo—built in Go—one of the most popular tools in the JAMstack ecosystem?

With hundreds of choices, why is Hugo—built in Go—one of the most popular tools in the JAMstack ecosystem? This talk will look at some of Hugo's super powers and less well known features to see how it can be used to great effect on any type of site, from the small to complex.

Go Go Hugo!

I make pointless stuff and I think you should too.

I make pointless stuff and I think you should too. It might seem like a waste of time but I want to convince you, with the aid of some examples, that pointless projects are the best projects. 

You learn more, you have fun and it’s easier than ever to share them with the world.

JAMstack Conf 2018 San Francisco

Nov 29 - Nov 30 | California, USA