Transcript permalink

Bryan Robinson 0:00 permalink

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a very special year end episode of That's My JAMstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and Instead of our usual format of a q&a with just one JAMstacker, I've asked one question of many of our guests from the past year, that question very simply was, "What are you most looking forward to professionally and personally in the JAMstack in 2020?" Their answers were all amazing. So buckle up for a good ride.

Bryan Robinson 0:23 permalink

We'll be back next week with our usual format. So be sure to like, subscribe, review and all that. But without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into all those answers. First up, we have Andy Bell, a designer and developer who was as it turns out our very first guest on this podcast.

Andy Bell 0:43 permalink

The thing I'm looking forward to the most is totally a professional thing with the JAMstack. I'm working on some "STUFF" shall I say that hopefully will help people to make money on the web easier and the JAMstack plays a rather large part in that. But at the same time, the real interest is how a central system can play well with both the JAMstack or more traditional stacks, the focus being on making certain things as easy as possible for everyone.

Andy Bell 1:22 permalink

Now I'm being very vague about what I'm talking about, because the plans that I've got in place are still very vague. But the important thing is, is that the JAMstack has paved the way for this sort of thinking to happen in the first place. Because the JAMstack's a completely different way of thinking to what we've been used to thinking in the past where the power is being put back in the hands of front end developers. So exciting stuff and the JAMstack is only going to keep getting better in 2020.

Bryan Robinson 1:58 permalink

Next, we've got Laurie Barth. When we chatted with Laurie in Episode Three of the podcast. She was a software engineer at a company called 10 Miles Squared. Now she is an engineer at a little JAMstack company you may have heard of called Gatsby,

Laurie Barth 2:11 permalink

There's a couple of things that I think are really interesting. I think we're moving away from this kind of default assumption that JAMstack means static content, and kind of everything done at build time. And into more dynamic functionality, serverless functions and lambda functions and all of that, and allowing us to make full applications that are really the same as kind of RESTful applications. But with the benefit of performance.

Laurie Barth 2:43 permalink

Kind of on the flip side to that is we are making larger and larger sites with more and more static content where we can which is fabulous, but that's a lot of build time. And I love that we're starting to see people you know, I'm biased because Gatsby Cloud is doing this, but are starting to see people take a look at what that build time looks like and making that more efficient. And deciding and determining that being able to see real time preview and all of those things is still super important. But we still want to get our performance benefit of doing so much of this up front in the build versus the runtime step. So I'm excited to see both of those things kind of they've started but I think they're going to become a little more robust and talked about and common to the larger tech community. And I'm excited to see what people do with those possibilities. Yeah, so looking forward to 2020

Bryan Robinson 3:48 permalink

Next up from Episode Seven, we've got Gift Egwuenu. Gift is a software engineer and one of the Co-organizers for Concatanate Conf and JAMstack Lagos.

Gift Egwuenu 3:58 permalink

I am really excited to continue working with the JAMstack in 2020. And recently, I've seen a couple of services pop up in my reader that I'm excited to try out and also do a lot more with serverless architecture because I feel like I've only touched the hem of the field. I want to do a lot more.

Gift Egwuenu 4:23 permalink

And also there are other things I'm looking forward to try out as well. There is the Netlify Build plugins that just got to know about recently. I feel like the JAMstack is evolving over time. And 2020 is going to be the year of adoption because I feel like so many people right now adopting the JAMstack it makes me so happy. So yeah, I'm looking forward to these things in the next year and super happy to continue working with the JAMstack.

Bryan Robinson 4:53 permalink

And now from our eighth episode, we've got James Quick. James was a software engineer at FedEx when we last spoke, but now is a developer evangelist with Auth0.

James Quick 5:03 permalink

So what am I looking for most in the jam stack in 2020? Well, for me personally, you know, I've got two two projects that are on Gatsby static sites, using Netlify as a host using some lambda functions and Netlify to kind of support some of the backend stuff. Looking at really making improvements on those websites. So just kind of improving my brand, but also taking advantage of more of those features out there in the JAMstack.

James Quick 5:25 permalink

I'm really a big fan of the lambda functions in Netlify. I think I can kind of fill any gap for the most part that I need with some sort of back end functionality. They can fill it that way with functions and just kind of take care of it and not have to run my own server and I have to do all that stuff. Just basically to find that one function and have Netlify serve and host it for me.

James Quick 5:44 permalink

Really excited for just like company wise, I want to see what Netlify does this year. I want to see what Gatsby does. Those are the two two big technologies that I follow in the JAMstack. And I think they they both got funding this past year. They both have lots of things in their backlog. I don't know what those things are at all. I don't have any personal insight, but you can tell that they're really excited for the things that they're going to do going forward. And I'm just excited to see see what that turns out to be, you know

James Quick 6:08 permalink

And the Angular side, Angular just came out with a static site generator. So now you've got them across Angular, React and Vue, looking into going to probably spend some time looking into Vue this year. So I want to see what kind of the static site aspect of that is. I don't really have any insight into it at all at this point.

James Quick 6:24 permalink

But yeah, I think for me, just the community is going to keep growing, you see more and more conferences, you see more, more blog posts, more podcasts, more people are talking about it. And this really feels like, like people were talking about it last year, and maybe started really talking about it the year before last year kind of had that consistent growth, it really seems like it's almost at a peak point where you're going to see a lot of a lot of people converting over and really not just asking the question, what is JAMstack, we're really diving into leveraging it for their own systems. And I just I'm excited to see how that grows. All the tools that come out, get play with new stuff, and to get to add extra features to to my sites and other people's sites as well. So I think it'll be a big year for the JAMstack in 2020. And I can't wait to see what happens.

Bryan Robinson 7:08 permalink

Now we've got Brian Rinaldi, a developer advocate for Stackbit that I chatted with in our ninth episode.

Brian Rinaldi 7:14 permalink

What I'm looking forward to most for JAMstack in 2020 is moving from a curious niche in web development to becoming one of the primary ways developers architect websites. It felt as though 2019 was a turning point for JAMstack. Tools gained adoption, new companies developed in the ecosystem. And people started to really notice it. For example, I had a conversation with a well known company about a year ago that thought it was a fad unworthy of their attention. And that same very same company this year, told me they're ready to invest in it. So I think you know, if you think about the technology adoption curve 2020 will be the year we cross from the early adopters to an early majority and see that adoption increased dramatically.

Bryan Robinson 7:59 permalink

Our Next answer comes from our guest for Episode 10. Tamas Piros. Tamas is an educator at JAMstack.training and a Cloudinary developer evangelist.

Tamas Piros 8:10 permalink

I actually look forward to two things in 2020. One is related to static site generators. And the other one is related to API's and headless CMS.

Tamas Piros 8:22 permalink

Basically, I believe that today, one of the key issues of the JAMstack, and the static site generators that are out there today is the fact that they can't do differential builds. What I mean by that is, if you have a site and you make a very simple change somewhere in the site, or just update a single blog post, static site generators will then rerender the entire site, which means that it's going to be potentially time consuming and there's absolutely no need to do that. So I know that Gatsby's been working on a solution and I hope that Other tools that are out there will also come up with their own solutions to do some sort of incremental builds, based on changes or based on maybe a user configuration.

Tamas Piros 9:13 permalink

The other thing that I look forward to is, as I said, related to headless CMS and the media, I find that today, the web is really visual. And therefore every website that we use, and every website that is being developed has a lot of images and videos. And of course, when you think about a content management system, regardless whether that's headless or something like WordPress, or or some others, they also need to have a way to allow users to utilize images and videos. Now today, there are only a few headless CMS out there that actually allow you to manage images and videos and I hope that more of them will have integrations with tools like Cloudinary, for example, for allowing the users to embed images in blog posts or in product descriptions or any other place.

Bryan Robinson 10:12 permalink

And our final answer comes from the future. Believe it or not, in next week's episode, we'll be talking with Sam Julien from Auth0. He was kind enough to send me an answer to this question before he was officially on the show.

Sam Julien 10:25 permalink

What I'm looking forward to in the jam stack in 2020 are a couple of things. First, there's a really cool project in the Angular community called ScullyIO, which is sort of going to be an iteration or a version of Gatsby but but with Angular instead of React. It's not exactly the same as Gatsby. But it's a JAMstack or static site generator for Angular. So that's one thing.

Sam Julien 10:53 permalink

I'm also just generally excited for the direction that the JAMstack is going to go on the front end. I think people are finding there are a lot of benefits to Next. And there's a lot of benefits to Gatsby. And I think the community is going to continue to evolve and sort of merge together some of those feature sets as devs hammer out what works the best for doing static sites or server side rendering along with serverless functions for the front end. And yeah, I think it's going to be a great year.

Bryan Robinson 11:25 permalink

So that's it for our 2020 year in preview for the jam stack. Like I said at the end of this episode, we'll be back next week with our usual format. Until then we here at the That's My JAMstack podcast are wishing you and yours a happy, prosperous and educational New Year. We'll see you next week. And as always, thanks for listening and making this community amazing.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com