Shawn Wang – A Skeptic’s Intro to the JAMStack (Intermediate)
The JAMStack stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup, and at first glance it seems a truism – of course everyone uses that, right? What kind of stack is that? At its core, however, it describes a new architecture for web apps and sites that is at the confluence of multiple trends in serverless, JavaScript frameworks, static site generators, and Git-centric workflows.
Over the past 20 years, the stack of web apps has slowly shifted from fully server-side driven (LAMP) to a “full stack” straddling front-end and back-end (MEAN). Thanks to furious innovation in JavaScript and serverless technologies in the last 5 years, the stack has shifted even further forward to empower front-end developers to be responsible for fully dynamic web app experiences on par with mobile apps. JavaScript frameworks like React have arisen to make writing compenentized web apps much easier. Their ability to statically render and rehydrate have allowed a new generation of static site generators like Gatsby and Vuepress to offer dynamic and fast experiences previously not possible for static sites. On the backend, the proliferation of the third party API economy and the launch of AWS Lambdas and other serverless functionality make it ever easier to build without a monolithic server. This allows a clear decoupling between front-end and back-end, and a fundamental re-examining of the application delivery architectures as a direct result. By leaning on serverless functions and static-building, we can use a Git-centric workflow to eliminate a lot of the complexity inherent in today’s architectures, with direct implications for reliability, security, performance, and simplified caching. Finally, we can unlock new possibilities with the new JAMstack architecture, like deploy previews and atomic deploys.
Indira Pranabudi – Perceived Performance, and Why it Matters (Introductory)
In our quest to improve user experience, we often end up bloating websites with too much content, leading to performance issues. Slow websites are a pain, and studies have shown that up to 40% of users abandon pages that take three or more seconds to load. In this session I’ll talk about how we can improve performance as well as what *perceived* performance is and how we can leverage it.