Thoughts on Jamstack Conf and the future of the Jamstack

On Tuesday, October 6th, Netlify hosted the second virtual Jamstack Conf. The TakeShape team was in attendance and we had a great experience listening to the presentations and networking one-on-one with attendees. In case you missed it, here’s our highlights and takeaways from another great Jamstack Conf.

It’s clear that the Jamstack is growing up and being used in a wider set of applications beyond blogs and static content. While this message came through at the last Jamstack conference, it was even more pronounced this time around.

Kicking off the conference, Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann announced Edge Handlers, a new feature for layering more dynamic functionality between a client and a globally-distributed static site. This enables advanced functionality like personalization, redirection, and A/B testing while maintaining the Jamstack’s benefits of speed, security, and affordability. And since you can deploy TakeShape projects directly to Netlify, we're excited for TakeShape users to get access to these new features, too!

Zach Hawtof, a senior product manager at Salesforce, also made the case  that the Jamstack is ready for even bigger challenges. Big companies like Salesforce are starting to deploy Jamstack applications for their speed, security, and great user experience. The Jamstack isn’t just for independent developers and small teams anymore, it’s become a much more general-purpose solution.

All of this keeps building the argument for migrating web development away from the dominant solution, Wordpress, and onto the Jamstack. The headline event of this conference was a fireside chat between the CEOs of Netlify and Wordpress. The two Matts, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress and Matt Biilmann of Netlify, debated back and forth about the relative advantages of their respective platform.

The discussion was at its best when it kept the big picture in focus. It revealed a fundamental difference of opinion between where web development has been for over a decade and where it might go next. With Wordpress, development has been constrained to monolithic architectures and bundled solutions of platforms, plugins, and providers. With the Jamstack, we’re seeing the rise of an unbundled approach to web development, with more flexible architectures that take advantage of a variety of single-purpose services to offer just the functionality they need.

Both have their trade offs, but it’s exciting to see the entire Jamstack ecosystem (of which TakeShape is a member!) growing to the point where it can give Wordpress some serious competition. No matter what happens in this contest, web development is going to keep getter better because of it.

Bonus round

There were a couple of other things we learned that caught our attention, too!

• We were surprised by the lightning launch of toast.dev, a new take on bundling and compilation of code and assets for the web. It stands apart from other popular bundlers by being written in Rust, with a high-level JavaScript API. This means it compiles fast, even for static sites with thousands of pages.

• External services are becoming increasingly important in enabling dynamic applications built on the Jamstack, but managing and connecting them together is still an unsolved problem. This is a problem we’re focused on at TakeShape and we’ll have some exciting new features to share soon—sign up for a free account to learn when they go live and get beta access.