JAMstack_conf London 2019

I’ve been wanting to go to a JAMstack conf since the first one was scheduled for October 2018. This year when it was announced there would be one in London I was super excited to get the opportunity to go.

The conference was across two days with the first consisting of workshops, lightning talks and welcome drinks. The second was the keynote and conference talks either side of a lightning round with some exciting announcements.

Tuesday - 2019-07-09

First up was the workshop events where I was attending a workshop on schema stitching with GraphQL using GraphCMS and Moltin

Workshop

Jesse was a great at going through the basics of the headless CMS and why you should be using one. The workshop consisted of us defining our CMS content model with pen and paper before creating them in the GraphCMS UI for use with the Moltin eComerce API

Technical difficulties

There were issues on both the GraphCMS and the Moltin side, mainly around the UI for Moltin. We all managed to breeze through these keeping a good pace on the content.

GraphQL Schema Stitching

Once we all got through the initial setup on our projects it was quite satisfying to get to two schemas in one query. I still have a bit of work to do on my project as we all ran out of time towards the end. Jesse covered the main goal of the workshop which was to stitch the two schemas together. The additional UI work I can pick up at a later date.

Lightning Talks

After the workshops it was time for the lightening talks.

@jamiebradley234 did a talk on the booming tech scene in Middlesbrough.

@danfascia did a great talk on how healthcare tech is benefiting from JAMstack methodologies.

Wednesday - 2019-07-10

Talks

First up we had some apologies from Phill Hawksworth on behalf of Chris Coyer as Chris couldn’t make it. We sent him a get well soon message.

State of the JAMstack Nation - Sarah Drasner

Sarah gave a demo of how quickly you could set up a JAMstack site, using Vue and Nuxt

Netlify Analytics - Matt Biilmann

Massive announcement for Netlify analytics I signed up there and then for my blog. Obviously Netlify is used to build Netlify so Matt showed off the continuous deployment for Netlify whilst putting the feature live.

Transforming the Json - GROQ (& Sanity CMS) - Knut Melvær

Knut showing off the advantages of using GROQ for querying your data.

Also it’s now open source

Stackbit - Ben Edwards

Ben announcing that Stackbit was coming out of beta. Stackbit is a great all in one tool for making JAMstack sites with CMS integration.

Code Sandbox. - Ives van Horne

Ives (Flip) went into how he made codesandbox.io whils being a college student.

If you want something build cheaply, ask a student to build it for you was the take home here for me.

Why & How Smashing Magazine moved to JAMstack - Vitaly Friedman

Brilliant talks from Vitaly on the transition of Smashing Mag from monolith over to the JAMstack. Also great detail on the redesign.

WeWorkLabs moves to JAMstack - Ramin Bozorgzadeh

JAMstack helps me sleep at night!

CSS Houdini Today - Una Kravets

Una was super jazzed about Houdini, you could do some pretty neat css tricks with it.

https://extra-css.netlify.com/

Serverless functions - Simona Cotin

Simona detailed key usecases for serveless functions.

Performance optimizing and Webpack bashing - Jake Archibald and Surma

Surma and Jake went through how to optimise a modern day minesweeper game for mobile.

“Should I worry about performance?”

Answer: YES!

Hosted web fonts slow things down, because the browser has to load from multiple servers. Optimize further by only including the characters you need. Use css, assets, fonts directly in the HTML to eliminate needing additional requests.

Here’s the repo: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/proxx

Hot!

Being in the UK we had the British weather to content with and the venue although fitted with A/C units in the speaker hall the venue outside of that was hot and sweaty! I spent the majority of my time between talks situated directly in front of the A/C units.

That’s it folks!

This was a great event I met a lot of new people and several Twitter friends. I can’t wait until the next one.