August 2017 Summaries

In a conversation on JAMstack Radio, Richard Feldman and Brooke Angel from NoRedInk discuss their experience with Elm, a statically typed functional programming language, in building their internet-based curriculum. They leverage Elm for its safety features, which provide protection against common errors, making it an ideal choice for onboarding new developers. The conversation also highlights the team's use of Netlify, a platform that supports the JAMstack, to deploy and manage their applications.

In preparation for some very exciting new features that will be announced soon, we took some time to get our ducks in a row and redesign our Site pages. The new dashboard provides an overview of recent activity on your website, including recent deploys, split testing status, and recent form submissions. It will display more status cards as additional features are added. The updated settings page has been reorganized with a new sidebar, making it more convenient to navigate and use. The sidebar helps you quickly jump between settings pages and discover new settings as they are added, while also providing feedback channels for users.

Netlify CMS is a single-page app written in React, built on Git, and can be used with static site generators like Hugo or Middleman. It's designed to be minimal and easy to understand, allowing users to create, edit, and manage content without the complexity of traditional CMS applications. By setting up Netlify CMS locally, developers can experiment with its features and learn how it integrates with GitHub as a content database, enabling users to store and deploy their content efficiently. The CMS uses authentication services provided by Netlify for local development, allowing users to create, save, and edit posts while storing them in their remote Git repo on GitHub.

Service workers are a key feature in modern web development that enable websites to provide better user experiences, especially for international markets with unreliable internet. Pinterest is using service workers to cache JavaScript files and deliver notifications, showcasing their potential for improving performance. Additionally, the conversation highlights the value of service workers in serving offline experiences, allowing users to access content even without an active internet connection. The episode also reveals Pinterest's ambitious vision to leverage service workers to deliver a comprehensive offline experience, further solidifying their importance in web development.

Netlify has raised $12 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz and existing investors to bring a one-click setup for deploying and collaborating on modern frontend web projects, leveraging the JAMstack architecture, which aims to decouple the frontend and backend, enabling better performance, scalability, and security. With over 100,000 developers using its platform, Netlify has gained traction with popular open-source projects like Yarn, Lodash, and Kubernetes, and is poised to continue building out its collaboration tools and infrastructure to support large organizations adopting this new stack.

In a recent episode of JAMstack Radio, three experts - Rafael Conde, Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, and Craig Wattrus - share their insights on building design systems. They emphasize the need for companies to invest in design systems as they scale, highlighting the benefits such as improved designer onboarding and the avoidance of complacency. The conversation also touches on the pain points of scaling design principles and how design systems can mitigate these issues.