August 2018 Summaries

The JAMstack has evolved into an entire ecosystem with a growing community, and to celebrate, Netlify is hosting its first conference, JAMstack_conf, on October 29th-30th 2018 in San Francisco. The event brings together a full day of presentations, workshops, and discussions centered around the JAMstack and creating performant, secure web projects without servers or DevOps. The speaker lineup includes innovators and educators such as Monica Dinculescu from Google Chrome & Polymer, Chris Coyier from CSSTricks, and Wes Bos from Syntax.fm. The event is designed to be intimate and interactive, with a capacity of 300 attendees, and will also feature a worldwide hackathon, an agency day focused on strategies for selling the JAMstack to clients, and plenty of opportunities for networking and conversation.

The latest version of React DevTools offers a powerful new tool, the Profiler tab, to detect and diagnose performance issues in React apps. The Profiler helps identify expensive renders and too many commits to the DOM, which can cause performance issues. In this case study, the author used the Profiler to quickly diagnose and fix a known issue with server logs on app.netlify.com, which were causing unresponsive UIs for users. By analyzing the Profiler data, the author was able to pinpoint the problematic component, `DeployLogContainer`, and implement a debounced state update function to reduce unnecessary commits to the DOM, resulting in improved performance and reduced render times.

The Static Site Generator (SSG) landscape has seen significant growth, with many projects gaining popularity and accelerating their rate of GitHub stars and Twitter followers. The top 10 SSGs are listed in descending order according to their GitHub stars, with Jekyll maintaining its lead, followed by Next, Hugo, Gatsby, Hexo, GitBook, Nuxt, VuePress, Docusaurus, and Pelican. Each SSG has its unique features, strengths, and weaknesses, catering to different developer preferences and project requirements. The choice of SSG can be overwhelming, but with active communities, resources, and a wide range of programming languages and templating support, developers can find the perfect tool for their needs. This year's rise in popularity of ready-made, opinionated tooling has highlighted the enthusiasm for tools like Gatsby, while Hugo provides rich templating and asset pipelines without bundling JavaScript features automatically.

The author of the text suggests that most open-source documentation is user-facing, but lacks documentation on how to contribute to projects. They highlight Sander Verweij's dependency-cruiser project, which visualizes and validates dependencies in a project, making it easier for contributors to navigate large codebases. The author provides examples of using dependency-cruiser with the reactive-react and preact projects, showcasing its ability to visualize top-level files, detect circular dependencies, and create a map-like visualization of a project's structure. They also discuss how this technology can be integrated into documentation systems like docusaurus to provide continuous updates and links to relevant code files. The author concludes that visual internal documentation is an important aspect of promoting better open-source projects and invites readers to explore its possibilities.

Netlify has been using Let’s Encrypt to provide free HTTPS for its customers since 2016, aiming to make the secure web more accessible. The company recently migrated from ACME v1 API endpoint to v2, introducing wildcard domain support, which was a long-requested feature by both Netlify and its customers. This migration allowed for the introduction of wildcard domain certificates, making it easier to manage multiple subdomains with a single certificate. Despite some challenges, such as hitting Let’s Encrypt's 300 new orders per account limit, Netlify successfully implemented this feature, reducing support cases related to SSL/TLS certificates by more than half. The company is now working towards its goal of providing HTTPS for all sites hosted on Netlify, thanks in part to the support of Let’s Encrypt and ACME v2.

cState is a free, open-source status page solution designed for small businesses, startups, and hobby projects. It aims to provide a user-friendly experience while being compatible with Netlify's infrastructure, leveraging Hugo as its static site generator. The project addresses the need for reliable uptime and robust infrastructure in status pages, which are essential tools for developers, companies, and customers. By utilizing Netlify, cState can take advantage of its CDN and CMS features, making it an attractive option for those looking for a simple yet effective status page solution.

The Concatenate Conference, a virtual event organized by Microsoft engineers in response to visa challenges faced by Nigerian developers, successfully brought together developers from around the world with attendees tuning in in-person from Lagos, Nigeria and speakers participating remotely via conference call. The event's blend of in-person and remote interactions proved to be incredibly successful, providing ample opportunities for networking and learning. Despite being an experiment with less than a month's notice, the event was an immense success, featuring talks by notable speakers such as Sarah Drasner, Jeremy Keith, and Mina Markham.

The new feature, Netlify Drop, is a simplified way for users to deploy websites on the web. Existing BitBalloon customers will continue to enjoy simple drag-and-drop website deployments but now have access to more powerful features and benefits of Netlify. The changes include a new site design, free custom domains without additional fees, free HTTPS to secure sites, and updated bills and contacts with the name changing from BitBalloon to Netlify. Existing accounts and account details will remain unchanged, but users may need to update their bookmarks to access the new deployment feature.

With the rise of frontend frameworks and serverless architectures, static sites have gained popularity over the last couple of years. Static sites are characterized as being lightweight and consist of a frontend view layer that serves content without the need for a backend database layer. Sites built in this manner enable developers to build quickly without the overhead of having to build and maintain databases and servers to manage their data. Static site generators have become increasingly popular, with many options available, each catering to specific use cases such as universal web apps, blogging, documentation, and more. Popular static site generators include Nuxt, Next, Gatsby, React Static, Jekyll, Hugo, VuePress, Docusaurus, and Jigsaw. Each generator has its unique features, advantages, and disadvantages, making it essential for developers to choose the right one based on their specific needs and use cases.

Serverless technologies offer several benefits, including auto-scaling, pay-per-execution pricing models, leveraging third-party services, focusing on business logic, and event-driven workflows. This abstraction layer shifts complexities away from developers, allowing them to focus on core business logic, UX, and other key aspects of their applications. Serverless functions are well-suited for a wide range of use cases, such as web and mobile backend APIs, form processing, image processing, and scheduled cron jobs. However, they may not be the best fit for ultra-low latency characteristics, like real-time gaming or applications using websockets, due to limitations in maximum timeout (currently 5 minutes) and potential performance issues.

Netlify aims to reduce deployment friction, allowing developers to focus on creative aspects of their projects. The company's deployment process integrates with standard Git actions, making deployments a natural extension of daily development activities. By using pre-rendered sites and intelligent CDNs, Netlify enables confident and automated approaches to deployments. This allows for the creation of simple yet effective solutions, such as the interactive clock example, which demonstrates the benefits of low-friction deployments. The example showcases how continuous deployment can be done with confidence every day, every hour, or even minute, highlighting the potential of Netlify's services to simplify and streamline development workflows.