February 2020 Summaries

Gatsby has introduced powerful open source features that allow massive build speed improvements for sites with lots of images. By using Google Cloud services such as Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Functions, users can set up parallel image processing to significantly reduce build times. The process involves enabling the required services on Google Cloud, deploying the necessary services, updating Netlify sites to use gatsby-parallel-runner, and triggering a new build to test the improved performance. This tutorial demonstrates how to implement gatsby-parallel-runner to make image-heavy Gatsby builds nearly 2× faster, with a notable 47% drop in build times on a demo site.

Here's a neutral, objective, and interesting summary of the text in one paragraph: The author reflects on Netlify's All Hands gathering, a remote-first company's week-long event where teams from across the globe come together to discuss work, share ideas, and align on goals. The event allows for connection and balance between the company's values of transparency, empowerment, and commitment, despite being distributed across different time zones. Team presentations, workshops, and goal-setting exercises took place during the gathering, which helped employees understand how their roles fit into the larger organization. Despite maintaining a global infrastructure to support customers, the team prioritized collaboration and shared knowledge during All Hands week, showcasing Netlify's core values of transparency, empowerment, and commitment in action.

The Hero Devs team has been actively updating and expanding on the Scully project, an Angular static site generator, since its alpha release a few months ago. Key updates include the addition of TransferStateService for transferring state between Angular applications and static sites, performance statistics to measure page generation time, customizable Scully configuration options, support for multiple folder structures with markdown files, and improvements to styling and command line options. Other notable additions include watch mode for server-side rendering, a new logo, Spanish documentation, and the ability to generate user-specific content. The team encourages users to explore the project's repository and contribute to its growth, enabling exciting possibilities in JAMstack + Angular ecosystems.

The starter plugin for deploying a JAMstack ecommerce storefront on Netlify, built using Gatsby, allows developers to easily get started with building an integration to the BigCommerce platform. It provides a combination of ecommerce functionality and performance through static sites distributed globally on the Netlify CDN. The plugin uses GraphQL APIs to pull data from the BigCommerce store, enabling merchants to create fast, personalized shopping experiences. With the starter plugin, developers can deploy a fully functional JAMstack ecommerce storefront in under 5 minutes. The tutorial demonstrates how to set up a BigCommerce store, API user, and install dependencies before deploying the storefront on Netlify. It also covers the process of creating product pages using Gatsby and GraphQL queries, as well as adding dynamic content such as an add-to-cart button and cart functionality. Additionally, the tutorial discusses extending the plugin for additional use cases such as multi-branding, internationalization, and embedded checkout.

The author of this text created a detector for Angular projects using the Netlify CLI's open-source nature and its ability to detect project types. The detector is a single JavaScript file that checks for required files, dependencies, and scripts to determine if it's an Angular project. It returns an object with information about the project, including its type, command, port, proxy port, environment variables, possible arguments, URL regular expression, and distribution folder. To contribute this detector to the Netlify CLI, one needs to fork the repository, create a branch, add the detector file, test it in a local project, commit and push the changes, and submit a pull request following the guidelines. The process involves a few steps, including installing dependencies, setting up a remote repository, creating a new branch, adding the detector file, testing it locally, committing and pushing the changes, and submitting a pull request.

Matter Supply, a Portland-based agency, was hired by Nike to build a secure, infinitely scalable website that would allow users to share their dreams as part of the company's Emmy-Award winning ad campaign. The project required delivering a site fit for 1 million users, 100,000 submissions, and hundreds of thousands of website hits per day within a short time frame. Matter Supply chose Netlify and JAMstack to empower their developers to focus on building the experiential aspects of the project, rather than managing databases or scaling servers. The solution enabled them to deliver the site ahead of schedule, supporting 200,000 daily visitors without additional server spin-ups, exceeding Nike's expectations in performance, scale, and speed.

The JAMstack is a security-focused approach to web development that simplifies the journey each request for assets makes, serving things statically directly from a CDN or a simplified file server. This reduces vulnerabilities and decreases the opportunities for attack. The JAMstack also enables faster page loads through caching, which is automatically populated and persisted with every new site build. Modern CDNs are gaining advanced capabilities, such as edge computing, which handle crucial business logic like redirects and authentication at the edge. The JAMstack does not mean an end to servers, but rather a decoupling of functionality from the frontend, allowing for custom logic and server-based specialist roles to be maintained. A rich content experience can be created on the JAMstack by decoupling code and content, enabling collaboration between developers and content creators.

The JAMstack, a web development ecosystem, has been the focus of `JAMuary`, a month-long series of updates and discussions on various topics related to it. During this period, Divya shared insights on how to optimize SEO in the JAMstack, create personalized experiences for content marketers, and use Git effectively without needing extensive knowledge of it. The discussion also touched upon the risks of relying on external APIs, the potential of using the JAMstack for public good initiatives, and clarified the meaning of the `M` in JAMstack. Additionally, it highlighted the importance of considering API usage and crafting custom solutions to avoid over-engineering. The series aimed to provide valuable information and insights for developers and content marketers looking to learn about the JAMstack ecosystem.