September 2021 Summaries

The Jammies Awards recognize individuals, companies, projects, and initiatives that are pushing forward the modern web and Jamstack ecosystem. This year's awards have six categories, including Social Impact, Ecosystem Innovation Award, Outstanding Community Meetup, Jamstack Project Of The Year, and Jamstack Agency Of The Year. Voting for the finalists is open until October 1, 2021, and winners will be announced at JamstackConf 2021. The finalists include notable projects such as a11y project, Guide dogs for the blind, Astro, CloudCannon, and Unilever, Planet & Society, among others.

This year's Jamstack Conf is a full-blown house party celebrating the growth of the Jamstack ecosystem and community, with a focus on how far it has come in the last 5+ years. The event features a variety of talks, including Learn With Jason sessions, product launches, and presentations of the 2021 Jammies Awards. Presenters will share their experiences with adopting the Jamstack, including Universal Standard's migration to Shopify with Nuxt.js, Twilio's large-scale migration to the new Twilio Console, and Optimizing Gatsby build performance with observability. Other talks cover topics such as speeding up Singapore's COVID-19 response with the Jamstack, WordPress at the edge with Next.js and the Jamstack, and the next generation of Jamstack performance being less JS. The event also features interactive demos, community talks, paid hands-on workshops, and surprise guests. Register for free to attend the conference on October 6 and 7.

Netlify has integrated its popular Deploy Previews feature with Jira, allowing teams to create and share feedback on website changes directly from the platform. With this integration, users can invite unlimited reviewers for free and automatically sync reviewer feedback between Netlify and Jira. The new integration enables teams to file issues directly from their Deploy Previews to Jira or other developer tools like GitHub and GitLab, making it easier to collaborate and deliver better web experiences.

Netlify is introducing new features and integrations aimed at accelerating app development across teams, including a new Enterprise Grid plan that simplifies team governance, a Jira integration with Deploy Previews for faster feedback gathering, and enhancements to collaborative tools. The company has also reached a milestone of serving 2 million developers worldwide, further solidifying its position in the Jamstack ecosystem.

Netlify is introducing a new Enterprise Grid plan that includes advanced organization management capabilities, designed to help enterprises with multiple web development teams manage their projects more effectively. The new plan provides team-level governance and controls, as well as automated billing with business unit-level invoicing, increasing transparency around individual team usage. A new Organization Overview page allows owners to oversee and manage all teams, web projects, and billing across the enterprise, with aggregated usage metrics for each team. This change is exclusive to Netlify's Enterprise Grid plan, which aims to support mature clients managing multiple development teams outside their agencies, across different business units.

The University of Wisconsin Health network transformed their legacy web architecture, written in Java and hosted on premises, into a modern Jamstack approach. They replaced their homegrown CMS with Contentful as their primary CMS and used Netlify as their frontend build and deployment platform. The new site consists of three deployments: 10,000 pages across 2 locales on the main UW Health site, 3,000 pages on the patient portal, and 17,000 pages on 2 external health libraries. By using a monorepo with a shared component library, they achieved a single, atomic commit for updates, enabling swift deployment with confidence. The Jamstack approach also enabled them to use serverless functions to enhance dynamic capabilities, treat content as data, and achieve better editorial workflows. With the new architecture in place, the team is empowered to work together more effectively and explore newer technologies within the Jamstack ecosystem.

Gatsby 4 introduces new render modes including Deferred Static Generation (DSG) and Server-Side Rendering (SSR), allowing users to balance fresh content with fast build and render times. Gatsby 4 breaks free from its static-site generator roots and embraces server-side rendering, enabling a more flexible approach to content delivery. The new render modes are designed to address common pain points such as building large numbers of infrequently visited pages and delivering custom content for rapidly-changing pages. With support on Netlify, users can now easily try out Gatsby 4 and take advantage of its improved features.

We're gearing up for Jamstack Conf 2021, a free event for developers to connect with the Jamstack community. Registration is free, and grants access to talks from speakers at Peloton, New Relic, Twilio, and more explaining how they're building Jamstack applications at massive scale. The event also features hands-on tutorials, including workshops on Data Visualization for Web Developers using Observable, Build an Online Store with Next.js, Snipcart, and Netlify, Practical Introduction to Relational Databases with PostgreSQL, Building Modern Websites with GatsbyJS, Node.js Beyond npm, Getting Started with Next.js and Contentful, Build with SvelteKit and GraphQL, and How to create editor experiences your team will love. The event is designed for developers who want to learn from the Jamstack community and connect with others in the field.

At the recent Nuxt Nation event, Nuxt 3's public beta was previewed with a release date of October 12th, 2021. The new version is designed to take advantage of Vue 3 optimizations and new functionality, aiming to improve developer experience and performance for end-users. Nuxt 3 will feature a smaller core, faster dev environment, native support for the Composition API, and built-in TypeScript support. Additionally, it's expected to offer SSR support for Netlify users "out of the box" powered by Nuxt Nitro and serverless functions.

The author built a headless Shopify e-commerce site with Next.js and shares their experience, including setting up a unified start to headless functionality. They used serverless functions to query the Shopify API and shared styles across projects for consistency. The author provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up Shopify and Next.js, including creating a development store, generating API credentials, and deploying the site. They also explain how to add serverless functions for the Shopify API, make pages for the site, and populate data using `getStaticProps` and `getStaticPaths`. The author concludes by encouraging readers to build their own headless Shopify stores with Next.js.

Emily, a Senior Software Engineer at Netlify, shares her journey into engineering, starting with learning HTML and CSS as a teenager. She recounts how she was drawn to Netlify's remote-first culture, citing the company's emphasis on communication skills, supportive environment, and "no stupid questions" policy. Emily begins by working on internal tooling, standardizing local developer environments across the organization, before transitioning to the Runtime team, where she works with a product pod focused on Rust development. She reflects on how her remote experience has been rewarding, requiring intentional effort to form connections with colleagues but offering flexibility and diverse perspectives. Emily advises potential Netlify joiners to apply, set work boundaries, and reach out to people for conversations. Outside of work, she enjoys reading, digital painting, and keeping fish.

Netlify is introducing Log Drains, a feature that allows users to centralize application management using existing log management solutions like Datadog. This integration enables analysis, alerting, and data persistence for Netlify traffic and serverless functions logs, providing advanced use cases such as custom monitoring dashboards, near-real-time notifications, and user agent analytics. With Log Drains, users can utilize their existing tools to monitor Netlify-based websites and applications, streamlining observability and application monitoring needs.

This August was significant for the Jamstack ecosystem, with new Netlify partner integrations, guides, and a special event on Architecting with Next.js. The upcoming Jamstack Conf is scheduled for October 6-7. Netlify has also shipped exciting product updates, including an auto-detecting Essential Gatsby plugin that simplifies running Gatsby projects on the platform. Other recent updates include improved functions logs, customizable serverless function imports, and a new comment box in collaborative Deploy Previews. Additionally, Netlify has released a new Focal build image for all new sites, and there are plans to introduce a simpler content management experience with its integration with Contentful. The company continues to enhance its features and tools for developers building Jamstack websites.

Netlify recently hosted the "Architecting with Next.js" event, a half-day conference that showcased business teams using Next.js in production. The event featured talks on best practices, challenges, and architecture deep dives for building with Next.js. A guide titled "Deploying Next.js on the Jamstack" was also released, while videos from the event are now available online. Netlify Senior Solutions Engineer Chris Hannaby discussed common architectural patterns with Next.js, including data-fetching methods like incremental static regeneration. Cassidy Williams and Salma Alam-Naylor of Netlify and Contentful shared insights on performance benefits and pitfalls of Next.js, as well as how to make the most of the framework. Additionally, Eric Chernuka from Symend presented a case for Server-Driven UI with Next.js, while Aleksandra Kacperczyk and Jakub Sikora of LiveChat discussed their journey from Gatsby to Next.js.