Brian Rinaldi2019 definitely seemed to be a pivotal year for the JAMstack. New companies cropped up (yep, us included), JAMstack_conf_sf was the biggest event yet and lots of new tools seemed to gain momentum daily. In this series of posts, we're asking some well-known members of the JAMstack community what they thought about this past year and what they think you can expect for the year to come. This edition features Tara Manicsic of Netlify.
Check out the other interviews in this series:
Tell us about yourself and what you do? Does JAMstack play a role in your day-to-day work?
Hi, I’m Tara Z, Manicsic and I work on Angular developer experience at Netlify. Our company basically boils down to a bunch of people that are super excited about what the JAMstack brings to web performance, user experience, and developer experience (to be clear, that’s not our official creed 😋). In other words, JAMstack is my day-to-day. We all try to build tools and resources to help developers create, maintain, and deliver applications.
What is your current JAMstack stack? What tool(s) have you most excited?
As an Angular developer, there hasn’t been too much tooling round the ecosystem. This seems to be changing as more developers are seeing the advantages of the JAMstack. For instance, the team at HeroDevs is releasing the first Angular Static Site Generator, Scully. I’m super stoked for it. With their schematics you don’t have to learn any new language or syntax, it’s just Angular. Plus, it works on Angular.js and Angular projects massively shrinking their package size.
My JAMstack stack has always included Netlify (even before they were paying me 😉) because I loved their dev experience. This year David Wells announced Build Plugins which will allow even more customization to your build process. With Build Plugins you can hook into different parts of the build lifecycle to add functionality. There are so many possibilities that all of us in the community can build, I’m so excited to see everything that's created.
What changes did you see, for better or worse, in 2019 related to the JAMstack ecosystem?
I’ve spent some time introducing more Angular developers to the JAMstack this year and am excited to introduce even more in 2020 (#2020Vision ™️ Hawk Philsworth). This has proven to me that the JAMstack ecosystem is going to keep growing as more stacks see how they can improve performance and experience using JAMstack best practices. Plus, there are more examples of enterprise applications creating more reliable user experiences, faster response times, and cutting their costs.
What changes in 2020 do you see forthcoming that will have an impact on adoption of or day-to-day development using the JAMstack?
I was attracted to the JAMstack because the developer experience seemed ideal to me, especially the git workflow. Working with the Netlify CMS showed me how it worked to have a UI for people who weren’t used to git along with the git interface for those who preferred. Plus, version control for all! What a dream 😍. I’m seeing more and more ease in developer experience with Scully’s easy set up (thanks to their devs' smart brains & Angular schematics), Netlify’s Build Plugins and Netlify Dev previews for customization and local testing, and more APIs being created with actual documentation so devs can use them. All to say, the more we make the developer experience better, the more we happily use it in our day-to-day development.
