My Trip to JAMstack_conf _sf
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of travel, meeting new people, and great conversations with partners and others in the ecommerce industry as a result of attending various conferences. For me, it all started with JAMstack Conf 2019 in San Francisco.
In case you just want the highlights, the TLDR is that it was an amazing conference and experience; not only as a result of the unique topics and exciting conversations with partners, agencies, and developers, but also because of the enthusiasm and community that seemed to exist among all the attendees.
However, in my completely unbiased opinion, you should take a deeper dive and read on to learn more about the JAMstack and what happened this year at JAMstack Conf 2019, as this technology stack is opening up a ton of cool new opportunities for developers (beyond just ecommerce) and businesses.
What is JAMstack?
While the conference itself and the outputs from it were phenomenal, my start to the conference wasn’t quite as auspicious. Every Friday at the downtown Austin BigCommerce office, we do the Downtown Throwdown. It’s an opportunity for teams to share updates on what is going on in their domain, upcoming events, and exciting news, and give shoutouts. The Friday before the conference, a very kind engineer gave me a shoutout for being a speaker at the event. However, this engineer also bravely admitted to not knowing what JAMstack really is.
Rewind 1 year and I would be in the same boat as them.
So — what is JAMstack and why did I go to a conference about it??
Let’s start with me. I’m a Product Manager at BigCommerce, focusing on the 3rd Party Storefronts (3PS), Channels, and Webhooks domains. 3PS focuses on all the APIs and features necessary to enable merchants to sell on external storefronts, or those powered by presentation tools and frameworks beyond the BigCommerce Stencil storefront. It falls under BigCommerce’s headless initiative, which began in 2018 with the launch of the BigCommerce for Wordpress plugin. We have since expanded our headless offerings substantially through additional CMS / DXP platform connectors, headless guides, and progressive web app (PWA) starters.
And that brings us to the JAMstack. High level, it stands for Javascript, APIs, and Markup. In more detail, the jamstack.org site puts it much more eloquently than I ever could: “It’s a new way of building websites and apps that delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience.”
The term was coined in 2017 by Matt Biilman (who I got to meet!), CEO of Netlify, so it’s still relatively new. But my, oh my, has it gained popularity, adoption, and grown substantially since then. This year at JAMstack Conf, the focus was on scaling with the JAMstack, a topic that really drives home how this methodology of development and tech stack is changing the developer ecosystem and impacting industries around the world.
Recap
I love developer conferences. Always have, probably always will. (This makes sense; I was a software engineer for many years prior to moving into product). They’re a chance to really nerd out, in the best way possible. You usually get to learn about new technologies, ways in which others are applying these technologies, and more, not to mention talk in-depth with other conference attendees and speakers about topics you are passionate about!
And, let me tell you, JAMstack Conf did not disappoint in this area. There were so many dynamic and really intriguing talks, my favorites of which I’ll recap in just a bit. First, however, let’s dive into the presentation I did!
My Presentation
Before I get started, I must give a huge shoutout to my coworkers, Juned Kazi and Nabil Cheikh, for attending JAMstack and being ultra-supportive, as I was pretty nervous for my presentation, which was one of the main reasons I went to JAMstack. It was a first in many ways for me: first major conference talk, first talk in front of 400+ people, and first time to do a live demo in front of that many people. (In case you couldn’t tell, I’m the kind of person who jumps into the deep end of the pool, rather than wading in).
The presentation focused on how to build ecommerce storefronts on the JAMstack with BigCommerce. I started with a live demo of using the BigCommerce Gatsby + Netlify starter app, which was built with the help of Third and Grove, to get an ecommerce storefront up and running. You can check out the code here. This was my favorite part because you can spin up a functional storefront, complete with product detail pages, cart, and checkout functionality, in about 5 minutes!
For the rest of the presentation, I did a broader dive into what BigCommerce has to offer for merchants and developers, with the various out of the box headless connectors and apps that BigCommerce offers for CMS / DXP platforms and PWAs, and our API first strategy. As a former engineer and a technical PM, this approach, which applies to not only our headless initiative but also our entire platform, is what gets me excited about work every day, as it offers the flexibility our users need to create the robust, custom solutions they and their customers need.
Conference Highlights
While there were so many amazing talks and presentations, some that really resonated with me and the work I do on a day to day basis were:
What Got Us Here, Won’t Get Us There. Scaling Development at Canada’s Largest Retailer
This talk from Justin Watts was pretty inspiring, as he covered how his company was able to use the JAMstack to scale their delivery of digital experiences for users. Their primary goal was to find a way to build 150 experiences in 2 years, knowing that with the current tech stack and processes they had built 9 in 7 years. The results he shared from migrating 1 DXP to the JAMstack were outstanding.
Stackbit Lightning Launch
Ohad Eder-Pressman gave an amazing and just really cool lightning launch demo of Stackbit and the new capabilities that they are launching with Stackbit Live. With this tool, you can do super easy, 1 minute self-serve CMS build and deploy for a site. As an admin, you have access to a widget on the site that allows you to do live editing for a WYSIWYG experience. My coworkers and I were immediately brainstorming ways we can partner with Stackbit and make our own users’ experiences better.
Um, it’s about your JavaScript…
Tammy Everts from SpeedCurve gave an eye-opening presentation on performance and how, most likely, your Javascript is slowing down your users’ experience more than you’d like to think it is. Though I tend to focus on APIs and more backend products, I found this talk incredibly enlightening. Tammy covered performance budgets, what metrics to use, how to measure them appropriately, and some ways to improve the metrics you are seeing. I definitely recommend watching her presentation if you work on the frontend in any capacity!
Insights and Tips
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert conference presenter or master at getting the most ROI from conferences; however, I spent quite a bit of time in the past month evaluating my various experiences and have a few insights and tips that — hopefully — will be helpful to those who are new to presenting and/or looking to get more out of attending conferences.
For Attendees
Don’t Forget Your Business Cards
This probably sounds like really basic advice, and that’s because it is. Even if you think that no one will ask for your card, bring them. Because most likely someone will ask for one. And let’s be honest, which of the following “worst case” scenarios would you rather be faced with: carrying your cards in your wallet / purse the whole conference without giving 1 out or not having them, being asked for one, and scrambling to find something (anything!) to write with and on so you can share your contact info.
Pro tip: set a reminder to pack your business cards before you leave on your trip.
Be Present
This is my nicer way of saying don’t multitask. You — or your company — paid for you to be at the conference. You have an opportunity to learn things and talk with people that you might not otherwise have. That lightning talk on a new technology or presentation on how to build a faster dev ops flow isn’t going to spark your creativity or get you thinking on how you can apply that in your day to day if you’re on your phone scrolling through slack or reviewing a PR on your laptop.
Everyone is guilty of it, so the key is to be mindful of when and where you are engaging in other activities that aren’t related to the conference. Believe me, as a product manager, I know how stressful it is to play catch up because work doesn’t stop even while you’re at a conference. But think of how many opportunities for innovation and improvement you may miss out on if you aren’t fully present.
Take Notes
Write down quick notes on the talks you saw, the people you met, the conversations you had. Daily, at breaks, whenever it works for you! Just make sure to do it, because even if you think you’re going to remember everything, you’re not. That really engaging conversation that you had with a potential partner for 30 minutes is going to get muddled with the 10 presentations you saw that day, the conversations you had at lunch, the demos you saw at booths.
Trust me, you’ll be glad when you finally get back to the office and are doing all the follow up work post-conference.
For Presenters
Build Your Own Presentation
This may seem like common sense, but the reality is that we’re all busy and often slide decks get put together by others or with the help of others. Building your own deck and presentation will not only help you feel more confident in yourself, which will calm nerves somewhat, but it will also help you recover better in case something goes wrong, you stumble, etc.
If you have to use a deck built by someone else, l recommend going through it with whoever built it, deeply understanding the talk track, and then reworking the slides to use language and images that are more natural for you.
Use De-stressing Techniques
If you get nervous before your presentation, there are a number of mental and physical things that you can do to help reduce your anxiety. Two of my favorites are box breathing and applying pressure to the hand valley point.
Box breathing is simply inhaling for 5 seconds, holding it for another 5, and exhaling for 5 seconds. It helps to stop you from focusing on the things that are causing your anxiety and calms your nervous system.
The hand valley point is a pressure point between your index finger and thumb that has been shown to reduce stress and tension. You typically want to firmly pinch the area for about 5 seconds or more. You can learn more about pressure points here.
So, What’s Next?
Coming off of a conference, especially several conferences, there’s a lot to get done. As a product manager, I’m taking the inputs from developers and partners that I got from the conference and incorporating them into planning and ideation for my roadmap. We’re also continuing conversations with potential partners to discover how we might be able to work together to deliver better or new experiences to our shared users.
Did you attend JAMstack Conf 2019? What’d you think of it? @bigcommercedevs would love to hear your thoughts and input on JAMstack, getting the most out of conferences, and more!
