Guillermo Rauch — The Movement is Real

Hello and thanks for joining me today on the first edition of Backend Less Conf. This conference is about, obviously as the name says, doing a lot less. We're going to talk about the broad trends of software engineering that are behind this movement of just broadly speaking, you were doing a lot of stuff in the past and now you can do a lot less stuff. In particular, the idea is that you can focus a lot more on building great products and great experiences. And as a frontend developer, it's really the most important job that you— we have, and you're uniquely positioned to to really take advantage of this transition that we're seeing. We're really altogether seeing a movement. It kind of started for us with the move away from servers. So when you deploy your application or website to the ZeitNow platform, you focus just on deploying your code. You just focus on building your app. And what we took care of basically is we managed all that hard infrastructure. We took all the engineering that goes into servers and clusters and provisioning and exposed it to you with a great developer experience. So the first part of this movement was moving away from servers to serverless. But it's not just a buzzword. So how does that work specifically? Well, we moved away from the single data center. We moved away from putting all your code and your apps in one place to putting it at the edge. So this idea of putting all your sites, your static websites, your functions at the edge is really, really important because again, it's focusing on building great products. When you deploy, put your content at the edge, then your visitors, your customers, your users will get it as soon as possible and you'll always be online. So it's really, really sweet. And so this move from data center to edge is enabled by what we're gonna talk about today, this idea of Jamstack. So you write JavaScript, you query some API, a lot of those APIs you're gonna learn about today because they're gonna be these great backends that already exist that you can use. And you ship some markup from the edge to the client. So in some ways the edge is also becoming the device and the computer that executes that JavaScript, that J in Jamstack. It's really, really exciting. If you're coming to this conference from a design background or you're more interested in design, you've probably also seen the movement away from templates that were— or template systems that were very common in full-stack development frameworks to component systems. So if you're working with React, Vue, Svelte, You're probably thinking of using a component system, a design system, style guideline, and that's really, really exciting because we're moving away from something that is really fixated, something that is not as easily executed on the client, to something that's basically universal, reusable. And that leads me to the most exciting part of, of this movement as well to me, that is, we're moving away from writing lots and lots of code to writing low code. And again, that sounds a little bit like a buzzword, but the idea, for example, of using a component system is that you write once and then you reuse. And the idea of, like we're going to discuss today, using a backend that already exists and using serverless services where you don't manage lots and lots of infrastructure really will see us writing a lot less code or even writing a lot less config. So this movement is really just all about productivity and just making you focus on the things that matter. Roughly again, we're, we're seeing that when you would start a project, you would focus on probably try to build the whole experience bottoms up, writing all the backend, then writing your frontend. And today I think we have the best starting point ever, which is you start with the frontend and then you use the best possible backends that are out there. Even more, perhaps deeply, we're seeing the move away from abstraction to interaction. Perhaps the most interesting feature that we've developed as a company is this idea of the deployment preview. So when you push your code to Git, or when you execute now on your terminal, we're gonna give you this URL as soon as physically possible that has the live working production-ready representation of your frontend. So what that means really is that in the past, whereas the review process would be all about, okay, I go to the PR or I share my coworkers the code, the diff, the commits. Well, we're now showing them a live URL of everything that they've been running, everything that they've been writing. And they can interact with it. So this idea that you can not so much focus on abstraction, which honestly as developers we love, but that we can now discuss the evolution of a project or an idea in terms of sharing hyperlinks to the live global deployment of, of your project is really, really exciting. Exciting. So moving away from code review to deployment preview is, is, is pretty much the embodiment of this movement and this transition. So, so in practical terms, how does this idea work of I can get started really quickly by writing code that, as I said, with, with, uh, JAMstack, I can start writing JS, I can start writing even static HTML. How do I take advantage of this idea of the backend parts have already been figured out for me? So one really obvious way, and we, we're joined today by, by some great companies in this space, is you are going to use headless CMS technologies. So practically what this means is you focus on writing great, beautiful frontend experiences, and then if you want to make the content of those frontend experiences editable and real-time and a collaborative process, you can defer the CMS part to a service that already exists. So moving on, even databases, right, are no longer something that you set up from scratch. So in the past, you would think, okay, I have to set up my full stack application like LAMP, where you would set up MySQL together with PHP. And what would happen is, okay, you're in charge of the whole thing. But now we're moving to databases that are in the cloud, and are already out there and are just available and scalable and so on for you. Even from an authentication perspective. So identity authentication is typically a very hard problem comparable to figuring out problems such as cryptography, like where the common advice is that you don't roll it out yourself. So instead of rolling out your whole authentication system, you use systems like Auth0 or AWS Cognito Cognito. And for example, if you're writing a website that is very content heavy, a lot of our developers write websites like documentation websites or API websites or blogs and magazines and so on, you might want to add search. And again, in the past you would think of, oh, I have to set up my own search cluster. Whereas now you can just drop in a little bit of client-side code that embeds a rich input for dynamic real-time search like Algolia provides. So this transition away from, okay, I'm gonna take care of the full stack and that's gonna be my full responsibility to roll out this project is really just enabled by the availability of all the services that you can query mostly from the client side. And when that's insufficient, that's where, for example, technologies like serverless functions come in where, okay, that backend is insufficient, doesn't already exist, or for my project to succeed, I have to write custom backend logic that what it's doing is joining services together. That's where, you would write, for example, a serverless function. So a great example of this is, for example, I would never try to write my own backend for billing. I would probably use something like Stripe. And sometimes the logic for, okay, this, this customer pay me so that they can perform a certain action needs to still be something that you write backend code for. But again, you're not writing the whole billing system, obviously, you're writing a function that communicates to that service. So the tiny bits of glue code that come later on are this great model that we're proposing where, okay, you start with your frontend and then as time goes by, you can sprinkle bits of backend code. So Backendless Conference doesn't say, oh, backend doesn't exist anymore, but it says, let's just do the right amounts of backend coding that we need to do. And to sort of wrap up this idea, the very enablement of this, as I mentioned, is JavaScript. So the Jamstack as a paradigm shift towards which we're moving means you are empowered to place this client-side rich interactions on every device in the world in a multi-platform way, and you will be in charge of controlling the whole experience. So as a front-end developer who, who's joining us today, you are the, the sort of centerpiece of this paradigm. And on that note, before we get too technical, I wanna reiterate that the conference is about you and we're not intending to make this a webinar. We're intending to make this a really fun and engaging experience. It's all about learning. It's for people who know very little to people that are experts. It's about asking questions, it's about, you know, not being shy. And to that end, just to set the tone, I encourage everyone to introduce themselves in our Slack channel that we created for the conference. And just to make it a little bit even more engaging and fun, we created a command that you can execute on Slack. So if you write /gif, you're gonna be able to create a little GIF or jif reaction. So I'm gonna start by doing my own now. I'm gonna send my own introduction through the /gif command. And then I encourage everyone to do so as well. And throughout the day, if you wanna react and show us even where you are, and what your place looks like wherever you are, whether you're a coffee shop or your house, and you want to react or just say something, we encourage you to put a face to your message, add a face to your message. And yeah, so thanks a lot again for joining us. I'm gonna send my introduction now and see it online.