Yes, please build Netlify comments feature too. 😂

Just like Disqus

Hi Max,

Yes, absolutely. Why do you think there might be a problem doing this? seems relatively straightforward.

i may not see your reply so hit any of us up on twitter if you run into trouble doing this.

Thanks for the reply Phil Hawksworth - really cool insight

It's easy to take for granted the difficulty of keeping things feeling simple - it definitely makes Netlify stand out.

It can be hard as a developer sometimes not to overcomplicate your work because you want to work on the new stuff all the time but it isn't usually what the end user wants / needs.

Ha ha, yeah... my own blog is a good testament to that. Leave it alone, Philip!! I take my hat off to the discipline I get to witness. It's a great lesson for me.

The never ending blog restyling is a sure way to lose sleep :-)

Thanks Phil

lol, I think you already know the answer to that one. 😉

Seriously, though, of course we don't have favorites, but y'all should take note of this guy ^. If you have a Netlify question in stack overflow, or Netlify Community, or Netlify CMS gitter chat, there's a very good chance that Tony will be the one answering it. He's the Netlify expert!!

😊 I was hoping for a roast, not an answer that would make me blush.

If you are new to Netlify or wondering if you should, you really should be looking at it. This is not a hosting service, this is a partner in helping making sites faster and more secure.

Tony we love you.

Some of the exciting things we're working on are a secret for the time being 🤫 (we'll be announcing one of those really exciting things at JAMstack London!) but something they all have in common is that it is sometimes very complicated to make something feel simple! It really pays off because it makes everything feel more intuitive, which means you need less docs, and things to explain how it works. But what's funny about it is the final product is so simple, it looks like there's not a lot of effort involved!

Nodding along pretty aggressively to Sarah's reply.

For me, one of the biggest challenges is in choosing what to focus on first. It feels like a really exciting time not just for Netlify, but also for the JAMstack as a category, which is wonderful, but I sometime find it hard to decide which opportunity to focus on. Especially when they are all so compelling.

Ooo good question. I'm currently in the middle of writing a Nuxt module that would work with Netlify really well and even do CMS integration, but hadn't thought of this piece. I'll poke around and see what's possible here! Thanks for the suggestion.

Thank you !

I know atinux is working on nuxt modules for a full generate (payload as json alongside html I think) if that can help :)

I'm sure what you're on will be great !

Yep, he and I have already spoken a bit about this- I think he's going to jump in to do some work on the module when I get it in a good state, so you'll likely see a collaboration from us 👍

The JAMstack is a modern web architecture: helping people create fast and secure sites and dynamic apps with JavaScript, APIs, and prerendered Markup, served without web servers. This means Wordpress, Squarespace, Drupal, and other server-run web apps are not JAMstack (sometimes I find it helpful to define things by what they are not). Chris Coyier recently wrote a great post about how it is all about static asset hosting, and you can use as much or as little of J, A, or M as you like.

Netlify serves the JAMstack developer - you don't have to use Netlify to be JAMstack, but we just happen to be very very very very very very very very focused on those needs and provide all the tooling you might need including form handling, authentication, and serverless functions, as well as building on top of the JAMstack assumption by providing continuous deployment with instant rollbacks and branch deploys, free SSL (HTTPS) on Custom Domains, split testing, image transformation, and local development.

Aw thanks swyx! Personally I just found zzz.dog which looks super fun, you can make simple 3D shapes generated from declarative JS, made by Dave DeSandro. The examples people have been making with it on codepen have been super cool.

In terms of tools that many would find useful, this tiny one by Chris Coyier that my coworker pointed out the other day is pretty dope: strftime.net

I recently stumbled on colorsafe.co and really like it!

I'd already been using tools for checking contrast ratio to make sure my color choices pass WCAG accessibility standards. (Lea Verou's contrast-ratio.com is my longtime favorite.)

But what I like about colorsafe.co is that it gives you a quick click interface for choosing colors. I find it especially handy for quickly picking slide deck colors - because not only are high-contrast color combinations good for accessibility, they also make your slides look better on projector screens in bright rooms!

I too came across zzz.dog and it is amazingly fun! I've seen examples of people using it alongside React Spring for instance to create really neat 3D renders and animations. You can find lots of those examples on Codepen.

Also Josh Comeau wrote a wonderful post complete with code snippets to explain using CSS 3D transforms, which was incredibly mind blowing. joshwcomeau.com/posts/folding-the-dom

I look at what David Wells does and try to do half of it

Ha ha. Me too! As a stretch goal.

The other thing to mention is that we have a wonderful team of engineers, designers, documentarians... all working together to ship these features. Those of us on this AMA are often in the position of contributing to that work, but also fortunate to be able share the information about the work of a larger, and really rather gifted team.

(it's a fun part of my job to be sure)

The product team is really well organised and function brilliantly together. And we're in a happy position of being able to release many incremental improvements over time to keep pressing forward.

And we also use a time machine.

Tons. the problem and opportunity of working on DX is that you are literally never done. Jeff Bezos has been working on the internet retail experience for 20 years and it is still Day One for him.

I think it is still too hard to write JAMstack apps. We are -early- in this paradigm, and that's why it is so hard. But every year it gets a bit easier with an ecosystem springing up around it. We got some part of the way there with Netlify Dev, but ultimately my white whale is tackling the broken promise of fullstack JavaScript. Multiple dozens of billions of dollars have been created with Rails (name a 10-15yr old decacorn tech company, it was probably built on Rails). Laravel's Ecosystem is flat out amazing.. Django gets you an awesome admin panel right out of the box. Meanwhile in JS land we futz around for hours trying to debug our node_modules and build steps. Unacceptable. If JAMstack has a chance of being productive (not just faster/more secure/decoupled), the serverless/JS ecosystem needs to drastically catch up.

+1 to swyx's answer, and I have a few more thoughts:

When I look at some of the things that have taken off recently, I see how much people are using and loving abstractions as a service.

Serverless is one such model that allows you to use event-driven logic on server side without setting up a ton of infrastructure, I think we'll see a lot more of this new way of working in the years ahead- abstracting some processes that might be automated, or simply keeping things consistent across machines we previously needed unnecessarily complex processes such as containers allow for.

That's one area. On the client side:

Personally, I think the web is capable of so so much but we're still not taking full advantage of it. Some of this needs some help from the browser side to fix what's broken and should have already shipped a while back (hello where is hardware acceleration on SVG DOM nodes helllloooo) and some of it is from the dev/design side of still kind of treating the browser like a document reader- we still build layouts like we're using tables even though we can do so so much more!

How does this affect developer experience? Devs need APIs they know will work quickly without a lot of hacks, and they also need tools to help build brilliant experiences on the fly without a ton of mental overhead. Some of this comes back to the promise of what tools like Netlify do: spend less time gluing together "kit of parts" services, knowing that your deploys will work in a streamlined manner, and you have more time to commit to user experience overall.

Re: Challenges in terms of Infrastructure, from our Head of Infrastructure, Ryan Neal:

A lot of our problems fall in three big concerns:

• scale
• availability
• developer productivity

Scale: We are doing 10s of thousands of requests per second near constantly across our network. That value is doing the nice "up and to the right" that makes business happy and engineers excited. That means that any service that wants to operate on that firehose of data, or be involved in the request chain, has to be able to handle throughput. Want to know something about the traffic is being served out of Singapore? The service needs to handle billions of events. Want to break that down by a few facets? It is going to be 10s millions of unique pairs, so you have to consider disk/memory/time very carefully. This makes for some fun challenges on how you write horizontally scalable services that are elastic enough to come up and down quickly.

Availability: Our customers are trusting us with their web presence, we take that very seriously. To that point we design with failure in mind all the time ("How does the system work if this fails", "How will we know it failed", etc). All of our services, from edge to origin, are built to answer these questions. They're made to be immutable, disposable, and fault tolerant.

In order to provide more 9s we also focus a lot on automation. People aren't good at managing systems, systems are good at managing systems. We are constantly looking at the system and trying to find more ways to keep it stable. In the near future we are going to be re-examining some of our core design decisions to see if we can find better ways for it to gracefully degrade and automatically repair itself. Of course, we're an always on system too - meaning we have to change the tires on the car as we are driving it.

We are in 6 cloud providers right now, growing to 8 in the next few months. Being cloud agnostic adds a lot of complexity, from simple things like "how do we authorize into the server" to "how do we fail between clouds in a reliable way". Not being able to say things like "Just use this service" means that we have to have the ownership and knowledge to effectively run a lot of core services ourselves.

Productivity: We are constantly updating the platform for both product reasons and for scale considerations. These change need to be applied quickly and safely by our developers. That means that on the infrastructure side we need to build out the tooling that will let us operate, observe, and modify the system in a deterministic way. We are always finding more things we can monitor (imho: you can never have enough insight into your system).

We also have a unique problem that our infrastructure is split in that some of it is containerized and some of it is raw boxes. This split is because we sometimes need the performance of the raw boxes (e.g. the edge nodes) and sometimes the flexibility of something like kubernetes. This means that we have to figure a way to apply changes to both and give our developers the same experience but handle the differences behind the scenes.

In terms of what we're looking for in Engineers, our Head of Product Engineering addressed that in this great post he wrote! css-tricks.com/interviewing-for-a-technical-posit…

We don't have any immediate plans for it, though it's something we have talked about for sure.

response from Shawn from the Netlify CMS team:

We always planned on having some sort of “managed” Netlify CMS offering, but we never quite figured out how to crack it. Mostly because there really isn’t anything to manage - the closest model is stackbit, and they’re really just generating a starter template for you. But any discussion of us actually hosting it rather than it being a page in your repo and on your site was always shut down, as it inherently moves away from what Netlify CMS is designed to do - both exist in and store content in your repo. The final thing is we don't want to compete with Headless CMS services, who are our biggest partners.

I see.

What you can do, instead of building a new managed CMS from scratch you can provide a manage CMS which will be same as self-hosted CMS only difference will be it will the hosting part.

All the functionality and configuration will be exactly the same so the users will be able to switch from self-hosted to managed.

This is a great question! Picking up new skills is so important for developers because the landscape shifts so quickly. A while back, a lot of people asked me this question so I wrote an article about it: css-tricks.com/learning-to-learn

The tl;dr is:

• try to identify holes in your knowledge- this can include looking through course structure online, or looking at API docs, etc
• then write down and schedule all of those pieces so that you can devote some time to it, and mark things off little by little
• I make sure I'm practicing the new things I'm learning- if I have to learn it for a job, great! That's baked in to the process, but if I'm just trying to level up, I might make a side project so I learn it.
• Making something I enjoy really helps me learn because I'm more incentivized to do it
• I also pay attention to how I'm learning, that I'm doing what works for me

Hope that helps!

Great method. Sarah Drasner Thanks for sharing :)

1. i prefer to write. if its small it can just be a slack message, but i also do internal blogposts and postmortems mobile.twitter.com/swyx/status/1103010268152356864

2. nobody can "guarantee" it. but we can try to just pay attention to user needs :)

3. above my paygrade

4. good question, i dont think many of us believe in a strict number of years requirement, but of course it correlates with relevant experience and ability (and pay 😅).

5. the most motivating thing is helping users and responding to their pain points. i also get to write blogposts and do talks which is motivating on its own.

1. 

We do lunch and learns at Netlify quite regularly. These are great opportunities to share what we’ve been working on with the rest of the team in a pretty informal setting. There’s also a product demo meeting biweekly where we get to share and also hear from others on the team and what they’ve been working on. It’s a great way to sync up esp since so many of us are remote!


2. This is tough, as swyx mentioned, nothing is guaranteed. But in general users power a lot of decisions we make :) 


3. 

We usually do yearly reviews and that’s oftentimes when this evaluation happens. Since we’re still early stage, this process hasn’t yet been formalized but will be very very soon! If you’re interested in general career progression at other companies that we kinda sorta emulate, check out progression.fyi


4. Number of years isn’t a great way to evaluate candidates. I’ve seen developers with 10 years of experience who are not as “up to par” as a developer of 3-5 years or experience for instance. It’s all relative. Having said that, we do look at what you’ve worked on/have been working on and try to gauge if a candidate is enthusiastic about a specific area of expertise. Also, if they’re willing to learn and adapt quickly. This is hard to gauge but a coworker of mine Jacob Schatz puts it so well in this tweet -> twitter.com/jakecodes/status/1135677610053251073


5. 
For me motivation is tied directly to whether or not a task resonates with my own goals and aspirations. Sarah puts this so well in this tweet-> twitter.com/sarah_edo/status/1131424076726132736

For sure! If you'd like an example of how to work with env variable and functions when accessing an external API in Netlify, I wrote a blog post recently that may be helpful, complete with code samples to play around with. Also, more importantly, it comes with free pizza recommendations if you ever find yourself in Chicago! -> netlify.com/blog/2019/05/29/creating-a-map-of-the…

In addition to Divya's post, you might also find this example of a serverless function which acts as a proxy, adding a secret API and calling a service.

github.com/depadiernos/token-hider-inator

I find these useful to dip into... a wide range of examples and references gathered here.

functions.netlify.com/examples

Thanks again both of you for your awesome work and for some great resources!

Hey Miguel!

Oooo this is a good one... I'm not at liberty to say exactly what it is, but we're planning on announcing something we hope you'll love in July at JAMstack conf London! Aside from this shiny new feature, we're also working on getting some great existing features out of beta and making them even better, more flexible, and higher potential for productivity, like Netlify dev! (where you can use a CLI use Netlify locally and even share live links with your coworkers before deploying :) )

As a documentation engineer, the next big thing that I'm excited about is a makeover for our docs! We've been working on re-organizing topics based on user research, ad we're also building out a beautiful new site for them to live in. We're hoping to have them all ready by the end of summer, maybe sooner. :)

Hey Milica!

Great question. We're a distributed team, so each of our days looks a little different- my day will look different from other team members so probably good to hear from many of us!

My day has a lot of meetings involved as I'm a manager, and my job is to remain available for my team and drive strategy. I do block out time to code on Wednesdays, and also code at nights sometimes and on the weekends sometimes. I am a more of a Night Owl so my morning routine is extremely simple, I get much more independent work done at night.

I wrote up an article on how I prioritize my work, in case it's helpful :)

css-tricks.com/prioritizing

I love questions about productivity and organizational hacks! Especially since talking about this means I now have to be kept accountable 🙈

Organization for my day usually starts at the top of the week, since it lets me set an intention and goals that I want to accomplish. On our team, we all fill out a form noting everything we worked on last week, and the things we're planning to work on that week as well as any challenges that stand in our way. This form submission gets emailed to everyone on the team, so we're all kept in sync.

As for day to day tasks, I try to note everything I want to do on todoist when I start my day. It's so easy to lose track of time when I don't do this, because I tend to jump on things willy nilly if I don't have a specific goal set for myself. I additionally try to be intentional with my time by using a pomodoro timer app of sorts called Forest, it builds a cute tree for every block of time you focus!

Also, I'm more of a morning person, so I do heavy, time/labor intensive tasks at the start of my day; it's a productivity hack known as "Eating the Frog", if you're into productivity hacks :)

For me a typical day starts with some correspondence catch up. Since I'm based in the UK and most of my colleagues are in the US, they have been busy working and talking while I was asleep. So I like to try to catch up on what was going in email and on slack while I start my day and slurp my coffee.

I also spend some time seeing what has been grabbing people's attention on twitter (which is usually rather delightful as people using Netlify often seem enthusiastic or full of valuable ideas).

Then I dip in to community.netlify.com where there is also often some useful conversation or some people I might be able to help out.

Most of this is possible because of the head start I have on the day. As the US wake up, my time gets to be more in demand so I try and get my head down on some writing or technical exploration before people get up if I can.

When the US is awake I'm more likely to have some project meetings, 1:1s or team catch ups. As a distributed company (50% remote, 50% in SF) we're mindful of making connections between people even when they are remote. So we put some effort into that too.

Another big part of my job is attending or speaking at conferences. This often involves travel which, while I love it, does eat up time and quickly make everything I've written so far in this answer a work of fiction. then it can be a scramble.

Divya mentioned our weekly team planning, but beyond that, I use Things to help me list and prioritise the things I personally want to achieve that day. It helps me to get the list out of my head and onto a screen somewhere. And it gives me the chance to gleefully check things off.

If I understand ASP.NET MVC right, it is not JAMstack, so we do not support that at Netlify because we don't offer you a running server. However if you want to run your ASP.NET server as an endpoint and put your frontend assets on Netlify as a CDN, that could work.

Hey Carl!

Re: Pricing- Uptime SLA's are supported via our Enterprise ADN, which is engineered for greater resiliency and greater performance than our standard network. Customers can always upgrade capabilities from their starter plan with things like additional seats ($15/user), additional bandwidth ($20/100gb) or advanced forms capabilities ($19/mo) - just to name a few.

Re: Brotli support- we currently have an feature request issue open for this, when we get to it depends a bit on some other pieces of our product roadmap and when we can staff it. Sorry I can't give a better answer than that, we agree it would be great! In terms of you committing .br files- we won’t automatically add the right headers for brotli even if the user compresses the files themselves. And while you can add your own custom headers, we don’t allow you to use conditionals in _headers or nelify.toml for headers and serve the brotli files if the user agent requesting the files supports it. So, not at the moment, no, but likely in the future.

You bet! It's on our minds :)

This is really important to me. I'm currently looking to move all sites I'm responsible for to carbon-neutral (ideally directly renewable-powered) infrastructure.

Obviously speed, efficiency, and cache proximity to the user are super-important factors as Phil outlined above, so any research Netlify can produce on the impact of this on power efficiency would be incredibly useful.

In the meantime, it would be really helpful if an estimate could be made available of approximately how much of Netlify's resources are provided by which providers, so that the energy sources used by those providers can be taken into account. (Or better still, if Netlify wanted to do the maths based on those figures and publish a total carbon estimate as a percentage of total power usage.)

The info on Netlify's sustainability page (netlify.com/sustainability) is minimal at best. How will an individual or company know that they are hosted on AWS or google through Netlifly? Can they choose this? Why is there no information on the page elaborating on this?

Of course some of what we're looking for will vary from job to job. We do our best to be clear about what skills and experience we're looking for in each job description we write. In general, though, we're big on collaboration, and we communicate a lot, so we look for people who demonstrate an ability to give and receive feedback with care and empathy, to reflect on their actions and be open to learning, and to share their thoughts and process as they solve problems and hit stumbling blocks.

In an application, one thing we usually look for is a thoughtful cover letter. It doesn't have to be fancy (don't worry if English isn't your strong suit!), but if you take the time to help us connect the dots and show us how your experiences and passions match our needs, we'll pay attention! We're thoughtful about finding a good fit, and if you show us that you thought about that, too (and didn't just use a blind shotgun approach), it means a lot.

Thanks for your question :) To serve our overarching goal of making the web better- our intention is to always maintain a rich set of capabilities with our free tier. The full feature list of our Starter plan (no cost) is highlighted here

swyx Sarah Drasner thanks so much for taking the time to answer and inspiring the confidence that the free features (most probably) will stay free :)

High fives all around!