Now Deploying to Netlify

As my time at Filament Group draws to a close, I am very excited to share with y'all that I am joining Netlify!

Given my own open source work with Eleventy over the past two years, this might seem like an incredibly obvious transition. Obvious transitions are good!

I have been very impressed with the founders of Netlify: Chris Bach and Matt Biilmann. I was first introduced to Matt years ago when our paths crossed working on the font loading for the Smashing Magazine relaunch. He had written a great PostCSS plugin to handle automatic class management for font loading.

For me Smashing Magazine was the watershed moment for JAMstack1, similar to what Filament Group (and friends) did for Responsive Web Design with the Boston Globe. The Smashing Magazine launch showed that not only is a large-scale JAMstack implementation possible, but it can be a more efficient way to work with the potential to deliver a higher quality final product. The JAMstack gives more power to front-end developers by properly decoupling the front-end from the back while simultaneously delivering performance improvements. It allows front-end developers to focus on their specialty.

Sites that move to this architecture really have the opportunity to see some big wins in both developer experience and user experience (as if they were ever in disagreement).

At this point it's pretty clear that Responsive Web Design has won. The few lone hold-outs are left defending the User-Agent string—that’s not a hill you want to die on. Are there a few bad implementations of Responsive Web Design? Sure. But it's the clear winner to deliver your site to the infinite landscape of real world devices.

I believe the same revolution is happening with JAMstack and I’m excited to play a part of it at Netlify.

1. Jump back to the reference. I’m pretty sure Dave Rupert said this first or at least something to this effect at JAMstack_conf.