It's been an amazing couple of days and I've only now found the time required to jot down some notes, so here's my most important takeaway of everything that happened so far: Without having to think about it for a second time, I'm absolutely confident in declaring JAMstackConf London my clear conference winner this year (so far). To understand this, and for the sake of clear structuring, let's start at the beginning.
Workshop Day (2019-07-09)
After arriving in the very busy city of London, we headed straight to the venue, Tobacco Dock. As it turns out, the place has quite a few entrances to choose from, but after you find a way in, you're greeted by nothing less than a huge meeting space enclosed by lots of industrial design and architecture. The first conference day was solely dedicated to a number of really interesting workshops around the JAMstack, including my coworker Jesse Martin's take on getting everybody up and running with a project built on Hygraph, Moltin, Gatsby and a live site hosted using Netlify in less than a workday.
As a technical sidekick, I was available for basic guidance and assistance, but I mostly spent my time observing a room full of people trying out and stress-testing the product I've worked on for the last year. While this has been an admittedly scary experience, it was nevertheless a helpful and necessary one, moving ahead. I was under the impression that most people were able to follow through with everything, so there should be some results available on GitHub already!
Time for talks! (2019-07-10)
The primary conference day was naturally exciting due to the sheer endless flow of visitors and speakers to connect and exchange experiences with.
Every presented talk was more or less directly connected to the conference mission, I was thrilled to learn about a few tricks to build animated gradients with CSS Houdini!
In general, though, all speakers showcased amazing projects and insights into their usage of current technologies surrounding the JAMstack, such as Vitaly Friedman's talk about Smashing Magazine's journey around infrastructure decisions, or Jake Archibald and Surma's entertaining finale.
I've got to give a shoutout to the amazing organization of the whole event (this goes to the folks at Smashing Magazine and Netlify), including scheduling and managing the venue for both days, coordinating all talks (and partial replacements), the moderation by Hawk Philsworth and so on and so forth, to make it short - it was great!
Wrapping it up, thanks for reading this post and sorry for the cheesy pun in the title, I really needed (and wanted) to do this 🤷🏼♂️