What is the future outlook of Jamstack in 5 years and what key trends will shape its direction?

Other than the fact that I really felt strongly about Jamstack from as soon as I discovered it and I really never looked back, beyond that, in terms of trends within that trend, I've not been very good at predicting things. I didn't really know where, say, serverless functions were going to go and that sort of thing. I didn't predict that. In short, I didn't predict how good things were going to be. I really thought that the best thing that we could hope for was a good editing interface.

When I started, we had a tool called Prose.io. A former Drupal firm built the new version of HealthCare.gov after the old version failed spectacularly. They built that in Jekyll, and they built an editing interface for it. It was really meant for that site, for that instant in that time. It was really hard to use, but it was a little bit better than, say, sending your clients to GitHub, which I actually tried. But that's the best I had hoped for at the time -- that we would have a good editor.

I had no idea that we were going to have things like serverless functions and be able to pull all of this functionality into our sites. I had no idea how robust the API economy was going to be. I had no idea how important deployment was going to be. We use Netlify -- we've been using them from day one. I'm aware of Vercel, and I think that the feature set is pretty much the same, but I don't know Vercel as intimately. But we use the deploy previews that Netlify provides for us every day with clients. The concept of atomic deployment, where they're only pushing to the server pages that have changed on our website, saves us a lot of headaches. The ability to package up our serverless functions right with our repo and push them out to Netlify is fantastic. I never really dreamed that that sort of thing would be around now.

So I would hesitate to say where I think things are going to go in the next five years. I think that we're going to continue apace with an improved editing experience. Oddly, it's interesting to me that we're seeing the build tools getting funded in the open source space with Astro's $7 million funding for what is essentially a static site generator. There might be more coming in the future.

You had mentioned Automattic and Jamstack, and I think the closest company to that is really Gatsby. They built a tool that became enormously popular, which has some WordPress-type of features where there's a rich set of plugins, and it makes it easier for people to come in and add functionality without at least a huge depth of engineering, though it’s still more complicated than WordPress. Then they're hosting those sites as well, which is what Automattic does. I have no idea how that's going to work out. I don't understand the economics necessarily of a Gatsby or Netlify or Vercel, because there is always to my mind these big companies looming in the background that knew a lot of that work and can probably pick up some of that functionality and maybe obviate these firms. I don't know.

But I do know that what’s really wonderful is all of the innovation that we've seen, and then people are finally starting to fund open source and see the value of open source, and we're seeing this combination of open source and private tools, or where a private company is providing part of the service but open sourcing the other part of the service, which makes sustainability for open source. I think that that sort of thing is going to continue in the future. I'm not sure what else though. There are probably some innovations, though, that Matt Biilmann is creating in a back room somewhere that I have no idea about, and I'm going to be very pleasantly surprised when they tell us about it.