Why has developer experience become such an important topic and how has Jamstack contributed to improving it beyond enabling faster deploys?

The biggest thing that I noticed is that we saw a shift from companies using the web as an augmentation to their business strategy to -- especially when 2020 rolled around -- the web being the driving force of their strategy. With every company, we saw an explosion of online retail in 2020 because everybody had to go online because we couldn't go inside anymore.

I think that shift means that just about every company now is either hiring full-time web developers or working with web development contractors, and in all of those cases, the thing that they're building is a direct result of the experience that those developers have. If you've got developers using tools that they're excited about, that are easy, that provide them with the right level of abstraction where they're focusing on building features instead of on dealing with the overhead and boilerplate and the kind of meta work of keeping the lights on for a project, you are able to ship features faster, and you have lower turnover, because your devs aren't frustrated by process. They're not frustrated by “Oh, if I want to move to a new computer, I got to do three hours of setup work to get this app running” or something like that.

I think that the drive to online really helped the whole world refocus on the fact that developers are driving commerce. They're driving the economy right now at every level. Even hotels, their whole experience now is through apps and using your phone to open your hotel room door. That's all built by developers. So you want your developers to have good tools, because it's your hiring strategy, it's your retention strategy, it's your iterative strategy, it's the way that you lower your go-to-market time. All those things come directly from providing your developers with tools that they're excited about, that they can use easily, and that set up good defaults so that, if your developers take every shortcut in the world, the user experience should still be good. That's what we're trying to set up with the Jamstack. As an ecosystem, how do we make it so that, if a developer shows up and takes every shortcut available to them, they're still going to make a high-performance site that's maintainable into the future and that doesn't take forever to deploy?