Everyone Can Be a Full-Stack Engineer

Serverless infrastructure makes it easier than ever to eliminate the boundary between frontend and backend. When engineers own the entire stack, they can focus less on rebuilding the same infrastructure and more on what matters: the user experience.

Web apps have traditionally been built with a 3-tier stack: frontend, backend, and database. Each of these tiers is often written in a different language and has its own set of technical challenges. Many of these challenges are common across wildly different products. Every product needs a database that is scalable and correct, a backend that is fast and secure, and a frontend that is reactive and interactive. Given the number of different concerns, it’s no wonder most companies have separate teams managing each layer!

In this presentation, we’ll zoom in on the essence of the dynamic web app.

  • If we solve the common technical challenges that all web apps face, what’s left?
  • How do serverless solutions compare to in-house stacks? Can they deliver more with less work?
  • How does product development change when individual engineers can own features, end-to-end?

Speaker

Alex Cole

Software Engineer @convex_dev, previously @Asana

Alex is a software engineer at Convex, building Convex’s reactive backend-as-a-service platform. He’s passionate about reactivity, TypeScript, databases, GraphQL, and mountains. Previously he worked at Asana, leading the Client Infrastructure team.

 

Read more

Date

Wednesday Oct 26 / 10:35AM PDT ( 50 minutes )

Location

Ballroom BC

Topics

Frontend Full Stack Serverless Infrastructure Webb Apps Languages

Share

From the same track

Session Frontend

Building Typesafe APIs with tRPC & TypeScript

Wednesday Oct 26 / 11:50AM PDT

When developing modern APIs, there a few options to choose from. REST is not a standard  but instead style. Trust is constantly broken between the API and client. gRPC and GraphQL provide standards but require complex tooling.

Speaker image - Brian Douglas

Brian Douglas

Co-founder & CEO @saucedopen, previously led Developer Advocacy by showcasing newest features @Github

Session Frontend

Enhance: SSR for Web Components

Wednesday Oct 26 / 04:10PM PDT

Building web apps is often characterized as painful, complex, and time consuming. There are many tools, libraries, frontend frameworks, and opinions about how to fix that problem… but they come with a catch. The frontend ecosystem is fractured into incompatible niches.

Speaker image - Brian LeRoux

Brian LeRoux

Co-founder & CTO @Begin, created and maintains OpenJS Architect, maintains Enhance.dev

Session

Panel: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Frontend

Wednesday Oct 26 / 02:55PM PDT

Each of the track speakers joins together in a panel about how the front-end is changing in today’s high velocity, domain-focused teams.

Speaker image - Brian LeRoux

Brian LeRoux

Co-founder & CTO @Begin, created and maintains OpenJS Architect, maintains Enhance.dev

Speaker image - Brian Douglas

Brian Douglas

Co-founder & CEO @saucedopen, previously led Developer Advocacy by showcasing newest features @Github

Speaker image - Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss

Data Analyst @Netlify

Speaker image - Alex Cole

Alex Cole

Software Engineer @convex_dev, previously @Asana

Session

What the Data Says: Emerging Technical Trends in Front-End and How They Affect You

Wednesday Oct 26 / 01:40PM PDT

Over the last 30 years of web development a predictable cycle has appeared in the adoption, commoditization and eventual abstraction of major new technical trends in web development.

Speaker image - Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss

Data Analyst @Netlify