Can you tell me about the educational background that led you here ?
The technologies used in the serverless and JAMstack are pretty new, we don't really learn that at university. So most of devs who use them are learning by themself as David did :
I'm self taught from googling, trial and error and a lot of persistance. I went to school for Marketing and entreprenuership.
What are the projects you were in you love the most and why ?
I love to build software that is extendable. The idea that someone can take something I've written and add the additional functionality they need on their own is extremely powerful. I think I got this idea back from my days working as a WordPress dev. Since then, I've built a number of projects that are pluggable by design including Markdown magic, Analytics, Netlify cli & Netlify build to name a few.
what do you think the future of the web will be ? (In 2 years, 5 years which languages will be the most used in new websites).
In 5 years most backend tech will run via serverless compute. The days of managing servers & containers will be long gone. Most services are taking care of the heavy devOps for you and letting devs focus on their actual applications.
If you haven't tried making serverless websites, do it once, you'll get addicted ! It's so a convenient and nice workflow.
Explanation of serverless
David Wells actually wrote an article and made a video about that. In brief, there is still servers running because you couldn't serve your website without them but you don't have to manage them. You don't have to scale them. Everything is static and pushed to CDNs to make your website available as fast as possible. And one of the best part is the price : you only pay for the milliseconds your code needs to execute.
So it's cheap, fast, secure.
Database ? Form submission ? etc...
No problem, lamdas functions are here. They are functions triggered with a url (and it avoid some cors issues).
Setting it up
Here comes Netlify.
Netlify is a static web hosting company. This means we serve static HTML/JS/CSS from a CDN (content delivery network). This means the website are MUCH faster than traditional hosting providers and more secure. It's referred to as the JAMstack. This talk goes into more detail talk - react world react or checkout JAMstack
Basically, it's a service that get your code from a git host, build it, and make you website live.
What are you doing at Netlify ? and what was your part on the cli ?
Myself and Brett comnes, rebuilt the CLI for Netlify as one project. Other projects I've done at Netlify can be found in my work & in this post
There are awesome projects, go check them out.
What are your favorite libraries and frameworks so far ?
Serverless framework, React, AWS stack in general, and Next.js are fantastic tools
Again, serverless seems to be the winner and the future.
Thank you David Wells for having answered these questions