Jason Lengstorf is the VP of Developer Experience at Netlify. We talked to him to learn more about two trends that are driving Netlify's massive growth: (1) the trend towards serverless and apps and websites that utilize Jamstack-style static content delivery, and (2) the rise of developer tools that abstract away the complexity of cloud services like AWS.

1. To start off with, I'd love to hear you define Jamstack and explain your personal path into the world.

2. When the Jamstack movement started, a lot of what was created with it was personal blogs, portfolio sites—simpler kinds of projects—and over time, and especially today, it's evolved towards more dynamic applications. I'd love to hear your take on where it is today in terms of complexity. What can be built on Jamstack, and how do you see that evolving in the future?

3. Let’s talk about what you do at Netlify, which is working on developer experience. It's something that people talk about a lot. What’s your understanding of what has happened in the last few years that has made developer experience such a big thing, and why is Jamstack so key to it, besides maybe faster deploys?

4. One idea we are noodling with is that Netlify and to an extent Vercel are like modern versions of Heroku, being a wrapper around a bunch of other tools and services that make it super easy to get started no matter who you are as a developer. Does that analogy resonate with you? Do you think that there are things that Netlify is doing better than Heroku did, or if there are any lessons to be learned from Heroku as a phenomenon?

5. So everybody moved towards trying to have a Heroku-like experience, trying to abstract away certain things that they figured out developers didn't want to have to manually configure every time.

6. In the last few years, AWS has put out stuff that's vaguely along the same lines as Vercel and Netlify,  like Amplify and App Runner. What’s your take on those, and what would Netlify's positioning be vis-à-vis that option?

7. It seems to me that the big point is just how big and complex AWS has become, to where it’s actually prohibitive to say, “Okay, we'll take off the training wheels. You can build whatever you can figure out.” Have we reached a point where that’s too big of an ask for the majority of developers?

8. I've noticed Netlify is a sponsor of various frameworks and other open source projects. I'd love to hear from you about why that is important and what that does for Netlify, for Netlify users and for the ecosystem as a whole.

9. You were saying that at IBM, the Jamstack approach emerged in the shadow of this larger monolithic system. Within huge companies like IBM, where do you see potentially Jamstack-like approaches emerging most readily internally today? Are there still places at these companies where it's going to be hard to make that work?

10.  That helps me understand the strategy of focusing on developer experience as a way of encouraging generational change in organizations, so people coming into organizations think about this as a way to build websites.

11.  I'd love to talk about APIs as the “a” in Jamstack. Obviously, you and Netlify can’t endorse any specific APIs, but to what degree have you seen the emergence of developer preferences for specific ones in different areas? Some developers we’ve talked to will use whatever the client wants, but a few say they’ll always use this for security authentication or that for search.

12.  Are there disadvantages to the headless API approach? One thing we've heard is that non-technical marketers don't always love working in, say, Prismic, which can be a little more annoying than WordPress if you are totally new to it.

13.  What kinds of things would need to happen for headless WordPress to be the primary way that WordPress is delivered? Or headless Shopify? I assume that for the average mom-and-pop that went online because of COVID, it might be too big of an ask to set up headless Shopify. What's the roadmap—if there is one—for that becoming more popular?

14.  Say you were to build a headless ecommerce that does use Shopify as a backend but is built via Jamstack. The other big advantage is that you're not limited in any way to the Shopify ecosystem for what you want to do with marketing, page experience, card abandonment, whatever. Basically, you're opening it up such that you can use any API in the Jamstack universe versus just what's on Shopify. Is that fair to say?

15.  Something that comes up in talking about Jamstack is this idea that there's a lot of cyclical things in software development. Like you said, Envato and all these plugin marketplaces and themes recurring, but in a very updated, modern way.