There are plenty of ways to get information on and access to the latest trends and technologies, but going to conferences is sure one with great benefits. You can not only hear top notch experts giving you hints and tools to improve your workflow, but you can further build your network and get hands-on experience on the spot. Fortunately, there are numerous quality events within and beyond our borders and ReactiveConf is most certainly one of them. It takes place in the beautiful city of Prague and is the ultimate spot for the European tech community to get the latest global insights in web & mobile development through meaningful connections and shared experiences. We were among this year’s attendees and we even went backstage to interview some of the speakers, so that we could share all the great information on their hands with you, too.
In the first episode of this Special Edition TechTalk series Balázs Komár Co-Founder @IseeQ and @xLabs leads a discussion with Nader Dabit Senior developer Advocate @Amazon Web Services (AWS) about full stack development today, the benefits of open source projects, and tools to improve developer velocity and efficiency.
There’s been plenty of rapid changes in technology over time, even in full stack development. Nader gives us an insight: “In the past, full stack development meant that you had to understand everything on the backend and everything on the frontend. And on the backend that got pretty eerie, pretty complicated: understanding how to create and manage servers, how to deal with databases, APIs all that stuff.. On the frontend it wasn’t so bad, I think what we’re seeing now is kind of a shift – it’s becoming more complex on the frontend and less complex on the backend. Not saying that building things on the backend is becoming easier but now there’re more abstractions that you can leverage using: cloud technologies like some of the stuff that I’ve been working on, but also some of the stuff that’s just out there. Like Microsoft, Google, of course, have their clouds and there’s a lot of startups and companies that are building serverless technologies that are kind of making the backend part easier. So, I think what we’re seeing is traditionally frontend developers becoming full stack developers. Not in the traditional sense of them being able to build full stack applications in the old way, but in a new way.”
We’ve been hearing about and seeing a lot of open source projects, which are getting ever-more popular, rightly so! Those who’ve been involved in such co-op ventures, and those who’ve never been brave or curious enough to get their noses in them, maybe the following information will help them to embark on that journey. Nader starts explaining the success of open source softwares by introducing one of his own projects, called ‘Conference app in a box’, which is, by the way, welcoming all of your contributions.

“The reason why Wordpress became so popular was because it’s so widespread and people are still using it. It’s because within just a few minutes you can deploy the database, the client, the server, all the different pieces that you need to have to kind of build something good. I think what we’re seeing now is some of these newer technologies are built to to do that, but maybe using more modern technologies. And ‘Conference app in a box’ is well, the conference version of that.”
He further explains by telling about his most recent ventures, which has actually just been launched at ReactiveConf live; jamstack-cms. “I spent the last few months building something called jamstack-cms and it’s built using modern technologies like Gatsby, ‘serverless technologies’, React on the frontend, and on the backend it’s using manage identity services, lambda functions, using GraphQL and I’ve packaged everything into a single repository that can be deployed from the command line in just a few minutes. So, what you end up with, it’s like with wordpress: you have all these things deployed just within a few minutes. You can now do that, and again what I think is like the future modern way. I don’t think jamstack-cms will become what Wordpress is, but I think what it will become is, in my opinion, kind of laying the groundwork for the future things that we’re going to see and people hopefully will take the idea and maybe build something better, we’ll see.” This one, however, is just a beta version yet: “you need to have an AWS account and if you have that you can deploy it. I think you need to run like 3 commands and then you’re good to go and launch is on the frontend.” Although, the future for it is clear “for version one (in like 6 months or so), I’d like to have it configurable with other cloud services, so people might want to use Netlify, Google Cloud or Azure. I want to find a way to make it pluggable and in that way we’re not limited to only AWS customers.”
It doesn’t come as a surprise for anyone to know that there’s such a huge gap between the development of different technologies. “A few technologies are becoming very very popular and a lot of technologies are not catching on. So, people are adapting GraphQL or React or Vue.js. I think being able to identify what’s going to be hot and what’s going to be useful is a skill to be acquired.” – Nader states.
If you’re a newcomer full stack developer and you’ve ever wondered what kind of tools you could use, Nader gives the following tips: “Amplify, AppSync, Netlify, anything in the serverless paradigm is something that’s going to be catching on and something I would keep an eye on. Also, anything that increases developer velocity and developer efficiency. So to me that’s like cross-platform frameworks.” And if you’re already involved in it and you want just want to increase velocity and efficiency: “Serverless paradigm, but it’s more about abstractions over managing your own service and managing your own thing. So it functions as a service, falls into this category of assay service. So, anything in that falls into the category of improving developer velocity and efficiency. Therefore, the developer doesn’t have to implement these things, they can use something that someone else’s already built. Anything that allows you to not deal with the infrastructure is really good – Amplify and AppAync, Cognito, S3.”
Plenty of other things our great interviewee’s told us, yet one thing that is perfect to close off this article and something he’s stated so rightly so: “Serverless is the solution not for everything but for most things”.

If we’ve caught your interest, you should for sure go and watch the full video or listen to the full podcast!