Static to Dynamic and Back Again: Future of Frontend

hey everybody thanks again for joining us so maybe a quick preamble which is you know david touched on this is the age of web vitals and sort of um performance uh it is never more important to deliver a fast loading and rendering experience on the web um but the industry remains sort of undecided to me in how developers get there it's about pre-rendered content it's about dynamic content my head is spinning so i'm joined by a number of talented panelists who can help me and us answer this question

we have rita kozlov who is product manager at cloudflare um specifically on cloud for workers guillermo rauch who is the ceo of cell and the co-creator of nextgs and katie seller miller who's a um architect at etsy um really just to kick things off i'd love for you all to just you know 60 seconds tell us about you know your work and how it connects to this topic i'm going to start with rita and then guillermo and katie sure hi everyone uh so i'm rita um

as ben mentioned i'm the product manager for cloudflare workers which is cloudflare serverless offering um and yeah i'm really excited about this topic um the way that workers kind of came to be is that you know for such a long time the the way of thought was for your site to be performant you pushed as many static assets up to your cdn right um and so we thought well what if

um instead of just static assets right and being able to distribute them around the world the whole purpose of that is to get them as close to the end users as possible so that uh until we can beat the speed of light you can get that top performance um and so what if instead of uh just pushing static assets up you could run your actual code and application logic near the user um so yeah we'll come back to that we'll come back to that topic for sure uh guillermo go ahead really quickly what

is versel what is next js yeah so we're approaching the same problem of making frontends super interactive and super snappy but we started with an xjs with a framework for react which you know four or five years ago is starting to like take off in a really important way but it's really hard to put all the pieces together it was really hard to take react and turn it into an actual front end with pages routing uh you know style systems even css was hard to put together so we wanted to deliver a delightful developer experience

and then a platform that would similarly do what rita is saying take those assets take those pages take the dynamism and the static parts push it to the edge and with that same goal of delivering front experiences as fast as possible to end users cool um katie you got a different role uh sort of a different a different role here can you tell us about your work yeah so um as ben said i'm katie seyler-miller i'm at sea's front end architect and i'm here to kind of provide a

perspective as someone who is very deeply in the world of performance as more of a boots on the ground practitioner someone working at a company who has to kind of take all of these different concerns and balance them along with things like organizational capabilities and getting you know buy-in from leadership for perf actually on the ground figuring out how to fix things so i'm super excited to to really talk about what it's like as a

modern day performance practitioner great thanks everybody so i wanna i wanna start with this kind of like this question which is um you know there's new phones coming out there's new computers um the phone in my pocket is probably more powerful than you know the the laptop i dragged around eight or nine years ago i'm just making up numbers here but you