Guillermo Rauch on Just Do Less — SmashingConf Live August 2020

[Music] okay so yeah the talk is called uh just do less and it's really about a set of principles for making great technology happen uh i'm gonna go into specifics of software development and jam stack and a lot of the exciting work that we're doing with nexjs of which i'm the co-founder and

co-creator and the versailles platform uh the best place to deploy any jam suck website and jam set frameworks like js so in the past as phil said i was involved with a number of projects of of which the common theme really has been speeding up user experiences real-time communication but most of all it's really been about javascript it's been about creating great uis with it it's about community and

with this sort of background a lot of what i want to talk about today is how do we make great technology happen how do we make great decisions for technology and kind of the underlying principle that i want to talk about is this idea of just doing less the principle is hopefully something that can allow you to navigate a world that is getting more and more complex especially uh in the front end world right so it's

hard to navigate sometimes the plethora of decisions when it comes down to static site generators web frameworks react versus vue javascript versus webassembly all the things that are sort of coming your way uh it's it's quite hard to make good decisions so hopefully with this principle that i'm going to talk about today it becomes easier to navigate that ultimately it's also about remembering that as developers we do a lot of work to

ultimately create delightful experiences for people and enabling great business outcomes so i really want to involve this theme of all the technology that we use choose and create has to do ultimately with the end user experience and the other and perhaps uh less obvious part of this all is that sure you want to start doing as little as possible you want to start being as lazy as possible really

uh you want to start being as simple as possible but no but not simpler and i'm going to talk about how we can navigate that world of ever accumulating complexity because at the end of the day we all get excited as developers to reboot projects start from scratch start from a clean slate use the latest web framework but it's uh helpful sometimes to just look ahead and sort of foresee the complexity that is coming because for most people it is coming and

it's inevitable and i wanted to contextualize the talk too because we are and we have been as a company as developers of a popular web framework we have gone through this journey ourselves so we've been in the space of designing a framework and when it comes down to exposing developers with choices there's also been many so one of the things that i wanted to do with this talk that i've been working on for a while now is give you our journey as well give you a

sort of opinionated point of view of this very complex world and hopefully with the lessons and examples that i provide you can sort of make a very informed decisions and learn how we basically put this principle of lessons more into action and one of the things that i've seen come up in the recent number of years that has helped sort of bring this principle into action