On October 2nd and 3rd, Compose is returning for its second edition and per requests from last year, we’re going big on the developer content this year! There will still be plenty of opportunities for schmoozing with vendors, partners, and Netlify muckety-mucks… but the stage is going to feature code and concepts and demos and examples and… woah there Philip. Take a breath and explain why you’re so excited. Ok here goes…
We’re bringing experts from around the industry to our stage in San Francisco. Expect talks on building with the web platform and popular frameworks. Learn about building with new tools and primitives in the Netlify platform. Discover how the ecosystem is evolving and bringing more options and confidence for developers building the web. We’re going to have some fun along the way.
In short, we’ve dialed the content for web developers way up this year. And we can’t wait.
Speakers and themes at Compose 2024
While we still have a few speakers to announce, the program is looking great. Let me share a handful of the themes and details with you now so you can see why I’m excited.
Primitives and fundamentals
The teams at Netlify have been busy building and exposing more platform primitives for developers, frameworks authors, and content creators to leverage. Netlify CEO, Mathias Biilmann will give updates on this effort and with news on our plans for the future. He’ll offer insights into how the platform can be used to gain a competitive advantage when building the web. I predict lots of people eager to grab Mathias to talk more (which there’ll be plenty of opportunities to do).
Netlify has always been keen to embrace and build upon existing web standards and fundamentals, so it’s encouraging how this theme appears to be regaining momentum in the developer community.
We’ll have talks from…
Nick Taylor of OpenSauced to explore the history and features of the lowly HTML form element, which will dig into the power built right into browsers around this element and associated technologies. Nick is going to talk about how this oft underappreciated part of the web platform can drive modern web applications, go further into seeing how popular web frameworks leverage it, and how we can use it to provide robust, consistent, and rich user experiences without reinventing the wheel. A valuable message and important mindset.
Abbey Perini, a Vue developer at Nexcor who has been making a splash in the Vue community will also talk about web standards and specs in the context of how slots are used in components in order to deliver modular, extensible, reusable code. Abbey will give us insights into how these work in Vue and how that compares to other frameworks. Great insight for developers considering their approach to modular code and to assessing frameworks.
Speaking of frameworks, we’ll also hear from Matthew Phillips, CTO of Astro, to learn about recent developments and plans for this incredibly popular framework. We recently announced that we’re partnering with Astro to support their efforts, and are big fans of the approach Astro is taking to build atop web standards and to offer a model of opting in to complexity rather than inheriting it by default no matter what your project is. (A philosophy that resonates with Netlify and makes Astro suitable for a wide range of project types)
AI and modern tooling
Another theme sweeping the web development industry is AI. At Netlify, we’re very interested in how the use of AI can augment and enhance the web development process, so you can expect this to be a theme that surfaces many times during the day, and in the discussions at the various activities around the event.
Jina Anne of Microsoft (and beloved crafter of the web) will discuss the use of AI in creating personalized and adaptable user interfaces, and how AI can impact our work with design systems. There will be talk of ethics and opportunities. Not to be missed.
Mark Techson of Google and Angular fame, will expand on this topic and that of developer tooling and frameworks in his talk, “Build the next generation of web apps today”. Mark has a style of presentation that never fails to energize and inform. To be honest, I’d listen to him talk about watching paint dry… but that’s not the talk he’ll be giving here.
We’re going to get practical too, with a talk from Eve Porcello who has been both educating and entertaining web developers for years through her work at Moon Highway and around the internet. Eve will team up with Kira Corbett to livecode and use AI as a tool to create and deliver their presentation. Eve’s irreplaceable, but she’s going to try to replace herself anyway.
We are also terribly lucky to have Andrea Griffiths of GitHub speaking at Compose this year. Andrea’s talk will be another practical example of using AI tools to assist with the web development process. Expect to see a Next.js application evolve before your eyes with the use of various APIs, GitHub Copilot and nerves of steel from Andrea. I hear there may even be a prize awarded to a member of the audience. Color me intrigued.
Case studies, trends and lessons
Akia Obas, Netlify’s Director of Data and Insights, will be there to share analysis of our annual web development survey and perhaps some nuggets of info afforded to us from our position of running millions upon millions of sites and applications. Which reminds me, you can add your voice to the survey which is open now.
We’ll also get to learn from customers and partners who have been building the web with Netlify. There will be case studies to share challenges, approaches, and results from real-world projects, incredibly valuable for those planning the technical approach, or assessing potential vendors and partners for their next composable project and any scale.
There’s more, you’ll just have to come
With more details being confirmed as I write this, and the prospect of a gathering of developers, technical architects, partners, and Netlify engineers and experts all coming together for what tends to turn into a great meeting of minds (and a jolly good party), my advice is to snap up a ticket as soon as you can.
More to come! See you there!
