Netlify’s new Chief Technology Officer Dana Lawson has a confession: She finds JavaScript “painful.” It’s an admission given a bit sheepishly since the cloud-based web development platform’s target audience is frontend developers.
“I did a rodeo tour of JavaScript. I’m a terrible JavaScript developer, and I work at a frontend company,” Lawson laughed. “I tell [Netlify CEO] Matt Billmann all the time, maybe I’m in the right position because I know how painful JavaScript is.”
Still, Lawson, who was promoted last month, is excited by all the developments in the JavaScript framework world.
“You look at Remix — Remix handles it one way, you come over here, you look at Astro, Solid, and again, Next, who are just really pushing the edge on […] how to do ISR [Incremental Static Regeneration] and streaming when it comes to the power of what JavaScript and serverless can do, it’s incredible,” she said.
She does wonder if it all comes at a cost, however.
“On the flip side of that, I think […] wait a minute, why are we making the web harder?” she said. “The web is meant to be fast, it’s meant to be approachable.”
Making that happen drew her to the company from the vice president of engineering role at GitHub, she said. Among Netlify’s efforts to simplify is its recently launched Composable Web platform for enterprises, which Lawson cited as a tool that assists developers with challenges such as security and compliance.
“When I was at GitHub, it was about empowerment of developers to be able to do more, be innovative, and help advance human progress,” she said. “And now at Netlify, we’re able to do that but with a bigger set of players that don’t have to be full-stack engineers, that can be frontend engineers, be experts in what they do, and still have that autonomy and agency to innovate.”
Before her promotion, Lawson served as the senior vice president of engineering at Netlify, but her career started in the military.
“I never thought I would be here in tech, since in the late 90s I grew up in Southeast New Mexico — not known for its tech scene, more known for football and oil,” she said. “I wanted to forge my own way out of poverty in the desert. I joined the military, and I’ve always had a knack for science and math, and there was a new field emerging. I knew that I could stay inside because computers need air conditioning — that was my logic. That’s how I got into this field.”
The Army put her through an intense year of learning everything from networking to programming, she said. She learned Java, but worked primarily on the systems side, working as a Unix administrator and with IBM WebSphere. When it comes to languages, she’s a self-described “Go nerd.” She also likes Python.
“I’m glad that AI and ML are back, because Python is awesome,” she said. “It’s just super intuitive. And that’s really exciting. I didn’t predict Python to come back like it [has].”
We asked Lawson about Netlify’s own approach to managing its frontend. As might be expected from a company known for its promotion of Jamstack, Netlify’s own web assets are Jamstack and headless, Lawson said. It has sites built with Eleventy, Astro and Next, she added.
“As the world really continues to think about computing, and speed and time to first byte, and honestly, the quick evolution of these generative AI tools. When these models are running on phones — because they will — […] it’s going to be a whole new ballgame,” she said. “Browser and serverless is still going to rule supreme, because you’re going to want to save that compute, the energy and bandwidth, for the heavy lifting.”
Since The New Stack had recently looked at the question of monorepos on the frontend, we asked Lawson how Netlify approaches repos. She acknowledged this is a huge conversation for technology leaders and answered somewhat cautiously.
“You’ve got to find the right tool for the right job,” she said. “As newly minted CTO types, we just want to have homogenized systems so that we can reduce complexity and so we can improve productivity. And I feel like I have made bad decisions in the past of going like, hey, let’s just go into full microservices and move away from a mono repo and a monolith, so that we can have better separation of service.”
But that approach might lead to more problems than a company might have had just staying with the mono repo, she added. The code is just the beginning of the journey when considering mono versus multi repos, she cautioned.
“My opinion of it now is you’ve got to look at it holistically, and really understand what problems you’re solving, what problems with the technology you’re solving, and I don’t think there is one system to rule them all,” Lawson.
Often, people move off monoliths because they reach the limitations of scaling capacity, she said. Instead, she suggested it’s better to think about the trade-offs and risks the development team is willing to accept, as well as the size of the team and how it relates to business outcomes.
“Is there any one system to rule them all? I think it’s a trap.”
Note: Dana Lawson is not related to the author.
