JAMstack Article
Tags: javascript
Published: 2020-12-18 21:53:27

*Josie Woodman*
The title of the session I attended was called **Bringing Remote Sensing and Disaster Relief to JAMstack.** Before attending, I had no idea what that meant because I didn’t have a full understanding of what Jamstack was and how they were going to bring remote sensing (which I didn’t know much of either), and what “disaster relief” meant in this context, so it was interesting to see what it actually was. I found it pretty interesting to see what developers can do with coding and what they can create with just the power of a computer and the knowledge of several coding languages and features. I was hoping to learn more about Jamstack and what it has to do with this particular session, and to learn how to do it myself and how it works so that one day I could maybe try it and see if it works for me.

I learned about Nature Serve and how they put together a map of biodiversity importance involving animals and climate change and to pinpoint which animals are in danger of going extinct the most in the lower 48 states of the United States, and the reason I include this, is because it is very fascinating to see how the human race has come so far to create technologies used to help the environment and all those who reside in it; like the animals. They also showed a similar map about the COVID-19 pandemic and several other really cool examples.

Another thing I learned that Jamstack actually plays a strong role in helping scientists with global issues that they are trying to solve through advanced data technology that takes the data, breaks it down and analyzes it into possible solutions in order to help solve these problems. The program is called EarthDATA and it has a series of collections (topics) with data and important information gathered from scientific research to attempt to predict outcomes and solutions to the ongoing issues.

One more thing I learned was how the speaker, Colby Fayock, explained and walked through how his company was working with a web application called Capella that takes older images of street maps from years ago to pinpoint the exact street view location as an image on the exact same spot on the map, much like Google Earth. He told us that he used the following programs to successfully make this application:

* Gatsby
* AWS S3
* React Leaflet
* AWS Lambda
* STAC
* Elasticsearch

My final thoughts of this session was overall very impressed and very hopeful for the future of technology. It is so cool how developers are using their skills to help the world and everyone in it to prevent danger and harm. They can pinpoint where wildfires are and can view it from various perspectives using satellite technology. I find that so amazing and the perfect way to utilize technology in the 21st century. The only question I have regarding this topic, is will the general public be able to access and use this information and technology or will it be strictly a government operated operation? Will it be used for good or bad?

# Link to webinar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHUir4I13c&list=PL58Wk5g77lF94tg-F3y5zRyDeLVhTDnTg&index=11
https://jamstackconf.com/2020/october/