App sharing links, GraphQL introspection and the Fast Forward program

Howdy and happy October, Contentful community!

Oh my, so many exciting things happened this month that I hardly know where to start.

We released the Fast Forward schedule, Salma and I had big fun at our Structured Content webinar and we were jammin' big time at Jamstack Conf. It was an excellent month!

Additionally, the App Framework had feature additions that you don't want to miss!

Are you ready for all this? Ready, steady, go!

Events

Our annual conference, Fast Forward 2021 by Contentful

It's time to come together again. Our virtual conference Fast Forward will take place November 3–5. And we just released the program with speakers from GitHub, New Relic, FIFA and Scott Hanselman from Microsoft. Make sure to have a look and sign up for free to learn how developers, builders and creators change the way we’re building products and websites. I can't wait to see all of you there!

Sign up for Fast Forward

Also, if you want to get some hands-on experience, join our team on November 5 for a full day of masterclasses that focus on Contentful's most powerful capabilities and best practices.

Contentful corner

App icons, app sharing and more new App Framework features

I'm incredibly excited about this App Framework release. The App Framework allows you to customize the Contentful web interfaces. That's valuable by itself already, and from now on, you can share your apps with the world! And you can upload a custom icon, so that they look sharp too! 

I'm super into this feature, and if you have built apps that you want to share with the Contentful community, reply to this email and let me know about them!

Here's Salma and Brittany to tell you all about App sharing and custom App icons.

What is a REST API?

Salma published a beginner post covering RESTful APIs such as our Content Delivery API. If you want to learn more about it, this post is for you!

5 answers to the most common Contentful questions from content authors

Our friends from Smarter Content published a valuable article covering Contentful questions from an editor perspective. Smarter Content is publishing good content lately, so make sure to check it out.

Build your own blog app with SwiftUI (and Contentful)

I'm not a Swift developer but after reading Roman Luzgin's post I considered giving it a try. This post walks you through the process of setting up Contentful and SwiftUI. Thank you, Roman, for sharing your journey!

A project from the community – Contentful-umzug

If you're serving content to large scale applications used by many different teams, you might know that content migrations are inevitable. Rouan Wilsenach published an npm package that will come in handy!

We're looking for a new Developer Experience leader

Our Developer Experience team is looking for a new leader (yes, you can become my boss!). If you know someone who has experience shaping developer communities and would love to lead a lovely team, please let us know!

Links we like

All you (n)ever wanted to know about introspection

Our very own API engineer Stephan Schneider spoke at the local GraphQL meetup and went knee-deep into GraphQL introspection. I recommend watching it, if you want to level up your GraphQL game.

An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

I had a fascinating chat with our ecosystem engineer Marco Link. He recommended checking out a new JavaScript bundler, esbuild. It outperforms everything present in the ecosystem and, after looking at these build-time statistics, I'll definitely give it a try.

Skills you need as a web developer

Speaking of web development tooling, there are countless other things that you have to consider when building for the web. I found Andreas Mehlsen's web development map and it's a great starting point if you want to discover more things to learn.

Changelog

Webhooks for tasks

Contentful webhooks now support events for tasks. Post new tasks to Slack, send an email to your colleagues, automate all the tasks!

More new task features

To manage your workload, you can now assign tasks to teams, add a due date, and work with them in Compose + Launch!

New extensibility locations for apps in Compose + Launch

It's not only tasks that are available in Compose + Launch now. You can now place more apps in the sidebar and page location to streamline your editing experience!

Stay safe, and talk with you next month!

That’s it for October! Visit our developer portal to stay up to date. It includes developer blog posts, videos and tutorials. Let us know via Slack or Twitter how we can continue to help you make awesome things.

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