Recently, Ryan Florence posted a tweet that I summarize as a criticism of the Jamstack for being oversold on its benefits and undersold on its complexity (i.e. we don't talk about the hard parts like auth or data persistence as they are handled by "magical elves"). Obviously, I disagree but there's some truth to the criticism.
Of course, we do talk a lot about these very things as a quick perusal of past issues of this newsletter would illustrate. However, the discussion, especially for someone new to Jamstack, may be distributed across countless posts simply because there are many ways to solve each. Perhaps there are ways we can better communicate up front the pieces that make up a complete Jamstack solution (beyond the SSG & deployment) that won't leave folks like Ryan with the wrong impression.
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Thinking in Jamstack
Working with the Jamstack forces developers to think about things they have not had to think about before, in particular, when to render content - in the build or on the client (or even on the server).
Brian Rinaldi
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How We Improved Smashing Mag Performance
This is a great article that is mostly not about Jamstack. However, given that Smashing Mag is built on the Jamstack, it is a welcome reminder that using Jamstack is not a silver bullet for performance issues.
Vitaly Friedman
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Search in the Jamstack World
Nearly every Jamstack site ends up needing to implement search, but there are a range of tools to do this, everything from free build-time indexers to paid services. This is a good look at the most popular options.
Nebojsa Radakovic
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Yari, the New MDN Web Documentation Platform
A look at the Mozilla Developer Network’s new Jamstack-based platform and how it not only benefits performance but also the contribution workflow for external contributors.
Bruno Couriol
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✂︎ Tools and Resources
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Digger - A service that is kind of like a build your own customizable Netlify deployment pipeline, but using things like AWS and GCP (in private alpha).
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Jamstack on .NET - A new resource built by the maker of Statiq, a relatively new tool for building Jamstack sites using .Net.
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Hugo Cheat Sheet - A printable reference for common Hugo functions and variables (requires an email to download).
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What Is Gatsby.js, and Why Is It a Big Deal? - If you're interested in Gatsby, this is a very good interview with Gatsby engineer Max Stoiber.
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Thanks for reading. Catch you next time — Brian
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