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Jamstacked Issue 33

The community that Jamstack gave us

Published: Jun 24, 2021

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​33 — June 24, 2021
✦ web version

In the early days of "static sites", before the term Jamstack was introduced, there were a lot of users but little community. Mostly folks were siloed into communities specific to the tool they used - Jekyll, Hugo, and Middleman being some of the largest at the time. However, giving something a name allows people to organize community around it and share common problems/solutions. Nowadays, for example, we have two strong Slack communities, Jamstack meetups around the globe, Jamstack events, books, newsletters 😉 and more. So, while there may be high-level debates about the evolving meaning of Jamstack, the community around it continues to grow.

Speaking of community, Neltify is conducting their annual Jamstack Community Survey if you are interested in participating.

Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's Good

Next.js 11 Released
The popular React-based framework adds features such as improved performance, Webpack 5 support, conformance and improvements to image and script processing. Thomas Ledoux has a good rundown of the features announced at the recent Next.js event.

Next.js Team

Just How Niche is Headless WordPress?
A look at the growth of solutions and even companies dedicated to headless Wordpress that are very developer-focused. But Chris thinks that they will remain relatively niche because of Wordpress’s huge non-developer audience.

Chris Coyier

How to Build a Database-Driven Jamstack Site
Connecting your Jamstack frontend to your data backends can get complex, and some SSGs don’t offer built-in ways to handle it. In this post, I explore building a Jamstack site using Hugo that pulls data from MySQL at build time.

Brian Rinaldi

Survey: Jamstack Users Look Beyond Performance Gains, Next.js
This survey is interesting mostly because I’m skeptical of the results. Next.js losing adoption to Statiq, Scully and even Jekyll? Seems more likely that the survey gained traction in very specific, tight-knit communities rather than a reflection of broader usage?

Lawrence E Hecht

✂︎ Tools and Resources

  • Jolt - A new framework designed for building Jamstack apps with serverless functions that can be easily deployed to AWS.
  • Learn Eleventy From Scratch - This extensive online training in Eleventy from Andy Bell is now free.
  • Ship Less JavaScript with Astro - An interview with one of the creators of Astro talking about how its approach is different from other SSGs.
  • Hugo 0.84.0 - This release brings several configuration fixes and improvements that will be especially useful for themes.
  • TheJam.dev session recordings - All the sessions from TheJam.dev earlier this year are now publicly available.

❖ Tidbits

Gatsby Rolls Out Functions, "Shifts Left"
Gatsby rolled out a functions capability during Gatsby Camp. These serverless functions will automatically deploy if you use Gatsby Cloud but the article states that they are supported on Netlify as well.

Robert Richardson

Dynamic Short URLs with Eleventy
Generating custom dynamic redirects that work in Netlify based upon data using Eleventy.

Raymond Camden

Guide to Jamstack personalization
Comparing two services that offer personalization features for Jamstack applications: Outsmartly and Uniform Optimize.

Joost Meijles

Client-Side Routing In Next.js
Guides you through almost everything you need to know about Routing in Next.js.

Adebiyi Adedotun Lukman

Thanks for reading. Catch you next time — Brian