My first jam on the JAMstack
Is this what love at first sight feels like?
I got introduced to the world of JAMstack not too long ago. I had heard crazy loads about GatsbyJS and Netlify previously from other indie developers, but even after checking out their websites, I could not yet grasp the significance behind these new web technologies. Only after being introduced to the larger context and trend behind JAMstack and falling down the Google rabbit hole reading up more articles about it, did it all make sense.
Connecting up a bunch of APIs using Javascript to run your site, while updating content via Markup, feels like the future. Much of the heavy lifting on back-end code is abstracted away, which to a newbie coder like me, feels a lot less scary and a lot more time-saving to get a site up and running. The fact that it serves up static pages gives it a great speed and security boost, but the sites are hardly static, because you can serve up dynamic content via APIs too. The modular aspect of stacking these API services on top of one another feels so similar to the nocode approaches I’m familiar with, of meshing different web services together to make a product. Don’t things seem to be moving towards more abstraction, less coding? JAMstack seems to be a step closer towards the direction of nocode, if you ask me.
After all that research and reading up documentation, I was pretty convinced to try setting up a JAMstack site today, via a combination of GatsbyJS, Netlify, and Netlify CMS. But chance encounter with Stackbit made all that unnecessary. In just a few minutes on Stackbit’s visual onboarding tool, it connected up my Github and Netlify accounts, and generated a static site based on a SaaS theme. And voila! I have a boilerplate JAMstack website already, and the only thing left that I needed to do to to make it truly mine was to customise the content, and link up a custom domain. I didn’t even need to touch any command line, install NodeJS, or code any Javascript. The ease of setting up a blazingly fast website based on modern technologies, all in a few minutes, just blew my mind.
Did I mention all this was FREE? Yes free, like air.
Crazy!
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