KBall connects with Katie Sylor-Miller to talk about migrating OhShitGit to the JAMStack, migrating legacy codebases to modern front-end technologies, and design systems.

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When you add anything with user-generated content or dynamic data to a static site, the complexity of the build process can become comparable to launching a monolithic CMS. How can we add rich content to static sites without stitching together multiple third-party services? Every time I get into the nitty gritty of JAMStack implementations with anything but static content sites I end up saying (or merely thinking to myself), “This sounds like a whole lot of work to avoid some server-side rendering…” This piece on CSS Tricks appears to back up that premonition: Despite my enthusiasm, I’m often disheartened by the steep complexity curve I typically encounter about halfway through a JAMstack project. Normally the first few weeks are incredibly liberating. It’s easy to get started, there is good visible progress, everything feels lean and fast. Over time, as more features are added, the build steps become more complex, multiple APIs are added, and suddenly everything feels slow. In other words, the development experience begins to suffer. The good news is there are many smart, talented folks working on solving the various challenges that JAMStack sites face.

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Congrats to Quincy and everyone who has joined his mission with freeCodeCamp on an astounding rise: More than 40,000 freeCodeCamp graduates are now working in tech at companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Spotify. Millions of people watch freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel each month. Millions of people read freecodecamp.org/news each month. And people ask - and answer - thousands of tech-related questions each month on freecodecamp.org/forum. freeCodeCamp.org is now one of the most-used technology sites on the entire web. The future is bright. Click through to read what they accomplished in 2019 and how they’re up and running on a JAMstack.

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KBall catches up with Phil Hawksworth of Netlify at JAMStackConfSF to dive deep into JAMStack, what it’s about, where the ecosystem is going, and what is still hard.

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JAMStack is all that, whole grain low fat, I know you want a piece of that… No but seriously now, I love what’s going on with the JAMstack and the implications for performance, security, and maintainability. Not sure what this stack even is? Why should you care? In this interview, Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine talks with Phil Hawksworth from Netlify about what it is all about: JAMstack is all about a way of deploying and serving websites that don’t rely on an origin server, they don’t rely on requests hitting an active server all the time.

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How do you send email from a JAMstack-style site? Chris Coyer writes on CSS-Tricks: Let’s say you’re rocking a JAMstack-style site (no server-side languages in use), but you want to do something rather dynamic like send an email. Not a problem! That’s the whole point of JAMstack. It’s not just static hosting. It’s that plus doing anything else you wanna do through JavaScript and APIs. Here’s the setup…

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A new static site generator baby is born. It’s highly inspired by Gatsby.js (React based) but built on top of Vue.js If Gatsby intrigues you, but React isn’t your thing… check out Gridsome. It has the same concept of a universal GraphQL for all of your data sources.

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Bob Mitro, Owner of Publii: Unlike static-site generators that are often unwieldy and difficult to use, Publii provides an easy-to-understand UI much like server-based CMSs such as WordPress or Joomla!, where users can create posts and other site content, and style their site using a variety of built-in themes and options. I love static-site generators, my favorite being Jekyll. The performance and security benefits are pretty amazing. Still, I have to agree with Bob here, they’re not always easy to use for non-developers. Publii looks like a nice option for clients or those of us who prefer a nice UI.

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This project is designed to be a fully-functional, static site implementation of a blog system that is mostly compatible with Ghost and is built on EmberJS with fully working out of the box SEO friendly output. It supports being hosted on AWS S3 or any other static site hosting solution. Check out the demo. It’s 100% static and hosted on S3. 🎉

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Static site JAMStack generators are on the come-up and Gatsby looks super cool. This post is a bit heavy on the hype-side, but a good intro nonetheless if you want to check it out without, you know, checking it out.

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