It’s our 3rd annual New Year’s party! We welcome a new panelist, review our (failed) resolutions from last year, discuss what’s trending in the web world, and even set some new (failed) resolutions for this year.

This is part 1 of a 5-part series on learning Astro, a new-kid-on-the-block static site builder that’s capturing the hearts of web developers due to its Bring Your Own Framework (BYOF) approach and Zero Emitted JS (ZEJS?) by default.

Throughout this series, I’ll walk you, step-by-step, through building an Astro-based blog(codenamed: Astro-Ink). You’ll discover more of Astro, its benefits, and super-interesting constructs and patterns that Astro brings to the table.

What Vercel has enabled teams to do with Next.js is next level, and it’s truly evident when you read stories like this one from Cory Etzkorn on Notion migrating their marketing site to Next.js.

We rebuilt our entire marketing site from scratch, choosing to go with a statically generated architecture over our former purely client-rendered approach. Two months and 109 React components later, we’ve now fully migrated to our framework of choice, Next.js, and couldn’t be happier with our decision. Here’s how we got there.

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and JS Party panelist Amal Hussein join Jerod to discuss the state of the web platform! We opine on why it’s so important and unique, where it stands today, what modern web development looks like, and where the whole thing is headed in 2021 and beyond.

If you missed this exchange between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann at the recent Jamstack Conf, read this to get the tldr. Here’s a section of the conversation to focus on…

Public debate kicked off at the end of August, with Mullenweg telling reporter Richard MacManus: “Jamstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it…”

“I don’t think the era of WordPress is over,” Mullenweg added. “I think we’re going to reach over 50 per cent market share in the next few years.”

This is not so much to do with architecture, but rather because users love software-as-a-service, whereas Jamstack is about custom development. There is not yet a Jamstack equivalent to the likes of Shopify, Squarespace or Wix, all mentioned as growing businesses.

WordPress and Jamstack are not completely in opposition. “I still think WordPress can play a really important role in the future ecosystem,” said Biilmann. The pattern he said he sees is WordPress used as a headless service, with developers “completely being in control of the front end layer.”

In which I pick on Jamstack a bit to make a larger point that we still haven’t found that Silver Bullet and we’re not going to so let’s put our thinking caps on, make sound choices, and pick the right tools for each situation.

It’s backwards compatible back to IE 8 (😱), loads super fast thanks to minimal page weight, and completely free to run on Netlify. Get yer live action demo right here.

Divya and Jerod welcome ZEIT founder Guillermo Rauch to the show for a deep discussion on the state of JAMstack, what’s new & exciting with Next.js, and some big picture analysis of where the industry is heading.

Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub, board member at Netlify) joins the party and brings his new, opinionated, full-stack, serverless web app framework with him. Will Redwood help usher in the future Tom predicted back in 2018? We discuss that and a whole lot more on this must-listen episode.

Want great developer experience and easy scaling? Redwood is here! Built on React, GraphQL, and Prisma, Redwood works with the components and development workflow you love, but with simple conventions and helpers to make your experience even better.

We’re having Tom Preston-Werner on JS Party tomorrow for a deep-dive on Redwood.

Dustin Schau joins the party to talk about the state of Gatsby and the changes and improvements to it in the last year. We talk about what Gatsby delivers to the front end and how it does it quickly with improvements to the build system. Dustin also fields our questions and talks about Gatsby Cloud and where things are going.

KBall interviews Brian Leroux in a wide-ranging discussion covering “Progressive Bundling” with native ES Modules, building infrastructure as code, and what the future of JamStack and serverless deployment might look like.

WordPress is MASSIVE — so why would a site using WordPress consider moving to JAMstack? This technical case study from Sarah Drasner covers how Smashing Magazine manages their content and what an actual WordPress migration looks like (using Smashing Magazine).

In this two-part article series, we’ll cover what an actual WordPress migration looks like, using a case study of the very site you’re reading from right now.

We’ll talk through the gains and losses, the things we wish we knew earlier, and what we were surprised by. And then we’ll follow it up with a technical demonstration of one possible migration path, not off WordPress completely, but how you can serve decoupled WordPress so that you can have the best of both worlds: a JAMstack implementation of WordPress that gives you all the power of their dashboard and functionality, with better performance and security.

Chris Coyier:

The “official website” changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about, but I care as someone who has to write the word in a professional context quite often. If we’re going to “Jamstack,” so be it.

I prefer JAMstack, myself, but I think the Ajax analogy he quotes is an apt one. Aside: if this trend continues, Chris and the team might need to rename the site to “Jamstack-Tricks” soon.

Oh, and while we’re here: It’s Changelog not ChangeLog 😄

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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. 🎉

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.