
Jamstack Handbook – All things Jamstack with 3 step-by-step tutorials - colbyfayock
https://jamstackhandbook.com/
======
aosaigh
Who is the Jamstack for in your opinion? I'm a web developer that makes a lot
of apps and marketing sites for small to medium businesses and I find it very
hard to justify the added complexity of a Jamstack architecture - there's just
too many moving parts.

It seems to me you need a few things:

\- A dedicated development team to manage the stack

\- Enough traffic to justify the complexity

\- Regular content publishing to make use of the build pipeline

\- A need for speed beyond what's regularly acceptable

Great work anyway on the book, it's good to see people charging for curated
knowledge.

~~~
nicoburns
Added complexity? At its simplest, Jamstack is just a static site generator. A
service like Netlify will do the entire build pipeline for you (for free) just
by pointing it at the git repo. Or if you want to DIY the hosting, then all
you have to do is find somewhere that can host static files.

Jamstack is largely about removing complexity.

~~~
aosaigh
At its simplest yes. But if you are proposing this as a solution to a client,
they will likely want to edit content. That will have to happen on a headless
CMS instance. That's whole new stack to maintain alongside. You then need to
set that up and configure the SPA to talk to it (GraphQL/Apollo?). When I come
back to client project in a month, is all this still going to be working ...?

Maybe, but it's certainly not less complex then a traditional Wordpress site.
So I'm wondering what are the criteria for using Jamstack successfully?

As you said it could be that it's good for simple static sites but not great
for more complex content-drive sites - I don't know, that's what I'm asking.

~~~
Pandabob
Obviously it depends a lot on which CMS you're using and I can imagine there
being a lot of complexity involved.

That said, setting up something like Contentful and integrating it with NextJS
is roughly a day or two of work if you're doing it for the first time. And it
all works over REST so you don't have to worry about GraphQL.

You can even do "previews" now with Next thanks to preview mode:
[https://next-preview.now.sh/](https://next-preview.now.sh/)

~~~
mherchel
Contentful just abstracts away the complexity (for money). It's still complex,
but you're paying instead of dealing with the complexity.

~~~
colbyfayock
i think thats a fair point but there's a lot of benefit from from that.
they're able to focus on making a great CMS

there are also some open source solutions that are great. Netlify CMS works
really well for a very basic page / blog management solution

a lot of the headless CMS solutions also offer generous free tiers, making it
perfect for web devs to spin up a free instance for their personal sites and
projects

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bauerd
The invention of the "JAM stack" is one of the greatest marketing stunts I
know of. Kudos to Netlify for rebranding HTML+AJAX

~~~
skc
The problem that Netlify has is that they are simply a feature of the big
cloud providers.

Microsoft is already testing the waters with their own offering and I'm sure
AWS and Google are as well. I'm not sure Netlify will survive the onslaught.

~~~
colbyfayock
i think there's a lot of truth to that - but they do is so fantastically well

there are a LOT of pain points to deal with rolling out all that is included
with the base netlify offering

hosting a static site is pretty easy - but configuring routing between
cloudfront and s3 can be complicated so that the reequests don't always
reference the root index.html

creating an autodeploy infrastructure can be challenging as well, tools like
github actions might make that a little easier, but there are a lot of
considerations there

it also makes these kinds of solutions more accessible to developers who might
not have the understanding or interest to set up that kind of infrastructure.
front end devs can build sites, connect, and go with little fuss

~~~
lowdose
I second this. Players like Netlify and Digital Ocean have a ridiculous amount
of mindshare for solving a certain problem faster without the complexity that
the big cloud providers bring.

I think the market is larger for simplified services without the IAM and S3
cruft, especially when you have to educate the client on the solution.

------
rishav_sharan
I like the idea of JAMstack and will likely use it for simple toy projects.
But I do not like the idea of promoting paid products on HN. this link is
basically just an ad telling users to "buy the book".

There is nothing for me to read, learn or discuss on the landing page unless I
buy the book.

~~~
projektfu
The upvoting/downvoting mechanism should be sufficient unless you have a
scenario where people are upvoting titles without reading the page.

Note to author: perhaps more enticing would be to have 4 examples, the first
being a free preview of the book and rest would require payment. Then people
could evaluate your tutorial style.

~~~
colbyfayock
thanks - thats a good point - i plan on releasing the first tutorial free
actually - i just haven't had the time to get that out yet, that'll be
hopefully posted on freecodecamp.org in the next couple of days

------
nanna
This looks great. People interested may also want to take a look at Andy
Bell's 11ty book, which is more of a general introduction to web development
and the jamstack:

[https://piccalil.li/course/learn-eleventy-from-
scratch/](https://piccalil.li/course/learn-eleventy-from-scratch/)

~~~
colbyfayock
Andy Bell is fantastic, great rec

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poyu
Can anyone point me to a good headless CMS solution that doesn't introduce
vendor lock in? I've tried Contenful and I only got nothing but good things to
say about it. Probably something open source and self hosted.

~~~
colbyfayock
there are a lot of good options here:
[https://headlesscms.org/](https://headlesscms.org/)

i personally use Netlify CMS for my website. it's not as feature rich as some
other options, but for a personal blog, it gets the job done, and it's open
source

~~~
poyu
Thanks for that link, will take a look!

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z3t4
You dont need that much tooling. A static site generator will do. Build your
site with vanilla HTML or markdown. Use web micro-services for widgets like
search, comments, contact-form, etc.

~~~
colbyfayock
for sure - that's definitely a valid solution. it all depends on the goals
you're trying to meet

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eurvin
'an unexpected error has occured'

I hope you get it up and running again soon, because I am very curious to know
what your handbook is all about.

~~~
colbyfayock
:o where are you seeing that, on the homepage? it's loading for me

~~~
eurvin
I get it in Safari 12.1.2 (12607.3.10) on the mac. It works correctly in
Firefox for me now.

~~~
colbyfayock
that's so strange - sorry you're experiencing that. im not having any issues
on my mac's safari :( glad FF is working for you though

i'll try to see if i can figure out a way to reproduce

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bitxbit
I guess there’s some use case for Jamstack static generators but unless you do
frequent builds just building vanilla HTML is my preference.

------
easton
What’s the expected knowledge before you read this?

~~~
colbyfayock
For the book - I don't think there really is a high expectation of knowledge,
except maybe just general web development from a high level. The hope for the
informational part is to get anyone acquainted with it

For the tutorials - the expectation is familiarity with Javascript and
probably React, given the examples are React, though I walk through each steps
with the code changes

~~~
Cederfjard
Edit: Pardon me! I think I encountered some weirdness on mobile, I couldn’t
scroll very far down. After a reload I’m seeing more.

——-

I’m seeing very little about the actual content of the book on the page. Could
you please detail a little bit more about what’s actually covered? What apps
are you building in those tutorials? Etc.

~~~
colbyfayock
sorry i heard there are some issues with the site but i haven't been able to
reproduce to fix :(

please let me know if you hvae more questions!

