Beginnings

I first heard the term JAMStack on Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s Top 8 Web Development Trends 2019.

I’ve been playing with static site generators for a number of years for little task specific learning sites mainly for content produced by my wife for Startdoms but also prototypes for teaching Maths with the University of Leicester.

My company builds prototypes for a wide variety of projects - lots of realtime these days with visualisations. I have been typically building sites with APIs in Django and Go but also Node. I mainly use VueJS for frontend development having graduated from Angular 1 and before that jQuery.

I’ve create backends for business logic, access control and for protecting API keys to several old school API based services in the backend eg transactional email. For about a year I have been curious about the pieces - serverless functions (AWS Lambda, OpenFaaS), cloud databases (Firebase), headless CMS etc. Now people talking about the parts as a whole, I can feel a whole industry movement.

I was updating/reimplementing an old ASP.Net site (from 2010) that contain material and intactive workshops for a book. I was using Django for the content - with markdown for the pages. Within hours of hearing the term JAMStack I decided to create a static version of this site while learning the details of Hugo configuration. I did this over the weekend. I was excited.