Why Jamstack?

Jamstack is like passing the Torii Gate into a new realm.
Jamstack is like passing the Torii Gate into a new realm.

I think I will take a personal approach to answering this question. As a web developer since 1999, but I really got burned out from developing by 2012. Not good when you are also an ICT teacher. Then, in 2019, I was introduced to Gridsome, a static site generator. That was my first introduction to Jamstack.

It brought me back to the time of developing websites with Quanta Plus which was my go to IDE in 2004. I got to see code first. I was back in control of web development. More websites switched to WordPress. This killed web developing. Developers lost control of, well, developing and, even worse, designing. We hated the new WP frameworks where you spent more time clicking than actual development.

I have nothing against WordPress; it is a great CMS. Managing a full stack server running WordPress can be daunting. If you are a WordPress developer and you have not had a plugin hack, well either you are a liar or you never used WordPress.

Eventually, you got bored with maintaining a server just for WordPress. You wondered when the next PHP update would break your WordPress instance. And, my God, the time spent checking whether your cached site was running was uncountable.

With Gridsome, I thought my days of running WordPress were over. Eventually, I learned NuxtJS which brought me to Next.js. This led me to SvelteKit and Astro. Now I am pushing my code to GitHub, deploying to Cloudflare Pages or Vercel. I am storing my images to Cloudinary. The latter sentence is called the Edge, which I will talk about on another page.

I am not talking about what Jamstack is, as you noticed. You can go to Jamstack.org for that. Instead, I am showing how it made development fun again. I could also bring in WordPress as well. Since APIs are a very important part of Jamstack, I can still use WordPress as my “headless” CMS, either with REST API or GraphQL.

Even better, I can use APIs from other applications, databases, etc., to further enhance my web projects.

So for me personally, I went from developing in WordPress and managing a full stack LEMP server to managing a Jamstack project architecture on the Edge. In short, when a customer asked if I could do something in WordPress, my response was always, let me check. Now, when a potential customer asks me if I can do something with Jamstack, I can say yes.

Therefore, I like Jamstack. If you are interested in developing a future project in Jamstack, or you just want to chat more on the topic, just send me an email via my Contact Form.