My take on Brian Douglas’ take on the JAMStack
I attended my second civic tech hack night at Code for America in San Francisco last night and I was so thrilled by what I encountered there that I couldn’t not write about it.
The main reason I went was to listen to what Brian Douglas had to say about the JAMStack, and boy was it music to my ears, and everyone in the audience. The overarching theme of his words was that most websites are needlessly complicated. He took us on a quest back to the early days of the web, where HTML reigned supreme and everything was static by default. Then, a bunch of developers got carried away doing crazy complicated stuff hitting servers to get button text and serving up ham and cheese sandwiches via a node server. What we’re left with is this highly scalable, genuinely amazing backend technology for software that actually needs up to the second data changes such as social media sites and news websites. However, the fact is that the vast majority of sites don’t need a backend at all. Jason, one of the organizers of Code for SF at one point openly lamented the woes that they are facing managing their codeforsanfranscico.org site because it was originally built using Jekyll and Github Pages, then someone took over the development alone, decided they needed a node server in the mix, subsequently left the organization and now they can’t understand his complex code and are migrating back to Jekyll.This is a prime example of technical debt, which is a huge problem in software. Developers too often overcomplicate things to boost their egos, not taking into account that if they believe in the product they are working for, and they should if they are working on it, they almost definitely won’t be the last person to work on the code base. I too am guilty of this at times, but I am learning that it serves both me and the developer after me to KISS. It’s amazing what is possible with the combination of JS, APIs, HTML and maybe a fancy CSS library like FlexBox or SASS.People are fooled that some sort of backend is at play in static sites using these combos and they also get a much snappier site bundled into the mix. Brian’s content was accessible to all and most importantly sprinkled with a healthy dose of humor to keep us interested, most notably the Yeezy references which he is especially fond of. Some other notable mentions from the talk were the mention of the JSON Web Token(JWT) protocol, which enables developers to set up authentication relatively easily on a static site, which has long been seen as one of the major reasons to build a backend.
I’ve been using Netlify as a CDN for precious sites I’ve built and I just today moved my main site onto the platform, it’s a level up from Github Pages and if you’re just running a personal site it might not even be necessary. However, it definitely does make things like setting up a production and staging environment to check how your site behaves in the big bad world rather than on a sheltered localhost. Brian’s presentation was at no point salesy, and he’s a former salesman so that’s saying something. I even managed to snap a photo with him after which is a nice way to wrap up this post. Thanks for reading and check out my personal site to subscribe to my email list or ask me any questions you have on front -end development!
Oh and here’s a photo of the hack night itself that I bounced around for a bit at afterward.
Thanks for your attention, it’s the most valuable thing you can give anyone. The hardest thing about writing these posts is often getting started, so any suggestions/requests for topics would be appreciated! I also welcome feedback on previous posts.
