Explanations

Good overview of the prevailing software architecture and application hosting models of the past 50 years, up to the serverless paradigm trending today.

👀 Based on my most current knowledge, I give it at least 5 more years of peak hype and ground-breaking innovations https://t.co/QubyWzSl83 — Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) July 31, 2020 Re React is such a good idea that we will spend the rest of the decade continuing to explore its implications and applications. — Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) November 22, 2016

Podcast interview with Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel; featuring me as part of the The New Stack team.

Useful post by flaviocopes, breaking down frontend and backend as it stands today.

It’s taken a while for the JAMstack terminology to sink in, compared to how I have used web publishing terminology throughout my career (dating back to the 90s). Here’s how I currently see my “stack,” with key terminology in italics: a) I use Hugo as my framework; aka it’s my Static Site Generator. (Another framework I’m familar with at this point is Gatsby.) So when I start a new post, such as this one you’re reading now, I type this into my terminal:

Lambros Petrou, Software Engineer at Facebook and ex-AWS, has a good post comparing Netlify, Vercel and AWS as jamstack platforms: If you focus only on Jamstack applications, my recommendation would be to go with Vercel. It has amazing performance, and the zero-config approach really does wonders for the majority of the popular frameworks. Recommending Next.js for one more time 😃If you are going to find uses for Netlify’s add-ons, then it’s a great choice as well!

Servers are not going away, but they are moving around and hiding. Static Site Generation (SSG) can be thought of moving around the servers and taking them away from the hot path. Instead of putting a server in between the user’s request and the response, we compute the response ahead of time. Guillermo Rauch

And by “static” pages we don’t mean, like, 1994 static. The vast majority of Netlify pages are dynamic — they are just interacting with the browser instead of needing to be built server-side. Netlify co-founder and CEO Matt Biilmann, speaking with The New Stack in September 2017.

I’ve been going through the video tutorials for Hugo created by Mike Dane, which I’m finding really helpful in getting up to speed. If you’re new to Hugo like me, I highly recommend them. Start here:

I’ve started a new, experimental, blog on the open source ‘static site generator’ Hugo. It’s being deployed by Netlify, via GitHub. This was inspired by my recent column about static site generators (SSG) on The New Stack, where I’m a senior editor and weekly columnist. Specifically, I wrote about Gatsby and the fast-growing web development trend known as JAMstack. Read my column for the details, but the upshot: this is a new, cloud native, way of publishing a website.