My love-hate relationship with the #JAMStack
A thread 🧵 👇
#100DaysOfCode
The year was 2020. The lockdown has taken its toll on my boredom. Browsing software development forums became my second job. I knew all the trends. All the hot topics.
That’s where I discovered something called The JAMStack. “Sounds delicious”, I thought to myself. Let’s learn more! Turns out it stands for “Javascript, APIs and Markup”! I am intrigued.
By coincidence, a year or so before I started discovering @GatsbyJS and @Netlify and how awesome they are at building and deploying static websites when working together
Back then, however, I had a different mindset. I was a more “traditional” developer. “A web application without a proper LAMP stack? Inconceivable!!”.
“How am I supposed to store data and files?” I thought. The JAMStack community had the answer: “everything’s on Github of course!” The answer was disappointing to me. No way I’m forcing potential clients that have nothing to do with programming create a GitHub account.
On the other hand, however, it was great for me because I know GitHub quite well. I could create a blog website using the JAMStack fine. But for projects where clients aren’t developers? JAMStack isn’t the right choice. Or is it...
A random thought popped into my head: don’t you have a Google Drive account you haven’t used since university? And doesn’t it have a well developed API you can use?
Well! There you go! You don’t like GitHub for storage? There it is! There’s your solution for file storage! Google Drive it is. But what about data?
Google has another fancy tool which also has a nice API! Yeap! You got it! Google Sheets! That’s your data storage right there!
The more I thought of it, the more I loved the idea of the JAMStack. All the while everything is free! All you need to pay for is the domain.
OK! All is great! But there’s one thing missing. I needed to create some sort of API which binds it all together in a nice package.
Enter: SERVERLESS!
The easiest way to create an API is serverless. AWS Lambda. Azure Functions. Netlify Functions. So many choices! What? The first million requests are free? What are you waiting for! Bring it in!
And with all that, I never looked back. Last month, I published my first full JAMStack application. A website for my dad’s small business. Complete with a custom admin console. Saving him a ton of 💰
savvasstephanides.github.io/showcase/sscom…
And this ladies and gentlemen, is how I learned to love an architecture I hated, because I haven’t thought things through thoroughly. Saving me a bunch of money in the process. #
Thank you for your time.
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