Exploring the Bounds of Jamstack on What the Jam
January 23, 2024
Watch in 29 minutes
Welcome to a new episode of "What the Jam," the show that dives deep into the fascinating realm of Jamstack, bringing you face-to-face with its most influential figures. In this episode, we're excited to feature Zach Leatherman, the creative mind behind Eleventy and a key figure in the Jamstack community. Zach takes us through his journey with Eleventy, discussing the inspirations and challenges behind creating one of the most popular static site generators. He shares his insights on the evolution of Jamstack, its role in reshaping the landscape of web development, and a path forward. Have your say at https://thefutureofjamstack.org
Searchable Transcript
and I think that if jamstack can succeedit needs to have a clear definition ofwhat it is and what it isn't and if it'sjust going to be this vague
all-encompassing umbrella term thenjamstack will fall and there's no use tokeeping it around it has no educationalpurpose it will have no technical
purpose it won't mean anything so if youwant jamstack to succeed it needs tohave a clear definition it needs to takehard stances on things and draw some
hard lines because that's the uniquebenefits of jamstack have those hardlines this is what the jam an interviewSeries where we're finding out what's
next for jamstack find out more at thefuture of jam. org I'm really excited tohave the creator of 11y and hand andmini pies and jamstack Zack liman here
today welcomeZack yeah thanks thanks for having meI'm excited to behere Zach what does Jam tech
mean to you oh my goodness yeah yeahthere's been a lot of definitions overthe years um for me it's build timerendering it's been sort of build time
rendering from the beginning you'repreena all of your markup and sourcefiles and you have a folder of uhcontent that you can and assets that you
can upload to your web server um um andI think maybe over the years I've alsosort of included The Continuousintegration server piece of it so the G
workflow where you commit to get and itautomatically triggers a new build um Ithink that that can also that's maybeanother piece of it that I really like
but maybe that's not Baseline jamstackthat's an enhancement off off the uh thesort of yeah the Baseline experience ofjust just having static HTML files that
you can upload to a web server and hostvery easily and it's very portable yeahit's it's a good question of there'sdifferent lines here of of what is core
jamstack what's the best practice andthen what are things that work well witha jam stack um but aren't necessarilyJam stack and I think those three things
often get blended into a soup and it'shard to to pull them apart um like thereI think yeah you'resaying the the cicd get kind of
workflows of best practices what wouldyou put in those othercategories uh what do you mean by othercategories so there's like core
jamstack um best practices and then notjamstack but works well withjamstack yeah I think that uh yeah whatI mentioned is uh just core Jam is a
folder full of files um sort of jamstackenhancements or jamstack adjacent thingsum is the sort of the workflow processof having an automatic deploy which I
think is great I love that feature Ithink serverless is maybe somethingwhere it getsinto um more jamstack distant but
jamstack still jamstack adjacent um butif a a host didn't have a serverless umfeature built in I wouldn't considerthat not to be a jamstack host I mean it
really comes down to if if you are astatic host you are a jamstack host Imean it's it's very interesting becauseI remember from my personal website sort
of back in the day as I made atransition from WordPress to jeal manymany years ago um I was still hostingstatic files on a PHP application server
and I was paying for PHP applicationserver price but just hosting staticfiles and uh and I and I could see myhost start to differentiate between the
two I was using nearly free speech atthe time and I still have some things onthem but um but yeah they sort of wentthrough this this Milestone of divorcing
the PHP aspect from the static hostingas aspect and actually had differentpricing models for each and so it becameeasier and cheaper
for both the host and the the personpaying the host's bills me um to use astatic site and I had to worry about somany so like less architecture pieces um
WordPress went through a very very hardtime for a while um where yeah I meanWordPress instances were getting hackedall the time and there was a lot of
vulnerabilities and you had to keep yourWordPress instance updated you had towatch those updat updates too because ifyou weren't good about updating your
instance then your website could gethacked and I think at one point mywebsite did get hacked um W when I wason
WordPress um I mean it wasn't like a bigdeal because they just injected justsome I don't remember what it was but uhyeah some extra JavaScript onto my pages
and this was probably 15 years ago butum yeah I think at that point I was likeI need to get off of this and get tosomething where I don't need to worry
about it at all and that is yeah reallywhat the static uh Jam stack experiencegives you interesting was that yourjourney into static and jamstack that
experience of getting hacked and thepricing model changed that that was thepush yeah I mean it wasn't a huge pricedifference but it did sort of indicate
to to me that from a hosting perspectivethey were thinking it about it muchdifferently um and it was cheaper yesbut it was still some less than $5 a
month or something it wasn't like a ahuge huge price difference but it did toto me indicate that there is an ATSscale difference between the hosting
company paying for application serversand PHP to run um versus just uh havinga web server by itself yeah yeah totallylike their cost structure like I imagine
they had vpss set up and they have tohave a certain amount of resourceallocated to each PHP site which isn'tnecessarily true with aesthetic sites
you can do more of a shared pull um andthat's not necessarily a bad thingeither um in the way that it would bewith a PHP
size yeah absolutely and and you cankind of see that in what GitHub offerson their free tier too which is kind offunny um and I think that's how a lot of
people got into Jackal is through uhGitHub pages and being able to host awebsite for free uh on GitHub Pagesusing jle because jao is built in that
sort of catapulted jaal's success in thestatic site generator space too I meanGitHub wouldn't have done GitHub Pagesif it were PHP based things they just
could not have scaled things at thatlevel um or would not have wanted towith the free tier um and so yeah Ithink jamstack really in my mind really
provides a a an extremely nice on-rampfor people uh wanting to build a websiteit's a it's great for beginners andexperts because it's just fewer things
you need to worry about and I reallylove when you can find something thatworks for all experience levels um formaybe different reasons but yeah they
Everyone likes it for for for similarreasons as well yeah it's like the bellcurve with the the beginner theintermediate in the master gy brain yeah
yeah you come full circle at the endwhere it's like actually Simplicity andnot having to worry about all this stuffis is pretty good then you can just
focus on making the experience reallygood rather than having to get all thesetools to worktogether yeah yeah and I think that uh
certain people really like getting toolsto work together but I don't necessarilylike that I mean I I built a toolbecause
uh at least in part I didn't want tohave to uh configure someone else's toolchain and that may be part of how itstarted but uh yeah I mean yeah I think
it can work for everybody so so let's goto the Genesis of of 11 what were youseeing at the time um in in the likejamstack space um and and why do you
feel like 11 was was necessary or neededyeah I mean it's it's hard to know if myperspective now has been clouded by allof the things that have happened since
but yeah uh in my mind I really remember110 sort of coming around the same timeas Gatsby did uh originally and Iremember sort of a lot of discussions
around single page applications andclient side rendering and whether or notyou need heavy JavaScript bundles tobuild static sites um
and I really think that jamstack in away was the parts of jamstack successwere built on single page applicationmodels which I didn't agree with I
didn't think that that was a necessarycondition for for a jamstack site toexist because I came from uh experienceswhere it didn't I mean that's how the
web has been built for many many years Ithink the original sort of bake don'tfry article from yes Aaron Schwarz waslike 2003 or something it's uh so the
ideas behind it have been around for 20years um but I think the branding pieceof it was was a little different and itdid sort of ride the the same marketing
wave of single page applicationFrameworks um originally and I thinkthat's where it got maybe some some goodmarketing bumps from um and I think it's
I think it's important to acknowledgethat too um because things are a littlebit different now uh and yeah I thinkthat uh that's okay jamstack doesn't
need to be uh a silver bullet and we'vekind of talked about this before um itdoesn't need to be everything toeveryone and I think if we try to make
jam Tech everything for everyone um thenit loses meaning 100% And yeah I thinkit just makes it hard to to talk aboutit as well if it's so broad because it's
like well which part of the jam deck areyou talking about are you talking aboutapplications are you talking aboutstatic websites or something in between
um I think that's that's been one issuewith expanding the definition and thethe kind of trajectory of a lot ofJavaScript Frameworks is it's normalized
a lot of things that that is reallyagainst at least the the ideas behindthe jamstack like now we're okayshipping huge JavaScript files we're
okay doing serde rendering on whatessentially should be a static websiteuh we're okay not using HTML and CSS andand and using JavaScript to do those
things instead and it it just it it'ssad I think that that has beennormalized somuch
yeah and I think I think it's a I meanweb development and front-end webdevelopment specifically tends to actlike a pendulum um and it swings sort of
back and forth and I've been around Ithink I've been a I've been a paidfront-end web developerfor 17 years 18 years now and so I've
been around long enough to sort of seesome of those Trends repeat them repeatthemselves over and over again um and Ithink that I'm hopeful for the next wave
which seems to be the pendulum swingingback towards um less JavaScript and andbetter performing websites um yeah awayfrom sort of the default of single page
applications for everything um which Idon't think is a good default Choice I'mfine with it as a choice yes I don'tthink it's a good default
Choice what do you think the defaultChoice shouldbeI mean it it really depends on what
style of application and what style ofwebsite that you're building but it'sreally hard to get away from the basicsof HTML and CSS as the starting points
um and whether or not you're even usinga site generator at all I think is a isan extra layer on top of that questionyou could just have an HTML file that
exists on your web server and that's awebsite um I don't know why I meanpeople get so tied up in in building allof these sort of rubbe Goldberg style
machines to build websites but I reallythink that if you look at what you needto share content on the web it's just anHTML file you can add some CSS to even
make it look pretty and at that pointthe userexperience is imperceptibly differentthan if you had introduced a JavaScript
First Tool so what I mean to say is youcan with CSS and HTML with just thosetwo things you can make a website a veryvery super modern very greatl looking
website um that will be so much betterthan anything that a JavaScript toolchain will introduce and I say that assomeone that has is currently
maintaining a tool that is a JavaScripttool chain tool um butyeah I think it's really important forpeople to understand the minimum viable
things that you need to build a websiteand really I think a modern website onlyneeds HTML and CSS now um I don't thinkyou can get away with HTML only at this
point you got to make it look a littlebit better but um CSS will get you 100%of the way um for a lot of use casesyeah it's easy to forget that you know
these are the technologies that theplatform is understanding and it's it'sa question of how you get there whetheryou just write the thing that the
browser is going to interpret or whetheryou have a whole tool chain behindgenerating that and both are useful butfor for completely different use cases
and the former probably isn't usedenough it's just a lot of overengineering yeah and I mean I thinkthat's maybe the secret to el0 is
longevityhas been that we really try and stayright above that reusability layer ofyou're building something with the bare
minimum you suddenly need some reusabletemplating um and maybe some datainjection um and we really don't existwe try to stay as close to that minimum
as possible um we don't have a bundlerby default we do have a bunch of pluginsthat you can add on top of 11d um butreally the Baseline core experience of
11d tries to stick as close to that aspossible um that step right after yousort of get to the reusability questionand and your site needs a little bit
more needs to be a little bit moremaintenance friendly um and yeah I thinksticking to that and having sort of aweb standards based approach can you can
have a website that lasts 10 years 15years um which is maybe not how a lot ofuh folks think about having websites butthat's what I want for my websites I
don't want to have to rewrite my textstack every two years which is seemslike it's a very common thing in theJavaScript ecosystem world yeah it's
like inevitable longevity yeah yeahtotallyum what um I want to throw some names atyou for
for what we could call this communityand this approachyeah um and get get your feedback on itso one we have jamstack keep it the same
Jam St is uh it's a term that's usedthroughout the industry and is somewhatunderstood but also there's a lot ofconversations like this one just trying
to understand what itis um then we have jamstack plus whichrecognizes that jamc kind of has thisthese
um ambiguous edges and it would be anattempt to tighten that up static firstwhich is going back to what you weresaying earlier it's it's really try to
emphasize that the choice should bestatic first and then use something elseif that doesn't fit the case or um thefinal one is a new term that is I don't
have a word but is like an interestingcool word that doesn't have any meaningabout the static the stack itself but itwould be a community and an umbrella
that this community could could fallunder what do you think about thoseideas and what are you drawn tothere I mean I am a fan of jamstack as a
term I like the jamstack term I likewhat it did for uh static siteGeneration Um I feel like it has beentransformed in a way that has been
damaging to itum but I do also feel like it still hasvalue um I think that it has anincredible amount of community knowledge
of sort of jamstack as an architecturalmodel um that I do not think is uhshould I do not think is something thatshould be thrown away um so I I am a fan
of jamstack I think that it has had ahard time in the last year or twoum just with the introduction or themaybe the popularization of uh uh non
jamstack tools sort of trying to fit nonJam stack tools Under the Umbrella umand yeah I I don't think that that's anecessary thing that jamc needs to do it
needs to be a laser focus definition ofwhat it is and what it isn't um so thatit can be a valuable discussion pointand a valuable educational thing um so I
I am a fan of jamstack I do like thetermjamstack um I I don't even necessarilythink that jamstack plus needs to exist
I think that we can just haveTechnologies that are sort of jamstackadjacent and if we need a a new term forthat that's that's fine um but I don't I
don't know if I'm a fan of of having a asecond term that acts as like a anumbrella for the things that um I thinkcheapened the the original definition of
jamstack um because I think it's betterand I think people respect theintellectual honesty of being able tosay this is what it is this is what
isn't this is what it isn't this is whatyou use it for and this is what youwouldn't use it forum so yeah that's kind of where I'm at
on that yeah what just diving into thatone where do you think was to where doyou think jamstack went too far like II've rewatched Matt's announcement of
jamstack at smashing comp 2016 recentlyand there was a there was a big emphasison the the reason for needing a new termwas because static is like a loaded
term people think that it means simpleand there's no interaction on the pageand it's like lesserand and if you're trying to sell that to
someone maybe nontechnical it's it's tough just thatalone even though there are so manybenefits and so many websites would be
so better if they wereaesthetic um but over the years it thatdefinition has expanded to the pointwhere now I believe it includes suicide
rendering um I it's it's unclear what itdoesn't include to me like where do youthink that was pushed toofar yeah I mean it's interesting to look
back on it becauseuh I think that in many respects the thejamstack 2.0 pivot was an interestingMilestone and that was sort of when at
the same time it was renamed from Jamstack JavaScript uh apis and markup toum sort of the title case version uhjust like a standalone word and I'm I
like the the brand change I was in favorof that I didn't think that JavaScriptapis and markup was particularly aparticularly useful descriptor um but at
that same time you could see theindustry um also sort of giving rise toFrameworks that were not staticallygenerated so your remix and uh certain
aspects of nextjs I think really pivotedaway from Jam jamstack core principlesand at the same timejamstack tried to include those um in a
way that I just don't think that itmakes sense to include those umespecially looking back on it it doesn'tmake sense to include those um they're
not static Frameworks they're not umjamstack Frameworks and I don't eventhink the authors of those Frameworkswould
disagree um so it it felt like a anoverreach in many respects to to try andinclude those under the umbrella um in away that it just didn't it didn't make
sense to a to the definition of jamstackas most people understood it I thinkyeah agreed cuz like I thinkjamack the movement everyone has a
WordPress story like you did before ofyeah okay security or performance ouchstatic websites nice and I I thinkjamese was the antithesis of of Weir
press in in2016 and and yeah 100% a lot of peoplecame on that Journey from WordPresseveryone has that story but now it's
hard like I find myself asking like isword priest Jam stick and it like ifit's not then why not it it kind of itmeets the definition uh you know if if
suicide rendering canbe included in the definition then whynot word press oh with the moderndefinition
yeah I think that that is a a very goodpoint that under the modern definitionit's hard toDiscount uh PHP style things as non-
jamstack but I mean as we've said inthis discussion I I don't think thatWordPress is a jam stck uh framework umand I don't think anything that sort of
does that runtime processing uh in PHPis a gmst framework I don't yeah I don'tthink it makes sense to include that umbut it's also just sort of fascinating
to to look back on the history of thatjamstack pivot as well because uh I usedto work for NFI so I sort of saw some ofthat decision making behind the scenes
and um I remember sort of the veryWordPress focused uh mission of thecompany um and I was really on boardwith that I thought that uh jamstack was
a great alternative to Wordpress andWordPress is this huge comp compcompetitor um and they power a ton ofthe web and so I really thought that
jamc was going to be a great alternativeto Wordpress um and it didn't DethroneWordPress like like maybe I had hopedbut um I think at the same time you saw
sort of like versel coming in andcompeting in the same space and um Ireally think that that was a huge hugeinfluence on the on the pivot as well um
yeah I think that that's the primaryreason that the pivot happened yeah yeahit's like just I guess WordPress issaying as Legacy web and
and um nextjs is like the hot new thingbut it's easy to forget that I don'thave the stat on hand but it's somethinglike 60% of the web is WordPress right
that's the elephant in everyone's roomyeah WordPress has dominated all of theJavaScript Frameworks I mean it's justit's making so much money and it's this
big huge success story and but yet ithas all of these very obvious flaws so Imean that's sort of maybe getting intouh the netlify pivot but um yeah I
really think that WordPress should be athing that is competed with moredirectly yeah agreed so what do youthink needs to happen in the jamstack
community for it to remain relevant umin the webecosystem yeah I mean that's a that's avery interesting question will jamstack
be able to stand on its own as a awellestablished and well documentedarchitecture pattern or will it be seenas sort of this Legacy thing that people
are moving past and I think that ifjamstack can succeed uh it needs to havea clear definition of what it is andwhat it isn't um and if it's just going
to be this vague all- encompassingumbrella term uh then jamstack will falland there's no use to keeping it aroundum it has no educational purpose it will
have no uh technical purpose it won'twon't mean anything so if you wantjamstack to succeed um it needs to havea clear definition it needs to um yeah
take hard stances on things um and drawsome hard lines because that's um theunique benefits of jamstack have thosehard lines um and yeah that's that's it
and that's all I guess nice this is agreat conversation Z so much thank youso much for enjoyingtoday yeah I really enjoyed it that's it
for today's interview find out more atthe future of jam step.org[Music]
