We had a great set of
talks at our last
JAMstack.NYC event. Jeff Escalante shook things up
declaring that the best static site might not be static at all; someone even walked out during his talk! Afterward, in our Slack
community, we had conversations about website complexity and scale. Not everyone agrees on the right approach, but there’s some serious work going on there, including Gatsby’s new
Builds product. I’m happy to see the boundaries of JAMstack being stretched.
No doubt about it, web development entails managing a lot of complexity, but I can’t help feeling that our field leans toward complexity. React, for instance, is developed by Facebook: “the things that we’re doing may not be optimal for you if you are not at Facebook scale or complexity.” Yet, React. Everywhere. It’s worth remembering that the the JAMstack movement arose from the idea of eschewing unnecessary complexity: just enough tooling and infrastructure.
Speaking of just enough tooling, some of us have been chatting about
Alpine.js, a new lightweight framework—with no build process—that can be used in your templates (see this
Hugo demo); sitting between vanilla JS or Jquery and going all-in on a bigger framework.