*This is the beginning of my journey into becoming a Jamstack Sensei. I figured the best place to start is to explain what Jamstack is, how it works, and why it's so awesome. This is a very, very brief overview to get you familiar with terms that you will be hearing right away. Get more in depth knowledge at the Jamstack website.

Let's Talk About Jamstack

Jamstack is a really sick way to make websites fast and awesome!

That's my personal definition of Jamstack. Once you see how this tech stack works, I'm sure you will agree with me. Let's jump into a more formal overview of the features of Jamstack.

JAM - Tech Stack

So the Jamstack features Javascript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup and has two main features: pre-rendering and decoupling. Pre-rendering is generating the website markup before the pages are rendered. Decoupling is the separation between services or systems to make each section of the website easier to deal with - for example, separating components from APIs. See you totally get it already!

Pre-rendering

I decided that pre-rendering is pretty important to talk about when using Jamstack. So this doesn't always make sense to people who haven't seen a pre-rendered site before. Using Static Site Generators, we can pre-render our website and see the changes before they occur. It also makes gettin the website up and going, very easy!

Power Your Jamstack

Jamstack leverages the fruitful API economy in order to build content, interfaces, the back end, and much more. It really allows for developers to decouple services and build powerful and complex apps that include payments, data, and - I don't want to start down this list or we'll get lost.

Benefits of Jamstack

I will write more in depth articles on these features, but since this is a more high-level overview of Jamstack, I will just list the benefits of Jamstack below:

1. Security
2. Scale
3. Performance
4. Maintainability
5. Portability
6. Developer Experience

Jamstack Best Practices (see above in Benefits of Jamstack)

1. Entire Project on CDN
2. Modern Build Tools
3. Automated Builds
4. Atomic Deploys
5. Instant Cache Invalidation
6. Everything Lives in Git

Static Site Generators & CMS

Okay, now we're at the exciting stuff to talk about here! The static site generators are one of the most exciting parts of this project I'm attempting - I have to build with 333 static site generators! That's a lot of learning.

Static site generators allow you to decouple and render-live your website as you build it out. Here is a list of the available SSGs.

The customer management system is also exciting to talk about because there is so much different technology to choose from! Here is a list of the Jamstack CMS.

Learn More at Jamstack.com and More Posts to Come

This wasn't meant to tell you everything that I want to about Jamstack, but rather it is more of a warm-up for what is to come. I urge readers to visit some other Jamstack resources if you are curious about understanding what makes this tech stack interesting.

Next post, I will actually jump into a tutorial and show you how to make a Jamstack website! I have been working on this for a while and am super excited. Until then, let us know what you would like to learn more about and I'll do some research.

Thank you for reading and I hope you check my next post out next week.