Lately I’ve been intrigued by this thing called the JAMstack. It stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.
GatsbyJS
The particular technology that sticks out to me here is GatsbyJS. It allows you to create blazing fast websites that when it comes to shipping is just a static site. It gives you all the power of React with a lot of boilerplate abstracted away from you.
No need to know webpack or routing as it provides you a basic framework to allow you to just start building websites. I think this is how I would build websites if I was still in the client services business.
The docs are great and they have so many plugins available to you its crazy. I like how it is CMS agnostic and allows you to use Contentful, WordPress, or even just plain old markdown files (which is what I’m using for this website).
I took the task of redeveloping my website using GatsbyJS and couldn’t believe how quickly I could do it. All this while still being a newbie to it.
Tailwind CSS
The other technology that interests me is utility frameworks and in particular Tailwind CSS. It was created by someone I have followed for a long time, Adam Wathan so that definitely helps.
It takes a bit of a controversial approach where all you do is assign long list of class names to elements that control the styling. This is a large shift from the concept of not having style information in your markup.
When redoing my site I used Tailwind CSS and I was surprised at how my workflow
changed. It was easy to play around with how I wanted padding and such. Try
px-4, nope thats too wide, try px-2.