Jamstack 2020

[rviscomi]

Part III Chapter 17: Jamstack

Content team

Authors	Reviewers	Analysts	Draft	Queries	Results
@ahmadawais	@phacks @MaedahBatool	@denar90 @remotesynth	Doc	*.sql	Sheet

Content team lead: @ahmadawais

Published at: https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2020/jamstack

Welcome chapter contributors! You'll be using this issue throughout the chapter lifecycle to coordinate on the content planning, analysis, and writing stages.

The content team is made up of the following contributors:

• Authors
• Reviewers
• Analysts

New contributors: If you're interested in joining the content team for this chapter, just leave a comment below, and the content team lead will loop you in.

Note: To ensure that you get notifications when tagged, you must be "watching" this repository.

Milestones

0. Form the content team

• Jul 6th: Project owners have selected an author to be the content team lead
• Jul 13th: The content team has at least one author, reviewer, and analyst (a minimally viable team formed)

1. Plan content

• Jul 20th: The content team has completed the chapter outline in the draft doc
• Jul 27th: Analysts have triaged the feasibility of all proposed metrics

2. Gather data

• Jul 27th: Analysts have added all necessary custom metrics and drafted a PR to track query progress

• Aug 1 - 31: August crawl

• Sep 7th: Analysts have queried all metrics and saved the output to the results sheet

3. Validate results

• Sep 14th: The content team has reviewed the results sheet

4. Draft content

• Nov 12th: Authors have completed the first draft in the doc
• Nov 26th: The content team has prototyped all data visualizations

5. Publication

• Nov 26th: The content team has reviewed the final draft, converted to markdown, and filed a PR to add it to the 2020 content directory

• Dec 9th: Target launch date

[rviscomi]

I'd also like to suggest a new chapter that I can write about Jamstack. Featuring the usage of Next.js, Nuxt, VuePress, and likes. Let me know what you think about that.

Originally posted by @ahmadawais in #876 (comment)

cc @OBTo

@tpiros was also interested in authoring a Jamstack chapter

[tpiros]

Thinking about this a bit further, especially when it comes to metrics, this could be a subtopic under Performance?

It'd be interesting to see how sites created with the Jamstack do in the performance space

[rviscomi]

This may be similar to chapters like CMS and Ecommerce that used performance as a lens through which to look at a well-defined problem space. In those chapters there was also more to discuss than only performance, which made them good candidates for standalone chapters.

Depending on how much "meat on the bones" there is for the Jamstack topic, we could consider folding it into another chapter, having it be a standalone chapter, or broadening the scope to include other tech stacks.

I'm not familiar with Jamstack so I'll defer to @tpiros, @ahmadawais, and those with more experience.

[tunetheweb]

Yeah I was going to ask how you would define something as a Jamstack from the outside? Other than certain hosts hosting it (in which case CDN would be a better fit) I would have thought it would be difficult to measure from outside.

[ahmadawais]

Jamstack I believe cannot be similar to CMS or perf since those are the value propositions. I was hoping to check the trend of how many sites are using popular and known static site generators. I believe this could be a part of other chapters like CDN, JS, and Markup — provided we are able to track it. 😃

[borisschapira]

While I really enjoy Jamstack, I think it fits into content management, only with a different infrastructure. What could possibly be of interest on the Front side is to distinguish SPAs (Gatsby type) from non-SPAs to evaluate the impact of JavaScript on a first load in a content-reading context.

[foxdavidj]

I'm a big fan of adding more segments like this to metrics, because this tends to be where the most exciting findings occur. Couple questions:

1. Which metrics would be most interesting to segment/compare like this?
2. How reliably can we detect if a site is Jamstack?

[rviscomi]

Relevant discussion: https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/define-jamstack-sites-performance/1713 and https://css-tricks.com/a-look-at-jamstacks-speed-by-the-numbers/
cc @denar90

[rviscomi]

@ahmadawais thank you for agreeing to be the lead author for the Jamstack chapter! As the lead, you'll be responsible for driving the content planning and writing phases in collaboration with your content team, which will consist of yourself as lead, any coauthors you choose as needed, peer reviewers, and data analysts.

The immediate next steps for this chapter are:

1. Establish the rest of your content team. The larger the scope of the chapter, the more people you'll want to have on board.
2. Start sketching out ideas in your draft doc.
3. Catch up on the project methodology to get a sense for what's possible.

There's a ton of info in the top comment, so check that out and feel free to ping myself or @OBTo with any questions!

@tpiros we'd still love to have you contribute as a peer reviewer or coauthor as needed. Let us know if you're still interested!

---

As discussed in earlier comments, this chapter might end up being a better fit as a subsection of other chapters. Let's go through the content planning exercise to see if there's enough substance for a standalone chapter and reevaluate our options as needed.

[ahmadawais]

Thank you, @rviscomi. Looking forward to more contributors. At least 2-3 people in each of the following categories are welcomed.

• Co-Authors
• Reviewers
• Analysts

Tagging a couple of folks below, we'd love to have here as contributors:

@rauchg
@timneutkens
@sdras
@Timer
@philhawksworth
@zachleat
@MaedahBatool
@tpiros
@asharirfan
@saqibameen
@msaaddev

Peace! ✌️

[tpiros]

Thanks @ahmadawais would love to be a contributor and may I also suggest @debs-obrien (I can't tag her for whatever reason: Debbie O'Brien - https://twitter.com/debs_obrien)

[borisschapira]

I'd like to nominate @DirtyF, @phacks, @nhoizey

[phacks]

Thanks @borisschapira—would love to be part of the content team!

I’m co-hosting the Jamstack Paris Meetup, and am very interested in the ecosystem, esp. with regard to performance. If I may suggest @YuLingCheng who’s part of the meetup team as well, she’s done some amazing talks on the CMS aspect of the Jamstack.

[ahmadawais]

Welcome, @tpiros and @phacks to the team. I have added you both to the reviewers/analysts sections. Let's figure out the chapter plan by 20th July.

[denar90]

@ahmadawais, wip is here - #1228
I need to figure out how to join and have desktop and mobile results together. If it's solved - super easy to run other queries for other metrics, kinda the same but changing metrics names. I think we can finish it up this week.

[remotesynth]

I chatted with @denar90 today a bit about the query and we discussed some ideas for expanding some of what it detects.

[denar90]

@ahmadawais I've attached google sheets into PR with TTFB results, so you can start exploring. Hope to finish other queries pretty soon.

[rviscomi]

@denar90 @ahmadawais there are a few housekeeping items to take care of before you can review the results and start writing about them in your chapter:

1. The queries should be updated to the canonical Web Almanac dataset, which is the 2020_08_01 (August 2020) crawl. This crawl just finished recently and we're working on updating the httparchive.almanac dataset on BigQuery in Generate 2020 almanac tables on BigQuery #1258. We'll send an announcement this week when the dataset is ready.
2. The queries in PR Jamstack 2020 queries #1228 need to go through a code review and that might affect the results. So best not to save any results until that PR has been reviewed. Mark it as "ready for review" when you've written all of the queries and updated them to the 2020_08_01 crawl.
3. The spreadsheet you use for your results must be publicly accessible so that the data visualizations can be published in the chapter and readers can access the raw results in the sheet. We've left a placeholder under "Results" in the top comment of this issue and we're working in Add result spreadsheet metadata to each chapter #1233 to generate those sheets for you and add them to the issue. Your sheet is ready here but we're still going through the process to update all 22 issues with their respective sheets so the issue will be updated in a day or two.

[denar90]

Cool, thanks for the clarifications 👍

[foxdavidj]

I've updated the chapter metadata at the top of this issue to link to the public spreadsheet that will be used for this chapter's query results. The sheet serves 3 purposes:

1. Enable authors/reviewers to analyze the results for each metric without running the queries themselves
2. Generate data visualizations to be embedded in the chapter
3. Serve as a public audit trail of this chapter's data collection/analysis, linked from the chapter footer

[ahmadawais]

Thank you, @OBTo and @rviscomi we'll definitely use them.

[foxdavidj]

@ahmadawais in case you missed it, we've adjusted the milestones to push the launch date back from November 9 to December 9. This gives all chapters exactly 7 weeks from now to wrap up the analysis, write a draft, get it reviewed, and submit it for publication. So the next milestone will be to complete the first draft by November 12.

However if you're still on schedule to be done by the original November 9 launch date we want you to know that this change doesn't mean your hard work was wasted, and that you'll get the privilege of being part of our "Early Access" launch.

Please see the link above for more info and reach out to @rviscomi or me if you have any questions or concerns about the timeline. We hope this change gives you a bit more breathing room to finish the chapter comfortably and we're excited to see it go live!

[ahmadawais]

Thank you. It's been a busy few weeks. Tgis new deadline will help a lot. The team had a meeting this week and we have been adjusting things here and there. Will share soon.

[rviscomi]

Hi @ahmadawais any update on the status of the first draft?

[MaedahBatool]

@ahmadawais I have reviewed the document in suggestion mode. Please review it. The chapter looks pretty good and informative. Looking forward to getting it published. 🙌

[ahmadawais]

Thank you @MaedahBatool

[ahmadawais]

@rviscomi @OBTo the chapter is ready. It's already been reviewed. I plan to convert it into markdown and send in a PR tonight.

• Thank you @denar90 @remotesynth for your work on the analysis of this data
• Thank you @MaedahBatool for the review. @phacks if you can take a look at it that would be great too.

Looking forward to the launch in a couple of days. Woohoo! 🥳🥳🥳

[tpiros]

@ahmadawais let me know if you'd like me to review this as well? Sorry got tied up with my chapter (pretty late...) but would love to add my input if it's not too late.

[phacks]

@ahmadawais Had a blast reading the chapter, thank you very much alongside @denar90 @remotesynth @MaedahBatool for all your work! Sorry I couldn’t help more this year.

I’ve reviewed the chapters and left comments and suggestions, feel free to integrate/discard/ask me precisions for any of those. Happy to implement some myself as well if you’d like me to!

[ahmadawais]

Thank you for the input @phacks — no worries @tpiros it's already done and launching in a day or two so. Thank anyways.

Formatting it was a lot of work. Took me several hours. Finally, all done!

[lex111]

I just want to point out one important thing. Currently, when analyzing SSGs, the so-called Documentation Static Site Generators are not taken into account, in particular Docusaurus, which is in fact the same as VuePress, but on React stack. This tool is presented on the Jamstack site as SSG https://jamstack.org/generators/
I think we need to consider these types of SSGs when analyzing data.

UPD: In the case of Docusaurus Wappalyzer mistakenly does not consider it to be an SSG. I opened a PR in Wappalyzer to fix this https://github.com/AliasIO/wappalyzer/pull/3592