I had a chat about personal web at The Future of Jamstack

Mike Neumegen from CloudCannon has been running a great series of interviews about Jamstack and related topics at The Future of Jamstack. He reached out to me a short while back to ask if I’d like to join and share my thoughts on the topics of Jamstack, personal and small web and so on. I obviously said yes.

The episode is now out: The personal web with Juhis - What the Jam.

We talked about a variety of topics. I’m very optimistic about the future of web through the re-emergence of personal and indie web that we’re seeing right now. A lot of people are building personal sites, writing personal blogs and at least in my bubble, there’s more and more discussion that happens across these blogs.

A major part of this has been the improvements in tooling. As I discuss in the episode, my first touch on what would now be considered “static site generators” was over a decade ago when I was a webmaster (remember when people were called that?) for a site. It was a PHP site that was dynamically created from flat file data with Perl scripts. To be honest, it wasn’t the greatest experience.

Right now the tooling for building static sites is so good. I’m a big fan of Eleventy due to its flexibility and simplicity but other static site generator tools like Astro, Hugo and Pelican, to name a few, are great alternatives too. These days, the static sites get to have a lot of the benefits of dynamic sites: effective templating and building parts of the sites from data, to give a couple of examples, while gaining the benefits like performance, security and ease of deployment.

Anyway, head over to Youtube and listen the chat! We had a lot of fun with Mike while recoding it and I think it shines through the discussion.