It’s a great pleasure for me to write this foreword to Brian and Raymond’s new book on the Jamstack. Both Brian and Raymond have been part of this dynamic movement that’s changed the face of the modern web over the last 5 to 10 years.
I first met Brian at the start of 2015 when he was speaking about static site engines at the HTML 5 meetup in San Francisco. This was in the earliest days of Netlify, while the product was still in private beta, and before I had even coined the term Jamstack, at a time when just a few early adopters across the industry had started to believe that the web could be simpler, faster, safer, and better to develop with if we embraced the idea of decoupling the web UI from backend infrastructure and business logic.
It was meeting with and talking to these early adopters in different areas of our industry, like Brian, Raymond, and many others working on SaaS applications, headless CMSs, real-time web databases, interactive experiences on the web, and so on, that helped my cofounder and I build conviction that there was a broad, industry-wide change about to happen and that we needed a name for it and a nomenclature around it.