How I got into Jamstack, and why I started Stackrole

I wrote this as one of the first posts on Stackrole's blog, under the title "Welcome to Stackrole". It's the story of how I moved from WordPress to building sites with Gatsby, Netlify and a Git-based CMS. I've kept that story as it was, and added what happened next at the end.

Inception

The idea of starting Stackrole is only a couple of days old, but it began back in 2017.

Those were my early days with React, and I had just discovered Gatsby. Through a friend and mentor, Jason Lengstorf, I joined Gatsby as a contributor.

That was the aha moment: with Gatsby I could build websites and learn to write better React apps at the same time. I rebuilt my own website with it, and it was blazing fast.

Then came Netlify. Like every other solopreneur, I had many websites, all costing money for hosting and SSL certificates. Few affordable hosts offered free SSL, and the ones that did charged more for everything else. Meanwhile, Google had started counting HTTPS as a ranking signal and Chrome was marking plain HTTP sites as not secure.

After a long search I found Netlify: hosting on a CDN, HTTPS included, and Git integration with continuous deployment, all for free. Every developer's dream come true.

With Gatsby as the static site generator and Netlify as the host, I was all in on Jamstack. The one missing piece was a CMS. I have used WordPress for years and I love it, but it has its pros and cons, and I wanted something just as easy that fit this setup.

A couple of months ago I discovered Netlify CMS (now Decap CMS), an open-source, Git-based CMS. Instead of a database, it stores content as Markdown, YAML and JSON files in your repository. That makes a fully static website with CMS-like editing possible. It completed my stack, and Stackrole came into existence.

With Stackrole I bring a decade of professional experience as a UI/UX designer and web developer, working on many SaaS products.

What happened next

The plan in that first post was to launch an open-source Gatsby starter, then premium starters. Here is how it turned out:

• June 2020: I released Foundation, a free Gatsby and Netlify CMS starter for personal sites and blogs. It is still on GitHub, with over 250 stars and more than 100 forks.
• Premium starters followed: Wade, a site with a timeline, portfolio and blog, and Maestro, a multipurpose template.
• 2021 to 2022: Stackrole grew into a Jamstack template marketplace and directory, listing more than 145 templates across Gatsby, Eleventy, Jekyll, Hugo and other generators, with a blog and a newsletter. I later rebuilt it on Strapi.
• 2024: Stackrole's run ended. Some of its how-to guides live on here, like Building a Jamstack website and Adding custom domain for Netlify website.

The stack changed too. This site is built with Astro instead of Gatsby, but the idea that started it all is the same: pages built ahead of time, served fast from a CDN, with content in Git.