Architecture · 2016–2024 · Platform Wars
Jamstack
Pre-render + CDN + APIs. The brand cooled; the pattern (static where possible) stuck.
Jamstack mutated delivery by putting HTML at the edge and admitting dynamic bits can be APIs. The marketing label cooled when auth and personalization refused to stay static. The pattern stuck under names like partial prerender.
Patterns
Context
Frameworks fought for the runtime
Front-end frameworks consolidated power; TypeScript became table stakes; Next and friends absorbed routing, data, and deploy gravity. Serverless and Jamstack rebranded old ideas with better CDNs, then cooled when auth and personalization refused to stay static. Blockchain-for-CRUD and big-bang rewrites collected dumb budgets. The winners were boring platforms with ecosystems — React gravity, Rust where systems care, Vite for greenfield bundling. The losers were narratives that skipped product-market fit or treated every App Router rewrite as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Practice · 2014–2023
SPA for Every Page
Client-side apps as the only architecture. Great for apps; absurd for brochures.
$ Marketing sites and docs portals shipped multi-megabyte JS bundles for content that wanted HTML. SEO and performance teams spent years unwinding "modern" defaults.
Framework · 2016–now
Svelte / SvelteKit
Compile away the framework. Less runtime theater, more shipped HTML — including this site.
Framework · 2016–now
Next.js
React with routing, SSR, and deployment opinions — App Router gravity and vendor lock-in as the default web stack.