"Jamstack" has always been a marketing campaign for Netlify. While I am a big fan and advocate of Netlify as a tool and platform, I have watched with disappointment for years as they have tried to masquerade "jamstack" as a community-fueled architecture movement, while simultaneously exclusively owning the conference, website, and community forums. And on top of that, they have been actively changing the definition of what it actually meant to match with Netlify's changing platform capabilities, and twisting it in subtle ways to ensure that their competitors were excluded. As a result of this, "jamstack" has ended up as a deeply confusing buzzword that nobody can actually define, but has something to do with a way of building websites that you then go on to host with Netlify.
It was for years a great disservice to the development community, especially to newcomers who benefit from clear, coherent terminology and the ability to separate company marketing from genuine architecture concepts. This term will not be missed, to say the least. If anything comes from its demise, let it be in the form of lessons learned for developer tooling companies:
- own your marketing and be genuine with it, make it clear what is marketing vs not
- if you come up with a new concept that you'd like to name, ensure that the definition is extremely clear, and that it does not change after being initially defined
- draw clear lines between enterprise marketing and developer marketing