I am a big fan of JAMstack for side projects because you just upload them to Netlify or similar and leave them there for years without worrying about maintaining them too much.

I have a pet side project stack that consists of:

* Netlify for CI/hosting

* Github for Source Control hosting.

* Elm language for a sane language to compile to JS.

* Vanilla CSS and my favourite minimal CSS framework of the day e.g. milligram.

* Local storage and download/upload functions for backup. Good enough for an MVP.

* Longer term, for storage I am thinking about Dropbox integration, although I might give in and host a little service but this shouldn't need to change much between projects.

Calling it SHAMstack is odd, because the J as in JavaScript is more relevant than the fact it is statically hosted. JS is needed to do a lot of heavy lifting in lieu of having a back end. Although I guess APIs implies you must be using JS.

Meaningless buzzword. It doesn't describe the stack - the A in JAM (for API) encompasses all of the server complexity which could be literally any other tech (even a LAMP stack).

Depends. If the app can stand alone like a PWA type of thing then this architecture is very useful for both speed and offline graceful degradation. Also having to render some of your page on the server and some on the client can be painful. Doing it all on the client is neater in some aspects, relegating the server as a security and business logic engine. It’s the old three tier architecture!

I'm not arguing for or against it. It's just that it's misleading as you can't simply wish a backend API into existence. JAM describes the 'frontend stack' only.

This feels like click bait.

Yeah, but it's really funny clickbait