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How freeCodeCamp.org uses the JAMstack + a single API server to help millions of people learn to code every month

Quincy Larson on December 05, 2018

Hey dev.to peeps - long-time lurker, first-time poster. freeCodeCamp.org is now helping millions of people learn to code every month, and we're ...
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Anna Rankin

This is great! I've been hearing "JAMstack" for a while now, but never really dove into what a real-world app would be comprised of. Thank you for your walkthrough of how your application works - I love that it gives you the freedom to focus on what your application does, rather than on common solved problems. 💯

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Saurabh Sharma

Same with me 😁

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Ali Spittel

Love this -- I always recommend JAMstack for blogs -- so much more expensive and more work to host a WordPress site!

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Ben Halpern

Not to mention performance and complexity issues.

There are still plenty of valid use cases for Wordpress, but I don't think I've personally ever recommended it for anything. 😄

dev.to isn't literally JAMstack, but we use a lot of the same principles.

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Ahmad Awais ⚡️

I love both #JAMstack and #WordPress :)

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Tom VanAntwerp

6,000+ pages sounds like it would be a pain to rebuild with each change. I've considered something like Gatsby for a large site I manage with mostly static content, but we've got 9,000+ posts and I'm concerned about the build times whenever someone realizes they made a small typo.

Is Gatsby smart enough to only build what changed, or does it build everything every time? And how long does that take?

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Quincy Larson

Gatsby is pretty smart. Building has been slow in the past, but it's steadily getting faster.

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Dustin Matlock

Smashing Magazine switched from WordPress to a JAMstack: netlify.com/case-studies/smashing/

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Anthony Alaribe

Try Hugo. Your 9000 page site will take a second to build. Most likely less.

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Ben Halpern

I have no idea, but it really should be smart enough to build what’s changed. Seems like fairly straightforward diffing.

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Ahmad Awais ⚡️

You can both cache the build inside of Gatsby and on Netlify. :)

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dumdumdev

This is more of a question than a statement. I thought that was what a React app was good at. Only building what had changed.

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Krista Handel

Congrats on your first post! This was a great read.
FCC is where I learned that I had a passion for coding and JavaScript even through my struggles. While I did end up going to a coding school FCC helped boost me in the right direction!

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Angela Whisnant

I love it,too. It's been so helpful to be able to practice and reinforce everything I've learned in the classroom.

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Aaron Holland

This is awesome, I love freeCodeCamp.org! Thank you for sharing how you use the JAMstack.

Just curious what is it you use for monitoring?Those metric charts are beautiful.

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Quincy Larson

The first chart is from NGINX's Amplify platform and the second one is from Azure, where our API server is hosted.

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Joseph Maina

I was about to ask where your "public API - a Node.js / Loopback server" is hosted. Then I read this reply.

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Aaron Holland

Thank you!

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Dmitriy Belyaev

Thanks, Quincy!

The information is very valuable.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

Love that you put the cost as the first benefit of JAMstack. I'm sure it applies for smaller apps/side projects, too.

Did you find infrastructure costs prohibitive when you first started freeCodeCamp?

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Quincy Larson

Considering freeCodeCamp.org initially had no budget, yes - hosting a MongoDB cluster and a bunch of web servers was prohibitive. I spent $100,000 of my savings the first few years keeping freeCodeCamp.org going. We are break even now. We probably could have gotten there a bit earlier if we'd embraced the JAMstack sooner.

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Hashim Warren

thank you for how much personal investment you've put into helping people all around the world

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Angela Whisnant

Ditto!

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subatuba21

That's really impressive!

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Ahmad Awais ⚡️

JAMStack is amazing. Quincy, I have almost the same setup for my course VSCode.pro it's Gatsby on top of #JAMstack and WordPress — with an API Kubernetes Cluster thanks to Go-lang.

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Hashim Warren

do you have a post about that?

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Ahmad Awais ⚡️

Sadly no. Will write about it. So much to do.

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Mac Siri

Hey Quincy! Was it difficult to transition to JAMstack? and was there a feature you had to give up or heavily modified?

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Quincy Larson

It was a big endeavor and we're still in the process of transitioning some services.

The main challenge is rethinking different aspects of your application to use the JAMstack properly. There are some tradeoffs, though I think they're worth it.

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dumdumdev • Edited

I just want to personally thank you for FCC and all the work you have put in it for people like me. I have learned a ton. Thank You!
I have gone through the Front End Dev section and need to just build the Tech Doc page to finish. Looking forward to that.
(The site works very well for me it isn’t slow at all.)

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Nathan Sebhastian • Edited

Wow even FCC use gatsby 👏👏 btw Quincy, do you use the offline plugin? Last time I have some trouble with gatsby offline plugin, in which the old data will be loaded first before the new one, requiring users to refresh the page at least once before receiving update.

Thanks for the post as well 🙂

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Anish Karandikar

Super awesome lean architecture! Have you considered going serverless (using say AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions, Azure Functions etc) for your backend API instead of a constantly running Node.js server. It feels like the next logical evolution...

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Matt Studdert

Cheers for the write-up Quincy!

Also, watched your JAMstack Conf talk over lunch yesterday. It was really insightful, thanks! Love all of the consideration you're giving to working in low/no connectivity areas.

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Daniel Rodríguez Rivero

Thanks for sharing your experience. However, it's somewhat curious to see how something I have been using for years has now a name and it's presented as new and shyny.

Again, thanks for demonstrating that even a very interactive site can be built with this kind of stack, which could encourage some simpler sites go even more JAM

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Zubair Khan

Thanks for the great insight. I have bookmarked this.

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Alan Barr

Thanks for sharing this Quincy and thanks for your dedication to education!

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Stefan Dorresteijn

Incredibly interesting article, thanks so much for writing it!

I've never really thought of JAMstack as something that would be useful but your piece does show how many real-life applications it truly has. Might just try it out for a couple of my smaller projects. Thanks again!

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Ravavyr

Great write up and breakdown. Also freecodecamp is pretty awesome, I just started playing with it to refresh some of my knowhow. The static deployment is really smart, not sure about the one-server for the api though, isn't that a DDOS weakness or is it set to scale on Azure? [also figure azure probably has DDOS protection on it]

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Marcelo Gonçalves

Have you looked into Netlify Functions feature? That could be a good fit for the API/backend in a serverless way. By the way, thanks for the post and for the great work on FCC!

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Javier Pomachagua

Hi!
How about deployed a Nuxt as Jamstack with Strapi as CMS and MongoDB Atlas.
I dont know how cheap is to host in heroku strapi cms and mongodbatlas the database for a blog.

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Max Ikäheimo

An amazing post from a while back, great stuff.

We also wrote a beginners guide for Jamstack - in case you want to learn more about Jamstack in 2020: ikius.com/jamstack-ebook

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Kyle

Hey Quincy - I really enjoyed your presentation on using the JAMstack. You seem like a humble, friendly guy.

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Yusuf Shaikh

I love freecodecamp

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Cosmin Popescu

Nice article !
:)
Keep up !
😀