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Comment by omegant | Hacker News Reader

I’m learning to code and want to deploy a static site server. I feel this could help me, but I’m not sure.

I guess it is self evident for experienced programmers but from the site I can’t tell exactly what it does.

If you're familiar with webhooks, you can code and deploy them easily with Napkin by just writing code in the editor and clicking "Deploy". With other tools, you usually have to install dependencies on the command line or set up more complex cloud services to do this. You can see an example of the webhook use case with this Slack bot example: https://napkin.wiki/slack

For a static website, there's a lot of great options that don't require a "backend" per se. Vercel and Netlify are great if you use React and/or Next.js. For a no-code solution you can check out Webflow. If you want to just serve static HTML/CSS/Javascript pages, my preference is to do that with just AWS S3 (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Hostin...).

Congrats on learning to code! If you ever want to chat about backend stuff feel free to reach out to nick@napkin.io :)

Thank you very much for the explanation and tips. I want to start with a static site as a proof of concept to show some friends. But eventually I would like to advance to a dinamic web app that can be used from tablets or phones. Looks like napkin could help me start prototyping without having to learn the whole backend stack , which is just another complex new learning process to add on top.

Hey! If you’re familiar with the term JAMstack, you can think of us as the “A” for API’s. A static site like a blog typically doesn’t need any backend-specific functions but anything that requires a server to run you could use Napkin for. Popular frontend hosting platforms like Netlify and Vercel also have serverless function add-ons that can be attached to your project.

Our goal is to be the “CodePen for backend” and our one-off functions can be used for more than just websites (think mobile apps, IOT devices, etc). We’re excited to build out examples and enable discovery very soon!

I didn’t know about Jamstack, but I find it a very interesting way of delivering an app. I will study the possibilities for sure!

Thank you very much.

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