What did we do?
Case study.
Sneaky Peek let editors preview content changes instantly with any headless CMS and any static site generator. Instant previews for the JAMStack.
Sneaky Peek was an exciting project that improved the experience for content editors working with JAMStack sites and headless CMS's.
Historically the JAMStack approach has added many benefits to websites including better speed, security, and scalability, but one area in which the approach had a negative impact was the content editing experience. Sneaky Peek fixed this by providing content editors with live previews of their changes when using any headless CMS and any static site generator.
The benefits of static sites, without the waiting
Over the years content editors have become accustomed to the live previews offered by traditional CMS's like Wordpress. They could edit their content and see the changes reflected instantly as a page on their live site. Before Sneaky Peek this experience was hard to replicate using static sites and headless CMS's. Editors would often have to wait minutes for their changes to deploy before they could see how they would look on the live site.
This was often a sticking point when trying to convince clients to take the JAMStack route so we decided to build Sneaky Peek.
Full-stack development
Sneaky Peek required all of our full-stack development skills and consisted of a number of technical elements that were required to power the project.
After creating an account, users could connect their GitHub account, configure a project, and then connect to their headless CMS of choice. After doing this, they would be provided with a unique preview URL where they could watch their site update in near realtime before publishing content changes.
To achieve this we relied on Kubernetes to run a users development server in the cloud and then would trigger rebuilds using webhooks fired by their headless CMS's when content changed.