Cory Bell

I'd recommend Gatsby and use their PWA plugin. With a PWA you don't have to deal with the app stores, get better SEO, etc. Here is a starter package that offers quite a bit. It obviously includes all of the optimizations and performance wins that Gatsby is known for, but also includes support for creating your blogs with Markdown and since it's just a web app you could do most (if not all) of your animations in pure CSS or grab a library like Lottie to help.

JSS is makes a lot of sense when styling React components and styled-components is a really nice implementation of JSS. I still get to write pure CSS, but in a more componentized way. With CSS post-processors like SASS and LESS, you spend a lot of time deciding where your .scss or .less files belong, which classes should be shared, and generally fighting the component nature of React. With styled-components, you get the best of CSS and React. In this project, I have ZERO CSS files or global CSS classes and I leverage mixins quite a bit.

Netlfiy Functions uses AWS Lambda under the hood, but Netlify adds some nice sugar. The biggest advantage is the local development experience with netlify-cli. This allows you to run your functions locally with local configuration or pull configs from the Netlify dashboard. I built a health-check endpoint in about 2 minutes, and my send-email function in less than an hour.

I think Netlify is the best hosting option out right now. They have a very generous free tier, CI/CD integration with any git provider, serverless functions, SSL, a great CLI, and a lot more. This is my default choice for hosting static websites and serverless functions.