Solspace Podcast

Gustavs Gūtmanis, Lead Developer of Products at Solspace, and Ivars Bariss, Director of Operations at Solspace, join me to discuss the idea that websites can make a gradual transition to a headless architecture.

We start by discussing external search appliances like Algolia and Meilisearch. We talk about how these, by nature, are headless. We create an HTML / Javascript presentation layer and consume the search index through API calls.

Examples of site sections that can gradually be converted to a headless approach include search, marketing landing pages, e-commerce, and forms.

We discuss how clients often see site content divided along the lines of responsibility groups such as career sections, job listings, press releases, events, etc. Each of these content types is often run from a separate service and pulled into pages by API. So the gradual transition has already begun.

We discuss product and service configurators which are independent tools that can be dropped into an existing site, drawing their data from external APIs.

We talk about editorial workflows in a headless world and we discuss how content teams can now work in parallel instead of in series thanks to what headless enables.

Gustavs Gūtmanis, Lead Developer of Products at Solspace, and Ivars Bariss, Director of Operations at Solspace, join me again to discuss the idea that websites can make a gradual transition to a headless architecture.

At Solspace, we focus on making websites more and more reliable on a daily basis. We do this by looking for ways to reduce friction. This activity usually turns into money for our clients. The less friction, the greater reliability, and the greater the revenue. We take another look at gradual conversions to headless architectures as a way to vastly reduce friction.

In this podcast we discuss a new internal project being developed by Gustavs. We're building a bootstrapping framework for headless sites and gradual headless conversions on React JS. We talk at length about how this approach will allow us to more quickly and easily deploy new headless sites for our clients. We talk about how headless conversions can be made using this intelligent framework, and we talk about what kinds of scale such a bootstrapped approach will allow.

On this episode I am joined by Thomas Payet, the co-founder and COO of Meilisearch. From the Solspace side I am joined by David Estrada, the developer on the Solspace team with the most Meilisearch experience.

Meilisearch is an open source API-based utility focused on excellent search speed and relevance of content within a given website. In this first episode of our two-part series with Thomas, we get into an overview of how Meilisearch came to be. We talk about the history of the search bar on websites and discuss how technologies evolved to support users as they try to search within a website for the content they desired.

We discuss why Meilisearch went in the open source direction and we learn about their plans for monetizing and generating revenue to support the overall effort. The prime revenue stream is expected to be their hosted cloud offering. They will handle scaling for customers, software updates, uptime and the like for a reasonable and predictable fee.

On this episode, I am joined again by Thomas Payet, the co-founder and COO of Meilisearch. From the Solspace side, I am joined by David Estrada, the developer on the Solspace team with the most Meilisearch experience.

This episode builds on the previous Meilisearch episode by discussing use cases for Meilisearch in more depth. We discuss the power and usefulness of acted searching to allow users to drill down more deeply into search data sets. We discuss how SaaS, mobile apps, and documentation systems make use of Meilisearch. Finally, we get into some questions about what comes next with Meilisearch As A Service; things like contextual relevance, personalized relevance, recommendation systems and the like.

This episode features Solspace’s Mitchell Kimbrough in conversation with longtime friend Leslie Camacho about EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®), including why Mitchell has decided to implement it at Solspace. You may know Leslie for his leadership at EllisLab and Pixel & Tonic. Leslie has recently embraced a new mission as an EOS Implementer, helping businesses grow from small and scrappy to strong and scalable.

What is EOS, you may ask? Essentially, EOS provides a streamlined accountability-based operating system for companies with between 10 and 250 employees. This conversation will introduce you to EOS as Mitchell and Leslie tell the story of how in a moment of kismet and great timing, Mitchell decided to take the leap and engage Leslie to help Solspace implement the new system.

If your business is doing well right now, it’s still worth taking a look at EOS. Understanding the principles could help you make the most out of your current resources even if you don’t choose to impleme

This episode continues Mitchell Kimbrough’s conversation with longtime friend Leslie Camacho about EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®), including why Mitchell has decided to implement it at Solspace.

Individual and organizational discipline and accountability are cornerstones of EOS. Mitchell and Leslie talk about normalizing the hard stuff, celebrating what’s good, making healthy confrontation a habit, and staying committed to the process. Mitchell reflects on the choice to put as much effort into being a healthy company as we do to improving our technical expertise, and the power of using a scorecard to identify and track key measures of success.

The conversation ends by coming full circle to core values, what matters most. Leslie asks, ‘what do you love doing? Is that the same thing the world is pushing you to do?’

This week Mitchell Kimbrough talks with Genina Ramirez, Chief Growth Officer at Focus Lab, a branding agency that has embraced the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®). Both Solspace and Focus Lab share the same EOS® Implementer, Leslie Camacho. Genina discusses her history with Focus Lab, and how EOS® changed the trajectory of her career and was pivotal for the company’s growth and success. Mitchell and Genina compare notes about the experience of launching EOS®, and the impacts it had on their teams. Genina describes the way EOS® provided a neutral set of tools that Focus Lab used to build a bridge between where the company was and what they dreamed of becoming.

This week Mitchell Kimbrough continues his conversation with Genina Ramirez, Chief Growth Officer at Focus Lab, a branding agency that has embraced the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®). Genina and Mitchell get further into their discussions about Focus Lab's experience with niching down and focusing on a service offering that really made sense to them. They talk about how EOS enabled this courageous act. They also talk about a new brand recently launched by Focus Lab called Odi which provides even more focus as they target a specific market segment and client profile.

(Part 1) What do you do when your professional work is seen as NSFW by some people? You move forward and take it seriously, that’s what. Listen how Fly Media Productions uses the EOS framework to best position themselves for the “pleasure” industry. It’s truly fascinating (and not actually NSFW).