Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that simple Kwesion, what's your jam in the jam stack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have Miguel arias on the show. Miguel is the co founder of Kwes forms. Hi, Miguel, thanks for being on the podcast with us today.

Thank you for having me, man. It's a pleasure. Awesome. So

tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing.

Okay, a little bit about myself. I'm the co founder of Kwes forms, it's a, it's a form service ideal for like the Jamstack community. I like to think of us as like the next evolution of what form service should be. Before we were around, there were a lot of over called, like endpoint services, to kind of handle your, like your submission, storing and whatnot. And then we kind of felt like there was a big gap in the market where, you know, like, it kind of took care of that. But then you had to go on your own and figure out validation and components, like date pickers, multi step, things of that nature. So we kind of felt like it was a perfect opportunity to kind of get in there and that space and put out a product that that we would love to use, you know, and that we felt like maybe other people in that space would like to use as well. So what I do for fun, you know, COVID is kind of killed a lot of it, but when I, what I normally do for fun is play basketball. The weird thing about it, though, is that I actually like to practice more than actually play. Sure, I think it comes with like my perfectionistic nature, I just, I just have this thing that I like to train and just and my wife is the same exact way. So I'm glad that we found each other because we didn't go to the parks when it's empty. And just like practice all day. It's like the weirdest thing, but that's what we like to do. You know,

I can totally get that, like, as soon as you as soon as you introduce other humans into it, then like there's so many ways that like imperfections happen because of that. Some people find beauty in that and then it's like, but no, if you really want to, like compete against yourself, like doing it on your own just makes so much sense.

Are you like sports guy, he like we like playing basketball?

I am I am not particularly athletic. I do have sports. Basketball is is up there. I am very when you introduce other human beings, I am very bad when it's just me shooting and like, you know, kind of running around. It's okay. Like I could I can play horse decently. But you get somebody in my face and I fall apart.

Yeah, you know, I kind of find it like it's like therapeutic in a way just to kind of compete against yourself. It's cool. It's a good way to kind of exercise patience and stuff. I really like it.

Yeah, it's like, it's like, Alright, you know, you know, free throws, right. And like, it's really funny. My, my mother is actually a huge like NBA fan. And like when she's rooting for her team, she gets so frustrated at the players missing free throws.

Yeah.

Don't you practice that enough? Like, can't you just make that shot? It's like, Well, yeah, except for when all the variants happen. And you know, you will miss every once in a while. But yeah, you get to kind of practice that. And you get to like, find your form. And I think there's a lot of a lot of cool things that happen in that space.

For sure. Yeah. Cool.

So let's talk about the Jamstack a little bit. And I'm sure we'll kind of weave in some more about Kwes as we go forward. But like, what was your entry point into into the idea that Jamstack or static sites or whatever you want to call it?

Yeah, the funny thing is when we started our service, um, we really just started it, because at the time, like, I met my co founder, because he was actually my boss. Yeah, when I was about, like, 18, I was looking to, to get a job so I can marry my girlfriend at the time. Well, I mean, she's my wife, now. She's my girlfriend at the time. She's my wife. And so we used to use a service called formstack. You know, which is great, but it was like, a, it's like a drag and drop type of service. And then one day, I just kind of burst into his office, as I normally would do. And I was like, bro, we should make our own like form service. You know what I mean? Like, not drag and drop something that I would like to use, just because it was a hassle to kind of go through that process and then have to like, put it on your site, you have to strip all this styling. It was just like, it was like an unneeded amount of work. Right. It's how I felt.

I use Formstack quite a bit at the agencies that I worked at. And yeah, it was, it was super handy for that for like the editors making the forms. It was super awful for like the developers working

Exactly. So then we kind of felt like, you know, this really isn't the ideal tool for us, you know, so then I burst into his office and I told him, we should make our own thing and he kind of just like, looked at me like I was crazy. I was like, Yeah, he's like, go back to work. So then, so I was like, Alright, cool. I went home, I kind of just kept thinking about it, it's just in my nature, like, I get obsessed with things. So I kind of kept thinking about it. And then one day, I think maybe it was like, the next day, the next evening, I was in the shower. And then I just got this idea of how I would be able to go about it, you know, and I, like ran out of the shower naked, like, super wave naked. And I ran to like my notebook and start writing down and my wife was looking at me, like, I'm like a lunatic, you know? And, and so that's how we kind of started it. But I didn't really know what Jamstack was at the time. I never even heard of it. Yeah, the only reason, the reason that we got into it was because as it started gaining, like popularity, we started noticing a trend, like we started noticing people telling us, oh, this is perfect for my Jamstack site. And this is good for Jamstack, whatever. And I was like, What the heck is a Jamstack? You know, we looked it up and, and we felt like, you know, this is awesome, I kind of felt when I saw it, it made perfect sense. Like, that's where the industry at least, I feel like that's where the industry is probably headed because of how simplistic it is in nature. Like, I feel like the theory, or the concept of a Jamstack is to like, try to simplify, you know, your workflow as much as possible, you know what I mean? So I felt like, you know, it was a perfect entryway for our service, and I just kind of just fell in love with, with the whole concept of it in the community, which then allowed me to allow me and my partner to kind of improve the product now that we kind of knew what was really meant for right hand out, let's improve it even further.

Out of curiosity, what was kind of the, the beginning there? Like, what, where, where are you targeting the forms before that cuz like said, like, it is, like a great fit, like finding these services that you can fit into the Jamstack is just is so important. So like, Where was the methodology? Like, who are you targeting before you kind of had this discovery?

Miguel Arias 6:54

I got to say, yeah, wherever developers were working and needed a form that was maybe outside of whatever stack they were using, or didn't want to bother with, they could just pick it up and put it put it in

Right and make something fun, you know, it's like something that they would actually enjoy using, we felt like if a developer could enjoy using it, that was that was our guy, you know,

Out of curiosity, is there, is there any sort of in the actual, like infrastructure behind the product? Like, are you using kind of notions that you've kind of discovered in the Jamstack? In the back end? are we are we talking? Is it? Is it kind of its own monolithic structure? Or is that you know, microservices or serverless functions? What what's kind of going on there?

Well, it's definitely its own thing. It's the script itself, because it's built on JavaScript, right? Because, you know, handles your front end validation, back end validation, you know, helps you build out these like complex things like multi step forms, repeater fields, things that normally kind of take up a lot of your time, that's like monotonous, it helps you achieve these things in a much more enjoyable way. Right. So then, the first time I built it, I had built it on a front end framework. But then as I kind of got to understand the Jamstack community a little more I, my partner, and I realize how how much importance is placed on speed, right. And things being lightweight. So then we ended up, you know, rebuilding version two, which we released, like, a few weeks ago. And we we dropped the size of it from, like, 300 kilobytes to about 20 kilobytes. Oh, wow. Yeah. So and the only way that we were able to do that was to kind of try to stay to as native JavaScript as possible. You know what I mean? I guess to answer your Kwesion, like, yeah, we try not to use too many like microservices to accomplish it just so that we can kind of keep the file size down. Yeah, but yeah, so it's basically just supposed to be a script that you import into your site, and then you know, you're good to go.

And I love the idea that like, at first you had these kind of bigger pieces to it, but then seeing how people were building on the Jamstack and realizing the importance they placed in certain areas. So like you said, like, speed and performance being such a high level thing that that allowed you to kind of pivot the product in a way that was in line with those Same philosophies.

Yeah. Like that just kept coming up, you know, and which, which is funny, like how I said we had spent, like three years building on that product. But then when that kept coming up, we just kind of realized, you know, this was not built on the right foundation. We had to scrap it go back to the drawing board start over, you know, but it was great. You know, I kind of I saw it as a learning experience. When I built the this the second version, I really knew who I was building it for, you know,

yeah, that the audience is super important to kind of figure out and find exactly their needs. And it's super cool that like the it's a it's a JavaScript solution that has performance built in like that's, that's always super important, because JavaScript can get real heavy real fast. If you're not paying attention to that.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Nice. So now that you've kind of kind of joined this, this Jamstack community of kind of builders, like, what would you say is kind of one of one of your jams in the Jamstack? Like, obviously, Kwes, I would have to assume as is one of them, but like, what sorts of ideas and like philosophies and maybe even other products and services? Are you really enjoying that you've kind of found yourself in this niche?

Well, I mean, you took my first answer. Okay. Yeah. I think Well, like I said earlier, like the whole concept and theory behind Jamstack elite, at least for me, like, I really love the fact that it's kind of like, okay, you simplify your product. And then once you feel like, it's It is as simple as possible. You'd like simplifying again, you know what I mean? Like, I love how there's such an emphasis on like, lowering the learning curve, like this new thing came out pretty recently, Alpine js, I don't know if you've heard of it. Yeah, it's kind of like Vue js, at least, the way that they even describe it, it's kind of like uJs, where it's like very, very similar syntax, super simple, but it's written in like HTML markup pretty much. And I just blew my mind when I saw that, because I felt like Vue JS was already extremely simple. But then they found a way to simplify it even further, you know, and that's, like, super inspiring, I feel like you can always simplify your product to the point where it's just becomes almost like second nature to us it you know, like is, like picking it up. And learning it is like not a problem.

I was gonna say like, and getting it as close to like, the natural languages of the web is also like, super nice. Like you said, it gets Alpine is even close, like view got close to like, some the declarative nature of like HTML. And then Alpine took it a step further and said, You know what, let's make it look exactly like HTML. You know,

it's funny, you say that, because that was like the whole concept behind our idea for the validation rules, because we had used certain, like, you know, other services that because, you know, there'll be services out there that are just front end validation rules. But I always felt like they were kind of, you know, like, not super difficult to write, but you had to write it in in JavaScript. And I felt like, it would be super cool. If we could put out a service where you could write the validation rules in just like markup, you know, what I mean, like HTML markup, so then that kind of gave us the idea to just add them inside, like a rules attribute inside the input. You know, like, you know, you have your input, you say, rules, and then you add your validation in there, and then a validated front end and back end at the same time, right. So it's like, the whole concept behind it was like what you said, trying to get it as close to like, the native, you know, markup language as possible. And I feel like Alpine JS did like, an amazing job of accomplishing that, you know,

yeah, yeah. And I like, I like that you're like building it in that way, too. Because like, if you think about the the nature of a product that is like making forms as easy that it's like, including your site is possible, you might be working with somebody that is, you know, creating maybe just HTML CSS, right, and they still won't be able to like import that into their project. Or maybe they're using something like 11 D, and it's a very, like HTML feel everywhere. And they still want that without having to go outside and be a JavaScript developer like that. That's, that's such a handy thing for something that should feel as simple as forms should feel.

Right? Like, we want it to be able to allow users to build down like a complete form, like everything you would really need, but without really needing to know how to write JavaScript, you could and you could, like, extend it further, which is awesome. But you really don't need it to be able to create a fully functioning complete form, you know what I mean?

Yeah, and when you kind of look at it, and you look at, like, the big competitors in the space, like you mentioned, formstack, and there's stuff like wufu, that are these, like, you know, you know, GUI interface, like let's drag and drop the the the form fields in, like, that's, that's one step further, and then what you get out of it is like a jumbled mess. Whereas this can kind of be that that middle space, where it's like, you know, what, an editor might actually be able to stumble their way through this kind of thing. But it's going to be in a way that developers can come back and be like, Oh, no, no, we're gonna do this slightly differently, because I understand the underlying code.

Yeah, that's true. But really our our intended audience is really just developers. If you know, HTML, CSS, I mean, you don't have to be like a crazy programmer, if you know, HTML, CSS, any developer can do it, you know, but that's why I felt services like formstack, and wufu. They're just like in a different space, right, they're servicing a different audience. Like you said, like the editors, people, like in marketing teams or something like that. And that's, you know, that's great, that's perfect for them. But then we kind of felt like they were also servicing developers, but just not as good as, as it could be, you know, what I'm saying, at least in my experience, when I use it, it just kind of felt not like a natural workflow for me, you know,

and what, you know, I used to look into, like their API's and to send the biggest thing you could do, and you could do, like, you could have created your own like, form API based on their API, but you know, no one's got time for all that when they just want to put a form on the page. So like, having something that is itself, given his own API driven experience, just means you get that kind of for free at that point.

Yeah, and it's just, you know, it's simple, it's enjoyable, it's, that that's really the goal, which I feel like, it's the goal of overall Jamstack just like services like, like Vercel and Netlify, that just kind of, because I feel like Jamstack, you know, the the nature of it, is you have your front end framework, right. But then you got like the missing piece, which is the rest, like, you know, the whole back end, part of it, deploying, and in this case, forms, emails, things like that. So I feel like services, like ours, you know, services like Vercel, and Netlify, they kind of complete that whole environment for them. And I, and I honestly really do feel like it's where the industry is headed, just because of how simple it is to kind of start it up and get it going, you know?

Well, and the nice thing is, like you mentioned, like Netlify, and, you know, they've got the like, the super simple, like form stuff built in, right, you toss Netlify attribute on your form, and you're done. But that doesn't really accomplish, the more complex, you know, UI as you might want to do around forms. Because forms can be super simple, and that's great. But they can also be, you know, complex business, decision driven things that need some extra logic and need some extra handling built in, that you'd have to kind of roll on your own, if you're trying to use like, the super simple solutions that are out there,

right, and things like, you know, not to bash on what Netlify hazard form services like those, they're just like an endpoint that don't really have, like a front end aspect to them, there's a certain kind of security that you're going to be lacking there. Because, for example, like validation rules, especially ours, we our validation rules are unique in the fact that they're on temporal. So if you were to, like, add a form and validation rules, you know, load of the page, if you were to inspect element and try to remove the rules, no, it's not, it's not gonna happen. They're the rules are there to state, you know, and maybe try to inject a new field, if you try to remove a field, you know, because it validates on the front end and the back end. So then when you kind of don't have that, that part of a form service, you know, it's a lot easier to be able to inject fields change, like the type attribute of a field, or if something's a read only, you can like go and just take off the read only attribute. And, you know, that is just a certain kind of security that will be lacking, if you're kind of lacking that part of it.

And you could, you could handle that on the front end, on your own. But like I said, like, when it comes to forms, you just want the form to work, you don't want to have to go and roll that yourself, you rather do whatever cool feature you're working on, that needs the form, like work work on it elsewhere,

because it's just monotonous. And the thing is that every project that you do is kind of, you know, almost like 99% of the time, you're gonna need a form, you know, so then, you know, this part is solving a piece of it, but then you kind of have to every single time, figure out a way to add these, everything else has missing to it, you know what I'm saying? So, it's nice to just have a service that you could, you know, import the script plug it is done, you know, and I mean, it, everything's done, you don't have to go on a scavenger hunt and find, you know, like another Validation Service and then find a way to validate on the back end and then find yours or something like compliance, for example, right? Like you have these medical sites that need HIPAA compliance, and things like that, you know, what I'm saying is easy to, it's so much better to just be able to trust a company to kind of handle that for you. And that provides a really easy experience in regards to like implementation. Yep,

I did one HIPAA compliance site one time and I never want to touch that sort of thing again. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 19:35

what what is your what's your actual jam right now? What are you listening to what sorts of music are you into or your favorite song or musician?

You know, I wish I could be one of those people that have that's that's super unique taste in music knows all like the underground people before they get famous or something. I'm definitely not that. I feel like music has this this super unique way of putting putting you in like, the frame of mind that you want, right? So, you know if I'm trying to relax or something, maybe I'll listen to like something classical. You know, if I'm trying to focus, I'll listen to something else. And I'm trying to get inspired. Maybe there's like a Drake song that inspired me. So I think it's just gonna depend on, you know, what kind of what kind of move what, what kind of emotion I want to put myself in, right? Yeah. So I think it's cool how we can we live in this era that we could just, you know, on demand, just be like, okay, I feel like being inspired. Let me put on this song, you know?

So so let me let me ask this then. So when you're when you're coding when you're working on the product, what's in your earphones at that point,

it's gonna be the weirdest thing ever. But what I listen to at that point is literally just like rain. I put like, how in the rain. I don't know why, but it just, it really helps me focus like crazy. So I just put like the sound of rain for like, 10 hours or something. Or like snow or something weird like that.

Yeah, I found some like some lo fi like YouTube videos that have like rain and stuff in the background like that. That's so soothing. Like, you can definitely get you into a focus minds.

Yeah, I like that, too. So sometimes I put like the lo fi, hip hop or something like that.

Nice. So So what would you like to promote and kind of get out to the, to the Jamstack community as a whole? I mean, obviously, we're probably gonna talk about Kwes, but go for it.

Yeah, I will, you know, we're still kind of new in the scene. You know what I mean, we launched it about so the whole story, you know, we worked on it for about three years. We launched it last year, we scrapped it somewhere. Like it like, I don't know, October not really scrapped, because it's still out, you know, it's still being supported. But then we kind of put out the the new version, I would say, maybe it's been a month already since we put it out. Okay, and yeah, I would like to get that out there, you know, for people to check it out. Give it a try. You know, we offer free trials and we feel like it's a really great service and we would love to hear anybody's opinions on it. The only reason why has gotten to this point is because of you know, all the love that people have shown and people reaching out to us. You know, we We always love when people reach out to us. They call it a game changer. They they really seem to love the product, you know, so any anybody out there that wants to check it out? give their opinion, definitely welcome you to hear. You could also check us out on Twitter. That's a Kwes forms, kW LS fo RM s, and my personal Twitter Miguel JSMIGU, el, Jay AR, I as I almost forgot how to spell my own name.

Well, and don't worry, I'll grab those links. And I will put them in the show notes for everyone to kind of grab as well as i think it's it's what kwes.io, right kW. Yes. Awesome. So, Miguel, thanks so much for being on with us today. And I hope you keep doing amazing things at Kwes as well as Kevin this broad Jamstack community.

Awesome, man, thank you so much. You too. You got a great podcast going on. Here are some of your episodes. I love them.

I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Thanks again to Miguel and thanks to everyone out there who listens week after week. If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review or a rating in your podcast app of choice. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things jammy

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Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that not so tricky question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have Anthony Campolo. A full stack web developer and RedwoodJS advocate.

All right, Anthony. Well, thanks for coming on the show with us today. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. So it's great to be here.

Excellent. I appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?

Yeah, absolutely. So I am a bootcamp student. Someone who is kind of coming to programming from a different area of life, I was originally a music teacher, and then also ran a performing arts summer camp for about four years, and just decided that I wanted to try something else out. And you know, that the journey I got to, to coding is, is long and winding, which we'll talk about a little bit as we as we go on. But um, right now I am at lambda school, and learning full stack web development. And so yeah, that's where I'm at. Right, so your lambda school, you do that kind of full time for a small cohort, right? Yeah. So they have a full time and a part time program. So full time is a nine month program. And then part time is an 18 month program. So I actually started full time, and then switch to part time. So I've, I've done a little bit of both, it kind of just depends on you know, if you're also working to support yourself as well, or if you can really do it kind of full time. So yeah, it's, it's it's nice, because they have that flexibility. So people can kind of choose the schedule that that fits for them. Very cool.

So what do you do outside of obviously, now you're learning to code what's, what's your idea of fun nowadays?

Yeah. So I've gotten just really into open source. And it's the type of thing where I'm doing it both to to eventually help my my career, but it is something that I've really enjoyed. And I've learned a lot about RedwoodJS. In particular, I've spent a lot of time blogging about it. And I've also given a couple meetup talks about it. I did one at Jamstack Denver, and another one for GraphQL Texas. And I'm also now doing some some podcasts. I got both Jamstack podcasts done by Bryans. So that's good. And yeah, so that's kind of where where I'm at now, I'm really kind of deep into into the redwood world.

Very cool. Very cool. So obviously, you're a bootcamp student. So you're picking up development as you go along. But what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack? Was it Redwood? Or was it something something else in the past?

Yeah, so it definitely was way before Redwood and already kind of being familiar with with the Jamstack beta easier to kind of get what Redwood was was going for. But to take it back a little bit. I originally before I was doing any web development stuff, I was actually learning like data science and machine learning stuff, is what I was first trying to get into. And a lot of people who do that type of research, they have their own personal websites as well to talk about the stuff they're working on. And there's a couple where I would scroll the bottom and it would say it was created with Jekyll. And so Jekyll is funny enough static site generator created by the creator of Redwood, Tom Preston-Warner. And so I think that was probably the first time I ever had heard of the term static site. And I ended up not going that route. I ended up just making a WordPress website when I was first getting into like blogging. But then once I started to transition more into web development and learning JavaScript and react in particular that I learned about Gatsby, and so I spun up a Gatsby blog. And I listen to a lot of podcasts. So out here podcast with, with Kyle from from Gatsby, or I'm Matt from Netlify. And so I was I was hearing all these all these people like talking about these ideas, and it was just kind of floating around. So it was it's been a kind of a slow, slow roll into it. But it's definitely it's just like it's a huge, massive thing that's just there. And if you kind of pay attention, it's hard not to poke that bubble every now and then.

Exactly. And so so you said that you were kind of when you're getting into development you were doing you know more on the machine learning side and stuff so that like more computer science II stuff, what's kind of your, your, your plan, where do you want to go with web development, kind of in a post bootcamp world and all that?

Sure. Right now, I mean, I'm really into just kind of like the, the dev advocacy side of it, because I really enjoy creating. In the tutorials, I enjoy going out and talking about these things. And my background as an educator kind of fits really well in that in that niche. And there's you know, there's different kind of corners that that people go for. There's some are kind of more education, focus, some are more outreach, focus, some are more about like, bringing feedback back from the community. And so redwoods been cool, because all the kind of mechanisms for feedback are already in place. So I see myself more just like getting out and explaining it to people like, what is this? How does it work, and then that's like, kind of the whole role that I've kind of monopolized.

Nice, you've got kind of that that arts background, which definitely helps when it's like framing the story of how to do that education, too, that's always a handy thing to kind of have in your tool belt.

Yeah, you definitely need to be able to put things into a narrative for people to really want to, like, pay attention, especially for technical things. But I find that the history of this thing is is so fascinating. And I've actually spent a lot of time writing about kind of this transition from static site generators into the Jamstack. And now even like the Jamstack is turning into something else that we're not quite sure what it is yet. Because we've we've gotten rid of the acronym and now Jamstack is stands for nothing. And it's just kind of like an architecture. And so I'm really interested in those kind of ideas of like, Where is the Jamstack going?

Definitely I think, I think that there are so many new technologies kind of coming out Redwood being among them next JS having like, all these new ideas around what static and and like, server side and what these different pieces bring to the table and how they can kind of be intermingled? I'm kind of curious, like, how does Redwood see itself? Cuz I know it's a it's a full stack front end kind of application builder. But what what's the community kind of see in terms of like, where it's going?

Yeah, so it's called a full stack serverless framework for the Jamstack. So you have the Jamstack part, which is about having your front end be just static assets that you can serve from a globally distributed CDN. And then the full stack part is, how do we get those same benefits attached to the database and the back end? So it's about how do we also get that back end to be distributed globally, which, like fauna, db is doing a lot of really interesting research there. And then you have the serverless part of it, which is, how do you get your whole application to be sort of smushed into just these like AWS, lamda handlers, or, you know, Google Cloud Functions or Azure Functions. So the back end is set up in a way. So it's easily deployable to these sort of Functions as a Service serverless back ends. So it's, and then also, I didn't even mention graph QL. Like graph qL, is kind of what ties the two together. And then so there's a lot of there's a lot of tech that goes into it. And it takes a long time to kind of wrap your head around, which is why I like spent a lot of time writing about it and talking about it. And you know, I have hours and hours of material about it at this point.

How are you kind of pursuing kind of redwood right now? Like professionally, personally, what what are you building with it? What what are the applications that you kind of see optimized around what Redwood can do?

Yeah, so the first thing I did was just go through the tutorial. And this is what I would really recommend everyone who is getting into this, you should just go through the whole tutorial and kind of build out that project because they started with what they call tutorial driven development, which is sort of a play on README driven development, which is another term Tom was using a while ago. And the idea being that you create the tutorial, and then you build the framework to make the tutorial work. And so it's, it's a really crucial part of it. And now that I've kind of gone through that, it what it does is it has you deploy to Netlify for your front end, and then Heroku for your back end, does that have a Postgres database, so I'm really interested in kind of like other deploy targets and other databases you can link it up to so I wrote an article about how to connect it to fauna dB. And then that was also deployed on Vercel. And then there's other people who are doing work with like, the serverless framework, and like Azure, Postgres. So I'm interested in kind of like, now that I know how to build out a redwood project is like, what are the different ways we can deploy it? And what are the different ways that we can get it out actually, onto the internet?

Yeah, and like, how can we do that that database structure because that's, you know, traditionally what's always been the fun challenging aspect of the Jamstack is like, how do you get that third party data and, and if you're having it be your own database at that point, like a Heroku, Postgres kind of idea. That's not that doesn't necessarily fit in with some of the other Jamstack ideals, whereas a Fanta DB type solution might and like serverless functions and lambda might over like, you know, hosting elsewhere. How is that going? How does that feel in terms of ripping out a Postgres server and installing a no SQL server or maybe a third party data API of some other sort,

it's really interesting. And another thing you have to consider this is, what we haven't talked about yet is Prisma. And Prisma, is, it's called a query builder. So it's a little bit like an ORM, but a little bit lower level. And that's what you use to do a lot of your database work for like Postgres, or MySQL, or like SQL Lite. So as I said, when you go through the regular tutorial, you you eventually have a Postgres database, and you're using SQL lite and development. And Prisma is what you use for like your migrations and a bunch of stuff like that. So you have to rip out Prisma to use fauna. So that's actually kind of the biggest thing you have to consider is do you need the functionality that Prisma gives you. And you know, some people don't, because they're, they've never used it, they don't even they don't even know what what it does so. But once you kind of learn Redwood, through the tutorial, you learn it with Prisma. So it can be easy, or can be hard to kind of tell where the two, actually where the line is between the two. Because redwoods csli actually reaches into Prisma c li and what do you do Redwood commands, some of them are actually Prisma commands. So So for me, I actually learned a lot through the fata project in terms of just like, Where is the boundary between Redwood and Prisma. And so that's kind of the thing you're gonna have to, to figure out if you want to decide which kind of route you want to go with with your database when you're using Redwood

It's interesting, like one things I've kind of seen in the Jamstack world in general, but with some of the conversations around Redwood is this idea that opinionated frameworks aren't a bad thing. So like, you know, Gatsby comes with its unique flavor of react. And it's tightly coupled with GraphQL. Redwoods coming with its own brand new things, I've actually heard it favorably compared to, to rails in a lot of ways. Like, it allows you to create things very quickly, if you're doing it in their opinionated way. It seems like we're going a lot in that direction. So that if you have a set of opinions that you like, you can find some sort of tooling around it. And seems like Redwood is kind of settling into a very specific niche there.

Absolutely. This is a big thing with other frameworks that are compared to a lot you have like Blitz is now they're like rails inspired, opinionated, full stack framework. And then you have Bison, by Chris ball, which is a really interesting projects that is still pretty new, and is up and coming. But it's Yeah, I like it. Because it's nice to have options, as nice for me as a beginner to be able to see a stack put together. And so even if, you know, I ended up moving away from Redwood and doing other things, just learning how the redwood stack was put together, is has given me things that I can take from for the rest of my career. So it's not about like, this is the one true way to do kind development so much is like, here's a way that we think works for us through our experience as as developers and taking bits and pieces from different frameworks they've used in the past and, and the rails comparison is interesting, because I think this can actually trip some people up. And they think of redwood, like rails. And so they think, you know, whatever advantages or disadvantages rails has, Redwood will have those same advantages and disadvantages, but actually, it was made to contrast rails in certain ways as well, there are things that Tom doesn't like about rails that he specifically is trying to do different. So I think that's, that's an important thing to note, too, is that, that don't get hung up, like too much on the rails thing is that it's rails inspired in the sense that it wants to have like, a happy path. But what that happy path is, is not the same thing as rails.

Yeah, and definitely, you know, what I mentioned that I it's, it takes the positive side of like being able to scaffold quickly and build quickly from the rails ideology and kind of runs with that. I think it's really, really interesting that, you know, coming from, you know, Tom's kind of rails background and working on various things in the past, he's been able to bring that sort of hard knocks education into what he built. I think that I mean, you mentioned that I think you're exactly right, that it's one of the best ways to learn is to take a very opinionated framework, and see how somebody has set it up somebody who has, you know, decades of experience, you then get to learn from those decades of experience, which I think is a very, very powerful tool.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's been fun. And it's not just Tom to like actually Peter, Peter pastorius he's worked on a lot more of the code than then Tom has. And I say he's kind of like the Rosetta Stone of this project is that it came out of the work that Peter and Tom were doing on chatter bug. And so they were, you know, doing react and graph qL, and all that kind of stuff. And they and they wanted to put together a framework that would work for that, that would give them the same sort of benefits they had from rails, but with this new technology,

I'm gonna date myself a little bit here, and I'm not too afraid of that, I suppose. But, uh, one of one of my biggest learning experiences, and this has been a decade ago now was actually I primarily use jQuery back in the day, as many people who were, you know, doing web development a decade ago were doing. And the biggest thing I learned was when I actually read through the code of jQuery and dissected how it worked, which was Mind you, like, five years after just using the framework is like diving in and saying, Oh, that's how JavaScript callbacks work, or Yeah, like other pieces that I hadn't experienced and hadn't had to write because of jQuery, I then was able to learn by reading it. And I think that that a lot can be said about, you know, these new frameworks, and that as well, it's like, learn how to use it, you know, get it system under your belt, and then like, wait, no, now, how did they write that? How does that function and like, it just, there's so many education opportunities?

Yeah, it's a weird time getting in now. Because learning things like react, like, I know that I should try and like read through the React source code, but it's, it's hard. And it's really hard to even know, like, what what to get out of that. And, you know, they also talk about how you can't really do View Source anymore, because of how much all the all this stuff gets minified and spit out. So yeah, it's really hard to even know like, you're using all these tools and where it even break in to try and figure out how they how they work. Luckily, it's like Doc's have gotten a lot better. So really, like, you should just read through, you know, the, the React docs front to back, and I find most people they don't even do that. But um, yeah, back in the day, where you could just go read through the source code, I think that's, um, it's not really a thing you can do very much these days. That's fair.

Yeah, I guess there's also like, the idea of like, all the code splitting that we do to whereas, you know, jQuery used to be, you know, one directory with like, you know, 10 files in it, nothing, nothing major, you know, now, if I were to rewrite jQuery, it would be 100 files, you know, 150 files just to do that same functionality. And the same can easily be said for, you know, react and for the for the meta frameworks built on top of it.

Meta frameworks and meta meta frameworks, because there's now frameworks built on top of frameworks, like Blitz and bison are built on top of next. So I find that really interesting how you have all these different layers, like further and further layers of abstraction with frameworks built on top of frameworks, it's, it's super fascinating.

You can go back and in like the first dozen or so episodes of the podcast, like I was talking with a bunch of Gatsby people, a few next people, I would ask, like, how do you refer to this? Because it's not a static site builder anymore. That's not what this is, is not a static site generator. And they're like, Oh, you know, it's an application framework. And then a guest, I had second half the sea for a season. Like, oh, Google is calling it meta framework. I was like, you know, that makes sense, a framework on top of a framework. But yeah, then we've now got meta meta frameworks, which is exciting, but the language feels a little tortured about it.

Yeah, I know, Jason Lengstorf was calling Gatsby a content mesh. At one point, which I thought that was a really fascinating term, especially because of how it uses graph QL. And this idea of kind of, like, you have this one universal middle layer between your back ends and your front ends. And so you can create whatever front you want, and then pull in whatever combination of back ends you want. And, yeah, that's the thing that I found really interesting with with Redwood is, is just when you have graph qL baked in from the start, like what you can kind of do with that what kind of power that gives you it's, I really liked graph QL. But that's been the thing. I've enjoyed learning the most out of redwood, for sure.

It's definitely way better than then going and getting the entire, like, Jason return response from an API that has, you know, dozens of things that you don't need inside of it. I'll always appreciate what graph qL did around that.

Yeah. And it's one of those things where I imagine a lot back end people are like, graph qL is not simpler. It's much more challenging. It just seems like it's simpler once it's set up. So yeah, I definitely sympathize with with people who who think you know, it's a huge startup cost. But I think that the benefit that your your front end gets from just being able to have really flexible queries is is just you know, it's really high. Definitely.

So I think I can make some assumptions here. But what would you say that your jam in the Jamstack is I'm assuming Redwood and graph qL but Want to leave the door open whatever else you want to say in here? Anything goes.

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely what I've invested the most time into into learning and to communicating. But I am really fascinated by the the entire ecosystem. And I'm starting to learn a little bit of like Nuxt cuz I'm really interested in view three with like the composition API and how all the changes are going to come in with that. I'm really interested in spelt and like sapper, and I just heard about elder which is supposedly like the new static site generator thing for for spelt. That's supposed to be really good. So yeah, red wood is definitely like my bread and butter right now. But I'm constantly expanding out and try to look at what else is out there and, and other ways to do things. Because I find that for me, that's the best way for me to learn is to compare different ways of, of doing things. And then you have in one framework, and it doesn't have something and other framework has to figure out how to implement it myself. And very cool.

So what's your actual jam right now? What's your musical jam work? What's your favorite song or musician? What's in your earphones?

Yeah, so I used to be a full time professional musician. So music is obviously a big thing for me. My favorite band has always been Radiohead, going back to like I first got into them around when in rainbows came out, which was like 2007. So that is my favorite band ever since then. I really enjoy Bone Iver. I first got into him back when his first album came out. And his career has just been incredible to see now he's like, he's Kanye West albums. And he's been nominated for Grammys and all that. And then like, just 90s indie rock. So like new book hotel, Modest Mouse, built a spill, you know that that whole kind of scene? That was always really influential to me. So yeah, those are some of my favorite bands and artists.

Very cool. All right. And is there anything that you would like to promote something you're doing? You log out to the Jamstack? world at large?

Yeah, so there's this thing called Fs jam. So full stack Jamstack. It's, um, you know, it's what Redwood is, is going under right now. And a friend of mine, Christopher burns, he is kind of creating, like an organization around this. So the Twitter handle is Fs jam o RG. So Fs jam org, and we'll be putting out some content and possibly even getting a podcast going. So yeah, that'll be something to look for.

Very cool. So something to stay tuned for, as they say in the industry. Right.

Well, thank you, Anthony, so much for coming on the show today. And I hope you keep doing amazing stuff with red wood, but also beyond as you're saying, like, there's so much to learn and so much to to write in, right,

Totally. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's been a blast. I'm always really enjoying the content you put out and I've learned a lot. So continue to do what you're doing.

I appreciate it. Thanks again to Anthony. And thanks to everyone out there listening week after week. If you enjoy that podcast, be sure to leave a star heart review, rating, whatever, in your podcast app of choice. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things jammy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask the time tested question, what's your jam and the jam stack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week, we have Drew Clements, a front end developer for Foster Commerce.

All right, Drew. Well, thanks for being on the show with us today.

Thank you for having me.

Awesome. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing?

Well, again, my name is Drew Clements. I'm a front end developer with Foster Commerce. We use view a lot on the front end. For fun. I like to play video games. I play guitar. I play paintball. Although I haven't played in a year or two since we've had our first kid.

Yeah, I have I have many hobbies that I have that I have not done nearly as much in the past five years since I had since I had mine. So I totally get that. Yeah. So So what sorts of video games do you play video games?

I mostly play a bunch of first person shooters. I'm really big on the latest Call of Duty right now. PUBG, all those fun things.

And then you say you're at foster commerce. So I assume that's, that's an e commerce agency or developer. What do you actually do there?

So we build e commerce solutions for a multitude of clients. Cool. And you say you say mostly in Vue nowadays. Yeah, we for the front end, we use view. And in the last few projects, we've started roping in graph QL. with it.

Okay, very cool. So So obviously, we're using some some semi Jamstack things, at least when it comes to Vue and GraphQL. But what would you say is kind of your entry point into the world of Jamstack? Where did you kind of get into it?

The entry point for me was when I wanted to probably like a bunch of other developers, I wanted to build myself a blog, because I told myself, if I built it, I would actually write.

So when I was looking at, you know, different options for how to do that, I came across things like Gatsby in similar frameworks, I didn't really know much about it, I really just kind of dove in headfirst.

Nice. And so so out of curiosity, you you did the technology, you learn the technology to do the thing, right to write the blog. Now I've been through three blogs before I successfully actually started writing, were you able to actually overcome that hurdle and write on the blog.

I wrote two articles on the blog. That was about as far as I've made it here was here recently, I've been using the dev.to for some of my writing, but I'm actually in the process of rebuilding my blog, I'm not redesigning it. I've already gone down that rabbit hole. But I'm rebuilding it. So I'm gonna be able to use the dev.to platform, kind of as the CMS for my Jamstack Bog

Very nicely, because they they at least there's an RSS feed. And there's probably some other stuff that you can get out of that right.

Oh, yeah.

Very cool. So so what what kind of technology brought you into the Jamstack? So you said you started researching blog platforms? I think you mentioned Gatsby. But you're also in Vue land. So what are you using nowadays? In terms of that? Or what technologies are you researching? Right now?

I'm researching ways I can make Nuxt as Jamstack as possible. I really, I really liked the view framework. And Nuxt, I guess, I guess that's server side view. But there, there are some stuff, you can put some things you can do to it. To make it a little more Jamstack. Ease, I'm really trying to look into two ways I can do that. That's part of the research for rebuilding my blog site. It's how I can implement some of those things.

Get it get a static as possible. Like it's as quick as possible, I think. Yeah, I think they're doing a lot of stuff right now around around static routes and stuff like that. So that should be that should be a good investment there.

I think. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun when I'm still in the kind of the reading and looking around phase I'm, I'm ready to jump into it that

nice. So. So that's kind of personally how you're using the Jamstack. Are you bringing any of that back into your work in e commerce? Or are you primarily working on just a front end with kind of some stationary back ends in place?

I haven't really had the chance to bring that into any of the professional products that we're working on. A lot of the ones they're just they're larger complex builds that I think we actually within let me backtrack that a little bit within the last week. Within the last week, we've discovered that one of the sites we're building would probably actually benefit from being a Jamstack site. But at this point that the deadlines to close for us

to make that pivot. Yeah, my favorite thing, from what I worked at agencies is discovering a new technology. you're discovering a new a new way of doing something, and really wanting to use it on a client project and then realizing No, we have like, you know, three more weeks left in this project. Okay, quite do that now. So out of curiosity, what you know, without specifics what what kind of things with the Jamstack bring to that project? Is it about like performance, security, flexibility.

In this case, it would be performance, it's the, there's not a lot of interactivity on the site, there's just a lot of content being generated from a CMS. So from, from a user's perspective, if we could just, you know, grab all that at build time, or whatever that process ends up being, and just generate the static assets of it and hand it to them rather than rather than, you know, there being the front end spa process of it. It would just, it would just give the users a whole lot better experience.

Yeah. And I feel I feel like probably one of the one of the biggest sectors in the web industry that could do well to adopt Jamstack. is e commerce. I feel like some of the tooling isn't quite there yet. Like there are Jamstack type tools for e commerce, but they all feel like they lag behind the the bigger players.

Yeah, that's, that's one of the things we've been seeing is that it'll be like a nine out of 10 thing like, it has nine of the things we really would like to have. But the 10th one that it's missing, is the one that we absolutely need. Yeah.

I also feel that not just from a Jamstack perspective, but oftentimes just just doing client work like that one thing that we have to have can't use x, y or z framework.

Yeah. Cool. So

what would you say is your as your current kind of jam in the Jamstack. So obviously, using view or and playing with Nuxt. But what what kind of service or product or philosophy is really keeping you engaged in the way the Jamstack works?

For me, I would have to say, the the simplicity, or I guess, relative simplicity of the Jamstack philosophy. I remember when I was first starting out, and I wanted to build my own blog. And like, kind of when I was just starting to get like a confident grasp on the front end. I was like, man, I still have to learn all of this back end technologies to actually build something. But then, you know, when I found Gatsby, and I think I looked at Jekyll and Hugo, a couple of other things like that, you know, that just kind of discovered that I could build stuff without having to become a full fledged full stack developer. And maybe part of that was even true before the Jamstack came about. But the Jamstack was, what kind of opened my eyes to that.

Yeah. And there's so many services out there that make it so that you like, even if you just had a static site generator, like, like you mentioned, with Hugo, with Jekyll, you can produce a really nice site. But then if you want to add additional functionality, there's just, there's so many ways to do it without having to, it's gonna sound bad, but without having to learn that like extra piece of technology that the back end requires you want a database, you can just push schema less data to something like fauna DB or something like that. You can just push it out there and have have a cool back end with no, no real effort.

Yeah. And I was never against learning the backend technologies. I was just so anxious to get something out there that I wanted to do and as quick as possible in it. At that point, it was like, it was something else I'd have to do before I could do the fun part. And I was just really anxious to get to the fun part.

Yeah, definitely. And I mean, myself, being a front end developer in general, I remember, had a portfolio site. This was years and years ago, now that I happen to know a little bit about Python and Django. And so I wrote it in Django, which is, you know, a Python framework. And it works nicely. And it was a learning experience. And then a year later, I needed to update it, I realized that whatever I'd done a year before, had made it so just wasn't going to work. If I push the code live. I was like, oh, okay, I, I can't do anything without breaking both my CMS and breaking my live site. Oh, there's this static thing. I can just like, I think like, immediately after that I rewrote my portfolio in HTML and CSS. Like, I didn't even have a static site generator. It's like, I can't have this happen again. Yeah. But yeah. And then kind of progressing into these other tools that allow that just allow front end developers to flourish? I think, hmm.

Yeah, I think the the first iteration of my, of my blog was it was statically generated. And then the the content was just static within it. It wasn't coming from CMS. But then after, you know, I've learned a little bit in that first part of the process. So then when I got all developers do when I rebuilt it again, the second time I integrated the, I think I'm using the Netlify CMS into it. And then you know, part three, that's going to be coming out sometime, probably not before the end of the year is going to have the dev.to integration into it. So it's kind of has been like a building process the entire time. Always add, add one more thing to it, like as I go,

I think that's that's such a great way of getting into things like listening That and realizing that was kind of my process into the Jamstack to where I was like, Alright, I need a static static content, I can do that, Okay, I'm gonna use a static site generator and my content will be markdown. No problem, okay. Netlify, CMS allows me to have a CMS that deals with my markdown beautiful, oh, there are these API based things that I can do even better. And so like, I feel like you just you pick up a new piece of technology every step along the way, until you get something that really is almost like, you could give that to a client and they'd be perfectly happy with it.

Yeah, absolutely. That was, the only reason I'm considering going to the dev to thing is just so I can, you know, write once publish in both. Right now, if I want to write it. If I want it to be on my dev account and my blog, I have to either copy and paste or write it twice. So this is, I guess, kind of a, an automation feature.

Yeah. Well, and in fact, like they even have some automation, but it doesn't fully work. So like my RSS feed goes into dev dot two. But I still have to touch every every article, I still have to go back and like, Oh, this syntax highlighting didn't work, or, oh, this image is pulling my version of the image, I need to upload it to dev dot two for my own bandwidth. And yeah, if I wrote it in dev dot two, and then brought it to my site that would that would automate most of the problems away I think.

Yeah, that's, that's the part I'm really excited to get to get into.

authoring in one place is definitely the way to go.

Yeah.

Cool. So let's talk a little bit about music right now. So what is your actual real life jam? What's your favorite song or musician? What's in your earphones?

It rotates fairly often. Like I have a huge Spotify playlist that keeps me pretty satiated throughout the day. And that that covers anything from like, you know, Fall Out Boy pop punk to like some really heavy metal stuff. But you're here lately, I've been on like a late 90s, early aughts, skate punk kick. So I've been listening to a lot a lot of Goldfinger the mighty mighty bosstones XSR 71. Kind of like the Tony Hawk Pro Skater one soundtrack you chalk it up to that

that is that is pretty much the the perfect analogy for my my my late teens was Tony on the Tony Hawk video game soundtrack because that was that was very energizing. So listen to that on Spotify and then whatever, like the Spotify automation AI brings your way.

Yeah, pretty much do you

find Do you find that certain types of music because because you just listed out some pretty varied styles there from like, you know, heavy metal to you know, ska and punk from the from the late 90s. Do you find that some of the music does better at various things for you? Like do you do you focus better with like, hardcore metal? Or do you focus better with with ska or punk?

I think it's kind of a situational thing. So like I noticed in the morning, I'll usually start out with kind of more of the in the punk mode or sometimes out there on like some lo fi hip hop when I'm getting started in the morning. Then like if I'm like, if I'm like really focused and in the zone, like out there on some metal and it just, you know, blinders on heads down.

And one thing I'll give I'll give you a warning about actually, so I just discovered this I use I use amazon music for mine, but I share it with you know, with my entire family and when you go to their like recommendations and all of a sudden it goes from from something like some video game music or some some upbeat you know, hip hop and then all sudden you're listening to Daniel Tiger and you don't know how that happened happened. It happens when you have when you have children, that happens pretty easily.

Yeah, that that happens to me, I have had that one playlist that I usually go to. But they Spotify does has kind of like a recommended listening based off of your, you know, previous history. So I have gotten hit with some Rain rain go away.

Every now and then. Perfect. Yep. Yeah. So Well, is there anything that you would like to kind of promote that you're doing that you want to get out to the Jamstack community? Anything that is that is coming coming our way from you?

Yeah, so it's it's not Jamstack yet, but it's it's coming down the pipe. Mima co founder. We've been building a site called protege dev since March of this year. And really, it's a it's a remote job board for junior developers. It's right now right now. It's just a create react app. But in the future, we're going to be moving to either either next or Gatsby we haven't really decided yet. It's a it's a remote job board. But we are ideas for it to be more than just a job board. We're not we're not sure how we're going to do this yet. But we want it to be a platform that also champions the candidates we're trying to get hired. So like I said, we're not sure if that's going to be like content, or maybe a podcast or something right. Right now it's open source so people can contribute to it. And our idea behind that was that if a company comes here to post a listing, they can check out the contributors page and see, oh, I can hire this person, they've actually helped build this platform I'm posting the job on. So we still have some some ideas of how to shake that out. But

one of the hardest things for juniors to kind of get going is that kind of idea that they've got a portfolio outside of like, test projects. So like, Oh, I helped implement or fix this bug on project dev like that's, that's a really cool way of helping them get get into things like Oh, and by the way, that means that I know how to use GitHub. And oh, by the way, it means I know these technologies. I think that's a really cool way of resume building for those juniors as well.

Yeah. And we have, so we have react on the front end, tailwind for styling, and then it's Firebase on the back end. So and I think, I think last I checked, we had not counting me, we had 22 contributors, maybe? Well, you know, some of those are accessibility fixes where they're, you know, just adjusting some contrast ratios. But then there was one where a contributor came in and built some GitHub actions out for us. That kind of automates part of our processes for pull requests and things like that. So anyone can really jump in. And it's really kind of free rein anyone could jump in and touch whatever part of the project they wanted to.

So yeah, that's I think that's a really worthwhile project, I think that there needs to be, especially in the remote world, like more ways for junior devs to find to find work, because back in the day, it was like, you could sit next to a to a mid or senior level Dev and learn lots of things that you needed to. But a company that is remote, needs to have a lot of things in place to make sure that like, boosting up their juniors is a priority. This whole project started out because at the beginning of COVID,

I lost both of my jobs. And I had the protege out of domain. I knew the situation I was in, I would look down the job boards and see senior senior senior tech lead CTO, all these jobs that I didn't feel I was qualified to apply for. So I had a whole lot a whole lot of newfound time. So I just started throwing it together and pretty pretty early on my co founder Andy he found he found the project through Twitter. And I think I think it was like a Wednesday he said, Hey, I'd like to help contribute. And then by like Saturday, he had built like the entire form process for hosting a job to at first it was originally just going to be like a I was hoping it would turn into something but at the same time, if it didn't, it was still something I put I could put on my portfolio. Yeah, but then he came in like full sin. So I was like, Alright, here we go. The thing.

Gonna, it's gonna completely spin up at that point. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of people in that situation too. Because, you know, they say, you know, it's fine to like, apply for jobs that are like a little bit beyond your reach. But if you're a junior, and all you see are seniors and yeah, like, like, Director level CTO level. That's a couple a couple steps beyond what you're willing to maybe put yourself out there for?

Yeah.

All right. Well, very cool. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today. And I hope you keep doing amazing things both in e commerce land but also with, with Project Dev. That sounds like a really cool project.

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

Thanks again to drew and thanks to everyone out there listening to each new episode. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure to leave a review or rating in your podcast app of choice. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things jammy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Support That's my JAMstack by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack

This week, we've got Auth0 as a sponsor. While their prowess at authentication is important, they're also releasing a ton of new tutorials and courses on their YouTube channel, including a free course on building a full-stack Jamstack app with Next.js.

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the intriguing question, what is your jam and the Jamstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have the amazing Dan Barak. Dan is the co founder and CEO at the Jamstack company Stackbit. Before we dive into the episode, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor, auth zero, we'll talk a bit about all the amazing educational content they're putting out at the end of the episode. If you're curious about that, Jamstack and auth education, head on over to a0/to/tmjyt for all the videos.

All right, Dan. Well, thanks for being on the podcast with us today.

Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

Yeah, no problem. So tell us a little bit about yourself, what do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing.

I'm the co founder and COO of Stackbit. And we're the only platform and for the complete platform for the Jamstack. And so I come from a product background, I've been a product manager at Lyft and Facebook before that, and startups and before that, as well. And for fun, I usually do things that my six year old does, and means like a lot of Legos, riding bikes, and etc.

Very cool. So my five year old is absolutely in love with video games, which I kind of apologize for, in numerous ways, multiple days a week. But yeah, that's that's pretty much my, my fun twos, oh, whatever my five year olds into right now?

Exactly, yes, we just, we just started using the Switch. So he's, he's very much into that.

That's, that's what we do quite a bit too. You just you watch daddy play, and then daddy gets to actually play video games a little bit.

Exactly. Exactly.

So tell me a little bit about what does it actually mean at a kind of a product company like Stackbit to be, you know, COO, what do you do on kind of a daily basis there?

So the COO at a purely technology company, mostly I think, and it's about running the company smoothly. So it's, it's managing most of the of the people and making sure that they have what they need to move forward, and they're not blocked. And they're also, you know, on the administrative side, you know, that everything is a Okay, everybody's has, you know, contracts getting paid, like all that work smoothly, we're fully distributed company across the world. So making sure that part is running up and running. And other than that, is also kind of dealing with no as a co founder, and you also deal with a lot of product coming from a very deep product background. And a lot of the product work is done between my one of my other co founders, like in CO hot Pressman, and we're like working together on the product, making sure engineering is up to date and makes and, you know, has a good roadmap, we obviously have an engineering manager, but in discussing priorities in etc. Other than that, obviously go to market talking a lot with customers and clients, and selling in etc. Like just everything, making sure everything takes Yeah, definitely kind of a catch all, but also some important things along along the the product side as well.

Yep. Very cool. So you've been at you, you mentioned Facebook and lifts some outside, you know, not to use the word traditional, but definitely some, some older, longer standing tech companies, but what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack, of which sackbut is such a kind of an integral part.

Yeah, so as often happens, I think we use it these things happen from I've both like a domain and passion and from a personal passion, you know, and one of the things that was very, very much important to me was working with, with great people, and, and ohada. And I go way back, like 1012 years, as well as with Simon, our third co founder, who's the CTO. So we've, we've known each other for a very long time, we've worked in the past together and manage like not to kill each other. So so you know, it's like, very good signs. And, and, and so, you know, mostly, I've switched product domains a lot as I was transitioning between companies, and never did I kind of clung too much to like a specific domain and always They're very excitable and excited about everything. So I can deep dive very quickly into each domain.

Unknown Speaker 5:09

Very cool. So. So I'm kind of curious, like, the collaborative nature of kind of where the, where the Jamstack is kind of starting to go towards, like, how, how content people, editors, and developers and designers, how all of those kind of play together, it's kind of what drew you over to kind of this world, especially like in the Stackbit world.

Yes, essentially making sure that you know, that the Jamstack is growing, and it's a wonderful, and platform, I think, or stack, you know, it's like it has great developer experience. And it's fast, it's secure, it's scalable, all those great things. And but from you know, like the marketing perspective, or the business person's perspective, and you're kind of going back in time, and you have to edit things in a way that they're disjoined, from the actual result, making it very hard to, to actually understand what you're changing, you have to look for, you know, how is this thing that I see on the screen right now, on my website? Where is it defined in the in the CMS? And how do I find it, and I change it? And if I change it, like, Is this too long? Will it fit? Okay? Okay, I have to build it, you know, I have to like, now wait seven minutes for my site to build just to understand that. So it feels like a very, very hard process. And we hear that from customers, both from like, agencies that are trying to move people over to this, you know, much better and much better ecosystem, and from people internally in companies. And one of two things happen, either they are presenting, you know, like, Hey, we want to, like, have all these benefits, and then they're presenting and the tools that are available to the business person or to like the non technical stakeholder, and they're looking at it, and they're like, whoa, wait a second, what is what is this? What do I do with with this interface? I don't want it right, give me WordPress, or something like that. Not that because it's good, but because, you know, allows me to do a little bit of my job, and better. And, or, on the other hand, is like the engineers making know, the right decision for the organization, transitioning to the Jamstack, but then kind of blocking in many ways. And the non technical people, you know, it's like, even like coin lists, in this in kind of hilarious, it's hilarious. You can like testify on your cell phone. It's hilarious. Maybe maybe stupid is the right thing. But it's like jam stuck, like you're in a place where like, some of the choices have been made. And now you're lacking, you know, this, this one solution, one platform, and that unifies everything, and you just have like, the separate tools.

Yeah. And it's kind of it's oftentimes, you know, we talked about the, the benefits for the Jamstack has to developers, those are very obvious in many ways, like in terms of like, work in the code that you want to work in and, you know, not have to worry about the things that you don't want to worry about. And we talked about, like some of those end results, right, the websites that are out there, they're fast, they're secure, kind of out the box, but oftentimes the neglected audiences that kind of in between, like in between the developers And what is finally, finally on the site is copy, you know, copywriters, and editors and designers putting, you know, photography around. And it's definitely, I think an unders underserved to a degree audience for the Jamstack. Even though, if the website is faster and more secure, it's gonna be better in the long run, but if you can't edit it, that can also be a problem.

Yes, exactly, this is and, you know, this collaboration, most of the websites and most of the, you know, am marketers working in a very collaborative manner. And, and organizations have their own workflows, you know, who gets to make changes, who gets to, you know, now we need a translation. So a page is now ready, it has to be translated into other languages. And it has to be approved, you know, sometimes by your manager, sometimes by legal. And oftentimes, you know, designers want to look at what, what you've made changes to, and kind of, you know, make that happen. And this is like, obviously, in large organizations, but even you know, even when somebody's publishing by themselves, they still have a little bit of a process, they go through, you know, like, they validated, it works well on mobile, and do a bunch of other things, you know, clicking the links, making sure nothing is broken, if you have an e commerce site, and making sure you know, end to end, you can you can complete a purchase, etc. So, so facilitating that, and making sure that and that collaboration can happen is I think key.

So let's talk a little bit about stuck back. Because, you know, we'd like to talk about, you know, how you use the Jamstack professionally a decent bit, how are you utilizing it, obviously, Stackbit is a is a very Jamstack centric company. But like, philosophically speaking, how do you all kind of perceive the Jamstack. And we're, we're kind of going

I think we perceive the Jamstack in a way that is very much and you know, about, about choices, and about customizing and picking the right solutions for you. That's why and you know, Stackbit is this kind of end to end solution and platform for the Jamstack, and allows developers to just pick whatever combination, and have site generator and CMS and, you know, themes or designs that work for them, this is very much into, it's about the not just fly by the choice, right? We will support and work with, with whatever tools you choose, you've chosen, but it's also if you if you choose to create a site with Stackbit. And that also kind of nothing is a walled garden and nothing is proprietary like you Am, as a developer who created this, you have access to the repo, it's like your repo, it's your and, you know, your space in the CMS. So Stackbit is very much and you know, we believe will provide a lot of value. And, and that's why we're not trying to build any walls around it, right, you can like build your site with staff bid and edit with the Stackbit studio, you know, send previews, publish, do whatever, if it's not valuable, stopping to use that that is just, like, super easy, they don't, you don't have to do anything. And even while you're using staff that if somebody really prefers to go into the CMS, you know, and like, you know, there's something more complex that they prefer to do with Sanity, or like, just make some changes there. Because like, that's, that's their workflow, then it all works together, right? The the the preview reflects all the changes that are made in code made in the CMS, whether it's within Stackbit or without. So having this openness is very important to us. And being able to, and support all the different tools in the ecosystem is important.

That's a really interesting word choice there with with the fact that you're talking about, you know, choice. And oftentimes, I come from an agency background a little bit to you, you end up locking your agency or your company into a very specific stack, because you like x templating engine, or you like the benefits that you get out of y CMS. But in the future, you may not want those things anymore, or you may there may be the next cool development framework that comes out. And you wanna switch over to that, but maybe you've lost your clients and they think this is the only way I can edit or this is the only CMS that I know. And so, one of the one of the virtues I stole about the about the Jamstack is the idea that any front end developer can make a website from, from soup to nuts from beginning to end. But if they only specialize in that one Like front end framework, and it only communicates with a couple CMS is in a very specific way, it could be very difficult to make a switch. But sounds like making these pieces not to go back to your first question about having a six year old and playing Legos. But it feels like there's a lot of Lego pieces that we're hoping to kind of be able to make interchangeable so that we can use framework of choice with 18 different CMS is with, you know, all these different pieces.

Yeah, that is that is very correct. And I think you're, you're right, that there are multiple use cases here, right. And oftentimes, people, especially the build sites for a living will kind of settle into one and framework and one workflow and kind of make that happen. And we support that fully, right. So you can, you can, if you have like a specific theme that you're working with, that has all the elements and all the pages and all the things that you were kind of like you would use for your clients, then and you know, you can import that into Stackbit create sites repeatedly with it, and then either make the customizations yourself in the studio, even without a developer that point, right, because if even if the developer has defined the framework, and then somebody was like a Tinker and like this, like a technical person can now work with the Stackbit studio and customize it, and then hand it over to the client, even allowing the client themselves to, to make changes. And when when I say client, like obviously, this is kind of like the agency setting, but the exact same thing happens within companies, right, the engineering team, the front end builds the site, and then they they kind of hand it over to the marketer, more product person to to build.

So we definitely just change the word client to stakeholder, and then we're good to go.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, I think like the stakeholder feels like more formal and kind of more rigorous, but yes, this is essentially Yes, you have the developers and you have the stakeholders. And so we definitely support that piece. But yes, we also we also support the the option to easily change, and, and switch and technologies, we see people that are using our site builder, right, they just, you know, they just go over just activate and can super easily within 60 seconds, create a website. And that website can be built with different configurations. So so you know, some people are just like iterating over all them and trying to see, you know, which CMS works best for them. What is, you know, what is the difference between using next js and Gatsby and Hugo and Jekyll and how everything is arranged. So they're learning from it. And I think the nice thing is that, you know, developers are kind of very much a lot of them are early adopters and like to fiddle around and play with things and change them. Having kind of this em studio that abstracts some of it from, you know, your stakeholder is very nice, because they, they don't have to learn a different CMS, and if this is using reference objects, instead of just you know, like, and other ways to represent content, and it's very much abstracted away, and the people who are more usually kind of more like, prefer, you know, like the same interface, and then would love to kind of like, have a specific workflow because they're trying to get something else done, right, they're trying to get their job done, which is changing the website to reflect the brand to get traffic to grow the company, and they would have a very stable interface to work with.

Now, that makes that makes total sense. So, normally, at this point, we would ask, what's your jam in the Jamstack? And I've got some assumptions around what yours might be. So let's hear that and then maybe ask a follow up or two?

Well, you know, I'd be lying if I'd say that ours is not my favorite, right is this, because I think, you know, like, being I've started out as a developer, and I think I've, I've kind of matured out of it too fast, you know, I was too eager to do other things. So I kind of like very quickly and got out of it, you know, just just stay and just switch to product management and switch to like, you know, being a founder of companies. So, you know, it's like, Am I feel my choices are probably, like, you know, less informed, and I love the fact that I have the ability to play around with our tool and super easy, like, if I had to start a Jamstack site from scratch, it would probably like, take me a week, you know, to define everything correctly understand the content schema, you know, and kind of make sure well, the web hooks are all set up and I make the right choices. And I I obviously you know, you know, kind of like many people and I'm very pedantic, you know, like, I really want to be like get the best you know, in class things. I would like to Spend an obsess over it for hours. And, but so yeah, so I really love this and this kind of ability to work quickly and fast and see things visually. And personally, when I, when I start, when I start in Jamstack site, which I do multiple times a week, is I really, I really love the themes that we offer, because there have been built in with the sun about, like, their design is great, I think but it's also they have the right content schema in place. So I have a lot of flexibility into changing things around, you know, I can, I can always add more sections, which things are like around in terms of like, if Is it like right oriented, left oriented? Do I have like images or videos or like, whichever of those work? Am I usually prefer to use next js. And in in terms of CMS is I kind of alternate all the time to keep me on my toes. And I think the it's usually Sanity and contentful. And also, you know, just like, plain am just using Git, you know, just putting markdown files in Git and having that it's always kind of like a simple and fast solution if you don't need anything, and fancy. So I

put a few files together in a folder and you're done.

Exactly. And then and then obviously, you know, we deploy to Netlify. And yeah, from that point onward, I kind of like, I switch to the studio and forget about all the others and

let all those technical concerns just float away, because you don't need them anymore.

Yeah, and they're like, you know, as, as somebody who's like been in product and all these, like, very data driven companies like Facebook and Lyft, I'm, for example, I'm a sucker for a B testing. You know, it's like, I just, I just can't operate without data. Yes, I have gut feelings. And I have, you know, kind of like a vision for certain certain things. But, and, you know, like, and AV testing on the Jamstack was always kind of such a pain. And we're now releasing, releasing this feature, which is in allows you to just like, if you're a business person, a marketer, product managers just create an A B test with one click of a button. And we're just we're sitting there, because we're sitting on top of everything else, we're just orchestrating all these changes. So we can, we can create a new branch in git, and GitHub, and then you know, another environment in the CMS and tie it to the to the AB testing feature on Netlify, eyes, and CDN and make that all kind of work together. And so for me, it was like a very kind of passion, project to nature, we can, we can do that. And people can actually make data informed decisions.

Yeah, and it's one of those one of those interesting things. Like, it's a feature that Netlify has had, for most, like most the time that I've been using it, which is a long time now. But it was never everything that you need to actually do AV testing properly, say, Oh, you know, if you've got everything in markdown, you can have a new branch, and that branch can be, it's great that it's CDN served. And that logic is not in JavaScript or anything like that. But like managing data sets and your CMS and managing all these other pieces, kind of were left to the developer to figure out and it sounds like abstracting those out, means that a marketer can do it, which is really the end goal, something like a B testing. Exactly, exactly.

And, you know, like I've seen, I've seen the way, you know, accelerating that ability. And like, I think in this case, like it's more than accelerating, it's like, as a marketer, with no developer, like you just couldn't run even an A B test. But even if you had a developer, it's like, it's so much work, as you kind of just described to get that working. And so so, you know, companies, we would measure em, if we built an internal tool that allowed marketers to just iterate faster, and try more things. It was bound, you know, like, it's just like, it's just like statistics, you know, part of these tests will be successful part not, and on average, it will drive each test, you know, will drive this amount of impact. So the faster you can move faster, you know, you can iterate and understand what works better, and just create so much more value for the business.

It used to be to be able to have these super simple AV tests, you went to JavaScript, which that itself, it's almost like a Heisenberg principle, the act of adding JavaScript to the page to test something is going to impact the test the thing that you're testing, it's an Heisenberg principle of JavaScript or something like that. Yeah, it's great that great that we can utilize Netlify CDN A B testing, but also get all the, the marketing aspects of it as well. So it's best of both worlds almost.

Yeah, and I think this is this is just, you know, it's it's one example. Another thing I'm thinking about a lot is is just internationalization and and you know how Having multiple languages, and, you know, I've seen this, I've seen this again at Lyft, when one of the projects that we had we drove was just making sure that Lyft is available in multiple languages. And until, you know, until my team came along and changed that, and I think at the end of 2018, you know, it was like, it was just English in English. And making those changes, you know, part of it is like, within the code, and part of it is, is in the CMS, you know, because, like, there's, there are application aspects, and there's like, website aspects. And it's just, it's just so hard to kind of make sure that everything works correctly, and every string is wrapped, you know, like, I'm doing air quotes here, you can see that, but, you know, everything is like properly wrapped, and like developers have to provide context cycle, this string appears on this page. And it is the explanation of what happens if you press you know, submit, and having that, you know, having a tool and, like Stackbit that allows you to just switch environments, this is another thing that we're adding, you know, switch kind of like the locales and be able to look at them separately and be able to just, you know, have the people who deal with the German side, see the German strings and translate them and be able to, like, look back and see, like, Oh, this is the content, this is how this is what it meant in the English version. And, and quickly switch between those is also very meaningful. And, again, these tools exists, I think, the one thing that is kind of missing is that glue, that orchestration, that tying them together, and which, which we felt is very much needed.

And that is not even that that point didn't exist, but that point existed inside of people. It was a developer, those having to do all that. And now there's a service and we developers, we love the service that can get rid of the stuff that we don't want to deal with.

Yes, exactly. It's like, you know, it's like as a developer, you can like set things up and in a way that you like and you feel is the right way and then you can you know, sleep at night knowing that like everybody is able to work and do that within their kind of rail guards and or guardrails, sorry, in bounds and and make sure you know that this this, everything works properly and correctly.

Very cool. So now it's time for the big question, which is, what is your actual jam? What's your musical jam right now? What's your favorite song or musician? Or maybe just genre?

Yeah, so I think and I think this is like the the one the one aspect of my life that is very much I feel like super ignorant about like, I love listening to music, but I have a sign of kind of like a artists blindness, you know, maybe or something like that. I just like, don't have something some light body specific that I just listened to all the time. I think jazz is probably my, my working music. My dad, like really love classical jazz and got me into it somewhat, you know, I think like it was in my teens, so I have liked it have felt compelled to rebel against it. For no, so, you know, but I think it's very much like when I work this is this is my jive. And then, you know, when I'm running, I'm just trying to get Spotify to, to feed me something that will keep the pace going.

You got to keep your feet moving to the beats that beats copy the exact beat that you need for for running.

Exactly, exactly. And, and I've sometimes I really love audiobooks and podcasts. And so sometimes I run to those, I tend to do much worse usually. Yes, as the running results go,

yeah, I can definitely feel that. So is there anything that you'd like to promote anything you might get to the Jamstack community as a whole, that you are the stack that is doing?

I think I think I honestly, I've done like so much self promotion here. And you know, like that, that stems from like the very best intentions. And I think from a belief that this is actually it, but yeah, I don't I don't want to I don't want to add anything to it. I think we we've spoken about most things in context. And so So I think, you know, definitely what I would say that I love talking to customers and to users and to anybody who's like, has an opinion about, you know, the Jamstack our specific tools or anything else in the ecosystem websites. And so I just welcome these conversations. And I think I learned every like every single time that I talked to anybody that's, you know, outside the company. I learned something new. I do learn new stuff from people in the company as well. Just kind of like to highlight that piece. So if people want to reach out to me, I'm really happy to discuss, you know, answer questions, or anything like that you know about the Jamstack, about Stackbit. And yeah, that's about

it, I say. And if there's one thing that developers do have is plenty of opinions. So yeah, hopefully, hopefully, you'll get some best way to get in touch with you like Twitter, LinkedIn,

I think I'm much more of like a of an email person. And so Dan at Stackbit.com, just will will do the trick, and beautiful and that's why I'm like, I'm trying to get to inbox zero for things that matter. And usually I fail like miserably for like the general way emails that I get, but I do tend to read and respond to almost anything that you know, is kind of tells us something about the business opinions or anything like that. It was like a genuine outreach.

Very cool. That's That's it. That is a noble goal. I'm, I can't imagine what your inbox might look like. But uh, but I appreciate that. You're that you're working towards it.

Yeah. Cool.

Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show today. And I hope you keep doing amazing things of stack but and in Canada, Jamstack as a whole.

Thank you so much for having me. This is fantastic.

Thanks again to Dan for being on the show. And thanks to all of our dear listeners for tuning in Week after week. Be sure to star heart favorite or you know, whatever in your podcast app of choice. Now sponsor time this week, we're lucky to have Auth0 backs our sponsor. Auth0 is an amazing authentication platform, but they also have a wealth of amazing content coming out regularly on their YouTube channel, including a free course called Full Stack JamStackbit Next.js. If you're interested in learning more about Next, taking the Jamstack further, authentication on the Jamstack head over to a0.to/tmjyt for their YouTube channel.

That's it for this week. But until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things jammy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Support That's my JAMstack by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack

This week, we've got Auth0 as a sponsor. While their prowess at authentication is important, they're also releasing a ton of new tutorials and courses on their YouTube channel, including a free course on building a full-stack Jamstack app with Next.js.

Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the time honored question, what is your jam in the Jamstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have our first ever. That's My Jamstack remix. We talked to today's guest about a year ago. And we're bringing him back to catch up.

When we last met James, he was a software architect at FedEx doing Jamstack things on the side. Now James is a Developer Advocate Auth0 bringing auth flows and Jamstack education to developers everywhere.

Before we dive into the episode, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor who happens to also be Auth0. We'll talk more about their amazing educational content at the end of the episode. But if you're curious about that, Jamstack and auth education, head on over a0.to/tmjyt.

All right, James. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show again.

Yeah, yeah, I am super excited to be here. I know, we haven't gotten to see each other in a long time now that we're not in the same city. So at least we can hang out and do a podcast together. I feel like it's probably the best alternative.

Exactly. And for those listening that don't know, James not used to both live in Memphis, Tennessee. He's still down there. But I've since moved to the to the frosty north of the US, Michigan. Yeah.

I was just gonna say like, I miss our, like, kind of planning meetings, we would have like every month, but just kind of checking in and see what each other was working on and bounce ideas back and forth.

Yeah. And that also would have been different nowadays. Anyway, cuz we used to do that at coffee shops. And I'm not sure we would have any more

zoom for the when I guess.

Exactly. Which also means that we can do that, you know, anytime.

Yes, that is.

So So longtime listeners will be familiar with you from the old episode. This is a remix episode where we're catching up with you. So let's catch up. So last time you were on. You were jamming, I would say in your spare time. But you were working as a software engineer at FedEx. So I know a lot has changed for you. So let's catch up. What are you doing now? In terms of work and on the side and all that good stuff?

Yeah. So I think when I went on last time, was in October, November of last year, so it's been eight or nine months. But shortly after that is when I decided to leave FedEx. And I really was I just wanted to get more into dev really type stuff. So doing video content, speaking at conferences, and just joining like a an exciting, like younger startup II feel to a company. So anyway, all of that kind of came to fruition for me to join Auth0 back in January of this year. And I think I did, I did one trip and two conferences, and everything stopped. So we had a big transition to we talked a lot about this personally, but doing live streams on twitch and creating more YouTube content and that sort of stuff. So it's been a little bit of a transition. But it's been that way for everybody. I think. So anyway, yeah. I have been working for SEO now for however long it's been seven months. And it's been going really well.

Nice. And so it also you said, you know, you're you're you're getting more into dev rally type stuff. So what do you do as a dev REL at all? Zero?

Yeah. So if people are familiar with the idea of developer advocates, in general, it's, or my definition is really just like earning trust and respect in the community. And that can take shape and a lot of or take form. And a lot of different shapes take shape in a lot of different forms. There's a lot of it would be like speaking at conferences. So again, that's kind of on hold for the time being at least in person, it could be being at meetups in person, again, that's on hold, or at least virtually for the time being. And then in addition to that, is creating content that people enjoy, we are specifically looking to grow our YouTube channel and Twitch channels, get an ambassador program that Sam julene on my team is working on to help get some people to kind of represent our brand and help them kind of grow some of their skills and public speaking and content creation and that sort of stuff, too. So yeah, that's that's the kind of activities that we're doing. And I've done lots of virtual events and conferences and stuff, which has been interesting, but I would definitely love to be back in person sometime soon.

Yeah, definitely. Like like the the virtual stuff can be a lot of fun and you can reach a lot of people but nothing quite beats. The random interactions you get when you're at an in person event.

I'm sorry, the hallway track is what exactly what a lot of people refer to and it is it is a very powerful, powerful and enjoying or enjoy mint fun track.

Yeah, exactly. It's, it's just it's nice to hang out and just have have just random asides with people. So So Let's talk a little bit about the Jamstack at all zero also like just how you're utilizing Jamstack philosophies now professionally and personally like in the in the first episode, you're primarily doing it in your spare time. FedEx not having done a whole lot in that world yet. But what what's different? How's the house Auth0 pursuing had the Jamstack? And how are you changed in the way that you pursue it personally now?

Yeah, I think on the personal side, it's, it's kind of similar, although I've done a lot more. So still still running my youtube channel doing a video a week, and a lot of the recently has revolved around the Jamstack. So I've done a Jamstack Crash Course, actually two Jamstack crash courses, I've done things on serverless functions, getting into next js, which is pretty exciting. For me, I've been kind of putting that off for a long time, because I'd use Gatsby and serverless, functions and Netlify. Now with that stuff kind of all tied together. And actually, this is really interesting. So that personal stuff is not that different. Although I've got more experience, and I'm doing more content, it's still the same, like I'm working on it on my in my spare time. And then for Auth0, when I started in January, we had kind of some targeted audiences that we really wanted to get more engaged in. And we had been really engaged in the angular communities, I think we had two or three people at the time that were Angular experts, I guess, like gdds, on the angular side, I guess, is what what that is. And so they had like really strong relationships there. But we didn't have relationships, and like react and view and and really the Jamstack in general. And so with that being mentioned, to me as focuses, it was just kind of an opportunity for me to really lean into it. So again, like creating content around that I just released a next j. s and austero video on the SEO channel on YouTube. And that's a lot of where our conversations, lead. And the activities and things that we do is like in this Jamstack world that is is different than what a lot of people are used to, how do we do authentication. And that's been kind of fun to dive in and create some demos, and explore with these different technologies and the Jamstack and then tie that back to zero and kind of figure out how these pieces fit together.

Yeah, definitely. I feel like there's there's a perception in the world. And obviously, there's been hot drama in the in the Jamstack world recently with, with WordPress and all that good stuff. But there's, there's this feeling that the Jamstack has certain limitations to it. Now, those of us who are in in the world and using it regularly know that we can do most things with it. But one of those big limitations would be around the personalization, the authentication area. And it seems like all zero can be a big player and circumventing the issues that might come with statically generated sites.

Yeah. And I think this is where the idea of static statically generated sites or static sites, it's it's that misnomer, right that, like you said, people that aren't like intimately involved, think of it as being just literally like, just HTML, right? But we forget that Jamstack includes JavaScript, so we can basically do anything in our JavaScript that we want. And that's kind of where all zero is fitting in here, we've done some work with integrating all zero into Gatsby. And a year or so ago, we actually had a guide. And this is an approach that some people still take, where you can have certain pieces, certain routes, for example, inside of Gatsby or other frameworks that are protected. And you do something differently with those where you kind of like override the built in routing in Gatsby. And then you add your logic to those specific routes. Everything else just kind of acts as is. But the interesting thing with Gatsby is it has this hydration aspect to it, where they I mean, you can do whatever you want, right? Like with Gatsby, you think of them and you hear them as a static site generator. But it's really I forget exactly what phrasing they prefer to go with. But with the hydration process and react, you can do whatever you want with a regular react application. And so we've started to create some content around just like tying in all zero into Gatsby. And you can, there's not really much of a limitation there. Like there's a couple of very subtle tweaks that you have to do to incorporate that into Gatsby versus just regular react. But like after you do those couple of things, it works just the same as it would. And we have a new react SDK is a new, it's been a few months now. But we have the new react SDK. And to me, it just makes it so easy, so easy to incorporate into your app, and then you get access to these hooks. So you're using modern react, you're getting all the things that you need about the user, and you can access it in your application, wherever you need it.

Nice. And so so it seems to me like like that's working in Gatsby kind of integrated with Gatsby about a year ago. And then you can move in, like you said, you're moving into the next world a little bit where you've got like API routes you can have you can have the hybrid model with next where you can have like some routes being generated statically In some, some fully directly, like server side, do you see like that hybrid model catching on at all? Or is it or do you see like static is still being a pretty big way of going in the in the Jamstack? world?

Yeah, I, for me, I'm kind of all about next j s right now, I think ultimately it gives you the flexibility to do both, right. So like, if if I decided next j, s was going to be my framework going forward, there, I could do the same thing I could accomplish in Gatsby with next j. s. And I would argue, like I've done a YouTube video on the comparison of these two recently, like Gatsby is more optimized in terms of its ecosystem, and its documentation for static just because that's kind of where we're at focus. Next, JS can do those things. They're just maybe less like plugins. So you may have to figure out a little bit more to yourself, but you can do it all. So for me, I love the flexibility of next js, I love that it still fits into the Jamstack. Because your API routes, even though you kind of you can basically treat them as if it's like a node application like it looks, it looks almost the same as what you do if you built a node app from scratch. But the output of an X JS app or the deployment of it is the it's just serverless functions. And you can obviously deploy to Vercel, which is where those are made by the same company, right? So that's kind of an optimized process. But you can also host in, in Netlify, and other places as well. I don't know, I just I love I like the idea of being able to have more of the traditional web app in the sense that like you have server side rendering, but it's still in the Jamstack, and still works really well with all the things that we expect out of a Jamstack site.

You just spoke pretty passionately about about next j s. So I'm so so what would you say that your jam the jam stack is right now. And I think if I went back and listened directly to to the old episode, I think we're talking to Gatsby a decent bit back then. Yeah. But what's your favorite service right now? Or maybe philosophy framework? What makes you love the Jamstack? Now as opposed to 10 months ago?

Yeah, next js is definitely one that's been kind of an eye opener for me. So like you said, I'm talking passionately about it, I've been excited about it, I actually just recorded a two hour course that's going to be on the auth0 YouTube channel. So people go and check that out. And the next next couple of days or week at the very most, and it's it is next JS air table all zero until one CSS. So next, as far as flexibility is amazing. I have used air table in a lot of my demos since then for I mean, it's a pretty powerful database. But it has such a great SDK to work with. And it's really quick to set up and it just looks great. So I've done that with data a lot recently, I've also used fauna dB, a good amount recently as another alternative database for the Jamstack. And they really advertise themselves as being optimized and targeted at the Jamstack. And they've got this, this graph qL layer that they basically like set up for you. And I've never written a graph qL server from scratch. So I don't actually know like what it's like to do that I've just used tools that take care of it for me. And fauna, db is one of them. And there's a couple of other services. One is Cloudinary that I've like started looking at since since last November. And you and I are both media developer experts, which is indeed not necessarily a Cloudinary pitch, but it is sponsored by Cloudinary. And I've really enjoyed diving into learning more about media and doing transformations and the storage and things like that in Cloudinary. So I think ultimately, it comes down to there's like the Jamstack is so cool, because there's now systems out there to do like every aspect of features that you might be looking for in an application. And some people might look at that and and say like, well, that may be more expensive. Or I could just build it myself. And that's true. But the exciting thing for me again, is like I don't have to build it all. And if I want to build an application, I don't have to worry about all the specific details in these different categories. Like those things can be taken care of, for me through these third party services.

Yeah, I think I had a conversation the other day, I don't remember who with but, you know, it's like you can you certainly can build all these things from scratch on your own server. But Why the hell would you want to like and I think I was actually having this conversation specifically around auth zero, right, like I it was, I could build an entire auth workflow. Like it wouldn't be that I would say it wouldn't be that hard. security's always hard but like, I could do that. And I could use like, you know, user databases and stuff like that. But like, why would I want to create that flow from scratch? Or why would I want to set up image transformations from scratch? Or why would I want to even go in and create these images from scratch at these different sizes? Like That all sounds like a headache to me? Absolutely.

Yeah, that's that's one of the big conversations for us. The phrase that we use is build versus buy. And if you look at authentications Specifically, like, yeah, I've done it before. And like I followed in West bosses node course back in the day, like you do all the authentication stuff in node, and you do JW, T's JSON Web tokens, and you send it back and forth, and it works really well. But the thing that, that you forget, or you need to at least consider is like, Alright, basic authentication works. It's not too bad. It's still work, but it's not too bad. But then you get into like, Alright, what features Do I need on top of that, and something like something like a password reset, that's it's not a simple flow to do. I think westballz actually covers it in that course. But there's logic to that, right, because you have to track like, you send them a special code, and you store that in the database, and you have to have an expiry time on it, you have to check all that stuff. It's doable, but it's getting a little more complicated. And then you get into like, Alright, what if I want to include other social providers, I want to do Twitter and GitHub and Google and that sort of stuff. And you can go through their documentation, and you can find a way to put it together. But you're getting more difficult than you think about like multi factor authentication, and like password, list, login, and all these things. And like, that's where you start to realize like, and this may not be worth my time to build all of these other features, as well as stay on top of like, all the security threats that are that are out there. I mean, those things change on a daily basis. And if you're a person or a small team, it's really hard to make sure that you're really really taking care of your applications at all times. So that's when you start to realize like, Alright, maybe it is worth just like having someone else take care of that part for me.

And it was actually in a conversation on an episode of That's My Jamstack, leading up to this one, about like, the weakest point in an application isn't the code necessarily, it isn't a specific feature. It's kind of the developer writing it. And so if you are not a security expert, or you are not a media expert, or you are not a x feature expert, and you write that you then become kind of the weakest link in your codebase. And why not defer to an expert in that field, and write the feature that you care about not the feature that you have to have to make it work? Absolutely,

there's an interesting perspective on that, too, of like, who becomes the expert, because I've been in a situation where, you know, we are tasked with coming up with a solution to something and maybe it's authentication, maybe it's a million different things. And developers that aren't experts in that at companies where they have, they're not super siloed. So they kind of work on whatever needs to be done, or figure out what needs to be done. They're not experts, right. But if they are the people who then start to build something out, and they're doing the research, and they're trying to figure it out, internally, they become the experts. And that's probably not the person that you actually want to be that expert, because that person, and I've been in this situation, I'm watching YouTube videos, and I'm like taking courses and reading articles to figure it out. But that's not my area of expertise. I'm just trying to fit these pieces together. So like the idea of like, who is the expert, there's the actual expert. And then there's the person internally that people look to you as the expert. And that person only knows so much. Yep, the

organizational expert, and then it's the, it's the bus problem, right, what with that person gets hit by a bus or, you know, leaves the company like, then who becomes the expert, then it's kind of you keep adding links to this chain, and they are progressively weaker links.

I think we talked a lot about the bus problem at first. But it's still a huge problem, or it was when I was there, of there's still only so much knowledge that you can pass around to people without taking like really dedicated time to get them deep into it.

When that's I think one of the things that I personally love about the Jamstack, and a lot of ways is that if you are a front end developer, and you take a look at a code base that is built decently with Jamstack philosophies, you can probably reason about it, as opposed to if you come in, and there's a large scale of Node ecosystem, like at some new company that you're working for, it's gonna take you much longer than if you're like, Alright, well, I know, I know, react. So therefore this company using next I'm good to go to, like start reasoning about what they're doing. Oh, you know, I know how to use API's, therefore, I can kind of trace how the data is flowing through, you know, from fauna, db, or from, you know, some provider where that data is coming from, because it's all in the end, some amount of JavaScript and as long as it hasn't been written to spaghetti ish. You should be able to reason about it in some way without, without a lot of institutional knowledge, which is what the bus problem is kind of all about. Yeah.

And that's where, again, like the idea of having these services that take care of that stuff for you. Now, your knowledge is all the stuff that's most important to your business, right like you. Like the authentication piece is not special to your business. It's just a requirement for your business to be successful. The media management Is our transformations or optimizations on images,

digital asset management,

yes. Just buzzwords all around. But your digital assets, man, asset management, is again, probably not something that's like that's your core logic. It's just a piece of your application. So now, you spend more time focusing on not only building but like internalizing and having the knowledge around the stuff that's important to you and your application. What makes

your application your business, your website, special work on that don't work on the things that everyone has, because they have to have it.

Unknown Speaker 20:31

So let's pivot away from technology. And to be honest, I didn't make it all the way through the episode from from last October. I don't really remember what you said about your musical choices back then. But what's your actual musical jam right now? What are you listening to what gets you pumped one is still the same.

Back in November, or whenever that was, it was Jason aldine. Country artists, and I was listening to him on repeat and like now I'm listening to like, my wife has a pretty good station on just like modern country, which we listen to a lot. But I also still listen to a lot of Jason aldine. And then I've also been listening to for several months now and artists called rod wave. And this is a rap artist. So if you're into rap, you check it out. If you're not into rap, you probably won't enjoy it. My tastes are kind of all over the place. So from Jason Aldean on the country side to rod wave on the rap side is what I've been listening to a lot recently.

Nice, weird question

all about the weird question.

Yeah. Cuz like I'm with you, in a lot of ways on like, what I listened to a year ago is not drastically different from what I listen to today. Do you find that that's just kind of how you live your life? Or has that changed? And have you become less adventurous over the years with your musical tastes?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I've become less adventurous. I think I've always gone through cycles of like finding, finding an album of some sort that I like, like in the back in the day, it might have been like a mix CD that I made myself. And that was the thing that I listened to. But I think I've always kind of like gone through these phases of who I listened to. And some of it, I actually, like I mentioned, my wife having really good playlists, like she's much better at listening to Pandora, and then paying attention to the random stuff that she hears. And then now she's got that many more things that she knows of and wants to listen to. I'm not as good at being random. And I think that's, I think I've just kind of been that way. So I am, I am always looking for trying to find new music in theory, but it's also like, I just enjoy the stuff that I enjoy. And sometimes I just keep running with that instead of venturing out of finding new things.

I just find that as, as I age, I think about these things a little bit more like, Am I just set in my ways? And while I listen to the same four albums over and over again for the rest of my life?

I don't know. And I mean, that may not be a bad thing. It's all about what you enjoy. Right?

True. Yeah, whatever makes you live your best life. Nice. So what would you like to promote and get out to the Jamstack? world before we let everyone go? What what are you doing right now that you want to share out there?

Yeah, I am. So I don't know when this will be released. And it may be this podcast may be released by the time or my what I'm about to talk about might be released by the time the podcast comes out. But I'm working on my very first ebook as part of a two week product challenge where you create a product in two weeks. And that ebook is the Developer's Guide to creating or starting a YouTube channel. And it's all about like, how do you get started and like, here's tips and tricks and software and hardware and things that you can use, but also what are the benefits and why you should do that as a developer. So by the time you listen to this, this will probably already be deployed. So you can check out YouTube for developers COMM And check out that ebook there. And then just in general, still doing lots of stuff on my YouTube channel at James q quick. And then also on the SEO side, I'm really starting to give a big focus to continuing live streams, but also did a lot more video content on the Osceola YouTube channel. So au th zero and go and check it out. We probably by the time this podcast comes out this crash course or mini course with Nexus air table, or zero and tailwind, CSS and other hot buzzword will be out. And I think that one is pretty cool because it walks through like the entire authentication workflow and the Jamstack and tying these technologies together.

Nice. So I'll have all those links in the show notes. I do want to take a half a second and talk about the the E book right because you've been doing video content. For a long time. I've been doing it for a decent bit too. And I would say that if you watch some of my first episodes, I'm sure you probably would agree with some of your first episodes of, you know, tutorials in video form. The differences between that and what you and I are both doing how are pretty drastically different. So would you say that hopeful that you're hoping maybe the ebook can help people skip over some of our earlier hurdles?

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's definitely a part of it. I want to say like it's not enough. necessarily going to be a focus throughout the entirety of the book. But I think one of the big focuses is just to try to convince people that like, yeah, you're nervous about it. And you're worried about like, what if people judge me? What if I get negative comments? What if nobody watches it, but I really want to encourage people, like, none of that shit matters, like, just do your first one and see what happens. And like, if you didn't enjoy it, and if it didn't work out, well, that's fine. But like, try it. Because there are these, there's so many benefits to it, like it goes on your resume, it gives you experience with speaking, there are all these other benefits that come along with it that, like I just, I hope that I'm able to encourage some people to create their first video and what happens from there. Like, hopefully, some of the tips help too. But just getting that first video is such a big accomplishment for people. And I kind of

find find it's very similar with blogging, like blogging is the super low barrier to entry thing. But like, if you struggle with an issue, and figure out how to fix that issue, that means that there's at least at least one other person in the world that has struggled with that issue and would find whatever content you create about it, probably insanely helpful.

Absolutely, yeah, I've always, always been a big fan of like, no matter, no matter how little you think, you know, whatever or how small something is that you learn, like somebody else, like you said, doesn't know that thing. So now you're providing the resource for them. But also, you're providing the resource for you. Like I can't tell you from the articles and videos that I've done, how many times I've gone back in search for that thing, and I find my video or article and that just goes to show you like you may know something now you might forget it. Now you need a reference, but also like people are going to have that same issue. So there's always an audience now you have to kind of figure out how to get it in front of them. But even if people don't see it, it could be a useful thing for you.

And I'm also going to give you one one more shout out that you didn't mention. James James also has a Discord server, where there's a bunch of developers all kind of in there learning. I'm a member of the discord server, so you can always come chat with me and there's nothing else but uh, but no, it's an active little community. And I've enjoyed seeing it grow over the past few months.

That's been a really cool thing. I didn't really know what to expect in starting a Discord. I didn't know how it would grow. I didn't know how the community would get along together. And we're at I think, like 400 people almost exactly now. And this is after two or three months, which is really cool. And the community is great. People are so supportive. They're always sharing resources. They're asking questions, it's been just fantastic. So I'll give you a link to to discord if you want to throw it in the in the description as well. If people are interested in joining.

I certainly can. Yeah. Cool. Well, James, I appreciate you coming on. And I'm looking forward to seeing the E book when it comes out. Which it may already be out when this is actually going on. But you know, time is a weird thing. So yeah, keep doing the amazing things you're doing and maybe we'll have you on another year from now and we'll see the differences the year makes.

Yeah, I'd be excited to do like the what is that at that point the remix times two I guess.

It's the the hundred other songs. It's like the remix to ignition where there wasn't an actual first song. Yeah. The remix to the REMAX. It'll be great. Thanks again to James for being on the show. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in Week after week. Be sure to star heart or favorite in your podcast app of choice. Now sponsor time this week, we're lucky to have Auth0 back there sponsored Auth0 is an amazing authentication platform, but they also have a wealth of amazing content coming out regularly on their YouTube channel, including a free course called full stack Jamstack with next j s. If you're interested in learning more about next, taking the Jamstack further authentication on the Jamstack head over to a zero to slash TMJ YT that's TMJ YT for their YouTube channel. That's it for this week. But until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things jammy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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This week, we've got Auth0 as a sponsor. While their prowess at authentication is important, they're also releasing a ton of new tutorials and courses on their YouTube channel, including a free course on building a full-stack Jamstack app with Next.js.

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the time honored question, what is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we talk with Gareth McCumskey, a serverless architect at Serverless Inc. Before we dive into the episode, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor off zero, we'll talk a bit more about the amazing educational content they're putting out at the end of the episode. If you're curious about that, Jamstack and author education, head on over to a0.to/tmjyt. That's My Jamstack YouTube for all the videos. Hey, Gareth, thanks for joining us on the show today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I just, I love talking about Jamstack stuff. So it was a opportunity not to be missed.

Cool. Well, you like talking about Jamstack stuff. But tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?

So my work right now is essentially I'm a Solutions Architect with Serverless, Inc, the creators of the Serverless framework. And yeah, being a small startup means that I kind of do a multitude of roles like most folks in the in the company. So I I'm involved a lot with helping users have the framework design and and sort of plan out the systems there. They they plan on building with service. And the other side of it is as well as I act as sort of developer advocate in trying to help spread the word about serverless. And related stuff, I guess you can say,

That's kind of growing the whole the whole world so that you know, people who want serverless might come to serverless in the future.

Yeah, absolutely. And I find a lot of folks will hear some brief inkling about serverless, not quite sure what it means. And because you know, we've been able to produce enough content, they get a bit bit of understanding, and then they have questions. So it's nice to be there. So for that, for that growth period that a lot of devs go through. And I guess on my personal side, I'm, I think very much into the computer world. So especially with the with the load with the global pandemic we've been going through lately. So I'm quite an avid gamer. Yeah, and it's just that's kind of that way I love steam these days.

Nice. Are you? Are you on the PC side on the console side are like kind of in between?

Well, PC side, which kind of means I never leave the desk. But yeah.

What's your what's your go to game right now, especially with with pandemic round?

Well as a typical developer story, where I play a game called factorio. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's essentially an engineering style game where you build a factory and consume resources. And it's a massive problem solving things. So I go from working with developers all day long to basically running a little factory.

You know, from from software engineering to real engineering, in software.

Yeah, something like that.

Nice. Alright, so so we're talking Jamstack today. So let's talk a little bit about what was your entry point into this world of Jamstack, or maybe static sites, I know you've been in the industry for a while?

Well, it's one of those interesting situations I found myself in. And just a bit of context. So long story, here we go. I have had, I was a lead in a team at a tour company that basically sold all their product online. And with that, they had a platform that was built on WordPress that they've been using for about 10 years. So really showing its age really legacy when we're talking legacy. And when I joined, there were there were there being some serious issues with performance and science. So ultimately, we came to the point where we had to re architect pretty much the entire platform. But we needed a way to do things piecemeal as well, because we couldn't go down a rabbit hole for a year come out with something on the other side that maybe didn't fit, they need to start seeing some return on what we were working on. So initially, after spending a bunch of time looking at stuff, I found serverless, which was kind of my gateway into Jamstack side of things, and looking, looking at building, you know, the whole Functions as a Service became very attractive, especially when you're in a team of about two or three developers where none of you have massive DevOps experience. Myself, I can kind of spin up a web server when I need to keep it up to date. But you know, I wouldn't necessarily trust myself, you know, the massive production, cluster, and so on. So that became a little tricky first, and serverless seemed like the right answer for that. But serverless doesn't come without its own own way of doing things. And traditionally, for me, I had come from the world of big fat PHP frameworks that handled everything, you know, rendered rendered everything on server and push that out to the browser. So there's really going back to my roots when I was looking at serverless and realized that probably the best way to attack this would be to build back end API's with serverless and have a completely static front end running something like view or react or Whatever, and have that calling this API back, because the API back end is really where we were concerned about load the most. And this led us to start building a solution like this, where we could have a team focus on building a nice front end, and have a couple of guys building a front end. And myself, maybe, I think, was one of the engineers working on the back end, small team. And this works incredibly well, for us. We had an entire ci CD process, things were going really nice. And the first time I heard Jamstack, was about, I don't know, nine months into doing this, we attended a conference and somebody gave a talk about Jamstack. And the four of us sat in this talk looking at each other throughout this entire discussion going that's what we did. So it was very interesting way. And and I think one of the one of the key things that we talked about afterwards was how it was going back to our roots as as people building stuff for the web, seemed to be the best solution all along just building static HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and having API's to call to

Yeah, so an interesting thing that you kind of said, Kevin, in the beginning of this story, which is, I think, different from what a lot of people have said about their kind of intro into the Jamstack was, you actually started with this idea that we need serverless functions, we need Functions as a Service, whereas most people are saying, you know, hey, I am already using view or I'm already using react. So I got into this thing called Gatsby, I got into this thing called grid zone. And that was my entry point, or, you know, I like HTML. So I got into Jekyll or something along those lines. Where it said, where you're kind of saying, you know what, we don't want a monolith on the server, we want to break it up. And then oh, what are these other things we can do to attach it is that kind of a good representation of what you're what you were going there?

Yeah, it was interesting, because there was some other things we were looking at sort of at the same time, I was really doing a big investigation into micro services as well, because this is back in 2016, as well, just to give it a little bit more context. So micro services was kind of new and coming out. And there's a few books written and it was growing in popularity. And when looking at microservices, the one thing that struck me instantly was how come out complex the infrastructure behind it looked. So microservices looks really complex for us to try and use. And we didn't feel confident in our skills, you know, in managing all this amount of infrastructure, as I mentioned, and servers just seemed a great answer for that. And very quickly, we realized that building a back end with something like serverless wasn't just about the Functions as a Service, because lambda was that new thing that I'd seen at AWS event which sort of struck struck me as well, and ultimately led me when I was investigating serverless, to realize that this was using lambda. But it's also all about the other services that you end up consuming as well, which you build upon. And that essentially replaces the need for this massive monolithic back end server. One of the things I point out to folks is that when you're building an application, there's really three, three main things that you need, you need some way to receive a request, some some HTTP endpoint, you need some way to compute, and you need some way to store data. That's ultimately and then of course, the fourth part, I guess, would be the response back, which would be the static pages that you're providing to user to, to consume. But ultimately, with an API, there's three components, we need to receive a request, you need to compute a response, and you just store data. And when you look at serverless, especially on the AWS side, which is what I'm most familiar with, you have AWS lambda, which kind of started a lot of this dynamodb, which ends up being a fantastic serverless Datastore. And API gateway, which becomes that front end that you need that can handle handle that scale and load. And then you've got your pick of the static, static site, web servers out there, everything from s3, to you know, there's a whole bunch of options out there to store static sites. So that's pretty cool. Awesome.

So So obviously, that was how you were using the Jamstack. Professionally, back when you were doing that, how are you using the Jamstack professionally now and also personally, personally?

Yeah, it's interesting, I kind of use things in very similar way. So right now, pretty much all the sites that I build end up with a step by step all the front end sets in a statics store somewhere like an s3 with a cloud front in front of it. And the API back end, the difference has become the difference now is that the issue, I'm traditionally from the back end, so that's why my focus tends to be on on back end infrastructure. I just more adept at that, I guess. There's a lot of skill that goes into building a good front end and I just haven't had the time to really focus on that. I mean, it's a it's a massive world to delve into. But for example, my my back ends now for my API's tend to be microservices based, and with tools like like, you know, with the cloud and AWS and many other cloud providers as well. You can build really sophisticated back end services with Beautiful asynchronous communications between them. That lets you defer all sorts of load and issues that you may normally experience into asynchronous processes that kind of execute when they feel like it when they go capacity, which is fantastic. It just means that when you have that, that buzz of traffic at eight in the morning from your customers, because you sent them a mass email, you can handle what you need to the front end, because s3 or all these other site generators can handle the HTML and CSS they need to push out. But your back end is just deferring all the processing of the instance. It's a pretty interesting way to build things.

Yeah, it definitely it can. It can be kind of a web to weave in your mind, but it works incredibly well on the actual technology.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, doing things like receiving an API call. And it's interesting, because I've had this discussion with other folks as well, where they talk about things like you know, if somebody wants to edit their profile, this is a silly example where, you know, they change their email address, and they hit save, they expect that to be saved immediately. And when the page refreshes, they're expecting that to be the representation of what's in the datastore. In the back end, Meantime, it doesn't have to be, that could just be what's cached locally. And the front end knows, I've told the back into stores, it told me it's going to at some point, I trust it, I'm just going to tell the user This is what the email address is now because the beckons told me that's what it's gonna be, it's pretty optimistic way of, you know, storing these things. Meantime, that beckons been designed in a way that it's just absorbing all this traffic as it can. And yeah, things just work really beautifully.

And so I'm kind of curious. So I don't think we've had someone who, who's probably heavier on the back end. On the show, I think, I think for the most part, we've had some full stack developers, and we've definitely had a slew of front end developers. So if you were to talk to a pure back end developer, maybe like how you were 2015 2016, you know, having a big PHP stack or even like a dotnet, or something like that? How would they how should they think about transitioning to something like Jamstack, with, you know, various serverless pieces?

Yeah, it's interesting, we had to do this actually, with the company that I was working for at the time. And one of the things, one thing I always suggest, first of all, is to start with a basic PRC, something, something that's concrete, so it's not meaningless, but not something that's critical. So you don't want to go PRC your checkout process, because that could affect the bottom line, bad idea. But we're seeing something like for example, we had a review system that people could leave reviews for the tours they had gone on. And the review system is important for the full conversion of sale. But if it happens to fall over, it's not the end of the world, people can still check out, we can still sell things on the site, and so on. So ultimately, that was our stepping stone into the world of Jamstack and serverless. we extracted this widget that we had in multiple places across the site, turned that into essentially a component for the front end, that had a back end component, which was an API. And that's how we how we proceed that just this one, one small component. And ultimately, that was a massive success for us, and proved out the technology. And we took the next step where we went through the site and looked at some of the content we had for things like the About Us page or company values page. And but that's the kind of content that does have changes at times, but changes very infrequently, it's not a product page that might change in you know, within within seconds with the price and reviews and any other information. So the next step was to extract those out, turn those into static pages with some kind of CMS back end, but not something that needed to be to the second with updates that you could let generate in the background whenever it needed to, and it would pretty much just sit there statically. And again, there was that there was the proof of concept for the front end. Now because we've just done a small component. Now we were proving the front end, and that worked beautifully. And just keep going up, then we started converting product pages, then we converted checkout. And you just keep taking these pieces at a time basically the strangler pattern. If anybody's familiar with that, we just take one piece at a time. And with a tool like CloudFront, or any other CDN cloud was what we were using at the time. CloudFront was set up to default to route so it would go to the WordPress installation by default. But we could use the URL structure of our site to break apart each piece one at a time. And initially, we were manually entering these URL endpoints like slash about us and they would point at an s3 bucket slash company values were pointed at s3 bucket route slash we just pointed the WordPress instance that was sitting on an easy to instance. So that allowed us to wait to sort of break things apart and point traffic at the right locations while we were building. Interesting. So

yeah, I don't think we've ever had anybody talk about about that. We've talked about like breaking up monoliths into micro services, but like literally breaking up the front end to is a very interesting thing like oh, I've got WordPress, we can't completely migrate away from it for X, Y and Z yet, but you know, our about page does need to be a database generated page, our company values like let's just redirect That VR CDN. And that's a really interesting take on that. What would you say is kind of your overall jam in the Jamstack? What's your favorite service? Obviously, you work for a service, that's a pretty big service in the Jamstack. But what's your favorite service? What's your favorite philosophy or framework, and then like, what just makes you love the gym? Second, it's gonna keep you working in this space for a while,

huh? Where to begin? Alright, so I guess the biggest overall one, and we've really pointed out I'm very much sort of the back end guy. But the thing I love the most, and this is gonna sound strange being a guy who likes to build back ends. But I don't like code necessarily. It sounds bizarre. But code is is actually the weakest part of any application. And a lot of developers especially. But a lot of those are coming and raise their eyebrows at that, because that's what we get paid for it. And they want to get paid to write code. When really, it's not what any business wants. And I've it's taken me most of my career to realize this. But what most businesses want is they want a solution that solves the problems, they ultimately don't really care where it comes from, as long as it's reliable, and it's done within some reasonable timeframe and cost, then they're happy. And that's what Jamstack and serverless, as well just, you know, as part of that has really helped me build with all the solutions that I have. I, I normally, you know, espouse the mantra of serverless, first or Jamstack. First as well, I mean, that's one way to look at it is, instead of writing code first first solution, see if there's an existing service out there that can solve the problem for you. And usually, it's going to be reasonably priced and paper use. So you don't have to worry about this massive, you know, albatross around your neck. And ultimately, what it gives you is a way to solve a problem that you don't have to maintain over time that you don't have to make sure that whoever you hire into the position will know how to work on and code for. And a simple example of this is if you look at a very basic API, for example, with something like API gateway, a lambda function and dynamodb, the lambda function itself is probably going to end up being if you have a simple crud application, let's call it a create user endpoints as an example, if you have a POST request for that you set up API gateway API gateway is going to receive an HTTP request, it's going to handle the HTTPS for you, you can configure API key, so you can restrict or restrict access to it automatically. You don't have to worry about that. It will manage load for you. There's no load balancing involved in it at all. I sound like I'm selling API gateway. But I'm just talking to the the basic features of an API gateway. But the biggest thing that it does as well is routing. And often routing has been one of those things left for the big fat frameworks to do for you in code, which sounds great, except now you have a dependency on code that somebody else managers, whereas now with something like API gateway, this is a running service inside a cloud vendor that is executed as nothing, you don't have to worry about that open source project, maintaining the routing mechanism, this is done as part of a service, it's built for you. That's that's the way it works. What this means is my lambda function now isn't isn't resolving routes, it's just receiving event data, it's just receiving an HTTP request. And similarly, if you if you look further down into data storage, using a tool, like Dynamo dB, for example, is a key essentially, at its most basic form is a key value data. So it's a little bit more advanced than that. But we just say that for now. What's really nice about this is that it has an API, a very simple API that you can send requests to. And ultimately, there is no ORM necessarily involved. So you're writing a basic API calls to a Datastore in the back end, and a lambda function is going to probably be about a 10th of the size of your regular amount of code that you would have sitting in even a non monolithic framework these days. So that for me is the biggest one is the reduction in code.

Yeah, and I think I think that's an interesting way of putting it too, because anyone who's viewed my code, at least knows this the weakest link in my application. But on top of that, like if you look at it, and you say, you know, I'm, I'm a web developer that excels at writing, x type of feature, but you know, what I'm really bad at is writing off, like auth is an incredibly complicated, very security, heavy specialization in code. I should not be writing that, oh, I can go find you know, one of these two or three, four different services that will provide off for me in a very compact API driven way, which I think, is probably for the best for a lot of web developers out there.

Yeah, that's one of those things. I think developers are really bad at writing a really bad security. And it's no fault of developers. It's actually a fault of our education in the industry. It's kind of like, I'll worry about security when I'm done. Which is probably not what you should be doing. But you know, that's this way we have problems to solve. We have solutions to build the worry about securing it later. But yeah, mean things like auto will will hand you essentially an entire solution to handle auth and I've built my own custom authorization services even in the gem stack itself. It's not an easy task, you're constantly maintaining it even, I'm maintaining it to this day. Unfortunately, if I just used the service that was available to me, I probably wouldn't have to do that I'd saved myself a lot of time and effort. And my, you know, the users of the system would be probably a lot happier to.

And you even mentioned something, something that the nowadays at least with a lot of the modern tooling scene, you know, super easy, right, which is managing HTTP versus HTTPS. But like, even three, four years ago, you know, I was managing servers and having to, you know, deal with, okay, well, let me figure out, Let's Encrypt, and let's make sure that that bot is running at the appropriate speed and the appropriate time. And that was a huge headache. And now it's literally just a Boolean field in, you know, most of these cloud providers, like, yes, please handle HTTPS for me.

And even I mean, I've been around in the days before, Let's Encrypt. And that was, that was an absolute nightmare. It actually got to the point, I don't even know how to set up HTTPS anymore on a on a web server, because back then I would go down that rabbit hole handed over to the to the sysadmin. To finish it up for me, because I was pulling my hair out. Let's Encrypt, solve that problem to a large degree for servers. But it's still not an easy task. And it's something you have to either set up an automated process for or come back to every three months to renew those certificates. But you know, the cloud vendors just completely take that away from you again, it becomes so much easier to set up.

I mean, granted, it was my entry point and the learning how to do cron jobs and some other stuff. I I owe some education to doing SSH. But yeah, it was a SSL it was it was definitely a trial in a lot of ways. So what would you actually say in terms of musical jam, what is your musical jam right now? What's your favorite song or your favorite musician?

So lately, I've gotten into a new band, and I've always been a bit of a metal head. So anybody who's not into into that kind of music, I do apologize. But lately, there's a really great band of heard called Jinja. And anybody who's not familiar with them, I would suggest looking up the song on YouTube called Pisces. By ginger, it's a nice surprise when you get to watch that it's pretty infamous in YouTube circles now for being one of those react. videos that you surprise a YouTuber with? Yeah. But yeah, it's it's it's just one of those bands that have really impressed me with their, the entire band. I mean, the the vocalist, she's absolutely incredible, has an amazing voice. And just ultimately, the entire band works together, like an oiled machine. They're absolutely amazing at what they do. It's what it was one of the things that really impresses me is when an entire band works together so well that not a single one of them sort of stands above the others. They're all just absolutely awesome.

And that takes a lot in the in the music world not to have that ego to like be able to mesh like that.

Yeah, it's always nice to see their interaction on stage and so on as well, where they're all trying to have their moment in the in the in the sun essentially trying to show what they can do. without it being, you know, over the top.

It's not It's not the 15 minute drums. All right. Yeah, exactly. Nice. So. So is there anything that you'd like to promote and get to the Jamstack something you're doing or something serverless wants to talk about at all?

Well, from the service side, there's something new that I can mention. Front End, folks, as you mentioned, there's a large audience of front end developers that listen to the show, where I've been on the show, at least as well. One thing I can mention that that is really great is that we're in the middle of working on a really great project called components right now. And this is different if folks have known the serverless framework from 2015, we released the the actual serverless framework itself, it's a fantastic tool, it does a lot of great stuff, a building, for doing back end work, and so on, help orchestrate all of these services and so on in AWS. But what we found is that while it's great at doing that, and it simplifies things a bunch serverless as a concept is very new and different enough that it's kind of a barrier to entry for a lot of folks. And especially if you're not already a if you haven't been building backend solutions for a long time. It's unfair, just you know, I, I would have no one would expect me to just dive right into view and react and angular know my way around in exactly the same way that you know, there's there's a lot of stuff when dealing with with back end code and applications. But one of the things that components does is that it takes the idea of serverless and boils it down into a nice consumable package with very little configuration. And you can actually go to the point of configuring a solution in serverless, with about three lines of configuration, a single COI command, and you've essentially deployed your Jamstack application into the cloud. Yeah, it's it's actually pretty awesome. I've been playing with it a lot myself. And we are actually it's one of those things we built for other teams and we're using it ourselves now. And it's it's really also because what it and this is the sounds like hyperbole, but it really isn't because ultimately I can go to Can I can I drop a URL? Oh, yeah, go for it. So if folks can just go to Apple serverless.com, which is our online platform, and once you've signed up, you can go and create with any of the existing components. And there's new ones coming out all the time. But one of the ones I can point to as for example, the full stack application, which ultimately what this gives you is a command to run in the CLR to install and initialize your your application that you want to create your full stack app. And this full stack app contains essentially four components. One is for a front end. So we call it the website component, the other. The other is an express API. So if you know anything about Express, you can actually just spin up your own sort of Express back end within it as an API, database component for Dynamo DB as well as permissions that set up all the permissions you need in AWS. And you can just go in and you can, you can deploy it immediately because it has a working front end back end and everything else that it needs. And just play around with it in your own AWS account. Or you can go ahead and edit it, you can point it at your own react, view, whatever code, when you run the deploy command, it'll automatically build your front end, it'll automatically connect to AWS, and push everything into s3 into lambda into API gateway, all these things that you need to run this application and then give you a URL CloudFront URL at the end for you to go and try your application. It's it really is as simple as that.

That's very cool. Because I find that one of the one of the easiest ways to get into new technology, especially new architecture, technology is to find an opinionated source, and then like use that opinionated source editor until I feel comfortable with it, and then kind of I can roll my own at that point.

Yeah, and that's exactly the point. Over the years, we've seen a lot of folks come into service with Express as an expectation. And while the Solas framework can be used to deploy Express applications, just as they are, it's kind of a bit of a bit of a faff to use. It's, you know, you've got to configure things, you've got to configure things a certain way, you know, it becomes a bit of a hassle. So I deal with the Express component, for example, is that you can literally just pointed at that f.js file, which contains your your Express routing, and off it goes, it's into lambda, and works as intended. And the idea there again, is, as you said, folks, we'll get into this, they'll start using their application, things will run well. And that's the other the other thing that was difficult for me to figure out about this philosophy that you asked me before, because Jamstack and serverless is incredibly forgiving, you can do things kind of okay, and if it runs well anyway. And if it doesn't, if it stops running, well, you can tweak it in ways that'll make it run better. And once you once you become steeped and understand the technology, you can then rebuild pieces of at a time because that's what you did. Anyway, you started building pieces, you could replace those pieces with more optimized versions of them later down the road. And it becomes incredibly easy to do that. It's so super forgiving. Just try stuff out. And that's where a lot of folks will come and say, you know, how do I get into doing serverless? I said, Just try it, just do something with it. Even if even if it's gonna be even if it's the worst possible solution you could think of building with serverless it's probably gonna still gonna work and I'll probably still work. Okay. And that's okay. Okay, it's fine. Just change it later.

Yeah. Okay, means that you have shipped something that somebody needed. And it's out there.

Yeah. And yeah, your users all they want is a working solution. They don't necessarily need the best crafted, highly engineered, fanciest solution that you can come up with. They just want something that works. All

right. Well, Gareth, I appreciate you coming on the show today. And I hope you keep doing some amazing things at serverless as well as just kind of in the in the general web dev back end world.

Yeah, well, that's the goal. I'm hoping we can get there.

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Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the timeless question, what is your jam in the Jamstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and today on the podcast, we have Ohad Eder-Pressman. Ohad is the CEO and co founder of the Jamstack company Stackbit.

Before we dive into the interview, though, I want to take a second and thank this week's sponsor off zero, we'll talk a bit at the end about the amazing educational content they're putting out on YouTube. But if you're curious about that Jamstack education, head on over to a0.to/yt for all the videos.

Alright, thanks for being on the show with us today.

Thanks for having me, Bryan.

Cool. So let's start. Let's, uh, let's tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing?

Sure. So I'm Ohio, I live in work in San Francisco. I'm a co founder and CEO of Stackbit that company building platforms for developers and other stakeholders to produce Jamstack sites very passionate about the Jamstack and kind of involved with the space for a while. What do I do in my free time, I guess hanging out with family families taking up more and more time bigger share of my life. I, I used to grow up on size don't really have a lot of time for that anymore. But I'm very curious person. So you put something in front of me, I just dive in. You know, like, I watched a ton of videos about engineering yesterday, you know, in like how to do construction underwater. So yeah, let's call that a hobby for the next 24 hours.

Sure, sure. I thought so. Are we gonna be seeing some some underwater architecture from Stackbit? Probably probably just watching the videos.

No, no, no, these things don't always have to intermix? Yeah, I love construction and building things. Very big DIY.

Cool. Very nice. And with the, with the old bonds, I have it, like you grew them, you shaped them, like how many did you have kind of at the most?

I think I've killed five and then stuff.

That's, you know, the world gave me a signal and I listened.

Yeah, I actually had one in college. And I kept it alive about six months in a dorm room, and then took it home for the summer to my parents house where it got destroyed, because there was an infestation that happened. And then I never picked it back up. So I was one and done. But it was a lot of fun. It was cool to like, you know, gently clip and gently shape over the course of the six months.

Yeah, it's very Zen. Very Zen. I love that.

Cool. So what was your entry point into kind of the idea of the Jamstack? Or if you're old school enough into the idea of like static sites and that sort of thing?

Unknown Speaker 2:51

I like how it was it was possibly the first, the first WordPress on the Jamstack kind of ideal, export the entire WordPress, HTML and just toss it up on s3 bucket.

Mm hmm. Yeah, we're seeing some companies do that today as a strategy for people who are still very, very much committed to the WordPress ecosystem, and admin and tools and so forth. But yeah, for me it the gratification was instant. Because you know, like, the moment you do that, you don't have to worry about anything. The next time you do have to worry about something is when you want to edit your site. It's like, hold on, hold on, hold on, what did I do? And so that took me on a journey of, you know, introspection and prototyping, in years of, of just going through different methods of working on my website, which eventually led to a lot of the things that I'm kind of involved with in the Jamstack. Nowadays.

Very cool. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of a lot of tools, a lot of different things you can use. So let's talk about that professional use of the Jamstack. Obviously, Stackbit is a very Jamstack centric company. So how are you? How are you using a professionally what's Jamstack kind of got to do with the Stackbit thing?

So, you know, I'm a big believer, big, big believer in the Jamstack. And in the concepts of, you know, building sites and serving them statically. And in a very confident that the tooling around all of that is constantly evolving. Stackbit that was born in response to that point in time earlier on where I was, like, how am I gonna edit my website. And, you know, I personally went through a lot in this seven years or eight years that that transpired between 2012 and, and maybe seven years, in 2019, when we started Stackbit, but in essence, that, you know, the Jamstack is a phenomenal way to build website, which is only accessible to developers who are comfortable with the command line. And since I'm very, very confident that it's the it's going to be the predominant way that we build websites, the predominant concept and architecture that replaces lamp, I realized that we're going to need tooling, we're going to need better tooling for developers, we're going to need better tooling for their stakeholders, we're going to need platforms that enable people to create Jamstack sites as easily as it is to create a Wix or Squarespace or even a WordPress site. And, you know, we're going to need tools for marketers and companies who need to do a weak editing to websites that are built in the Jamstack architecture, which you know that Jamstack really hit home on a lot of great benefits, like a great developer experience, and modernize developer experience, the fastest websites in the world, and likely the most secure websites in the world. But at the same time, it sacrificed the world of tooling that is now considered table stakes whenever you talk about creating and editing a website. So if if we really want organizations and people to adopt this, this architecture, we have to give them the tools that enable them to be successful in doing so. And we can't we can't look at something like Squarespace and say, well, that's that's a wiziwig experience. It's consumerized. It's not what we're competing with, you know, I think Jamstack has to compete with that specifically with Squarespace or Wix. But, you know, in general, we have to get the experience to that level and beyond in order to enable this to become the predominant architecture for the web,

I guess. So going forward. The The goal is kind of like we have this developer ecosystem and the developer ecosystem is actually pretty friendly to developers that know about it. But how do we make the Jamstack and all the benefits that the Jamstack brings accessible to those who don't have a developer on staff like so that they can have it as well as we can still have our shiny fancy things in the in the code?

Well, that or, you know, here's an organization and developers have built a site, right, because developers aren't going anywhere. You know, I, you know, I'm also a big believer in low code and no code, but developers aren't going anywhere. It's just that the work that they're going to be spending their time on is going to be higher impact and more developers, but their stakeholders and let's just call them marketers, for simplification, you know, are going to use other tools. So developer can set up a Jamstack website, but their counterparts at the company are not going to use the command line or edit markdown files and GitHub. They're going to need proper tools. They need to be able to preview them. need to be able to share, they need to be able to create 100 landing pages with a couple of clicks and uploading a CSV file of keywords. They people need these tools, you know, if you think in the context of jobs to be done, like a lot of people need to work on a lot of sites every day. And if we want those sites to be Jamstack, we, we want to help those websites become Jamstack websites and have anybody reap the benefits of this architecture. We have to build this tool.

Next, so you mentioned something, it's actually something that I haven't thought about before. And I come I've got a little bit of a marketing agency background, the idea of the of having a CSV of keywords, and then like spitting out like 100 landing pages, is that I can't even think of how I would how I would kind of start doing that on the Jamstack. Like, philosophically, that seems tough.

Right? I mean, it's, you probably integrate it into some sort of data processing pipeline that runs before your static site generator, or if you're using one that has an ecosystem that can import, you know, CSV files, and just use that as part of your data. You know, you'd kind of work at it that way. But it's, you notice, it requires a developer, there's no best practices for how to do that. There's no kind of like, framework that encourages you and empowers you to do that. And so, but it's not rocket science, like, How hard is it to take something from here and put it in there, it's just we need these abstractions. And we need these tools. And we need user interfaces that empower real people to, to be able to do these things and not have to come back to developers because the world is shifting in this direction of empowering people to do more. And let's think about it as low code. You know, marketers now have tools like air table and motion and whatnot, and they just expect to be able to do more. And so when you try to sell the Jamstack organization, today, it's like, yes, and actually, you're going to be more dependent on your developer. And guess what, that dependency is going to create a lot of work for your developer that they're probably not too excited about, you know, like, and so it's, um, it's all about creating the tools and abstractions, and services, that, that real empower developers to focus on the things that they enjoy, and that they're good at, and enable the marketers to do all of the day to day work, it kind of streamlined way, and not in a way that creates just tedious repetitive work for developers.

Cool. So I think it's interesting that, you know, Stackbit kind of sits in this unique position in the ecosystem, like the hub of a whole bunch of different tools. And you, you recently wrote a post contemplating the Matt Mullenweg. WordPress vs. Jamstack stuff, we don't need to get into the, into the drama of that piece. But like, the idea that I think I think you wrote that, like, it's not that there are these insurmountable issues in the Jamstack. It's that we're working on building the tooling. And we're still very early in that tooling. I'm kind of wondering like, what what's the what, what what, what insights Do you have coming from this centralized location in the Jamstack? about that? Because obviously, you wrote about that, and I'm interested to find out a little more.

Yeah, I think I really enjoyed writing that piece. And I think it's, it's, it's valuable for all of us to have this type of discourse. It's not something official to be dismissive, not of Jamstack, and not a WordPress, which isn't going anywhere, we have to recognize that it has some benefits, and the world knows how to use it. And so how do we like where do we go from here? The my commentary was focused on, you know, it's not about comparing the Jamstack toward press Jamstack has to be compared to to the LAMP stack, right? The Jamstack is an architecture, it's a way of doing things. It's it's kind of a flexible definition, right? Like if you have a Gatsby front end for, for content coming from a WordPress, you know, admin install and sites deployed on Netlify. Is that a Jamstack? site? Like, I totally think it is. And, you know, it's, it's, WordPress is very, very dominant right now. I personally think it's dominant, because because it's dominant. I don't know if that makes sense.

I know there's momentum.

Right, exactly. There's momentum. And there's kind of wait, but you know, I'd love to meet the developer, who is completing who yesterday completed their boot camp, right? Because that's how most developers kind of become developers nowadays, which is fantastic. So show me that developer who is excited to go into WordPress and learn how to build plugins in PHP. You know, I don't I think that's non existent. And so I just I think that the that developers aren't going to pull us Out of WordPress with time. And I say that, you know, we, I could have made a prediction that WordPress will turn into a Jamstack solution and kind of get rewritten in JavaScript. But I think it's such a massive open source project with open source governance and so forth, which is, is great at times, but at the same time, I just, I don't see it shifting fast enough, so that it can keep up, you see how long it took for Gutenberg to, to arrive, which, you know, is infinitely better experience than what was there before, but I, I just don't see it happening.

And so you know, that the tooling for the Jamstack today is not competitive enough with with WordPress, you know, WordPress, you can send a non technical person to themeforest, they can download the zip file with a theme, they can go to digitalocean and get a droplet and with like reasonable UI, they can kind of get a site up and running. In all honesty, I think it's a horrible experience. But it's, it's possible, and it's feasible, and people actually do it every day. So that the Jamstack isn't there just yet, Stackbit tries to do a lot to push us in that direction. But it's, um, it's still it's still taking time. And, you know, if you look at some of the core challenges with with the Jamstack, which are, well, I need to connect different services together, or, you know, incremental build rehydration, but there's a lot of there's a lot of kind of, you know, technical challenges with the Jamstack.

But the rate of progress, and the number of super smart people working on it really encourages me that, you know, I don't see those as fundamental issues with the architecture, I just see, you know, this is the current state of the tooling. And the tooling, I mean, look at the tooling 12 months ago, look where it is now. And let's imagine where it's going to be in 12 months. And so I'm not, my point is not, you know, hey, let's fight about who's better right now, you know, of course, WordPress is super dominant and popular and kind of the default choice, but I'm just allowing myself to extrapolate based on the trends that we're seeing, you know, we, we look at a lot of data, and we see the dynamics and the evolution of the static site generators and the preference, that that kind of shifts and, and the rapid adoption of Jamstack technologies, right, static site generators, headless CMS is in deployment platforms, modernize deployment platforms, we just see the the growing adoption of those both in in enterprise companies, you know, Alexa top 10,000, but also in cohorts of websites, like all the yc companies, or all of the websites mentioned on indie hackers. So, you know, if you look at indie hackers, and we've done this work, and you look at all the websites started, but all of the people there who are predominantly early adopters, DIY, DIY errs, it's upwards of 20% of the websites created there are powered by at least one Jamstack kind of leg, if you will, like a headless CMS, a static site generator or deployed to say, and Netlify. So yeah, super confident, and confident, not in a cocky way, which is super positive. And, and kind of looking forward.

Yeah, I really like the idea of it's not it's not WordPress versus the Jamstack. It's more it's, it's the LAMP stack isn't even versus, but it's like, comparing you compared to the LAMP stack. If you look at the LAMP stack from, you know, I guess, the late 90s, early 2000s, it's very different than where it is today. And all of that tooling came up in a way that, you know, solve the same issues we're talking about, and now we're just solving them in this way that is more secure, faster, etc.

Right? And I think it's very natural. You know, when say, when you represent WordPress to become defensive and say, oh, but you know, look, Netlify is only such and such percentage of the web. But I mean, you know, I think Netlify is an amazing company, we can talk about them. But more importantly, the Jamstack is an approach is, is much bigger than any single company, or any single static site generator, and it is this kind of, like, fluffy, broad definition. And that's also one of the reasons I'm very, I believe that it's going to kind of eat the web, you know, because it's, it's better. And it's a logical choice. And it's broad enough that, yeah, a lot of sites are going to be Jamstack sites, and some WordPress sites are going to be Jamstack sites as well. And you know, Matt, Matt, of WordPress agreed to that. And so it's this isn't about, you know, it's it isn't as much about worse WordPress versus Stackbit or WordPress versus Netlify. This is, you know, Jamstack is an architecture is going to take over the web again, in my opinion, and so how do we prepare for that? How do we go Encourage that, and what's missing for that to happen? And for the people who adopt that to be successful and not feel like early adopters who have made the wrong mistake or an early, you'd like to who have moved there too early, if you will? Yeah,

definitely. Very cool. So we've listed out a whole lot of different different benefits, different thought processes around the Jamstack. But what would you kind of consider? What would you say your jam in the Jamstack? Is? Obviously you run a service, this Jamstack service, but like, what's your favorite service product, philosophy, framework, even what's what what makes you love the Jamstack

I love I love the simplicity, and the straightforwardness of it all. I'm very biased, because I didn't mention this earlier on. But I'm, I'm involved with a bunch of different companies in the Jamstack. And I'm the you know, the first investor in Netlify, and on the board of the company. And so I was in, you know, I was fortunate to be in the room with Matt and Chris were like, oh, should we coined this term. And I was like, Guys, let's let's not bet the company on that. But they've obviously, they've obviously done really well and have created tremendous positive change in the world of the web. I'm also an investor in, in Sanity, and I think the team there is doing a phenomenal work. And obviously, associated with a bunch of other companies. And so I, you know, like my go to stack right now would probably be either next JS or eleventy, depending on what type of site I'm playing with. I really love just storing my content and get but if I need something more serious, I really enjoy, really enjoy Sanity. And yeah, deploy to Netlify. So that's my that would be my jam. And you know, of course, it's I, I don't start a website today, that isn't managed by statute. So it's, you know, some most people probably know Stackbit, but for our site builder, you know, 60 seconds, pick your stack, and you have a life site working, where we've provisioned the source code for you and everything is wired. And none of it is built with some secret stack, that sauce or custom Stackbit SDK is just taken and do whatever you want with it. But our main product is the Stackbit Studio, which basically, if the Jamstack unbundled content editing from publishing and kind of this integrated all of the product workflows, we kind of re aggregate all of that back into a single experience, where you can have a website, whether it was built with Stackbit or whether you build it by yourself, you can plug your repo in your, your your CMS in and you get a you get a WYSIWYG editing experience, you can create a B tests, you can create pages, you can share previews, and you It kind of looks and feels like a Squarespace or Wix or maybe a little bit of a web flow. And, and so that's how I enjoy working on my website. So of course, I can go directly to the repo and make changes if I want to edit templates or do anything like that. And it automatically gets reflected, but like my day to day of just like, you know, once you build a website and ship it, that's when the real work kind of starts depends if you think about your website, as a developer, or as a marketer. And, for me, I kind of enjoy to traverse both paths and kind of go back and forth. And so I spend most of my time in Stackbit, but when I work on my websites,

And so to kind of go back, you said, you know, you like the simplicity of the idea of the Jamstack. And so it sounds like the Jamstack has simplicity. And each of the products that are a product of the Jamstack. Collectively, they can be kind of complex and sounds like what you're doing with with a Stackbit Studio to kind of create a simple interface for that extra complexity that comes from the multiple simple applications out there.

Yeah, that's one. That's one way to look at it. Because of course, to integrate these things and think about how they touch each other is, is somewhat complex. But the bigger thing is that if you even put aside the complexity, there's just a lot of capabilities that existed before whether it's in WordPress, or whether they exist today. When you create a website with Wix or Squarespace, like, you know, things like with you, we get it. It's not complex is just impossible, right? You're, you're expected to go and edit your content where your content lives. The place that manages your content, and does a phenomenal job of letting you create structured content, and then manage it and play with it and edit it has no idea what you actually do with that content, because we've separated content and and how we render it right. And so Stackbit just has a lot of a lot of secret sauce to kind of re bundle that experience and introduce those capabilities, which are not hard to just, you know, don't exist or like impossible.

Cool. So, so let's let's pivot just a little bit so we can keep our episode length. We could talk about a lot of this stuff for a long time I can gather here, but so we keep our episode length right on that. Time. Let's talk about what your musical jam is. What are you listening to right now? When you're working when you're with your family, that sort of thing?

Yeah, I'm extremely eclectic, extremely eclectic. So this morning, I've been listening to both the Novus and lamenting the fact that I haven't learned Portuguese yet. I really love languages. But, you know, because I have have a young daughter, we listen to a lot of a lot of kind of kids, kids, kids songs, and so forth.

And yeah, so that's kind of where I am right now.

Nice. Very cool. So, so to kind of finish things off here, is there anything specific that you'd like to promote out to the Jamstack community, anything that you're doing that you want everyone to kind of get them eyes on?

You know, I think, keep your eyes on, keep your eyes on the Jamstack. We're, we're doing a lot as a, as a company, not only to build better tools to empower people, but also to uplift, the whole, the whole Jamstack. You know, Jamstack themes that dev is, is the leading resource for open source themes for any of these static site generators. And we're just doing more and more of that work. So we're announcing a very, very cool project soon. So stay posted. Very Jamstack key. Yeah, yeah. A lot of good stuff coming. Awesome.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today and tell us all about things going on and in Stackbit world as well as personally with you. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Brian. Thank you for the patience and the opportunity. And yeah, I enjoyed this as well. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Thanks again. Oh, hug that awesome conversation. And thanks to you, dear listener for tuning in Week after week. Be sure to star heart favorite review, you know, whatever and your podcast app of choice to spread the word. Now it's sponsored time. This week, we're lucky to have back off zero as a sponsor. Author zero is an amazing authentication platform, but they also have a wealth of amazing content coming out regularly on their YouTube channel, including a free course called full stack Jamstack with next js. If you're interested in learning more about next taking the Jamstack further, or just authentication on the Jamstack head on over to a0.to/yt for their YouTube channel. That's it for this week. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things jammy

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Welcome back, Jamstackers! It's been a bit of time since last we talked, but I'm so glad to be back with you. You're listening to That's My Jamstack the podcast where we asked a timeless, ageless and incomparable question. What is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week on the show, we have Brad Garropy. Brad is a lead front end developer at Adobe by day and a live code streamer by night.

All right. Well, Brad, thanks for being on the show with us today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm a recently promoted lead front end developer at Adobe. And the job description basically entails that I build SAS services for the Magento ecommerce platform, as you mean like Software as a Service things or another definition of SAS? Yeah, software as a service. So imagine things like product recommendations or search that can be kind of tacked on to the e commerce store. So what do you do for fun that if that's what you do for work? Yeah, well, definitely for fun, I do a lot of programming and side projects, but away from the computer, I really like to work out I'm into bodybuilding, powerlifting, running, all those types of things.

Awesome. So so what what kind of, is it like strength training? Is it are you doing like a Olympic league? Like overhead presses for your powerlifting? What what's that entail?

Yeah, like my training splits are typically like this, they start off with one of those powerlifting movements like your, like your bench press, or your squat, your deadlift. And then the rest of the training session kind of focuses around bodybuilding movements like to, to really stress out and tear down the muscles.

That sounds awful from somebody who doesn't do a whole lot working.

You know, it's funny, I found that a lot of developers actually take well to powerlifting. Because it's a it's usually a very structured program with progression and percentages and numbers. And I think developers just feel right at home when they have a lot of structure to training.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of a logical, like I said, the progression is a logical thing. And that tends to play well with the way our brains work.

Exactly.

Nice. So so this is a Jamstack podcast, let's talk about the Jamstack. A little bit, what was your entry point into this idea of other static sites or Jamstack? As we can know it today?

Yeah, it was interesting. I, I started learning web development at a really volatile time, like create react app was just coming out. And this notion of front end frameworks was just really picking up and my entry point into Jamstack, was trying to make my first blog. And I had to think about, you know, how do I source data but still make hosting cheap and free and easy? Yeah. Right. So Gatsby was one of the first tools that I got to reach for I did run Jekyll for just a little bit there. But Ruby, Ruby is difficult to work with.

Yeah, definitely as a as if, especially if you're coming from like a front end development perspective. And you also often have to do Ruby work, like that just doesn't feel quite right.

Yeah, like my learning path was like HTML, CSS. What is this Jekyll thing? You know? Yeah. So eventually, I kind of switched over to Gatsby and kind of hopped on the train with everybody else about like, this is kind of how you source data and and pre generate pages, which made hosting, you know, easy, simple and free, which is I'm a big proponent of free

Free is definitelya nice thing, especially especially in like side projects like that. Like, if you got a budget at work, like, that's cool. You can use that budget, but when you just want to blog, like, I don't want to pay $10 a month in hosting for that blog.

Yeah, and, and Jamstack is really cool, especially with that philosophy, because there's so many services around the Jamstack, that the way they work is they offer free tiers and free tiers just good enough for my use case, you know, I haven't built anything that's kind of broken out of that free tier.

Yeah, I think it's one of those things where if a developer is using it on their personal projects, or their little side projects that like, they may then want to use that for bigger projects at work, and they may find more enterprise clients that way, something along those lines.

Exactly, yeah, they they, they can bait you in with some really good premium features, or just essentially just like scalability. Yeah, definitely like that. The scaling is always a always a fun challenge to not have to worry about yourself. Absolutely. I I see my back end team at work constantly like thinking about how do we use Kubernetes to scale our API infrastructure and what happens when, you know, we released this to the public and there's 100,000 requests in, you know, 30 minutes. And they have so much to worry about with with us front end folks and the Jamstack technologies, you kind of make your HTML pages, add in a little JavaScript for interactivity and API calls, and they just get cached and served as kind of works in the end. So you talked about building a blog. So obviously, you've you've used Jamstack, a little bit personally, but how are you using these philosophies? professionally now, but also a little bit more on the personal side, too? Yeah. So the blog, it's Brad garrett.com, it was my entry point into kind of building a site with real data and content. But I built many other like side projects that stemmed from there that kind of gave me my my base as a front end developer. So I built like, a little website for my wife's photography business that was done on the Jamstack. I built daily, Texas country.com, which is like a Texas country music focused blog and community website, and that sources data from all sorts of different places, and it uses Gatsby for that data sourcing. And I've even built things on the Jamstack. Not using like Gatsby and react, I built a svelte application that, in my opinion, still very much adheres to the Jamstack to track workouts.

Okay, cool. So so it's like when you say, it still adheres to the kind of Jamstack philosophy? What do you kind of see as that as that philosophy? Because a lot of people have different definitions of it.

They do. Yeah. So it folks listening to the show probably know, Jamstack stands for JavaScript API's and markup. And so this workout timer application is a single page application that I still believe falls into the realm of Jamstack. A single page application is still delivering HTML, which is your index dot HTML file just happens to be pretty blank, although you can kind of pre generate the shell of the application, and then populate data inside of there. So this application is just a timer that runs and you can go to a page, if you're logged in, where you can fetch your previous workouts, it saves it up to fauna, db.

Oh, nice. Very cool. So. So also, I'm kind of curious, you said that the daily Texas country it was a it was a Texas country music blog, but also a community. What's the community aspect? And how's that playing with the Jamstack?

Yeah, I suppose what I mean is like, I'm trying to bring the community together on that website. So I make a bunch of different types of content. So I'll source YouTube videos that I make I'll source blog articles, and all sorts of playlists to try to get folks to gather at that website. There. I see that confusion there. There was no like, notion of a user or a member where there's comments or anything, I kind of use the other platforms for that.

I gotcha. And you're sourcing those and pulling them in. You said via the Gatsby source stuff. Right. Right.

Unknown Speaker 8:13

Cool. Cool. So So we've talked a little bit about Gatsby, but what is kind of your jam in the Jamstack? What's your favorite service or philosophy framework, etc.

Man, I think this is the really cool part about the Jamstack. And this is where the A in the Jamstack kind of plays an important role. So like, first of all, hosting on the Jamstack is great. Netlify is a tool that's universally loved. And I am no exception. They they make posting your files easy integrating with GitHub easy. It makes hosting serverless functions easy. And even doing things like DNS management easy. If you opt into their DNS servers, you can do like redirects very easily or sub domains. Just easy is the word that comes to mind. That's on the hosting side. Another thing that I really like about the Jamstack is that there are so many services that support it. So this kind of brings me to like the A in Jamstack, where, if you're coming at it from a front end developer point of view, you can build a front end, but you're looking for like, what is it that might happen does? How do I connect it to services or databases, and that's where you kind of go searching for the A, the API's. And I think it leaves developers in an interesting, interesting place, they have to kind of choose what services to stitch together. And for some folks, that might be like, a good thing or a bad thing, because at the end of the day, if you're choosing to integrate a bunch of services together to create a product, you have to write a bunch of like Glue Code and you might reach more of like a fatigue and trying to determine what's the best service for CMS or a payment processor or a database?

Yeah. And you haven't mentioned, like the fact that you've got, you have to string these services together, you have to figure out what is that string? How do I actually do the stringing of those services?

That's right, yeah. And this is where a lot of confusion can come into play. Or if if, for instance, one service isn't as flexible as you want. And now you have to like migrate to a new one, or if one service changes their pricing model, there's so much to consider. So I think a and Jamstack is fairly overloaded. When when all the services work well together, you just kind of you're picking apples from the tree, and life is dandy. But when you kind of run into problems, you really have to, like, interact with those services, support teams, or dev roles, and try to find answers.

So do you have any kind of like, best practices to like, try to avoid some of those those hiccups? Or are there any any kind of tips or tricks that you that you've had to implement as you've been building some of these things?

Yes. So one approach that I've started taking was, don't rely on CMS, if you don't have to, if you don't have somebody else, that's going to be modifying data on your website, I would opt not to use a CMS. First of all, that means you can generally bring your content right into the repository, where the front end code is hosted. And it's co located, which is a good thing, you own your content at that point. What that does is it kind of helps saves you from like, integration problems with your front end build tools. Like for instance, I was using contentful for a while, and I found that there, Gatsby source plugin was missing some fields that I really, really wanted. And after working with, like their, their dev rails and and submitting like some issues, it was clear that like, this stuff just wasn't going to be resolved. So that was one of the things that kind of forced me to move content into my repository. Another thing is like development environments, if you use Netlify, for hosting, every one of your GitHub branches, is actually turned into its own subdomain on Netlify. So that you can have like, immutable deploys two branches that have previews of content that's not actually published, which is so helpful. And sometimes getting a CMS to do that can be kind of difficult.

There's definitely some overhead that kind of comes into play when you have to do that from a CMS or from any kind of API layer at that point. For sure.

So like, I think mitigation wise is like, own as much code as you can without reinventing the wheel. And then if you have to use a service, find one that's fairly popular, or one that clicks with your mental model. And it just takes trying different services out to figure that out. I've recently worked with fauna DB as like a serverless first database. And I found that after understanding their query language, it really clicked with my mental model of like, this is how my Jamstack site is going to work with serverless. First database.

Yeah, well, and the interesting thing for me fun is actually was the first, like, no SQL like, schema list database that really clicked with me. Like, I'd used Firebase and some other stuff in the past, but never, never felt quite right. And then something about fauna just just hit me in the right spot. And I built a couple small apps with it now.

Yep, yep, I built my Murphy app with it. And I'm pretty happy with it. And actually chose not to go with their graph qL implementation, I'm doing just their, I guess, their JavaScript library implementation.

And there's a lot of interesting things that you can do kind of in the in the back how they work to where they've got their their SQL query language, their fun a query language, and you actually build out complex queries as functions that they have. And then you can actually just submit one like line of JavaScript, and it runs that function on their on their servers, which can be really, really handy.

Yeah, and I found it like, super helpful to build up a utility folder, or like a utility file with like a bunch of CRUD operations written out in SQL. So if you want to read all posts, or read a single post, or edit a post, and you just kind of build out those CRUD operations, then they're like building blocks you can use in your serverless functions, that, you know, you might have route handlers for each one, and then you just call out to that specific utility function. It just, it almost felt like I wrote kind of an express app without having to set up, like, all of the boilerplate, you know, and it was just really easy to deploy things to Netlify.

Yeah. And like the interesting thing to me too, is that like, honestly, the SQL language kind of broke my brain. In a little bit, it was, it was very difficult for me to get into. But there was a moment. And it was like two days into working with it. Were all of a sudden, like, it was like the matrix, I get all sudden, like, see my queries happening and like understand exactly where it was coming from. So there's definitely a hurdle there. It's it's a new language, but it's a, it can be very, very beneficial, I think,

yeah, I was very lucky in that I had the help of dev REL from fauna, I was actually streaming and tagging them and everything that I was doing. Next thing, you know, I got a dev REL sitting in chat. And then he joined up on a Discord server that I'm in. And he, he really worked with me side by side to like, improve my queries, discuss options, I even got invited to like a feedback call where I could, you know, talk to them about the decisions I made and how I use fauna and areas I see for improvement. And that's another thing about the Jamstack. I just feel like, all the companies are very much like developer experience first, and they're willing to engage and they, they hire Developer Relations people, and they do a really good job at reaching out.

I think I wonder if that has anything to do with kind of the, to your point on the A in the Jamstack, the API layer and how you really do kind of need developers on your team to be able to to utilize the Jamstack properly. And I wonder if that's, you know, the defining characteristic of a Jamstack company, is how well, they manage their developer community, because that's, that's who really buys in and makes all this work.

Yeah, like if A is truly kind of just a bunch of services that you have to go utilize. They have to know who their customers are, they have to know who they're delivering to.

Cool. So let's talk music. What's your actual jam right now? What's your favorite song or musician or I know you run a website about music. So hopefully, you've got some some hot takes here.

Yeah, so that daily, Texas country website is all based around a playlist that has like 1200, Texas country songs, and it's actually 1200 Texas country songs. Oh, yeah. This is only like a very select subset of the ones that are curated by me, you know, so it's a it's a big genre, because it's a big state. You know what I mean? Yeah, definitely. Anyways, there's a up and coming kind of artist, he's 21 years old, just turned 21. His name is Colby Cooper, and I love like, basically everything that he does,

so it was out of curiosity. So what is Texas country as compared to country with a capital C?

Yeah. Okay. So I think the main difference is a country that kind of comes out of Nashville, you kind of do like there's a natural epicenter of country music, and there's like a Texas epicenter of country music. And the difference is, the giant labels like Sony and Columbia are producing records out of Nashville, that that sound over produced, they use drum machines, they use snap tracks, all these different pop music elements in country music that Texas country music fans don't view as like traditional country music. Whereas in Texas, you're typically recording in like, a very modest studio. You expect to have like a fiddle in the band. That's definitely true. And there's like a steel guitar like more rich natural instrumentation, and then you typically just have like, Guys being very honest in lyrics just talking about everyday stuff.

Is Texas country that the hipster country of the country world.

So I think i think i think Nashville folks looking in would say that, but I think Texas people looking out would say no, this this is the original We are the one true country.

Gotcha. Mind you. I'm from Tennessee, so I don't actually like the Nashville the Nashville scene. But uh, but I guess I guess it's been it's flavored my my knowledge of the genre.

I think the coolest part about Texas country music is that like, you can go to a concert on any given Friday or Saturday night for like 15 bucks, you know, you're not going to have to pay $70 for an arena. See, you can go see your favorite artist right around the corner. You know, any given weekend.

Nice. Very cool. So is there anything that you would like to promote anything that you're doing that you really want out to the Jamstack community right now?

Yeah, I'm actually like, a much smaller content creator than the crowd I hang out with. And so I would love to like try to build up my my Twitch and my Twitter a little bit more. So I'm Brad Garrett at Twitch. tv slash Brad GaryVee. I stream like weeknights, like 10pm fairly late. So I'm a night owl and Twitter. It's twitter.com slash Brad Garrett up. I try to tweet out some tips every now and then and just keep you all informed about the projects that I'm working on.

So what are you what are you streaming most nights? What what kind of code Are you working on?

Yeah, I work on react. I work on feltz. But lately, it's been a lot of felt because of this Murphy app. I've been live streaming the entire development process of the Murphy app written in spelt on the front end and serverless functions and fauna DB on the back end.

Very cool. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show with us today. And I hope you keep doing some amazing things both at Adobe as well as in all these awesome side projects you got going on.

Thanks a lot for having me, Brian.

Thanks again to Brad for coming on the show this week. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening each and every week, week after a week. Now sponsor time and I'm really really excited to talk to you about a free course that our friends at auth zero have released. This course is going to cover building a full stack Jamstack application with next j s, air table off zero and tailwind CSS. Now next j s is going to be the front end framework. You'll learn all about designing with tailwind CSS air table is going to be for your database. And of course, for authentication, we're going to be using auth zero. So to watch this course, head on over to a zero to slash full stack Jamstack for all the details. And of course thank you for sticking around to the end, listening to our sponsors, visiting our sponsors, all that good stuff. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things jamming

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Hello, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the timeless question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week on the show, we had the amazing and talented Debbie O'Brien. Debbie is the head of learning and developer advocate for NuxtJS. She's a Microsoft MVP, Google GDE and Cloudinary MDE.

But before we get to that, let's talk about our amazing sponsor this week TakeShape. We'll talk about their content platform after the episode. But if you're curious to find out more right now, head on over to take shape.io slash That's My Jamstack for more information.

All right. Well, thanks for being on the show with us today. Debbie, how are you doing today?

Hey, I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

No problem. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that kind of thing.

So I'm working for NuxtJS as head of learning and Developer Advocate. So that's kind of pretty cool. And in my free time I'm doing sport because like lockdown makes you fat. So I'm doing a lot of sport, Taekwondo running, cycling anything.

Anything get a little active, right?

Yeah. Also because we were locked up for like two months. So it's just like, good to get outside and actually do stuff.

Yeah, the best I'm on managing right now is just short walks outside. That's, that's what I've got going.

Well, it's a good start.

So tell us a little bit more about what you do as kind of the head of education and dev advocacy at

Yeah, so basically, my job is to kind of like make sure that Nuxt is really easy to use, easy to learn by providing good documentation, great examples, demos, pretty much anything that you would want when you want to like learn something, that you have the right materials, and then we'll work on workshops and video courses, etc. And then obviously, just Nuxt-ifying the world. I mean, the whole aim is that everyone uses Nuxt. They know what it is. Because it's amazing, right? So we just have to like, show it to the world. And then like, everyone would just come on board.

Watch everyone pour right in at that point, right?

It's easy. It was really easy.

So so what what do you kind of see is the difference between like, since you have both those titles can combine what's the difference between like developer education and you know, Developer Relations or developer advocacy?

Um, I guess you could say they're very similar sometimes, especially when you're writing a blog post, right? Because you're advocating because you're producing material, but you're also teaching because you're teaching someone something new. So that's why I think they're very much combined. But I guess if you were like to go for a job and learning it doesn't mean you have to be a speaker on a stage right. So the advocate, advocacy ism is a little bit more. Get out there in front of people. I think, you know, be more, don't be shy.

Cool. So, so we'll talk a little bit more about Nuxt here in a second. Because I imagine when we talked about your, your use of the Jamstack. Professionally, we'll talk a lot about that. But what was your entry point into the idea of the Jamstack, or static sites, or whatever that may have been,

Yeah, so I guess I kind of just fell into it in a way, um, we were working for a company, and they, we had to, like, rebuild the website, it was it was really, really, really slow. And it was development experiences terrible. There's a lot of problems. So we at the time, we researched which framework to use, and, you know, was react or Angular or Vue. But we needed server side rendering, we needed like, you know, good search engine optimization. So a lot of them were a problem for us. And we came across Nuxt. And at the time, they said no, because Nuxt was too young.

So they basically asked us to build our own framework. So we built our own framework, which was like a statically generated site framework. And we built that which is still in use today by the company. It's an amazing experience to build your own framework, but never do it. Yeah, it worked. Yes, it was great. Yes was fantastic. But you have nobody contributing to it. I don't work there anymore, and nobody's who's going to maintain it? So having a community behind you is, you know, you just need it when you're creating something like that. It was a great experience. But yeah, when we finished it, and we kind of showed it to everyone, we said, Look, this is how it works on it is super fast. And like, the website is still alive today. And it's still super fast. But my recommendation was okay, now that we've built this, now it's time to move to Nuxt. And they said, No, I left the company. I didn't want to work on my framework for the rest of my life.

Yeah, like you said, like creating something like that can be super rewarding, but like long term, it's a problem.

Yeah, and it has its limitations because you know, if you want to do new things and add more to it, etc. And there was just two of us actually, full time on the project and then a few others that were kind of helping out. So I wasn't the main like the person who was doing all the developing developing work. was working more in the front end side of things and kind of like making sure things work the way they should some more in architecture. So if you take away the person that really built it, which he's now left the companies, well, then you kind of like, you know, I'm not gonna be on my own doing all this No way.

Yeah. Well, and then it's like, if you need to update a feature, do you really want to touch all that code that could then come crumbling down around you?

Exactly, exactly. I don't know. companies don't trust, like open source, for some reason. But I think that's changed a lot. Now. That was like a couple of years ago. So

Yeah, I hope I hope that there's a nice bit of growing momentum behind, you know, don't reinvent the wheel. Like, let's use open stuff, not close stuff, and most definitely not coated ourselves.

What a lot of companies do I mean, trivago have their own and it's working perfect for them. And Uber, do they have their own as well? I think it is. So there's quite a few that still are producing their own because it works for them. Because, you know, I don't know. They can do what they want on with a team of developers. And if you have a big team of developers and they're willing to spend time and money because at the end It's money, then yeah, go for it, but it's not necessary.

Well, I also kind of look as much as like, I'm usually gonna derive Facebook overall, like, I like the Facebook model of they needed something, they created the React stuff. And then they said, we're gonna open sources because we sure you know, we really want, you know, the community involved in it. So we have less work to do to

Exactly. I mean, it's a it's a win win. Right?

Exactly. Cool. So So let's talk about how you're how you're using the Jamstack. Now, now that you don't have to create your own framework, how are you using it professionally? How are you using it personally?

Yeah, well, before I started in Nuxt, I actually work for an agency and one in my job interview, actually, I kind of said, You know, I want to work with view and with Nuxt. And they said, well, you're going to be in charge. So you can just do the technology. And I was like, I like that. Okay. So I accepted the job because of that, right? And, and I literally Nuxtified the whole company. None of them had view experience, and I taught all the developers view Nuxt it was it wasn't An easy, right, it was a kind of a big battle because you know, you're going into a company that was very back end focused.

PHP igniter, for example, was what they were used to working with. And you're coming in and you're saying, right, you know, front end is going to take over. And we're gonna, we're going to use Nuxt. And we have all this power now. And it was a challenge. And then, okay, introducing Nuxt is one thing, introducing static sites that was like, you know, why, what do you want to do? What do you mean? What, why do you want to take the server away? What do you want to do that for?

We love our PHP.

Yeah, so it was, it was really hard work actually convincing people. So yeah, I just fought. I'm a good fighter. I did Taekwondo, so I just kept fighting. And the fighting works, and eventually you win. So we managed to be able to convince the back end team and the, my old boss to basically use Nuxt, and we started using it for a lot of company projects. And when they seen the performance benefits, it was kind of like, okay, so yeah, this is a little bit better. And you know, So we kind of managed to, to basically produce Nuxt websites for pretty much every company that we work to it, which was great. So it was it was a good way of like, you know, Nuxtify the world through the agency. And then I moved on and started with Nuxt. I've only been with Nuxt, three months. So it's quite new. And yeah, it's it's obviously amazing, because now I actually, you know, just get paid to work with Nuxt, which is just fantastic all day every day Nuxt.

I'm kind of curious to take a take a step back. So you went into an agency that was primarily using PHP, I've gotten the impression overall with the PHP community that the Vue is actually looked upon as kind of the JavaScript to use did was that kind of your experience there? Or is it maybe too early at that agency and they hadn't quite gotten to that point. So I know like Laravel has always liked view and integrated well view.

Yeah, unfortunately, they weren't that far advanced. So it was actually me that introduced Laravel to them, and said, like, you know, you want to build your own CMS or why don't you use Laravel because it works nicely with Vue. And then we can help you on the front end. And we can work together and, and the back end team then started to work with view, and started to really like it. So they were like, in love with Laravel and view and the whole mixture of how it works together. So I think they were, they were quite open to move in that direction, but they just didn't know the right direction to go to. And I don't know, I guess when I come in and say this is the way you know, you might geek out a little bit and you can like, just follow me. Come on. I know the way.

Very cool. So out of curiosity. So you're at Nuxt now, and obviously you've been you've been kind of your own advocate for Nuxt for a little while. I'm very curious around the space that Nuxt and Nuxt. And even even like Gatsby and Gridsome kind of occupy because they're not static site generators, and I just I don't know what to call them. What would you call them? What kind of phrase would You manufacturer around all about?

Well, the Chrome team actually call it a meta framework. We're just calling it a web framework, because we're using NodeJS. And we use Vue. So you know, depending on what you want to use, it's not just a view framework. It's also based on NodeJS as well. And it's using, you know, developer tools. So we call it an intuitive web framework. Because we can have server side rendering, and we can have static site generation. And we can have single page applications, we can have it all right, not all of them can have that. So Nuxt kind of is different in when you compare it to some that are just static site generators. Um, but yeah, Jamstack framework doesn't sound really too good either. doesn't

No. And I mean, you could theoretically probably do an Nuxt application, not even like using CDNs, not using some of the more traditional stuff in a in a Jamstack stack. So I guess you could you can even have Nuxt without the Jamstack at that point.

Yeah. I mean, Nuxt just works with everything. It's just cool.

Cool. So I would I would hazard a guess and say that perhaps Nuxt is your jam in the Jamstack?

For sure. I mean, yeah. Nuxt is my job for quite a while, as you said, before I even started working with Nuxt. I was like, you know, speaking about Nuxt at conferences, and you know, it's actually funny because, um, I didn't like Nuxt.

At first. I didn't want to use it.

This is at the time when we were trying to figure out what we were going to build our own framework and stuff on, we wrote our own server side rendering on top of you to try and make it work and it wasn't working properly. And I reached out to the core team members to Eduardo, from the core team from view and said, like, you know, I'm having this problem and I really need server side rendering. And like this is not working if you've got any recommendations and he was like, did we just use Nuxt? Okay, for the Vue team are recommending Nuxt so that means it must be okay to use.

So when I started playing around with it and stuff, I didn't like it because it gave me things I didn't know. And I didn't need. I was like, what's this? I don't need that. I don't want that. What Why are you giving me this? So it kind of like, pushed me away from it. And then when I realized that, you know, when you stop using it, and you start just using view, you go, Oh my God, I've got to like, do the whole router, follow my own. Nuxt just doing all that for me. I'm going back to Nuxt. So I think about when you don't understand something, you don't like something, when you start to understand it, you start to realize what it does, and then you go, wow, this is actually powerful, but I know how it's working. So I get it. And it makes sense. And yes, I want to use it. I think that's what's important is understanding.

Nice and so so now that you've kind of you have an understanding of it what what is what has been the big draw that has kept you with Knox, so obviously, you know, you didn't understand it, didn't like it at first, but now that you're really in it, what are its like core features that are gonna keep you staying with Nuxt for a while.

Well, there's quite a lot. I mean, develop experience, for example. So like, I mean, I wrote the course Vue router, and it's a lot of work. So I know what it's like and what's involved in it. And this is all done for you with smart prefetching. With code splitting. It's all done. And there's a lot more other benefits. So we just released the Nuxt components. And now we don't have to write import statements were components. So Nuxt is making your developer life easier. And when you're like having to, especially when you work in an agency, and you have a limited amount of time to develop something and you need to get this job done. Well, you don't want to be spending time doing unimportant tasks like writing import statements, or, you know, configuring your router. So in Nuxt, takes that away from you. It's kind of like, yeah, this is really, really cool.

But the other great thing is the performance. And for me, performance was probably the biggest seller, because I'm a bit of a performance freak. And I you know, I've been waiting to Webpack so I like I really am focused on performance, I'm Google Developer expert as well. And when I was consulting with the agency, I did a lot of work on performance. So to be able to go into a company and say, yeah, this is the website, look at performance it is Look how how fast it's working because of the smart prefetching that Nuxt gives you because of the automatic code splitting that Nuxt gives you. And you know what, I'm going to create a pw way for you. And you do it in 30 minutes, because not even three minutes. Like it's as simple as that. I mean, that's just magic.

That's just something a company says, Wow, you know, I've seen it like, from the companies we've gone into just to kind of go Wow, this is amazing. This is so fast. This is so good. So performance for me is is key.

So with all the like, obviously, the Jamstack itself is a very performant kind of architectural mindset. But with that server side rendering built in with the specific routing built in so Nuxt is kind of pushing almost performance first.

Yeah, I mean, we're very performant for sure. And it developer experience I recommend to go side by side. So like basically your performance on making the developers lives easier. That's what we want to do. We want to make it like we're lazy people, right developers, so We want to just have fun and we don't want to do those unimportant tasks. So if Nuxt can do all that for you, and you just concentrate on curating the cool stuff, then that's what makes your, your experience better. Right?

Hmm. Very cool. So So are there any kind of ancillary philosophies, services, software that you're digging on in the Jamstack, as well, besides Nuxt are the pairs particularly well with Nuxt.

So obviously, serverless functions are like, you know, a big thing. And we I didn't, I haven't dug that deep into it, I started using them. And it's something I wanted the company to use at the time. And we're going to actually build them into Nuxt. So we're gonna have Nuxt functions. So that's gonna make the whole Jamstack even more powerful. And I think that's what I'm, yeah, that's what makes everything just kind of like go together. You know, with the back end team can build something cool. We have a serverless function, you just go to the API, get it done.

Pretty cool. So So is it going to be its own flavor of serverless functions or is it going to be just co located With with the front end code, how is that gonna work?

I'm actually not too sure the they're working on them at the moment. And I don't know if it's gonna be like, similar to how the lambda functions work or not, I'm not sure, or it's going to be based on that or, but it basically just means that you'll be able to write them directly in your code, which is just going to make your life easier again, right? Because that's it, we

definitely, I've never really enjoyed having like the lambda functions completely separated out. Like that's always been one of the pain points for it. So that's cool that you're working towards more solutions for consolidating everything.

I was just gonna say as well like something that we released just recently with the full static module. So that was released last week. Because before we weren't in full static, we were statically generating or pre rendering the sides. And then when you changed from one page to another, it's still called the API because it was it was rendering there and then and calling that API, right, whereas now we're not doing that anymore. And we basically on a build time, we call your API, we get everything. thing that we need from the, from the data, and we store it in a static folder as a payload js file. And then every time we client side render the page, it's going to go to that file and collect that data. And that works a little bit different to other frameworks. And the reason for being is that we were able to separate the build from the content, which means now that you can actually just regenerate your content without having to go to Webpack and without having to build the whole site and the assets and the etc with just generating the content and that makes it super super fast for for content regeneration.

Okay, so yes, it's like the build time is gonna be less for just kind of smaller, smaller changes, right?

Yeah. And this was a big problem, especially with the agencies which I don't understand why right because it was like two minutes and they were like, oh, but it takes two minutes to build I was like, so what a coffee but for some reason, that was an issue and now we're down to like 10 seconds. So you know, if you're going to find would be 10 seconds, then you know, I can't do anything else. We know I think

the more at that point.

Yeah, I think it's a big it's a, it's a big thing that a lot of people had, especially when you're working with bigger sites, why do you have to rebuild it just for, especially if you're working with a CMS, right, and you're just changing writing a new blog page or changing something in a CMS, you don't need to rebuild that that whole website. And most of the websites we've built for clients, you never need to actually build anything ever again, because that site is finished. And they're just changing minor content every now and again. So to be able to hand that over to a client and say, right, there you go, it's going to be super fast. In 10 seconds, you'll see your change. And also, we built in a live preview mode. So this is again, released only last week. And now you can actually live preview your changes in your API. So by using like a query Param preview equals true. And then you can actually see your live preview changes from your API. And then you can say, Yeah, that looks good. And then deploy, and then it's going to build it, and then you've got it. intensely. Cool.

Yeah, that preview such an important step and like especially like you've mentioned, like the agency lifecycle, like I have to be able to see the the change I'm making before before I can definitely approve it for production.

Yeah. And it's pretty much the non developer people, right? And I get to because they're afraid of like, you know, they need to see you there. They're not like us who like don't mind or something's broken because we know can fix it. Whereas they probably can't fix something. So they just like I need to see it as it working. And then, so yeah, this this is going to be a big game changer.

Cool. So let's, let's pivot and let's talk a little bit about music. What's your actual jam right now? What what are you listening to when you're able to listen to things?

Well, you see, I actually can't listen to music when I'm coding. Actually, can't I? Yeah, I need to. I need silence And yeah, so I don't have any sound at all except the birds singing outside my, my office. So I don't really listen to music when I'm coding. But when I'm cooking, I listen to music when I'm cooking. I can't talk just which is weird, right? Don't talk to me when I'm cooking because I can't I guess I'm just concentrating so much that like, you know, I can have music on Wi Fi and but I actually don't even know what's playing. And it's just there. It's background noise, I guess. So. I don't know. I'm pretty boring in that sense of like, what? Yeah, what music? am I listening to whatever Apple gives me or whatever Alexa gives me basically.

Hey, fair enough. We turn we turn a lot over to the robots anyway, might as well let the the musical choices happen there as well. Yeah. Very cool. That's, that's interestingly, I'm, I'm kind of in the same boat when it comes to cooking too. I need to I need to focus a little bit. I need to make sure all my timings are working out and all that all that good stuff.

Yes.

Cool. So is there anything that you would like to promote in cow to the Jamstack community as a whole that you're working on right now?

So I guess like, obviously, the, the full static that we released, so that's what check now in Nuxt. And especially if you've never built a static site, where you've built a start a site with next like, like a single page application or server side, rendering Like, it's so easy to change from one to the other, just by changing the target to static, once you've updated to version two point 30, and change the target to static, and then change the command to next build, and next export, and now you've got a static site. I mean, that's it. So it's not like, Oh my god, I have to like start from the beginning or refactor the whole thing. Like, literally, you don't. And I think that's what makes it really cool that you can just change from one to the other. So I would say to everyone to try and test out static sites and just give them a go. The content module as well, that we released for building your content. So you can have like a good base CMS inside Nuxt. So you don't need to like advocate by CMS, because we've got one like built in for you. Yeah, really cool features released. We're going to be releasing our new Doc's very, very soon as well. And we're actually changing our whole website to use the content module because actually, we built this for us, like like you said earlier. So we build the content module for the Nuxt Doc's to make our lives easier, and we're sharing it with the world to make the world lives easier. So if you like it as much as we do, then you you know, I'm sure you're gonna love it because yeah, it is it is fantastic. So

the nice thing is you've got your own use case for it. And you get to test it out and make sure that it's the right thing for for everyone before you even launch it.

Well, that's pretty much everything we're releasing now is because it's what we want, locally that we have a lot of people on the team now. And there's a lot of great ideas. And we're just like, we have to do this again and again. And again. Why can we not just do something like this? And then we fix it for the world. So yeah, that's really cool. I would say sign up for our newsletter, and you can hear all the news about Nuxt. so you don't miss anything. Because we're releasing so much stuff that it's kind of hard to keep up with in the actual team. So I can only imagine outside what it's like.

Yeah, I mean, and especially if you're if you're paying attention to a couple different products, you're like, Okay, just let me know, bring it to my inbox.

Yeah, yeah. And if you're an agency and you have to work with other like, you know, frameworks and technologies and stuff, then you obviously can't focus so much time on just one. So yeah, it's hard. It's really hard. To keep up and we're moving at such a fast pace, but it's such a great pace, right? Because we're creating great content and great modules, etc. But yeah, we're climbing climbing ladders. climbing mountains, I should say.

Even even bigger than ladders.

Yeah. Well next is like the logo is based on mountain. So we're all about mountain.

Fair enough. And I I can see that. Yeah. Cool. Well, Debbie, I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today and to share more about Nuxt and the things you're passionate about. I hope you keep doing some amazing things, both at Nuxt and kind of in the community as a whole.

Thank you very much. It was great to be here and yeah, just try out next. I hope you you can just like create an excellent site yourself and you know, for this whole Jamstack podcast stuff up there. That would be cool. True,

true. Although I was rebuilding a house and Season Two was gonna have a new website and then I only got halfway through I said what I've got.

That's always the way we're always too lazy in the end.

Exactly. Thanks again to Debbie for the awesome conversation. And thanks to all the amazing people in the Jamstack community that tune in Week after week. Before we get to our sponsor, be sure to like part star favorite or whatever in your podcast app of choice, and spread the word about the amazing people doing awesome stuff in our community. And now for our sponsor, if you listen to season one you're probably aware of take shape by now. But as a reminder, take shape is a content platform for the Jamstack take shape has a headless content management system and easy to use graph qL API, a static site generator and amazing new product called match a service that can tie together multiple API's into their handy graph qL interface if you're doing anything with content on the Jamstack Be sure to check them out at take shape.io slash That's My Jamstack. That's it for this week. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you back here for the next awesome episode.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Support That's my JAMstack by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack

Hello, everyone, welcome to the next amazing episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the age old question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? On today's episode, we talked with the amazing Obinna Ekwuno is a software engineer for Gatsby, a media developer expert, egghead instructor and an accessibility advocate.

Before we dive into that interview, let me take a second to thank our sponsor this week, TakeShape, stick around after the episode to find out more about their content platform, or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Obinna, thanks for thanks for being on the podcast with us today.

Happy to be here.

Awesome. So tell us a little about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? That kind of thing?

Oh, um, so I am a software engineer at GatsbyJS. I work on the DevRel team. I originally joined Gatsby to work on the learning team. Like building stuff with like documentation, writing some documentation and working on like plugin automating workflows and like all of those interesting stuff, trying to like make like documentation better for like people to, like, get more information out of out of Gatsby. But now I work on like the DevRel team, which is like really cool, because like, I still do some of the learning work, but like also, like more DevRel right now. Um, that's what I do for work.

For fun, like, I like to write poetry. So I just, you know, write poems, hang out my friends. I I started getting into gaming a few months ago, my friend gave me his ps4 to like, try out some games. So yeah, that's that's what I do for fun right now.

So what kind of poetry are you writing?

I'm mostly like mostly melancholic poems like just, you know, I'm just writing I'm documenting like, life as a Nigerian boy growing up in Nigeria and you know, just just, you know, writing more for my myself, my future self done, like anybody really

Awesome, I believe of everyone that we've, we've talked to you're the first person who said that poetry is what you do in your spare time. So that's, that's awesome.

Thank you.

And then with Gatsby, so you said you were originally on the learning team and the devrel team. That's been an interesting thing that I've heard about Gatsby, what's the main difference between, say, the Education team and and DevRel? Because I've always felt that those kind of overlap in some ways?

Yeah. So like, there's not like so much difference is because when working out like when I was working on like, the learning team, because we're still trying to like flesh out the DevRel team at Gatsby, so learning was more like, you know, writing documentation, speaking, podcasts, all of those interests interfacing, like the community, so it was kind of like, it was more like DevRel but then at the same time, like actually having to write documentation as part of your job. But, so like, that's like, those, those are like the, the parts are like overlapped but like so that's why it was really easy for to transition from like learning things. There. Because like it was just same thing I started doing originally, but like, you know, with like, Oh, this is not what you're supposed to do full time.

So let's, let's talk about the the Jamstack a little bit. So what was your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack? Or maybe your static sites? How did you kind of enter this world?

Yeah, so, um, I think that was like, two years ago, when I had been writing, like, React for a bit. And, you know, it was really, um, it was really because I had to, I don't, I didn't have like a traditional entry into like tech.

I studied engineering in school, and like, it was really in uni. And like, it was really confusing to like, learn how to code. So I was writing, like, React after learning, like a lot of JavaScript. And then, you know, someone just came up one day while I was like, hanging out my friends from computer science, and they were like, hey, look at this cool stuff called Gatsby. Like, what is like The Great Gatsby like the movie, like who would name something who would never framework out of like a movie, but then you know, that then I you know, got into like the documentatioon. And you know, just really just kept going from there. So like Gatsby was like my first introduction to like, oh, when I saw that I think the thing that really got me into it was seeing that I didn't have to like worry about routes anymore. The whole the whole put put the file in the page folder and becomes a router. It got it got me. I was like, What? Yes, this is how I want to build

It definitely. Like I when I got my first intro into like some of the React stuff. I just, I didn't want to handle routing. That was like the worst thing about building a single page application. And now with Gatsby is just drag and drop almost

So when you were studying at university, you said you were like software engineering. Were you specifically looking to get into went into the web world? Or were you looking to do other things with that?

So um, I was studying electronics and computer engineering, and you know, like having having so I was doing more of like, smaller electronics like, you know, smaller sector boards, how do waveforms work, all of those things. Interesting stuff that I never really paid attention to. Well, but the thing is like with me, like naturally, I'm just really I'm really curious. So at first I didn't even want to like I didn't know what tech was about, I just really just wanted to be a network engineer. So I was learning a lot about TCP and IPs and network layers and all those like interesting stuff, Voice over IP, you know, the cool things for me at that time, then, I got into like tech, when one of my, my classmates was because I was just going to like, the classes to get my degree, like because I was good at math and physics. And you know, engineering just came like, Oh, that's what you're supposed to do.

But then when I really go into like, my classmate taught me to write HTML. And I learned HTML, I was like, Oh, my God, then I go, I go to CSS and I'm like, what's sorcery is this? How, how does this happen? You know, so I've always I think the thing that really got me here was like, always wanting to because everything excites me with like, when it comes to like tech, so like, always know, what's the next thing I can do? How can I use this in another way? So like, that's like, what's really interesting That's, that's what really got me into like, where I am now.

Very cool. So obviously working at Gatsby, your day to day deals a lot with the Jamstack. But how specifically, are you using the Jamstack professionally? How are you using it personally? What are you kind of doing nowadays?

Yeah, so um, I first like my, like building on stuff like Jamstack was like kind of building stuff for Gatsby was how I got to like the Jamstack. I like now because like, I work on the on the documentation. So like before, you have to actually write documentation, you kind of need to like test out or you're writing about and actually know if it works. So that's like most of the stuff that I do professionally with the Jamstack. So maybe if you're trying to document how a plugin works like you're actually running up a Gatsby, you're firing up a Gatsby demo site, trying to like implement this plugin, seeing use cases, questions that people might have about implementation and all of those like cool stuff. And mostly on testing out tutorials. When you write, you're trying to write a tutorial on how to use this With Gatsby, I would have to, like, you know, have to understand how this works, and then test it out, build it out and then write the documentation for that. So that's like how I work with it professionally. Um, and mostly just like educating people on it.

Personally, I have I have a personal sites that have I have been working my friend always laughs at me every time I mentioned my personal site, because I've been working on this site for like, for like, the past year. And the reason why I haven't really competed is that every time I feel like it's ready, I see some other thing I learned. I work on like, Oh, I want to add this to my site and then I just keep I keep test using it to test stuff. I do recent thing that is really getting me excited is Gatsby recipes. So like that's what I was like, oh, cool, how do I you know, just out of curiosity, how do I remove everything in the Gatsby config js and try to make try to see if I can make like a recipe out of like all of those things. So that's so that's how I use it personally, just I use my I use my site, as like a testing field for everything.

Very cool. I've actually seen a lot recently about how your personal site should be your, like development garden. Like you shouldn't think of it as like a final final place for things that just you should be pruning it and planting new seeds and all sorts of stuff. It's a cool analogy.

A good a good example would be this a colleague of mine, Josh. Josh writes a lot about his, um, his like, on this personal site and he adds like a bunch a lot of like, awesome features on that. And like I just whenever I think of my personal site, I'm like, I want I want my sites look like Josh is on. Because he just, you know, he works on like the cloud team, I got to be and then every new awesome feature that's coming up, he just uses a site to test it out. So yeah,

So obviously you're working at Gatsby, but what what would you say kind of your jam in the Jamstack?What's your favorite service or product? Or maybe it's like a philosophy what what do you enjoy the most about the idea of the Jamstack

I love that like the Jamsttack community is kind of like it because it's like relatively new, per se. It's like a place where people, you know, the entry level is like, it's not it's not so high. And like the community is really willing to like help people learn more about it because the community is actually just green. I think of like the the companies actually like leveraging of the Jamstack like Netlify, for example. It's like a company started in 2014. Gatsby gate became a company in 2018. Most, most of the technologies that we're using and stuff that we're still figuring out how do we want to make this like, for like, the, what's the code for like community, so I love that, like, the Jamstack community is really, um, it's really trying its best to educate and curious people along and make things simpler.

Um, my favorite service at this time and I don't mean to sound salesy, but then I really am in love with like Gatsby cloud, to be honest, because like, like, it's done like, I mean, the first time I heard about it, I thought it was I thought something else, like I don't know what it was, but like right now I'm just appreciating what's like what it does, we like build times and how it helps what's it called: developers like interface with content creators and all of that. I also really love Netlify, because like, I could host stuff without even without even understanding what CI and CD, like all of those DevOps, whatever related, you know, and I just really love that like, um, another thing I love about the Jamstack is like, the thing it does with so I can have different services coming to like a website's site without having to like worry about how those services run under the hood. Like I could host images on Cloudinary. do stuff like Gatsby, try new stuff for like, Auth0, you know, just what I need into where it is.

So out curiosity, so obviously run the speed of Gatsby Cloud is kind of important. It's obviously tooled up to run Gatsby? But kind of how have you been feeling? That's a relatively new product. And I don't actually know a whole lot about it like, What? What's been kind of some of the biggest advantages that you've seen playing with it?

Yeah, so, um, Gatsby cloud launched like last year. And like, we recently just shipped a new feature called incremental builds, which is like, really what excites me the most, because what incremental builds offices, so usually whenever you have to, like build, like a site, you know, static sites are fast, like relatively fast, depending on how much data you have, like there. It's, it's fast, but then gets me with incremental builds is trying to like push the limits of what we actually call fast.

So incremental builds, like what Gatsby does is also you've built a site, and then cool you build a site in like 22 seconds. That's all right. And then you want to make like a content change. So for example, you kind of do like a content change and then usually what will happen is that your site will be Build for every content change you make. But then what incremental builds offers is that for every content change, it really just compares, like the difference between the first build, and like the new edits that you've done. So I like to think of it in the react and the virtual DOM, um, play of how hot reloads of like, Oh, we measure what's what, what change versus what was, and then just build whatever changed. And that will reduce like, build time.

So you could have like, the first build is 22 seconds, the next build can be five seconds. And when you think obviously, like five, six pages, it's, it's, you know, it's cool, but then think of it in like 1000 pages, that that would save you like a lot of time and Gatsby also launched something will it build, which is like, a, like a benchmark site to see, to kind of know how many so if I had like 2000 pages on my on my sites, how long would it theoretically take to build this? So you can actually see that and then yeah, that's that's really wasteful. To me like, and it's awesome when you get the opportunity to walk for a product that you really like love that really just makes you happy. So yeah, definitely.

Yeah. And that's like one of the one of the biggest naturally one of the biggest arguments, but one of the one of the strongest arguments against some, like the static site generation stuff is, well, you know, it's great for little toy sites. But when you get editor, enterprise sites with thousands of pages, it can take forever. But if it's incremental, and it's only generating one new page when you do that, that's beautiful.

Exactly. Yeah. That's what makes me happy about that's what I love about the Jamstack. Like, we're always just trying to look for new ways to make things better. So when you so when you think when you think this cannot go past this level, boom, it's something else.

Always kind of standing on the last iteration, and making it better for the for the developer to work with it but also, because it's so powerful and because like the Jamstack is so so quick for performance and all sorts of stuff ends up making the the end user happier, too.

So what's your what's your actual jam right now? What is what's in your headphones where you listen to or your favorite artists? what's what's going on there?

So, um, um, cuz because like I write like a little poetry, I tend to listen to a lot of like, poets. Mostly I listened to poetry but like, also listen to rap because I like I call it conscious rap was kind of like those kind of rap songs where actually you kind of feel like you're in tune with the artists. And it's not just the beat that you're listening to. So currently, right now, I listen to a lot of Kota the Friend which is like he's he's like an independent artists out of New York. You know, he's rapping about, you know, trying to raise his son, you know, and all of like those really deep stuff and like I really resonate with him. I also listened to a lot of Fela - Fela Kuti, which, which for me, is is like education because like, cause Fela, Fela like comes from like, a place of What's it called, um, being African and being in Africa, so I'm over a more of a introspective person. So I like to like just listen to people that actually just take time to block out the noise. And like, put all of like all the noise aside and just really just be real with you. So that's so I listen to a lot of different fella could see Kendrick Lamar? Yeah, most of like, yeah, my, my music. My taste in music is actually just very random.

Yeah, sure. No, that's me. I think everyone's got, you know, the the certain artists that they that they really like, and they can span multiple, multiple types of music. So I really appreciate like the idea that like, getting in tune with the artists because that's always that's always like a nice thing to be able to like hear someone that is is as introspective or as thoughtful as you are.

Yeah. Thank you.

Cool. So So is there anything that you would like to promote that you're doing anything you want get out to the gym. That community as a whole.

Yeah, so I tried to like I try to like create like content because, um, because like I'm really curious so I just really just try to like put stuff together and just you know, I blog a lot on on LogRocket. And then also like I recently go into screencasting so I'm like doing all of that to egghead and I just make community resources because I feel like I really feel like as much as the information should be free as much as like you know, content creators actually need like some support but then yeah, that's it just just put out the content because like people because I love like the community really helped me while I was transitioning from being you know, solving a lot of math that I honestly didn't know that I think of it honestly didn't care about. You're just solving a lot of math and then moving towards like a computer science like background understanding abstract syntax tree all of those like awesome stuff like that. My my friends helped me like understand like, it was for my community resources. So I really just, you know, make resources on egghead basically any blog that would like allow me to, I used to write a lot on Scotch. That that was like the first place to actually like, wrote stuff on. Yeah.

Cool. So as you're kind of transitioning from, from kind of written stuff to the screencasting a, how's that been for you and be? How did you learn? Like when you said, like, all these community resources were important. Did you read more? Or are you more of like a visual learner and followed like, screencasts like what you're doing now?

Oh, so I'm transitioning from like, transitioning from the roots into like, screencasting. So writing was like, it comes natural to me. Because like, because like, I write a lot of forms. But then screencasting was something I was like what I did a lot of like, a lot of like, you know, iterations with Zac. Zac works at Egghead. Shout out to Zack because that really helped me because I I would do a video I did have like, oh no this. This is nice and I could say, Oh, no, because you know, people are watching this on your phones, and all of that. So, it was it was really frustrating. But then it got to the point where, you know, Zac, Zac had a lot of corrections for me. And I was like, ah, maybe this isn't for me. And then one night, I'm just laying down and I and I say to myself, you know, it really just boils down to how bad you really want to, like, do something to be honest. And then, you know, I just, I just go to did the recording once and sent it to Zac. And he was like, awesome. I was like, What?

So, so that and from there, like, I just, I have like, two videos, I don't know. And I have like, three more coming, you know, just really just looking for how to like, do that. And then I think the second question was, how did I? How was it for me learning to code? Yeah. So um, I first like I started off with like the under law. I did this under law training, where I can't remember I'm talking about my work, and then our learning community. So like, they really just go a lot of mentors and I told us Oh, you know, you're learning HTML today, I did a lot of like Google sponsored things on Udacity. And then at some point, like the visual, the visual learning wasn't really working for me because all I got was like, the perspective of people. And I wanted to, like, understand how it worked. So I, I, I started reading like documentation. Like even right now, like I'm learning I'm learning a bit of like view. So before going into like funding masters or trying to find like a course on Udemy I'm trying to get like documentation because I because as much as I don't think every documentation is that great like this, this this has been a really good experience like so I'm more of like, I like to read documentation and then get opinions, listen to podcasts, you know, talk to people all that so that's that's how I learn and and learnings are continuous for me. Because like, I don't I don't really feel like there's a place where you get to be like Oh, yes now and I I know it's all

I know everything now!

Yeah. Yeah.

Nice. Well, as you said, like even with the technologies that we're all kind of playing with, there's always something new like, you know, react with hooks A few years ago, Gatsby now has recipes. Like there's always something new.

Before create react app, there was Webpack, configuring Webpack for like a react. I did I did that. And then I was like, No, I never went back again.

Cool. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today and kind of share your stories. And I hope you keep doing some amazing things at Gatsby and writing more amazing poetry and stuff.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Thanks again to Obinna for the great conversation. And thanks to you our dear listeners for tuning in Week after week. Before we get to our sponsor, be sure to like heart star favorite or whatever in your podcast app of choice and spread the word about the amazing people doing awesome stuff in our community.

And now for our sponsor, if you listen to season you're probably aware of TakeShape by now. But as a reminder TakeShape is a content platform for the Jamstack. take shape has a headless content management system an easy to use GraphQL API, a static site generator and amazing new product called Mesh - a service that can tie together multiple API's into their handy GraphQL interface if you're doing anything with content on the Jamstack Be sure to check them out at take shape.io slash That's My Jamstack.

That's it for this week. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you back here for the next awesome episode.

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