That's my JAMstack

Hello, everyone, welcome to another fun packed episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that difficult question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? In this week's episode, we chat with Jason J. Phillips, Director of Engineering at a 2U, boot camp instructor and a media developer expert.

Before we dive into the episode, I wanted to mention our sponsor take shape, stick around after the interview to find out more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

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

Appreciate you, Bryan. Glad to be here.

Cool. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?

Yeah, so by day, I am a director of engineering for boot camp applications at 2U. We house a lot of boot camps web development. FinTech, UX, and a couple others through extension schools at universities. And so at night, I also teach web development and data visualization boot camps, most recently through the UC Berkeley Extension. And University of Denver was my most recent class.

Cool. So you're doing actual technology for companies that are doing boot camps through schools? Is that right?

Yeah. So the team that I that I oversee and manage runs a slate of applications that's for all parts of the learning aspect. So we build tools for instructing as we build tools for our students in our boot camps. We integrate LMS as for our learning platforms, so everything from the student is already enrolled to the student graduating, my team plays a role in their software journey. It's never a dull moment, pretty awesome.

So what do you do for fun outside? Obviously, if you're if you're teaching at nights too, then there's not a whole lot of room for that but what's what's your idea of fun.

Yeah. So I tend to run far away from technology for fun. While I do enjoy programming and you know tinkering around on my off time, I tend to be away from the house. So hiking outdoor activities. I'm a big cyclist and runner. I'm still trying to eventually chip away at hopefully running for the half marathons in 50 states I've allowed nine states now. So yeah, I try to make up for all the sedentary sitting at the desk by running myself until I can't run anymore.

Cool, so do you do like competitive or re you just doing it like those half marathons just to do the half marathons?

Yes. So my tagline is I don't run fast I run far. So that not competitively but I definitely enjoy a lot of the runs for fun and just to beat my my own personal times and then doing some team adventure races. Like there's a series called Ragnar where it's a team of 12 split between two vans and you run 200 miles over 36 hours.

Wow. I'm out of breath for a mile. And that's about that's about as much as I can go. So that is super impressive.

I mean, those races is all about the team. Because again, I run far not fast. So on the wrong team I can be probably very disruptive to a group, but it works out well.

Very cool. So So tell us what was your kind of entry point into the idea of the Jamstack or into static sites or wherever you found your way into this cool community?

Yeah, so I think the thing that hit me right away about Jamstack is that my first experience on the web, you know, was all static. Back in about 2001 2002, there was a popular platform called Graymatter written by this gentleman on Noah Gray, and it was written in Perl, but it it would take all your content, as text files and all your comments and actually generate static output for your site. So while the compilation step because it would recompile your entire site. So if you had thousands of pages as a blog, and you know, hundreds or thousands of comments, it would take forever. But once it was done, you had this beautiful site that just ran. It had the notion of templating. So I was like really one of the first experiences I ever got of playing around with a static site in any form. And so jumping back into like the modern era, I think it was around 2013. Before then I'd play around with Jekyll and Octopress for a couple years to replace the WordPress sites I've been working on. And then I dove into Wintersmith and Blacksmith was like some of the firt like early NodeJS, static site generators I've worked on.

So I'm curious real fast, because this was actually a conversation I had the other day about Wintersmith and Metalsmith and all all those kinds of first node static site generators and kind of the idea of like, why didn't those take off? Whereas potentially, like, now we've got stuff like, you know, eleventy kind of taking that role. But then on top of that, you know, obviously Gatsby and, and Nuxt and all that. Do you have any thoughts on that? Like, having used that, I used it a little bit, and it was over my head at the time. But like, what, what do you think about that?

Yeah, I think the barrier to entry lowered in terms of the setup, right, so I would say the first time I encountered Wintersmith and Blacksmith and a couple other of those types of sites, it was the same thing. It's like, Alright, this seems like a lot of configuration. I got these crazy Gulp processes or some other build process where now, especially with the advent of create react app and other tools, even in Angular and other ecosystems. It's much easier to get a common set of defaults that are a little bit opinionated, but enough that you don't have to mess with it to get started and you can kind of customize as you go, and I think that is what allowed Jekyll to take off when it first came out. Was that outside of a few hours sensible configuration in a YAML file, you could just write markdown and run it as default. It took very little in the way of getting started with it.

Yeah, the configuration is definitely it was a it was a big pain. I mean, honestly, some days when you're just trying to work on a project real fast, it can still be a pain if you don't actually reach for all these tools.

Yeah, I mean, it's, this is like the beauty of the the abstractions that we love building on top of, right, let's say, I really think it was just a maturing of the node ecosystem. And also just now we're within arm's length of a tool in almost any ecosystem now, but especially within JavaScript,

in fact, like the cool thing is like we're seeing projects coming up that are like refactoring Jekyll like there's Bridgetown nowadays. That is, you know, trying to say all right, we need a modern Ruby static site generator and Jekyll is just been around the block a few too many times. Yeah, that's

And I love to see it right. I think Jekyll for you know really brought static sites back into the forefront. And also outside of purely technical circles, you know, for other people to actually understand the care about it and see what the benefits were. So I think, you know, as we have these round Robins of, hey, this community is pushing that community ideas further And beyond that, who knows where we'll end up in 2025. It'll probably be something where we think the page gets created and the site's updated in like nanoseconds,

hey, there's that there's a JavaScript library for for reading brain process. So who knows? So I'm also curious. So So you've been you've been doing static sites for a long time with with Graymatter kind of being that that first entry point way back in the day. My first entry point was a little bit later, a few years after that with movable type blue. I'm wondering like, like, obviously, we're way better than those systems were back then. I remember I had a blog. They had thousands of posts for newspaper I worked for and it was like a 40 minute compilation step to deal with that. Do you think? Do you think that that timing was kind of the the downside of the static stuff? And is that is that why you think maybe we went dynamic for a number of years and only now coming back with the speed that we've got?

Yeah, I do think it had a lot to do with the company system, when b2, which was like the precursor to WordPress first came out, right, like it was competing with MovableType and a couple others at the time, and those were winning out. But then once someone saw that, hey, you could install this on a server and click a button and now you have a blog. And it starts out right away and you can add post right away. I think that's where the shine of the newness of this dynamic content sites came into play. And then I think there was also the piece of we didn't have, I think as advanced ways, generally available to structure content in static sites, whereas WordPress made that a bit easier to reason. So the tools like Drupal, where you could create structure around your content and understand like, what do I mean, when I'm creating a blog post? What do I mean when I'm creating a static page? And I think we will type in those tools as they moved along that over time, didn't have that really as well along with the long compilation steps.

Well, I know even like, later in the game with WordPress at the agency I worked at, we use a plugin called Advanced custom fields, almost any WordPress site we built had that by default, because that structured data was so important. And WordPress, I mean, out of the box didn't give give you a whole lot of structured data. So I think that's an interesting thing as well. But that's that's seeing a resurgence as well in terms of like, we want granularly structured data.

Yeah, and especially with a lot of the headless, headless CMS tools out. The awesome part is that there's a lot of different options that allow you to structure that content based on who's structuring it right. So like, with Sanity, you can reflect that in JavaScript files with other tools reflected in the CMS itself. So at the accessibility of structuring that content is really available to whatever type role needs that level of granularity to control it. So I think those tools also helped a lot. And, you know, even like, the pushes that we've had for Semantic Web and semantic structuring of content, even in just markup files and talking about what was it, like microformats, and all these other things, like a lot of that has kind of pushed us to where we are today.

Totally agree. So So we've mentioned a lot of different technologies. We've mentioned a lot of different things from from honestly, the history of the past almost 19 years now. What what's kind of your jam in the Jamstack? What's your favorite service or product? Or maybe it's just a philosophy or a framework? Where are you digging on right now?

Yeah, I think for me is getting back to this the simplicity of index page on the web. You know, like a lot of the things that we talked about, I that's what I enjoy most about the philosophies and the approaches of Jamstack You know, as an example, there was a client that I worked on back in 2008. For Fairmont International, a huge international chain of hotels. Every single page was its own index page. It was Yeah, every single page was a folder with an index page in it. For every single locale, language pair, they support it, which was over 50. So at any given moment, I was SFTPing like, hundreds of files, if we haven't changed a global header, and it wasn't a server side include, we had to change it on hundreds of pages. So I think just this approach that we can take these modern tools, and still come up with the simplicity of just another static page is super awesome. Outside of that, I am a huge fan of Netlify. We use it a lot at work to for like AV testing and for launching a bunch of previews for for our deploys for some of our front end applications that are built in react, which allows us to quickly test for UX changes Things like that. So, yeah, Netlify has been increasingly, I've been increasingly using a lot of the portfolio tools. So I, I dig it a lot for my personal blog and other things.

It's really hard to beat. Just the fact that it's all in one like you want you want serverless function, no problem. You want forums, no problem. You want just simple deploy of an HTML page. No problem.

Yeah. And I think also, even with stuff like forms, right, I think that solves a problem too, that we had back in the MovableType and other eras. And also in the first wave of static blogs, where we had to rely on Disqus or all these other external tools to get comments and then injected back into our sites. Now we have the full control of being able to build what we want, and or integrate suites. Like I know Gatsby studio is like kind of building up as well. Vercel has got a great, awesome set of tools, with Now or I guess they call that Vercel Now as well. But yeah, I think, you know, with these all in one suites that are leveraging these other platforms, they also make it easier for us to deal with lambda without having to jump into the AWS world and learn about security groups, everything else. So it's pretty awesome.

I had never touched a serverless function until Netlify rolled out their functions, just because it was just too big a pain to go into the into the GUI interface and deal with all that nonsense. I was like, Oh, I have it in your GitHub repository. No problem.

Yeah, just that that hole, just put it in a in a single folder. Let us know what folder it is. and it pulls up. I wish we had that when lambda was first being talked about, because that probably would have gotten a lot more adoption.

That would probably be two or three years ahead of where we're at right now.

Yeah. It's because I tried lamda once before that, and it was like, and it took me this long, a few years before and I just started playing with Netlify functions maybe like two weeks ago. So and I love how simple it is. Yeah,

You can just a Hello World example takes you know, five minutes to get up and running. It's beautiful. So So how are you using these kind of Jamstack philosophies at work, you know, with all these boot camps, and also, you know, personally, you mentioned your, your blog, but but kind of browse through what you're what you're using right now and how things are going for you.

Cool. Yeah, so. So at a previous job, we're using a lot of static page generation for our marketing site and letting that be cached in our system. So that marketing site was lightning fast. It was all static markup. And then we just use the API's for our back end financial platforms to integrate with authentication or integrate stock tickers, all those types of things. So what it enabled us to do was to quickly iterate on our marketing pages, and let the actual full, single page application stay on its own structure. And then it allows us to play with things like mono repos, which allowed us to have like share the common elements between all the different sites, but split architectures where needed at my current role one of our student facing platforms, we use the branch preview feature with Netlify to steady generate our sites and That's probably saved us, I can't tell you how many hours from our own QA process to now, and has made it so much easier to be able to switch between branches change, see the changes, see what changes look like in an integration branch before we actually roll that into master and release it.

So that's been super awesome. And then personally, so I do use Sanity.io for their headless CMS solution. I've really enjoyed having a clean interface to go in and write push a button and save it and push another button. And it goes off to the races to build everything. And so just this notion of my site can statically regenerate it whenever I want it to be like, it doesn't have to be recompiled unless I push that button also gives me an interesting level of control over content publishing that I didn't have before. Right, instead of me worrying about some systems timing. I can just say, all right, I release pages every Friday, but I can create my own editorial process around that before we statically build that site on the production. So that's been super awesome for me as well.

The whole idea of having an editorial process and all that is definitely something that is super powerful when it comes to especially like you mentioned, the deploy previews and all that, like you can send it, you can send preview links out to like, get feedback on a post before you launch it.

Yeah. And it makes it also makes code reviews, much more accessible and less obstructive, right. So if your reviews are really going to be around the functionality of the code, you can, instead of having to pull it down, you can review the code within GitHub, which is expanded their like code review tools a lot, and just the ease of reviewing code in the site. But then you have the fully launched version on that deploy branch, which, again, just makes that much easier. And then it allows you to do things like hey, I have a similar branch that we can wire up for the API so we can test that API changes. It's just it's just being able to split concerns where you need to at different parts of the process is pretty solid.

So out of curiosity, since since you're doing tech for a lot of these boot camps, and you're and you're teaching web development, Are these things being taught in the boot camps and in the classes? Or is it more traditional Dev, and then oh, by the way, don't forget, there's this new thing coming out, too.

So I think there's a mix. For our classes in particular, we do start with a static approach by telling them all about GitHub Pages and getting them used to that for their first set of sites. So for, I could say, probably their first 10 to 12 weeks, every homework, every page, every project they do is being deployed and GitHub Pages statically. And then we make the connection to them of the other tools later in the course. But we never actually get to come back and say, all right, you can launch here but when they get to their second or like end of class project, we have a lot of our students who end up deploying on Netlify or using like Firebase Hosting or even using Heroku and like static generating webpages and and just having it hosted via static folder. So some of the students end up deeper in Jamstack because of their own research, but they definitely get that hint of that throughout. course by talking about GitHub Pages and talking about what that means, and what Jamstack will be for them.

All right, well, so So let's talk about actual music now. What's your actual jam? Where are you listening to what's in your headphones on daily basis?

All right, so my favorite song of all time is Bootsy Collins, I Rather Be with You, there's just says something about that intro to I hear that anywhere I stop. And I just end up swaying slowly. As far as songs as I've been listening to you, like, for the last few months, is an artist by the name of Karen Harding, who had some, some really nice like Deep House hits, and one is called Say Something. And it's just a really kind of upbeat, quick, simple song that I hear it and it's like, Okay, I'm ready for the gym. Or I hear it and I'm ready for like, three hours of coding. Or I hear it and I'm like, Alright, 30 more minutes. I'll get on my live stream. Yeah, like it just it's my musical rebel. It's all I love that song.

So, so Also, you know, what are you - What are you looking to promote right now? What What do you want to get out to the Jamstack? community? You know, what, what are you doing that you want to get out there?

Yeah, I think first and foremost, which we're both members of, is the awesome media developer experts community. Yeah, we definitely want to make sure folks understand that they could join the discord even if they're not an expert, come join the community to talk about media, especially now that we are moving with heavy Jamstack and we're in that's gaining a lot of steam, that media handling and media expertise is going to be much more important because now image sizes matter when everything else on your page is code split and, and so much smaller. So now we need like a renewed focus on media.

The second thing is, you know, I've joined in toss my hat into the Twitch arena. I think for me, I'm sticking a gearing to towards really early stage to mid level engineering. So we'll talk about a lot of topics. I've been working on a movie Tracking site application just giving everyone a piece of functionality every week that we work on and on the stream. So that's been pretty awesome. So if you want to give a kid a follow up, come check it out. Jason J. Phillips, we'll make sure we give you some notes. But uh, yeah, that's, that's the things I've been up to recently that I've definitely want to get out there.

Very cool. I love the live streaming community. I've been a part of it for a couple months now. And it's just absolutely amazing. And I'm glad that you're a part of it. And I'm gonna go click that. That little heart button here in a couple minutes.

Yeah, definitely need to swing by, a few others, too. I've loved seeing the individuality amongst everyone. Yeah, when we're all talking about similar topics. It just makes that that ecosystem and that community so vibrant. And folks are so super supportive. It's like, if you're looking for like environments to to learn code, or to even stream code yourself, live streaming, especially on communities like Twitch and I think there's some fun Doing it on Mixer (editors note: Mixer just closed after recording) as well. It's, it's a good place to start and kind of get away from some of the toxicity you might see in other platforms. I don't doubt that it ends up on these platforms as well. But the communities right now are just so helping inclusive and like internally boosting each other, which is super dope.

I love it. Like there's so little judgment that happens. Like, I'm not always the best, like hardcore programmer and I've actually had chat debug my code for me, it was great. It was like a beautiful moment.

Yeah, I think the thing I love about that, is that, for my former students, I always model for them a lot that, you know, no matter how experienced you are, you're gonna make you're gonna make errors, you're gonna have bugs, right? The point is for us to kind of learn from those and not repeat it the same way. Right. And so, I do love that there's this freedom to just be yourself as an engineer on a live stream. Yeah. And, I mean, I've definitely had a moment where we were sitting in for 20 minutes trying to figure out why something wasn't working. And it literally was, I refer to the model in my code wrong. And I was like, Yeah, thanks. That's 20 minutes of me sweating and getting frustrated for no reason.

And there is sweat involved. It's it's it can be nerve-wracking in front of in front of a crowd.

Yeah, but it's a it's a it's a weird kind of scary freedom. or something. We're like, Jason, I don't get it. I'm like, I know. But there's just something also empowering when people do come in to chat. And you know, there's a message of support or a message of, hey, you missed something like just that. Automatic, like, leaving the house help is super awesome.

Yeah. And like, it's just like sitting in a room with you know, with other developers thinking through a problem it can be just super helpful just to talk to somebody about even that somebody can't talk back. Yeah,

and it's, and the community also isn't looking for like the super. Like wunderkind. I've been programming since I was two. So I never heard A bug in my C sharp, right? It's a lot of folks are just looking for folks who look like them or sound like them or have life experiences like them, and actually be able to see them writing code. And I think that's super empowering for all of us to play a role in. Because we don't know who were inspiring next, or who just needed that little bit of validation of, oh, Brian talked about his story. I will link to Brian's story. I could do this, right. And that that for me is like the, the main like, just thing that pulls me into education and into like, live streaming.

Yeah. Or like, Hey, you know, Bryan spent 20 minutes finding a typo in his code. I've done that like five times, maybe I am a programmer.

Or someone's like, Oh, I'm not a real programmer, but I'm building a tool to and this is a real thing that happened. I'm building a tool to screenshot my screen. Use OCR to look at my code. And then Tell me if there's better ways to write those functions. Like when you think you're not a real programmer, get out of here, you leave right now. Like, man, you should get on stream and I'm gonna follow you nervous now.

I'm not a programmer, but I wrote this entire thing that honestly, I couldn't do. So that's, that's super impressive.

Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's been amazing. So yeah. For folks out there, and especially in the Jamstack community, if you're looking to do that. Everybody's voices needed. You know, streamers, watch each other. People will watch each other stream. It's a super awesome thing.

Yeah, definitely. Cool. So I appreciate you taking the time to be on the show with us today and to share your thoughts and experience so keep doing amazing things on the web in the Jamstack.

Bryan, appreciate you. I love what you're doing here and thanks for having me on the show.

Hey, everyone, it's Bryan again. I want to thank Jason again for being on the show and I want to take a moment to thank you are listening community is one of the many things that makes the Jamstack shine. And you all keep me coming back 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, easy to use GraphQL API, a static site generator and an 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 takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack. 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

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

Our Guest: Espen Hovlandsdal

What he'd like for you to see: Sanity.io

His JAMstack Jams: Mixing Dynamic and Static together | NextJS

His Musical Jam: Russian Circles | Godspeed You! Black Emporer | If These Trees Could Talk

Hello, everyone and welcome to another exciting episode of That's my JAMstack - the podcast where we ask the fun filled question "What is your jam in the Jamstack?" I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week, we have the amazing Espen Hovlandsdal from Sanity.io.

Before we dive into that interview, we'll welcome back our sponsor for this week TakeShape. Stick around after the episode to find out more information about their content platform or head over to TakeShape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Well, Espen, thanks for being on the show with us today.

Sure, glad to be here.

Cool. So can you 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 my name is Espen. And I work as a software engineer at a company called Sanity.io. Most people will probably call Sanity, a headless CMS. But I tend to think of Sanity more as a platform for structured content. So we have like a hosted database in the cloud. And you got like an asset pipeline and a rich set of API's to talk to that database and to all like surrounding services. And of course, it's also got the actual open source, headless CMS that's based on React, which then talks to those API. So we're kind of a headless CMS built on the Jamstack. So it's been fun.

Cool. So how would you How would you differentiate - since you said you like to think of it as a structured content or structured data platform - how would you differentiate that between that and a CMS?

So our API is kind of the first piece that we built. So we put a lot of effort into making sure that the API's are really like, great to work with. They're very flexible in terms of how you can query for data, how you mutate data that's based on like a very fine grained patch system. And you also have like transaction history. So you can go in and see all the changes that have happened over time to the document. And so it's sort of building the API first and then putting a sort of CMS on top of that, that talks to those API. So we sort of dog food all the all the API is through that product.

Okay. Very cool. So so it's it's more of an API that happens to also have a product in front of it that is a CMS.

Yeah, kind of. Yeah.

Very cool. So what do you do for fun? That's what you do for work. What were you doing in your free time?

I moved to San Francisco from Norway in August last year. So I've been sort of getting to know the city and the country. So that's been interesting. Now with the Corona lockdown and stuff. I've had less time to explore the city, but I've been playing a lot of video games for the past few weeks and also try not to do too much coding in my spare time, but that's like, I feel like I have a valid excuse for that these days. At least.

True. Yeah, I can definitely understand that. What games are you playing right now?

I've been going back to The Witcher 3, which I'm quite fond of, and playing a lot of Civilization as well.

Civilization if you if you have spare time, and you just want to get rid of that third time, that's the game for you.

Eight hours fly by; your whole weekend this there.

So so obviously you're well versed and kind of in depth in the Jamstack world being part of a structured data company such as Sanity, but what was your entry point into the idea of the Jamstack or static sites?

Good question. Jamstack is kind of a loose term. So it's kind of hard to know what people put into that. But I guess when I was 13, and I made a bunch of like fan pages for all my favorite video games. So does that count that's like static HTML uploaded to an FTP right?

When I was 13, I made fan sites for anime and all sorts of stuff. So hundred percent it counts.

Joking aside it's, it's kind of funny how we went from all these, like, static HTML sites that were just super easy to host. And then, at some point, we, for some reason thought that everything had to be server rendered and dynamically generated. But, uh, yeah, I used to work at this. There's a newspaper company in like a large online newspaper in Norway, they had so much traffic that, uh, that they built this, they built and funded the Varnish project, which is like a cache layer in in the form of a reverse proxy. And even with that, in front front, we kind of embraced the concept of building as much as possible into static copies of pages. So I've been working in that kind of paradigm for quite a while.

But with like, more increasingly dynamic and complex pages, it's got gotten harder and harder to do, right until we got these static site generators. I think I think I started looking at it. Well, what most people think of as Jamstack back when Kyle Matthews started tweeting about building Gatsby, he was a huge fan of React ever since, like 2014. Yeah, when he when he started building Gatsby, he was tweeting all the while he was creating it about, like, why he chose to use GraphQL as a data layer and all the kind of choices that went with it. So I was kind of, I was really intrigued by it. And when I finally got a chance to try it out, I was just really impressed because it's kind of always what I wanted ever since I started with React, the ability to just build this static site in React and then have that mounted on the on the client side. So you can get that like dynamic stuff as well.

Yeah. Best of Both Worlds in that. Yeah. Cool. So yeah. So you went you basically straight up static, like way back in the day with HTML, and maybe and some CSS thrown in through server side render and dealing with all the cache and then into the Gatsby from there.

Yeah, I was starting to work at Sanity and And I was following the Gatsby development. And initially, one of our community members made a source plugin for Gatsby. And I was really happy to see that. And then I discovered some really cool things that Gatsby plugins did like internally. So I saw some overlap there and some potential that we can improve the plugin with some of the core features of sanity. So I kind of built a our like official Sanity, the Gatsby plugin as well.

Oh, very cool. And have you have you noticed a lot of like, community contributions in the Jamstack versus like server side world? Is it a different feeling? Are there more, fewer? Like what's that kind of feel? Like you said, like, the community actually first created that?

Yeah, it's been it's been really interesting to see a lot of contributions to both the Gatsby ecosystem especially, I mean, they're really, really good on getting contributions from people and really generous interest. of recognizing the work that's been done by people and sending swag and all kinds of stuff. And also would like frameworks like Next and Gridome and you see a lot of contributions. Not sure if there's a more, but I guess it's easier to get started with contributing to those frameworks since you've got it all running locally. And it's very easy to, like, run through the build and see that it works as expected.

Yeah, that makes sense. So how are you using, obviously, at Sanity, Sanity is a is a Jamstack company. But how are you using kind of philosophies both professionally and personally of the Jamstack?

Well, professionally, we're maintaining all these starter project templates and stuff. So we get to play with a lot of approaches to how you want to structure your data and how you want to pull that in and how you want to build these things. So we've got I've been playing with all sorts of stuff like Gatsby and Gridsome, Sapper, 11ty they've all got, like slightly different ways of approaching stuff. Like 11ty, For instance, has a, it's kind of one of my favorites right now, because because of this, like simple nature of it, it doesn't like lock you into anything. The only thing that I really, really appreciate you be using React just for that, because I'm so familiar with JSX. But apart from that, it's it's really refreshing to see a different take on the whole data just being whatever way you can get data from some service and then render static from that

Those JavaScript data files are pretty great.

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, it's a guess we try to build as much as possible using the static like, thought they went into, like our website is now running on next year's and I think we're trying to move as much as possible to using static statically generated things there. There are still a couple of reasons why dynamic content makes sense in terms of previewing drafts and all kinds of stuff, but for the main reason, for the main part, it's should be able to just work statically. Right.

So out of curiosity, you're you're working at kind of a big, structured data company, or maybe we can we can simplify and say a CMS for the, for the current question. That's typically been kind of the purview of a dynamically generated site and a server, you know, server rendered site. What are kind of the challenges that we that we face in kind of coming from traditional like server side stuff and moving into this static realm, like, what, what, what feels different, what feels the same between those?

Well, the big point is always going to be the build times. And when you're used to like the server rendered approach with your changes are just immediately visible. So I'm glad to see a lot of work has been been made. Now into Gatsby incremental builds and also Next is working on and Vercel is working on being able to invalidate data quite like granularly, so you be able to only regenerate the parts that actually changed. I think that's the probably the like, by far the biggest change in terms of differences on the actual client site is just so it's just a lot easier to host these things. Right. It's, it's probably one of my favorite features about the Jamstack is just the how easy it is, once you've got the site built to actually maintain it or not maintain, basically, you just let it run, right. Since it's all static, so that's been really cool.

You said you used to work at a news organization. And you had to like do the heavy front end or the heavy you know, server cache with Varnish and all that. Do you foresee more news organizations going in this direction. I'm a little nerdy when it comes to news because I used to work in news as well. And we definitely had our own issues like we migrated to WordPress for blogs. And then we had a blog that kind of blew up. And it was its own fun adventure. But do you see the Jamstack as being an ideal space for news? Or is it more always going to still be in that kind of dynamic CMS range?

I think it's actually a pretty good fit. As long as you can work out the incremental builds. It's, it's there's no good reason why it shouldn't be just static content, especially when you've got these layered approaches like Next uses where you can have a app that's both, like partially server rendered, partially client rendered and partially statically built that's just like, the flexibility that gives you is just perfect because it allows you to send down just like a lot of pages or can be fully static, and for the ones that can't be at least you're able to like incremental Build your way out of the super dynamic realm and into a more static way of thinking. And I think the same is true for for Gatsby, and probably more frameworks coming up. Like I see the Vuepress is working on quite some, some quite impressive things where they ship like a tiny amount of JavaScript to the to the client. So that'll be interesting to see how that plays out over over time.

Yeah, I love the idea with that, that they're, they're optimizing that kind of load you get from a too big JavaScript bundle, too, which is amazing. They're thinking about that.

Yeah, it's been one of the more like recent criticisms is just how much data you're sending back and forth. And for a lot of pages, you're just rendering the same, like you're getting a JSON blob and then rendering the same thing on the client, which is kind of wasteful if it's fully static, right. So being able to flag something as just being the system Just this won't change and don't rerender this part of the page, that's also going to be really nice to to get at some point built into the frameworks.

So we've talked about a decent bit of stuff already but what would you say is kind of your your jam in the Jamstack, what's your favorite service or product or philosophy even what's gonna keep you coming back to the Jamstack year after year.

There's so many of these things now that I just kind of love to see the ecosystem grow and, and see all the like, different frameworks to inspire each other and kind of steal features from each other, which leads to quite a interesting space. Right now I'm really into NextJS. Just love all the, like I said, all the dynamic bits that you can combine with the static bits and also the sometimes I really do want some kind of server side logic. And the fact that that's sort of a first class citizen like built into versatile and it's just easy to deploy a static site, but with some, like server functions that are running serverless functions is, that's just great for most of my use cases,

Especially when you can kind of combine in those serverless functions, and they're kind of co-located. They're not a separate thing.

Yeah, exactly. It's just so much easier to introspect what's going on and, and keep them all in the same repository.

Cool. So it's kind of that that interplay, that you kind of see that as the future like the interplay between dynamic and static as the way we're gonna go forward.

I think definitely. I can't see that it has any real drawbacks. When you have that amount of flexibility, you're, you can kind of pick and choose what you like, and easily migrate between those different paths if you need more or less dynamic content. So I really, really like that. And as long as we managed to like, stick to the ease of deployment and ease of running these things, it's probably going to be a be around for quite a while. It's kind of the future.

Very cool. And I don't know if anyone has actually kind of put it in that way on the podcast yet. So I kind of have to ask, like, part of the beauty of the Jamstack is the resiliency. Do you see that that that future could have some issues around that? Or do you think that with the serverless stuff as long as you've shipped a solid serverless function, you should be safe?

Good question. I mean, there's a lot of lots lots of stuff to still figure out. I think there's best practices that are missing for a lot of these things, especially in terms of security, I find a lot of serverless functions are basically open to the public if you know the route sometimes. So educating and making some best practices for how to secure stuff and, and make things more resilient and also being able to easily see what's actually going on inside of these serverless functions. I'm not sure how many people are actually tracking like errors inside those functions and how often they're crashing. So I think there's a lot to be to be done still on, on educating people on this thing been, but in general, I'm very positive as to the future of these things.

Yeah. I love the idea that they can interplay together so easily. It's a cool look towards the future.

Yeah, absolutely.

So what would you say is your your actual jam right now your musical jam, what's your favorite song or musician that you're listening to right now? ,

I kind of listened to a bit of everything tends to be based on my mood. Lately, I've been listening to probably my favorite genre, which is post rock and post metal. So there's a lot of Russian Circles and Godspeed, You! Black Emperor, and If These Trees Could Talk, things like that, but I tend to go back and forth. I listen to a lot of old school dub and old school punk rock. Sometimes I need some metal just to get some frustration outs. Yeah, yeah, jump back and forth.

Very cool. So is there anything that you'd like to promote that you're doing right now anything you'd like to ask for the Jamstack world as a whole?

Well, sanity.io, obviously, I really am in love with this product. Even though I work there. That's a that's not just a promotion, I really do think it's a great product. And also, we're hiring. So if you want a job, go check out Sanity.io

So I'll make sure to post that link in the show notes. And I want to thank you for taking the time to come chat with us today and kind of share your perspective on the jam stack world.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks again to Espen for being on the show. And to you all of our dear listeners for tuning in each 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 one you're probably aware of TakeShape by now. But as a reminder, TakeShape is a content platform for the Jamstack. TakeShape 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 takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack.

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

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

Welcome friends to season two, That's My Jamstack. If you'd like season one, you'll get more of the same out of season two, me talking to developers and designers in our amazing community talking about their passions in and out of the Jamstack.

I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have the amazing Tim Benniks on the show. Tim is director of web development at Valtech, part of the Cloudinary media developer experts program, a speaker and much more.

But before we dive into the interview, I want to welcome back into season two, our amazing season one sponsored TakeShape. Stick around after the episode to find out more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Today, on the podcasts we have Tim. Tim, welcome. Thanks for coming on the podcast today.

Thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here.

Awesome. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?

Yeah, sure. So as I said, my name is Tim Benniks and I was born in Amsterdam, but now I live in Paris. And here in Paris, I'm the director of web development at an agency called Valtech. Which is kind of a global agency where we do big platform builds, for big ecommerce and stuff like that. And so I'm doing a whole bunch of different web development things and the management and things like that.

And what I do for fun changes all the time. Actually, I've been a lifelong musician, so that always stays. I always enjoy making music. But lately I've actually done a lot more content creation and I've been doing stuff like speaking in conferences, so I really enjoy that aspect now like figuring out what gear to use to record something actually being able to speak in front of a camera and not be boring, like so for fun I tried this kind of stuff now.

Cool. Yeah, I definitely I can I can get behind that is once you go down the gear rabbit hole of like audio recording and video recording. There's there's no hope for you anymore.

This is a trap. And the worst is, as a musician, I've recorded a whole bunch in studios, but also at home back in Amsterdam. And then when we moved to Paris, I decided to either sell stuff or just gave it to friends who needed it. Because I was going to a small apartment, I couldn't make a lot of noise. So I had this nice stuff. And now that I'm back in a place where I can actually record, I don't have the stuff. And now I'm like, oh, but I don't like the cheap things, because I'm used to all this nice stuff now. So it's, it's a double trap for me.

Nice. So what kind of what kind of music do you do? I mean, we'll talk about what you're into in terms of listening. But what kind of instruments do you play? Or what's your musical style?

So I'm a guitarist. And not much more. It's one of those like, if you ask me to sing, it will be awful. But on a guitar, I'm fine. And when I started out, I was like a session player. So I would play anything someone would like and i just i Like that. So I would be like, all over the place in all different kinds of things. But after a while, I noticed I just want to settle for something I really enjoyed, which was blues music, like the old school Chicago, 1960s blues, that's really where it's at. For me, I really enjoy that. And then when I'm on stage playing that it doesn't really matter anymore how technical you are. It's much more about the vibe and the feeling and timing and having fun. And now that I don't play as much if I grab a guitar now I just play that and I'm happy.

Very cool. So obviously not music podcast, it's a Jamstack podcast, let's talk about like, what was your What was your entry point into the idea of the Jamstack? Or maybe it was static sites when you got into what what's your entry point?

This is years ago. Now the works jam stack were never uttered at that time. I'm kind of a dinosaur in our industry. And I'm really... I started with all the basics, right? Like what does HTML do and woah we have CSS now stuff like that.

And so at one point, I found this thing called Jekyll and it's still around. And Jekyll is this static site generator. I think it's built in Ruby, I'm not even sure anymore. And it was also used for GitHub Pages back in the day. And I always made my own websites with this.

Everything at work was always more enterprise level, or more creative or more, let's say let's do a campaign for Chanel. We wouldn't be doing this, we always had like, big enterprise system. So in my own time, I wanted to do something simple that had like super good performance and stuff like that. So I started with Jekyll and I used that for years.

And at one point, of course, I was kind of forced into VueJS land because of work. And because I was also always a vanilla JS guy. And I really started to enjoy that more and more and then NodeJS became big and then suddenly there was Nuxt. So next year is kind of it looks like next year, so a little bit on the on the React side. And they had this way to generate your website statically. And of course, when that came out Jamstack existed. And I didn't know it was Jamstack, I just still generated my site statically because it was fast and it was all good. I could have cheap hosting. I didn't get hacked all of that.

And my latest one is now that i i found Gridsome and if you're in Vue land Gridsome is great for Jamstack-like projects. And every time I need to to up something that has static content in it and maybe some microservices around it, I tend to use or Gridsome or Nuxt and then just fill it up with some data. And the rest would be way more fancy potentially. But this is still my base. So that's how I entered this this realm of awesome.

Very cool. Yeah, like that. I think that's a for a certain generation of static site people, Jekyll is very much the entry point like that was that was my entry point. We've had a few guests on that said that that was there's all from that kind of background of, you know, I used to write HTML and CSS and I needed something a little bit more and it became Jekyll.

Yeah, I truly... I loved their template language and how that all fit together and it felt like black magic back then, because I didn't really care about how it was built. It just worked and it had like a CLI and that was new to me. And it's just pure gold at that time.

Yeah, definitely. Cool. So So nowadays you're you're in Gridsome you're in Nuxt, how are you using it personally, but also like, are you using it professionally now? The Jamstack and Gridsome and all that good stuff.

Well, this thing is clearly seeping into work now. So what I'm working on generally are big platforms. Let's say for a client like let's say, EasyJet, which is like a big airplane company or we have L'Oreal that has like 15 or 20 brands that all need websites. And like we have like 3-400 instances of websites in one system. So they all use this big enterprise stuff. And we are seeing more and more that the performance needs. And the KPIs for good websites nowadays are much closer to what a static Jamstack site would do.

And also for business, right? Because we are also thinking about performance, scalability, cost uptime of servers. And so slowly but surely this is is going into the work life now. We don't really go fully Jamstack just yet. But things like microservices, lambda functions, cloud connections, things like that. They really come into the picture now. And it just kind of if I just give it a year, and most projects will be some sort of a Jamstack approach. I think

That's awesome. Yeah, I did agency work for about six and a half years and managed a team and It was right before I got fully into the jam stack world. I had Jekyll blog and all that, but I really wish I had dug in and we had started working towards that when I was still in agency lands, I think it would been awesome.

Ah definitely, I'm in a place where there's this is still led by big business. And if you have a contract that you pay 2 million for a couple of years, you're not just going to say "Okay, how about we ditch that CMS system and now we go for something else."

So what I have to do is find creative approaches to to give them the opportunity to want to change, but not that cost them too much money and that. Let's say we did this recently for Louie Vuitton, which is like a super fancy brand of luxury stuff in Paris. They have this old ecommerce system with like a monolith. And what we did for them is we they knew they wanted to change because one release was like 25 hours and it would not always go right it was fairly challenging and they wanted to release every week. So we lost half our week on releases not even coding.

So what they said, we're just going to need to separate the front end from the back end. So we have more flexibility on doing front end changes, design things, A/B testing, stuff like that. And so we came up with a next system for them. That would be its indexing universal mode. So we're not really in jam stack land just yet. But these guys, they now have the opportunity to say okay, so we have this big ancient CMS system behind us, we built on top of that and API layer that goes to the NuxtJS. Now, we are suddenly in the position to say, let's swap this old system out for a new one that's cheaper and lighter. And then so we gave them the opportunity for innovation on their tech stack, and it's so much cheaper now. And they can do it hosted in the cloud rather than on like a co located server somewhere in the basement. Right. So all of that starts to work. And I'm quite sure that most of their content pages will be some sort of a statically generated system, where then their ecommerce pages are more Nuxt in Universal mode. And I'm seeing that for the future, I think.

Awesome. That's really cool. So would you say that the NuxtJS and Gridsome are your jam in the Jamstack? Or, or what you know what sort of service or product is kind of what, what makes you love the Jamstack?

Um, what I like most is like, let's let's think because the Nuxt and the Gridsomes, and maybe even Gatsby, or all of those, they work really well. But they work so well they're like black magic. And they're almost commonplace now, which is totally cool, right? It just works. So what excites me more are things like lambda functions, and how do I connect extra things against this stuff that just already works really well.

So for example, I've built this little app. I've built a couple of apps to just figure out what this cloud stuff does, like I did for a talk, I was preparing about Jamstack, I actually built an application that connects to my Strava server. So Strava is where if you do a bike ride or you're running, they track your pace and your GPS and stuff. But then, if you want to embed what you did on your blog, it didn't work well. But I was running marathons. So I wanted to write a story embed a training run and talk about it just because I'm a nerd. I like data, right? It didn't work. So I decided, Okay, I'm just going to build my own embed. And I will query Strava to get all the data and then I will show my run on a 3d WebGL globe and you can follow me live.

Just good fun. And that teaches you WebGL, it teaches you about how time works on a globe and like how do you plot GPS, all that craziness, but what made it fun Was that I decided, Okay, I, I don't want to have one node or PHP server or whatever that gets me all the data and then renders the front end. No, I want to do this in the Jamstack way where I have a single page app that's statically rendered. But that still does AJAX calls or some sort of REST calls to get the data and so I came up with something like four or five lambda functions. We use Azure Functions for this, because where I work, we get a free Azure subscription, which is great. And these guys are running fast. They do a lot of cool stuff nowadays.

And so I had to learn like how do these function as a service thing kind of work, but I managed to do my auth authentication with token exchange with one function to get the list of my activities with another function, and then to grab the data off an activity and morph it into another type of structure. sure that I could use in JSON, for my representation on the 3d globe, the funny thing is like you only log in once, right? So that or maybe twice, whatever. And you only get the list of all of your activities maybe once or twice, but then you can click on every activity and you get them a lot. So if you need to scale you, you only have to scale the one where you get the activity all the time, but they don't know about each other. You just have to give it a token, and it understands what to do.

And I also added a little bit of cache in front. So but there was also a redistributed cache. So it was not centralized. So there was nothing central there. And if I wanted to change my login flow, or add maybe a twitter login or a Nike login, I could do that because I used those lambda functions. So at the moment, that's my jam to see how can I put this together? How can I orchestrate it and how can I have fun with it and especially having let's say Web hooks in between those things. Like they can suddenly do things on their own, without me actually orchestrate

The robots taking over the world at that point.

Oh, yes. Exactly.

So it's kind of the putting the pieces together and finding new and kind of expressive ways to build out fun applications.

Exactly. And because at work, I have to do all these serious ecommerce things that also also, they all need to do this kind of stuff. But then they have extremely expensive monolithical systems that do this. But you know what, you don't really need it. Because if you want to scale a monolith come Christmas time, that's so hard to do that you have to put them on multiple servers, then you have load balancing, and then how do you maintain a session or a cookie, you have to share them between those systems, then you need to hire a company that does that for you. So that's so expensive and so bad for the environment. actually having these lambda functions that can scale indefinitely because they're so small Having your website as a static bunch of files, if you want to scale that you just put it in more places on the CDN. Right? So I really want to make sure that at work, this kind of thing starts to seep in. So it's not just playing anymore. This can be actual business.

Yeah, and especially, especially the e-commerce that Christmas time example is 100%. Like, how do you scale that without spending thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a short period of time? Well, you can do it in lambdas and small functions.

Yes, exactly. The only drawback is like, what we see in Jamstack is we tend to do this to simplify our lives, right? We don't want to have those older servers everywhere to keep stating the complicated stuff. But the drawback is you also have to orchestrate and maintain that all those small services keep working. And if one dies, what happens because you don't always notice, because if something is a monolith, the whole thing will likely die. In this case, it's just one island that silently drops off but you don't see it anymore. Which is pretty cool because it's very stable. But you're going to need to have some sort of a way to maybe deploy different versions of it or have a monitoring like if it's down or not like, there's all this extra stuff. So it's still probably expensive, but it's more of a one time thing.

Yeah. Cool. So So what is your actual jam right now? What's your favorite song? What's your favorite musician? Where are you listening to right now?

So lately, I really, my dad actually put me on to this like, this is it's a little story that I that I have is like when I was young, in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam, where I grew up, you always take your bike to work as a young child, or not to work to school. That's what you do. So no school buses or whatever you just go, but my dad, when he had time insisted to take the car to bring us because then he could play us blues music. It was able to give us a sense of music and I love that so much. Now now that I'm 35, he still does that he still sends me stuff. So he sent me something called Fantastic Negrito which is quite modern approach to how you would play blues music. And it's very raw, and but it also kind of fits in a pop sense. He has a really cool political views, but it's also a gritty, it's a bit of like, I don't know, I cannot say that it's like Gary Clark, Jr. But what it means it's on the same kind of level. And it's kind of acceptable for people who are not blues fans. And I'm totally into this. And I can play a whole bunch of styles of music, but he has this energy that I just don't have, so I wouldn't be able to play that. And if it's something that's super technical, I can generally just practice until I have it with this guy that's just not there. It's all about the feeling. And this is why this is such a fantastic musician. So if you have the chance and you like blues, music or bit rock stuff, you should really try to listen.

Amazing. Awesome. So is there anything that you'd like to promote something that you're doing that you want get out into the Jamstack community?

Actually, I would, and it's not specifically Jamstack focused. But recently, as I said, in the beginning, I've been I've been trying to record things and figure stuff out about content creation. And one of the things I I have always loved and now I'm trying to do is doing interviews with people a little bit like you are doing with me now, but then on YouTube, and I'm not here to just plug me in go to my channel. It's kind of more the people I get to interview. And because what we do is we go over how it has happened, that they are on the place where they are, like, how did they become so good at conference speaking or at teaching, or at, you know, open source contributing.

So I have a whole bunch of VueJS core team members, I have developer advocates at Microsoft, like people who are quite far ahead of me, like they are on point like they're there for a while. And I'm lucky enough that they get they want to speak to me. And what we try to do is figure out how they got there. What is their story, and find kind of tips and tricks for people who aspire to do this, that they can do. Just the things that they say try it. And the most amazing stories come out that like, we would go to a cafe and drink something together, they wouldn't tell me and then on this interview based on a certain line of questions, or questioning, stuff comes out that I didn't know about, which is amazing.

It's like there's people who were very depressed, couldn't get their job done and suddenly found this this way into tech and change their lives around or someone who was a single mom very young and didn't know what to do and is now the lead evangelist at Sitecore. Like these are amazing stories. So, what I would love to plug is just have a look at those interviews. And it's not just me, the guy who asked the questions, but listen to the people with their stories. I think that's worth your time if you're in our community.

Yeah, definitely. That sounds that sounds amazing. Well, we'll put a link to that on the show notes. Awesome. Thanks. Very cool. Well, thanks for taking the time and and being on the show with us today. And I hope you keep doing amazing things both as your agency and then kind of your personal time.

Thanks a lot for that I had a blast being on.

Thanks again to Tim for being on the show and to you, our dear listeners for taking the time out of your week to listen in and find out more about our amazing community. Before we get to our sponsor, be sure to like hearts 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 TakeShape by now. But as a reminder, TakeShape is a content platform for the Jamstack. TakeShape 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 takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack.

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

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

Special thanks to Kathleen for doing the transcription for this episode

Welcome to another jam packed JAMstack adventure on That's My JAMstack — the podcast where we ask the fantastical question, what is your jam in the JAMstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And on today's episode, we had the amazing Kathleen McMahon. Kathleen is a developer and design systems guru and I had an amazing conversation with her. But before we dive into the interview, I do want to mention that our amazing sponsor TakeShape is back again this week. Stick around after the episode to hear more about their amazing content platform for the JAMstack, or head on over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

All right, Kathleen. Well, thanks for joining us today on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

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

Okay, so alright, let's break this down. For work, I am the Tech Lead for the O'Reilly Media Design System. So that's an internal open source project. We're trying to get you know, just a consistent look and feel for our components and our just our materials. I don't know if you've ever heard of design system, kind of a hot topic lately, but yes.

A little bit.

So that's what I work on. For fun, in the fall mostly, I race cyclocross — very badly — on a single speed in the back of the pack, because everyone laps me twice, and I wear costume to make everyone that passes me laugh. And I also put tunes in my back pocket. So we have, you know, soundtrack, we have costumes. Everyone knows me because it's a person who wears, you know, like this... it looks like this lit up thing of like — spaghetti — with like a Spam costume backwards or an M&Ms costume backwards, you can be entertained!

Have you ever caused any wrecks with that? Like have people like laughed so hard, they fall off? Okay. All right, good. Good.

No, no, no, I've been doing this for a very long time. Like my, I'm much better at soccer, but I love to I love and I love soccer, but I love to bike. I'm just horrible at it. And it's fine. I just like to be at the back while everyone else is racing like going hard. And I'm back there just chilling out.

Nice and you get out you get outside, you have some fun, and you have let other people have fun while they're competing, too.

Yeah, exactly it's this huge camaraderie. And you know, who's coming, everyone announces they're coming and just you hold your line and someone else passes you and, you know, you making sure you're not holding back the leader. Everything's good.

Well, very cool. So... so let's talk a little bit about the JAMstack. So what was your entry point into this idea, either JAMstack or static sites or wherever you kind of started with it?

Ah, that's a very good question. So, um, how I got into JAMstack was... so our design system has documentation. And our documentation site was built before MDX came out. So before JAMstack was really a thing. So it was around 2018 when MDX spec was really starting to get, you know, baked in a bit. And the way we were generating our documentation site is we had a separate repo. In that repo, we were using react-docgen, to generate our, our component.

For example, our component pages. So we could use Markdown and it was awesome, but we had to use it in a very brittle way. We had to, we had a script to scan through our component files to you know, create, you know, data for props, tables, spit that into an object. We would have. We would use our Markdown files to write down like, you know, this is your primary button. This is the code for it. This is how you should use it. But we had to write our Markdown in a very specific order. We had to have like an h1 for our, our component name. We could have one paragraph — but only one paragraph — of intro paragraph. When we had two, you know, you could write it, but only the first one would show up from our script. And then we would have, you know, every single variant had to be written as an h2 with, you know, the variant, but not to be... only one paragraph, only one variant, and you couldn't put any h3s in there, you couldn't do anything else. And the minute you started, being freer with your Markdown, things would not render. And you couldn't even bring in rack rack, I'm sorry, you couldn't even bring in React components at all into the Markdown. So you were... you would have this one file for the information that was in your Markdown, and you'd have another file that would grab everything from your React components. Put it into a different object, and you would cobble them together in this very just... it was so hard to work with that...

Even as someone who was used to the code base, it was hard. And for people that were contributing, they would flee. I just did a talk about this in early February for Gatsby days. I was talking about this whole journey and it was just I use a lot of penguin gifs. Penguins, you know, fleeing and running away and just like, you know, just hitting their head against the glacier because everything was brittle. So this is why once the MDX spec matured, I was like, "wow! We could do some more, so much more now. We can write what we want to write. What we write will show up on the page." And this is so much more exciting to use. And now we can have contributors that want to come in and say, "Oh, you know, I found a typo." Just you know, fix the typo, push up a commit.

And don't worry about the actual structure of your markdown. You're good to go.

Right. You're good. Yeah.

So, so that's MDX and obviously, Are y'all using Gatsby then for the design system documentation?

Yes.

Very nice.

Yeah.

Kind of walk through that a little bit for me.

Um... Do you want to me to walk you through my learning curve? Or...?

Well just kind of like I guess transitioning from the React docs to Gatsby.

Okay, so that was a two weeks of pain that was so worth — it was so worth it. Um so what I did the transition was I... went to Gatsby. Of course my cat is meowing right now. That is Thor if you ever hear him meowing. That is Thor, the Mighty Thor. What we, what I did was... I went into the Gatsby site, I did their tutorials. I went to tutorials one through eight and um, you know, made myself a site. And after following that, tried to figure out what was missing because that — you know, that the tu- tutorial, you know, walks you through, this is how you get started, you know, doing a blog post and all these other things. And it started with with some Markdown. But it was missing some stuff. So you had to like write down what what everything, you know, everything that you missed. And I would get stuck on certain things like either creating pages, or the GraphQL query. Because you had that, you had to figure out like where, where you had to modify either the Gatsby node page, or the Gatsby browser page, or the Gatsby config. And you had to do it in a certain way. So, once I found out the right combination of understanding that I had to adjust my config, so it would support like post — because we just use postCSS in our projects. How to use themes because I watched a Twitch livestream stream with Jason Lengstorf and Chris Biscardi, and they were talking about the experimental themes. So I followed, you know, what they were doing and made a theme within a theme while it was still experimental phase. Grabbed that into our doc site, tried to make things work, and the hardest part was trying to — it wasn't where you would make your, you know, your source pages and, you know, just generate your files — it was talking to the separate directory where our components were because... We wanted our components, we wanted a better separation of concerns of documentation for just a general doc for general docs, one location. And not in a separate repo anymore. In, it's just this separate directory in this one repo. But our, our components are hosted in a source repo. And so we have it for better separation concerns we have, you know, the button component is in a folder with all you know, all its files. And so you can always keep everything you know, all you know test files and CSS files and you know, Storybook file, and the Markdown file all co-located in, you know, one location. So make, you know, make maintenance easier. Now, with that the hardest part was trying to figure out, "okay, how does Gatsby talk to this source folder?" And once you found the right combination of, you have to do a query this way, and you have to point it to the right you know you have to use these plugins like the Gatsby... Gatsby file, plugin and you add/use, you know, this other plugin which I could pull up the code base to to remind you of all the words right now, but I can't because MDX right now it's on my brain, and I'm very excited about it. But! I'm figuring out and looking at it right now. Ahh. There we go. So with with the config, you know, you have things like the page creator, the file system, you had to learn, you know, how to resolve your paths. And if you were, if you were new to you know how to use Node at all, it's a learning curve for anyone. Or if you haven't done Node, for a while, you're like, Oh, what is this like, __dirname? What does that mean? You know, how does this do things? So it was pretty cool. Once you figured it out. You're like, "Okay, this is what works", then comment the heck out of it. So everyone else will know how to use this. So once you got everything set up for like, how to handle postCSS, how to compile ES6 packages, because that's what we're using in here. How to autolink headers because you want to make sure that your your headings are accessible and you can link right to them and share those links. And how can you point to the data file, because we're still using that data file to generate props tables. And but also point to the source folder. So we can grab any MDX files from the source folder. Once you figured that out, it was, everything was happy. And then all you had to do was in the Node file, do the... do the gatsby-node file is make a query to find the childMdx body, which was awesome. And then you would just create the page and point it to the template you were using. So it was like "this is magical!" All you have to do this thing on everyone else just have to do like npm run, you know, npm run docs. Like what? Yeah, everyone else is gonna be not like, you have to do this npm link, npm link to this and da-da-da-da. You're like, "no, no, we just want to do one thing. One, one command." So we got down to that, and it was just very exciting. And you learned a lot about Gatsby because like the stuff where you're doing it like a...

Like either a static query or page query because there's two different ways you can do, depending on if you're in a layout file or other files. We had to do this particular query in gatsby-node because we're pointing to a separate directory, because there's a lot of stuff that gets done under the hood. And their docs are getting better. The team there is great. And like they've been incrementally making everything so much better. That back, you know, back in 2000, there was almost a year ago that we convert our docs. Back then it was you had to, you know, if there was anything missing in the docs you had, you're kind of on your own. But now it's a lot better of like everything's pointing where it needs to be pointing now. And which is interesting, because I'm going to divert into a different direction. Gatsby's had this 100... 100 Days of Gatsby and it's almost finished. It started January 1, no, mid like a Wednesday at the very beginning of January, because I signed up for it. So I'm like, I'm going to go through this again. See what I missed. See what I learned. And I went through it again, I've been writing down notes of everything that's missing in the docs, because I'm gonna make PRs. Like, you know what, these are the things that weren't clear to me. And it will help, you know, contribute back, say, "hey, this is what I learned. This is what I missed." And, you know, there's ways that we can add that back to the docs.

That's kind of awesome. I feel I feel like one of the big things in the JAMstack right now is just this open source community and how like, everyone wants to make it better. And it's not like a complaining mechanism. It's like, "how can I go in and make the next person have an easier time?" Is that, is that kind of been your experience as well?

Oh, totally. Because it's your your, everyone's trying to learn this at the same time. And these products that are coming out are amazing, and they are doing a lot of stuff under the hood for you. But there's also things that are missing. It's more of a — and it's not intentional — but it's more of an assumption of you already know these things already. You already know that... if someone says Yarn and you're using NPM, you use NPM. And you understand the dangers. of using Yarn and NPM at the same time, but if you've never used that, you know, you have to go back to approaching it or like, what if I've never seen this, but what if I've never seen you before? I don't know, I'm just gonna follow the instructions verbatim. Why is this breaking? I don't know. Or, you know, just things were even, like, there's gonna be a lot of people coming from, you know, self taught, you know, or any other, you know... It could be a bootcamp, or where you get thrown in, you know, four hours of HTML and some other some other questionable practices. Um, but yeah, um, but it's important that the community give back and start talking to each other. And that's one of the reasons why I love Gatsby so much is because the community over there is amazing. And the team over there, they walk their talk. They are always helpful in finding ways to make sure that, you know, if something's missing, they either encourage contributions. They're willing to pair with you, and help fill in those gaps. So yeah, I love the community. Just for that reason.

I'm kind of curious. So... so we're talking about, like, the docs in general. And I feel like — and maybe you've got an opinion on this — like, we were at a point in, you know, quote unquote, the JAMstack, right, where it was a very, very, like heavy developer-centric ideology for a while. But it's starting to get this massive adoption. So we see a lot more beginners coming in. And it's very curious to see how we have to adapt to that. Because you're right, like, I see some docs who say, you know, run NPM this or you or Yarn this. But then I see some that just spit out one or the other. And I'm wondering, like, how we can facilitate a bigger or a quicker adoption of like, a beginner-first mentality in a very developer-centric area.

Ah, yeah.

That's almost like the question of all time at this point. Um, yeah. You know, it's one thing is making those... making the time to write the docs. But other is — a lot of part is — the feedback. Like, a lot of like, personally, I see a lot of people can complain about something, but they won't offer a solution like, "hey, I, you know, I didn't understand this", or, "hey, I didn't understand this. I wish I, you know, rather than I wish it told me this, because once I figured this out, you know, it really helped me." Some people are solving it by when they learn they blog about it. So that's great. But then you have to like search for the blogs. So it's like, how do you combine you know, all that knowledge that is on the interwebs, everywhere, and but also find a way to get it back into the docs? Because when you are on a, you know, smaller, smaller startup team or even open source, anything you have to rely on your contributors to, you know, get your work done.

Yeah. So that makes a lot of sense to me. And I wonder if more places should actually be linking to all those great blog posts. Of course, there's still that findability issue. Like if you're a maintainer, you're not just actively searching for blog posts about your stuff, although maybe you are. But like, I'd be very interested to see it like a push that's like if you write a blog post, keep it on your site, but like, let's link to it. Like let's build a, a repository for each framework in their documentation of like, articles on X, Y, and Z.

That's very interesting. For example, accessibility project does that right now. Like accessibility project is really great about I mean, they have articles on there, but Iit will also link to different like, individuals tend to blog a lot. I do know that Gatsby has their own blog, so that you know, isn't just gets the employees that are blogging. There are individual contributors that are blogging to so maybe that's the way to do it. But how do you get that out there? How do you get that... that knowledge that hey, you know, because guess these philosophies, you all are welcome here. Everyone is welcome. Right. And maybe I haven't been reading closely enough to like read the blog where it says, "hey, you know, you can blog for Gatsby because of this. I mean, I just need to read more closely to say, wasn't like written there? Or is it more of a, like presumption? Or something where you can like, share that information out to people like, "hey, you learn something new? Why don't you post it on, you know, the blog" or like a lot of people are posting on Dev.to.

True. Yeah.

And they will, they will do, you know, they will do tags to stuff, you know, then you can start searching by tag.

I wonder if you could, at that point, like build a React app into Gatsby and into their site or into into what you know, what, whatever open source thing is it to like do a search for Dev.to tags. Like I'm an Eleventy buff, so it's like, if they just pulled in like an Eleventy tag, then I don't know that'd be really interesting.

It's almost like like the arcgis like the COVID map. The legit one, not the one that's like that asks you to download stuff — shady stuff — to your computer. Something like that, because there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of crowdsourcing stuff out there just to share the information. So yeah. That would definitely be a good thing to do.

Yeah. But viral spread of helpful...

Not that! Not, no... not the vir-- yeah. Yeah. No need to download anything.

Exactly.

Cool. So uh, so I assume so professionally, you're using the JAMstack in this kind of Gatsby docs way. Are you anything personally? Or is it all just kind of that that professional aspect.

For now it's professional, but I'm, I'm — in my copious amount of free time, you know — still working through those 100 Days of Gatsby because, you know, you're learning how to approach using JAMstack in different ways. So once I figure that out, I have two sites that I could potentially convert because one of them is a WordPress site. And so that's the site I've had, you know, for my, my freelance design business, you know, that I've had for a long time. It's a... 2011 WordPress theme, and you know, I literally have like three blog posts, but you know. mostly it's a portfolio site. So I could migrate that over. And then you know, my other dev site, I could potentially make that JAMstack too. I'm just trying to figure out what I want to do. Because I think the dev site is like, combine JAMstack, or like, even my projects, like, do one project three times, like, this is how you can do in vanillaJS. This is how you can do it in ReactJS. This is how you can do it in Vue. So it's, there's different ways you can combine things. But yeah, I have, I think I want to try converting my WordPress site over.

I'll say from from my experience, it was actually pretty easy. And this was even like, I converted mine over about two and a half years ago. And it was not bad and they're better tools now. So like, that's a great way of thinking.

Yeah, it's like I have a site just convert it over. hardest part is like figuring out the whole portfolio part without redesigning. It's like you wouldn't, "you will not redesign your site. You will just port it over."

As a fellow designer, there's almost no way that happens, you know, it feels good to do it. I don't know,

It does but maybe I should scaffold first at least. Scaffold first and see how much you can do with Mark-- with MDX though. Because MDX... the way that one of the things I've been really loving about MDX is like how the, the, the team that is working on the spec, what they're doing with it. I mean, the things that you can do, where you can take MDX syntax, and even Mark like Markdown syntax, and you can like swap in certain things with React components. They call it shortcodes now, but you know, if you can swap shortcodes in is magical. And the way that you can — I saw one of the Gatsby employees, Kyle, not, not Kyle Matthews. I think Kyle Gill was tweeting about this last week, and I bookmarked it or like a week and a half ago, and he was showing how he was learning that you could import MDX files, like a Markdown file into a Markdown file.

Right? Yeah.

Yeah! And it wasn't just like importing a React component, you were importing an MDX file into an MDX file. It's just like, "Whoa!" So you couldn't... you don't have to have necessarily like, you know, this very, very long scroll forever page. You could be, you know, putting them up into smaller chunks. And people can, you know, won't be overwhelmed when, again, making new docs, someone can start editing something, and then they just pop in that file.

And they're done. They're good to go. Yeah,

Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing!

I also have a friend of mine who has redesigned his personal site like 15 times in the past three years. And his his take this time is he's actually taking the default Gatsby theme, the thing that like comes baked in, and he just started with that cuz he was like, I have to finally get it live. Like I've redone this 15 times I have to make it live. And so he's just incrementally changing that design, changing that like... structure, and he's also that kind of designer first and then has become an engineer since then. So like, we like to do custom stuff and then we never launch it. So...

Incremental builds are nice.

Yes, they are. You just push it up and it's like, oh, well, it's already up there. Sweet!

I'm Done! Good to go. Cool. So it'd be fair to say that the Gatsby is your jam the JAMstack, we want to go all the way down to like MDX as your jam in the JAMstack? Like what would you consider your main top thing?

Okay, my main top thing first is MDX and then, and then Gatsby. Okay. Just because MDX I've been like experimented with code blocks and learning... learning from like watching other people do it and like wow, like how much I can like, make a code block better. And I want... I want to — I'm in the middle of trying to make a code block that is... You have... Formidable has a package react-live and like bringing that into code blocks is awesome. And they also have prism-react-renderer, I believe, is another one so you get the syntax highlighting in there. But um I'm working on making a component that will, when you have the block, you could have it editable, but maybe you could — I'm trying to find a way that when you, you know, click on a button, you could see what the rendered code is versus like, just, you know... using ReactDOMServer to show the rendered code. Like, this is the semantic structure that gets rendered under the hood. So you can see what classes get, you know, because that's — a lot of times people want to, they want to either dig into the code base, but you got to click here. It's like, "if I write this, what code will I get under the hood?" But also have that and also have the code block, you know, like, have display of the component, but below it has — and you'll see this often — if you have the code, you know, the code there, but sometimes that code block will get really long. So have that collapsible. But also then people forget, have it keyboard focusable, so you can tab through everything. And if there's a focus trap, make sure you can get out of the focus trap and move forward. So I'm looking to make an accessible code block thing. And once I get it, I will put it somewhere up on NPM and people can use it.

So that is very cool and, yeah accessibility on that sort of thing. People... people don't realize it's not always easy — especially when you want to do like the really nice, usable, fun interface. To make accessible you got to put the work in or... have somebody do an open source package and download it. Which is always a nice thing

And make it feasible so they can like, override themes but also you know, maybe if there's a way we can when they do the theme go "hey, those color combinations may not pass... if you do it that way." So...

but start with an accessible you know...

Exactly. Accessible start and then then progressively enhance from there.

Yes. There's a way like we can add tests for like what has, you know, accessible violations but I think there might be a way that you could look, maybe have some sort of contrast... Because there are these other tools we could have contrast checkers where you can do eyedropper things. Maybe there's a way to do like a... 'cause I know BlocksUI is working on that right now. BlocksUI is working on like when you put text over, you know, something, they'll immediately give you alert like, "hey, this is not following things." Yeah, but this is a component This isn't like a whole like UI, you know, like WYSIWYG system here so it's a little different, but maybe if they do the tests.. if they do the test, you know, that could be a way.

Yes. Cool so so what's your actual musical jam right now? What's... what's in your earphones? What are you listening to regularly?

So um, when I... when I am well either coding or just in dance mode, I have a thing for Soca and Dancehall. And so I always excited when, I'm always excited on Carnival season comes around. I got first got turned on to it in the 90s with a band called Krosfyah. Krosfyah, which it's k-r-o-s-f-y-a-h. And their song was Pump Me Up and it was just like... once I heard that I was hooked! And then I discovered Lady Saw and Buju Banton and I you know, some other ones that were really great, and like one one that I really liked... but then he wasn't really... nice to the community so I can't like him anymore. But ever since then I've been always following, you know, these different you know, artists and lately it's Machel Montano is my favorite. Bunjai Garlin and Shal Marsh Marshall. So say Shal Marshall right now this is one — that's definitely Boston, Boston accent there — I apologize. Shal Marshall. And one of his songs is Splinters and it is great. And Miachel Montano's — one of them is Brace Up — is one of my favorites lately. The other one is with Calypso Rose. Leave Me Alone. The other one he does and other ones with these. I have a couple of ones that are like the ones called Possessed. With Kerwin Dubois and Machel Montano. He'd likes to do compilations with people and it's just these like, happy and some of them were just like, "I'm focusing, leave me alone" but um, you know, "don't... don't mess with me because I'm you know, I'm partying" and yeah, so that's that's me. It's just happy music. Happy music.

Yeah.

I like it cool. So is there anything that you'd like to promote and get out to the JAMstack community as a whol? Anything you're working on?

Um... Well I'm trying to get that um, that code block component out there. I would have, like, promoted the conferences but I'm... they're all being postponed right now. It's like, I'm waiting to hear from a couple of them, because they haven't officially postponed but I think they will. But the other two, like one is Self Conference is postponing for a year. And there you know, I would definitely like, if you can have a chance to get in Detroit, that's one to watch. And the UIArch Conf, which is supposed to be in April, and I was gonna do the Web Accessibility Conference there. That is postponed for now, to November of this year. The other two, three, you know, you haven't heard the postponement date, but I'm assuming. Because otherwise, I wouldn't be able to get back into the country. Which fine, but at the same time, not...

Fine, but not fine.

But not fine.

Cool. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today and keep doing some amazing stuff. I'm really looking forward to that accessible code block, too.

Wonder... wonderful. And it's, it's an honor to be asked to speak on the topic and to talk about the JAMstack. So...

I want to thank Kathleen again, and thank all the listeners around the world for making the JAMstack community, one of the best developer communities on the web. Be sure to start heart favorite or whatever in your podcast app of choice, and spread the word around for those that haven't yet heard. With that it's sponsor time. And I wanted to talk about TakeShape. TakeShape is a content platform directly designed for the JAMstack. They have a super simple GraphQL API, a static site generator, and a CMS all ready for your use. They're also working on their mesh product, which allows you to mix and match multiple data sources into one easy-to-use API. Definitely worth checking into. Head on over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information. With that, I'll bid you adieu until next week, and implore you to keep making amazing things on the web, and to keep things jammy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Welcome to another jam-packed JAMstack adventure on That’s My JAMstack, the podcast where we ask the fantastical question “What’s your jam in the jamstack?”

On today’s episode we have the creator of the Angular JAMstack framework Scully: Aaron Frost. I’m excited to dive into Scully’s creation and find out more.

Before we get to the interview, I just want to mention our sponsor this week: Take Shape. Stick around after the episode to find out more about their Content Platform or just head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information

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

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

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

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

Welcome, welcome everyone to a new episode of that's my JAMstack the podcast where we explore the deepest parts of the developer psyche by asking, what's your jam in the JAMstack. On today's episode we're chatting with Jenn Creighton, Jenn is a conference speaker and the organizer of useReact NYC. She's also the front end architect for The Wing.

Also, this week, we have our amazing sponsor TakeShape. Find out more about their JAMstack content platforms stick around after the episode or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack.

All right. Well, thanks for joining us on the podcast today, Jenn.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks. So 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 am a front end architect at a company called The Wing. We work on building out co working spaces that are really geared towards women. So we're thinking a lot about what women need in those spaces, and also there's a lot of networking events and things like that in our spaces.

So I'm the front end architect there, I lead all of front end. I help ensure our system stays healthy. I work on our technical decisions there. You can already tell I'm a lot of fun because I really love tech. And honestly, like what I do for fun, I'm usually at a conference. I'm usually speaking at a conference, I really, really enjoy giving technical talks. So you will find that I'm often at a conference, I travel a lot to do that. I did 14 conferences last year, which I won't be repeating but it was a lot of fun. I had a good time. And if I'm genuinely not doing any tech related things, I am probably with my cats or my puppy or I am sewing. I really enjoy sewing.

So I saw and I think this is on like your Noti.st profile, is your dog's name really Sailor Moon because that's amazing

Her name IS Sailor Moon. She is named after the you know, Sailor Guardian Sailor Moon and she's a little blonde dachsund and, and I grew up watching Sailor Moon. I loved that show. I would watch it so much. And when I was thinking of names for her, I really want something kind of fun. So I picked out that it's really great too, because when you tell people her name, you can tell if they watch the show or not. Because they're either That is amazing. Or they're Wow, that's a lot of a name.

I'll be honest, do you just call her Sailor Moon all the time.

We usually call her sailor or if she's being a bit sassy Miss moon.

That works that work. And any fun sewing projects that you're working on.

I actually haven't sold in a long time because of the mentioned 14 conferences. So actually did not so I think anything last year. No, that's not true. Wait, I took a sewing class in November as my like, you're gonna do it and I sewed a pair of pants for the first time I took a sewing class to like force myself into a non tech hobby, which is a good thing to do once in a while.

Yeah, especially 14 conferences in 12 months. How many how many months were filled with more than two conferences? Did you did you group together and how exhausting was that?

Some months were grouped together. Um, let's see, I think I know at least I did, in September, I did two. And I traveled really far for them. So I did JS Conf Korea, and Components Comf in Australia together. And I think I had some some weeks and breaks there but a couple of them were like, in the same month and so I would knock out like two or three in the same month and then have like a little bit of a break which usually Wasn't a break. Like between Components Conf and React Conf. I actually had to write my React Conf talk.

The glamour of being a conference speaker!

It's so not glamorous, it's so exhausting. And yet, we can like people who enjoy it can't stop doing it. I don't know if you remember this, but there was a survey that came out many many years ago that said that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death. And so conference speaking is actually like a near death experience. As you get like this ridiculous rush, you're terrified you feel great afterwards. You're like, I'll just do it again.

I just watched the the Imagineering story the the story of all like the Disney theme park building and all that. And it talks about all the all the rides and how the goal is to make people feel like they're about to die without getting them actually all the way to death. So it's the same basic principle just with public speaking.

I think that happens with code too, Like, I just spent two days solving this issue of my tests failing on circle ci when they weren't failing locally. And I wanted to die. I want to lay down and die. I was like, take me, Lord, now and then I figured it out. I felt great.

So this is a JAMstack podcast, let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit. What's been kind of your introduction into that world or into static sites or wherever you kind of came to it from?

I think with static sites, the first time I remember seeing like a static site generator was Jekyll. And this was back at a startup many, many years ago. I remember we used it for I believe our marketing site, which was like pretty typical. And I really didn't know that there would be static site generators. It was kind of surprising to me. But I also didn't really play with it because I was just trying to learn JavaScript. I was like, this is where I'm like, trying to figure things out. The actual JAMstack, you know, JavaScript API's and markup, my introduction to that has come a lot later than I think a lot of people I actually just started, I'd say late last year getting interested in the concept and starting to learn about it. We use it at work for our marketing website. And then personally, we've used it for a meetup that I run here in New York called useReactNYC.

What's sort of technology stack are you messing with right now?

So both of them are using Gatsby, but the marketing site is Gatsby plus Contentful. So that of course, our marketing people can make their own changes to the site, and we don't have to be, you know, nudged. "Hey Can you do a thing?"

"Please deploy, please, deploy!"

"Please make this change." So it gives them the freedom to do that without having to wait on us to make changes. It gives us the freedom not to think about the marketing site, very much. Then for useReactNYC, we wanted to create a website for the meetup so that people could learn more about us what we're about, and also join our community, both by attending the meetups, but also by joining our slack community, and also by helping us to build the site. And since we're a React meetup, it made a lot of sense that this would be a static site, and that we would make it with Gatsby.

Very nice. And any sort of ... Is there any sort of like API integration? Are you pulling in like meetup information from a third party? Or is it all just manual entry into into Gatsby?

Right now let's just manual entry. We definitely want to expand it at some point. We're just not sure that we have the time right now between the five organizers that there are, we actually took on another organizer this year to make five of us Yuraima joined us and we have just all been really stretched thin. So even with the fifth organizer, we're still like "huuu", but we're hopefully gonna start recording the meetup soon and hopefully we'll also host them there so that people can view the content.

Pretty cool. I definitely understand that. That meetup organizer life where you're like, hey, PRs are accepted, and then no one submits a PR.

Yeah, we did have a particular member of the community, Nick, who came in and helped us really do a lot of work on the site, when we were all stretched very thin. And my very good friend Melissa, helped us actually by creating the design of the site, and it's really beautiful. She did a wonderful job. She also designed our stickers. So really, like all community events, it is really like we wouldn't have done it without the community like helping us out. That's was important.

Cool. So uh, are you You said that the marketing site at The Wing is currently built on Gatsby. What other sorts of projects do you work on at The Wing other than obviously getting the word out about these kind of co-working spaces?

So what what I personally work on is that I work on our single page application. So Gatsby is for our marketing site. But we do have a single page application that is for our members. That's our members portal as well as an admin site for us to handle things like applications or members, information, adjusting settings for them, so on and so forth. But our members portal is where everything really happens for them, they're allowed to find other people in the community and chat with them. There are job postings on the site as well. And there are a lot of events at The Wing that are very specific to what our members want to hear and see. And so they can RSVP for those as well on the site, as well as just the general thing of like adjusting settings or registering guests. So I work on all of that and as we try to build out new features that are going to help our members connect more and forum like real in life connections are putting a lot of those in this single page application.

Very cool. And so just like -- I have a degree in philosophy, so I have to sometimes dive into philosophy on the podcast -- So where would you kind of consider kind of breakpoint, because you said, you know, I'm using the JAMstack for the marketing site. And for the meetup site, I've always kind of thought of any SPA as having JAMstack asked qualities. Where do you kind of draw that line? Like, what what's JAMstack versus non JAMstack for you.

So the reason that I qualified as a single page application instead of anything to do with the JAMstack, is because it's built using create react app. And so it actually has a server. So nothing's actually served by CDN, which I think is an important component of JAMstack sites, you know, they have to be served statically through CDN or some means of static. So they're not pre rendered. They're not static. It's it's an actual serving of just an index.html, and then we fill in the JavaScript for everything.

I gotcha. Cool. That's the the kind of fun thing about running this podcast is that I hear lots of opinions. And they literally run the full gamut of like, everything's the JAMstack to like, even smaller like subsets. And it's just yeah, it's awesome.

Yeah, I mean, and when you hear like that it's JavaScript API's and markup, you're like, well, how is this not every single page application? And that totally makes sense. Definitely. I think the JAMstack has some really specific qualities to it, though, that are very different from something built with like create react app that actually does have a server that you're not actually serving at statically. And you're relying on the JavaScript to do all the heavy lifting of creating all the page. It's not pre rendered. You know, we certainly don't have the ability for... One of the things I really like about the JAMstack is that it closes that gap for the user, right like they get the stuff immediately. And also how your deploys go. You know, you can roll them back and there get based. But you don't have that with the single page application. And sometimes I was wondering with that I was like, does this need to be anyway, I was like, but I'm not rewriting the whole thing. And that decision was made before I came into the company. And I was like, You know what, it's, it's fine.

And still React. So you still get to work on react.

Yeah, and I love I love react. So that like, is a joy for me.

And so is there anything that you've that you've been learning based on your work in Gatsby that you're bringing back into the the server side and the Create React App side of all that

Not specifically? I think Gatsby comes with a lot of wonderful things that are not even technically part of JAMstack, right. Like I would say I would say that there is a great amount of focus on accessibility and Gatsby I really, really appreciate that. And that is something we're really focused on at work. So like many startups, so our product team is really new at the way. And like many startups, the first version of our product was built externally by a third party. And so we're now as a product team, picking it up and sort of changing the architecture and making it more of a long term scalable application. And that includes taking a look at our accessibility and realizing that we're really far off the mark right now. And we need to do something about that. I really appreciate that Gatsby, in addition to using JAMstack is actually really like moving forward with accessibility and giving you a lot of information about that along the way.

Yeah. And the great thing for me is that there's so many people jumping on Gatsby right now, just in terms of like, it is like probably one of the hotness is in the JAMstack right now. And to have that their focus so that people who might not have learned about accessibility in the are getting those tips and tricks just by having that in their code base by default. I think that's amazing.

Yeah, exactly. And that's one of the things I really enjoy about that project. And that's one of the things like, as you're working on that, you get to learn that you can bring that to all your future projects. It's not specific to the JAMstack. It is all about the web.

Best platform there is... the web.

Yes.

Cool. So So would it be fair to say that in the JAMstack, the Gatsby is your jam? Are there any other technologies that you're really interested in right now?

I think Gatsby is the main one. Obviously, we're really enjoying also Netlify and being able to like push things out really easy. So we use Netlify also for our preview links at work which is really great. So just definitely enjoying that. But yeah, I think definitely Gatsby considering that I've used it at work and now in this useReactNYC project.

Nice and so work when when people are saving into contentful, are y'all deploying Preview deploys to send them links at same time. So like they can see it live on the site before they publish it.

I think so. Yeah. I forget because I haven't worked with it in a hot second and if anyone's changed behind my back, but yeah.

You never know.

Honestly, with a startup you never know.

It's so easy to deploy, right?

Things happen in a startup that I'm like, wait a minute, you're doing what now? Can we just Can we just grab five really quickly and make sure this is a good idea? All the time.

Okay, gotta move fast, right?

Yes. Move fast break. Things. Break. ... Both of us are like "arrrrgh no!"

Yeah. Don't Don't tell QA that you broke it. It's fine.

Yeah.

Cool. So let's, let's talk about actual musical jams. Then what are you listening to right now? It's in your headphones. What's going on there?

So my number one thing right now is Halsey. Which is strange. I didn't listen to her before, but I actually so I'm a big fan of Saturday Night Live. I love Saturday Night Live. And she hosted not that long ago. And she was the host and the musical guests. And I wasn't familiar really with her music, but she had this song on there, You Should Be Sad. And I just fell in love with it. So I've actually been playing that on repeat for like a while. I love her vocals on it. It like just makes me feel really good.

Yeah, so specifically that song but then kind of the whole, her whole artistry.

I let I let that song play and then I'll listen to like a lot of the other ones on the album and I'm finding that I really enjoy her songs, which is really great.

And just depends on what mood I'm in.

What other moods strike you for, for other musical tastes.

And sometimes we like to go old school like country. Little little like kind of plucky banjo sound You know, really enjoy that sometimes. So I went through an Iggy Azalea phase. That was an interesting period of my life.

I think we've all been through that sort of phase. We've all been there.

Sometimes my my discover weekly on Spotify, I think is consistently confused. It's like, remember when you were sad? Well, here's all the sad songs and I'm like, oh, but Spotify. I'm not sad anymore. It's like, Okay. Here's poppy feminist music. I'm like, no, we're not in that mood. We're angry, now. Where's the angry? It's like, I cannot help you, I'm sorry. Sorry, Spotify.

The algorithm can only do so much for you. Cool. So is there anything that you would like to promote something you're doing something you want get out to the JAMstack community?

Well, first of all, if they're interested, they can follow me on Twitter. My handle is gurlcode girl with a "u". I'm also going to be speaking here in New York at React Day New York. Later in September, I'm going to be speaking about some things I have learned going from React to React Native, which is a whole new world for me. And then I'm also developing a course on React component architecture. That's my, my favorite sort of subject. I'm developing it for Thinkster. So that should be coming out, I think in a few months, if I have enough time to do all the recordings

Very cool. And also, I haven't watched it yet, but I'm super excited now that I've seen it to go watch your the "What happens next", the choose your own adventure with iterators. Like, I have to go watch that I saw that topic. I said, Okay, carving out the time for that one.

I love iterators I love them so much. They're wild. They're in so many things that we use in JavaScript, and we have no clue. And that's what that talk is about. And also it's like ridiculous and silly. You're on like an alien planet solving a mystery. And I had this artists do this beautiful work for it. So it's ridiculous, but yeah,

Ridiculous is the best way to go.

Yeah, it's like funny and weird. I enjoy it.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. And we'll be sure to link all those, all those amazing things that you're doing up in the show notes. And yeah, thanks for taking the time.

Thank you for having me really enjoyed it.

And as always, thank you to the amazing JAMstack community, your continued support via shares, likes favorites, and all those mechanisms is so incredible that I literally just don't have the words to deal with it.

With that it's sponsored time, and we're talking about the amazing content platform take shape. This week, I want to mention their amazing GraphQL API. It's not an afterthought, but a fully realized part of their platform. It means that whether you use their CMS or another platform entirely, you have an incredibly easy access to all your data in one simple API call. Do you want to see what that's like? Head on over to takeshape.io/that'smyjamstack to sign up. And with that, I'll take my leave of your ears. So until next week, Keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things Jammy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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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