That's my JAMstack

Welcome everyone to another episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast where we explore the inner psyche of JAMstackers everywhere asking the simple question, what's your jam in the JAMstack. On today's episode, we talked to Colby Fayock, a senior front end engineer with element 84. But before we dive into the interview, let me shout out to our sponsor take shape. Stick around after the episode to learn more about their content platform or head on over to take shape.io slash That's My JAMstack for more information.

Colby thanks for being on the show today.

Thanks for having me.

Alright, so let's let's start out tell us a little bit about yourself about what you do for work, what you do for fun, that sort of thing.

Sure. So I'm a senior front end engineer and UX designer at Element84. For a little bit about us, we focused on bringing remote sensing and Life Sciences data to the cloud. So that's usually like satellite data and health data. But once that's in the cloud, that's kind of where I stepped in and put you eyes in front of that. So some things that I'm working on right now are a dashboard.

For testing a commercial satellite, and we're also working on a mapping interface for helping first responders tackle natural disasters like Wow, so like a big use case for that was working with people who were actually in it for the campfire California wildfires.

Oh, wow. Very cool. So I curiosity. You're building interfaces? Do you consider yourself more on the design side or more on the developer side, even though you're working in code, obviously.

Yeah, so I definitely am more on the front end engineering side. It's kind of funny because I started off more on the design side, but as I kind of learned and learn, I've just slowly moved the needle to the engineering side. But that said, I still thoroughly enjoy both aspects of it. And usually I'm still the one doing the wires and such on the projects that we're working on.

Cool. Now, what do you do in your in your free time outside of work?

So a lot of the times when we when we can figure it out, I like to travel with my wife. We just got back from a trip to Southeast Asia, which was pretty cool.

But aside from that, you know, I, I do really enjoy coding, but probably spent too much time watching TV movies. And lately, I've been trying to push myself to write more. So I've been putting a lot of articles up on Free Code Camp. And that actually inspired me from a co worker who kind of gave me the idea that, you know, there's a lot of ways to look at different articles, right, rather than I kind of had that imposter syndrome. But I'm able to get past that. And it's been successful. So far,

I'm a firm believer that anyone who's writing code can benefit from their own blog in the future. Like if you're if you're writing and you saw the problem, write about it, and then you Google it down the road, and you'll be the response.

Right, exactly. That's a good book kind of way to bookmark your solutions. Exactly.

And so what's the what's the best place you've traveled or your favorite place to go when you're traveling?

You know, Southeast Asia was probably my craziest experience. And I say crazy just because it was so different from anything I've ever been to. But I've been to Brazil cuz my wife is Brazilian and

I really enjoy Brazil, the people, they're just so awesome. The food is amazing.

So that's probably one of my favorite places. Go and what's the what's the best Brazilian dish?

Oh, man. Well, Brazilian barbecue for sure. Cuz I don't know if you've ever been to one of the Brazilian steak houses in the United States, but it's just incredible.

Nice. Very cool. So let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit. Obviously, that's what this podcast is all about. What was your entry point into this philosophy of the JAMstack or maybe static sites or wherever you want to call it?

So it's kind of funny because I listened to a couple of the other podcasts and a lot of people seem to be getting into development from the old MySpace days. So when I was in high school, I would do the I would hack over divs on top of the profile, people saw me doing that and I actually made a little bit of a side hustle out of it, redesigning some people's profiles, but from there, you know, just creating Counter Strike Team pages for the teams I was on.

But more on the professional side, you know, down the road. I worked at a an e commerce company called thinkgeek was a geeky niche products

I've bought from thinkgeek in the past.

Well, since then, they were bought out by GameStop. But we don't need to get into that. But it was interesting because they weren't a JAMstack site. But we were trying to cash the front, the front end so heavily, where it was just being served statically from fastly. But we redesigned the checkout and basically use the jam site principles of reaching out to their API's and stuff to build that. But it was definitely at the time, since it was still kind of a relatively newer idea for an architecture. It was rough to try to get the convinced that our engineers to support the API's to that fashion because it's traditionally a pearl house. So building out the that's how the pages were typically rendered. Yeah.

And modernizing that stack would have been quite fun.

Yeah, yeah.

So kind of so so from there. What what are you currently working and what are your favorite jams, tech technologies or philosophies? What are you using professionally and personally that sort of thing.

Yeah. So, personally, when I'm bootstrapping sites, I usually just default to Gatsby. And that if I just because it's, it's so easy, you know, static sites are just much easier to manage from a resource perspective, in my opinion. And, you know, it's super cheap and other buzzwords, like infinitely scalable. But as a primary engineer, you know, I don't need to worry about figuring out the server side server side of things. So I just kind of dumped my static assets. I still have like two WordPress clients, but I've since moved them to lightsail, which has made it a little bit easier since it's more managed on the AWS side. And I joke about the buzzwords part of it, but really, that's compelling for from a customer perspective, right? Because being able to use those phrases like infinitely scalable, secure and cheap is just so valuable,

Especially on like, I'm bigger clients where they're like, worried what if I get a traffic spike? Is the server going to go down?

Exactly, and it's a realistic scenario. And even if you have the most complex caching system, things can go wrong. So That's what, that's a big thing of what attracts me to it. But with Element 84, you know, it switches a little bit where we got most of it into s3 instead of using something like natla phi, but we're big AWS house. So JAMstack sites, kind of pulling those five fundamental pillars for AWS, which is like for good software architecture. So it makes it really easy to kind of push that

Hit me with the the five pillars for AWS, I'm not actually great with AWS.

So I wrote this down because I had a feeling you would ask me. Operational Excellence security, which is a big one, real reliability, performance and cost optimization. So pretty much exactly. It takes the ticks the boxes of every single one of those. Yep.

Very cool. And so what are y'all doing other than obviously, if you're on AWS, you're pretty much jam packed at that point. How is element a for utilizing this kind of separation and how are you doing like mapping and stuff like that in a JAMstack world so interesting.

Maps kind of inherently fit into the whole static site idea. We use a library called leaflet which it attaches itself to a static element inside the DOM. So imagine just a div kind of like you would with a react app, right.

And it just kind of plays from there pulling in the API's for things like matte tiles, and any kind of data you want to visualize on the map. But really, we can build out these applications completely static and pull all those API's and stuff around on the client, just like a, you know, normal JAMstack app.

But it's, it's made it easy to kind of fit it in there. And it's tough with leaflet sometimes because it relies on the window. So if you're kind of building it within a react application, you kind of have to get some past some of those challenges like particularly Gatsby. When you compile, it runs the code, right? So the window is not available. The leaflet library assumes it is and you can run into competition areas with that. So it has its challenges, but it's it's interesting, and it's provided some really powerful stuff. Yeah.

And we were actually just talking on last week's episode about replacing create react app with Gatsby and how like one of the big hiccups is there's no window and Gatsby.

Yeah, it's it's a real problem. And they provide a solution where you kind of set I I don't know what's actually happening, but you set the loaders to know in the in the web pack configuration that resolves it.

But of course, then you don't actually get the library for any kind of compilation but since it is just a client side only library it's it's okay for that particular piece.

Very cool. So let's let's talk about what is what is your actual jam and the JAMstack? What's going to keep you coming back JAMstack year after year? Going into the future?

Yeah. So I think generally the amount of options that are coming up to just quickly spin things up like I kind of mentioned Gatsby Netlify I'm pretty sold on that combo right now, just because it's made my life so much easier to spin things up where both me and the 14 like we can focus on the things that are different, right? Like we don't have to spend our time bootstrapping the app, creating a custom web pack configuration and all that. So it really makes it lets us focus on things that are different. I advocate a lot for Netlify simply because of those kind of things.

I think being able to play those tooling pieces heavily, just gives us a lot of power to push things forward.

Nice. And where do you kind of fall on, like static rendering on the server versus dynamic stuff, obviously doing mapping stuff, you're doing more stuff in the client? is there is there any way to offload that before built like during the build that you can kind of have the map in place before the client takes over?

Not from my experience, mostly because of the window issues. But I haven't looked too much into that aspect of it just because the library so heavily rely on the window and the DOM.

But that said, like, just generally with rendering on the server versus pre compiling, I like pre compiling because it you're doing as much work as you can before that server hits, so

Anything you can do before the actual server request or, you know, serving them. statically is just ideal, in my opinion, talk about buzzwords.

And the five pillars performance is a big deal there.

Exactly. I mean, just getting that first paint, you know, trying to avoid any kind of server processing before it hits the person in the browser is important.

Definitely. Uh, so so you're using leaflet for mapping, Gatsby and a lot of your prototyping anything else you're kind of exploring right now.

Nothing too heavily. We're building a component library based off of the leaflet of just trying to make things a little bit easier for people to interface with it because of some of the problems I mentioned. We're hoping to eventually open source that but you know, the whole, building something and open sourcing is isn't always as straightforward as you might want it to be.

But hooking the maps into other kind of data technologies, such as one particular pieces STACK API, which is already

I wrote this down because I wouldn't remember the acronym, its spatial temporal asset catalog. So it's essentially Yes, it's essentially collecting metadata and the imagery along with the satellite imagery and provide it providing in a way that you can actually search on it. So being able to pull up those results, make dynamic searches on those maps is important to be able to help provide these people, like scientists ability to actually look at the data, right? So using tools like that helps us a lot

Cool. And I imagine like when you're talking about scientists, and we're talking about climate stuff, and we're talking about all these like, heavy big sets of data, like how do you how do you deal with that large of a scope in a modular kind of tinier way?

Yeah, so probably our bread and butter with Element 84 is the data processing aspect of it. So that's a completely different component in built in our kind of architecture, where we have our data pipeline that pulls in and processes the data. Then we have a back end team which might be the same people that builds, like one particular instances, Elasticsearch, right putting that in front of the the main metadata repository. At which point for me, it's really just a bunch of API's that I'm able to search on. So coming from a UI perspective, I don't have to worry as much about those complexities. But it is interesting to see the pipeline of data coming through which we rely pretty heavily on Native AWS for goals.

So yeah, you're basically getting the Create your own like Big Data API set that you then just can go go home with and keep working on stuff.

Exactly. Exactly.

Very cool. So let's, let's talk, let's talk music. What is your actual jam right now? What's your favorite song or musician? Are you jamming out to?

Sure. So I am a huge blink 182 fan from the early days, so I'm still enjoying a lot of their music that they're putting out maybe not as much as some of the earlier stuff but a co workers would probably give me a hard time for saying this, but I still frequently jam out. So come and get it by Selena Gomez.

But on a serious note, A shout out to probably my favorite album. It's an older one called dangerous intentions from a group called patterns has like a really cool retro vibe to it that I really enjoy

Retro like 80s vibe?

I Yeah, I think so. Okay.

Retro could be like 65. And that'd be cool, too.

That's true. That's true. And at this point, probably 90s, right?

Unfortunately, had a lot. I don't want to talk about it. feel weird inside.

Cool. So is there anything that you would like to promote to the tech community something you're doing or more in general?

Yeah, generally I'm writing trying to write a lot. So checking out some of the articles I'm writing but you know, I'm, I feel really strongly about maps and being able to give a lot of power to people with the tools in their hand, right, so scientists and such. So to try and help get things started I created Gatsby starter just gets me started for leaflet. It's pretty much called, which is up on my GitHub. I can also post a link doesn't come with a ton of features yet, but it really allows people to easily spin up mapping application. And the biggest takeaway that I'm trying to push, and it's kind of like Chef Gusto, from Ratatouille where he says anyone could cook, I like to believe that anybody can create a map, right. So just being able to have people easily be able to spin up an app, it might put more power in somebody's hands that they didn't really have before. over the holidays I created based off of that starter, I created a Santa Tracker, which people had a good time with, it was cool being able to see some of my co workers spend time with their kids actually walking through the same santa tracker. so just be able to do fun things like that is powerful, and shows what you can do.

And you completely destroyed my follow up question was just gonna be like, how do I get started in mapping, but so we'll, we'll throw it out that that that Gatsby started for the mapping. Is there any sort of like big hurdles to getting into leaflet or if you've got that starter? You can just kind of go to town with it.

Yeah, I mean, once you get that, sorry, spun up. I have an example in there that it really just kind of zooms in on your current location if you allow it. Otherwise, I think it's D.C. Which is the area that I'm from.

But be able to take that example and apply it with leafless documentation, I think is probably the biggest bet there. And I'm hoping to do more writing on more complex leaflet applications. But generally, I think that's a good starting place.

Cool and I curiosity, you might not have an answer to it. Where, where could somebody go to find maybe some data sets that they could play with, especially around some of these more scientific topics with mapping? Are there any open data sets that they can explore?

Yeah, so NASA, actually, I, at least through their Gibbs program, and I know some of their other programs, they make a ton of data openly available for anybody. So kind of just searching on that is a good way to get your just kind of get rolling in it. I know. There's also some other teams like blanking on the name. They provide some open data for disaster scenarios, which is powerful because they enable people to do things that will help others actually work with some of these disaster scenarios, which is some of the data that we use with the disaster relief efforts we're working on.

Very cool. All right. Well, I appreciate you taking the time and talk with us today. And I'm actually very, very interested to go dive into that Gatsby repo. I want to check that out.

Yeah. Awesome. Let me know how it goes.

Thanks and keep doing amazing things. Awesome. Thank you.

Thanks again to Colby for being on the show. And thanks again to you dear listeners for tuning in Week after week, be sure to leichhardt star or what have you in your podcast app of choice. And now it's sponsored time coming back this week is take shape. take shape is a content platform for the JAMstack. They've got a headless CMS, a static site generator and awesome graph. qL API is super simple to get started and to work with and if you're interested, you should head on over to take shape.io slash That's My JAMstack to sign up.

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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast where we asked the pressing question, "What is your jam in the JAMstack?" I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week I'm excited to have on the show the amazing Khaled Garbaya. Khaled is an engineering manager at Contentful and runs an amazing JAMstack newsletter.

We're also welcoming back this week TakeShape as our sponsor, stick around after the episode to find out more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Thanks for being on the show today, Khaled.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So tell us a little about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, all that stuff.

So my name is Khaled. I'm originally from Tunisia, which is like a small country in the North Africa. And it's been I've been living in Berlin for over six years now. I am an engineering manager at Contentful And I love learning and building and public. And I also traveled for food. So that's that's usually my life. Yeah, that's, that's basically me.

I started, I don't know if this is relevant or some people might not even remember the days of Flash. So I started as a Flash developer and moved my way there to like gaming and then now it's more like web and servers and now people debugging people instead of code, which is also a lot of fun. Yeah, and I do also like some live streaming, and I teach some web development related and JAMstack related topics over on Egghead or YouTube or I also do some streaming in Twitch so I'm all over the place.

Cool. Make sure you give me those links. I'll pop them in the show notes. You say you, you travel for food? So how much are you traveling and maybe what's your What's your favorite country or city for food?

I mean, my favorite city is definitely Italy so far. I mean, not city but like an entire country. Yeah, my, the best city like I go there every year. We must go there at least for a week. It's Sardinia it's like a small island in Italy by the beach, and there's some great food and I want to be like always, like relax. So that's my style of vacation. I'm no hiker, or I do sometimes, but I'm just I'm lazy. I don't want to do a lot of activities.

I can definitely get that I spent a week in Italy and did way too much and would rather just relax on the beach.

Yeah, so I visited few cities hunting for food. Napoli also I went to the Holy Land of pizza. Rome is kind of an open museum. It's an amazing country to music also my country's full of food. So it's a nice to always visit family and have some food. Whereas I went to the US few, like two times, but just San Francisco. I don't know. I mean, usually, it maybe it's not the US.

Sure.

And yeah, traveling through Europe because it's, I mean, Europe here is like, very accessible and easy to go through. It's not like 10 hours flight. I think the furthest country was Japan. Last year, it was like magical.

Very cool, whole, whole whole different kind of plane existence in a lot of ways.

Cool. So So let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit. So what was your kind of your entry point into this philosophy, whether that's JAMstack itself nowadays or static sites? Where did you start in this

Yeah, so I had a blog and WordPress. I mean, this is sounds like you will hear the story a lot. When I didn't have time to, like, maintain it. There was a lot of bots, hosting a lot of files on my website. And it wasn't just like, I mean, I'm getting like 100 views a month on this blog post, why why do I bother even maintaining this stuff? And also open source like, I think the when, when JAMstack started rising like two, three years ago, I got involved a lot on open source, mainly with the Gatsby. So I was I did some pull requests to help the integration with Contentful to be like a little bit faster. And then I like fixed few stuff here and there. And they were like the Gatsby team was amazing and friendly. And my wife decided to build a food blog. So I was like, Yeah, okay, I was trying to save my marriage basically. Yeah, so I built her that blog and I kind of like geek out about it I use it like as a test space to try all of these stuff and then yeah, if I'm like very powerful low maintenance and also like low costs so I went all in in there and and started to explore it more and how to go beyond the static site basically. That's more what my god what like where my curiosity went. And yeah, since then, I'm a big fan of the JAMstack.

So So obviously, if you're at Contentful, JAMstack kind of a professional thing, too. But like, yeah, how we're using it there. How are you using it maybe beyond that food blog, or even what's kind of the stack for that food blog and you're in your hat personal endeavors?

Yeah. So In Contentful, first I joined as a software engineer, mostly maintaining the SDK, and a lot of tooling, and most of it was open source. So it was like, oh, amazing, it can be like, I can get paid and then work on open source. And from there, like the involvement of Contentful, and the integration isn't all of these stacks started to appear to help here and there and the direct people, and so on. And to talk about like, usually my stack would be Gatsby. Because I know there's like many other options over there. But that's why I got used to and kinda like my comfort zone now and I know it very well. So that's what I start with. Netlify for hosting. I used to host stuff over at S3 and cloud like cloudfront.

But then once I learned all of that, I was like, Okay, now let's Move to something easy Yeah, I use algolia for search. That's also really nice Netlify some several as functions I recently also use the Identity Service by Netlify. There's also like some other options like Auth0 which is really great and I think it generous. They give you a generous free offer for like users and so on but I don't have like that many users so I went with Netlify like a thousand I think it's more than enough for me and because it integrates well with like the whole hosting service and they can do a lot of powerful configurations through Netlify it made it made more sense. What else? Yeah, I'm I can't remember something But I'm definitely going to use a lot more API's

Definitely. And so that's a lot of technologies. What would you say is kind of like your one jam in the jam stack? What's that technology that you're always going back to the Gatsby?

Yeah, I think it's it's it's Gatsby and Netlify these are like the my Gatsby, Netlify and then Contentful because I can also like bootstrap my content really quickly. And I can give it to someone that they are not technical and can they can write stuff in there. And I also like geek about like, this content modeling in general, because it's like it's a big topic. And me so I that's like the my top three stack always because you need them most of the time, you will need content. So I'd rather give it to someone who knows well about content and they like they have a platform for that already.

Sure. They like the contents that they type in some stuff. They click Save, and they're good to go. Cool. So you just wrote an article at the beginning of this year right on Gatsby as a as a replacement for Create React App. Yeah. So let's talk about that a little, because I'm interested in that.

Yeah. So I like like I told you, I was curious overall in the JAMstack, how to go beyond, like a normal use case, like a blog or a marketing website, and so on. Because I think it's over. It's like, very powerful. It's, you can do more than that. And with Gatsby, which a lot of people they get wrong is like, yeah, it's another static site generators. But it's, it's more than that.

So it will give you like a pre rendered website. But then once it's fully loaded, it will load also react and rehydrate everything to react app. So basically, you have this powerful app that's sitting there doing nothing, just displaying, you know, and also like bootstrapping Gatsby, what site and the whole plugin ecosystem. It's really powerful. So I was like, let's try build an app with Gatsby and not like, React create react app. And what I found there is like, I built the first like, kind of small Twitter clone using react. And I was like, Okay, let's try and see how how much go they can just copy paste from here to there. And it was like, sometimes it's like, the entire component, just copy paste it there.

A few things to consider like the window object, when you when, when the process of statically generating the website kicks in, that's like a Node process. So the, the window object doesn't exist there. But other than that, you can use all the great features of react, you can use hooks you can use a lot of things. I mean, except suspense, because It's still not ready for, I guess, for us it and I don't know how long it would take. But looking forward to that. But also, I mean, since its react and JavaScript, you can load some more data. If you have a like dynamic stuff. Gatsby also has a powerful like API for creating pages. So you can create static pages, you can create dynamic routes. And since you you're able to use dynamic routes, and you can use actually reach router, which is embedded in there.

You could do stuff like authentications, because all these routes will not get rendered as static, like set equation, because it doesn't make sense to render dashboards for every user that you have. That's not that's not the case. So using that and the combination of different API's and if you have for example, like payments I don't know like Stripe now is a great example for that. The way it works, they give you like a public key and a secret key. So you can use the public key in your front end, and that's fine. And then if you want to capture a payment, you can get some token and send it to your API.

In this case, it will be like a serverless function using Netlify, and you can like capture the payment and you can do a lot of that. So I was like, asking over and Twitter like, hey, like, what's what's wrong while you're not like building with with a gaspee? And it turns out like a lot of people actually, either they had like a misunderstanding about like, the whole gaspee thing, or they actually building some apps with that and so on. So yeah, so I wrote that blog post about about that. And I'm actually like building a course around the the whole thing I'll send you the link later. And we can add it to the, to the show notes. Yeah. And then I will just break down the whole thing like starting from scratch, like how do you even start the website without even like using Gatsby to generate the templates? And how simple it is, and then we can go from there.

So I'm kind of curious. So, you know, obviously Gatsby is relatively strongly opinionated. Like, there's the Gatsby way of doing react and arguably is one of the better ways of doing react. I don't have a lot of experience with create react app. Is that that opinionated or is it more of like a "Here's some bootstrapping now you go do whatever you want."

Yeah, I think I think there's some opinion in every tool and that's sometimes good. I think most of the time is good, because if you remember the old days with react, you need to do like Webpack and like, do some configurations and then all I need this loader and that loader and so on. So both Gatsby and react create react app, they solve this problem. They remove the whole, like the whole headache of like building an app. They make you focus on just react, how to build react, create react app, like the end result will be a react app.

But Gatsby will be like more than that. So it'll be a static site that will transform later into react app. And, and then it doesn't also like stop there. So it gives you like another data layer, which is graph QL. And you can inject any data from any source in there. And that's a really mean graph girl proved to be like a great developer experience and user experience in general. And yeah, but the Create react app I think is like makes your life simpler when bootstrapping an app, have it running. You can totally build an entire app. That's fine. But it doesn't give you like, more.

I gotcha. So if you're making this like a really small app, you might still stick with create react app, but anything beyond that a little bit, you're gonna want go gafi route. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, I mean, it depends always, like what I say always depends on your use case. Because I'm not just I'm not trying to bash any tool. Everything's like super great. You know, like, when you start this conversation over Twitter, people, like just jump in, you're like, Oh, my God, what are you saying every time? Yeah, it depends on the use case. But I think, since they offer, like the offer, like kind of equal experience at the beginning, why not starting with with Gatsby and and then in the future, if you need to get some more data or like, integrate an API. I mean, you can you can do it.

Nice. So I I've actually I've only done like, surface layer Gatsby stuff. I've created a couple of like small static sites and that sort of thing. Are there any Is there anything to be aware of as you kind of try to take it outside of that static rendering and move it in into like that rehydration process?

Yeah. So that's mostly kind of done by Gatsby like the Gatsby runtime. One thing is some people, sometimes I see a lot of people asking like, oh, how do I do private routes? And Gatsby, or how do I do this and Gatsby? And actually, that question should be like, how do I do this in react? Because that's actually like a react app. Like you're dealing with react components? A few things like a gotchas. And all like the like I said, the window object. Yeah, the windows object. Sometimes you might be loading some apps that rely also on the window object, but you can in the Gatsby node, you can say, hey, what if you're loading this at in the SSR Phase ignore it or make it an empty modules yeah there's few things here there to watch out for while building but mostly also like you need to think about your your structure of the website what's what's what's really need to be dynamic and what what needs to be like static, like an about page or contact page or contact page. Yeah, maybe but that's also still kind of be can be static, and then inject few stuff in there. And then what's like dynamic and what do you what stuff you don't want to do. And also like Watch out from plugins, or wise Don't be like adding plugins left and right. Because again, it will be like, sometimes painful, a little bit painful when it comes to maintaining all of that. Yeah, and then push as much as you can at build Like the work you do the data processing and stuff, give to the user like a relaxed app, kind of like don't stress the app to show some user.

Yeah, a good progressive enhancement kind of ideology there. Cool. So kind of going forward, you know, next three or four years. Where do you kind of see the tech stack going in a way that's going to keep you in the JAMstack? Obviously, you're doing a lot of stuff in it right now. What's gonna keep you coming back year after year?

I think modularity. That's that's one thing. I like that every API and product or any company that's producing that they're only focusing on one thing, and that's proven to be always great. Like focusing on one thing and doing really great. I love like, hand handing over a lot of work to experts to do that for me. Yep, so yeah. As long as that's the idea and also also like about the community and it needs to be like an inclusive community and inviting more and more people to contribute and build nice tools in there. Yeah, that that's what keeps me there. What keeps me in the jam stack. And I'm not usually driven by hypes I love to kind of, because there's a lot of hype around like new tools and so on, I use only what I need. And jam stack allows me to do that. And I can replace some components with something else really quickly. And that's going back to the modularity. So that's what I like about

who I am when one new like hyped up thing goes from being hyped to being actually good and you know, ready for production, then you can just switch that into as you go on.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can also like, even if I like the idea behind it, I might experiment with it before. Yeah, I like to I mean us things and then I don't really like bash tools on online and I have strong opinions because I was like, yeah, it's assuming the best intention always this is probably solving a problem for someone else. Not me. So I use it if it makes sense. I can include it. Otherwise I can just move on.

Nice. So So JAMstack aside, what is your what's your jam and like in your ears right now? What's your jam in music?

Oh, man, um, the new Eminem album is nice is on fire. I think is is passing Kanye West. Kinda. Yeah, but I also like, listen to Cardi B. I like some some sort of, you know, rap and hip hop and stuff. Sometimes. I don't know like, It's weird. Like these old suggestions from Spotify. I just listened to them. Yeah, I listened to whereas like, sometimes Ed Sheeran, there's like some some cool songs. He did one with Eminem. I mean, I'm like, I'm like from the 90s. So I listen a lot. And, like, I'm kind of a little bit of old school and yeah, whatever. Spotify tells me to listen, sometimes I was just like, ok

yeah, give the music over to the to the algorithm and say, give me what's best for me.

Yeah, make sure to listen to few music I like and then the rest will come.

Exactly, exactly. Our robot overlords are taking care of you.

Yeah, exactly.

Nice. So is there anything that you want promote and get out there to the JAMstack community?

Yes. Uh huh. Let's see. So, currently, back to the topic of the Create react app, and Gatsby. I'm doing a live stream every day for like an hour, we are actually building an app called RubberGoose.dev. So you know the concept of rubber ducking? Yeah. So I think the name rubber duck is like trademark to something, so someone was like, yeah, maybe rubber goose. And yeah, the app is live. And we already made some great progress there. There's a landing page is capturing email, push it to Convert Kit. It has authentication, it has stripe billing, and plans or subscription all of that. And I didn't even build the content of the app. I was like, the stripe stuff so that you can find it over twitch.tv/kgarbaya. Or if you follow me at Twitter, which is @khaled_garbaya.

And yeah, and if you Go over sort learnjamstack.com I'm running a weekly digest for like some nice resources I find useful. In there also, on the top, you'll find a banner getting you to like the course if you want to get some, like some info about the course of the progress, I share some nice free previews and materials already about that. Yeah, and my website is k4d.dev. So I was like, you know, the four letters and between the K and D. I was like, like the Kubernetes or something. So yeah, that's like, my main website. So yeah, I guess if you follow me on Twitter and like, look around, you can find all the other links.

Sure. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you being on the show today and sharing your your expertise around great react app versus Gatsby and all that good stuff. And thanks for doing And all the cool educational resources you've been putting out there.

Yeah, man. That's my pleasure. Thanks for having Thanks for having me.

Hey, everyone, it's Bryan again. And it is time to talk about this week sponsored TakeShape. They're a really well crafted content platform made specifically for the JAM stack. So what's a content platform? Well, take shape doesn't just provide a CMS, though, you can certainly just use their CMS if that's all you're interested in. They also have a static site generator, a GraphQL API. And this really cool new Mesh product just growing by the day, which you can use to combine multiple API's into one really easy to use GraphQL-based API. So if those things strike your fancy, and for me, most of them do on one level or another, head on over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack to sign up.

And of course, don't forget to star heart favorite, subscribe, all those lovely things so that more people can find out about the amazing work that we're all doing in this great JAMstack community. So until next week, keep doing Amazing things on the web and keep things JAMy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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

Hey everyone, welcome to That's My JAMstack, the podcast where we dare to ask the question, what is your jam in the JAMstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and today I'm super excited about our guest. He's a principal developer experience engineer at Netlify and the host of the great video series Learn with Jason. I'm talking of course about Jason Lengstorf.

But before we dive in, I did want to mention our sponsor TakeShape is back again this week. I'll tell you more about them after the interview. But if you're interested in learning more before that head on over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack to find out what their content platforms all about.

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

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Awesome. So so I would hope that a lot of people in the audience know who you are, at least from the past couple years, but go ahead and give us a shout about who you are, what you do for work, what you do for fun, that sort of thing. Sure.

So I am a developer experience engineer at Netlify, which means that I'm kind of in between engineering and Dev Rel. I also host a show called Learn with Jason where I pair program with people in the community. We learn something new in 90 minutes. I am also a occasional blogger I'd write a lot about sometimes about code mostly about the the process of coding so kind of the meta work or the Yak shaving so to speak.

For fun, I am a I call myself a mediocre bartender. I love food. So I we cook a lot. You know, I'm kind of deep down a rabbit hole, I make my grind my own meat and you know, do that. We make bread from scratch and I like to do cocktail like you know, bartending kind of stuff like that. I make my own cocktails and stuff. It's good.

So what is the tastiest cocktail that you make?

Okay, the taste is one that I make. I will usually I just make other bartenders, good cocktails. I have I made one up. My partner asked me to make something that tasted like Christmas. And so I did kind of a riff on on like a classic Negroni build, but it was rum and spice liquors. So it kind of has this really Alpine kind of Christmasy flavor.

Alpine like a taste like a pine tree or...

So the one that I use is called blur Bluebird, Alpine liqueur, which it's got, like all spice and some kind of like fresh herbs and stuff. So if you had fernet Branca?

Nope.

So fernet Bronco, kind of tastes like mouthwash. This is like a a very, like, tune down version of that. So it's it. It has a hint of pine not like the taste of them.

And what's the what's the hardest thing you've ever cooked?

Ooh, great question. Um, I would say probably the hardest thing I've ever cooked is. Well, I mean in terms of complexity, just Thanksgiving dinner, because you you effectively have to Gantt chart that you know, you've got one of in one stovetop and 15 dishes to cook. So how do you make sure that everything comes out on time still warm, that you're not like trying to stack something that was supposed to cook it for 50 and an oven, it's only a 325 you know that that kind of stuff is all very challenging.

In terms of most complicated single dish, I any type of curry dish is really challenging. It's like, well, it it's not challenging in the sense that it is. It's not like French cooking where the the techniques are challenging. It's like a billion and a half ingredients and a lot of them are hard to find or something you've never used before. So there's a lot of like, not only learning how to use a mortar and pestle to make curry but like trying to understand what an ingredient is supposed to taste like.

Because you know if you've never used like Thai basil or if you've never used Thai seasoning sauce or You know, all these these ingredients that you'll find in Asian food, like, you're like I don't even have the context to know when this is like I don't know what right tastes like so you're making a lot of wild guesses and hoping the end product tastes like the thing that you love from the restaurant

Do you do have to make your own curry powder because I know that's like the best way

I've done it a couple times and it is definitely amazing it is so much work like it's it's one of those things that I feel like if it would be one of those things it would make sense if you had a bigger family so it's just me and my partner and to make it at the scale that we would need to to justify doing as much work as it is we need to eat it like every day for two weeks. And so typically what I found is that the level of effort that goes into the really, really intense stuff like making your own like making your own gyoza skins for like pot stickers and stuff, quality difference between buying them at the store Making them at home is noticeable. But marginal. The level of effort is totally, totally doesn't justify that little bit extra flavor. Unless you're doing it for like a special occasion.

Even still, I might say depends on how special occasion I guess.

Yeah, fair enough.

So, so obviously, we're not cooking today other than some delicious jam stack recipes, but, uh, what what is kind of your entry point into the jam stack or in the static sites if you are old enough to deal with that?

Yeah, so like entry point, like how I got into it. I mean, the way that I really got into it was once upon a time I was in a band, and I started by customizing the CSS for MySpace. That was really what it was, was like customizing my band's MySpace profile. And then I wanted to build an actual website for the band. So I built a, you know, totally in, like TextEdit wrote all the HTML all by hand and then just uploaded into a FTP folder on. I don't even remember what the host was some some cheap hosts BlueHost or something like that.

True static sites.

Yeah, real like true static site. So I just uploaded something into a folder. It was it was gnarly. It was this table base like this is before that, you know what this was before CSS or before I knew how to use CSS. So what I was doing was doing like table based sliced images, to position things on the screen old school. It was rough. It was rough.

Nice. So So what about modern JAMstack? What was kind of your entry point into into the past like five years of technology? Um,

so I was working at IBM. And we were dealing with, I worked on IBM's cloud services, IBM Cloud, and we were building dashboards out and a lot of these dashboards it was just a very complicated dev stack, right. So IBM Cloud is microservices. So each team owned a route. So you would own slash dashboard or slash account or whatever. And we owned slash account. So we were trying to speed up we had some performance issues where we were just it was taking way too long to load a page. And when I started digging into the tech stack, what I realized was that the way we had done microservices was to give each team a full node Express server. And then that was setting up these proxies that were wrapping other microservices. And so we had these kind of daisy chained microservices, then and a lot of it was just so that our local build was easy to manage. And you know, I have to like air quote, easy because it was still to get a dev environment setup. You had to add a bunch of environment variables you had to configure nginx on your machine. had to run, you had to have a reverse proxy running. And all this stuff was really, really painful. And all we were doing at the end of the day, was writing a react app that sent off calls to internal API's.

So I, I attacked this from from two ways. So my first talked to my team about GraphQL. And we wrote a middleware kind of thing. That was a, it was like a normalization layer over internal API. So instead of having to write these proxies in each microservice, we built a normalized graph qL layer so that the the front ends could just call GraphQL. And then once we've done that, we've successfully decoupled them so I started trying to build up proofs of concept where the front end teams weren't shipping node anymore. They were just shipping like static compiled assets. The graph qL was successful. The static shipping was not

We we hit Like, I mean, there are a million reasons for it, right? Like there's there Lots and lots of people who have very valid reasons for going lots of different technological directions. IBM's got 700 something engineers, or just on that team like on IBM Cloud 700 something engineers, and you know, they're architects at different levels. So I had my what I consider to be incontrovertibly correct opinion. And then there was another team that was doing more stuff with with like, sort of like graph, not graph qL, but like graph databases, and that was very server driven. And so they had what they consider to be incontrovertibly correct reasoning for doing that. And we just kind of stalemated while I was doing that, though, I was just kind of getting burned out on the the bureaucracy and the slow pace and the the the inability to like, do stuff. I always felt like I was getting close to doing something cool. But then it would hit this, this wall and it would just chug along and it was like okay, we're going to Do six months of meetings to do six weeks worth of work and that's not fun.

So around that time, I started looking at Gatsby as an option for the static builds. And I was talking to the Gatsby team, and through, you know, just good timing. They had gotten funding and we're starting to hire at the same time that I was starting to reach the end of my tether at Gatsby or at IBM. And so I made the jump over there. So that was that was kind of where I got officially officially into the JAMstack

Perfect timing on on everything.

Yeah, yeah

With 700 devs on a Team. Things are gonna move, move pretty slow.

Yeah, yeah. You know, the the the trade off that you get for like building enterprise enterprise grade software is it's going to be relatively solid because you have so many people to cover so many edge cases. But it moves glacially.

So So obviously, you were you were working at getting IBM into the JAMstack. Then you move to Gatsby and you were using pretty much primarily JAMstack technology at that point. How are you? Nowadays working at Netlify using JAMstack professionally using it personally what what kind of projects are you working through with that?

Um, I mean, I I feel like I was pretty, pretty convinced on the jam stack as an approach before I went to Gatsby that was, you know, I made a big bet on Gatsby when I went there. And moving to Netlify felt like a logical next step for me because what I, what I really believe is that JAMstack is something that's going to give anybody a very easy on ramp into putting things on the internet. And I feel like that's a that's a gap that was closed in the Hostgator, use text edit and drop an HTML file into FTP. And then we we created that gap again, when we got too much further beyond like the the PHP LAMP stack kind of stuff. Because now it's like, Okay, well, I don't know exactly how to provision a node server or how to configure a remote, I, you know, I don't want to have to SSH into a box to change something so that I can deploy it. And there are services that manage that for you, but they were all kind of, like expensive. And so Netlify has has democratized that a little bit by offering this, this free hosting for jam stack sites. And the jam stack in general simplifies the stack.

So for me, it's very like, okay, we've we've created a landscape that is more friendly to more developers. And now I'm just kind of in my personal stuff, and in professional stuff. I'm playing with the edges, because, you know, JAMstack is a tool, it's an approach, and it's not going to solve all problems. So I'm currently in the phase where I am trying to treat JAMstack as a hammer and attempting to see every problem is a nail. Because I want to I want to see like, where does it really fall down because there are obvious things that it can't do like You're not going to do a real time stock ticker, with, with static files, if you need that to be, like server generated, like, there's just you're never going to rebuild that fast, or at least not with current technology.

But there are a lot of things that people say, Well, you can't do that with jam stack. And I'm just trying to ask the question like, why not? Like, what what stops us from doing that?

So you know it you can do a lot like we're doing real time sound effects. We're doing persistent data where you can track things like Kyle Shevlin's, got a cool thing that he did on his his blog, where, if you read one of his posts, and you like it, you can stroke his beard, which is a weird thing to do. But he managed to make that persistent. So he's got a button that you can click, and it'll increment the count and say, like, Oh, this, this post has gotten like 57 beard strokes, which is really cool. And that's all done again in the JAMstack,

So, so like, right now I'm building a JAMstack powered site, where I used a Hasura to set up a database. And then I built the JAMstack site, that log I use OAuth through OneGraph, which is an amazing tool if you haven't used it. So OneGraph logs into my Netlify account, and then it logs into my twitch account, and then pulls in. Like from whatever site I specify serverless functions, which is a way for JAMstack to do like dynamic things. And then I'm able to using a JAMstack site triggers Sound effects on my live Twitch streams based on this like jam stack setup that I've got.

Highly interactive.

Super interactive. Yeah, you can do comments, you can do all sorts of things that that I think are typically typically thought of is like, Oh, you need a server for that? Well, this the software as a service landscape is so robust now. You almost don't need a server for anything on print. Like you don't need to roll your own server. The vast majority of services now Have a software as a service like implementation you can do comments over over SAS, you can do you know real time income increment, you can do databases you can do. Everything that you can imagine is probably got a SaaS solution, when that really opens up the landscape for the jam stack where you can do so much without ever having this to stand up a server

Yeah, those edge cases are getting smaller and smaller by the day.

Yeah.

Cool. So uh, what would you say that your, your jam in the JAMstack is? What sort of technology or philosophy process what were you really digging on? Maybe in the past year or so

Yeah. Well, so I think there's, there's like the professional interest and then there is the, like, I am excited about this interest and, and I have the benefit of like, through running, Learn with Jason. I get to effectively play with new and exciting stuff constantly. And so I've seen a couple really exciting things like Rich Harris came on the show and taught me about Svelte. And Svelte is incredible. It's this, you know, it's this magical disappearing framework that you write Svelte code, but then during the build process, it compiles away all of its code and shifts next to nothing. You got these tiny little bundles and it's amazing for performance. They they use it for data visualization and animation. It's it's really, really incredible.

But then you've also got like Eleventy from Zach Leatherman, which is this, this amazing framework that is completely unopinionated. Like the Zach told me, he can't even tell if a site was built with eleventy because it doesn't ... like there's no framework there. It just generates whatever you tell it to. And so those are really cool in terms of flexibility in terms of power. I haven't really used them at scale, though. Like I've used them for a little fun projects. And and I like them. I think they're super exciting.

For production stuff. I'm still using primarily Gatsby. I think that Gatsby has a, the the, the way that Gatsby has approached data management where you move things to a centralized centralized data layer, and then you work as if it's a, you know, a live, you know, database powered app. And then when it builds, it kind of packages up that data to go to the site. That, to me is something that we were still not really seeing, you know, in a lot of the JAMstack ecosystem. And that makes Gatsby like, you know, it's a little complex to set up because you got to learn graph qL you got to do all the, your you've got tools under the hood. So it's hard to tell where the boundaries are between like Gatsby and reach or between Gatsby and relay between Gatsby and and what, you know, react. So what are you Where did you hit the issue? Right? So there are some, it's maybe not as beginner friendly as well. Nothing is beginner friendly anymore, because everything's like, you know, it's turtles all the way down, right? like everything's an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction. So beginners are going to start wherever they are. And they're going to learn their layer of abstraction. And then like, if there's a need, they're going to go deeper.

I think the Gatsby has an incredible tutorial, incredible documentation. And so to me that that makes it the safest production top choice for react based developers, like, you know, if you're, if you're Angular Dev, like, I think Scully just shipped which is really cool. And if you're a Vue dev, there's like Nuxt and Gridsome that both have really cool options. So you know, I think there are a lot of really fun ways to solve these problems. But yeah, I'm a big fan of, I don't know, I just like playing this stuff.

A big fan of everything, right?

Yeah, I like it all.

Cool. So let's, let's talk about music. Then. what's what's your jam right now? In your ears.

Um, I have been listening to just so much We like stuff. So I kind of went down this rabbit hole right so I got really into Anderson POC, because I just never really heard anyone who did what he did. And then like I also started taking music lessons from this, this guy named Joe in Brooklyn who's a producer and he works with a lot of underground hip hop acts and like smaller names, but he's worked with people that people who are into hip hop may have heard of like Earl Sweatshirt and folks like that. So through that, I've been on this very odd adventure. Let's just fall down the the Spotify, rabbit hole of all of these really, really interesting things. And I just found an artist that I love. I gotta look up her name though, because I am blanking on it right now. Samap, the Great or Sampa the great, I don't know how to how she actually pronounces her name, but yeah, like this track called final form. It is unbelievable. It's so good. I can I'll send you link to it. It's like, kind of it's like in the Kendrick Lamar vein of, of hip hop where it's like solid wordplay. It's, it's pretty, like, you know, it's like, cool, it's, like socially positive, or largely socially positive. And, you know, it's, it's really, really, it's good.

Nice. Alright, so is there anything that you would like to promote to kind of get out to the jam stack community as a whole,

Keep, like, keep trying things. One of the things that I think is really, really important as JAMstack developers is, keep in mind that this is still a relatively new approach. And that a lot of the the, we're taking a lot of things that were common knowledge and we're rediscovering and so part of what I think is important as we get into the JAMstack is is first don't treat this like it's brand new. It's not this is this is stuff that we have been doing for a long time. So instead, start looking for like, Where Where do the abstractions make sense. And were like, what is it comfortable to do? So not what can we twist jam stack to make possible but like, where does it really feel right? You know so with the the SaaS based stuff are using software as a service as a data layer to back this completely static front end like to me that feels great. It It seems to solve all the problems that I want it gives me It gives me really good control. So I would recommend like go check out some of the the various software as a service platforms if you need a good idea of what some of those are.

Just go look at Gatsby's datasource plugins because it's going to list just a ton of services and things that they do that you could integrate directly into a Gatsby site right now. Or with a little more effort you could you could integrate into any JAMstack solution by just using their API's at build time to go play go do some dynamic stuff because it's it's so much fun.

If I can self promote a little bit yeah, I have on on Front-end Masters and on Egghead some courses on both Gatsby and the JAMstack where it talks through how to like we walk through projects that do some of the more dynamic stuff so you can get an idea of how it works. And then just go out and continue pushing those boundaries.

Awesome. You'll send me those links, and I'll put them in the in the show notes.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Alright, well, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. And I hope you keep doing amazing things that all the different jam tech companies you've been with, but with metla phi going forward.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on.

Hey, everyone, it's Bryan. Again, I want to point out two quick things before I let you go first, I want to point out that people discovering podcast can often be you know, review and ratings based. So if you got two minutes today and are enjoying this podcast, head on over to to the Google Play Store, Apple podcasts or really wherever you're listening to the show right now, and and write a short review. It'll help more developers find out about this amazing community that we're all living in.

The second thing I want to talk about is of course, our sponsor TakeShape. They're really well crafted content platform for the JAM stack. And what's a content platform? Well TakeShape doesn't just provide a CMS, though, you can, you can certainly just use their CMS if you want to. They also have a static site generator, a graph, qL API, and a new Mesh product, which is working to combine multiple API's into one easy to use GraphQL based API. So if any of those things strike your fancy and to be honest, all of them do for me, head on over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack sign up.

As always, thanks for listening, and we will see you next week with a new interview. Until then keep doing amazing things on the web and keep things jamee

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

Hello and welcome to another episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast asked the age old question, what's your jam in the JAMstack? On today's episode, we've got the amazing Aisha Blake. Aisha is a member of the Gatsby learning team, as well as being a teacher, speaker and conference organizer.

Now this episode is jam packed with JAMstack goodness. But before we get into that, I wanted to welcome back our wonderful sponsor TakeShape. Stick around after the episode to hear more about their content platform or go ahead and head over while you're listening to TakeShape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Hi Aisha, how's it going today? Thanks for being on the show.

Everything is great. Thank you for having me.

All right. So So obviously, you're on the show to talk about the JAMstack stuff, but go ahead and give us a little introduction for who you are, what you do for work, what do you do for fun and that sort of thing?

Absolutely. So I am a brand new senior software engineer on Gatsby's learning team. I am -- I do a lot of things. I do a whole lot of things. I am an organizer for two conferences in Detroit. One is called self conference is half tech talks, half people focus talks. It has really, really great community and one is new. I am also organizing a conference called after one of my favorite musicals, which is going to be a musical tech conference. </p>

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast where we asked the deep and complex question, what's your jam in the JAMstack? In today's episode we're talking with Ahmad Awais. Ahmad is a developer relations engineer at Cloudinary, a Google Developer expert and a prolific teacher.

I'm also happy to welcome back once again, our sponsor TakeShape. Stick around after the show to learn more about their content platform or visit, takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Thanks for being on the podcast today. How's it going?

I'm doing good. Thanks for having me.

Great. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us what you do for work, what you do for fun outside of technology and all that sort of stuff.

Awesome. Awesome. So I'm actually right now the principal Developer Advocate for Cloudinary. I advocate for Javascript and open source. I have been spending a lot of time for the last years on being a full time open sourcer, where I build a lot of things related to web sort of a web purist, which has also kind of led me to be a Google Developers expert for web technologies. And I serve on the Node JS community committee.

But I spent, I spent like this past life or about 13 years or so contributing to the WordPress core software, to WooCommerce into all sorts of things WordPress, but been always kind of directed for JavaScript. So when kind of JavaScript kind of took off, I knew that getting a promotion, I definitely moved to the React JS community. And then from there to NodeJS, I'm handling all of this and then JAMstack came into being and it's like what we always been doing, but with a better name, a better community and with better, you know, tooling and practices.

So that's me apart from that. I come from a family Teachers, both my grandparents, both my parents. So teaching is sort of a genetic bug in me. So and I like to be sort of funny, at least I try to be. So I call this entertaining, education plus entertainment. So I entertain a lot in this course out on VSCode.pro, teaching people how I do a lot of development in less time, like 200 plus development workflows, and whatnot. So that's me.

Nice. And now, outside of like the teaching and the and the technology, what do you do for fun?

Ah, that is actually a tough one. So I'm actually an electrical engineer. They're like, they're, like 15 or so electrical engineers, my family before me. And all of them graduated from the same universities when I asked what should I do this at electrical engineering is what you should do. It's the mother field of computer science and everything. So but my hobby was actually writing blogs. I've been writing content for over 16 years now. So writing blogs, I ended up being a designer, the end front end developer then full stack. So that was the road that took me towards where I am right now. a software developer web developer, per se. So this used to be like my hobby that I used to do. It's now my job so I'm officially boring. But for years now I've been trying to pick up one another one other hobby, you know, for, for take something beyond this, but that thing came out to be teaching, but it's also related to this. So I organized a lot of meetups I go to, you know, different local events in talk about, you know, brain dumping what I did last week and whatnot. Beyond that, I used to play a lot of football back in the day, trying to pick that up nowadays again, because I can put on so much weight since then.

But that's me. My hobby became a job and I'm boring.

That's, Hey, there, there are worse things to happen. Right. Cool. So let's, let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit. So obviously, you've been doing JavaScript for a while you've been in the developer communities for a while. What was your entry point into this idea, this methodology that is JAMstack, static site, that sort of thing.

Okay, so as I mentioned, I love blogging, and blogging and like, with, with time, blogging has become more and more complex. It's like, you cannot just have one single theme for all of your ideas. So that's that's me. You know, sometimes, while I love the site that I built for my blogs, and whatnot, sometimes an idea would come into my head and it would need a different concept would need a landing page of its on its own sort of thing. But I wanted to integrate that into my current workflow, being a WordPress developer that helped a lot like I was kind of building the core and the REST API was kind of being worked on for WordPress.

So we could Probably build static pages inside of WordPress as well. But at the same time, I was doing all lot of demos, I would go to these events in talking about stuff. And I never liked kind of software that I use for presentation. So I wrote this small sort of, you know, me specific presentation module that was web, HTML, JavaScript and CSS in it, you on too many other open sourcers, especially my wife, we actually met through open source. So she had well a static site generic called Poodle, which would help her in many other teachers in her startup to teach but, you know, developers about building small stuff.

It was this was before codepen was like the go to, you know, sort of thing online. I think debate was around. It's not around anymore. Lea from Prism kind of build it. But that was the idea behind it. You know, when people are learning Android development, it's, it's, I think it's relatively easier like, you learn this language. And this is your IDE and go build something when they are learning native applications. It's, you know, learn swift or learn c++ and then go build something. But when you invite them to the web developers, it's like, you learn HTML, but it's not really a language, you learn CSS. It used to not be a language, you can now write follow ups on it. There are pre processes post processes, then, you know, it's a giant big mess.

And then comes JavaScript, and the frameworks and now matter frameworks, so it quickly becomes a cumbersome job to not only teach, but get students excited about what web is. So I initially kind of became a very big fan of the zero configuration sort of tooling. Because at the core of my heart, I'm actually a lot more into automation than even teaching or anything, I automate a lot of my workflows. So automating, you know, Webpack, or some sort of configuration, automating modern cutting edge stack, kind of introduced me to JAMstack, you know, that that is how I got into how I want to build cutting edge landing pages or cutting edge web, cutting edge progressive web apps, but I don't really want to care about upgrading, Webpack configuration and whatnot. But I really want those new features that Dan Abromov just kind of announcing in React. But I don't have time to go ahead and improve that on all my apps. So that is how I ended up the JAMstack.

Nice and a lot your students I'm sure to like they don't want to have to deal with with any of that. I just want to be able to like here's the little bit of code that we're learning today. Hey, it works.

Yeah. My I remember that in back in 2011, I will ask for you know, raise your hand if you want to become a web developer and like, there will be one or two people, everyone was into image processing, machine learning. And at least from my meetups in my conferences right now, when I asked this question now they're like, 90% plus audience are like, yeah, I want to React. I want NodeJS. So that excites the hell out of me. And I think stacks like JAMstack, have something to do with that, you know, making it easier for developers to kind of show off what they are made of you know? That's It

Yeah, get get to writing features faster.

Yeah, it's, for example, right now. a pupil of mine kind of reached out to me. And he asked, Is there a no-code way to build JAMstack? I said no. And that kind of that kind of kind of like I started thinking about it. Okay, JAMstack is, I know JAMstack is new but JAMstack is the way V developers were using cutting edge front end or trying to express themselves. And for at least for now, it's not really accessible for folks who are not like, developers.

So so it has sort of kind of, we've sort of kind of pivoted to this stack, which is like developers friendly. In the moment, you'll kind of hear that, okay, here's a site is built on JAMstack, you kind of get to know that. Okay, he's definitely a developer. So it this is sort of a I think community spirit that is happening and where, like, not every other stack like this. I don't I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying that. This is it. How it is I perceived that front-end developers nowadays, for things that are either production friendly or not production friendly, are expressing themselves through JAMstack.

Yeah, and the great thing is like if you notice a little bit about those web technologies, you can upload us a site and it's a JAMstack. So At that point, like, do you know a little bit of JavaScript? You're good to go?

Yeah, definitely. If you had a static website, I see like a couple of really senior engineers at Google. I think, Paul, he was kind of converting his old static website demos to JAMstack. And you're like, Okay, this is fun. Now, I can do this with this. Okay, I just added this bottom board and our progressive, as well

So kind of how are you using the JAMstack professionally nowadays, cuz obviously, you're with Cloudinary. You're making a whole bunch of demos, how are you actually piecing all that kind of work together using the jam stack? So a

Good question. Personally, I kind of was for what gets me early on, like, I use markdown a lot. So I use my time for stuff that should not be. I write my production emails in markdown. So and that is a really interesting use case. And then John came along and he built MDX, and then writing your emails with MDX it was really awesome. But to kind of render MDX, you kind of need to attach yourself to some sort of stack, I ended up Gatsby. And then I was releasing this course last year. This is actually a very big, giant mess of over engineering. If you kind of look at look behind. It's you know, stack it's, it's PHP, LAMP stack, LAMP stack, and then go microservices, the Node JS API's, and then it's, the front end is in Gatsby so ...

it's a little bit of everything.

Yeah, I spent a lot of time just building in elements that would be mine. For the sake of over engineer, I am, you know, we I would just, you know, write small markdown in just send it out through a bunch of Amazon, SaaS API's to just a couple thousand users who are subscribed to me. So so definitely When I was building the fernan I didn't really want to mess around with CMSs you know, I like them, I know their value, I do not want to be alerted one day okay, the site you're selling your course on has been hacked You know, there's a massive update that you need to take a look at.

I just wanted to kind of produce a static page and be done with it because there are good parts of JAMstack from production from security point of view. But because of those static ness of JAMstack, there are things that you need to rely on like. Like for example, services, you know, SaaS for example, you are use Stripe for payments, and then different sort of ideas kind of come into being if now you are kind of using a backend-less site, but now if you need a backend the old backends might not be that friendly, with the JAMstack, so you need something like, which is friendly for example, I ended up joining Cloudinary because they they do not know right now with their sort of Serverless media platform, you know, like the JAMstack.

The biggest issue that I had was coming from WordPress market to JAMstack is being managed by media so I used to have this awesome gallery that would kind of produce for example, when I upload an image in my blog in which is based on WordPress, it for just use Amazon cognitive services to fill out the alt text automatically. That's really helpful for me, you know, it is, is that accurate kind of throwing a ball so it was really good for accessibility. But with JAMstack, I didn't want to maintain my infrastructure for media. So I ended up looking at different services in that can actually help you land a job there as well. So I've ended up using JAMstack For my VSCode.pro site and for I have for, you know, developer DC demos like for example, developer advocates build a lot of proof of concept demos that they want to kind of showcase to different developers throughout the community when they present when they go to meetups of endearing workshops. I think JAMsstack is like, really good use case there. You end up building something that is performant out of the box, even if you don't want to have time to care about performance.

And the nice thing about the JAMstack in terms of like demos and stuff is that you could actually build a site, house all those and write a whole bunch of stuff in markdown and then inside of markdown break out into HTML, if you needed to, to, like showcase another piece of a demo. Exactly.

You know, people are doing all a bunch of things like I just saw it, it was this project running on GitHub, which would life transform mark down inside of you company you just in it is like like you can put it out there on your website and people would uttered markdown and it would render react base component. So that that's super awesome.

Cool. So So what is your kind of one, you know, jam in the jam stack? What what's the technology that you're loving a lot right now or the philosophy or what is keeping you in the JAMstack community right now.

I want to see, I came here because there's no denying about it. And then there's like, there are unintended consequences, which I'm said like, when you start building on JAMstack, you have a better chance of convincing your team your backend engineers that your API should be architected in a good way.

So before there, it was just you against them kind of debate. Now. It's a community of LAMP stack that understands that this is what they need. And so if he's sort of Like first class citizens a game for front end developers, even if they do not care about it, because they know stack and cares about that.

But for me, it's, it has always been about Markup. You know, if I have to pick one, Markup is, like, I love Markup, you know, even I have installed extensions customize them, like, for example, if I'm sending you code through my gmail account, I have built this theme called shares of purple, that my, you know, my code that I send you an email would be highlighted with my theme. So that kind of helps me do that. assembler graphics engine that will kind of when I click Send, it will render that component to HTML and send it to you via email. So So markup has been my go to thing I think, a lot of times, we developers, especially developer relation folks, a developer, advocates and evangelist, we are less productive because we automate everything Except for Markup.

Like, we would have all sorts of automated migrations going on and whatnot, and, you know, NPM modules and NodeJS, and whatnot. But when it comes to writing documentation, we're like, Okay, I have to open up that old SaaS software go into their UI in deal with that. So I have been able to be more characters and more newsletters, right, more documentations through sort of markdown markup automation that I cooked up, like, on top of, you know, my IDE is informal snippets and whatnot. And the same snippet library that I built for over like, over a decade or so, it's now useful in the context of jobs act, because like, I just converted to, you know, to any way through MDX or to other, you know, back home like for example, document building a documentation site used to be not so fun job, but now Vuepress. And I'm saying this as a React developer, you know, I am not a Vue developer. When I'm like building small demos, and my team needs a documentation site, I just go to Vuepress, they have an awesome presentation layer, and I really need to write as markdown. And it also kind of keeps my projects diverse. Like I'm using Node JS, js and VueJS in the same project. So Markdown, it is like, I think Markdown has gotten a lot of attention because of JAMstack. If you are in JAMstack community, in not paying a lot of attention to Markup, I think there's a lot that we can do there.

Yeah. And the nice thing is it doesn't really care what your framework is what your other technologies are. You can just write the same thing and port it from technology to technology.

Exactly. Even for them. But if you have this editor, or ideas that I write, and just markdown, I can write it anywhere from my tablet to my phone But I know it is going to be published really well in it has also kind of allowed me to kind of convince many other services that they need to support markdown. And if they don't, it's easier to kind of contrast from markdown to HTML and then send it to their API's, which they kind of need and James again helps me that doing that I don't have to bear that infrastructure.

Alright, so what is your like actual musical jam? You're outside of technology? What are you listening to? What's your what's your musical tastes favorite artists or favorite song? Or what are you into right now? Ah,

when I when I was hearing your forecast, I knew this is going to be the toughest. Because I hear all sorts of music journalists, I'm not native English, as you might have guessed already, so mostly, you know, songs in my language, but they would not resonate with the audience as much but for sake of tech That we do like for JAMstack I think I am a big fan of like every song that was written and the you know that feature of him The Greatest Showman I heard heard them so many times like I none of other you know songs could beat the rankings in there for iTunes for my personal setup and even you can find it in my you know teens blogs as well for example, if you take a look at my Create button blog project and you take a look at the change of section you will see I'm quoting a million dream song like it's at so perfectly mastered our you know, technical community like it's every night I lie in bed. The brightest colors fill my head, a million dreams are keeping me awake, you know, for the world. We are going to make it this is jam packed. So, you know, we're kind of reinventing how we used to do web. We moved from static to dynamic sites, and then started cashing the number Dynamic sites to static sites. And now we've ended up with this idea that that's not enough, we need to move back to static sites and let API and JavaScript handle everything. Well, we only write markup for. So a million dreams like of what is going to happen next, the kind of SaaS companies that are going to be built on top of jam stack that are going to make our jobs as the, you know, the experience of operational experience of our websites easier for end users. So it's amazing. So I've been listening to that a lot.

Nice. Alright. So what's something you want promote something you want to get out to the JAMstack community raise the attention of, again,

I think JAMstack is really awesome. But I kind of fear that for the sake of revenue generation, many companies are headed the same way. The way as we kind of came out of You know, for example, I don't know if this will catch on. I don't know if this is politically correct, but I want to dumb it down a little, you know, like, if we are reinventing how we did front end frameworks to meta frameworks, which are JAMstack frameworks, we do not need to create more complexity in there, even if there is a need further, I think the scenes not options, philosophy of purpose, books are really well, you know, make a decision for your audience and go with it, instead of introducing like 10 different ways of doing market with, you know, our framework, maybe have one recommended way of doing things. If that flexibility, nobody's going to hurt with that.

But having recommendations the scenes, and not making it complex, again, would really be helpful to you know, to the jam segment into a younger generation that is going to be that has already kind of fed up with, like, I, I gotten this question million times that how do you really keep up with the growth of humanity? So I don't know do not have a definite answer to that. I think we can keep up with the growth of our community. If we don't break down a little.

Yeah, yeah, make it make it simpler, make it easier to get into and then there's the advanced topics later that people can can dive into once they've gotten in exactly

like, if after learn react, and then the framework that was built on top of react, then the framework is not really useful. That framework I should be using their framework to augment what is complex to take the scenes for me that if concurrent mode is needed here at not, if if how I should be sending fetch request here in it is switching. My context has been switched from SSR to SSE. How the scene is like on mean, to know, what is the right way to face that API right now? I think if we are going to move into the direction of making things more complex, like, for example, there was this young apprentice of mine. He said that we used to live in a world of service hydrograph. I said, No, we used to live in several rendered apps server side is like new. So. So I, what I really want to happen as we make decisions for our users, so that things get easier for them. But help them kind of grow, you know, the makes their apps stays their apps. performance. Yes. Let's talk about best practices, not necessarily the thousands of ways you can do it. Exactly, I think, solutions instead of configurations as a good idea.

Yeah, exactly. So that's the call to action for the episode right there is go out and make simple documentation for the jam stack. Awesome. Cool. Well, I appreciate you taking the time. Time to be on the show today and and keep doing amazing things that cloud Neri and your personal stuff and all the writing that you're doing. I really appreciate you getting the word out there about all this cool stuff.

Thanks a lot for having me.

And as always, thank you to our listeners, thank you for listening. Thank you for viewing, liking, subscribing, all that stuff. It helps us keep pushing forward in this amazing JAMstack world.

Now it's time to talk about our sponsor a little bit. This week's sponsor is TakeShape. TakeShape is a content platform for the JAMstack. They've got a super user friendly CMS, a nice static site generator, and a dev friendly GraphQL interface. They're also working on their Mesh product, which helps helps you combine multiple API's into a single GraphQL API. So if you're interested in all that, go ahead and check them out at takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first real episode of 2020 you're listening to That's My JAMstack, the podcast where we dare to ask the question, what is your jam in the JAMstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And today on the show, we have a speaker, author, teacher, a developer relations engineer at Auth0, Sam Julien.

I'm also pleased to welcome back to the show are sponsored TakeShape, find out more about their content platform after the episode or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

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

Yeah, thanks. I'm really happy to be here.

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

Yeah. So I am a Developer Advocate engineer at Auth0, which is just sort of a fancy word for Developer Relations. And so basically, spend my time I'm doing a lot of interacting with developers who use Auth0 the product and then kind of taking that feedback back to the different teams.

And so I, I do a lot of speaking at events and things like that and working on basically combining x technology with Auth0 and trying to find the problems with it.

And then for fun, I actually live in a rural area of the Pacific Northwest. I live on 10 acres of land with my partner. And then we have some friends who also are in the own the land with us, and so they come up on weekends and stuff. And so we have, we have 20 chickens that we raise, and we're getting some eggs from and yeah, and so ever since moving on to this land that's sort of taken over as my hobby. I feel like I was a lot more interesting when I lived in Portland as far as like hobbies and activities but that's aside from taking care of the property.I see you have a Breath of the Wild artwork on your wall. And that's basically my current hobby is playing Breath of the Wild.

You could think almost a lifetime into that. So that'd be fine.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I don't know if I'm gonna go ... So we only got a Switch a few months ago. And I don't know if I'm going to go for completion on it. But Amy is definitely. She's already I think she's already got like, 105 shrines or something. And she's, she's going for 100%.

You could spend a long time going for 100%. So you eat a lot of the eggs that you get fresh from the chickens?

Well, we we just actually just started laying. Like a week ago, actually, we got them when they were chicks. And so I think we've almost got a dozen at this point. So we're probably going to start eating them pretty soon. There first ones are always kind of duds because they're like trying to figure it out and not fully formed. And so but I think we're just about there to start eating them.

All right. Well, this is this is neither a chicken podcast nor a gaming podcast. Let's let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit, right.

Unknown Speaker 3:17

So what was kind of your entry point into this idea whether there was static sites back in the day, JAMstack nowadays? What's your what's your entry point?

Well, I mean, aside from, you know, the, the, the real static site being like, index.html and everything. Aside from that, I would say my introduction to the JAMstack was through Gatsby, and my introduction to Gatsby was just through, umm... So before I was in Developer Relations at Auth0, I was on the content team. So I was writing tutorials and stuff and we sort of went through this process. The blog at Auth0 is in Jekyll, and there's sort of this ongoing debate internally of whether to migrate to Gatsby or not. And I don't, I don't know if they're going to end up doing it or not. Because you know how it is with wanting to rewrite a platform. It's like, it's like, is this a good idea? Like, legacy code is still, it still works. So. But uh, so anyway, so that's so some colleagues on that team, were telling me about Gatsby.

And so I started looking into it. And I kind of just like instantly fell in love with it and started messing around with it and building stuff with it and looking at everybody else's blogs and portfolios that they were making with it. And it just really like scratch the itch for me of both being a developer and a writer, and I just really liked it. So then that kind of led down the path of the rest of the jam stack and all that. I guess

So, when you got into Gatsby, had you done a lot of react previously or was that new too?

It was actually kind of my way into React. Because I, I'm historically an Angular developer, like I came from C# and then like C# and Angular kind of go really well together. And so I've done I had done a bunch of Angular over the last few years. And then, but Auth0 basically uses React almost exclusively internally. And so I was, it was already sort of on my list of things to learn. But Gatsby was sort of a nice, like way into react because it handled all the tooling and everything, since it's just, it's basically just a supercharged create react app. And so it sort of gave me this nice platform to just dig into react, while not having to kind of worry about the all the tooling involved.

it's also got, I think, I think, a pretty strong set of opinions to which helps kind of guide on best practices.

Right, exactly. And an Angular like, angular has A ton of strong opinions. And so that's sort of what I was used to. I mean, it's sort of there's pros and cons to both approach both approaches. But I think when I was first starting to learn react when I joined Auth0, I was a little like dizzy by just how many different ways you can slice and dice react. And so Gatsby really did kind of help just kind of narrow the focus of like, here's like, a set of tools, like a ready made thing for you now just write some react and and figure it out, you know.

So, how are you using the JAMstack professionally? I mean, I know you said that they're debating coming to Gatsby and they are on Jekyll. But you're not on that content team anymore. Are you doing some JAMstack type things and your developer relations that Auth0?

Yeah, so I I, I'm sort of doing both stuff personally and professionally with it from the professional side at off zero. It's mostly I've been really kind of digging into What authentication looks like in the jam stack because it's kind of an interesting. It's an it's an interesting, new problem set, because it's sometimes it's more like a traditional web app. And sometimes it's more like just a single page application. And sometimes you have these serverless models that you have to authenticate and stuff like that.

So so I'm sort of in this research phase right now if like trying to build different prototypes with Gatsby or Next or you know, things like that and wrap my head around what the problem set looks like of like, when is it more like a traditional web app? When is it more like a spa? When is there sort of this in between weird case of serverless stuff and all that and so that's sort of what I'm doing now is is figuring out how Azzurro fits in with jam stack stuff and how we can make it easy for developers and that kind of thing. And then from the on the personal side of things, I'm using Gatsby to build, build, I'm rebuilding, I am rebuilding my own personal site with Gatsby, which is I still am not convinced it's a great idea, but I'm going to do it anyway. And, and, and then I built I loved Gatsby so much, but I, I couldn't find exactly like the way of teaching it that that I liked. And so I built a course for a platform called things through.io on Gatsby just sort of like getting started with Gatsby. And so that's minute sort of another side project endeavors this, this course and different content, I ended up doing a couple egghead lessons on some Gatsby stuff. And so that's sort of my Gatsby sort of fueling my side hustle as well as my day job right now.

Cool. So uh, so what is kind of the thing that brings you to the JAMstack in terms of what do you love about it? What's your what's your jam in the JAMstack?

I really think this whole concept of not needing to pair a server with a front end is really nice. I just think that nowadays there there are so many different like SaaS products and like serverless products and things like that, that like, it seems like for a lot of cases other than complex enterprise stuff. You don't really need to spend a lot of time messing with building your own server and all of that, you know, it's just like, if you're just doing if you're pulling in data from outside, you know, like Twilio or wherever, you know, or AirTable or things like that.

Or if you're just making like a recently, a lot of developer relations as you know as building a lot of sample apps. And so recently I've been thinking I would always build like a little Express server to serve up data and stuff like that. And now I'm sort of like there's not really any point, I could just put this in a serverless function and reuse the same thing over and over again, and I don't really need it. So I'm really liking that, that the JAMstack has sort of opened up, like it's making so much stuff easier for a large a large percentage of apps that people need to build, you know what I mean?

Yeah, and so so you come from like a C# background so you're obviously not afraid of server side languages. I myself, deathly afraid serverside languages, so kind of, do you have a point where you would go and spin up your own server now or are you going to just be going in this serverless way going forward?

Well, I mean, I can see so like my my previous jobs were at like in doing like line of business applications for like bigger companies. One was like a finance company one was like a renewable energy nonprofit. So there, those places have a lot of complex business logic that has to happen, you know, with a bunch of data in a database where you have to manipulate and run a bunch of business rules and stuff like that. And to me that, that seems like kind of the obvious use case for like a real server where you actually, like, have a lot of stuff that has to interact with the database and, you know, sort of the more traditional route of, of servers and databases and all that. And so, but I think for a lot of modern stuff that's not enterprise level, the serverless JAMstack stuff works pretty well, you know, and especially with having node I mean, you can sort of just use JavaScript all the time and it's just things are just so much easier. It's It's really nice.

Front End Dev and designer like me, like it just makes my life so much more pleasant

Yeah, for sure. Definitely.

So so the kind of the whole methodology of that is is where where you're going with your jam, right?

Yeah, yeah. Basically the whole philosophy.

Yeah. So. So in terms of serverless and all that, right, so you said you started exploring authentication in this world for all zero. How's that going? Because I'll be honest, I haven't done a whole lot of research into it yet.

It's interesting. And one thing we can link to is one of our architects named Sandrino wrote this really cool article on NextJS and Auth0, but I mean, it's with Auth0, but it also anytime we write about Auth0, we try to also have things that are basically broad, more broad for authentication in general. But we're sort of figuring out that there's these like I said, sort of three different models basically, of like, sometimes it's more like a traditional web app because you're basically, if you're if you're doing everything server side, then it's sort of more like a traditional web app, right? Because you're, you're not really running anything in the browser. I mean, you're running it in the browser, but you're not. There's nothing dynamic happening in the browser. And so you would kind of go with the standard, standard web app approach.

And then there's things like Gatsby are sort of like Gatsby is interesting, because it's, it got its start as like a static site generator, but it's never actually like, holy a static site, right? Because it's still react, running, you know, like as a spa. And so that sort of this weird case where it's like, it's kind of a static site, but really, you would authenticate it just like you would a spa, pretty much. But then there's this like Next has this whole thing with the serverless deployment model. And from there, you sort of have to determine like where I need The authenticated data like do I need it when the page first renders? Or do I need it later? and Sandrino, you know, has some nice diagrams in that article that will do a better job of explaining it than I can in audio.

Lovely Mouth Blogging as Dave Rupert would say

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that stuff's really interesting. And I'm still sort of wrapping my head around at all and building out sample apps and stuff like that. But but it's, it's interesting. And it's definitely as the JAMstack continues to be as popular as it is more and more people will need to understand how to protect all their data and everything.

And Auth is probably the one of the biggest challenges to like adoption in the JAMstack right now to like, how do I protect pages when it's just static?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Our architecture and content and developer relations at Auth0 have all been sort of mulling this over for a little while, because I think actually, for this article, Sandrino was talking to people outside and stuff because it's sort of like how do we want to do this? You know, like, what are the best practices here?

Let's create some standards for it and kind of go

Yeah, exactly.

So let's let's talk musical jam now what are you listening to? what's what's your favorite song or musician or genre?

I finally I have a great answer for this now and it's because So have you ever heard of the band Big Thief I have made so they on their last on their most recent album, their their single is called Not. And it's got it's like one of the my, like, favorite songs that I've heard in several years. Like there's something very emotional about it. That is just really awesome. And it's nice because I yeah, I just haven't I haven't felt that kind of like connection to a song. In a really long time so I've been I've been playing that a lot not by big thief.

Let's see what else what else have I been? I feel like as I get older I have less and less like emotional connection to things because I'm not young and nostagic anymore but let's see what am I've been listening to you other than that. I like Tool's new album a lot. I liked Angel Olsen's most recent album, I'm a really big Angel Olsen fan. She's sort of like the singer songwriter type, but her album couple years ago, called What was it called My Woman in 2016. That was a fantastic album, if you haven't listened to it.

That's actually my favorite thing on the podcast other than learning about new technology is learning about all these like drastically different musical tastes and going and listening to what what everyone says.

I love that. I think that's a really great when I saw that question in the invite. I was like, Oh, that's cool. That's Great I like that. I'd be curious, what's what's your current jam right now? What are you listening?

You turn the tables on me!

I'm turning the tables

First time! You know, I just I'm behind the times always like that perpetually. But I just this past summer went and saw Hamilton, the touring company came around, and I didn't think I was going to... Like, I thought I would like it; like musical theater well enough, but like, I am in love with it. And it gets me going in the mornings like it really pumps me up. And then I go and research all the founding fathers and realize how horrible they were. But it it gets me going at least.

Yeah, now, Hamilton; Amy was really into Hamilton. And so I kind of I'm like neutral towards musical theater. Like, I don't I don't dislike it. I don't you know, but Amy was really into it. And so when it came to Portland, I got us tickets and we went, and I'll admit, like, I loved it. I thought it was like it was not overrated at all like I kind of went into it expecting it to be a little overrated because it's so popular, but like, I thought it was fantastic.

There's a reason it won all those awards.

Yeah, I mean, some some things are hyped up because they're actually that great, you know, like, like Beyonce.

Yeah, exactly. I found that running to it actually works really well, too. So I'm trying to get into running and that has just the right beat for how bad I am at running. So

Unknown Speaker 18:26

I didn't even know he had written anything before that. And I researched what he had done was like, Oh, you've done this before. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, he's Yeah, he's super talented. But that one is about like Washington Heights in New York and stuff like that. It's really great.

For someone indifferent towards towards musical theater you you've got at least that much now.

Yeah, that's true. I I kind of Yeah, I would say. Other than that though I'm I tend to be pretty neutral about about theater, I could take it or leave it. I respect it. And I respect that other people love it. It's just not it's just not my thing. Not my jam...

All right. And so let me let me ask, Is there anything that you would like to promote? Get out to the JAMstack community? Anything that you're doing that you won't get out there?

Yeah, I'll say on the on the professional side. Yeah, just keep an eye on Auth0 for JAMstack stuff because we're actively working on it. And, and if people have like input or things they want to talk about, we have a great community forum. So if you're running into authentication problems in JAMstack stuff, like definitely let us know because we're always kind of putting our ear to the ground and trying to figure out what problems people are having. So we can Try to solve them.

And then personally Yeah, the the Gatsby course on Thinkster. I'm really proud of it. I think it's a good course. And so that would be good. I'm also I just started, I'm starting this new project called Get a Job in Tech. I'm a self taught developer, I transitioned from finance. And I was lucky because I had some mentors that sort of shepherded me along the way, and not everybody has that. And so I'm starting this new, it's still really early, but basically, I plan on I'm already like, right, sending out emails and stuff and writing content for it, but it's basically to help people with the like, meta skills of getting your first job because I feel like a lot of people think, you know, they learned they learned some stuff on like, Free Code Camp or any any other great site on learning to code and then they sort of get stuck because they're like, okay, where's like, how do I actually get the Job, and you just sort of throw your resume up on a lot of places. And then you get these rejection letters that are like, you don't have any experience and you're like, no duh don't have any.

It's a Junior position, come on!

Unknown Speaker 21:12

Perfect. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today and share your insights. And I hope that you keep doing awesome stuff at all zero and that your chickens eggs are delicious.

Unknown Speaker 22:09

Yeah, no problem. All right. Well take care.

All right, it is sponsored time, I want to take a second and thank this week's sponsor TakeShape. TakeShape calls, their offering a content platform. And that's, that's really the best description. They have a handy CMS, a static site generator, and a simple GraphQL API all ready to use on the JAMstack.

Beyond all that they also have new features coming in all the time, like their new Mesh product that allows you to mix and match data from multiple sources into one neat GraphQL interface. If all that sounds interesting, you be sure to go to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack to find out more.

And as always, I want to thank the JAMstack community for listening for responding on Twitter for talking about things in communities. Just for being an amazing place to work and to play and to spend my time. So if you like this podcast let me know by hitting the like, subscribe, all those good things and whatever podcast app you use, and until next week, keep doing amazing things and keep things jamming.

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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a very special year end episode of That's My JAMstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and instead of our usual format of a q&a with just one JAMstacker, I've asked one question of many of our guests from the past year, that question very simply was, "What are you most looking forward to professionally and personally in the JAMstack in 2020?" Their answers were all amazing. So buckle up for a good ride.

We'll be back next week with our usual format. So be sure to like, subscribe, review and all that. But without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into all those answers. First up, we have Andy Bell, a designer and developer who was as it turns out our very first guest on this podcast.

The thing I'm looking forward to the most is totally a professional thing with the JAMstack. I'm working on some "STUFF" shall I say that hopefully will help people to make money on the web easier and the JAMstack plays a rather large part in that. But at the same time, the real interest is how a central system can play well with both the JAMstack or more traditional stacks, the focus being on making certain things as easy as possible for everyone.

Now I'm being very vague about what I'm talking about, because the plans that I've got in place are still very vague. But the important thing is, is that the JAMstack has paved the way for this sort of thinking to happen in the first place. Because the JAMstack's a completely different way of thinking to what we've been used to thinking in the past where the power is being put back in the hands of front end developers. So exciting stuff and the JAMstack is only going to keep getting better in 2020.

Next, we've got Laurie Barth. When we chatted with Laurie in Episode Three of the podcast. She was a software engineer at a company called 10 Miles Squared. Now she is an engineer at a little JAMstack company you may have heard of called Gatsby,

There's a couple of things that I think are really interesting. I think we're moving away from this kind of default assumption that JAMstack means static content, and kind of everything done at build time. And into more dynamic functionality, serverless functions and lambda functions and all of that, and allowing us to make full applications that are really the same as kind of RESTful applications. But with the benefit of performance.

Kind of on the flip side to that is we are making larger and larger sites with more and more static content where we can which is fabulous, but that's a lot of build time. And I love that we're starting to see people you know, I'm biased because Gatsby Cloud is doing this, but are starting to see people take a look at what that build time looks like and making that more efficient. And deciding and determining that being able to see real time preview and all of those things is still super important. But we still want to get our performance benefit of doing so much of this up front in the build versus the runtime step. So I'm excited to see both of those things kind of they've started but I think they're going to become a little more robust and talked about and common to the larger tech community. And I'm excited to see what people do with those possibilities. Yeah, so looking forward to 2020

Next up from Episode Seven, we've got Gift Egwuenu. Gift is a software engineer and one of the Co-organizers for Concatanate Conf and JAMstack Lagos.

I am really excited to continue working with the JAMstack in 2020. And recently, I've seen a couple of services pop up in my reader that I'm excited to try out and also do a lot more with serverless architecture because I feel like I've only touched the hem of the field. I want to do a lot more.

And also there are other things I'm looking forward to try out as well. There is the Netlify Build plugins that just got to know about recently. I feel like the JAMstack is evolving over time. And 2020 is going to be the year of adoption because I feel like so many people right now adopting the JAMstack it makes me so happy. So yeah, I'm looking forward to these things in the next year and super happy to continue working with the JAMstack.

And now from our eighth episode, we've got James Quick. James was a software engineer at FedEx when we last spoke, but now is a developer evangelist with Auth0.

So what am I looking for most in the jam stack in 2020? Well, for me personally, you know, I've got two two projects that are on Gatsby static sites, using Netlify as a host using some lambda functions and Netlify to kind of support some of the backend stuff. Looking at really making improvements on those websites. So just kind of improving my brand, but also taking advantage of more of those features out there in the JAMstack.

I'm really a big fan of the lambda functions in Netlify. I think I can kind of fill any gap for the most part that I need with some sort of back end functionality. They can fill it that way with functions and just kind of take care of it and not have to run my own server and I have to do all that stuff. Just basically to find that one function and have Netlify serve and host it for me.

Really excited for just like company wise, I want to see what Netlify does this year. I want to see what Gatsby does. Those are the two two big technologies that I follow in the JAMstack. And I think they they both got funding this past year. They both have lots of things in their backlog. I don't know what those things are at all. I don't have any personal insight, but you can tell that they're really excited for the things that they're going to do going forward. And I'm just excited to see see what that turns out to be, you know

And the Angular side, Angular just came out with a static site generator. So now you've got them across Angular, React and Vue, looking into going to probably spend some time looking into Vue this year. So I want to see what kind of the static site aspect of that is. I don't really have any insight into it at all at this point.

But yeah, I think for me, just the community is going to keep growing, you see more and more conferences, you see more, more blog posts, more podcasts, more people are talking about it. And this really feels like, like people were talking about it last year, and maybe started really talking about it the year before last year kind of had that consistent growth, it really seems like it's almost at a peak point where you're going to see a lot of a lot of people converting over and really not just asking the question, what is JAMstack, we're really diving into leveraging it for their own systems. And I just I'm excited to see how that grows. All the tools that come out, get play with new stuff, and to get to add extra features to to my sites and other people's sites as well. So I think it'll be a big year for the JAMstack in 2020. And I can't wait to see what happens.

Now we've got Brian Rinaldi, a developer advocate for Stackbit that I chatted with in our ninth episode.

What I'm looking forward to most for JAMstack in 2020 is moving from a curious niche in web development to becoming one of the primary ways developers architect websites. It felt as though 2019 was a turning point for JAMstack. Tools gained adoption, new companies developed in the ecosystem. And people started to really notice it. For example, I had a conversation with a well known company about a year ago that thought it was a fad unworthy of their attention. And that same very same company this year, told me they're ready to invest in it. So I think you know, if you think about the technology adoption curve 2020 will be the year we cross from the early adopters to an early majority and see that adoption increased dramatically.

Our Next answer comes from our guest for Episode 10. Tamas Piros. Tamas is an educator at JAMstack.training and a Cloudinary developer evangelist.

I actually look forward to two things in 2020. One is related to static site generators. And the other one is related to API's and headless CMS.

Basically, I believe that today, one of the key issues of the JAMstack, and the static site generators that are out there today is the fact that they can't do differential builds. What I mean by that is, if you have a site and you make a very simple change somewhere in the site, or just update a single blog post, static site generators will then rerender the entire site, which means that it's going to be potentially time consuming and there's absolutely no need to do that. So I know that Gatsby's been working on a solution and I hope that Other tools that are out there will also come up with their own solutions to do some sort of incremental builds, based on changes or based on maybe a user configuration.

The other thing that I look forward to is, as I said, related to headless CMS and the media, I find that today, the web is really visual. And therefore every website that we use, and every website that is being developed has a lot of images and videos. And of course, when you think about a content management system, regardless whether that's headless or something like WordPress, or or some others, they also need to have a way to allow users to utilize images and videos. Now today, there are only a few headless CMS out there that actually allow you to manage images and videos and I hope that more of them will have integrations with tools like Cloudinary, for example, for allowing the users to embed images in blog posts or in product descriptions or any other place.

And our final answer comes from the future. Believe it or not, in next week's episode, we'll be talking with Sam Julien from Auth0. He was kind enough to send me an answer to this question before he was officially on the show.

What I'm looking forward to in the jam stack in 2020 are a couple of things. First, there's a really cool project in the Angular community called ScullyIO, which is sort of going to be an iteration or a version of Gatsby but but with Angular instead of React. It's not exactly the same as Gatsby. But it's a JAMstack or static site generator for Angular. So that's one thing.

I'm also just generally excited for the direction that the JAMstack is going to go on the front end. I think people are finding there are a lot of benefits to Next. And there's a lot of benefits to Gatsby. And I think the community is going to continue to evolve and sort of merge together some of those feature sets as devs hammer out what works the best for doing static sites or server side rendering along with serverless functions for the front end. And yeah, I think it's going to be a great year.

So that's it for our 2020 year in preview for the jam stack. Like I said at the end of this episode, we'll be back next week with our usual format. Until then we here at the That's My JAMstack podcast are wishing you and yours a happy, prosperous and educational New Year. We'll see you next week. And as always, thanks for listening and making this community amazing.

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

Hello, everyone, welcome to yet another episode of That's My JAMstack. I'm your host Bryan Robinson and this will be the last regular episode of the year will be back to official episodes of The New Year. But we'll be tiding you over with a special holiday slate of episodes where various guests from this past year will be talking about their thoughts on the JAMstack in 2020.

This week, though, we have the COO of a company called DigitalCube. He's a self taught web developer and a JAMstack enthusiast I'm very pleased to have on the show Daniel Olson.

I'm also pleased to have back this week our sponsor TakeShape. You can hear more about their content platform after the episode or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

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

It's a pleasure.

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

I'm the Chief Operating Officer at DigitalCube. I get to work on all the products we develop and travel a bit sharing some of the work that we do. One of those products I work on is called Shifter. It's a static site generator for WordPress and some might say it's a serverless hosting platform. Another product I get to work on is called Animoto. It's a managed WordPress hosting solution built for enterprise. We're only limits the options that AWS can offer us, which is a lot. But my my role is a bit of a variety show. Like many companies and the growing JAMstack community, we wear many hats. Most days I work on MVPs and do feature development. And the way I like to do that is through customer feedback. So my kind of my main jam is finding gaps where our products don't like cover and then building solutions with the designers and engineers around that.

Cool so what do you do outside of work? What's your favorite thing to do when you're when you're off?

What do I do? Also a bit of a variety show. I'm in the kitchen a lot. I make a lot of food. I like to dine out and like You know, try different foods. I'm also a big beer guy, I run like a beer website on the side. And that's kind of my life is around like, you know, enjoying tastes. So if there's something to like something new to try, like if when I when I travel a lot, my co workers like to like push the boundaries a little bit, and they'll try to get me to eat like strange things, but it never really works out because I always enjoy it.

So what's your favorite cuisine that that you've tried?

Maybe I don't hate me. Maybe some of vegetarian listeners might be upset. But I did go to when I was in Japan with my co workers after a meetup. Someone asked me if I liked sashimi, which Yes, I love sashimi. But we were in Fukuoka, which I didn't realize that sashimi me has lots of different meanings. And I've learned that in Fukuoka, sashimi could mean raw horse meat. Which is pretty, like common in Japan and in certain regions. So, I mean, you know, I'm game if everyone says it's good, I'll give it a try. And I was very impressed. I learned a ton about this, like, you know, like food category I never really knew anything about or I thought I knew about. But I would go back like in a heartbeat. I would love to do that again.

Interesting. Interesting that that surprised me. You caught me off guard with that one.

Yeah, and you can eat all of it. There's certain there's certain pieces or certain cuts that must be grilled. And some of them you can or you don't have to so like they basically bring out like a like a grill. And you can use chopsticks and you just give it like a little bit of heat. For some of the pieces, some of the sausages you have to cook thoroughly. But most of it you can eat with you know, Ginger or rice or like pickled vegetables. It's it's a I think it's a good experience. If you're, if you have the opportunity, I recommend it.

Interesting. Cool. So obviously not not a food podcast, more of a more of a tech podcast here. So let's, let's talk about your, your enjoyment of static sites or the JAMstack, what was your entry point into this kind of philosophy of building sites?

It's kind of a funny story. Um, my introduction to static sites was at, I worked at a branding agency for a number of years, and we're pretty small team, one of the other developers I worked with, he was, you know, kind of more familiar with the static sites and the services generators out there. And he told me about them and you know, we are WordPress shop. So thinking about, you know, the value or, you know, what the clients would need. It was always really difficult for me to, you know, jump ship and recommend that to our clients because at the end of the day, they're the ones who have to live with these sites and edit them and, you know, help like grow them.

So, you know, writing markdown using like, a non familiar CMS backend other than WordPress. was kind of a hard sell. But we it still was in the back of my mind. But when I went to a conference in Philadelphia, where I'm from, and I met this group of, you know, Japanese developers, and they were working on this interesting product, and they introduced it to me as a "Third Wave". They're like, this is this is going to be the future. And they kept trying to explain it to me, I didn't quite get it. And I didn't actually really understand it until like a year after. But what they were trying to do is to bring some of the approaches that status like static site generators were doing to the WordPress community and like bridging that gap. And it didn't click at first and it really made no sense to me because it was explained as the third wave, but, but it makes total sense in hindsight now.

So that was that was my first introduction. It was like I was kind of like I fell into it. But I also was like, living amongst it for For years not really paying attention to it,

So with with that what they were doing was that before WordPress had the API stuff was that before you could go headless with WordPress, or is that they were doing their own thing around that.

It was it was kind of alongside so there was these, you know, two communities within the WordPress ecosystem at that time. And it was people who are developing, you know, they're like power users are using plugins to do things. They're doing theme development. And then there's this other track where, you know, they're a group of developers are really trying to push the boundaries of what WordPress can do just as a blogging tool like they're using it as a full featured CMS. And that was when headless really kind of took off the REST API was getting a lot of attention.

Some of these other projects, and even plugins, were using the REST API, but it's I think, I call them that like their technology magic tricks, like, yes, it works. And then like you build a little demo, and then let's see how far we can take this magic trick and like you build out these incredibly large sites using WordPress. Completely headless. But it's really just, you know, an extension of that first demo, like, are you doing anything different? It's just the implementation.

But when I learned about the the project that these guys were working on, it was totally different. It was kind of a mix between the two. Yes, we want to give users the same experience that they're familiar with in the back end. But we also want to deliver the benefits that these other ideas can offer, like the benefits that jam stack has, or the benefits that headless has. So it was like kind of a cross between the two. But it was the WordPress REST API that actually enabled it.

True. Yeah. Cool. So would it be fair to say that kind of this idea of WordPress headless is where is where you kind of got into everything?

Yeah, yeah. And it was, um, you know, we, at the agency I worked at we built a lot of just, you know, demo sites and like little product sites for clients and it at the time, it was like a total experiment you couldn't even do it natively in WordPress, it was an extension like you had to install a plugin to enable the REST API. It was that early. And now it's a part of core and we talked about it. It's, you know, this ubiquitous thing that, you know, everyone's familiar with it if you're in this community, but at the time, it was like, What is REST? What does that mean? And yeah, so it's, you know, I'm, it feels good to be a part of something that I've got to see grow over time.

Cool. And so so I'm kind of curious about about headless WordPress. I've only I've done magic tricks with it. That's about as far as I've gone into that world for, for WordPress in the JAMstack. What are some, some challenges y'all have been overcoming? What are some, some things for people to kind of be aware of if they start playing with this idea?

So headless WordPress is I would consider that it's its own category. And the work that I do in the kind of the world that I live in, within like the development community, there's it's really three distinct categories. So you have like traditional WordPress, which is what, you know, people are familiar with that. And then you have headless WordPress which is decoupled. You're building your JAMstack site and using WordPress as your CMS or back end. And then you have static WordPress, which is kind of the in between. So we're using WordPress as a static site generator. So it's that's like its own special category. You're, you're not converting or building a new site using WordPress as your back end. You're using WordPress itself and generating the static site from that. That site itself, it's not there's no Developer Tools involved. It's just native WordPress.

Oh, interesting. So instead of like a cash, you're and then you're building in your build step from the actual WordPress files on a Linux server.

Yeah, so it's actually the way that we do it is the the approach is service. So the end result the way that it's delivered. And the product itself is built as service. So we were using AWS lambda. So we're an AWS advanced technology partner. So about 50% of our team are just AWS engineers who have a deep understanding of those technologies and the infrastructure. And then about the other half are WordPress developers. So we work really tightly together to develop solutions that take advantage of what AWS has to offer, and kind of leverage all these capabilities for WordPress. It's not, there's like there's two ways to do WordPress in AWS, you run WordPress, just as a layer on top, and it's just there. And then or you could actually kind of integrate it into the services and just get a lot more of opportunity, a lot more power out of it. But the way that we're doing it is we use the WordPress REST API, which like I said, it was basically that was the catalyst that made this possible.

The WordPress REST API the way that we use it, we use that to get to get a list of links from the WordPress site. So we we can, like at a quick glance, see every page that exists by hitting a certain REST API path. And then we pass that to AWS lambda, which then queues up a list of URLs to crawl. And then it crawls each URL seems it to an s3 bucket. And that gets served with CloudFront. So at the very basic level, that's kind of how it works.

Very interesting. And so you're, you're you're still using like WordPress, his own templates and all that, right.

Yeah. So if you want to use the themes, same themes and plugins, you are free to use those as long as they there's certain exceptions like contact form plugins, they naturally in the WordPress world, they want to post data back to the WordPress database, which, at that point in time, doesn't exist because you've now created a static site and WordPress is no longer in the picture but There are some like opportunities and shims that exist. One of the I developed a couple of plugins that will swap out like action URLs within forums to send those to third parties, whether it's, you know, jam stack friendly, like forums as a service sites like a forum spree or form kit, or basin or even that with five forms.

Interesting. So I want one things I've always wondered about headless, headless WordPress is the idea that if you're using WordPress headless, and you're doing it like with your own static site generator on the side, you're really getting like 25%, maybe 30% of benefit of WordPress, that sounds like y'all are closer to like, 75 or 80% of all the benefits of WordPress, because I was I was always like, why would you ever use headless WordPress if you're only getting a small portion of the benefit of it?

Yeah, and I see that too. And having like, really, like dived into the JAMstack ecosystem, seeing the tools that are out there, it's still growing. There's still a lot of rooms who for it to mature, and they're like things like gaspee the plugin ecosystem is like booming, there's, you know, there's a lot of stuff out there. But there's still more stuff in the WordPress world. So I get why people still want to use it like the theme themes are one thing, but also plugins, like having the opportunity to just search the plugin directory of the 50,000 plus plugins that exist, there's going to be some solution in there for whatever problem you need. And most of the time, it will work in that scenario, like even as a headless option. If it's a popular plugin, they probably have developed REST, like paths for it, to interact with it in a headless manner.

Yeah, but even then, like if you're if you're interacting with it in the headless manner, you then have to build that functionality into your templates unless you're using WordPress as its own static site generator at that point.

Yeah, and in that case, you just use it natively, how you want to, you know, experience it naturally in the WordPress world. And then you just click a button and then we crawl your site generate a static version. And then power down WordPress.

Awesome. So So it'd be fair to say that headless WordPress is kind of your jam in the JAMstack, or do you have any other like products or tools, services philosophies that you're really digging right now.

Um, I was introduced to. It's kind of funny. It's like, it's a feature that we developed. But I didn't really get much use out of it personally, until a customer had a very unique request. And it was the integration between our product and Netlify web hooks. And I started to use Netlify web hooks, just so you can basically build your static WordPress site on Shifter and you can deploy it to Netlify so if there's like, you know, I want to use Netlify Forms, I want to use Netlify analytics, I want to use the basic auth or I have another application and I want to keep all of my sites in one place. You can do that.

But one of the things that I didn't really dive into was there build tools. So when when you do the web hooks, and you can customize the Netlify Builds you can get like really granular with all the different things that happen during your build runtime. And I like I don't know why I just never really got into that. But I, one day, I just kind of spent all day reading about it and, you know, learning about it and testing it. And I was like, blown away by all the options that they have in there. It's kind of it's a, it's a hidden gem. Like I recommend spending a little time reading about it.

Well, I'm nowadays they even have the ability to plug into into the build process. They have variables, you can set up to do a whole bunch of stuff that they're testing out. Right now it's in beta.

Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a lot of amazing like fun stuff that's going on. And also the forms and the way the analytics work. It's like It's like analytics is such a difficult thing for a lot of web developers because of ad blockers and like proxies and networks. But if you're running your analytics like Netlify does based on Like the server stats itself, like you, like you're making a connection to this site, whether you blocked an ad script or not, that analytics reporting tool is still going to measure all that data. It's not going to give you like, as much as something like a google analytics that you're allowing to track you. But it's still a valuable tool for developers and even like, you know, if to run your business like what's going on in my application, you can cost optimize and and see what's really happening

And doesn't affect front end performance. Which is great, too.

Yeah, it's something that happens naturally, that data is logged anyway for the server itself. So you know, just providing access to it is it's crazy like it's they're providing access to it. It now has become a product.

Yep. Oh, yeah. Gotta find ways to monetize and keep the keep the doors open. I want Netlify around for a long time.

Yeah. And keep keep your customers happy.

Exactly. Cool. So So what's going to keep you in the JAMstack? Obviously you It's important you right now, which is great, but like, what's the core philosophy that you're gonna dig into in the next couple years?

I am a, my, my core philosophy is the rule of least power. I think that a lot of times we, you know, hit solutions with the hammer instead of like, figuring out a different approach, like every problem is a nail. Like the, the idea of applying JAMstack has, like an approach is really appealing to me because it focuses on something that I also really appreciate. And that's design thinking. So rather than just applying a solution, or you know, throwing more power at something, or making it like overly complicated jumps that can can be quite elegant, because it's using only things that you need.

So as opposed to what you know, like WordPress is traditionally a monolith. It comes with a lot of things that you don't necessarily need or may ever use. But JAMstack is like, All right, I'm building this site, I need comments. Just add the comments you need. I need ecommerce right now I'm just going to add ecommerce, but you don't need other features. They don't exist you didn't build them. And that's what I love about the the JAMstack community is it gives us the opportunity to pick and choose and kind of build exactly what we need.

I actually the rule of least power is one of my guiding principles actually wrote a blog post about a year ago on it. One of my favorite things that came out the development of HTML and, and and the web.

Yeah, and like I always kind of,I always get stuck like whenever there's a new app or new tool out there, like Yeah, but like this thing does it but also there's no UI for it and it runs faster. And I like I'm just kind of geeking out over that stuff like a Hyper, like Wes Bos on JavaScript courses he uses Hyper a lot. And like, I love looking at it. Hyper is like a beautiful terminal. But also it runs JavaScript and like it kind of takes a lot longer to open then just like my terminal with nothing in it. So that's like, those are my daily struggles.

The new cool versus what's the most efficient for you?

Yeah, don't go overboard. Just use what you need and get the job done. It's also I think it's good for me because I work with a lot of customers to on their servers. And like, if you're logging into a server, you don't have the luxuries of your like your customized bash scripts. And these, you know, like pretty UI is like you just have to know what you're doing. And like just kind of using the basic tools to get the job done is has really paid off for me. It's it's taught me a lot.

Having the same tools that everywhere definitely makes it easier when things go wrong in the non fancy places.

Yeah, I sometimes I think of it as like a little form of torture for myself just because I'm not giving myself like an advantage but it's it pays off in the long run

definitely alright so so let's let's talk music what's your actual jam right now what what musician or song or type of music Are you really into right now?

My my musical tastes vary throughout the day some days I wake up listening to like Wilco on all my Alexa devices just blasting throughout the house. And then maybe by lunch I'll be listening to like little Wayne's the Carter three and I'll just have like genius up like the website genius and just I'm picking apart all the rap lyrics. Um, but yeah, like I I, the thing that I really enjoy right now is and it's the perfect background noise for me. It's this thing called poolside FM. And there's a website for I think it's just poolside.fm but it's a it's a website that kind of looks super 80s and it plays music videos and also music along with it, but the music videos are like clips like old VHS random clips almost like everything is terrible. But I don't know it's just like the perfect background noise when you're like coding or just need something on while you're cleaning the house. And I've they never show like the what's playing are actually I listened to it on my Alexa but they never show it's playing so I'm always like asking my phone like, What song is this

as a little mystery to your life? Yeah. Cool. So is there anything that you would like to promote that you're doing right now that you want to get out in the world?

Um, actually, I want to give a shout out to to Phil Hawksworth from Netlify about I want to like throw back to one of your previous episodes and something he said that it's it's funny when I listened to the episode I I've said the same thing in a couple talks and it just resonated with me so I want to call it out again.

He he said something he's very careful about using the phrase static sites and I totally agree with that. And the reason that I agree with that is one of my favorite sites jamstack.org, which is kind of like a manifesto for me. It's like we are the JAMstack party. This is what we believe. But the most important part of that website is what it actually does not mention, it doesn't mention any specific frameworks. It completely focuses on best practices. And if you search the site, for the word static, it only appears once. And it says, I'm pretty sure it says probably static.

So it's like kind of like, you know, going back to it. This is not, we're not purists. This is an approach. It's a philosophy. And then it's a way to build something better. But yeah, that's kind of that's a that's I just wanted to mention that But yeah, I don't really, I don't really have anything to promote, like we we have, we're in the WordPress community. But we're kind of like we straddle those two things like WordPress and jam stack but I just think that, uh, the WordPress community and also the jam stack community has a lot to learn from each other. I think that Jeff slack.org is a good place to start. I think that really focusing on the approach rather than the tools is something that is really important that that you should do, and that you can learn a lot from. And also just talk to other developers see what they got going on and see what problems they have to solve. Maybe you can help them maybe your experience is valuable.

And we all kind of have different problems. And we find the right solutions for them no matter what the stack is.

Yeah, yeah, in in the WordPress world, like I've I've developed plugins, and some of the plugins that I've developed. I tried to build them so that they work in both environments, whether you know, you're running on Shifter, and we create a static site from that from that site for using WordPress. But you can also build that plugin so that it can work natively in a native WordPress and like hosting environment. And I've learned that building Something that applies to both types of like hosting platforms, it actually just makes it more performance overall. And like, you don't need to, it doesn't need to be static, but the way that you've built it, it could be static. And the end result is just more performance. So why not build it this way? anyway?.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to talk with us. And I hope you keep doing some amazing stuff on the jam stuff.

Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.

All right, it's sponsored time, I want to talk today about a specific feature in TakeShape, which is our sponsor, for this episode. And that's the API Explorer. Inside your TakeShape dashboard, you'll find the Explorer and it's a really great tool for a GraphQL novice like myself, but it also has lots of great features built in, like some autocomplete and built in documentation. It makes it really incredibly easy to find all the pieces of data that you want to include in a GraphQL query, and then it's going to build that query for you. It's a simple copy and paste away from your static site generator. So makes it really, really easy to interact with, TakeShape's API. They have a lot of other great functionality as well, you should definitely go and check them out. And you can do that by hitting up takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack.

I also want to thank our guests, Daniel again, and thank all the amazing listeners in the JAMstack community. Remember, if you're enjoying this podcast, give it a star a heart an upvote or review in your podcast app of choice to help new folks find their way to listening in and with that, we're gonna see you in the new year but I hope you keep doing amazing things in the JAMstack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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

Hello everyone and welcome to yet another fun packed episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast where we asked the age old question, what is your jam and the JAMstack.

I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and this week I'm joined by the former marketing lead now CEO of the e commerce startup Snipcart. I'm talking of course about François Lanthier Nadeau.

Also back this week is our amazing sponsor TakeShape. Stick around after the episode to hear more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information. François, thanks for thanks for coming on the show today.

Yeah, you got it. It's my pleasure.

So I've been following following you on Twitter for a little while, but I go ahead and give us an introduction. who you are what you do for work what you do for fun.

Yeah, good. Same thing actually been following you on Twitter for a while to listen to some episodes recently. So yeah, I'm CEO at Snipcart, it's an ecommerce solution for developers and then also the organizer of the JAMstack Quebec meetup that we host here at the Snipcart offices in Canada, in Quebec, Canada. For fun I play video games I read, I listen to audiobooks and podcasts I write, and I try to spend as much time with meaningful people like my girlfriend, family and friends. And that's pretty much it.

And what kind of things do you write? Like, is it is it tech stuff? Or is it not tech stuff?

It's actually both. I come from a marketing background. So sometimes, all right, I don't know tactical stuff on content marketing or SEO. But sometimes I'll write more personal stuff. I kind of have this semi official mission of talking more openly about mental health. And I've had some personal issues with this in the past and I try to share stories and tips and lessons regarding this. So yeah, sometimes it's more in that order.

Okay, great and That's definitely a an important mission in tech. There's a lot of people not talking enough about it.

Yeah, I think men especially sometimes, sometimes we have a harder time. So I don't know. It's Yeah, I find some some value in Redemption of my own and trying to do that.

Excellent. All right, so So let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit, It's a JAMstack podcast. So what was your What was your entry point into the JAMstack or into the idea of static sites or whatever you like to call it?

Yeah, we used to call it something like modern static site. It was Middleman and Jekyll. Mostly that got us into this space. So when we were just starting out as a SaaS, ecommerce, Saas for devs, we were just, you know, trying to get some traction to our site and some signups and stuff. So we were experimenting with different content marketing, strategic And at one point, I was asking our developers about tools they love and our co founder and lead developer, Charles mentioned Middleman. And he was saying that it was gaining a little traction and popularity through the dev community. So we we tried to build a site with it and integrate Snipcart with it. And it went just fine.

Yeah, Snipcart is a front end centric, e commerce shopping cart that lives basically just in your front end. And we do all of the back back end logic. So it was a good fit from the start with the JAMstack approach. But it wasn't designed as a JAMstack ecommerce tool. We kind of stumbled upon the whole paradigm and tooling to these marketing experiments, if you will.

Cool. And Snipcart started in what? 2013?

Yeah. Yeah, that's about right. Late 2013.

Okay, and and so so through that, that experimentation? Did y'all shift away from middleman? Are you still using that sort of thing when you're playing with your marketing stuff? Or is it in the new? The newer stuff that's coming out?

Oh, most definitely. So we try to evolve and experiment alongside the community with tools that were popping up. So we kind of created open source demos and get them repurposed for established tools like Jekyll. But we also, I mean, we also, for instance, experimented with Gatsby when it was just an open source repo with no website, or branding, or it wasn't that big of a deal, you know. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's part of our DNA to try and experiment and have thousands of side projects. Like developers usually do. So we thought we might as well try to harness this into, you know, attraction channel that brings us people and that also helps the community when we do these tutorials and and GitHub repos and stuff.

So obviously, being not necessarily a JAMstack company, but a company that is very strongly tied now into the JAMstack. How are y'all other than the side projects approaching the philosophy of the JAMstack? I'm real curious about e commerce and the JAMstack. I think that's going to help us take take it to the next level.

Yeah, ecommerce is... it's a complex based. And you can you can see that just by looking at the wide spectrum of solutions that are offered both to developers and non developers. In terms of influences and application of the actual philosophy, I'd say we, we really embrace or try as much as we can to embrace DX first philosophy. So it's as JAMstack caught popularity and fire and everything because it offered a good developer experience. And that sense, we're kind of trying to do the same thing with Snipcart. And we have been from the start, it's always been a developer first solution, something that is not constraining. It lets you work with the tools you love. And that's lightweight that improves your workflow instead of constraining it. So that that strategic in that approach of like the bottom up influence in terms of business, so we first try to influence and convince a developer that it's a great tool. And then we leverage the developers authority and influence inside a company or towards his client, their client.

To make make sure the managers and merchants are on board with that tool. Also. So this this the, the dx is something we're really trying to focus on right now. And you see, it's funny because the dx is great. Like it's important to provide a good developer experience. But then if the end of to some non technical client or some marketing team is done, and they do not have like the ease of use that developer had when they were working on on their stuff, it's not it's not good for the gemstone. It's not good for the old ecosystem was tooling. And that's why you're seeing a lot of tools pop up, to cater to this problem. So editing CMS site building, hosting, one click deploys, all of that stuff is is is layered on top of the the core dx experience of the jam stack. And yeah, we do the same thing with the hosted merchant dashboard. So the developer works with snap cart, they integrate it on a static site, let's say or with a headless CMS. And afterwards, the merchant is off is offered a hosted dashboard to manage the e commerce operations. So they don't have to play with code or get repositories or whatnot to manage your sales, ecommerce.

And so, one of the great things, especially on the developer experience side of thing is this kind of whole host of API's that are available for us. I'm kind of curious for your perspective on on. There's been some pushback from non JAMstack developers about kind of this this fractured ecosystem not fractured, that's a bad word, but like a multi faceted ecosystem. Are you experiencing that with, with people with clients, like oh, well go login to Snipcart for your ecommerce dashboard, but over here to manage the other side.

Yeah, that's that's actually a great question and I was talking was, there's this pendulum in tech that I feel is swinging between monoliths and then thousands of SaaS that are fragmented, like you were saying, but so some people would prefer the administration part to be enabled in one single place for their clients. And for these people, if they're motivated, and I don't know, talented in terms of the tooling they're using, they can, of course, integrate a lot of Snipcart functionalities inside a CMS directly. So we expose we have an API for this and we've seen it done on various sites. CMS, like Craft CMS is one of the first that did it well, so there are some plugins for snip card into some other cmss that can help in that regard. We tried to develop them ourselves in the beginning, but we realized it was just a whole mess, like maintaining everything we're developing with the other plugins that are specific to a certain CMS, for instance. So yeah, I'd be lying if I said, sometimes it isn't a pain. But many times, the ease of implementation and customization of Snipcart is a bigger benefit than the pain of having to login into an extra dashboard.

Sure, and I mean, from from my experience in agency world from a few years ago, we would create a Shopify site, but then also use another CMS through the marketing side, and that itself was a pain too.

Yeah, it can happen. But you know, Shopify is a great tool also. And I'm not like, I know that we used to say it was a very closed ecosystem and whatever in the beginning, but I think it's evolved a lot and some developers, they get so it also depends on It's so it's so complex choosing a tech stack nowadays because of this whole host of options. But the I think the thing that's very cool with the JAMstack is that it can grow well, it can evolve well, so you can start with a minimal number of tools, and then build upon them. And maybe when once you get to a point where you have enough revenue enough traction, maybe then you you move to a platform that's more monolid. So yeah, I don't know, I think it's a very solid entry point for web projects.

And it kind of I feel like e commerce especially it's this kind of world where you can ramp up complexity super quick. You can start very, very simply, and even like Shopify in terms of its you know, quote, unquote, simplicity is relatively complex and you get stuff like big commerce and Magento. And I shudder anytime I think about e commerce personally, but It gets complex fast for, for that end users. But for customers at that point?

Oh yeah, most definitely. I always joke about. So a Snipcart, we built an e commerce tool for developers. So developers don't have to worry as much about e commerce as they they could have. But if we were to start again, we probably build another product, because it's super complex. And I hear these kinds of echoes from people who are building on top of email Also, sometimes. Yeah, I mean, it's infinite number of features, feature requests coming in from every angle. And having just stepped up a CEO slash product owner. Geez, I can tell you that prioritizing and saying no, and developing the right stuff that benefits both the clients and the best Isn't this? It's a challenge. Yeah,

Especially since you've got both you got to maintain that perfect kind of developer experience and give, you know, user experience for the e commerce managers to

Oh, yeah. Oh, of course. And, like, we're, we're proud of what we built. And it's a good product. But I'm not the I'm not. I don't know. I don't have pink glasses. I know that it's an imperfect product. And also, like, we come from a place of a hybrid bootstrapped start. So we were bootstrapped inside a web agency in the beginning, like six years ago, but we soon grew into our own company that's distinct and profitable and whatnot. But we're still a bootstrapped player in a mostly non bootstrapped world, the e commerce giants and whatnot. Most of them are VC backed or have big money. So the challenge in terms of what we're working on, that becomes critical. And in a sense, in other areas it served as well to have this proximity and smallness and agility. So,

So so with Snipcart being adjacent to the to the JAMstack. What's your current jam in the JAMstack? What's your favorite philosophy or product or technology? Yeah, that's,

That's, that's, that's a question that you record it and then a few months later you might want a new answer. But one of the philosophies that I like the most about the JAMstack is the notion of decoupling.

So, I try to mimic this into my work in my personal life too. So at work, you know, we're trying to do wanting well, and not to be over to place product. And it's hard since we're doing e commerce and e commerce is all over the place. But in terms of management, and internal Team, we're also trying to delegate and trust other parties to do their job well, so we can sync up when it's time, but we don't walk on each other's shoes. And you know, in life, it's the it's the same thing. I think the non technical and non startup part of my life really feeds back into the work one. So I'm trying to decouple officially some activities and relationship and discussions. So so I can, you know, work on some other skills and stuff and then have a different point of view in a different energy when I come back into the business and development world.

And yeah, so to answer the question in terms of tooling, more specifically, Stackbit that was on the podcast, I think the last one or one of the last ones. That's that's very good tool. And we were talking about layering some user friendly tooling on top of dx. Cool for dev tooling. They're doing a great job at this as a not not not developer, I can like build a JAMstack site, and in minutes. So this is great Netlify for developers. Also, they're building a platform that's becoming very rich and useful. And internally, we're using more and more Sanity as a headless CMS. And Nuxt, to generate the static site. And some more dynamic functions in the fronted. So we've used this for our new documentation. We released the V3 of Snipcart, a few weeks ago or months, and yet we're using this for this and we'll probably use anything Nuxt to an or maybe Gridsome for the upcoming marketing site. So yeah, I mean, it's this is a dynamic ecosystem. People are motivated people are friendly when we were in New York, was speaking on a panel gems tech conference conference in New York for e commerce and I don't know it just it's a great vibe. And I feel like it's it's cool community to be a part of right now

How's the actual physical community for for the JAMstack meet up and up in Quebec?

Oh, it's small but growing, and we're around 20 people when we do the meetup. And what's fun is that we've like we're always gathering feedback in iterating each meetup and some of the feedback we've been getting is, okay, so I know I can make my own blog with Gatsby and it's very cool and react and whatnot. But I want to do this in production. I want to do actual work for a client in my agency or as a freelancer with this. So show us some production examples.

So we kind of decided to do some more real life technical demonstrations of look at this website and the wired we built, it is running for clients and some marketing people are using it. And it's a real production ready project here, how we here's how we bundled it. So that's great. And we're trying to push towards this like have more agencies use static sites for simple sites, have more agencies trying to experiment with headless CMS to decouple the front end if the clients that need to push some stuff on mobile on some some screens or some and desktop, so I think it's growing but it's Yeah, it's still a teenager in terms of adoption on its life cycle.

Alright, so I don't want to you know, blow our time estimate for the episode of the water but what's your what's your actual jam right now? What kind of music Are you listening to favorite song favorite artists? Yeah.

I've been curating a Spotify playlist on my personal account that I titled, is that soul I feel in my guts. It's a weird mix that really makes me feel like alive and it's like the Janis Joplin and other Sam Cooke and other cool artists like this. So this is this is my answer

So you're going to give me that link right?

Of course. Yeah.

Perfect, perfect because actually, I love that that type of music too. So got it. I'll be listening to that personally and then we'll put put it in the show notes too. Cool.

And so so finally, what do you want to promote today? What do you want to get out in the open in the community?

Um, great question. Well, your podcast, it's good. Thank you for doing it. Much appreciated. Of course, Snipcart's latest version, the V3 is out, snipcart.com. You can check out the documentation and tell us which think other than that. There's this semi official mission of Destigmatizing mental health in tech and my personal life that if some people are interested, flanthiernadeau.com. So my name .com. I have written about this over there.

Great, and we'll put that in the show notes to to make sure everyone can find their way over. Cool. Cool. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time and talk with us today. And I hope you keep doing some amazing stuff over stuff card.

Okay, well, thank you have a good day.

Everyone is Bryan again. And I want to take a second to thank this week's sponsor TakeShape. TakeShape calls their offering a content platform. And that's really the best description for it. They have a handy CMS, a static site generator and a simple GraphQL API already for use on the JAMstack. They may have all that power, but they also work within your current workflow. I'm currently converting one of my sites over to use the TakeShape CMS but because I can bring my own stack site generator, I don't have to rewrite a lot of code. I just changed where my data come from, and bam, instant upgrade to my CMS.

They also have new features coming on all the time, like their new mesh product that allows you to mix and match data from multiple sources into one neat graph qL interface, you can sign up for a beta of that new product over at takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack.

And while you're here, don't worry Get to leichhardt Subscribe, all those great things that you can do and your podcast app of choice to the that's my jam sec podcast, the more likes and subscribes and all that good stuff that we get, the more people find out about this amazing new way of doing design and development on the web. As always, thanks for being a listener and we'll see you next time. Until then keep doing amazing things in the JAMstack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of that's my jam into the podcast where we ask the burning question, what is your jam in the JAMstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And in today's episode, we're talking to a Cloudinary developer evangelist and awesome technical trainer, who just started jamstack.training Tamas Piros.

Today's episode is sponsored by TakeShape, a content platform made specifically for the JAMstack. Stick around after the episode to hear more or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Hey, Tamas, thanks for being on the podcast today.

Thank you very much for having me.

So if you don't mind, give us a little little overview of who you are, what you do for work, what you do for fun, that kind of thing.

Sure. So I work as a developer evangelist for a company called Cloudinary thata does sort of cloud based media management -- media being images, videos. So been with them for Over a year, and before that I've worked at various other companies that can NoSQL company as a technical instructor.

And as you know, as part of the role, I basically go and travel the world pretty much I attend conferences, I do talks and workshops at meetups and in various other places. And I also own a training company, which is called fullstack.training, where I basically try to deliver training courses about various pieces of web technologies. So that's what I do professionally.

On the personal side of things, I always point out that I am a water polo player, which is a very tough sport for those of you who actually know it. And I like to say that as a coach, as a water polo coach, I have a gold and a bronze medal from some international tournaments. And as a player, I also have a third position in a tournament so I have a cup. So these are my little personal achievements

You're potentially the the best athlete we've had on the show so far. So that's, that's cool. I don't know water polo sounds incredibly difficult to me.

It is it is. But you know, if you if you train and if you dedicate some time to it, then then it can be a little fun.

Very cool. So you're, you're working at Cloudinary. So obviously, professionally, you're doing quite a bit of JAMstack stuff, anything outside of work that you're working on JAMstack wise, or is it all just kind of that, that work environment?

It's mostly the work environment. The other thing that I work on is I have you know, my own personal site, which is a site about me about what I do is like a one page thing. So I build that using 11ty, which is one of the static site generators and I'm hosting it on Netlify. The only thing that I do really, I also have, you know, my company's website and I have a blog on there, which one day if time permits and when you know, the wind blows from the right direction. I will also sort of transform into JAMstack site. But you know, I don't know what's going to happen.

Sure. So you've got you've got the full stack training company, but you're also doing some JAMstack stuff with that too, right?

Unknown Speaker 3:14

So on that site, I basically have two free courses available at the moment. One is an introduction to JAMstack, which is it's really a non technical thing. There's, you know, there's no discussions about code. I just wanted to create this course so that anyone even coming from a non technical basis can kind of understand what the JAMstack is. The second course that I have there is how to create the blog using 11ty and some other services. And then at the moment, I am recording another one, which is create an e commerce store using Gatsby and Snipcart. I actually tweeted about that today. It's it's a Christmas store with all his Christmas ornaments and stuff. So it's basically pressuring myself to finish it before Christmas,

Yeah, otherwise, it's not going to work. So yeah, I have that side. I tried to, you know, use that to educate people about the JAMstack. And as I said, all the courses there are for free. So it's, I'm trying to, you know, produce as many courses as I can for free and put them out there.

Very cool. And have you so you've only got a couple courses there so far, but how does it feel doing the JAMstack side of things in terms of education versus that full stack side.

So with the fullstack side I was the courses that I had weren't always necessary about, you know, always full stack was sometimes just NodeJS, but I have to say it does help in a stance that in a very relatively short video course I can talk about like how to create an entire ecommerce site that involves, you know, how to develop it, how to sort of deploy it, how to enhance it by adding, you know, just, you know, snipcart, I mean, the whole experience of making this happen is is wonderful, right?

Whereas before, I had a course where I was talking about, you know, angular and node and express and full stack JavaScript and this and that, and that's like a very long course to put everything together. And I didn't even talk about how to deploy that, right, because I thought, you know, let's not focus on that. Let's focus on the actual code, whereas now, I can very easily just talk about how to deploy stuff

It lets you give like that full application feeling to all the all your courses at that point.

Exactly. Right. So in about 30 or 40 videos, you know, we start from nothing, and we end up having an app that works and is deployed, which is, I think, pretty amazing

I agree. That is kind of one of my favorite things on the JAMstack.

So let's talk about technologies. You've mentioned the 11ty, A little bit, Obviously, you're working at Cloudinary, what are kind of your jams in the JAMstack. What are your favorite technologies, philosophies, methodologies?

Sure. So I really like the the letter A in the JAMstack. You know, the API bit, because, and I just did a talk recently, and I made the joke that you know, how about 10 years ago, we used to say, oh, there's an app for that, you know, just about, you know, Apple's iPhone app store, you could do whatever you wanted.

And I think now, it's safe to say that there's an API for that, right. So it doesn't matter what you want to do, or how complex that thing is. I'm pretty sure that an API out there that is available for you. So, you know a few examples that I've used. And these are my favorite ones as well like Formspree. Like, the bane of my life was contact forms because I had to have a server it had to have some, you know, mail service up and running. And then you had to have something that processes the form and sends it and it's like, oh my god, And then with Formspree just have the form elements. You have the action attribute, and you literally say formspree.io/emailaddress, and you're up and running. I mean, how simple

Other things like, Auth0 for authentication, traditionally speaking was always very difficult, right? With their API's. It's, it's really simple. Or the recent recording that I'm doing for the e commerce stuff, right. So as I said, I'm using Snipcart. I'm also using Cloudinary to display product images, right.

So the combination of these two API's means that with Snipcart, I can just have an entire checkout flow, including you know, shipping, shipping details, payments, and everything embedded in my application in just like three or four lines of code, and that's pretty much it, everything works. And then they have their own dashboard where they have the stats, how many sales do this and then I'm also displaying products using Cloudinary which is, you know, displaying images and you know, videos on your website is traditionally speaking kind of challenging because you can go wrong with that.

And so here's an example what I'm doing in this app. I have this sort of like a jumper on a lady that is like a Christmasy jumper that I'm you know, selling in this wonderful ecommerce store. And Cloudinary has a feature to replace the color with another color. So as opposed to me generating you know, five or six different images from the same product to say what was yellow should now be red, and it should not be green should not be blue, and then just display those like, and that's it, you know, they can achieve whatever I want, using the API's.

And I can let all these companies to deal with, you know, scaling and security. And you know, because what happens when my ecommerce store becomes very popular, right? I don't need to worry about, oh, how I'm going to handle the increased load of the checkout flow, because Snipcart is responsible for that service. And I'm sure they're going to take care of that, right. So this is what I really enjoy and loving the JAMstack. So that's why I like to point out there, you know, I'm all for ace. And I'm sure there's an API for everything that I ever wanted to do on the web.

Definitely. And I actually really enjoyed the idea of the the Christmas shop, especially in terms of that scalability, because the Christmas shop may not do a lot of traffic from January to October, but it's going to ramp up real hard in November and so you have to be prepared for it, which would have been hard if you manage your own server.

Exactly. And now everything is pretty much transparent to you. You don't you know, see You don't need to worry about it. That's that's pretty much it.

And I absolutely love the the "there's an API for that". I'm, I'm definitely going to be gonna be tweeting about that as for sure. Alright, so so I guess Tell me a little bit about how you're kind of advocating and cloud Neri and what sorts of technologies you're using. Obviously, we talked about, like the color change, but like, what other kind of big things are you kind of talking about in your professional life in the jam stack.

So there's a first of all, because of, you know, me having this gem center training website, I tried to sort of explore all the static site generators, all the all the headless CMS is all the components, and all the tools that I could use under the JAMstack. I just like to explore these right and that's part of the role as a developer evangelist as well, so that you know, I'm kind of well versed in all of these different pieces of technology.

So at Cloudinary, really, you know, be focused on media images and videos and how you store them, how you optimize them, how you sort of transform them. So we have, you know, API's for not only just managing these media assets, but also as I said, you know, to transform them into any way you want. We recently added lots of AI features. So you know, don't forget, this is all on our site. So all you need to do is modify the URL or make the right API or SDK call, and we do the job for you.

So we have things like, you know, object recognition for about 20 or 30 items, so you can send an image to us and then we can find it, you know microwave on it. You can find the banana on it and then we can actually crop the image for you so that you know the banana or the microwave oven is going to be in the center of the image. And, you know, again, what do I need to do here? Nothing, upload the image, change something in The URL and I get the result that I wanted.

There you go. Yeah. And that's actually one of the one of the challenges I even had, managing an actual proprietary CMS was image cropping. And like dealing with all that, and figuring out where to crop the image, we put that on the user on our CMS users, and it never ended quite well.

Yeah, I mean, you know, you can do that automatically with any of these AI features, or you could, you know, just manually, you know, say with height, crop, and then you know, you're good to go. It's, I do enjoy, you know, that side of things. It's really, really easy. And then, you know, there's the delivery side of things. So we also use a global CDN, which means that, you know, once you do a transformation, it gets pushed out to the CDN, it's always going to be returned to the closest requesting user. And also, if the same transformation is requested, we don't do it again. Right. So it's just going to be cached in the CDN.

So it's the second time when you call the same image is even going to be faster and We do have automatic formatting features, which is basically says, if you're looking at this image from Chrome, we serve it as a WebP, if you look at it from a safari, we serve it as a JPEG right? And that's, again, completely transparent to you. Because otherwise, if you wouldn't have that feature, even have this sort of management tool available for you, you would theoretically if you want a website that performs well, you would have to create a JPEG file, a web p file, and you know, have the logic in place so that the right file is served to the right browser.

The whole CDN thing is, it's over my head, definitely. But it's very interesting to be that we have all these API's. They're doing CDN as well. So you've got Cloudinary on a CDN, FaunaDB has this kind of distributed database thing that we're fine with hosting on the CDN. And then putting all that logic at the CDN level just makes so much sense. But I could never set that up like that could never be me. So it's so nice to offload that to our various API's.

And, you know, that's also one of the core ideas of the JAMstack i think is you know, Everything should be on an edge server. So there's really, you know, no more excuses for not creating websites that that perform well.

Exactly as quick as possible all over the world. Cool. So let's let's get to what you're actually jamming on right now in terms of music. What's your musical taste? What's your favorite song or musician? What were you? Were you listening to?

So what I listened to in general, I have a weird set of music to listen to. It's really anything from metal music to reggaeton, reggaeton being my big favorite, right? So artists like J. Balvin, maluma, the Anki, these type of artists, and I love the music so much that I actually learned Spanish so that I can actually understand what they are singing about. And actually, I'm going to say this out loud now, so this isn't a recording. One of the challenges that I have for myself for the next year is to deliver a talk in Spanish. So I've been working on that, it's I'm getting there, I think but you know, 2020 is the year when it's going to happen. But yeah, so the big favorite that I have is really, you know, J Balvin. Anything from from J Balvin who is a Colombian reggaeton singer. I just love his songs. And I have to admit that, you know, we spoke about Christmas, it's Christmas time. I'm all for Christmas music. You know, it's Bring Crosby and Cliff, Richard and all of these. I'm going to start to play them very soon.

You know, I was at a cafe this past weekend, and they were playing Christmas music and I said, it's not Thanksgiving. So for us, right. It's not in the States. Not Thanksgiving yet. I feel like it's got to be December before we can listen to Christmas music. Yeah,

it's Look, it's 10 more days, and I can, you know, have you told

I mean, I'm not gonna judge you could listen to it in July and I'd be I'd be happy for you listen to Christmas music done.

I like Christmas. And, you know, I think Christmas music should be in December. It's cold maybe there's snow. It has a certain, you know, feeling for it. And I like that.

So last thing, anything you want to promote that you're doing right now, what do you want to kind of share with the jam stack world,

I would just, you know, like people to check out jumps at the training, if you know anyone feels like they are for recording their own sort of video course, I'm more than happy to host that as well or help them, you know, ideate and help them to record stuff. Or if they just have an idea and say, Oh, I would love to see, you know, XYZ in the JAMstack. And I'm more than happy to at least try to somehow record that or accommodate those requests. But yeah, just, you know, as I said, it's all free. So I hope people will, will find value in what I'm doing there.

Excellent. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

Thank you very much for having me.

I want to take a second thing this week sponsor TakeShape. TakeShape they're offering a content platform and that's really the best description. They have handy CM,S a static site generator and simple GraphQL API that's all ready for your use in the JAMstack.

And they may have all that power but they also work within your current workflow. I'm currently converting one of my sites over to us to TakeShape CMS. But because I can bring my own static site generator, I don't have to rewrite a lot of that code. Just change where the data comes from, and BAM, instant upgrade my CMS.

They also have new features coming out all the time, like their new Mesh product that allows for you to mix and match data from multiple sources into one neat GraphQL interface. If that sounds interesting. Be sure to go to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack to find out more.

And of course, as always, I do want to thank you, our listeners You are the reason I do this. Be sure to like heart, favorite, subscribe, whatever you do, and your podcast app of choice to let me know that you want more and more and more episodes of the That's My JAMstack podcast. We'll see you next week and keep doing amazing things on the web.

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