That's my JAMstack

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My JAMstack, the podcast where we ask the pressing question, what's your jam in the JAMstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and on this week's episode, we sit down with Brian Rinaldi, a developer advocate for Stackbit.

Brian, thanks for being on the show today.

Thanks. Thanks, Bryan for having me.

The "Bri(y)an" episode. Go ahead and tell it tell us a little bit about yourself what you do for work what you do for fun.

So I am a developer advocate at Stackbit. So you know, I get to mess around with all the new stuff and I get to do all kinds of JAMstack things and call it work and experiment with it, and write articles about it and speak about it. So it's, it's a lot of fun. But for fun, let's see. I'm mostly I'd say I'm a gamer. I'm a console gamer. So I am on either my PlayStation my Xbox or the Switch playing something

What were you playing right now?

I've been hooked on Apex legends for for a little while and that's kind of my main game but I still play Overwatch regularly. That's another one that is one of my longtime faves.

I've only ever played on the free weekends they've done throughout the throughout the life of it, but I've always enjoyed it.

That's an overwatch I'm assuming.

Yeah, because Apex legend is free, isn't it?

Yeah, it's free. Yeah. So yeah, it's one of those. What do you call? What do they call them? Like fortnite? Battle Royale? Yeah.

Well, very cool. Very cool. So obviously, this isn't a gaming podcast, although I could very easily talk for a long time about that.

Yeah, me too.

So let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit. So what was your entry point into the JAMstack? Or if it was long enough ago, I guess static site generators and that sort of thing. Yeah.

It was definitely long enough ago. I was probably an early adopter. I wasn't part of the beginning, but I was pretty early on. It was probably about six years ago that I really got heavily into static site. It's a bit of a funny story how I started.

Because I mostly started because I was needed to launch the site for work. I had just gotten recently gotten a role at a company called till Eric, which is now got bought by progress software. And we were going to launch a new developer focused site called Telerik Developer Network. And I wanted to to avoid some issues of competitiveness between WordPress and our current CMS solution that we sold. I wanted to just launch the whole thing using Jekyll because I knew some Jekyll and I've been experimenting with it and I got a no.

So nobody bought into this idea. And then we ended up using WordPress. But I kind of took that as inspiration to dive really, really deeply into disproving how wrong they were in making this decision. And it led to me presenting all over the place about static sites writing a lot of articles about static sites, you know, getting involved early on in the whole community. I wrote a report for O'Reilly about five years ago about static sites. And then I wrote a book with my friend Raymond Camden, about static sites I was about four years ago, I guess now, three, four years ago. Anyway, it's all been, you know, so I was Yeah, I was early on involved in that and, and have been, you know, dedicated to it since even though it's not until recently after joining Stackbit it was isn't necessarily part of my work day job.

And I feel like that's how there's a lot of great developer technology origin stories. It's like, it's like I had to prove them as wrong as I could.

Yeah, exactly. It's It's definitely been a part of my, throughout my career, this has come up multiple times.

Cool. And I also didn't know that you would, you would partner with Raymond on a book. So what book was that you said about four years ago?

Yeah, I think it's like three I think it came out like three years ago now. And we but we started running about four years ago. It's called Working with Static Sites. It's I think the only thing other than you know until Netlify released their thing through a O'Reilly it was the only book early had on the topic. We're we're hopeful that we may even get to revisit that because I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anybody who's starting out today. The landscape has changed. So much since the time we wrote it, that I mean, a lot of things will still work but it wouldn't necessarily be the most recommended way of doing things today.

I got you and as a side note to all the listeners out there, be sure to go back I think it's episode three Raymond Camden was on the show, so be sure to check that out as well.

My arch nemesis

Good natured sparring there?

Oh, he and I go way back. So it's Yeah, yeah. Hey, we've been friends. Well, not to give not to give too much away. But since we both did ColdFusion

So obviously, Jekyll was kind of that the entry point and into the world but fast forward, you know, six years now. There's been an explosion of all sorts of stuff. Yeah, I assume Stackbit is high up on your on your list of passions in the JAMstack or what are you playing with or are enjoying right now?

You know, One of the things I like about Stackbit. It is The ability to just; I've been passionate about the topic of, of the editing experience in, in the whole JAMstack for years. Even when I would speak about this, you know, four years ago, you know, it was basically like, "Listen, I know you all think markdown is super easy. And well, you could just you know, if I'm going to launch this site, and I'm going to give it to some editor, I'll just teach the markdown, it's just a few tags, you know, just a little bit of markup. It's really easy."

And I'm like, but then if you want to do this in markdown, can you do that? No, you can't. So you have to do HTML if you want to do that. And I'm like, and so this now I got to teach you markdown plus HTML, which is not easy. And the whole experience has never been very smooth from an editing person, you know, content editors perspective.

And I think so one of the things I've been passionate about is now with headless CMS and, or even like, you know, things like Like NetlifyCMS, which has kind of grown into a really, you know, great project. I think that's changed. And we now, you know, we now have the tools to make a really good editing experience with the JAMstack, which to me, that brings that brings us to the possibility of being able to, to, you know, bring this widespread, like, make make the adoption grow dramatically, because that has been one of the things that held the whole system back is, is this ability like even even now, like, oh, OK, I can change it on the CMS uncomfortable with the CMS side of it.

But then, and then I make that change, I submit and then it's like, Okay, let me sit there and Is it is it live? Is it live? Is it live? Is it live, right? And then it's like, okay, it's like, oh crap, I screwed up. When we go back, you know, we fix that typo is alive, you know, and repeat the whole process. So having been a part of marketing teams and in content focused teams I know like the struggles those that that though they have with these kind of tools and I think we're finally making that transition out of that.

But besides that I mean honestly I'm gonna I guess you might say old school kind of guy ice I still like Jekyll I still use it. I'd say most of the sites I build are still are in Hugo and I love Hugo and I've been using it for years and I maintain a like a bunch of sites that are built in Hugo.

I said I feel like on the podcast we've been pretty pretty much 50/50 from like that methodology of like the Hugo Jekyll 11ty, the kind of hand HTML to the browser and then 5050 on the other hand of doing Gatsby Gridsome those kind of React or Vue based situation so you kind of fall a little bit a little bit further on the HTML side of things on that on that more static static site.

More static-y that yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call it more static, I think, you know, you can still do all those things. It's just, you know, it's done a different way. Right. So, you know, one of the things I love about Hugo is just, like everything run so quickly, and I'm able, like, I feel like there's a lot of power in the template writing. And that I can dig into, like, you know, things that, that I I don't have to mess with any frameworks or anything, right. Like, I can build it with a framework. I could not build it with a framework. I'm free to do whatever. It'll work. Yeah.

Whatever you're feeling on that given day. You're good to go. So so out of curiosity, you talked about the the marketing team and that refresh, refresh refresh refresh methodology. Is that constant the inspiration behind that stack bit live thing that the

Right that's exactly it. So we have like, we already put out a control center that Will that you can get for free right now like you can just add it, if you're on Netlify, you can just add it to any Netlify site. And what it'll do is it'll automatically pick up like if a bill has been triggered, regardless of how that's been triggered. So like, you know, if it's been triggered by the CMS, or it's been triggered by a, you're checking in something to the GitHub repository, like it'll, it'll automatically pick that up, notify you and then you can watch as the build happens. And I'll tell you, okay, it's done. You can check the logs and so on. So that's part of like, that's the beginnings of that whole stack that live concept that we presented at at JAMstackConf in San Francisco. But it goes beyond that to whole editing experience that's going to allow you to edit things in line on the page.

Is that going to be as as agnostic in static site generator and CMS level as all the rest of it is or Yes, okay.

Right. That's, that's kind of one of the keys I think, to their we're obviously not the only people doing these kind of things. So One of the keys to our solution, I think is that, well, it it doesn't matter which static site generator which CMS for the most part you're using, we will we can support that. Where there are some other great solutions out there, but they tend to be fixed towards a particular methodology. ,

Cool. So, so you're using obviously JAMstack very hard professionally now, it is legitimately your job. You said, you get to play with all these cool JAMstack technologies nowadays. Yeah. Are you still exploring personally like outside you have anything running that way? Or do you get to just do everything professionally now and do it during the day?

You know, I still do. I still do personally because all the sites I do outside of work, even our jam stack. So like I run a bunch of online like meetups every month, as well as like online events and in person events that I kind of do on the side. And that site is all built in ego and I'm continuously updating that and maintaining that as well.

So you're running a meetup groups and then online meetups.

So I run Yeah, I do run meetup groups and I run but I run an online meetup. It's it's at like CFE.dev, if you go there. They I run a number of different things through that, like online trainings and stuff. But I have a free monthly meetup. That's for developers. It's on a variety of topics. Like, I don't, it's not JAMstack specific. It's just developer focused. Right?

Okay. Very cool. So what would it be? Would it be fair to say that Stackbit is your jam in the JAMstack? Are there other things that we want to kind of dive into in that way?

Uh, you know, Stackbit, I'm, I'm still digging into. One of the things I find about it like, I've been using Netlify since honestly, since the very very beginning. And, and I've I've always been a fan of it, but I felt like they've been releasing a lot of things I never got to dig into some really having a lot of fun trying to mess with like service. Was Functions and our like I did a whole post about Identity and stuff like that, which I hadn't really gotten the mess with. I feel like there's a lot of pieces of nightlife I that I haven't haven't ever touched because you know, I could do what I wanted to do very easily but I never had an excuse to get dig into them a little further. And I'm having a lot of fun doing that too.

Cool. There's almost like ancillary to the JAMstack. Things that you really need the JAMstack to do. Those pieces are there for you.

So I'm also curious about what your actual jam is your musical jam. What's your musical taste? What are you listening to while you work while you play that?

Oh, yeah. So So I've a lot of what I listened to is it's very electronic. So funny enough, Raymond Camden, I do this whole we have a newsletter. We put out I supposed to be bi weekly, but it's really kind of occasional, like every two or three weeks called CodaBreakers. Where we pick like New Music So I'm like really kind of focused on picking new songs all the time. I'd say lately my jam would be if I could say anybody in particular so so my latest jam like my jam lately has been LCD Sound System and which is not like new new stuff, but I I don't know why I've like rediscovered them and realize like, I'm like why did I not love them as much as I did when this the songs of some of these songs were newer? And and I've just really been digging that but, but other ones like I've really been into, what would you call it chill out music like Tom Cruise I've been. Caroline pull a check and if you ever heard of her, I've been listening to her cigarettes after sex. They're awesome. Very loungy sounding stuff. So yeah, I mean, mostly, mostly obscure, kind of music had tending towards electronic

And will we be able to know what your what your jam is on a on a bi weekly basis by following the CodaBreakers newsletter

Yeah yeah so it's codabreakers.rocks and it is a jam stack site rebuilt it it's it's it's amazing it's you won't you won't believe it it's it's it's really impressive a single page but but it does actually he built it I mean it's nothing too exciting but he did actually tied into the MailChimp API. So every time we we just send a new newsletter it rebuilds and it it adds the newsletter to the list and everything. So things like that,

And is there anything that you would like to promote what you're doing? What's going on that you want to get out in the open?

Sure. I mean, the big thing one of the big things I'm doing besides my work at stack bait is I'm running a conference here in Orlando in February. In check net is one of my sponsors. So we've got like Divya from Netlify is coming to speak. It's called Flashback Conference. flashback.dev, it's gonna be a lot of fun. I've got Kyle Simpson as a keynote, Estelle Weyl while as a keynote, I've got Ray's going to be speaking a lot of other really great people. So that would be kind of the thing I'm most excited about and what I'm working on, you know, when I'm not working for, for work, that's what I'm working on my free time.

Conference organizing is not easy.

No, I've done a lot of them. I've been doing like 10 years or so. And I've done a lot of them. And my wife, my wife's always like, I don't know why you put yourself through this. You stress out every single time and then you're like, Oh, it's going to be a failure. It's gonna talk and then it all goes well. And then you start the process all over.

I've never organized the conference, but I've done a yearly hackathon. And until I get that, that like 10th ticket sold, I'm just like, no one's coming. Yes. And then we get like 100 Plus, and we're good.

It's always like that in everybody waits to like the last two to three weeks to buy their tickets. And until then you're like, this is going to be a failure.

And you buy all your all your food and stuff, you know, for hundreds of people and you just know you're gonna have too much.

Well, I appreciate you, you taking the time and talking with us today. Hope to see you more stuff coming from stack but especially around that live stuff soon.

Thanks. Thanks, Bryan. Appreciate it.

And as always, I want to thank you, our amazing listeners, knowing the folks are listening and enjoying the show keeps us coming back week after week. If you want to support that's my jam stack. Be sure to give it a light, favorite or review in your podcast app of choice. Until next time, keep things jamming.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast where we asked the pressing question, what's your jam in the JAMstack. Today I'm joined by someone I've had the pleasure of knowing for a few years now he's a developer at FedEx, a technology speaker and educator. The one the only James Quick. Hi, James. Thanks for thanks for joining us on the podcast today.

Yeah, it's pretty cool to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

Yeah, no problem. So So you and I have known each other for a little while, but tell it tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself. What do you do for fun? What do you do for work, that sort of thing?

Sure. So I think one of the biggest things is we have a lot in common, especially the last maybe year so we've kind of bounced a lot of ideas and stuff off of each other. So I, I work full time at FedEx as a software developer, do full stack, so front end, angular and then back end Java Spring Boot, microservices, pretty fun stuff, actually. But outside of that, I do a lot of stuff kind of going back to my days of evangelism at Microsoft, conference speaking, I've been getting back into been pretty heavy into my YouTube channel, written articles, online courses. Again, kind of the stuff that we have in common, focused on web development, design and developer tools. So I've been doing a lot of that stuff the past couple of years trying to be trying to be more engaged as active as I can.

Nice and what do you do kind of outside of the the technology realm,

just on a personal note, so we have three dogs, we spent a lot of time with our dogs play a lot of sports. My wife and I play on two different soccer teams together. Also, I'm playing basketball one night a week. Sometimes during lunch, we play basketball at FedEx, which is pretty cool. One kind of fun fact that I'm working on right now is building an arcade cabinet like an old school arcade cabinet using like a Raspberry Pi to put games on, and then actually doing the woodwork to build a cabinet which I've never done. So we'll see how that goes.

we won't be like an angle when you're done.

That might just be part of the challenge. We'll see how it turns out, but it should be fun.

That's awesome. That's that's very cool. Cool. So So obviously, we're talking about the JAMstack here today or static sites or whatever you like to call them. But what was kind of your entry point into this philosophy of development?

One I think you were you were probably one of the earliest people to kind of preach or start to tell me about it. I think a big one was also listening to the Syntax podcast. So with Wes Bos and Scott Telinsky, listen to their podcast a lot. And they, they kept talking about static sites and static site generators and JAMstack and Netlify and all these all these words, and I was kind of aware of what it was, but didn't really have the hands on experience that I think we'll get to in a few minutes. So yeah, I was just kind of word of mouth for a long time. And I was like, I don't really I don't really need to, like, get into that at the time and eventually did and I think like I said, we'll talk about that in a few more minutes.

Yeah, so so so it's kind of just in the ether around you. What was the actual tech like? What was your first project that you did on the JAMstack?

First project and I've got, I guess I've primarily got two, or at least two real ones. So both of my sites, Jamesqquick.com, and learnbuildteach.com, I'll go ahead and give my promotional stuff. Both of those are static sites using Gatsby. So I had gotten into React maybe a year and a half ago, React was one that I kind of, shied away from for a while as well, had done Angular work was pretty big into JavaScript just hadn't done React, got into it really liked it, started using it. And then when I heard about static site generators, and learning more about them, again, podcasts and articles and stuff, I realized that my two sites, those two sites, I mentioned that were on WordPress, had some really big flaws with just a lot really primarily around like the development process.

So I couldn't find a way to like check stuff in a source code and have that have any kind of automated deployments. I couldn't figure out how to like the version, the data that was a big problem. So like if I made if I was trying to do stuff locally, and I made changes based on whatever the database was here, how did that interacts with the database out there, like in the live site, and basically ended up finding, I can't even remember what the plugin was, but it just it doesn't lift and shift. So if I do locally, it'll have it'll wrap up my entire database, all the content, all the WordPress settings, everything and just push those out to production, which is it wasn't like that bad, but it wasn't ideal.

That sounds absolutely terrifying. Like put pushing from your local database to a production database. Just give me some heart palpitations.

Yeah, the good thing was it like the tool was really nice. So it was kind of like I could I could go to prod, I could do like an export button, and it would give me whatever, like zip it put everything in. I could load that into my local version. I can make changes, I could send it back. So it like in that sense. It wasn't really that bad just because the plugin was nice, but overall, it was a mess. It wasn't it wasn't ideal at all for the simple site that I was working on.

So So really the JAMstack was kind of your, your ejection point from the WordPress world.

It was Yeah. And I think I figured like, as, as a web developer, I could probably do something a little more like developer than WordPress, I was using Divi theme, and it's a visual builder. And you can do all these things. And honestly, as a developer, it was harder to like design stuff in Divi, than it was to just code it. So I figured moving away from that. And then also kind of jumping into this jam sack world where I can incorporate blog, I could have other types of static information and the automatic build process and all that kind of stuff. And really check stuff into source control and have everything in source control, including like data and assets and stuff was really, really cool. So

That was also something that I ran into a decent bit agency world was was a data changes that were important, like, how do you deal with that on a regular basis and how you deal with that without some sort of downtime. Everything's just in source control. You're good to go.

Yep. Yep. I don't know. I don't know if we have Should we go get into like some of the some of the workflow for how that is for my sites now?

Sure. Yeah. Be I'd be super excited here that cool.

So I've got two sites, like I said, one is learn build, teach sex. That's kind of like, that's kind of my motto for online learning and teaching. So I take time learning stuff, I use what I learned to build stuff. And then I take what I build and learn and teach other people how to do it and the community online and all that kind of stuff. So on on that site, it's pretty, it's pretty, pretty simple. I guess the one thing that kind of fell into the realm of static site generators was just displaying course content information. So I only had like four or five total courses. So if a few free ones on YouTube, and then a free one on you, to me, and a free one or a paid one on you to me, and just want to display the information, but in theory, like I'm going to continue to build courses, and I could go in and I can like Copy and paste the div and I could type in the information to change it and all that kind of stuff. But now I using Gatsby, set it up to just read from markdown files, which is typically I think, what people do.

And I just put information directly in a markdown file, it queries that using graphQL. That was actually another technology that I've kind of heard about for a long time. And I was like, I'm not that interested. And then it's tied into Gatsby. So I get to use that there, which is pretty cool. And so anytime I add a course I just add a markdown file, rebuild my site, and then it goes out there and it's live. And the build process is really cool. So I use, Netlify to host. Netlify is so so easy to just connect a website to a GitHub repo, you tell it, you can tell it a command to to run and I think mine I guess it's Gatsby build. And then wherever the output of that build, like a public directory, basically, you tell it this is the public directory that I want you to serve. So it's those two things, and telling it where the repo is and it's out there and it's built.

So anything I push the master branch it automatically rebuilds and start restarts my site as well with the new information. So anytime I add a course I add a markdown file, check it in, and I push it to master and it automatically goes out there and it resets or restarts the site after doing a build. So all the content is out there it's good to go. Again, going from being on WordPress and having these databases and differences between local and prod and all that kind of stuff to this where everything is just basically in like one neat little bow and my GitHub repo was super super sweet.

Also have probably having to deal with you're probably doing FTP stuff back in the day with WordPress to not even having that source control with either.

Yep, yeah, did some so before that plugin I mentioned I was definitely going in and like drag and drop and using FileZilla directly to the server, which is, I think on the Syntax podcast they talks about, like the horror stories. They did those recently and it was all about like people, like going in and doing stuff directly on prod and How they mess things up. And yeah, whatever. So I think I think with the workflow that I have now that's, that's probably at a at a minimum.

And one. So one other thing that I did recently, I was writing articles on a site called scotch.io for a long time, and really good friends with Chris, who runs that he kind of cut back on the amount of articles that they were accepting. And so I started to think about writing articles on my own platform. And then from you actually copying those over to Dev.to and having those you have to tell me that like syndicated Is that the right word. Yeah, sure. Again, like this is this is the knowledge that you dropped on me, but basically, like put them on my site and then have them copied over to dev.to and link back to my site. So I get credit for it.

Yeah, the canonical link the meta tag. Yeah Rel Canonical

So with that, I started writing articles on my James q Quick site, putting those on dev.to and then with James q quick ended up going through that same workflow of anytime I have an article, which I have one to put out tonight, is just put a markdown file in there, re rebuild the site. And that does it automatically by pushing the master and the site is up and running. And it's good to go. So,

yeah, JAMstack at its purist right there. And I think at one point, you, you and I have talked about a little bit, I think we're working on a MailChimp server list function of some sort.

yeah. So that's actually like a whole whole new dynamic. So with jam stack, one of the potential I'm doing quotes here for people on audio, the potential limitations is that you don't have a back end, necessarily, like you could have a completely separate back end, you could talk the API's. If you don't want to write a completely separate back in and Netlify they've got you covered. So you can write service functions. And service functions are basically just like you write an individual endpoint.

So you can receive a request. You can do whatever it is you want with that request. Then send it off. So what I did to add newsletter subscribers to my site, I created a server list function in nullify that when someone fills out their email, it will send their email to the server list function, the server list function has their credentials for my MailChimp.

So obviously with secret credentials, secret keys, credentials, you never want those checked into source control, you never want those available for someone else to see. You don't want them in your front end JavaScript. So with the requests coming in to the server list function, the credentials are in nullify so I get access to them and code. I can take the email, I can make the API request on the server to send off and register them as a subscriber to the newsletter and then just respond back to the front end saying Yeah, you're good to go. So any any sort of like extra piece of functionality that I need, I could just create an extra server list function. Have, like however many lines of code 10 2030 not a whole server. Just be good to go from Whatever that functionality is

nice. And so obviously, that's kind of the the personal side, are you able to use any of these methodologies at work? I mean, as as much as you can talk about with with FedEx, but like, Is there anything happening in that world?

Sure. Not, there's definitely some. So one of our teams is kind of like a best practices team. And they do pretty good documentation on their like standards and like, the cookbook is what they call it. So it's like recipes that other people can use to do X. And they actually I think they use Hugo as a static site generator. And I I'm gonna blank here on what language and what language it uses behind the scenes. Yeah, that's, that's it. Yeah. So it uses go has like template tags and like short code, abbreviation, whatever those things are called. And yeah, so they use that internally for some of the documentation that we just kind of like share.

We also have our own team version, that I just I probably just haven't spent the time to, like, get into Hugo and really understand what I'm doing. I'm sure it's not that complicated. I just like looked at it. And I was like, Yeah, I don't really feel like doing this. So I haven't done as much as that myself. But I think that's for the most part. As far as I know, that's that's kind of the static site JAMstack type stuff that we're doing internally at FedEx, none of none of the applications that I work on directly have any of those implications, I guess,

Hey, but internal documentation is a great use case for JAMstack. So yeah, more power to them on that. Yep,

Definitely. And that's what like all of the Netlify, and Gatsby documentation is all static site stuff. I think, obviously Gatsby is using Gatsby, which makes sense, but that like their documentation is great, right? So you can go out there, you can search for plugins, you can do all these things. And you would, I guess some people have this misconception of like the limitations of gems that but you can you can fill those voids in all these different types of ways something like service functions, to where you really like you don't think of it as like, quote unquote, just static site is like you can build powerful applications that happened to be static sites behind the scenes.

Yeah, preach on that.

So so obviously if you're using Gatsby on a couple sites Netlify is your host, but what kind of what what part of the JAMstack is really your jam like, Is it is it Gatsby? Is it Netlify? Is it the methodology, the philosophy? Where's your love for for the jam stack coming from?

Sure. So definitely, definitely the two tools that you mentioned, Gatsby and nullify. Again, Gatsby like static site generator using react, which is what I like to use using graphQL, which like, has some pretty cool stuff behind the scenes. For me, just like learning what graphQL is and how to work with it. They also have some like image optimization stuff built in, so into Gatsby, so you can like it'll do like image optimization in terms of like sizing and you give it an image and it'll do the random sizing and it'll choose the appropriate one.

Kinda like what Cloudinary does as a service or like you can use Cloudinary to do that. So that's a really cool feature. Anyway, so definitely, like I said, Netlify/Gatsby probably the the mentality of the development workflow, especially coming from like the WordPress workflow that I had before. Everything is in this GitHub repo. I know where all my data is. I don't have to have a database. I don't have to have almost anything installed on my local machine other than node and whatever. Like Gatsby, for example, like I don't need anything else. I can do it anywhere. I can check stuff in from anywhere I push and it gets built, and it's out there and it's ready to go. And if you've already got note on your laptop, you've got a way of getting Gatsby no matter where you are. Anyway.

It's all NPM based. It all just kind of works.

Exactly. Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, like the best development workflow that I could have dreamed of when I was struggling to figure out how people did WordPress successfully.

Yeah, struggling do WordPress successfully is the story of the first half of my development career. So I feel you on that, what's gonna what's going to keep You in the JAMstack? Like, obviously, you're enjoying this right now. But like, if you look a few few years down the road, where are you seeing how that develops for you personally,

I think one to continue on the same same idea of ease of use, right? I mean, that's a huge thing. I think the whole ecosystem is continuing to grow. Gatsby just got however, millions of dollars of funding, they have Netlify, just got however many millions of dollars they got. They're continuing to kind of add, again, like those quote unquote, potential limitations, people are continuing to add solutions to those. So you can build like all these really powerful applications, but still have that really cool like minimal streamlined development workflow.

A lot of a lot of that like comes into play with these headless CMS that are out there. So to kind of replace the backend of WordPress and you can actually use WordPress as a headless CMS. And just kind of forget the front end of that and just pull data into their API, but things like content full and cosmic is one I've worked on recently. And there's so many other ones. I don't know, there's just so many tools. People are loving it. Like, obviously, you're doing this podcast because you love it. You've got people that are listening and coming on because they feel the same way. And as a community as an ecosystem being online, the more you hear about something, after ignoring it for a certain amount of time you like you kind of have to say, well, there's there must be something to this, because of how many people are talking about it. And I think that's the stage that we've been in for a while.

And it just seems like it's going to continue to grow. And I think the tooling will continue to get better and better and potential limitations will be addressed. And I don't know, I think you'll find less and less reasons to not go this route.

Yeah, I completely agree with you on that. So yeah, so I don't want to take up too much more of your time where we're starting to get in that 1520 minute range that I'm trying to keep us in. So what's your what's your actual jam right now? What's your favorite song or your musician? Or what's your coding to on a regular basis?

Yeah, so the last I guess it's been like the last Two weeks I've been listened to Jason Aldean new album So Jason Aldean is a country artist. And I wouldn't say I wouldn't say country music like characterizes me as a person. But I certainly like grew up listen to country music went to school in Nashville, so got a lot like got even more in the country music at the time, and have always liked Jason Aldean. It took me a while to kind of just get to this album. And as soon as I did, I was like, Oh, this is this is really good. So I had I had a day when I was cleaning the house, like last weekend, Saturday, and I had like a portable speaker and just had one of the songs on repeat for like an hour and a half.

Really just just one song.

Yeah, I got that for my wife. She ends up like taking taking a song and playing it over and over. So I've kind of gotten used to doing that too. But

I suppose whatever works for you, right?

Yeah, whatever helps you kind of zone out and just kind of, I don't know, kind of forget about what you're doing in terms of being able to relax, I guess.

Yeah, gotcha. And and we've mentioned a couple things before but but is there anything that you want to go ahead and promote that you're doing Right now any any any big things on the horizon for you?

Sure. So I have my one paid course on Udemy is called learn Visual Studio Code teaches you in my mind, like everything you need to know about VScode as an editor, how to debug how to set up, prettier, and ES lint configurations, Git integration, all the shortcuts that you could ever want to learn are in there. So that's a big one for me.

I also have a free one on Udemy that is build a quiz app with JavaScript, HTML or HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So no frameworks, no libraries, just building a pretty cool application, I think, with just kind of the core HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

And then like I said earlier, LearnBuildTeach.com is where I reference all of my content. I'm working on some content right now hopefully have maybe a little bit more to share later on. But one of them is going to be kind of a MERN stack application. It'll be an Amazon price tracker. So if you've ever heard of like CamelCamelCamel, You can give it a URL, tell it a threshold price and have it notify you if the price drops. And so I'm working on building that basically with the MERN stack, so Mongo, express, react, and node, and then tying in Twilio for text message notifications. So that'll be a course that I don't have a link to yet but hopefully will be the next big thing that I advertised. So keep an eye out for that.

Probably on the Learn Build Teach website?

Yes, it will be on LearnBuildTeach.com

Beautiful, beautiful. Alright, well, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to come and chat with us and share your experience. Yeah,

cool. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I glad I could help you kind of spread the positive word about JAMstack. And I will continue to roll on and use it on all my my sites.

Cool. Well keep doing amazing things. And we'll see you around the internet.

So now's the time on the episode where I ask all of you amazing podcast listeners in the JAMstack world. Go out to your podcast app of choice and leave a rating and review. So there are Hello JAMstackers out in the world have a way of finding this lovely little podcast. Thanks for listening as always, and we'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Welcome to another episode of that's my JAMstack the podcast where we highlight amazing people in the community and ask the pressing question, what's your jam in the JAMstack? This week's episode, we have one of the Co-organizers of ConcatenateConf, and JAMstack Lagos, the wonderful Gift Egwuenu. Welcome to the That's My JAMstack podcast. Thanks for being on the show today.

Thanks for having me, Bryan. Thanks for having me.

No problem. So I've been following you on Twitter for a little while. But I want you to go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience. Tell us who you are, what you do for work, what you do for fun, that kind of thing.

Yeah, sure. So my name is Gift Egwuenu. I'm a software engineer, and I work for a company called Andella and is based in Lagos, Nigeria. And I'm also a technical writer. I own my own blog where I write about technical topics, mainly focused on front end JavaScript, as well as JAMstack and accessibility. I also run several communities here in Lagos, one of which is the JAMstack meetup in Lagos, as well as a conference called Concatenate. I helped organize that. And for fun, I love photography. So I take pictures, majity street photography, but yeah, that's pretty much everything.

Very, very cool. So so you're pretty busy, especially with Concatenate just ending a few weeks ago, right?

Yeah. You know about contacting? Cool. Yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing.

Yeah, this is the second year that y'all ran Concatenate?

Unknown Speaker 1:42

Very cool. So so obviously the JAMstack and static sites are what we're going to talk about today, what would kind of your entry point into the idea of the JAMstack or the idea of static sites?

So I first time I actually heard about jam stack was from my Twitter timeline. So this was last year 2018. In last year, I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw the team jump stock and I was kind of confused at first actually wanted to know what this because you know, there are so many stocks, the mean stock, the lumps that I just wanted to know what it actually means. And and, yeah, so I just had to do like a Google search about it. And it was quite interesting.

At the same time, I just started blogging. So I started my blog, the same time and I was actually scouting for topics to learn more about and also write about, and this was really interesting. So I did my research. Thanks to the jamstack.org site. was really helpful. And then I stayed doing a lot of research about it. And I wrote my first blog posts on the JAMstack. That was my entry points.

Very cool. And I saw I saw on your blog, you've got like a post about Nuxt, you've got post Gridsome you've got post about Hugo, what's kind of your favorite technology or your favorite piece of the JAMstack?

Okay, that's, that's a difficult question. Cuz Actually, yeah, I've actually played with a couple of them. But right now I would say my favorite is Gridsome. Yeah. I initially worked with Hugo. This was while, I; This was I actually started working with Hugo without knowing about the JAMstack at first, because I had like, contracts gig where I had to build a custom Hugo thing, but then I didn't know have any idea about the JAMstack but I knew what Static Sites were. Didn't know there was something called the JAMstack. So I worked with Hugo. My first blog was actually a Hugo site because then I was pretty much invested in Hugo. So I had to like get my blog running on Hugo. I did I did that for pretty much one year before I started learning more about Nuxt and at the time, Gatsby was very, very popular even though I am also a React developer when I found out there was also a similar a similar static site generator like Gatsby and it was with some he was quite new at the time that I started using it. So I'd say it's just checked the docs, and it was really interesting. And then I decided at that point, I just say it's port my Hugo blog to Gridsome And ever since then, I've been loving it.

I only know a very little bit about Gridsome. And that's kind of it's on that. It's the Static site generator for Vue that Gatsby is for react?

Yes is pretty similar to Gatsby because he has the same GraphQL integration that Gatsby has. So yeah, they are pretty similar but they just have different programming languages. React and Vue. Yeah.

And I assume you kind of started making that transition from Hugo over to over to Gridsome because you were working in JavaScript more than and what Hugo's in actual Go.

Yeah, exactly. So I actually wrote I wrote a blog post on why I made the transition. Because Yeah, I was working with Hugo, I To be honest, I haven't really done anything with Go. So I was basically just doing things out of my own knowledge. I didn't really know so much about Go programming and it was very difficult for me to customize my blog at that point. So when I found out that Okay, there is Gridsome and actually love working with Vue. This is something that I can customize on my own without having to like Seek for extra help. So I just decided to make that transition.

Yeah. So so obviously that's that's you and your kind of personal and your blog site and all that. Are you using JAMstack philosophies professionally, at all

So that's the thing. At my job. I really don't use the JAMstack. I only use it for Yeah, my personal projects on my blog.

Okay, cool. And do you find that as you experiment with these technologies, are you able to bring any kind of peace that thought process back over to kind of your non jam stack job?

Yeah, so currently we are I'm working. I'm working with React at my job. But a couple of a couple of teams in my company, actually using Gatsby so which is great. My team currently only uses React. So yeah, this is something I can Maybe talk to them about if they're interested in making the switch. Well, yeah, that's though that's going to be long shots but yeah.

So is Gridsome what you would consider your jam the JAMstack? Kind of your favorite technology. Are there any other technologies that you're really passionate about right now?

Yeah. Gridsome is one of them. I'm really, I'm really happy about scripts on my last season. It's then another technology that I love using is Netlify. Yeah, because Netlify was like the my entry into the JAMstack. I got to know about the JAMstack through Netlify, and pretty much works with a couple of Netlify products. I use Netlify for almost all my deployments, which is great. Yeah, so I love those two technologies a lot.

So you've been working in kind of the JAMstack for a couple years now. What's going to keep you there? What is it about the JAMstack That is is hopefully going to be the big future of the web?

So for me basically JAMstack, I feel like JAMstack is still evolving because a lot of people are still trying to get acquainted with the whole knowledge about the JAMstack. I actually started working with JAMstack last year and so far it's been amazing and I feel like for the future we don't we can't we can't actually tell how much you can do with the JAMstack right now.

You can do a lot. People actually just think JAMstack is all static sites is just for needing a basic web or a basic websites for know you can actually extend the the things you can do with JAMstack even now that you have like things like serverless, which I'm actually at this point I'm trying to learn more about the serverless architecture. So yeah, you can pretty much extend the use cases for JAMstack in whatever you're working with.

Yeah, definitely. And so with the kind of the serverless stuff that you're starting to explore, do you have a background in back end development or are you primarily front end?

Yeah. I have a background in back-end. In my job I also do back-end development with NodeJS.

Okay. Very cool. So, so yeah, adapting that to serverless should be should be pretty simple and pretty fun.

Yeah, it is. Like yesterday, I was going through, I think his name is Jason. So he had like a workshop on Front-end Masters yesterday and I followed through. And he also one of the, all of the amazing things about his workshop was when he was trying to teach us about how to get started with serverless functions. And it was very easy. It was it was very slick, like, I did not think it will be that easy. Yeah, just Amazing.

So, what, uh, what is your actual like musical jam right now? Where are you listening to what fuels your day? What's your favorite music or artist or song?

Every day I have a playlist rights of Nigerian music, which I think I should share. Cuz it has pretty much everything that I love from R&B to Afro beats, mostly nigerian music. So yeah, it's a playlist on YouTube that I just developed for myself. And I use it mostly when I'm working.

Awesome. Yeah, definitely share that link with me. And we'll and we'll share it out because that sounds really amazing. Especially, especially like R&B and, and that sort of thing. I've always enjoyed that.

Cool, I will share that.

So last, but certainly not least, is there something that you would like to promote that you're doing something you kind of want to get out there and share with the world?

Yes, sure. I would like to talk about my blog. I know I've said a lot about it already. So I have a blog. It's giftegwuenu.com. And I also have a YouTube channel where I talk about tech, as well as my personal life. So it's on YouTube. I'm also Gift Egwuenu. So,that's my shameless plug.

Excellent, excellent. So yeah, and I definitely recommend, recommend that blog, at least. I haven't seen your YouTube channel. Go check that out too. But I love all the articles you've written on your blog so far.

Thank you. Thank you.

Alright, well, we'll we'll wrap things up. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. And, and hopefully, we'll see you doing more and more amazing things, especially with concatenating jam sack Legos and stuff like that.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was fun.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot.

Hey, everyone, it's Bryan again. And I want to say thank you to everyone who has listened to the podcast and asked if you enjoyed it, you head over to your podcast application. Give us a review or rating, how people find this podcast and learn more about the amazing community that we work in. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My JAMstack podcast where we profile amazing people working in this awesome JAMstack community. This week after the short hiatus, we're back talking with an amazing self taught software engineer from Charlotte, North Carolina. Everyone please welcome to the show the awesome Brittany Ball.

Brittany, thanks for joining us on That's My JAMstack today. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. How are you doing today?

I'm doing well, doing well!

So um, I guess first let's start with just an introduction. Tell us a little bit about yourself what you do for work and fun and kind of who you are as a person.

My name is Brittany Ball. I currently am a software engineer at a company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Skookum. They're a digital consulting agency and what I do for fun, I like poetry. So I do a lot of the, you know, open mic nights in Charlotte around Charlotte and I like to visit the different breweries. So that's a hobby of mine too

You actually go and perform poetry at the open mic night.

No, I don't have that much courage, but I like to listen to others before

I was ready to be like, so like, impressed and just have to like leave the call. Because Wow, that would have been amazing. Cool. So, uh, so kind of what's your specialty in terms of software engineering? Like, what what do you primarily do back in front end?

I'm a front end engineer. I love the design aspect of coding and you know, so I'm more into like, how everything looks and you know, functions on that that aspect.

Very cool. Very good. Me too. I like if I can't see it. I just I'm not interested in working on it.

Exactly. Yeah.

Cool. So So obviously, this is a JAMstack podcast. So I guess what what was your entry point into this idea or this methodology or static sites or whatever you like to call it.

I started to do research on Gatsby. And so that was like my entry point. And I really fell in love with how flexible it was. And, you know, the way that you could, you know, stack plugins, and, you know, the theme aspect of Gatsby and, like, Netlify and GraphQL. I just fell in love and like, I'm still, you know, learning, you know, it's so much you can do with it. So like, I'm still learning but I love it.

Very cool. and are using it personally or is it professional? Or where's that falling?

Right now I'm using it personally to build learning resource that I'm working on. So it's like trial and error, some learning as I know this is something that I'm really passionate about. So

when you're building the resourcing Casspi, I assume, yes. Very cool and what sort of what sort of plugins are using, so you love that you can, you can kind of stack those plugins together. And I'm very interested in cascades plugin ecosystem.

Um, so I'm using a plugin for that will. And so I have a blog aspect of this websites. I'm using a plugin to bring in our RSS feed. I'm also using a plugin that I actually worked with Jason Lengstorf who works for Gatsby, we built a plugin that would allow you to bring in things using a meetup API. So yeah, I'm using that plugin also. So like, I'm trying to like, it's a lot of things one into this learning resource. And so I'm having to like do a lot of research and if you know, it doesn't plugin, I'm learning to build my own and put it out there for others to use.

Because Gatsby is somewhat new in some, some of the issues I run into. Haven't, you know, they don't have a lot of in the community they don't have a lot of answers for. And so I have found myself going directly to the people that work. There are the people that don't that, you know, the Gatsby theme, and you don't have questions, I go to the person that built it. And as you know, oh, you know, does this have this? No functionality yet, and getting answers straight from the source. So I like that they're really open to reaching out to you and like helping you with that.

Pretty cool. Yeah, I've actually noticed that too. Like, I run into a bug and there's like, maybe one stack overflow question about it. Like you can't find the answer. Yeah, that's actually something I've heard a few different times about Gatsby Is that like a lot of people in the ecosystem are real friendly, you can reach out to them.

Yeah, they they are really friendly. And I just found out about Spectrum. And so on Spectrum, we have like a really big community and they're all open to answering questions about Gatsby and you know on Twitter if you you know, hashtag Gatsby have a question. So many people will reach out to you and like try to help you solve the issue.

So So what would be fair to say that Gatsby is kind of your jam in the JAMstack?

Yes, it is. It is really is like I'm really falling in love with it. And like I really want to, you know, create something major with Gatsby. Yeah, I really love it.

I really enjoyed the fact that so like, I'm a static site guy, I've been using like Jekyll and 11ty, but I love that like Gatsby is the this thing that's kind of beyond that, right? Like it's static sites, but then it's like a static app builder. Almost like you can do so much with it.

You do so much. Like I've been talking to like others and then like, I don't know about Gatsby aesthetics, I'm like, but it's like, so much more than just a static site. Like, it's so much you can do with it and like, just so awesome.

So the stuff you've been doing with it, have you been doing, like the full, like, single page application aspects of it? Or are you doing server side rendering with it or you actually kind of combining both of those?

Um, it's a little combination of both. So I'm using like, Netlify. So yeah, it's a combination. So I'm trying to, you know, this is like my first Gatsby site, so it's like trial and error, figuring it out on what to do and what I like and what you know, after this, I think I'm going to build something else in Gatsby like to just keep building until I figure out what works best for me.

I get that that first and then second and third and fourth. And especially when you have side projects. Once you start from really hard to stop?

Yes, yes, yes, I have like my GitHub, I have so many different ones. Yeah.

About that. Right. So before you kind of discovered Gatsby, and for you maybe got into this whole static site world, were you wanting to do side projects? And was it harder before you kind of discover this stuff?

Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was a lot harder to like. So before, I was just working with like, another JavaScript. And so like, that was harder because it took a lot of more work. And we had to, like, you know, do a lot of the building yourself. Whereas the Gatsby, you can bring in a starter, and it's already like, pre configured for you. And if you add in things and functionality and like, you know, plugins, and it's, you know, it was easier for me to learn and, you know, I say break things and, you know, fix them, you know, So yeah, I think like, I recommend Gatsby to like anyone that you know, starting out and they want to learn something like Gatsby is so, like, easy. It's like really simple to learn.

And so coming in coming into this kind of world did you do you have much experience with back end technology or view just has brought in okay, because I got a little bit of experience and I hate it I hate back end stuff.

Yeah, yeah, I had a little bit like starting out. I don't know if you know, but I'm completely self taught. So like I taught myself web development using YouTube. Yeah, and so I had to figure out a back end and front end and not like it was the line was kind of blurred for me. You know, which was front and back end, but I learned quickly the difference because front end is like so much more like a Filling to me.

And it gives you that quick feedback loop to like you you do something, you see it, it works. It's great. Or you do something you see it. It's horrible. You fix it. Yeah. So you mentioned learning on YouTube, but what were some of like your big resources? Or was it just random videos that you would find by googling?

Yeah, random, random searches. So that's when that's before like Free Code Camp. And a lot of you know, the things that they have now to learn on. They weren't around back then. And so it's all like me, like you, YouTube being, you know, JavaScript and seeing what videos we had and like which ones were you know, the thing about learning on YouTube. A lot of people don't teach the same and they don't break it down so that newer engineers or you know, someone that wants to break into the end industry can understand. And that's where I want to help. Because I know the things that struggle with, you know, trying to learn. And so like, I want to be that voice or others that, you know, I want to break it down so they can understand and not use a lot of big terminology. You know, it kind of confuses so like, that's one of the struggles I face when I was learning on YouTube.

Definitely. And sometimes the definitions don't mean what people expect them to mean to that. That was like my first five years learning I was mostly self taught like with a couple mentors, and like they would say something and I searched for it and it actually meant something different and yeah, exciting.

so so you're using Gatsby you're enjoying it, I assume. So you talked about how much you love it. What what's going to kind of keep you in this obviously you're maybe not using it professionally right now. But what's going to keep you playing in the jam sack working with a jam tech what makes you like what gives you the Love.

Um, they're always coming out with something new, some kind of improvement and so like, you know, because it's new or like, it's always something new to learn, like, and I heard, you know, they're doing something different themes now, you know. And so like, I'm just excited to learn what's new Gatsby? What you know what exciting thing I can do with it now you know, so they're always coming out with new ways to use it and so that's really exciting for me.

What Yeah, what's that new thing? Let me let me use that new thing

that had no time to get boring because it's always something Oh, guess what you can do what gets me now like,

all right, so so you know I don't want to keep you too long. Keep it nice and short. But I do want to know what was your actual jam right now? Where do you jam and how to where you listening to dancing to? I don't know.

So I have fallen in love with Lizzo, I love her. And I love everything about She stands for as far as like, women empowerment and you know, loving yourself and, you know, so I really, really adore this. Oh, you know, that's my jam, especially when I'm coding. Like, she just gets me pumped and excited and you know, proud to be a woman and like, I just love her

Very cool. And is there a sort of a thing you'd like to promote that you're working on anything that you want to share to the world? Um hmm.

I am currently starting my own chapter of Tech By Choice. So it's a nonprofit that, you know, empowers women and anyone that, you know, classifies themselves as a woman. It empowers them and helps them on their journey throughout tech. So it's free, free, free to low costs, courses and classes and like you know, mentorship and you know, that kind of, you know, You're not alone in this.

Is that local to where you are?

It's actually based out of California. But my chapter will be the first chapter outside of California.

Well, thank you for taking the time to chat with us. And letting us get to know you a little bit better. And I hope you keep doing some amazing stuff. And I'm going to be on the lookout for Tech By Choice. That's for sure.

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, no problem. And we'll see you on the internet.

Yes. Awesome. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of that's my JAMstack podcast where we are profile amazing people working in this awesome JAMstack community. In this podcast we ask the age old question, what's your jam in the JAMstack? I'm your host Bryan Robinson and today I'm joined by the ever amazing Phil Hawksworth. Phil is a member of the absolutely incredible developer experience team at a little JAMstack company called Netlify.

Hey, Phil, thanks for joining us on today's episode.

Well, thanks for having me. It's, it's nice to be here.

Yeah, no problem. And I guess let's let's start. Hopefully, a lot of our audience knows who Phil Hawksworth is at this point. But I give us a little introduction. Tell us you know, what you do for work what you do for fun, that sort of thing?

Yeah, of course. So say as you say, My name is Phil and I work at Netlify. So I'm kind of fairly well as a right in the middle of the the JAMstack kind of world really, I guess, been working in there for a little while. So I work as part of the developer experience team at Netlify. And I've been there for almost two years, I'm I don't quite know where the time has gone. But yeah, I've been there a little while now. But I've I've kind of been working on figuring out how to use Netlify as part of the JAMstack, finding out what people need from it, trying to find interesting ways to use it. And I've been, I've been interested in JAMstack and building kind of static sites, I'm careful of using the phrase static sites, it's so it's a dangerous thing to say. But I've been dabbling in that world for quite a long time, I used to work at an agency. So I did lots of work for doing architectures for different projects and clients there. And I kept on coming back to this approach that I now know to be called the JAMstack.

Cool. So you kind of already partially answered the next question. But your answer your point to the JAMstack was in this agency world?

Yeah, I think really, anyone who's been doing anything like technical architectures in an agency, where the client often dictates the the kind of platform and the architecture you might use, irrespective of what the problem is you're trying to solve, I was in that world for quite a few years. And more and more often, I'd be thinking, we can simplify this, there's an easier way to build these things out. You know, often a project would have an aggressive lead time, but that didn't always marry perfectly with the lead time for the infrastructure you have to build on. So for quite a long time I was I was really curious about how we might simplify things, how we might pre render things, and then serve them from a much simpler hosting infrastructure. And to be honest, it was things like Jekyll and GitHub Pages that got me into this. I think that's probably an entry point for lots of people over the years.

I think Jekyll was one of the first static site generators that made things really approachable, and was you know, felt mature and felt like it was well documented and had a nice on ramp, if you could get over one of the two of the wrinkles to do with Ruby. I'm not a Ruby guy. So that usually where I came unstuck, but once you got past that, I found that that was the that was the way in for me. And I got really excited about how easy it could be to generate a site and deploy it onto something like GitHub Pages at the time, which I think was pretty much at the forefront of automating kind of hosting a static site. So that's, that was my route in.

Okay, and how the clients feel about that. Like you said, like, they tend to dictate technology, irrespective of what they're doing.

Yeah. And it, it really depended on the client. Some, some clients were much more open to it than others. But I found that the bigger the brand, and the big, like the more established they were in the market, the more likely they would be to say, Oh, no, no, that's not for us, we need an expensive thing. irrespective of how complicated the thing is you're making.

So actually, that that became quite a difficult challenge, I found to to actually persuade people that they didn't need to spend a fortune on complex infrastructure and something simpler could could actually serve the purpose. And that that kind of played into the conversations I started having with Matt and Chris, the founders of Netlify back in the day, as, as they were trying to coin this term JAMstack, because they were having the same problem, you know, I was talking about static site architectures, and they were doing the same thing. And I think it's such a loaded term, the word static, that, you know, that's where the phrase jumpstart was kind of born from this, this, this desire to get beyond the kind of baggage that comes with the term static, which makes people think simple.

And I think as the the ecosystem, and all of the vendors and tools have matured around this, that's what's takes JAMstack sites to something beyond static, you know, it's beyond what you might think of traditionally a static so that's, that's where that kind of term I think, was was born from, and that was my entry point into as well trying to find ways to convince clients, some of whom would be okay with it, some of whom would need some convincing the they could spend less and go faster, which seems like a sweet spot for me.

Well, yeah. And it's funny, because like, clients assume that the more you pay, the better the service is. And that's not necessarily true. In fact, it rarely, is.

Yeah, there's, I think there's always this kind of feeling of finding something which is reassuringly expensive. I've definitely been in that world a lot where, by default, particularly the larger brands, who might go to a large, you know, big global agency, which is the kind of place I was working at, they, I think there's an assumption that they, they need the best in class thing, which has the biggest price tag. And often those are the things that are designed to do a wide variety of things for a wide variety of people. And that makes it hard for them to do the right, you know, the one thing that you need well, and so it's, yeah, it's definitely not like a perfect kind of marriage of what you pay more, you get something which is better.

This is a great example, I think JAMstack's a great example of simplifying and focusing down on the on really what you need to do, and then building that out, rather than trying to use a product which can do everything for everybody, which, as we all know, is hard to do. Well.

Cool. So obviously, you are working at one of the bigger JAMstack companies in the world, but how are you using the JAMstack professionally? How are you using it in your personal life, that sort of thing?

Well, I certainly am still using it very much in my personal life. You know, any sites that I that I make, either from my own blog, or any of my kind of side projects, what have you, I've got a handful of those. And I'm, I'm very promiscuous, when it comes to the static site generator, I use that I think we all kind of have our have our darlings that we like, over over and those kind of evolve over time. You know, I already mentioned Jekyll as the one that I started with him for a while I was also using Hugo a lot really got into Hugo.

More recently, I've been using 11ty it on my own site and various kind of hobby sites of mine and kind of sites of side projects. But at Netlify I we also use all of the all of those as well, you know, we use our .com site is built on Hugo has been for quite some time. But we also use things like React Static, which is which I think is an excellent framework for things like headless cms.org, that's with react static and also static gen.

So those, those are both websites that that Netlify put together so we use those static site generators. Aa bunch of templates and example sites, I use a 11ty on, which is there's all sorts all over the place. And and the only reason I feel kind of safe in doing that is one of these core properties of JAMstack sites in the you know, I don't need maintain that platform, once it's deployed. You know, if I've deployed something in one framework, one static site generator, I know that that's going to just keep working, as long as I don't, you know, I don't need to go back and keep maintaining it, I know that will be be fine. So I feel reasonably comfortable with, you know, trying out different static site generators, here or there. And knowing that once something's deployed, is just going to stay deployed.

And that's one of the kind of nice attributes of this stack. And the the overhead really is in remembering how to maintain it. And if you want to make changes, remembering the different templates, and syntax is and those kind of things. But that's one of the hazards of being someone like me, who's kind of dabbling with lots of different static site generators and, and trying lots of different things out at the same time. But and I don't know, that's kind of that's kind of fun, it keeps it fresh as well.

So you're experimenting with a lot. So what what is your current jam, right? Like, what what are you really enjoying using at the moment, or, you know, in the coming, you know, few months?

I feel like a lot of my colleagues, gonna make fun of me, because I'm always going on about 11ty. And I really enjoy it very much. And it feels, it feels to me a lot like Jekyll, in so much of as it's a it's kind of approach and the logic that sits down within it. But it doesn't have that Ruby speed bump that I mentioned. So it's very, very portable, in terms of both the output that it creates, like all JAMstack sites, but also the build environment is very, very quick and easy to get bootstrapped with it.

So I've been having just a ton of fun with that, especially as the project's been evolving a little bit. And it started to add things like support for JavaScript in the data files. So that's a fairly kind of common convention, I think, for static site generators to have a folder full of data files that you can use in your templates. And I really like the fact that it will let you write those files with JavaScript, which could go off and make a request and return data. So it makes it very easy to pull data in from different points that build time. It just makes it loads of fun. So yeah, I've been having, I've been having a lot of fun with that recently.

And the other thing I'd maybe call out is some I've been dabbling more and more with serverless functions, which I know kind of aren't necessarily kind of, from a purist point of view, part of the JAMstack, but they're, they're best friends, I think, you know, they complement each other really, really well. And so I've been having a bit of fun playing with things like using serverless functions as a fallback as a 404. Sso for any routes on my page on my sites that don't, that don't resolve to a pre generated page, sending those off to serverless functions instead, which can then dynamically render on the fly, something that's maybe hitting a data source or something like that. So it's an interesting kind of model. I'll publish some some examples of that. Hopefully, they'll be out by the time this is this is this is published as well.

I'm very, very interested in that. That's, that's a concept that I hadn't even thought about.

Yeah, it's a really, it's really interesting, because I think there's this temptation sometimes to say, well, we could use serverless function to, to render things on the fly. So we're still kind of, you know, not having a web server. And you know, we don't you know, so we've still, we still got that kind of simplicity in terms of the infrastructure, but you're not pre generating them. So I'm always cautious. I like to try and pregenerate as much as possible. So if something fails, it fails in my house, not in the user's house. But it's interesting thinking of serverless functions as a fallback for 404s, particularly if you're hitting something like a database, when you're generating the pages, you know, what if you're adding content to the database, and while the site is regenerating, and maybe creating other pages, your 404s could hit that database directly. And then return pages is an interesting kind of model just to extend the reach of JAMstack. So yeah, I've been having a lot of fun playing with that recently,

And so so where do you you mentioned pre rendering, and how, you know, that's kind of your philosophy on it? Where do you lie when it comes to like pre render, and then taking over that render with JavaScript on the fly on the front end?

I'm, I mean, I think that was great. I think it's, it's one of those things that, you know, it's all down to progressive enhancement, right? And treating things as, as a progressive enhancement, and deciding where your baseline is, what are you enhancing from, because you could very easily argue that a JAMstack approaches to render an empty body tag with a div with an ID in it, and then everything comes down the wire is JavaScript, and you do everything in the client. That's perfectly valid. And I think you know, it, there's this word again, it depends, right?

You know, if you're building an application, maybe that would be fine. But I love to try and get as much pre rendered as possible. So that while you're going off and making the request for JavaScript, the user has something to see. And while your JavaScript being interpreted particularly on things like mobile devices, which we know not everyone's got a powerful iPhone in their pocket, there are lots of like, less powerful devices, even if the connectivity is good, the power that's required to pause and execute and do all this stuff with JavaScript can make things a bit slow. Even if we're doing you know, what feels like a performant thing. We're relying on JavaScript a lot, we need to be careful. So I like to pregenerate as much as humanly possible. And you end up in this position where there's a balancing act, isn't there?

I mean, you've got to think about what's, what's reasonable, and what starts to add complexity for the sake of being a purist, and way that balance up. But yeah, I like pregenerating as much as possible. And then really thinking about progressive enhancement. And I'll always stand by progressive enhancement. I know, I know, there's some debates around that at the moment. But I think that's the right way to go.

So you've been professionally in this like, full on JAMstack world for a couple years now at Netlify. You were dabbling in it at the agency. Other than obvious being gainfully employed in a JAMstack company, what's going to keep you in the JAMstack going forward. What makes you just kind of deep down? know that that's kind of the future?

Well, I think, I think a big part of it is seeing the, the JAMstack ecosystem. Gah, that sounds like a terrible, like salesy phrase, isn't it but there are so many tools and vendors now, really supporting this and being a part of it, whether that's the explosion in the different types of headless CMSs or things like image services from people like Cloudinary, or Authentication Service services from people like Auth0, there's so many things coming along people doing ecommerce, there's, there's so much. So I think seeing the advancement in each one of those areas, that's keeping it very interesting for me.

And it's a I think it's a real validation that the approach is starting to reach critical mass, the fact that businesses are being formed and, and funded and you know, established based on these kind of models. And I think that's really exciting. There are so many people looking at different avenues now, here that we can all make use of that keeps it far from dull, and I love playing with all of the new services as they as they, they surface. It's nice.

So I think you might be uniquely situated to answer this question, which I haven't had a chance to ask before, which is, what are kind of the impediments to JAMstack flourishing in the future? Is it going to keep exploding? Are there any things we need to worry about in terms of hurdles?

Oh, that's a good question. I mean, it, I always, I'm always surprised about how the boundary seems to seem to get put getting pushed back further and further away. Because you know, the more you look at it, the more you think of think of the model as kind of static first and, you know, approach the approach the architecture, as I'm going to assume things are going to be static, unless I reach something that I just can't make static, and then look at the alternatives, as opposed to doing the other way around, where we might traditionally have thought, Okay, well, I need, I'll have a dynamic back-end, but there might be some opportunities to do things that are cached or make static and what have you. And, and I think that's, that's the harder way to approach it, I much prefer doing it the other way and assuming static first.

So the roadblocks seem to get pushed further and further away. Um, I think the, probably the ceiling that's hard to get through at the moment is sites that have many, many URLs, many, many pages. So I'm talking many hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, that's really tough to do from a pre generated standpoint. And static site generators are getting faster and smarter about that. And, you know, and I know lots of people are working on trying to get beyond the, this kind of hurdle of can be selectively generate different parts of the site. And it's a fairly complex problem, because the dependency graph of you know, all of your templates and pages isn't very nice, isn't necessarily very easy to visualize, or easy to understand. So that's an interesting challenge. But once we, once we get further down that line, and the site generators get faster and faster, I think that opens the doors to bigger and different types of sites as well that maybe have millions of millions of URLs, which at the moment is, is probably a bit of a ceiling for us.

Well, and really, I'm trying, I'm trying to think of what those sites would be other than, like big news organizations. That's about the only thing I can think of don't have millions of your eyes.

Yeah, I think typically, that's that's the classic example, you know, news, news organizations, or publications that have, you know, many hundreds of thousands of pages. Yeah. And the other one, of course, is sites that have lots of targeted, personalized content, that can be challenging as well. But again, that starts to become one of those points of how you architect it and what you're what what you value. So for instance, Netlify the app itself and Neltify, you know, where you go and configure your sites and all of those things, that has hundreds of thousands of users using it. And they're all using content, which is specific to them, you know, it's the data which is specific to their sites. But it's a JAMstack site. It's a, it's a staticly served React app, which then talks to dynamic API's. And you, that seems like a good model, you aren't giving up the pre generated nature of every page that might then be cruel, callable by search, search engines and what have you. But that's fine. But in that kind of environment, you know, I don't want the admin view of my website, you know, admin console being crawled by Google. So it's, there's a balancing act, and it's trying to figure out what's, what's appropriate and what you actually want. But yeah, so serving personalized content to people and then having that crucibles because you needed regenerated. That's another challenge. But I don't always know if it's actually required.

And on top of that, like most of those personalized things, you don't want crawlable anyway. So you probably right, as long as as long as you are connected in a way that the user gets the content properly, then you're probably pretty good to go.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So it's always a balancing act. And then I'm very cautious about describing anything as a silver bullet. And there are so many different ways that we can approach these architectures with the, with the tools that we've got in the jam stack. ecosystem, there's that word again. There's so many tools and approaches that we can take that we can kind of cut the cloth to suit what we need, I think,

So obviously, I try to keep these relatively short. So I'm gonna go ahead and move into the next question, which is, what are you actually jamming to right now? What what's your musical jam?

Oh, this is a great question. Well, obviously, Toto is never far from the top of my history. It's amazing how often I fall back to having some Toto being played is particularly good on a Friday afternoon, I think, when I need a little bit of a spring in my step.

But I one of the things I actually often find myself writing code to is the, the, the code radio that Free Code Camp provided. And if you've encountered that, it's just, it's just a YouTube link. And it's like this 24/7 music that's good to code by radio. And it's kind of nice as well, because you tuned in there, and you can see how many other people are listening as well. So even though you're not interacting in any way at all, you've got this kind of solidarity, which is kind of nice.

So those two things, but the only other thing I'd probably mentioned his Gaz Coombes, who he used to be the lead singer of super grass going back way, way back. But he's, he's got some albums out at the moment that I really, really like, and kind of keep me keep me interested as I'm kind of writing things and and building code. So yeah, definitely recommend Gaz Coombes, I think called Matador that I've been listening to a lot. It's good stuff.

I'll find that and tuck that in the show notes. So anything that you're you're looking to promote, obviously, you're identified, but anything specific, you want to talk about

the so there's probably just just two things. And depending on the timing of this, we've got JAMstack conference coming up in San Francisco, on the 16th, 17th, and 18th of October. So who knows, maybe this will squeak out into the world in time. Hopefully it's coming up very quickly. So that's, that's coming up.

And the only other thing I'd call out is there's now a nice slack community growing for the JAMstack community. And there are already a couple of good places to talk like TheNewDynamic Slack is a brilliant place that I'd recommend to people. But also for people who are maybe going to JAMstack conferences and meetups jamstack.org/slack will get you into a good place for for talking about all things JAMstack, we, we foolishly didn't call it JAMslack, which I think Jake Archibald kind of mentioned was a huge missed opportunity but so be it will have to that's just that's just a mess that will have to live with

and I might be a little too kitschy for some people though.

Yeah, we've we've stuck with just jamstack.org/slack

Alright. Well, I want to thank you for for taking the time and talking with us today. And and I want to say I appreciate all the all the different content that you put out.

Oh, that's very kind. Well, thanks for this. It's, it's nice to get to talk. And yeah, I've really enjoyed listening to everyone you've had on so we're looking forward to whoever

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Hello everyone! Welcome to another episode of the That’s my JAM stack podcast where we profile amazing people working in this new methodology. In this podcast, we dare to ask the age-old question “What’s your jam in the JAMstack?!” I’m your host Bryan Robinson and today I’m joined by Andrew Sprouse. Andrew is a cofounder and CTO of the amazing JAMstack company TakeShape.

So, Andrew, thanks for coming on the show today. Can you give our listeners a little background, who you are what you do for work and for fun?

Yeah, great. Thanks for having me, by the way. Um, so I'm Andrew. I'm the CTO and co founder of a company called TakeShape. And take shape builds tools for JAMstack developers. And outside of TakeShape. I like to cook I like to ride my bike. And I like to code. So

very nice. So that not not just coding, but also cooking and bike riding. What kind of stuff do you cook?

Oh, I'm, I'm very passionate about barbecuing. So any type of you know, charcoal fires, smoking. I have like a wood pizza attachment for my grill. So it's that's like a fun project on the weekends.

Very nice. I'm from Memphis. So I take barbecue very seriously, we might not want to get into strong opinions on that too much.

yeah, I think you would win on that one.

So obviously, now you're a CTO of a JAMstack company. But what was kind of your entry point into the JAMstack world?

Yeah. So my introduction to sort of static sites and JAMstack goes back to 2010, when we first started using AWS at work, and at the time, I was working with my co founder, Mark, but at Newsweek magazine on the web team there. And so we found out that you could just put HTML files on s3, and then you could host them, basically with zero effort. And it was super fast. And so that was like, wow, if we could really do you know, the whole website this way, that would be amazing.

So fast forward, like a few months, Mark left to pursue his own creative agency. And one of the first sites that he did was just some HTML, JavaScript and CSS on on s3. And it was the first proof where it was like it was this site for a charity called the Dobbs stories. And it was this first proof that, you know, you could build a full featured website, just with static files. And so that sort of influenced the way that we started to build from that, then on.

Okay, so So when you were at Newsweek were y'all using anything other than just hosting the static files on s3, were you going bigger? Or was it still like you had your content management system for the news? And

yeah, so unfortunately, back then, we were using enterprise CMS called, it was called Day CQ5. Now, it's called Adobe, AN so since everything couldn't be static, we would spend a lot of time caching, like doing really robust caching. And so that was kind of like, the website, in effect was static. But it was just being served from a cache as opposed to proactively pushing it out to, you know, s3 or Netlify or something. So we we didn't have the tools back then to be able to make the whole site static. So we had to use this traditional CMS.

I actually worked in a news organization for about six years. And even like the side projects we did, we're still like database driven WordPress driven kind of stuff. And then we had our big content management system stack. Did y'all do any side projects like that on on static? Or were you like hosting in some other way?

Yeah, so the discovery was for was for, you know, a side project was like, you could do a micro site with static hosting, but you can do the full blown media experience.

Gotcha. And so so there's that breakaway agency proof of concept. And then what was the big explosion point for you at that point? What what kind of tipped the scale into the giant, like static sites that you were doing? And then what was the JAMstack tipping point?

So the tipping point really came along, when we found out that, you know, this is really clicking for the agency. So actually, fast forward a couple years, I joined Mark at the creative agency to help him with technology. And so we're working together. And we're realizing that every project that we do with static goes so smoothly. And you know, it's an amazing end result for the client. And so we start to push all of our clients to go static. And that just got easier and easier when there was more tools. And we had a really favorite tool called Webhook CMS. And it was sort of like a CMS and static site generator sort of built into one. And it was like that, for us was like, Whoa, if you combine this concept of Headless CMS plus static site generator, you get this amazing end result, it's easy to set up. And, you know, the the performance is great, and you don't get any calls, you know, late at night that the site's down or have any maintenance issues.

Nice. So so the JAMstack philosophy is professional, you've just been doing them for what sounds like like four or five years now as like your main go to what about personally or doing anything personally with the JAMstack and your side, like coding projects?

Well, I'd love to have more side projects right now. But my, my main project is kind of my everything right now. So working on TakeShape. And actually building tools for the JAMstack on the JAMstack. Is is what I spend all my time doing nowadays.

So talk a little bit about that like building the JAMstack with the JAMstack. How does that work? How does that work?

So TakeShape started out as a headless CMS. And from the very beginning, we wrote the API first. And so being in a jam, Sac State of Mind, we're like, well, how can we do this with no servers. So we built the back end all on AWS lambda using API gateway. So that was that was sort of the first step. And then we realized that our client app could simply be a static, single page react app that we host on s3. So it's actually using JAMstack techniques to build a CMS that's supremely useful for people who are building on the JAMstack.

And we also incorporated just like our Webhook inspiration, we built a static site generator directly into the CMS so you could have the entire experience in one product.

I see that more and more in like JAMstack companies right now. I mean, Netlify is packing in like four or five different services. Obviously, AWS has a whole bunch of stuff built into it. And then I see you've also got the Mesh product, which is building an API's together, how's that been going?

So the mesh has been an adventure. It's a problem that we've solved on our own many times, you know, for specific point to point things. But it's been an amazing adventure to try to figure out a way to generalize it and make it easier for everybody. So everybody can benefit from our experience, and frankly, our pain with integrating API's.

So being able to use that mesh product in conjunction with our CMS product is just a, you know, it's the natural extension. So you have this idea of headless CMS with a custom data model. But then what our customers came to us for said, This CMS is great, but I have all these other things that I need to incorporate into my project. How do I do that? And what the best technique? And well, you know, as soon as we, our answer was, well, you have to launch a Netlify function and write all this custom code, and here's a sample project and then get repo that shows, you know, the sample people, you know, the eyes would roll back and, you know, glaze over. And they would sort of stop listening at that point, because they wanted it to be a plugin, or some sort of out of the box solution. So we realized there was a need for something like take shape mesh.

Definitely, yeah, when I was a, I actually have a little website, that's a repository of various products. And it's like, my client wants x, and there's so many things that clients want, and some of them make sense. some of them are a little bit weird, but, uh, but in the end that that is one of the impediments to getting JAMstack in agencies, at least when I worked in an agency that was one of the one of the problems?

Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's like, the tools can be amazing, the end product can be amazing. But if you can't package it in a way that the client understands, you have a really hard time selling, you know, them on it. And that's something that traditionally WordPress, and traditional products have done really well, where it's like, oh, well, you need this feature. Well, there's just some random plugin, some guy wrote that, that kind of does that. And maybe it will, will work. But at a marketing level, that's amazing. Because like, oh, WordPress has infinite features.

And then as the developer, you're saddled with some guys, you know, plugin that he wrote for one project, and you're kind of like, well, now I have a lot of work to do. And so the amazing part of the JAMstack is that each company that creates a JAMstack service sort of focuses on the thing that they're best at so Netlify, you know, is the gold standard for static site hosting, and you have, you know, image services like Imgix and Cloudinary and analytics and, and, you know, e commerce services, and so everybody gets to specialize. But then it also is like, well, now how do I bring it all together? And, and that is then thrust onto the developer. And what we found is that, you know, the developer has plenty of work to do, of actually making your product. So let's, let's give them a shortcut. And they're still using these best in class service is, but we're making them easier to combine.

I really like that concept of Mesh. Is it out of beta. Like, I remember a couple like a month ago, I tried to get in, but there was in beta, so I skipped it.

Yeah, we we currently have a beta waitlist going on. So I would encourage you to sign up, and we can sort of like move you up to the top of the list. And, yeah, so so we're currently, we're currently building out all the features, and it's super early. So, you know, we're getting great feedback from our initial users so far. And, you know, we're really excited we can't wait to, to, you know, release this to a wider audience. And actually, in October, we're going to be at the JAMstack_conf inSan Francisco, and going to be presenting, you know, like 10 minutes, overview of the Mesh and, and sort of, hopefully, we can open it up wider at that point.

Very cool. Are you gonna go out and be like, Matt Billman and like, deploy on stage? Or maybe, maybe keep it in beta until week after?

I don't know. I mean, that's a pretty brave guy. He's an and much smarter than I am. So, you know, he can get away with that. Mine might be a little bit more canned.

Alright, so obviously TakeShape is one of your jams in the JAMstack, but what are some others? What are some of your other favorite tools and products and things that you really enjoy using?

You know, it's sort of like the JAMstack, it's hard to have favorites, because there's so many different functionalities. So I've already mentioned Netlify, you know, they're sort of the leader in this space, and they do, every product that they come out with is, is really, really great. You know, we use their static hosting extensively. And, you know, if you like react, I think Gatsby JS is great. You know, it provides a great way for you to build out a site and then sort of like, add in those single page features that you would want.

And talk about plugin ecosystem, they've got quite the plugin ecosystem already.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing the amount of work that community has done, you know, and the couldn't have nicer founders, you know, those guys have have been really nice to us. And, you know, I always talk about Gatsby. And one other service that has sort of come onto my radar that I've only started to play around with is one called FaunaDB. And they've created this sort of globally distributed database that is ACID compliant, which is amazing for something that's that distributed. And so I just started, I just signed up the other day, and I've been playing around with it. So I have to plug them to

I think you might have signed up at roughly the same time I signed up. I'm working on my first like, demo in FaunaDB. I just started that like earlier this week.

yeah, it looks really cool.

And real fast you through the term ACID compliant out there. I personally don't know what that is. So I'm going to assume that least a few listeners won't know what that means. But what is acid compliance?

So it's sort of a, you know, a standard in database land of how can it's it's about consistency. So if if I write to the database, and then I asked the database back for an answer, am I going to get a consistent answer? Because in some databases, if you had, say, multiple servers, which you do not now that's abstracted from us, but if you have multiple servers and multiple locations, I might send my the update of the title of my blog post to that it would go to like three or four different servers. And then if I asked the cluster for what's the title, I might not if I if I asked for it at the exact same time, I might not get the the the old one versus the new one. And ACID is basically the guarantee that you would get back that consistent answer nice. I across all the machines,

I cannot even begin to fathom the solution there. But yeah, that is an important thing. Definitely.

Yeah, I mean, that that's the amazing part, you know, of the ecosystem is you can have the guys at FaunaDB, who are worrying about that deeply technical problem, and they can sort of bottle their expertise, and just offer it to everybody. Which is really cool.

And so what's going to keep you in the JAMstack world, other than literally building a product on the JAMstack for the JAMstack, like what, what makes you love it deep down? Obviously, you're pretty passionate about?

Yeah, I think, well, there's there's multiple ways I can answer this. But I think that the thing that I think of is if I've met a lot of great people working with the these technologies, and you know, it's the first development community that I've been in, that's been really like kind and, you know, friendly to beginners, and everybody's all about, you know, how can I? How can I boost, you know, your productivity or make your business better. And I feel like that sort of that spirit of giving everybody else a shortcut. And you know, you know, earlier in my career, I'd work with engineers who it was like, we gotta roll our own, we got to do everything custom, you know, we can't trust other people to to make good stuff, it has to be inside. And that sort of like limits your ability to be really productive. And so I think that JAMstack is on the right track, regardless of technology that that's the attitude towards building nowadays,

Bringing the best expertise from all over the internet.

Alright, so in terms of like, actual jamming, what's what's your musical jam right now?

Oh, man. So last month, I went to an Iron Maiden concert. So I've been jamming out to some, you know, to some metal while doing coding, but I enjoy all types of music. There's a really eclectic band called Khruangbin. They're sort of Thai inspired. It's acoustic music, but it's really cool. I can't even not confident that I would be able to spell it on the air right now.

We'll put it in the show notes. though right.

Yeah, for sure. That's all Also, if you want something a little bit more low key to code to I would say just that.

And I think I can guess what your answer to this is going to be. But is there anything that you would like to promote on on the podcast today?

Yeah, sure. I mean, first of all, I want to thank you for, for letting me on. And this is a really great opportunity to talk to you and to your audience. But yeah, TakeShape, we're, we're, we're working really hard to get good products out for everybody, and especially the mesh. And, you know, we want everybody's feedback on it once the beta goes out.

But please, you know, keep in touch sign up for the Mesh go to TakeShape.io and there's a place to sign up. And you can watch you know, the video that's there and, and sort of do that we'd love to hear from people there. You know, what they want out of the JAMstack? And, you know, how can we do better and and and build tools that people want to use?

Very cool. Definitely a noble aspiration: build tools that people actually want to not just have to use? Yeah, we hope so. All right, well, I really appreciate you coming on the show. And and I hope that you keep making some amazing stuff to TakeShape.

Great. Great. Thank you so much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Laurie, welcome to the show. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

Yeah, absolutely happy to be here.

Cool. So So I know that about you, but go ahead and tell the audience who you are what you do for work what you do for fun, that sort of thing.

Yeah, so I'm Laurie. I am a software engineer for a company called 10 Miles Squared Technologies in the DC metro area. And we're a small consultancy, so I kind of do whatever is asked of me. And then as part of that role and a little bit, because I enjoyed doing it, I convinced them that, you know, it was okay for me to do it at work as well. I do technical blogging and speaking and kind of community outreach interaction stuff.

Stuff. I was like a good good stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Like Egghead videos and contributing to some other publications. And if you hear a little jingling in the backg.round, that is our brand new puppy Avett, who is being a bit of a terror right now as she gets used to .. Oh, she just came up right by the side me. Hi, sweetheart. As we get used to our new house,

well, I have a 12 year old cat on my desk right now. So all pets are welcome.

Yes, this is the PETjam podcast.

So cool. So what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the jam stack or static sites or whatever you like to call it?

I blame Jennifer Wadella. And for those who don't know her, she is the founder of KCWiT and kind of a badass Angular JavaScript front end Dev. And she, I talked to her about, you know, maybe making a personal site, she had a really great one. And she said, here's my code for my Jekyll site like lift, whatever you need, make your own. And I did. And then she transitioned over to Gatsby and kind of spoke the gospel. And I was like, Okay, let me give that a try. And so from then on, I was like, this is the perfect kind of thing for my site. And and that's, that's kind of where I got into the JAMstack worlds because I wanted to be able to throw something up pretty quickly that was going to be performant that was going to have, you know, all kinds of nice dynamic behaviors. But but it didn't need to have all of this full back end content, as it were,

Sure, now you're a software engineer, so you're not necessarily afraid of the back end. So what what kind of draws you to something that doesn't need a back end?

I don't have to do the setup of like a bunch of different components, getting deployed into the cloud and deal with like, HTTP back and forth. And all those things like, it's great. And I am do it all the time when it's necessary. But if it isn't necessary, why add all that bulk and nonsense?

Sure. And as a front end engineer, I definitely consider that nonsense in a lot of ways

And don't get me wrong. I mean, I, I started in the Java back-end world. That was kind of my bread and butter. And so I've done Python, and I've done PHP, and I've done a bunch of different things. And they have their use cases. And they're incredibly important and incredibly powerful. But if all I'm doing is serving stuff that can exist in markdown, then there's absolutely no reason I need to build myself an API.

Definitely, definitely. And did you have any experience with markdown beforehand? Did you use it like in GitHub or what have you?

Yeah, no, in fact, a lot of my site is in YAML.

Yeah, I didn't have a lot of experience. In fact, I looked at and I said, Man, I hate this markdown thing that like a couple of my friends we're talking about and then everything's written and markdown for me now. So...

yeah, yeah, I I've gotten really used to it for formatting articles for Dev.to. But I still have not transitioned my site over. Because I'm not actually hosting that much in terms of content, I have kind of a YAML file for my speaking stuff, a YAML file for my Egghead lessons, a YAAML file for my blogs, and then I'm going to make a separate YAML file that's going to be like, external contributor publications, like CSS tricks, and that kind of stuff

Nice. So are you using the JAMStack at all professionally? Or is it all just these personal sites that you've kind of been doing?

Um, I've had not necessarily JAM... I guess it's sort of qualifies. I've done some headless CMS stuff, which I think is kind of like, it's using the JAMstack front end and pretending like it doesn't have a back end in a lot of cases even though it does. So little, that's a little bit different. But I kind of think of in the same world, and the other thing I have done is some kind of the gym sack stuff with with an occasional, you know, lambda thrown in there or whatever. That's more. That's more just a few functions to round stuff out. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure you saw it as @sarah_edo's. Or Why do I always say that; Sarah Drasner's write up on kind of an e commerce site where basically she was just using a couple functions to provide that which was great.

Yeah, I'm super inside. I haven't had chance to do that sort of heavy lifting in lambda functions. But I want I want to make a store just from that tutorial. So

right, yeah, there's a lot of power there, though. I joked when I was reading through it, and I just joked on Twitter that I'm just going to read a blog post where I explain what the heck the difference between Nuxt Next and Nest is. Because clearly, I know so well, and never get confused. When I see those million identically named things referenced.

I've never once been confused by that. Never one No, no.

Definitely.

So so with with that kind of your you got a little bit in the cat professionals that you're using. But have you found that there's been any bleed over from the experiments and the personal site into the way that you do kind of more traditional software engineering?

Oh, no question. Um, I mean, for one, the ease of deployment with things like Netlify and Firebase and all of that has a lot of use for our clients in certain cases, especially when they're trying to throw things up quickly, and be able to deploy them kind of consistently. And by themselves without a lot of engineering knowledge, those tools are really fabulous.

And a lot of the, the way things are built in the JAMstack, and the fact that you're focused on kind of an insane level of separation of concerns, just because it's it's YAML; it's marked down. A lot of that architecture plays in and JAMstack got me comfortable with a lot of CSS concepts that I I hadn't had to play around with. Thank you grid, flexbox, transitions, all that kind of stuff, pseudo classes and stuff, were things that I in larger behemoth projects that had legacy CSS, and that kind of stuff weren't as applicable. And now that I was able to use them and kind of playground areas. I throw them in, in client projects all the time now.

Nice. Very nice. So so what what is your current like jam in the JAMstack? is a Gatsby or is it something?

Yeah, it's Gatsby. Okay, me and everyone else, right. Sure. Yeah.

What draws you to Gatsby,

I had my Jekyll site. And that was really easy to port over to Gatsby, there were a ton of tutorials online. And the hardest part about that was getting Gatsby image to work. And ever since I've written blog posts on it, I've contributed to the docs, all of that stuff. So hopefully, that won't be hard for the next set of people who try and set up all kinds of different Gatsby image things

So, one of the appeals of Gatsby for me was that I didn't need to know much. I didn't need to know some of the React magic to make it work, at least for the use cases I have. And I actually feel like I've gotten a much better understanding of some of the React component architecture and similar things as a result of being in the Gatsby space. And again, it's one of those you have a personal site, you try things you do them, right, you do them wrong. And you end up dipping your toes into it and and having this playground where you discover a lot of concepts that you didn't necessarily understand before.

Nice. And I've got I've got this kind of this FOMO issue happening with Gatsby because I'm not a particularly strong React Dev. But I love the idea that they have so many plugins already available, and they've only really been around a couple of years.

Yeah, their plugin ecosystem is insane. And themes are going to be equally impressive.

Yeah, definitely. And so so yeah, it seems like there's already something for every single use case you could possibly need almost it's almost getting to the point where it's like the early days of like, positive WordPress plugin ecosystem.

Yeah, positive being the operative word there.

Exactly. Because it's all it's all developer focused, which is nice. So So what kind of is going to keep you in this JAMstack world? What what's what's, what's the thing that's going to anchor you in here,

I am probably going to self host my blogs at some point. And I think there's kind of no better architecture pattern that exists right now for doing that in a lightweight, maintainable way.

Nice. Cool. And so so I know you've got you've got the dog Take care. So we'll we'll wrap things up here pretty soon.

Sorry everyone!

Oh, no worries. No worries whatsoever. So So what's your what's your musical jam right now? What's your like? literal jam? So I'm listening to

the Taylor Swift lover soundtrack. And the dog obviously. And the Heather's the musical soundtrack.

Really? Yeah. Okay, I didn't even know there was a musical

there is it was off Broadway. And it's really kind of a fun, angry rock musical thing.

Very nice. Alright, and so So is there anything that you're doing right now that you really like to kind of promote and boost up?

Yeah, I'm doing some egghead videos, I'm doing some blogging and contributor stuff to some publications and obviously writing my own stuff. So if you're interested in anything in the kind of JavaScript front end world and sometimes I write about other stuff. It's all on my site. LaurieonTech.com and a fair amount of it is also I always post it on Twitter @Laurieontech.

Cool. And we'll put both of those in the show notes. So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us especially with a new a new puppy.

Yeah, for everyone who heard her in the background, she's she's sweet. You can see pictures of her online and maybe it'll be more forgiving of the interruptions

that @LaurieonTech account'ss gonna become a dog account,

for sure. No question already there.

Very cool. Well, thanks again. And and we'll go from here. And we'll see online making cool stuff.

Thanks so much, Bryan.

Thanks.

also want to thank you, dear listener, for listening through the end of the podcast and being sure to go into your pod catcher of choice, whether that be iTunes, the Google Play Store or some third party that I'm not even familiar with, and hitting that like button and leaving us a positive review to let everyone know that this is one of the better podcasts listen to for the jam step. So until next time, keep making amazing things on the web and keep things jammy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Hey everyone, welcome to another that's my jam stack episode. Today we've got the pleasure of chatting with a developer advocate who specializes, according to his website, on JavaScript serverless and enterprise cat demos, I'm talking, of course, about the amazing Raymond Camden. Raymond, thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me.

No problem. So I guess I'll start this off by tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of what you do for work and what you do for fun and that sort of thing.

Sure. So I am a developer experience engineer, for a very large financial firm that is really picky about where I'm allowed to say that I actually work there. So if you're curious, you can go to my LinkedIn and just know that you wouldn't leave home without me.

Leaving breadcrumbs behind you. What What will you do for fun outside of work?

Oh, shoot, write code. play a lot of Just Dance. I'm really, really good at it. Trust me, I'm not lying at all. I do some Lego. My girlfriend and I are working on the Death Star II. And we've been working on that for less, like, month or two. And we're on step like 50 of 2000. So it's, it's a process, but it's a fun process.

Nice. I think I think I saw on Twitter a couple weeks ago you were flying with just dance and actually pulling that off in an airplane.

Yeah, not not scoring very well. But uh, yes, I did play it on an airplane.

Cool. So I guess what was your entry point into this idea of kind of jam stack or static sites or whatever we want to call it to make sense?

Sure. So I've been doing back in work for a very, very long time. I started web development and like 33 or so I did some JavaScript way back then I did some front end work. And if you were if you have been around that long, you know, wasn't quite as fun back then.

So I retreated to the back end where you didn't have to worry about browsers and you just output HTML and put it down. I did a cold fusion for about 10 plus years. This was a not a free app server, not an open source one but a very practical one that had a really great community. And I was very privileged and lucky to be in that community for a while. But like for the longest time like that there was a problem that my solution was to throw an app server at it, whether it's cold fusion or NodeJS or PHP or whatever.

And back, I think in 2014 or so like 5 or so years ago, I ran across a little thing called harp JS. And it was this idea of a static site generator and I played with it and like a light bulb went off and I was thinking about all the sites I built with cold fusion network dynamic talking to SQL server and like the data was changing, like once a year, and I'm like, you know what, I don't need that anymore. And again, like light bulb moment realizing that it's not 100% solution, but for like a lot of what I built in the last 10 years, this would have covered a good part of them.

Yeah, very cool. Actually, I think, you probably don't remember this now. It's been multiple years probably been like four years. But you spoke at DevNexus. I was actually speaking at DevNexus that year. And I think you gave a talk on static sites that year. Like, more dynamic static sites, you know, via all these different third parties. I guess kind of out of curiosity since that was before JAMstack was even a thing how do you see the the landscape kind of shifting you know, you've been doing this for a while now, five years at least, you know from that story, so like, what's, what's changing, what's changing for the better, that sort of thing?

So I was definitely against the name JAMstack because it felt like marketing crap. It felt like, got come on it's a static website. That being said, I'm definitely coming, coming around on it. Because when you say static people think so many things that are just not true anymore. So giving it a new name without like the history and without the connotations, of oh, it does nothing. You know, I'm in favor of that. And if I have to explain what JAMstack means, then then so be it.

Yeah, it's what you can do. The types of things, just the strategies, you know, people are finding all these ways to kind of add dynamic back. And then you have platforms like Netlify, which are just amazing and putting so much in there. I don't feel like I'm working with static sites anymore. I feel like I'm working with an app server that's just a heck of a lot simpler in production than what I've had to work with in the past.

Nice. So okay, how are you utilizing these static site? And new dynamic static sites? professionally? Personally? I think your websites probably built in a static site generator, I assume.

Yeah. So professionally at the company that I shall not name. They're not using that at all. Well, I definitely can't speak for the whole company. Maybe somewhere else. So personally, like every site I build pretty much is using it. My blog has been static for two or so years. I've gone through two engines. But before that, it was WordPress for a while. And before them, it was my own custom blogware written in cold fusion. But yeah, my my static site now is over 6000 pages. It's a significant build, but I've had to play something new. It takes Netlify about 10 minutes to run that but yeah, that that was a process because I kind of couldn't do the simple brochure ware type static site thing I really had to think about. If I change a header that impact 6000 pages, if I change my blog theme, if there is like a recent post thing that impacts every single page, so I had to think about stuff like that to kind of make mine perform well and build well with the size that I have.

Now, I will say like, really, interestingly, 10 years ago now, I was working in MovableType, which had that whole rebuild process every time too. And that was like, I worked on a blog that had not quite 6000 but like, we're talking thousands of blog posts, and it was taking like 40 minutes to build. So hearing 10 minutes is still like a breath of fresh air compared to that old school methodology.

Yeah, and I mean, certainly like if I switched if I switch to the engine I was using previously it'd be faster, but I really didn't like it. I'm trying not to. I'll definitely name names. But I wasn't happy with that engine even though it was faster so I'm using Jekyll now it's not the fastest, but I really liked using it. Yeah.

Jekyll was my was my big entry point into static site generator. So I totally get that. It's it's super, I think it's super, super developer friendly. Cool. So uh, I'm gonna put this in strong quote, right, but like, what's your jam in the jam stack? What's kind of your favorite thing to be working on? What's your favorite product or framework or obviously you just mentioned jackal, but anything else on top of that?

Definitely a Jekyll. Definitely Netlify I for hosting with the fact that they have severless functions rolled in they just added analytics. I swear I don't work for them. But like so to me, like Netlify is the gold standard. So every single other service out there I compared to them, so you can use Amazon s3 to host your site site as well. But they definitely don't have the features that you get with netlify. Iwill say, I know Zeit. They have some good services as well. I just haven't had the chance to look at them closer yet. But my blog and a couple of my little side projects are all on Netlify right now.

Do you find that using this new methodology using stuff like Netlify makes it easier to do side projects? Have you done more side projects since adopting this workflow?

Yeah, not just static, also like codepen, copen, really good; code sandbox as well. So if I am just doing a real small demo, I'll do codepen or code sandbox. If I'm building a site with HTML and all that, then I will do Netlify for that. I've also use Surge in the past as well. I still kind of like Surge where, if I know I don't want to keep the site around, I just want to real quick, put it up there and show it type thing. Whereas for Netlify, I tend to not use them for one offs, if that makes sense.

It does actually search was my first data coast that I used and I kind of went when Netlify came, I was like, Oh, I gotta try this new thing. But that's gonna take a lot of effort. And finally did and now I've got so many one offs in there that my admin's a little bit junked up with the one offs and so like, I totally get that command line interface just put it up there, leave it alone and you never have come back to it.

You kind of talked a little bit earlier about like the ease of it but what what kind of made you fall in love overall with with the methodology Was it the ease? Was it the developer experience? Was it how fast it was? What's kind of your big jumping off point.

So ease at first, and when I used Harp, it is a very simple static site generator. So it was very easy to use because it didn't have a lot of features. And I tried it on a few like very small sites.

I definitely, if I talk about that excites our JAMstack now, I don't necessarily always say easy because there's still a good deal of complexity like like my blog has a capital P Process to to work with it. Somebody I forget their name, but I saw like a video like two years ago, and he was talking about static sites and he made this awesome point that you've got the same complexity, but the complexity is on your local dev server, not production.

So like my blog, there still again that that Process, and it was work and it was complexity and all that but like when I publish, I don't think about it. So when I was on WordPress, and WordPress is an amazing platform. It was my first time using it. I was just blown away. But like out of the box, it just does not work. It works not configured to actually run in production. I was kind of surprised by that. Like I did good traffic. But I don't get like huge company traffic and I really had to work to keep it up. And even after I did the work on the weekend, PHP with died, MySQL would die, whatever. And as much as I love my blog, I absolutely do not want to think about it, you know, on the weekend.

So So you come from a backend perspective. Do you miss anything about having your own server? Like, obviously you don't want to be working on PHP on your blog on the weekend? But is there something that you miss about that experience? Or are you perfectly happy working in the cloud, aka someone else's server?

I don't miss crap. No, no, I mean, I still write a lot ofJavaScript client side. I still do server side JavaScript for serverless functions and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm totally fine.

So you've been I think I've seen you writing a lot about Vue recently. Right? Are you are you seeing that that pairs really nicely with with kind of these these other services, or have you had any tricky points around that.

No, it's just fine. And I can't imagine any further framework being more friendly to the back end. I know that there are some generators that will use like React and some use Vue on the server side. So if you're already familiar with that, then you can do that. Gridsome is VueJS one that has been on my queue to look at more Just haven't had time yet.

So I guess Tell me kind of on the other side of things not in technology right but what's what's your what's your jam right now in terms of like music, what are you listening to what what powers your day?

My favorite band right now is Hatchie. They are kind of Shoegaze and they kind of have an 80s or 90s feel to them. But they're a new band. They just had an EP released. I can't remember the name but look up Hatchie. Friggin love em. Older stuff. I mean, I've been a Depeche Mode and Cure fan for a long time. I'm very old, so I was around when they were fresh, and a lot of Just Dance. I enjoy pop music when I'm dancing to it, not necessarily as like good music, but I will enjoy dancing to it On Just Dance OMG by a artist I can't remember his name, but Snoop Dogg is in it as well as a track called Narco. That's very good. And literally five minutes before this podcast started, I was listening to Lights by Ellie Golding and I love that song.

And I'll say, buddy of mine, Bryan Rinaldi we run a music newsletter called Coda Breaker. And that is a static site using a serverless functions that it's at codeabreaker.rocks. That's a new definitely those new TLDs. Last time I went to register and I was like "oh! dot rocks" that's like perfect for a music site.

Very cool. And is that is that have a player is that just like lifting stuff out?

The site actually use Serverless to get the past letters, newsletters and you serverless to make that sign up a bit easier. So you don't you don't have to leave our site to sign up for the newsletter.

Very cool.

And I blogged about that will process as well.

I will grab that link and I'll toss that in the show notes. at you. You mentioned being old. I wouldn't classify you as such but you've obviously been been working in this industry for a while right. Would you compare anything that was happening now in terms of like, rendering statically. Small scripts being hosted to like the real old school methodology like I remember, I wasn't, I wasn't doing it professionally, but I was, you know, high school kid working on stuff and like, copying, pasting like CGI scripts into my CGI bin and having no clue what they did. But just putting them out there.

Like my first couple of sites, so it'd be all static and be a couple of things that be dynamic, and typically that was a contact form that would POST to a Perl CGI script that would just read it, mail it, and then like spit out really basic HTML to say thank you for your submission. I did a lot of those I took a lot of website counters that would spit out an image that would go up as you as every person visited the site. Yeah, so I vaguely familiar. Yeah, I mean, one thing I don't miss was how slow things were back then. Like you know, I'm much more inclined to build stupid crap now. You know, my your ability to play now is a heck of life easier compared to how it was back then. So I'm really happy about that.

So yeah, I don't want to take up too much more of your time. So I'll ask Is there anything that you're doing right now that you want promote young anything out there will will do that?

I definitely CodaBreaker.rocks. We have like 30 subscribers, I should say. So. Bryan, and I and we both picked two songs each week or each newsletter. So there's four like newish songs. And then we pick for a kind of random old or just weird or just for fun type stuff. So it's about twice a month, it won't fill up your email box. And I'll give you some new music or some interesting music to rock out to.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. And, and maybe we'll have you back once people actually listen to the podcast, so that'll be great.

Awesome. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Today we have an awesome guest. He's a web designer and developer. You may know him from his CSS newsletter, Piccalilli, his awesome 11ty the starter theme Hylia, his friendly browser checker, mybrowser. FYI, or just his amazing hot takes on Twitter. Let's go ahead and welcome to the show Andy Bell. Andy, how's it going today? Hey, how you doing?

Okay. Thanks for having me. I'm pretty good.

So that was my introduction of you. But how would you describe yourself? Are you a designer or developer in your own mind,

I'll say I'm a hybrid sort of buff. So I tend to call myself a web designer these days because even though it's pretty old school term, it sort of describes what I do perfectly. I tend to see projects start finished. So yeah, web designer, or front end developer is tends to do most of the time these days.

Cool. So So what do you actually do for work and for fun?

And then other guys a chance to have fun because I've got two young kids. Yeah, fund is whatever, whatever includes those two, but yeah, I remember fun from before that.

I got young the same way I got I got three and a half year old, there's not a lot of fun.

So, I feel for you there.

Alright, so so what was kind of your entry point into this whole like jam stack philosophy and skill and or static sites or wherever you like to call it?

So, I started with stack size and with Jekyll, a few years ago, I got into Jekyll. I picked up as a solution for really rough agency project. That was, it was super fluid, the brief was so thin you could smoke it. And I just knew that it was going to be a nightmare from from the start. So I suggested, what do we use Jekyll to build it, because if, if I'm going to things change, it'll be a much easier process so that they're going to be really into it. And obviously it isn't it for our personal blog, and all that but is when 11ty came around, where I really started getting into static site stuff properly, really heavily into it, because it's just such a flexible system. And ever since then, I literally use it for everything now. And so yeah, it's brilliant. Love it.

So as a professional Freelancer using it on like your client projects and stuff like that.

If you're to list of things that 11tycurrently does for me is if prototyping, visual design. And its power in a book is power in the newsletter. And its power in normal client websites, my website, literally everything is now rolling through 11ty in some way awesome form at the moment.

So So would it be safe to say that that kind of 11ty is kind of your jam in the jam stack?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. big thick wad of 11ty jam.

There is there any other technologies or products that you're utilizing in the jam stack right now?

Yeah, so do a lot of stuff with with Node when I do anything that's got like backends. So, I tend to like So this project, called every layer that I work on with Heydon Pickering. Tha t's all built with 11ty but we use Heroku and Node to do the sort of clever stuff. Which is all going to be well by the time this goes out it actually will be live. And so I tend to use that I but I am a slowly get into the survivalist stuff as well in the Cloud Functions, because Netlify made that really easy. So yeah, but really, I tend to stick around in static site world. Yeah, that's, that's where I hang out.

Cool. So what what kind of what actually made you fall in love with jam stack? Like you talked about, you know, Jekyll being your entry point, obviously. Now it's 11ty that's making it much more, I guess, probably fun to work with. Yeah. But what kind of where did you fall in love with some of the ideas?

I think it was. It's the empowerment thing. So I'm pretty weak with back end technology. It took me a long time to appreciate that. And you can achieve a lot as a as a sort of designer with the JAMstack. And a lot of power is given to you. And you can do a lot for nothing as well. And that's one thing I really appreciate about is that someone can get an 11ty site or whatever they want to use, and deploy it for free, on Netlify and then they own their own content. So that stuff's really appealing. And then I think is going to be really key in the success of JAMstack as well.

I'm kind of curious, cuz I'm a hybrid to like, I'm a designer developer, and I hate the backend. I hate dealing with servers and all that. But I've been doing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for like a decade. How would you talk to a designer, that's maybe getting into HTML and CSS about static sites and about about that empowerment that you were saying?

Interesting question. And so soon as I just getting into HTML and CSS, I probably wouldn't, I wouldn't introduce them to this JAMstack, because I think it could create some confusion really early, especially understanding because I think when you learn in HTML it's useful to be able to see the document as a as a whole software experience that uncomfortable about the JavaScript frameworks, as well as that there's a there's a higher level of abstraction, I think, causes a lot of confusion for beginners. So but once they're a bit more comfortable and understood HTML, I probably introduce them to 11ty, and then Nunjucks. And so this is now you cannot take this piece of code that you've written in a partial and then you know, introduce it like that, piece by piece. So keeping it as simple as possible. And that's one thing that's really good about, especially 11ty is that it lets you go from zero to naught point one, you know that you don't have to go all in and fully commit to a light Gatsby or something, you can gradually implement it on an existing setup. So you can actually teach it by doing things slowly, but surely, and people can understand what his role is and where it lives. In the stack.

You mentioned, you mentioned Gatsby, I actually just saw a presentation on Gatsby and just it kind of solidified my personal opinions. It looks you know, super powerful, and all that. And I played with it. But the complete abstraction of everything that's going on, I looked at it and said, I've been doing this a long time. My brain doesn't work like that. I can't imagine anyone else getting into it. Yeah.

No, no, I did. I did a client project with it earlier in the year and just found myself yearning back for 11ty, this is a bit too much. pretty difficult to do. What web web development, this this doesn't really have a role in my stack, especially a specialist. So yeah, stick stick with it. I think while it gives you I don't think you really need it to be honest. But you know, that's just my opinion. Suppose.

Sure. And then I guess beyond that, you know, talking and talking about, you know, newbies or you know, people who, who are maybe making that that advancement from be able to do that static HTML, CSS, maybe a little JavaScript into more, you know, full stack and putting air quotes, no one can hear the radio, it's been more kind of full stack development. Would you still talk to them about more traditional stuff? Or are you all in static sites JAMstack ideology,

Progressive enhancement is my is my thing. So whatever, wherever you use, as long as what gets delivered to the front end is HTML, functional HTML by default, so if nothing else arrives down the pipe, you've still got usable website that's acceptable and accessible, then it's all good. And you could, you could use whatever you want to do, like you can use PHP can use Node, I don't really care as long as what arrives, if, if the only thing that rises the HTML, it works, and you can use it, and then everything else on top of that is a bonus so CSS great that works now it looks good, you know, and then JavaScript, it's definitely a sort of an additional sprinkling of functionality rather than the whole thing. You know. That's how I always operate regardless of what project is really, even when I've built like React projects is being SSR (Server Side Rendered) to make sure that if the client fails, which it will, there's not, there's not a sort of might about it, there's, there's a will about it, and then make sure they still work. So that all this stuff, so yeah, definitely.

Do you think that the static sites lend themselves stronger to progressive enhancement? Or is it? Is it just a matter of methodology?

And yeah, I think, I think they might have made that kind of best point a lot easier. And I think that's, that's probably one thing I really like about them and being able to generate what I want -- which is that HTML output -- it seems to be really easy, I think it's almost easier to generate Well, for me, especially to do that with a static site generator, rather than WordPress style, which, you know, it's what I cut my teeth with WordPress, I think even now, if I was to take on the, air quotes, simple project, before I might sling out a WordPress theme, whereas now sling out on the 11ty site, because I think that's now the quickest way to do it for me. Yeah,

That's actually really, really interesting. So I used to work in an agency for about six years, and we had our own custom content management system and all sorts of stuff. But anytime a client couldn't use that, we were just sling a WordPress theme out there. So you think that that potentially, we're getting to the point where it would just be easier to do a quick static site, instead of going picking out a moderate to decent theme and plugging and playing

I think, I think one thing that is missing and the other is a couple of marketplaces for themes I was just introduced to this thing called StackBit the other day as well, which I thought was really cool, which has that whole methodology going about it and I think that is going to be the the breaking point and the bit that pushes static sites because like people start with seems a lot in world WordPress world especially and I know Gatsby started doing it themselves, well. And I think that's gonna be the key and I really hope something arrives for all the generators like 11ty and Hugo and stuff. I know there's Jekyll themes stuff that are still going these days as well. So I think that might be that the thing that helps people at least starter kits anyway that do initial setup for people because it can be a daunting, you know, 11ty starts with nothing, there's there's nothing in there. It's empty. So I think people I know Phil Hawksworth he he's created a nice starter kit and then obviously I created the Hylia as well. And it's just the fact that like these little starting points that get people into it. I think that will enable people to create these projects quickly and efficiently.

Now, I mentioned I mentioned earlier Hylia you all do you also I think I read somewhere that you have a starter kit that's like a blank starter kit.

Yeah, Hebra. You might remember from the the WordPress old days where there's a thing called Stackers by Elliot J Stocks. And this basically that but with 11ty. That's how I got into WordPress was I watch Chris Coyier's digging into WordPress screen casts. And then one of the first things recommended was this Stackers theme. So I got really into that. And I always found it really useful, because it just gave me HTML, nothing else. And then I might as well now want to release Hylia, and they went down really well with everyone. And I thought it'd be nice to also give people the HTML only version of it as well, if they don't want to use all the SASS and all that stuff that I've added in there. So yeah, it seems to be it's not not obviously nowhere near as popular as the other one. But it seems to be helping some people out which is good.

Well, that was that was what you said, you know, that Stacker was was kind of your intro into like WordPress theme that That one wasn't mine. But it was a similar idea where there wasn't, I just got like the loops and stuff like that. And then I could edit that sort of thing, instead of having to write from scratch.

Exactly. And that was the use case, because one thing I didn't like about WordPress themes is like in design was that had the prescriptive setup. And undoing that was really difficult. So being able to, you know, put actual CSS on that, you know, yourself was a big, big selling point.

Do you think there's any any room for looking at like static HTML themes? Do you think that that's going to be something that can fill that gap for for static sites? Or is it just too much effort at that point, even to convert it over?

Could be, Yeah, I think I think one thing our industry is lacking big, big time on is knowledge of HTML, especially -- and CSS, but mainly HTML. And there's always been I mean, I wrote a post by the day about it on Monday, where there's this theory that a button that's being created with live React Native, or whatever it is, is more accessible when it might be technically correct. But at the same time, there's a lot of caveats to that statement, and I think within this forum, and I see a lot of documentation, a lot of popular websites and code samples using very poor markup. So there's definitely a space for I'd say, lazy developers, you don't want to learn markup, because it is the founding, you know, is the core thing on the website is HTML, you know, you can't have a website without HTML, I think there's space for someone to just do it for them to put out an accessibility fire as I like to call it just reduce one more opportunity for someone to have a miserable experience with assistive technology is, is to give people our best point, you know, the, the correct markup for an article the correct amount of markup for post list or even for like an e-commerce, you know, something like? Yeah, definitely see space for that.

So I don't want to take up a huge amount of your time. So I'll move into the last last couple things. First and foremost, what's your like, actual jam right now? Like, what are you listening to? What's your favorite song or artists that you've got going on?

I was looking at Spotify before we started and there's this this is called, going to murder the name but Lyre le Temps, and I'll send you a link, put it in the show notes. And it's it's really funky. It's really it's been been on the constant loop for me recently. And while I've been working and doing a lot of design work recently, so it's really sort of suited to that I need I need music that makes puts me in a good mood when I do design otherwise, I do terrible work. So it doesn't really matter when I do development, I can listen to whatever design is a very specific thing that I need. And, yes, I'll send a link to the album. I've been listening to a lot of his career. It's really cool.

And then you me, you got a lot of things I'm sure you can promote. What do you want to promote on the on the podcast today?

I think because it's especially when this goes out. Me and Heydon have created this thing called Every Layout, and it's something that's really important to both of us. We're really both really into CSS, as you mentioned, are on a newsletter, about CSS called Picallili, which incidentally, is getting report formed on the JAMstack as we speak.

But Every Layout is we're trying to distill CSS layouts and simplify them and teach people to simplify CSS as well. I think we, as a as an industry have overcomplicated CSS and we've thrown far too many heavy frameworks and heavy tools at what are actually simple layout problems.

And I think this is all a stigma about the modern layout tooling such as flexbox that Heydon and I are trying to solve, break and teach people how to use them. And yeah, it seems to be going quite well. So yeah, that that'll be ready for purchase. When when this goes out so go on and buy it because when you buy it, it means that we can give it for free to people who need it for free.

And that's the whole the whole mantra that we're doing with it is that we're using people's purchase licenses to then subsidize people who really need it for free and been able to give it to them. So yeah.

That's amazing. And, and the stuff I've read online that's in there is also amazing stuff too. So you should definitely go

Every-layout.dev is the URL

and that'll be in the show notes too. Yeah, it's definitely it's definitely worth checking out. We could do a whole episode about it. Have you and Heydon later on. But uh, yeah, it's amazing stuff. Cool. Well, thanks for for taking the time to talk with us today.

No worries. It's been good fun.

I really, really appreciate it and we'll go from here.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Intro/outtro music by bensound.com

Hello World, my name is Bryan Robinson and I love love, love the JAMstack. I've always enjoyed working on static sites, quick for users, they're quick to build. And as it turns out, they're not that static anymore. I'm on a quest to find more gems, hackers, and they get their stories. That's why I've created That's My JAM...stack. This podcast is all about the passions of the tech community, like Andy Bell, talking about progressive enhancement.

Progressive enhancement is my thing, so whatever you use, as long as what gets delivered to the front end this HTML, functional HTML by default, so if nothing else arrives down the pipe, you still have a usable website and its acceptable and accessible then it's all good. You could, whatever you want. If you want to use PHP or Node, I don't really care as long as if the only thing that arrives is HTML, it works.

I'll be seeking out amazing developers and designers of all walks of life, talk to me about what they do with the jam stack and why they love this movement on the web.

I played with it and like a light bulb went off. And I was thinking about all the sites I built a cold fusion that were dynamic talking to the sql server and like the data was changing, like once a year. And I'm like, you know what, I don't need that anymore. And again, like light bulb moment, realizing that it's not 100% solution, but but like a lot of what I built in the last 10 years, this would have covered a good part of them.

So come on and join me on this journey. find out all about some new and amazing services and techniques, and let's meet some wonderful makers along the way. And you know, if that sounds interesting to you, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and your app of choice. You can find the links and the RSS feed at that's myjamstack.com I really can't wait to share this movement with me. So check back in a couple weeks for the first episode.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai