Aisha Blake on accessibility, easier education and musical conference talks That's my JAMstack

Quick show notes


Our Guest: Aisha Blake
What she'd like for you to see: Gatsby Days - Feb. 3, 2020
Who got Aisha into the JAMstack: Working as a volunteer, creating websites in Jekyll
Her JAMstack Jams: The way it makes teaching easier
Her musical Jam: Dear Evan Hansen Soundtrack


Other things mentioned


Gatsby
Title of Conf
self.conference


Transcript

Bryan Robinson 0:03

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


Bryan Robinson 0:20

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


Bryan Robinson 0:40

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


Aisha Blake 0:42

Everything is great. Thank you for having me.


Bryan Robinson 0:44

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


Aisha Blake 0:52

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


Bryan Robinson 1:33

What?!


Aisha Blake 1:33

Oh, yes. Yes. So all of the performances, they'll be performances are going to be musical and/or theatrical, similar topics to any other tech conference. So the idea is that we're teaching people through performance art. I'm really excited about it.


Bryan Robinson 1:56

I'm now like, run through like, how would I do that? Like, because I speak at a few different conferences, how would I artistically render CSS talks


Aisha Blake 2:05

It was largely inspired by TailCall Optimization: The Musical, which was a brilliant, brilliant Disney parody. So three different Disney songs, teaching you about tail call optimization. At !!con last year. And I have been surprised like I this is like the intersection of everything I love. And I've been surprised how many people were already doing this kind of thing. Like, it's, it's really cool.


Bryan Robinson 2:41

Very nice. And when's that coming up?


Aisha Blake 2:43

That's going to be May 7 in Detroit, and self.conference is actually the following two days. So anybody who is interested in attending either one, you will have a little bit of a discount on the second ticket.


Bryan Robinson 2:58

Nice, very cool. Alright, so So obviously, we're not gonna be doing a musical here today because no one wants to hear me sing. That's for sure. So let's go ahead and talk about the JAMstack a little bit. So what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the jam stack or static sites? That sort of thing?


Aisha Blake 3:13

Yeah. So as far as static sites go, and it goes back to when I was learning to be a web developer, I was a volunteer, a Jesuit volunteer here in Detroit. That's how I actually came to the city. And I knew that I wanted to be a web developer, but I didn't really have I didn't really know how to connect to the skills that I had. So I have an Information Science degree. But I really didn't know how to take the computer science concepts that I had learned and apply them to something that was practical in my immediate life.


Aisha Blake 3:57

So during my year of se