That's my JAMstack

Bryan Robinson
  • 5.0 (8)
  • TECHNOLOGY

That's My JAMstack! is an interview podcast outlining various developers' methods of utilizing the JAMstack

  1. 06/03/2022

    Facundo Giuliani on end-user experiences, NextJS, and Storyblok

    Quick show notes Our Guest: Facundo Giuliani (Twitter) What he'd like for you to see: His musical Jam: The Meters Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:15 Welcome back to yet another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask the ever important question, what is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we had the amazing Facundo Giuliani. Facundo do is a developer relations engineer at story block, and an avid presenter and author about all things Jamstack. Bryan Robinson 0:46 All right, Facundo. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Facundo Giuliani 0:49 Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation and the opportunity. Awesome. So Bryan Robinson 0:53 tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? And what do you do for fun? Facundo Giuliani 0:57 Cool. So Well, I started working as a developer when I was 18. While I was studying at college, because I finished high school on on a school that had a career that was like programming oriented, let's say so I, I learned how to program during the high school, I started to work with all programming languages that people don't know what they are about, like Visual Basic six, or those things that are like, I mean, I talk to people that this 20 years old, and they look at me, like what are you talking about? Right. Bryan Robinson 1:38 But luckily, I at least dabbled in those super early on. So I'm with you. That's fine. Facundo Giuliani 1:43 Okay, okay. So, um, yeah, I mean, I started working with Visual Basic seats. After that, while I was studying, I was also working as a developer, it was like, almost 1414 years, probably that I worked as a developer. And during the last couple of years, after working on on different companies on different positions, but all of them mainly related to the development, like, full stack back and, and etc. I started to, to be more involved with the community started to generate content to share starting to talk to other people and and meet other people. And I really enjoyed doing doing that. I did that during my free time. During these last couple of years, like after work, I started to generate content, engage with the community, like being involved in a Ambassadors Program in in different organizations and companies. And this opening a new door for me, because I started to learn about developer relations, developer advocacy, developer experience, some terms that probably I've read in the past, but I didn't know what they were about. And, and I started to get interested on that, like I, I mean, I felt like I was enjoying more the fact of generating content, or sharing content with the community, or communicating with the community, I really like to talk to other people. And I enjoy talking. And I felt like I was enjoying more doing that, instead of doing my daily job of developer, let's say, I mean, it's not that I don't like to, to develop, but I was enjoying more generating content, sharing content with the community engaging with other people. And well, I took like this, I made a decision, I started to read about developer relations and etc. I saw this opportunity on serverless, that they were looking for a developer relations engineer, I applied for the, for the job, and I was selected. I mean, I had a portfolio because in the past, I presented some talks, or events or conferences, I had some articles that I wrote before applying for the for the job, working with different technologies, and etc. So that was my, my presentation letter, let's say, and well, I had the chance to apply and to be and to be accepted for the position, let's say. And since June, I'm working as a developer relations engineer at serverless, my first developer relations position and experience, and I'm really enjoying it. So that's a little bit about me. Bryan Robinson 4:38 Sure, yeah. So So you're a developer relations engineer at storyblocks. So you're doing all that kind of content creation, education, talking with community there. Are you still doing that in your spare time? Are you actually able to like branch out and do other things now that you don't have to do that yet to your day job? Facundo Giuliani 4:56 Well, that's a good point. Because I mean, I did it Probably, I'm doing it but just a little bit like not so much. Because the cool part about being a developer relations engineer is that I found that that it was possible to do what I wanted to do or what I was enjoying, while doing it on my on working time, right, I mean, during the day, instead of using my free time to generate the content to do that, probably use my free time to set my mind free, right? That I mean, I'm not complaining, because I really enjoy doing that. And I enjoyed that at that moment when I was doing it after work. But I felt like it was it was cool to to enter to a company and start doing this during I mean, like, my, the tasks that I'm doing in my position are related to that. So I can use my free time on that on other things. So I enjoy doing that. But yeah, I'm trying to take the free time for other projects, probably not related to to developer relations or engaging with the community. I'm probably not even related to programming developer or technology Bryan Robinson 6:15 at all. What's your favorite thing to spend time on outside of development? Facundo Giuliani 6:19 Well, I really like I mean, I was I mean spending more time outside, I moved to a house, I was living in an apartment and I have a house with a backyard. So I'm trying to spend time there or I don't know walking around the neighborhood, I live in more than a situs Argentina, in the suburbs of the city, not in the city center. And the place where I live is like a calm neighborhood with a lot of trees and etc. So like when I, when I finished my, my, my day after working, I like to go and walk around the neighborhood and etc. but also talking with friends. So there are other projects like personal project related to, to their staff playing, playing sports with friends. I'm trying to do several activities, like to get out of my house. I mean, I enjoy being on my house with Mr. Gary Burger, and etc. But I also enjoy seeing other people spending time with other people. And these last couple of years were like We spent a lot of time inside our houses. So spending time like, I don't know, keep grabbing some fresh air and talking to other people is something that I enjoy doing. And I try to do as possible. Bryan Robinson 7:33 Awesome. I think there's something that we all do a little bit more of, especially in the past couple of years. Yeah. So. So moving on to talk about the Jamstack a little bit. You have a history in kind of full stack development, back end development, what was your entry point into the Jamstack, and static sites and that sort of thing. Cool. Facundo Giuliani 7:52 So Well, in my previous job, I mean, my last job before being a developer relations engineer, I was working mostly as a back end developer, I was working with Microsoft technologies like ASP, dotnet, dotnet, core and etc. But I, I mean, I felt like I was missing the the opportunity of learning about probably newer products or different products, let's say related to the front end. And when I started to read about the static site generators, the headless CMS is that I mean, for the products that we did in my previous job, I was not able to apply these technologies on them. So I was like, not super aware of all this new approach of creating study sites. And I started to read about the Jamstack different articles, watching different talks, or Devens, at conferences, and etc. And I started to learn about that and to learn about the approach. I really enjoyed that because at a certain point, as I said, I am I mean, I'm working as a developer for since I was 18. But before that, I was creating websites at home when I was even younger, with with products that again, they don't exist anymore, like Microsoft front page, or Macromedia Dreamweaver. And what you did in the past with Microsoft from page was like creating your own website. And when I was said, I mean, when I was a teenager, or probably even younger, I really enjoyed doing that. Because at that time, internet was not what it is now, right? I mean, at the beginning of this of the 2000 years, or the or the or the end of the 90s Probably, internet was like the super new things and being able to create your own web page was like, Man, this is NASA technology, right? So I tried to create like websites related to anything related to my friends related to us. Searching a football club or related to I don't know, my different interested interest is that I had in that moment. And and what I was doing at that moment were static sites. I mean, they had movement. They have awful MIDI sounds in the background, because that was so yeah, I mean, that was like any any site at that moment, that sound. So that is terrible, I think now about that. And he's like, Man, why do you need to listen to music while we're browsing? A web page was terrible. But well, it's what we did. Yes, exactly, exactly. So I enjoyed doing that. But the thing is that they had dynamism, let's say, or movement, or etc. But they were static. So while when, when I started to read about the new approach of having studied websites, I felt like, I mean, the Navy sidebar, but we are again, doing the same that what that what I did was when I was a young teenager, or probably pretty teenager, I don't know, how is it called the the concert when you are 12 years old, or 13 years old pro. But, I mean, I started to feel to feel like excited with this concept. And I started to read about different study site generators, like neck JS Gods B, I started to read about React, probably get more involved with React, and etc. And on the other hand, all the concepts that you have avoidable to generate the content at build time, ahead of th

    29 min

  2. 02/09/2022

    REMIX! Tamas Piros on islands architecture, Astro and media usage

    Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:13 Hello, everyone, welcome to another stacked episode of That's My Jamstack. The podcast where we ask that best-of-all question, what's your jam in the Jamstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson . And this week, we've got another. That's My Jamstack REMIX. Bryan Robinson 0:32 We welcome back to the show Tamas Piros. Tamas Piro is a developer experience engineer at Cloudinary, and the founder and educator at Jamstack.training. Let's go ahead and dive in. Bryan Robinson 0:54 All right, well, Tamas. Thanks so much for coming on the show again, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you very much for for having me. It's good to be back. Yeah, as I say so. So this is another one of our remix episodes where we're having a guest that was previously on two seasons ago, two years ago, almost to the day on this recording. We talked in 2019. Now, this will probably come out in January, and it's December right now, but it's almost two years. So I guess give us give us an update. What are you doing nowadays for work and for fun, and all that good stuff. Tamas Piros 1:26 Okay, so work didn't change that much. So if people listen to that episode, or people know who I am, then I still work at Cloudinary. The only thing that changed is that I am no longer a developer evangelist, but I am now a developer experience engineer, which is more, you know, esoteric, so to speak. It's a it's a fancy term describing pretty much the same stuff, in my opinion. But I like that now. I'm, I'm recognized as an engineer, which I am, as opposed to just, you know, someone thought that I was a priest, because I'm an eventually. Bryan Robinson 1:58 So evangelist was always a weird title in general. Tamas Piros 2:01 Yeah. Yeah. And and yeah, so it's just more described what I do. But yeah, in terms of that, you know, no, no real, real changes. Tamas Piros 2:09 What I do for fun, I still do, you know, Jamstack, I see lots of stuff for Jamstack, I started to sort of look into what I label emerging technologies, which is, you know, not necessarily relevant to the Jamstack, you know, kind of things like rust or WebAssembly, that kind of stuff. In fact, I've done a lot of talks on web assembly in the past, you know, two years. And it's, it seems to be a very popular topic. But that's, you know, that's not related to jumps. So let's talk about that. Now. Bryan Robinson 2:37 I feel like there's a lot of those emerging technologies play a role in the Jamstack. But it's not actually what a Jamstack person is going to be worrying about. It's just it's happening on the backend, like some of the systems get built in Rust for speed and some other stuff and WebAssembly, maybe one day, because like, that'll can compile down to JavaScript in the end, right. Tamas Piros 2:56 Yeah, I mean, you know, WebAssembly, is what I like to say. And this was the title of my talk as well, which is supercharge your JavaScript into web assembly, right? So JavaScript has API's very similar to you know, you have a Fetch API, you have all these these browser API's. And so there's an API specifically for web assembly. And then you can just have a C++ project or projecting rust compiler down to WebAssembly. And then just to consume it using JavaScript within your browser. And in all these modern, all the modern browsers that are out there today can not only compile and work with JavaScript, but they can also do the same with WebAssembly. Right. So you get this built into every browser that that's out there today, which is pretty cool. Bryan Robinson 3:40 Yeah. And so, so Cloudinary, so Cloudinary. And if I remember correctly, two years ago, you had just started a side project called Jamstack.training, right? How's that been going? Tamas Piros 3:50 That's, that's, that's right. So yeah, I think when we first thought I had one course on there, which was a very generic sort of introduction to the Jamstack. You know, no tech involved, just just me explaining in, obviously, in terms of what the Jamstack is, and then decide became very popular, you know, in this two years, I know have, you know, very close to 2000 students, I have 11 courses up there. And all of those courses are still free. Tamas Piros 4:18 And I am now you know, sort of applying or making some changes to that site purely because I've been doing this for free for two years. And I'm using a platform, I have a domain these costs money. And I see that a lot of people love the content, I did experiment with adding the price tag to the courses. And then signups just literally stopped. So that wasn't that good. It wasn't working. And then ever since the courses are free again, I get the usual, you know, 356 10 signups per day, which is really nice. And so what I'm doing now is I am now accepting sponsors and I'm doing sponsorships. So, I did talk to some companies, but I'm just going to say this here as well, in this recording that if there's any company or anyone who wishes to sponsor, just like the training, I have three packages, you know, you can, you know, just put your logo on, you can have like a custom landing page, you can have your own video course, I can produce a video course for your produce and record a video course there's lots of options. So I would be, you know, I would love to have some conversation with people and organizations about this. And, and also, I'm, you know, in parallel to that, I'm recording a brand new course now. Tamas Piros 5:40 So I'm looking at Astro, which is a, an interesting tool. From from what I've seen, I'm putting together a sample application with it now. And then I'm going to create a another free video course about Astro, just covering these basics. And you know, I'm still not sure what I'm going to build, although I have an idea, Mike is going to be probably a very simple landing page, showcasing the capabilities of Astro. Nice. Bryan Robinson 6:06 So I think it's relatively obvious just from this early part of the conversation, how you're using Jamstack philosophies, obviously, you're teaching a lot of them. And I'm assuming Jamstack training is built using Jamstack technologies, but I kind of want to sidetrack a little bit since you brought up Astro, I've only scratched the surface of Astro, I've done kind of my first lap in it as well, what kind of drew you to wanting to do some some coursework around that. Tamas Piros 6:30 So what I tried to do as part of Jamstack.training was also to you know, pick a number of technologies that seems to be popular, or have the opportunity to become popular. And, and I kind of, you know, mixed and matched the, you know, static site generator with an API with a with a CMS and deployment platform. And then, you know, I said, let's use eleventy, with, you know, strappy and deploy it on on Netlify, for example. And, you know, the, the idea behind Jumpstarter training was always, you know, to teach people how to use technologies, as I said, that have the opportunity to become popular, and I see as shown to be super powerful. And I, you know, I really enjoyed the talk, I think it was I'm forgetting who did the tour, but it was part of the Jamstack conf a couple of months ago,transitional apps, the that one as well. But there was a very specific talk to about Astro, I think like he was like introduction, or introductory talk to Astro. And I looked at I thought this, this is good, this is powerful, you know, how it can bring, you know, react and view components and know JavaScript, and then, you know, have this whole island architecture. And I think, having a course about first of all explaining what this island architecture is, you know, how to do you know, static site generation, and how to just have a React component without JavaScript. And you know, these are very good learning points, especially for the Jamstack. So this is why, you know, I also choose to, to create a course on Astro. Bryan Robinson 8:04 So you, you kind of name drop there, the islands architecture, what does that mean? Tamas Piros 8:09 So the island architecture is really, you know, you defining, it's almost like an advanced way to think about component based development, right. So in component based development, you will have a Navigation component, you have a component for for an image carousel, you have a header, a footer, all the components that basically make up your page, almost like Lego pieces. And it's Island architecture, you kind of take that to the next level. That is this is just my view of it, and my sort of explanation of it. And so you now control whether a, you know, image Caruso, which, generally speaking has a lot of JavaScript involved, probably, you know, it's close to around maybe testing, you know, event handlers for clicks. So, you know, control whether that component or that component, Demetri relative components should be loaded at, you know, at load time at build time, you know, at an idle time. And you can very much control this using gasher, which is really nice. So, you can say, you can just drop in components that are purely for layout purposes. And you can say, well, those do not require JavaScript, and then you just delay the loading of a component that has JavaScript because either is you're not visible on first load. So it's, you know, it's not above the fold content. And so your initial load will also be very, very fast, right? Because you're now almost deferring JavaScript and a component that requires a JavaScript to a later point in time you're not blocking the main thread. And you're just classic web performance. Routers from from there Bryan Robinson 9:44 every I feel like and that was that was kind of a setup question, right? Because I actually am super jazzed about islands architecture. I think it is. Like it's what I'm most excited about for 2022 Tamas Piros 9:55 Testing my knowledge then I feel like university. Bryan Robinson 9:59 No, I was just kind of like what I was like, let's

    29 min

  3. 01/12/2022

    Raymond Camden (REMIX) on the amazing expansion of the Jamstack ecosystem and how far we've come

    Quick show notes Our Guest: Raymond Camden What he'd like for you to see: His New Jamstack book with Brian Rinaldi His musical Jam: Pink Martini Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Welcome, everyone to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask that amazingly complex question. What's your jam and the Jamstack? This week, we've got another That's My Jamstack REMIX! Going all the way back to season one, episode two, we're catching up with the amazingly prolific Jamstack author Raymond Camden. Raymond is a senior DevRel at Adobe, a Star Wars nerd, and a web and serverless hacker. Bryan Robinson 0:55 Hey, Raymond, thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Raymond Camden 0:57 Thank you so much for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:59 All right. So for longtime listeners of the show, I mean, like the longest time listeners of the show, they might recognize that Raymond has been on before, but it was legitimately two years ago, more than two years ago, and it was the second episode. And I think we're both older and wiser since then. And there might be folks that haven't listened to the entire archive of That's My Jamstack. So why don't you give everyone a refresher on who you are, what you do for work and what you do for fun? Raymond Camden 1:26 Absolutely. So yeah, first off, I'm definitely older. I'm not quite sure about Weiser. Give me 30 or 40 more years from that. So hi, everyone. I am Raymond Camden. I'm actually not sure what company I was at two years ago, probably two or three different ones. Bryan Robinson 1:45 You weren't allowed to say is actually what you had yet people go to your LinkedIn. Raymond Camden 1:49 yeah. That was American Express. They were antsy about, you can't see where you work. Yeah, I was American Express. And I'm not there anymore. So yes, I am currently at Adobe, I am a developer evangelist, I am working on the document services team. So we have API's that work in PDS. So like a concrete example of that is you let people upload PDFs and you want a consistent way to render it in the browser. And we have a free tool for that. You want to do some stuff on the server side. So you want to like OCR to PDF, or maybe cut it in half, or add something to finance, slice and dice PDFs, basically. So we have sort of API's that work with PDF, but that work with PDFs, and we have a PDF viewer for the web as well. And that's the team that I'm on. That's what I do for work. And it's got to find as well. But for fun. I am a big video game player, so as my wife so. And even better. She's a big PC Gamer, so she'll game on her laptop while I take away the TV from my console. So again, like that works Bryan Robinson 3:00 Best of both worlds. What? What games are you playing right now? Raymond Camden 3:06 When I'm not playing with my friends, every Friday night, we call it bowling league, we hang out and play Call of Duty. We just switched to Vanguard. But outside of that, and when I'm by playing solo, I currently am playing Far Cry six, which is pretty cool. I pretty much like only do multiplayer stuff on Friday nights. Because when you have kids, it's hard to do anything multiplayer, because there's no pause that all Bryan Robinson 3:35 that pause button is so important with kids. Raymond Camden 3:37 Oh, yeah. Bryan Robinson 3:38 Yeah. So cool. So you're doing some cool PDF stuff with with Adobe. But you're also probably one of the more prolific writers in at least in the Jamstack space, but like you do quite a bit of writing too, right? Raymond Camden 3:52 I do too much writing. been blogging since 2003 or so. And I try to blog about once a week. I did a lot more in the early days. But I also started before Twitter, you know, and so Twitter as bad as it is, you know, Twitter's great for short things like, Hey, you wrote a cool article, here's the link. And the old days, you know, there wasn't that. So on my blog, I would just quickly share stuff like that. So I look at my stats, there was one year right at about I think 800 blog posts, which is stupid. The last couple of years, it's a bit more reasonable. So I'm approaching 74 This year, so I definitely hit my one per week average. Bryan Robinson 4:40 Nice. That's I used to go for one a month and I'm not even there. So that is super impressive to me at least. So we talked a little bit last episode, but I want to give a recap. What was your entry point into static sites and the Jamstack? Sure. Raymond Camden 4:55 So I've been around for a very long time to I started web development and 93 year 94 or so, you know, back when there wasn't any defined roles, like you did everything. And I quickly found out that while I could do HTML, no problem, making things pretty was not my forte. So I got really involved in Perl, CGI scripts, and just the dynamic web, which back then, even though we had JavaScript, it quickly became really crappy. On the front end, so the back end really became the place to do anything dynamic. It's been a very long time in the ColdFusion community, which is in law was, you know, a great product, you know, it wasn't open source, and a lot of people look down on it. But it was very practical. It made hard things easy back, when there wasn't a lot of solutions out there that would do that. But yeah, you know, 1015 years to everything, and ColdFusion, and a database and a web server, and that was my jam for a long time. And it kind of two things happen at once. The front end began to get less crappy, like, shockingly, less crappy. And, you know, I always knew JavaScript, but you know, there wasn't much that you could do with it. And all of a sudden, you could start doing really good things. And so like that happened. And I began to realize that I was using a lot of power for websites that probably didn't need it. And I ran across a tool called hark js, which is still around, but I don't think it's been updated for a while. But it was my first introduction to the idea of a static site generator. And I, you know, sort of played with it and just clicked, it was like, oh, okay, it could be dynamic locally, but like, when I'm done with just files, and like, nothing can can crash, nothing could go wrong, nothing could be hacked. So like, I took a couple of my old ColdFusion websites, where, you know, they were database driven. And I recognized, you know, I haven't edited the database in like months. And I began to have to convert them to static and almost like, this is the best thing ever. And this began to do more and more with it. And it really kind of clicked for me. Bryan Robinson 7:20 So out of curiosity, and I don't know if we talked about this last time or not, but you're primarily a back end person from back in the day. And I found not always, but often back in people like servers, they they enjoy working on the server, not me personally, not back in person. But it's interesting that you made this transition to something that is not at all, like, you can host it on any server anywhere. It's just HTML, it's just whatever. But I guess, was it the simplification of the workflow that drew you to it? Or was it something different, as a back end guy coming in? Raymond Camden 8:00 It definitely the simplification. I mean, while I can appreciate the power of something like ColdFusion, or PHP, even, not having to worry about it breaking live was was huge. And doing more in JavaScript, you know, that doesn't need a server, you do have to worry about browsers. But you know, in general, browsers have a good level support for nearly everything that I want to do. You know, ignoring a certain mobile browser from a company in California, but even that does the basic stuff. Okay. Bryan Robinson 8:35 Yeah, exactly. We won't talk about that. It's fine. So cool. So a lot has changed in two years. It's amazing how much this ecosystem changes on a regular basis. How are you today using the Jamstack both professionally and personally and maybe like a slight comparison to maybe how you were using it two years ago? Raymond Camden 8:57 Well, for one, it's definitely nice to see the the ecosystem and not just in API's, but in companies like Netlify and their competitors providing more and more value out of this just off the box. When I first started I used s3 which was convenient you just FTP the files up and you're good to go. But then we saw tools like search for example, which is something else I don't see a lot of people using but I know it's still there and just command line and live what was just really really great like when I started getting a website up involved calling an ISP and waiting a couple days and then you know maybe you got your website where they you had access to again to copy stuff up. So seeing that ecosystem evolved seeing that the different features and seeing different companies now competing to offer more the most value just makes things great for for me I love the fact that I feel like I have good solutions for for like real science. So like, as an evangelist, I don't do a lot of real work. I make a lot of dumb demos. So I like mentally in my brain. I have a path that I use for like my blog, which is a real site. And then I have like a path for here's a dumb toy. I went online, and I don't care if it's online 10 years from now. Bryan Robinson 10:23 Thanks. And it's interesting to me. You mentioned surge and surge was early on for me as well like a way of getting things live. And I really appreciate it. And that was in the days before, like, honestly, important Netlify came around. And I remember the first couple times I use Netlify and figured out like I don't need I was using CodeShip with Serge as you needed to see ICD to like, have those deploys work well. And it's interesting to me how I think it was Phil Hawksworth said on Twitter, like, the table stakes have changed, right? Like what a company that is planning on doing Jamstack or Jamstack, a Jason stuff has is very differe

  4. 01/04/2022

    Salma Alam-Naylor on shipping, learning, and rendering in the Jamstack

    Our Guest: Salma Alam-Naylor What she'd like for you to see: Unbreak.tech Her JAMstack Jams: All the amazing rendering options! Her musical Jam: Move On by Emily Vaughn Grant (pay special attention at 1:47 in the track for the double tracked bass!) Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello Hello everyone. Welcome to another JAM PACKED Jamstack episode. This is That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the best question since sliced bread. What is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host Brian Robinson and this week, we have a very special guest. I'm pleased to introduce the winner of the Jamstack community creator award from Jamstack Conf 2021 Salma Alam-Naylor. Salma helps developers build stuff, learn things and love what they do. She does that via her Twitch streams, YouTube channel and blog. One quick update for the episode, we recorded this prior to Salma joining the Netlify team. So while we mentioned Contentful, in various parts of the episode, Sam is now on the DX team at Netlify. Bryan Robinson 1:04 Alright, Salma, well, thanks for joining us on the show today. Salma Alam-Naylor 1:06 Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Bryan Robinson 1:08 Awesome. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, Salma Alam-Naylor 1:13 I am currently a developer advocate for Contentful. I've also got like kind of other stuff that you do. So you might know me on the internet as white Panther. And I help developers build stuff, learn things and love what they do. I write educational blog posts about web development. I do a lot of live streaming on Twitch, I make YouTube content. And I'm an all round Jamstack enthusiast To be honest, for fun, I mean, I kind of do that for fun as well. But if you want to know about non web dev stuff, I actually love interior design. And I'm moving in the next like two months. So hopefully, when people hear this, they would have actually finally moved house. So I can't wait to get my hand stuck in to that little project. I also like to play cerebral puzzle games with my husband on on a computer, most recently, a game called Super liminal, which is all about like perspective and maths and stuff. It's very good. Bryan Robinson 2:19 I'm gonna jump in real fast. I have a six year old and we were playing super limited together. Nothing about it. I was like, this is super fun. And like we were having good time. He that was really cool. And then it gets creepy. I didn't expect they get super creepy. And he's like, I don't want to play this game anymore. Daddy. We never have to play it again. You're fine. Salma Alam-Naylor 2:38 Yeah, it was a good game. It's a good game. I remember this one bit that when you get on like a roof, and there's the moon. And we were like on the roof thinking this you have to we have to get above the roof because of the weird glitch thing when you turn the light on and off. But it wasn't it was an Easter egg. It wasn't a thing. It was fun. And I'm also, you know, my background is in music. I did a music degree. I was a music teacher. I was a musician. So I still try to play music for fun with my family. And I do want to get back into making music. Actually, I missed that a lot. But so when I move into my new house, I'll have a proper studio purposely for the music. So I think I'm looking forward to that a lot. Bryan Robinson 3:21 That's amazing. So what's your instrument of choice or musical talent of choice, I suppose. Salma Alam-Naylor 3:27 So when I was growing up, and when I was a teacher, my main instruments were piano and flute, but and singing, but I also taught kids how to play in rock bands for a few years. So I was a bass player. I don't really do much bass now. And I did some guitar and played some drums and stuff. But making music now I really like making electronic music mainly. I was also a musical comedian for a few years. Interesting. touring the UK, singing weirdly satirical British political songs. We'd get cancelled now so you can't hear any of it. Bryan Robinson 4:14 Out of curiosity. Is there any comedy in Britain? That's not satirical political comedy? I feel like everything kind of falls into it. Salma Alam-Naylor 4:23 Yeah, it's pretty much there's a lot to satirize in the British political system. But I guess that's for another podcast. Bryan Robinson 4:31 Yeah, sure. Awesome. Yeah. Let's let's maybe not talk about about the Jamstack. He's, he said that you're a Jamstack enthusiast. So what was your entry point into this ecosystem philosophy, what have Salma Alam-Naylor 4:45 you it was actually with Jekyll, the first static site generator many, many years ago, and that was the only one that existed you know, like around 2015 2016 and I had no idea what it was doing. But I was experimenting, I had really no idea that it was part of the Jamstack. At the time, I was just building a website, I had no idea that it was a static website, and really what that meant, but I was building something with liquid templates that compiled into a website. And I was hosting it on GitLab Pages at the time, not GitHub Pages. I was because I used to get lab for work. And so I kind of naturally gravitated towards GitLab at that time. But I guess the ecosystem sucked me in. I really don't know how I went from building my first Jekyll site to where I am now. I have no idea how, how this has happened, or what made it happen. But clearly, the Jamstack has, has a good thing going right. Like, it's fantastic. Bryan Robinson 5:51 So what are you doing right before you started playing with Jekyll, you were at some sort of company doing tech stuff he's mentioned you are you are using GitLab. So what was that like? Salma Alam-Naylor 5:59 So I did a variety of different things. Before I ended up here. I was working for some startups, I was working for a global e commerce company that was using like Java, whether bespoke kind of E commerce system with JSP front ends. I was also before that I was building a new e commerce platform in a startup that was JavaScript based what we're even using PHP, we're using PHP with JavaScript front end. But it was a it was a plain JavaScript front end, it wasn't statically generated, it wasn't using a framework or anything like that. After the global e commerce company, I was actually working for another startup building a React Native app. So like my career actually had nothing to do with the Jamstack. It was all my side projects. Until my last job, I was working at an agency, product agency. And we built quite a lot of things in the team. And actually we started gravitating towards next J S for these quick. They were initially proofs of concept, because next JS was pretty young at the time. But it ended up that next JS was a really scalable front end with a lot of capabilities. So we normally have like a dotnet back end and an extra as front end kind of thing with the API layer in the middle. And that was really my intro into the enterprise levels, scalable, robust, we can build whatever we want with the Jamstack kind of thing. Bryan Robinson 7:38 Alright, so let's fast forward a little bit. That was your last thing, right? How today, are you using the Jamstack philosophies professionally, I mean, obviously, Contentful is pretty, pretty big in that world. But also personally with both your educational stuff and anything else you're doing on the side. Salma Alam-Naylor 7:52 So one of the biggest philosophies that I like to promote the Jamstack is that just do it, just build something and get it live, just build it learn some stuff while you do it, and have a good time. Like, I can try things out without having to over commit to anything on the Jamstack I if I've got an idea for a website, a lot of the time I will get the idea or buy the domain, I will go on my Twitch stream for three hours. And I will build it and release it in that three hours. And that is the joy of the Jamstack. Salma Alam-Naylor 8:05 And what I love about that as well as it's so accessible to developers, because you don't have to over commit or pay for anything at that stage of IDEA inception. And so it's so accessible, and it's so in reach for so many people, for example, dot take dotnet I don't want to like hate on dotnet. It's great. It's a fantastic enterprise solution for enterprise products. But as a developer, as a front end developer, even though the dotnet comes with front end or back end stuff, what do I do when I've built an app? Like how do I put it online? So like I can just hook up a Jamstack hosting platform to my GIT repository, do a git push and great, there it is. It's online on a on a URL, I don't have to buy a domain even it's just there. And it's it's just so beautiful. And it's it really embodies the actual kind of agile kind of continuous delivery methodology as well. Salma Alam-Naylor 9:26 Every commit is a release, every commit is an immutable release. So you can roll back, you can have a look at the history you can you have, you can just click in a UI in like Vercel or Netlify or GitLab. Just click Oh, look at that. That's what I mean and week ago, I can compare that with what I've got now. And, and it scales. You don't even have to worry about scaling. If you get like a big hit on your proof of concept or whatever. And you know, it just enables developers to move fast to try things out to experiment and test Have fun without all the nonsense that developers have to deal with, day in, day out. And it's just a joy. Salma Alam-Naylor 10:09 And I've learned so much like, I never would have thought like, when I was building my like first websites maybe 10 10-12 years ago, my first proper websites, I never would have thought that I would be utilizing a CDN at the edge. And all of these different rendering methods, depending on the data that I needed to serve, auto scaling, immutable deploys, Git integration, infrastructure, serverless functions, you know,

    28 min

  5. 12/28/2021

    Sean C. Davis on the Jamstack philosophy, NextJS, and more

    Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, and welcome back to season three of That's My Jamstack. It's amazing that we've been going this long. I know it's been quite a bit since our last episode, but to jog your memories, That's My Jamstack is the podcast asks that time honored and tested question. What is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and we've got a lot of great guests lined up for this season. So without further ado, let's dive in. On today's episode, we talk with Sean C. Davis. Sean is a passionate tinkerer and teacher. He's currently working as a developer experience engineer at stack bit. Bryan Robinson 1:04 All right, Shawn. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking with us today. Sean C. Davis 1:07 Thanks for having me, Brian. Excited to be here. Bryan Robinson 1:09 Awesome. So first and foremost, tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? And what do you do for fun outside of work Sean C. Davis 1:15 For for work, I am currently the developer experience engineer for stack bit. I've been in the web development space for about a decade or so the first nine years, were all in agency space building agency freelancing, building websites for folks. And just this last year, took a shift into the product space and spending some time with stack bid. And that's that's been so that's super exciting. That's what I've been doing every day. And I'm sure we'll we'll dig into that a bit. For fun on the side. Well, I feel like I'm the I'm the classic developer in the sense that there's always some, there's always some technical thing that's happening on the side. Right now that thing is, it's it's my personal site I've had, I've had a couple of different blogs that I've maintained over the years. And within the last two years or so I've been trying to focus that content, bringing it all into my personal site. But right now, it's still kind of just like a, it's just a, it's a blog, most of most folks who come there, Googled some problem, they get the solution, and it serves those folks really well. But I'm in this transition of trying to make it more of a learning hub. So that's, it's kind of a side project now. But that's but it's still like it's fun, but it's still I don't know, it's where it could still be in a developer. I'm so like, the the other part of me, I've got two little kids at home and like a lot of folks when the pandemic hits kind of focused a lot of energy and attention into the home. So it's various projects around the house or like like many people I am part of the reason you couldn't find flour at the grocery store because I got really into baking for a while and still doing that a little bit to some like some gardening kind of just fun fun stuff around the house. Bryan Robinson 3:06 In your in your baking exploits. Are we talking like bread, baking, pastry baking, but what kind of baking Sean C. Davis 3:13 where I spend most of my time and still doing a little bit today is the classic sourdough loaf. So mostly bread, mostly bread, at least I'm better at the bread. I've done a bit of the Sweet Treats and trying to learn a little bit about the decorating but it's just the presentation isn't my strong suit. So the flavor might be there. I've got a ways to go in the inner desert department. Bryan Robinson 3:37 Yeah, I've got I've got my own sourdough starter and all that. So I definitely feel I actually, I like a time I can be a hipster about something. And so when my son was born, actually so that was six years ago now. So pre pandemic, my wife my birthday that year, two months after he was born he got me a sourdough starter from King Arthur baking and amazing. I lapsed right because obviously like infant and all that and I baked for a little bit but yeah, then started back up during the pandemic as well. Because who, who doesn't want to do that? We're gonna do Yeah, exactly. You got something to focus on. Anyway, I actually love your site. I'm sure that when we do shout outs at the end, we'll talk about that Sean C. Davis calm but one things that came up on the little repeating thing on your homepage is you're afraid of bears and Bs. Is that Is that a thing? Or is that just a funny thing? Sean C. Davis 4:21 Oh, yeah, it's a it's a funny thing. I mean, I I I love both of them, but also am terrified of both that I do. I do. I guess I didn't mention this in the fun thing. I really enjoy hiking and camping. haven't done much camping since having little kids. We're gonna eventually get them out there. But we do a fair amount of hiking. And so yeah, I've had a number of run ins with both bears and bees. And it's terrifying every time but I also very much appreciate and respect them for what they do for us. Yes. Bryan Robinson 4:54 All right. So let's talk a little bit about the Jamstack. So what was your entry point into this space? It seems this idea of Jamstack or static sites or whatever it was at the time. Sean C. Davis 5:03 It that's an interesting question. Because Okay, so if you say, Yeah, entry point into Jamstack, or static sites, if you broke that apart and said, What's your entry point into Jamstack? And what's your entry point into static sites? I have two different answers. So I'll tell you a little bit about the the journey from one to the other. It's, I find it kind of interesting. So it static sites were was the first thing before I knew anything about Jamstack. In fact, before Jamstack was coined, because the gens Jamstack term comes from I think, later in 2015, I believe. So the first agency job, I had built a few sites with middleman, they were originally a PHP shop, and about the time I joined, were transitioning into becoming a Rails shop. And so Ruby was the bread and butter programming language. And there were a few clients that would come on, who didn't want to pay for a CMS or just like they needed something real quick, and it could be static and totally fine. And so we, we were building middleman sites, but deploying, deploying them to like a digital ocean or equivalent, it's still running on a web server still serving up these pages in real time, even though they're just HTML files city like kind of silly, but But there weren't great solid patterns at that time. And about that time, 2013 or so is also when I started building custom content management systems. I built it, I evolved, and I iterated on it. And I think I was looking at this recently, I believe there were four major, different versions that I built over the series, or course of about three or four years in there. And so I'll come back to that. But as I was, so set, this first agency working on middleman, I built a few middleman sites is when I switched to freelancing. And then at this at the last Agency, also, a few middleman sites like middleman kept kept popping up when I was when I was freelancing there. Actually, that's when I built the fourth and final version of that CMS. And at that time, this is probably I think we're talking about 2016, maybe 20. Yeah, I think that seems right 2016. And so the Jamstack term exists, the term headless CMS exists, but I had no idea that these things were things that people were doing. But I had this need, where I had a client who wanted a mobile native application, and a, also a website. And it seemed like a lot of the content was going to overlap. And I was like, Well, I'm building this next version of a CMS, what should it look like? Maybe it should be able to serve both of these. And so I was like, Oh, brilliant, decoupled architecture like this is this is gonna be great. And so that that last CMS I built was API driven. And, and I believe, I believe the website was a middleman site, it, it may have been some other framework, but it was like this Jamstack pattern, but again, still deployed, still using a web server to serve every request. So like missing that, that final piece that that Netlify gives us in the CDN in that instant cache invalidation. So fast forward to this last agency, and we're also a rail shop Sean C. Davis 8:40 and built a few middleman sites. But what happened was, why I think that the 2017, I believe, the the CTO, late 2017, early 2018, our CTO gets wind of the Jamstack. And so this is pre Jamstack. Conference, still really small kind of tight knit community. And we're like, and everything just kind of aligned because we won this work. For a company where it was going to be building them a new marketing website, it was gonna be a fairly big site. But this company also had a product and an internal product team. And that team had already switched to building that product with React. And so and we had heard a little bit about Jamstack. We heard about Gatsby and we're like, Oh, perfect, perfect time. Gatsby is the cool kid in town. Like we can jump all in on the Jamstack we think we can reduce development costs over time. You know, all the all the classic Jamstack benefits like we can get those and so we took a leap. We jumped all in and so that was like that was the real introduction to Jamstack and I find it I find it kind of funny looking back on it now because I spent all those years with Jamstack like patterns and using tool and middleman was part of all of those and then we're like, oh Jamstack, but also switched to JavaScript based frameworks at the same time, which I think a lot of folks went through that pattern. But I don't know if funny to reflect on. Bryan Robinson 10:11 Yeah, definitely. And like that that kind of journey is really interesting. Like in that agency world, the fact that, like you were having defined these patterns on your own, and then this community kind of sprang up next to what you were doing, and then look like we can do those things, maybe even slightly better than than kind of where we are now that we see kind of this broader scope, and there are products out there. That's really, really interesting. And it kind of mirrors on my own journey. I was at an

  6. 02/03/2021

    Miguel Arias on form handling and lowering the learning curve

    Quick show notes Our Guest: Miguel Arias What he'd like for you to see: Kwes Forms His JAMstack Jams: Lowering the learning curve, Kwes, and AlpineJS His Musical Jams: Drake | Classical (and coding to rainfall) Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that simple Kwesion, what's your jam in the jam stack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have Miguel arias on the show. Miguel is the co founder of Kwes forms. Hi, Miguel, thanks for being on the podcast with us today. Miguel Arias 0:42 Thank you for having me, man. It's a pleasure. Awesome. So Bryan Robinson 0:44 tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing. Miguel Arias 0:49 Okay, a little bit about myself. I'm the co founder of Kwes forms, it's a, it's a form service ideal for like the Jamstack community. I like to think of us as like the next evolution of what form service should be. Before we were around, there were a lot of over called, like endpoint services, to kind of handle your, like your submission, storing and whatnot. And then we kind of felt like there was a big gap in the market where, you know, like, it kind of took care of that. But then you had to go on your own and figure out validation and components, like date pickers, multi step, things of that nature. So we kind of felt like it was a perfect opportunity to kind of get in there and that space and put out a product that that we would love to use, you know, and that we felt like maybe other people in that space would like to use as well. So what I do for fun, you know, COVID is kind of killed a lot of it, but when I, what I normally do for fun is play basketball. The weird thing about it, though, is that I actually like to practice more than actually play. Sure, I think it comes with like my perfectionistic nature, I just, I just have this thing that I like to train and just and my wife is the same exact way. So I'm glad that we found each other because we didn't go to the parks when it's empty. And just like practice all day. It's like the weirdest thing, but that's what we like to do. You know, Bryan Robinson 2:09 I can totally get that, like, as soon as you as soon as you introduce other humans into it, then like there's so many ways that like imperfections happen because of that. Some people find beauty in that and then it's like, but no, if you really want to, like compete against yourself, like doing it on your own just makes so much sense. Miguel Arias 2:26 Are you like sports guy, he like we like playing basketball? Bryan Robinson 2:30 I am I am not particularly athletic. I do have sports. Basketball is is up there. I am very when you introduce other human beings, I am very bad when it's just me shooting and like, you know, kind of running around. It's okay. Like I could I can play horse decently. But you get somebody in my face and I fall apart. Miguel Arias 2:50 Yeah, you know, I kind of find it like it's like therapeutic in a way just to kind of compete against yourself. It's cool. It's a good way to kind of exercise patience and stuff. I really like it. Bryan Robinson 3:00 Yeah, it's like, it's like, Alright, you know, you know, free throws, right. And like, it's really funny. My, my mother is actually a huge like NBA fan. And like when she's rooting for her team, she gets so frustrated at the players missing free throws. Miguel Arias 3:11 Yeah. Bryan Robinson 3:12 Don't you practice that enough? Like, can't you just make that shot? It's like, Well, yeah, except for when all the variants happen. And you know, you will miss every once in a while. But yeah, you get to kind of practice that. And you get to like, find your form. And I think there's a lot of a lot of cool things that happen in that space. Miguel Arias 3:30 For sure. Yeah. Cool. Bryan Robinson 3:31 So let's talk about the Jamstack a little bit. And I'm sure we'll kind of weave in some more about Kwes as we go forward. But like, what was your entry point into into the idea that Jamstack or static sites or whatever you want to call it? Miguel Arias 3:41 Yeah, the funny thing is when we started our service, um, we really just started it, because at the time, like, I met my co founder, because he was actually my boss. Yeah, when I was about, like, 18, I was looking to, to get a job so I can marry my girlfriend at the time. Well, I mean, she's my wife, now. She's my girlfriend at the time. She's my wife. And so we used to use a service called formstack. You know, which is great, but it was like, a, it's like a drag and drop type of service. And then one day, I just kind of burst into his office, as I normally would do. And I was like, bro, we should make our own like form service. You know what I mean? Like, not drag and drop something that I would like to use, just because it was a hassle to kind of go through that process and then have to like, put it on your site, you have to strip all this styling. It was just like, it was like an unneeded amount of work. Right. It's how I felt. Bryan Robinson 4:33 I use Formstack quite a bit at the agencies that I worked at. And yeah, it was, it was super handy for that for like the editors making the forms. It was super awful for like the developers working Miguel Arias 4:43 Exactly. So then we kind of felt like, you know, this really isn't the ideal tool for us, you know, so then I burst into his office and I told him, we should make our own thing and he kind of just like, looked at me like I was crazy. I was like, Yeah, he's like, go back to work. So then, so I was like, Alright, cool. I went home, I kind of just kept thinking about it, it's just in my nature, like, I get obsessed with things. So I kind of kept thinking about it. And then one day, I think maybe it was like, the next day, the next evening, I was in the shower. And then I just got this idea of how I would be able to go about it, you know, and I, like ran out of the shower naked, like, super wave naked. And I ran to like my notebook and start writing down and my wife was looking at me, like, I'm like a lunatic, you know? And, and so that's how we kind of started it. But I didn't really know what Jamstack was at the time. I never even heard of it. Yeah, the only reason, the reason that we got into it was because as it started gaining, like popularity, we started noticing a trend, like we started noticing people telling us, oh, this is perfect for my Jamstack site. And this is good for Jamstack, whatever. And I was like, What the heck is a Jamstack? You know, we looked it up and, and we felt like, you know, this is awesome, I kind of felt when I saw it, it made perfect sense. Like, that's where the industry at least, I feel like that's where the industry is probably headed because of how simplistic it is in nature. Like, I feel like the theory, or the concept of a Jamstack is to like, try to simplify, you know, your workflow as much as possible, you know what I mean? So I felt like, you know, it was a perfect entryway for our service, and I just kind of just fell in love with, with the whole concept of it in the community, which then allowed me to allow me and my partner to kind of improve the product now that we kind of knew what was really meant for right hand out, let's improve it even further. Bryan Robinson 6:37 Out of curiosity, what was kind of the, the beginning there? Like, what, where, where are you targeting the forms before that cuz like said, like, it is, like a great fit, like finding these services that you can fit into the Jamstack is just is so important. So like, Where was the methodology? Like, who are you targeting before you kind of had this discovery? Miguel Arias 6:54 Yeah, the methodology was really just, we wanted to build something cool, you know, something that we liked, and then we just put it out there. And it's funny, because you always hear in the SaaS community, well, not even just when you're building a product in general, that you're normally not supposed to work in secret for such a long time, before you put something out, you know, you want to do a proof of concept, put it out, see what people think. But then we totally you know, we were rookie, so we, we worked in silence for like three years. The product still not knowing what Jamstack was, or anything, you know, and then we launched it on product con. And then Ever since then, you know, we've we, that's when we started kind of getting the feedback, you know, but when we put it out there, it was really just, you know, for people doing WordPress sites, or just for anything, really, we were just, we were just targeting developers in general, you know, Bryan Robinson 7:45 I got to say, yeah, wherever developers were working and needed a form that was maybe outside of whatever stack they were using, or didn't want to bother with, they could just pick it up and put it put it in Miguel Arias 7:55 Right and make something fun, you know, it's like something that they would actually enjoy using, we felt like if a developer could enjoy using it, that was that was our guy, you know, Bryan Robinson 8:03 Out of curiosity, is there, is there any sort of in the actual, like infrastructure behind the product? Like, are you using kind of notions that you've kind of discovered in the Jamstack? In the back end? are we are we talking? Is it? Is it kind of its own monolithic structure? Or is that you know, microservices or serverless functions? What what's kind of going on there? Miguel Arias 8:22 Well, it's definitely its own thing. It's the script itself, because it's built on JavaScript, right? Because, you know, handles your front end validation, back end validation, you know, helps you build out these like complex things like multi step forms, repeater fields, things that normally kind of take up a lot of your time, that's like monotonous, it helps

    24 min

  7. 01/20/2021

    Anthony Campolo on full-stack serverless frameworks

    Quick show notes Our Guest: Anthony Campolo What he'd like for you to see: FS Jam - Full stack Jamstack His JAMstack Jams: RedwoodJS His Musical Jams: Radiohead | Bon Iver Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that not so tricky question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have Anthony Campolo. A full stack web developer and RedwoodJS advocate. Bryan Robinson 0:40 All right, Anthony. Well, thanks for coming on the show with us today. How are you doing? Anthony Campolo 0:43 I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. So it's great to be here. Bryan Robinson 0:47 Excellent. I appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? Anthony Campolo 0:52 Yeah, absolutely. So I am a bootcamp student. Someone who is kind of coming to programming from a different area of life, I was originally a music teacher, and then also ran a performing arts summer camp for about four years, and just decided that I wanted to try something else out. And you know, that the journey I got to, to coding is, is long and winding, which we'll talk about a little bit as we as we go on. But um, right now I am at lambda school, and learning full stack web development. And so yeah, that's where I'm at. Right, so your lambda school, you do that kind of full time for a small cohort, right? Yeah. So they have a full time and a part time program. So full time is a nine month program. And then part time is an 18 month program. So I actually started full time, and then switch to part time. So I've, I've done a little bit of both, it kind of just depends on you know, if you're also working to support yourself as well, or if you can really do it kind of full time. So yeah, it's, it's it's nice, because they have that flexibility. So people can kind of choose the schedule that that fits for them. Very cool. Bryan Robinson 2:03 So what do you do outside of obviously, now you're learning to code what's, what's your idea of fun nowadays? Anthony Campolo 2:09 Yeah. So I've gotten just really into open source. And it's the type of thing where I'm doing it both to to eventually help my my career, but it is something that I've really enjoyed. And I've learned a lot about RedwoodJS. In particular, I've spent a lot of time blogging about it. And I've also given a couple meetup talks about it. I did one at Jamstack Denver, and another one for GraphQL Texas. And I'm also now doing some some podcasts. I got both Jamstack podcasts done by Bryans. So that's good. And yeah, so that's kind of where where I'm at now, I'm really kind of deep into into the redwood world. Bryan Robinson 2:51 Very cool. Very cool. So obviously, you're a bootcamp student. So you're picking up development as you go along. But what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack? Was it Redwood? Or was it something something else in the past? Anthony Campolo 3:03 Yeah, so it definitely was way before Redwood and already kind of being familiar with with the Jamstack beta easier to kind of get what Redwood was was going for. But to take it back a little bit. I originally before I was doing any web development stuff, I was actually learning like data science and machine learning stuff, is what I was first trying to get into. And a lot of people who do that type of research, they have their own personal websites as well to talk about the stuff they're working on. And there's a couple where I would scroll the bottom and it would say it was created with Jekyll. And so Jekyll is funny enough static site generator created by the creator of Redwood, Tom Preston-Warner. And so I think that was probably the first time I ever had heard of the term static site. And I ended up not going that route. I ended up just making a WordPress website when I was first getting into like blogging. But then once I started to transition more into web development and learning JavaScript and react in particular that I learned about Gatsby, and so I spun up a Gatsby blog. And I listen to a lot of podcasts. So out here podcast with, with Kyle from from Gatsby, or I'm Matt from Netlify. And so I was I was hearing all these all these people like talking about these ideas, and it was just kind of floating around. So it was it's been a kind of a slow, slow roll into it. But it's definitely it's just like it's a huge, massive thing that's just there. And if you kind of pay attention, it's hard not to poke that bubble every now and then. Bryan Robinson 4:38 Exactly. And so so you said that you were kind of when you're getting into development you were doing you know more on the machine learning side and stuff so that like more computer science II stuff, what's kind of your, your, your plan, where do you want to go with web development, kind of in a post bootcamp world and all that? Anthony Campolo 4:52 Sure. Right now, I mean, I'm really into just kind of like the, the dev advocacy side of it, because I really enjoy creating. In the tutorials, I enjoy going out and talking about these things. And my background as an educator kind of fits really well in that in that niche. And there's you know, there's different kind of corners that that people go for. There's some are kind of more education, focus, some are more outreach, focus, some are more about like, bringing feedback back from the community. And so redwoods been cool, because all the kind of mechanisms for feedback are already in place. So I see myself more just like getting out and explaining it to people like, what is this? How does it work, and then that's like, kind of the whole role that I've kind of monopolized. Bryan Robinson 5:41 Nice, you've got kind of that that arts background, which definitely helps when it's like framing the story of how to do that education, too, that's always a handy thing to kind of have in your tool belt. Anthony Campolo 5:50 Yeah, you definitely need to be able to put things into a narrative for people to really want to, like, pay attention, especially for technical things. But I find that the history of this thing is is so fascinating. And I've actually spent a lot of time writing about kind of this transition from static site generators into the Jamstack. And now even like the Jamstack is turning into something else that we're not quite sure what it is yet. Because we've we've gotten rid of the acronym and now Jamstack is stands for nothing. And it's just kind of like an architecture. And so I'm really interested in those kind of ideas of like, Where is the Jamstack going? Bryan Robinson 6:27 Definitely I think, I think that there are so many new technologies kind of coming out Redwood being among them next JS having like, all these new ideas around what static and and like, server side and what these different pieces bring to the table and how they can kind of be intermingled? I'm kind of curious, like, how does Redwood see itself? Cuz I know it's a it's a full stack front end kind of application builder. But what what's the community kind of see in terms of like, where it's going? Anthony Campolo 6:54 Yeah, so it's called a full stack serverless framework for the Jamstack. So you have the Jamstack part, which is about having your front end be just static assets that you can serve from a globally distributed CDN. And then the full stack part is, how do we get those same benefits attached to the database and the back end? So it's about how do we also get that back end to be distributed globally, which, like fauna, db is doing a lot of really interesting research there. And then you have the serverless part of it, which is, how do you get your whole application to be sort of smushed into just these like AWS, lamda handlers, or, you know, Google Cloud Functions or Azure Functions. So the back end is set up in a way. So it's easily deployable to these sort of Functions as a Service serverless back ends. So it's, and then also, I didn't even mention graph QL. Like graph qL, is kind of what ties the two together. And then so there's a lot of there's a lot of tech that goes into it. And it takes a long time to kind of wrap your head around, which is why I like spent a lot of time writing about it and talking about it. And you know, I have hours and hours of material about it at this point. Bryan Robinson 8:15 How are you kind of pursuing kind of redwood right now? Like professionally, personally, what what are you building with it? What what are the applications that you kind of see optimized around what Redwood can do? Anthony Campolo 8:26 Yeah, so the first thing I did was just go through the tutorial. And this is what I would really recommend everyone who is getting into this, you should just go through the whole tutorial and kind of build out that project because they started with what they call tutorial driven development, which is sort of a play on README driven development, which is another term Tom was using a while ago. And the idea being that you create the tutorial, and then you build the framework to make the tutorial work. And so it's, it's a really crucial part of it. And now that I've kind of gone through that, it what it does is it has you deploy to Netlify for your front end, and then Heroku for your back end, does that have a Postgres database, so I'm really interested in kind of like other deploy targets and other databases you can link it up to so I wrote an article about how to connect it to fauna dB. And then that was also deployed on Vercel. And then there's other people who are doing work with like, the serverless framework, and like Azure, Postgres. So I'm interested in kind of like, now that I know how to build out a redwood project is like, what are the different ways we can deploy it? And what are the different ways that we can get it out actually, onto the

    24 min

  8. 01/06/2021

    Drew Clements on performance, simplicity, and getting to the fun parts

    Quick show notes Our Guest: Drew Clements What he'd like for you to see: Protege.dev - A job board for Junior devs His JAMstack Jams: The simplicity of the Jamstack that allows you to "get to the fun part" His Musical Jams: Fall Out Boy, Pop Punk from the late 90s, early aughts (you know, like the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 soundtrack!) Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask the time tested question, what's your jam and the jam stack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week, we have Drew Clements, a front end developer for Foster Commerce. Bryan Robinson 0:39 All right, Drew. Well, thanks for being on the show with us today. Drew Clements 0:42 Thank you for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:44 Awesome. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing? Drew Clements 0:48 Well, again, my name is Drew Clements. I'm a front end developer with Foster Commerce. We use view a lot on the front end. For fun. I like to play video games. I play guitar. I play paintball. Although I haven't played in a year or two since we've had our first kid. Bryan Robinson 1:06 Yeah, I have I have many hobbies that I have that I have not done nearly as much in the past five years since I had since I had mine. So I totally get that. Yeah. So So what sorts of video games do you play video games? Drew Clements 1:18 I mostly play a bunch of first person shooters. I'm really big on the latest Call of Duty right now. PUBG, all those fun things. Bryan Robinson 1:26 And then you say you're at foster commerce. So I assume that's, that's an e commerce agency or developer. What do you actually do there? Drew Clements 1:35 So we build e commerce solutions for a multitude of clients. Cool. And you say you say mostly in Vue nowadays. Yeah, we for the front end, we use view. And in the last few projects, we've started roping in graph QL. with it. Bryan Robinson 1:51 Okay, very cool. So So obviously, we're using some some semi Jamstack things, at least when it comes to Vue and GraphQL. But what would you say is kind of your entry point into the world of Jamstack? Where did you kind of get into it? Drew Clements 2:04 The entry point for me was when I wanted to probably like a bunch of other developers, I wanted to build myself a blog, because I told myself, if I built it, I would actually write. Drew Clements 2:14 So when I was looking at, you know, different options for how to do that, I came across things like Gatsby in similar frameworks, I didn't really know much about it, I really just kind of dove in headfirst. Bryan Robinson 2:27 Nice. And so so out of curiosity, you you did the technology, you learn the technology to do the thing, right to write the blog. Now I've been through three blogs before I successfully actually started writing, were you able to actually overcome that hurdle and write on the blog. Drew Clements 2:41 I wrote two articles on the blog. That was about as far as I've made it here was here recently, I've been using the dev.to for some of my writing, but I'm actually in the process of rebuilding my blog, I'm not redesigning it. I've already gone down that rabbit hole. But I'm rebuilding it. So I'm gonna be able to use the dev.to platform, kind of as the CMS for my Jamstack Bog Bryan Robinson 3:09 Very nicely, because they they at least there's an RSS feed. And there's probably some other stuff that you can get out of that right. Drew Clements 3:14 Oh, yeah. Bryan Robinson 3:15 Very cool. So so what what kind of technology brought you into the Jamstack? So you said you started researching blog platforms? I think you mentioned Gatsby. But you're also in Vue land. So what are you using nowadays? In terms of that? Or what technologies are you researching? Right now? Drew Clements 3:30 I'm researching ways I can make Nuxt as Jamstack as possible. I really, I really liked the view framework. And Nuxt, I guess, I guess that's server side view. But there, there are some stuff, you can put some things you can do to it. To make it a little more Jamstack. Ease, I'm really trying to look into two ways I can do that. That's part of the research for rebuilding my blog site. It's how I can implement some of those things. Bryan Robinson 3:56 Get it get a static as possible. Like it's as quick as possible, I think. Yeah, I think they're doing a lot of stuff right now around around static routes and stuff like that. So that should be that should be a good investment there. Drew Clements 4:06 I think. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun when I'm still in the kind of the reading and looking around phase I'm, I'm ready to jump into it that Bryan Robinson 4:14 nice. So. So that's kind of personally how you're using the Jamstack. Are you bringing any of that back into your work in e commerce? Or are you primarily working on just a front end with kind of some stationary back ends in place? Drew Clements 4:27 I haven't really had the chance to bring that into any of the professional products that we're working on. A lot of the ones they're just they're larger complex builds that I think we actually within let me backtrack that a little bit within the last week. Within the last week, we've discovered that one of the sites we're building would probably actually benefit from being a Jamstack site. But at this point that the deadlines to close for us Bryan Robinson 4:54 to make that pivot. Yeah, my favorite thing, from what I worked at agencies is discovering a new technology. you're discovering a new a new way of doing something, and really wanting to use it on a client project and then realizing No, we have like, you know, three more weeks left in this project. Okay, quite do that now. So out of curiosity, what you know, without specifics what what kind of things with the Jamstack bring to that project? Is it about like performance, security, flexibility. Drew Clements 5:21 In this case, it would be performance, it's the, there's not a lot of interactivity on the site, there's just a lot of content being generated from a CMS. So from, from a user's perspective, if we could just, you know, grab all that at build time, or whatever that process ends up being, and just generate the static assets of it and hand it to them rather than rather than, you know, there being the front end spa process of it. It would just, it would just give the users a whole lot better experience. Bryan Robinson 5:51 Yeah. And I feel I feel like probably one of the one of the biggest sectors in the web industry that could do well to adopt Jamstack. is e commerce. I feel like some of the tooling isn't quite there yet. Like there are Jamstack type tools for e commerce, but they all feel like they lag behind the the bigger players. Drew Clements 6:10 Yeah, that's, that's one of the things we've been seeing is that it'll be like a nine out of 10 thing like, it has nine of the things we really would like to have. But the 10th one that it's missing, is the one that we absolutely need. Yeah. Bryan Robinson 6:24 I also feel that not just from a Jamstack perspective, but oftentimes just just doing client work like that one thing that we have to have can't use x, y or z framework. Drew Clements 6:33 Yeah. Cool. So Bryan Robinson 6:34 what would you say is your as your current kind of jam in the Jamstack. So obviously, using view or and playing with Nuxt. But what what kind of service or product or philosophy is really keeping you engaged in the way the Jamstack works? Drew Clements 6:49 For me, I would have to say, the the simplicity, or I guess, relative simplicity of the Jamstack philosophy. I remember when I was first starting out, and I wanted to build my own blog. And like, kind of when I was just starting to get like a confident grasp on the front end. I was like, man, I still have to learn all of this back end technologies to actually build something. But then, you know, when I found Gatsby, and I think I looked at Jekyll and Hugo, a couple of other things like that, you know, that just kind of discovered that I could build stuff without having to become a full fledged full stack developer. And maybe part of that was even true before the Jamstack came about. But the Jamstack was, what kind of opened my eyes to that. Bryan Robinson 7:35 Yeah. And there's so many services out there that make it so that you like, even if you just had a static site generator, like, like you mentioned, with Hugo, with Jekyll, you can produce a really nice site. But then if you want to add additional functionality, there's just, there's so many ways to do it without having to, it's gonna sound bad, but without having to learn that like extra piece of technology that the back end requires you want a database, you can just push schema less data to something like fauna DB or something like that. You can just push it out there and have have a cool back end with no, no real effort. Drew Clements 8:04 Yeah. And I was never against learning the backend technologies. I was just so anxious to get something out there that I wanted to do and as quick as possible in it. At that point, it was like, it was something else I'd have to do before I could do the fun part. And I was just really anxious to get to the fun part. Bryan Robinson 8:20 Yeah, definitely. And I mean, myself, being a front end developer in general, I remember, had a portfolio site. This was years and years ago, now that I happen to know a little bit about Python and Django. And so I wrote it in Django, which is, you know, a Python framework. And it works nicely. And it was a learning experience. And then a year later, I needed to update it, I realized that whatever I'd done a year before, had made it so just wasn't going to work. If I push the code live. I was like, oh, okay, I, I can't do anything without breaking both my CMS and breaking my l

    19 min
See All (45)

Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

That's My JAMstack! is an interview podcast outlining various developers' methods of utilizing the JAMstack

Information

  • Creator
    Bryan Robinson
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2022
  • Episodes
    45
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2020
  • Show Website
    That's my JAMstack