That's My JAMstack podcast

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Bryan Robinson에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 Bryan Robinson 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.

Obscurities

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The Lead Masks Mystery: Death on Vintém Hill 5:58

19일 전5:58

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5:58

In 1966, two Brazilian men were found dead on Vintém Hill under bizarre circumstances that continue to perplex investigators and conspiracy theorists alike. Lying side by side, their bodies were discovered wearing matching lead masks—shields with no eyeholes—alongside cryptic notes. Were they victims of a cult ritual, a failed experiment, or something even more otherworldly? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .…

That's my JAMstack

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

45 에피소드

#Tech #News #Tech News #Bryan Robinson #Arts #Graphic Design

That's my JAMstack

27 subscribers

updated 3년 전

시리즈 홈•Feed

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

45 에피소드

#Tech #News #Tech News #Bryan Robinson #Arts #Graphic Design

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Quick show notes Our Guest: Debbie O'Brien What she'd like for you to see: Nuxt Content | Nuxt Static | Nuxt Components Her JAMstack Jams: NuxtJS Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:02 Hello, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the timeless question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week on the show, we had the amazing and talented Debbie O'Brien. Debbie is the head of learning and developer advocate for NuxtJS. She's a Microsoft MVP, Google GDE and Cloudinary MDE. Bryan Robinson 0:25 But before we get to that, let's talk about our amazing sponsor this week TakeShape. We'll talk about their content platform after the episode. But if you're curious to find out more right now, head on over to take shape.io slash That's My Jamstack for more information. Bryan Robinson 0:45 All right. Well, thanks for being on the show with us today. Debbie, how are you doing today? Debbie O'Brien 0:48 Hey, I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:50 No problem. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that kind of thing. Debbie O'Brien 0:56 So I'm working for NuxtJS as head of learning and Developer Advocate. So that's kind of pretty cool. And in my free time I'm doing sport because like lockdown makes you fat. So I'm doing a lot of sport, Taekwondo running, cycling anything. Bryan Robinson 1:12 Anything get a little active, right? Debbie O'Brien 1:14 Yeah. Also because we were locked up for like two months. So it's just like, good to get outside and actually do stuff. Bryan Robinson 1:20 Yeah, the best I'm on managing right now is just short walks outside. That's, that's what I've got going. Debbie O'Brien 1:25 Well, it's a good start. Bryan Robinson 1:27 So tell us a little bit more about what you do as kind of the head of education and dev advocacy at Debbie O'Brien 1:35 Yeah, so basically, my job is to kind of like make sure that Nuxt is really easy to use, easy to learn by providing good documentation, great examples, demos, pretty much anything that you would want when you want to like learn something, that you have the right materials, and then we'll work on workshops and video courses, etc. And then obviously, just Nuxt-ifying the world. I mean, the whole aim is that everyone uses Nuxt. They know what it is. Because it's amazing, right? So we just have to like, show it to the world. And then like, everyone would just come on board. Bryan Robinson 2:06 Watch everyone pour right in at that point, right? Debbie O'Brien 2:09 It's easy. It was really easy. Bryan Robinson 2:13 So so what what do you kind of see is the difference between like, since you have both those titles can combine what's the difference between like developer education and you know, Developer Relations or developer advocacy? Debbie O'Brien 2:23 Um, I guess you could say they're very similar sometimes, especially when you're writing a blog post, right? Because you're advocating because you're producing material, but you're also teaching because you're teaching someone something new. So that's why I think they're very much combined. But I guess if you were like to go for a job and learning it doesn't mean you have to be a speaker on a stage right. So the advocate, advocacy ism is a little bit more. Get out there in front of people. I think, you know, be more, don't be shy. Bryan Robinson 2:50 Cool. So, so we'll talk a little bit more about Nuxt here in a second. Because I imagine when we talked about your, your use of the Jamstack. Professionally, we'll talk a lot about that. But what was your entry point into the idea of the Jamstack, or static sites, or whatever that may have been, Debbie O'Brien 3:04 Yeah, so I guess I kind of just fell into it in a way, um, we were working for a company, and they, we had to, like, rebuild the website, it was it was really, really, really slow. And it was development experiences terrible. There's a lot of problems. So we at the time, we researched which framework to use, and, you know, was react or Angular or Vue. But we needed server side rendering, we needed like, you know, good search engine optimization. So a lot of them were a problem for us. And we came across Nuxt. And at the time, they said no, because Nuxt was too young. Debbie O'Brien 3:40 So they basically asked us to build our own framework. So we built our own framework, which was like a statically generated site framework. And we built that which is still in use today by the company. It's an amazing experience to build your own framework, but never do it. Yeah, it worked. Yes, it was great. Yes was fantastic. But you have nobody contributing to it. I don't work there anymore, and nobody's who's going to maintain it? So having a community behind you is, you know, you just need it when you're creating something like that. It was a great experience. But yeah, when we finished it, and we kind of showed it to everyone, we said, Look, this is how it works on it is super fast. And like, the website is still alive today. And it's still super fast. But my recommendation was okay, now that we've built this, now it's time to move to Nuxt. And they said, No, I left the company. I didn't want to work on my framework for the rest of my life. Bryan Robinson 4:38 Yeah, like you said, like creating something like that can be super rewarding, but like long term, it's a problem. Debbie O'Brien 4:44 Yeah, and it has its limitations because you know, if you want to do new things and add more to it, etc. And there was just two of us actually, full time on the project and then a few others that were kind of helping out. So I wasn't the main like the person who was doing all the developing developing work. was working more in the front end side of things and kind of like making sure things work the way they should some more in architecture. So if you take away the person that really built it, which he's now left the companies, well, then you kind of like, you know, I'm not gonna be on my own doing all this No way. Bryan Robinson 5:13 Yeah. Well, and then it's like, if you need to update a feature, do you really want to touch all that code that could then come crumbling down around you? Debbie O'Brien 5:21 Exactly, exactly. I don't know. companies don't trust, like open source, for some reason. But I think that's changed a lot. Now. That was like a couple of years ago. So Bryan Robinson 5:30 Yeah, I hope I hope that there's a nice bit of growing momentum behind, you know, don't reinvent the wheel. Like, let's use open stuff, not close stuff, and most definitely not coated ourselves. Debbie O'Brien 5:41 What a lot of companies do I mean, trivago have their own and it's working perfect for them. And Uber, do they have their own as well? I think it is. So there's quite a few that still are producing their own because it works for them. Because, you know, I don't know. They can do what they want on with a team of developers. And if you have a big team of developers and they're willing to spend time and money because at the end It's money, then yeah, go for it, but it's not necessary. Bryan Robinson 6:03 Well, I also kind of look as much as like, I'm usually gonna derive Facebook overall, like, I like the Facebook model of they needed something, they created the React stuff. And then they said, we're gonna open sources because we sure you know, we really want, you know, the community involved in it. So we have less work to do to Debbie O'Brien 6:20 Exactly. I mean, it's a it's a win win. Right? Bryan Robinson 6:23 Exactly. Cool. So So let's talk about how you're how you're using the Jamstack. Now, now that you don't have to create your own framework, how are you using it professionally? How are you using it personally? Debbie O'Brien 6:32 Yeah, well, before I started in Nuxt, I actually work for an agency and one in my job interview, actually, I kind of said, You know, I want to work with view and with Nuxt. And they said, well, you're going to be in charge. So you can just do the technology. And I was like, I like that. Okay. So I accepted the job because of that, right? And, and I literally Nuxtified the whole company. None of them had view experience, and I taught all the developers view Nuxt it was it wasn't An easy, right, it was a kind of a big battle because you know, you're going into a company that was very back end focused. Debbie O'Brien 7:06 PHP igniter, for example, was what they were used to working with. And you're coming in and you're saying, right, you know, front end is going to take over. And we're gonna, we're going to use Nuxt. And we have all this power now. And it was a challenge. And then, okay, introducing Nuxt is one thing, introducing static sites that was like, you know, why, what do you want to do? What do you mean? What, why do you want to take the server away? What do you want to do that for? Bryan Robinson 7:29 We love our PHP. Debbie O'Brien 7:29 Yeah, so it was, it was really hard work actually convincing people. So yeah, I just fought. I'm a good fighter. I did Taekwondo, so I just kept fighting. And the fighting works, and eventually you win. So we managed to be able to convince the back end team and the, my old boss to basically use Nuxt, and we started using it for a lot of company projects. And when they seen the performance benefits, it was kind of like, okay, so yeah, this is a little bit better. And you know, So we kind of managed to, to basically produce Nuxt websites for pretty much every company that we work to it, which was great. So it was it was a good way of like, you know, Nuxtify the world through the agency. And then I moved on and started with Nuxt. I've only been with Nuxt, three months. So it's quite new. And yeah, it's it's obviously amazing, because now I actually, you know, just get paid to work with Nuxt, which is just fantastic all day every day Nuxt. Bryan Robinson 8:31 I'm kind of curious to take a take a step back. So you went into an agency that was primarily using PHP, I've gotten the impression overall with the PHP community that the Vue is actually looked upon as kind of the JavaScript to use did was that kind of your experience there? Or is it maybe too early at that agency and they hadn't quite gotten to that point. So I know like Laravel has always liked view and integrated well view. Debbie O'Brien 8:56 Yeah, unfortunately, they weren't that far advanced. So it was actually me that introduced Laravel to them, and said, like, you know, you want to build your own CMS or why don't you use Laravel because it works nicely with Vue. And then we can help you on the front end. And we can work together and, and the back end team then started to work with view, and started to really like it. So they were like, in love with Laravel and view and the whole mixture of how it works together. So I think they were, they were quite open to move in that direction, but they just didn't know the right direction to go to. And I don't know, I guess when I come in and say this is the way you know, you might geek out a little bit and you can like, just follow me. Come on. I know the way. Bryan Robinson 9:36 Very cool. So out of curiosity. So you're at Nuxt now, and obviously you've been you've been kind of your own advocate for Nuxt for a little while. I'm very curious around the space that Nuxt and Nuxt. And even even like Gatsby and Gridsome kind of occupy because they're not static site generators, and I just I don't know what to call them. What would you call them? What kind of phrase would You manufacturer around all about? Debbie O'Brien 10:02 Well, the Chrome team actually call it a meta framework. We're just calling it a web framework, because we're using NodeJS. And we use Vue. So you know, depending on what you want to use, it's not just a view framework. It's also based on NodeJS as well. And it's using, you know, developer tools. So we call it an intuitive web framework. Because we can have server side rendering, and we can have static site generation. And we can have single page applications, we can have it all right, not all of them can have that. So Nuxt kind of is different in when you compare it to some that are just static site generators. Um, but yeah, Jamstack framework doesn't sound really too good either. doesn't Bryan Robinson 10:45 No. And I mean, you could theoretically probably do an Nuxt application, not even like using CDNs, not using some of the more traditional stuff in a in a Jamstack stack. So I guess you could you can even have Nuxt without the Jamstack at that point. Debbie O'Brien 10:58 Yeah. I mean, Nuxt just works with everything. It's just cool. Bryan Robinson 11:04 Cool. So I would I would hazard a guess and say that perhaps Nuxt is your jam in the Jamstack? Debbie O'Brien 11:10 For sure. I mean, yeah. Nuxt is my job for quite a while, as you said, before I even started working with Nuxt. I was like, you know, speaking about Nuxt at conferences, and you know, it's actually funny because, um, I didn't like Nuxt. Debbie O'Brien 11:23 At first. I didn't want to use it. Debbie O'Brien 11:28 This is at the time when we were trying to figure out what we were going to build our own framework and stuff on, we wrote our own server side rendering on top of you to try and make it work and it wasn't working properly. And I reached out to the core team members to Eduardo, from the core team from view and said, like, you know, I'm having this problem and I really need server side rendering. And like this is not working if you've got any recommendations and he was like, did we just use Nuxt? Okay, for the Vue team are recommending Nuxt so that means it must be okay to use. Debbie O'Brien 12:00 So when I started playing around with it and stuff, I didn't like it because it gave me things I didn't know. And I didn't need. I was like, what's this? I don't need that. I don't want that. What Why are you giving me this? So it kind of like, pushed me away from it. And then when I realized that, you know, when you stop using it, and you start just using view, you go, Oh my God, I've got to like, do the whole router, follow my own. Nuxt just doing all that for me. I'm going back to Nuxt. So I think about when you don't understand something, you don't like something, when you start to understand it, you start to realize what it does, and then you go, wow, this is actually powerful, but I know how it's working. So I get it. And it makes sense. And yes, I want to use it. I think that's what's important is understanding. Bryan Robinson 12:41 Nice and so so now that you've kind of you have an understanding of it what what is what has been the big draw that has kept you with Knox, so obviously, you know, you didn't understand it, didn't like it at first, but now that you're really in it, what are its like core features that are gonna keep you staying with Nuxt for a while. Debbie O'Brien 12:58 Well, there's quite a lot. I mean, develop experience, for example. So like, I mean, I wrote the course Vue router, and it's a lot of work. So I know what it's like and what's involved in it. And this is all done for you with smart prefetching. With code splitting. It's all done. And there's a lot more other benefits. So we just released the Nuxt components. And now we don't have to write import statements were components. So Nuxt is making your developer life easier. And when you're like having to, especially when you work in an agency, and you have a limited amount of time to develop something and you need to get this job done. Well, you don't want to be spending time doing unimportant tasks like writing import statements, or, you know, configuring your router. So in Nuxt, takes that away from you. It's kind of like, yeah, this is really, really cool. Debbie O'Brien 13:40 But the other great thing is the performance. And for me, performance was probably the biggest seller, because I'm a bit of a performance freak. And I you know, I've been waiting to Webpack so I like I really am focused on performance, I'm Google Developer expert as well. And when I was consulting with the agency, I did a lot of work on performance. So to be able to go into a company and say, yeah, this is the website, look at performance it is Look how how fast it's working because of the smart prefetching that Nuxt gives you because of the automatic code splitting that Nuxt gives you. And you know what, I'm going to create a pw way for you. And you do it in 30 minutes, because not even three minutes. Like it's as simple as that. I mean, that's just magic. Debbie O'Brien 14:21 That's just something a company says, Wow, you know, I've seen it like, from the companies we've gone into just to kind of go Wow, this is amazing. This is so fast. This is so good. So performance for me is is key. Bryan Robinson 14:33 So with all the like, obviously, the Jamstack itself is a very performant kind of architectural mindset. But with that server side rendering built in with the specific routing built in so Nuxt is kind of pushing almost performance first. Debbie O'Brien 14:46 Yeah, I mean, we're very performant for sure. And it developer experience I recommend to go side by side. So like basically your performance on making the developers lives easier. That's what we want to do. We want to make it like we're lazy people, right developers, so We want to just have fun and we don't want to do those unimportant tasks. So if Nuxt can do all that for you, and you just concentrate on curating the cool stuff, then that's what makes your, your experience better. Right? Bryan Robinson 15:09 Hmm. Very cool. So So are there any kind of ancillary philosophies, services, software that you're digging on in the Jamstack, as well, besides Nuxt are the pairs particularly well with Nuxt. Debbie O'Brien 15:25 So obviously, serverless functions are like, you know, a big thing. And we I didn't, I haven't dug that deep into it, I started using them. And it's something I wanted the company to use at the time. And we're going to actually build them into Nuxt. So we're gonna have Nuxt functions. So that's gonna make the whole Jamstack even more powerful. And I think that's what I'm, yeah, that's what makes everything just kind of like go together. You know, with the back end team can build something cool. We have a serverless function, you just go to the API, get it done. Bryan Robinson 15:53 Pretty cool. So So is it going to be its own flavor of serverless functions or is it going to be just co located With with the front end code, how is that gonna work? Debbie O'Brien 16:03 I'm actually not too sure the they're working on them at the moment. And I don't know if it's gonna be like, similar to how the lambda functions work or not, I'm not sure, or it's going to be based on that or, but it basically just means that you'll be able to write them directly in your code, which is just going to make your life easier again, right? Because that's it, we Bryan Robinson 16:22 definitely, I've never really enjoyed having like the lambda functions completely separated out. Like that's always been one of the pain points for it. So that's cool that you're working towards more solutions for consolidating everything. Debbie O'Brien 16:33 I was just gonna say as well like something that we released just recently with the full static module. So that was released last week. Because before we weren't in full static, we were statically generating or pre rendering the sides. And then when you changed from one page to another, it's still called the API because it was it was rendering there and then and calling that API, right, whereas now we're not doing that anymore. And we basically on a build time, we call your API, we get everything. thing that we need from the, from the data, and we store it in a static folder as a payload js file. And then every time we client side render the page, it's going to go to that file and collect that data. And that works a little bit different to other frameworks. And the reason for being is that we were able to separate the build from the content, which means now that you can actually just regenerate your content without having to go to Webpack and without having to build the whole site and the assets and the etc with just generating the content and that makes it super super fast for for content regeneration. Bryan Robinson 17:36 Okay, so yes, it's like the build time is gonna be less for just kind of smaller, smaller changes, right? Debbie O'Brien 17:41 Yeah. And this was a big problem, especially with the agencies which I don't understand why right because it was like two minutes and they were like, oh, but it takes two minutes to build I was like, so what a coffee but for some reason, that was an issue and now we're down to like 10 seconds. So you know, if you're going to find would be 10 seconds, then you know, I can't do anything else. We know I think Bryan Robinson 18:00 the more at that point. Debbie O'Brien 18:01 Yeah, I think it's a big it's a, it's a big thing that a lot of people had, especially when you're working with bigger sites, why do you have to rebuild it just for, especially if you're working with a CMS, right, and you're just changing writing a new blog page or changing something in a CMS, you don't need to rebuild that that whole website. And most of the websites we've built for clients, you never need to actually build anything ever again, because that site is finished. And they're just changing minor content every now and again. So to be able to hand that over to a client and say, right, there you go, it's going to be super fast. In 10 seconds, you'll see your change. And also, we built in a live preview mode. So this is again, released only last week. And now you can actually live preview your changes in your API. So by using like a query Param preview equals true. And then you can actually see your live preview changes from your API. And then you can say, Yeah, that looks good. And then deploy, and then it's going to build it, and then you've got it. intensely. Cool. Bryan Robinson 18:58 Yeah, that preview such an important step and like especially like you've mentioned, like the agency lifecycle, like I have to be able to see the the change I'm making before before I can definitely approve it for production. Debbie O'Brien 19:11 Yeah. And it's pretty much the non developer people, right? And I get to because they're afraid of like, you know, they need to see you there. They're not like us who like don't mind or something's broken because we know can fix it. Whereas they probably can't fix something. So they just like I need to see it as it working. And then, so yeah, this this is going to be a big game changer. Bryan Robinson 19:28 Cool. So let's, let's pivot and let's talk a little bit about music. What's your actual jam right now? What what are you listening to when you're able to listen to things? Debbie O'Brien 19:35 Well, you see, I actually can't listen to music when I'm coding. Actually, can't I? Yeah, I need to. I need silence And yeah, so I don't have any sound at all except the birds singing outside my, my office. So I don't really listen to music when I'm coding. But when I'm cooking, I listen to music when I'm cooking. I can't talk just which is weird, right? Don't talk to me when I'm cooking because I can't I guess I'm just concentrating so much that like, you know, I can have music on Wi Fi and but I actually don't even know what's playing. And it's just there. It's background noise, I guess. So. I don't know. I'm pretty boring in that sense of like, what? Yeah, what music? am I listening to whatever Apple gives me or whatever Alexa gives me basically. Bryan Robinson 20:21 Hey, fair enough. We turn we turn a lot over to the robots anyway, might as well let the the musical choices happen there as well. Yeah. Very cool. That's, that's interestingly, I'm, I'm kind of in the same boat when it comes to cooking too. I need to I need to focus a little bit. I need to make sure all my timings are working out and all that all that good stuff. Debbie O'Brien 20:39 Yes. Bryan Robinson 20:40 Cool. So is there anything that you would like to promote in cow to the Jamstack community as a whole that you're working on right now? Debbie O'Brien 20:46 So I guess like, obviously, the, the full static that we released, so that's what check now in Nuxt. And especially if you've never built a static site, where you've built a start a site with next like, like a single page application or server side, rendering Like, it's so easy to change from one to the other, just by changing the target to static, once you've updated to version two point 30, and change the target to static, and then change the command to next build, and next export, and now you've got a static site. I mean, that's it. So it's not like, Oh my god, I have to like start from the beginning or refactor the whole thing. Like, literally, you don't. And I think that's what makes it really cool that you can just change from one to the other. So I would say to everyone to try and test out static sites and just give them a go. The content module as well, that we released for building your content. So you can have like a good base CMS inside Nuxt. So you don't need to like advocate by CMS, because we've got one like built in for you. Yeah, really cool features released. We're going to be releasing our new Doc's very, very soon as well. And we're actually changing our whole website to use the content module because actually, we built this for us, like like you said earlier. So we build the content module for the Nuxt Doc's to make our lives easier, and we're sharing it with the world to make the world lives easier. So if you like it as much as we do, then you you know, I'm sure you're gonna love it because yeah, it is it is fantastic. So Bryan Robinson 22:07 the nice thing is you've got your own use case for it. And you get to test it out and make sure that it's the right thing for for everyone before you even launch it. Debbie O'Brien 22:14 Well, that's pretty much everything we're releasing now is because it's what we want, locally that we have a lot of people on the team now. And there's a lot of great ideas. And we're just like, we have to do this again and again. And again. Why can we not just do something like this? And then we fix it for the world. So yeah, that's really cool. I would say sign up for our newsletter, and you can hear all the news about Nuxt. so you don't miss anything. Because we're releasing so much stuff that it's kind of hard to keep up with in the actual team. So I can only imagine outside what it's like. Bryan Robinson 22:42 Yeah, I mean, and especially if you're if you're paying attention to a couple different products, you're like, Okay, just let me know, bring it to my inbox. Debbie O'Brien 22:49 Yeah, yeah. And if you're an agency and you have to work with other like, you know, frameworks and technologies and stuff, then you obviously can't focus so much time on just one. So yeah, it's hard. It's really hard. To keep up and we're moving at such a fast pace, but it's such a great pace, right? Because we're creating great content and great modules, etc. But yeah, we're climbing climbing ladders. climbing mountains, I should say. Bryan Robinson 23:13 Even even bigger than ladders. Debbie O'Brien 23:16 Yeah. Well next is like the logo is based on mountain. So we're all about mountain. Bryan Robinson 23:20 Fair enough. And I I can see that. Yeah. Cool. Well, Debbie, I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today and to share more about Nuxt and the things you're passionate about. I hope you keep doing some amazing things, both at Nuxt and kind of in the community as a whole. Debbie O'Brien 23:35 Thank you very much. It was great to be here and yeah, just try out next. I hope you you can just like create an excellent site yourself and you know, for this whole Jamstack podcast stuff up there. That would be cool. True, Bryan Robinson 23:46 true. Although I was rebuilding a house and Season Two was gonna have a new website and then I only got halfway through I said what I've got. Debbie O'Brien 23:54 That's always the way we're always too lazy in the end. Bryan Robinson 23:57 Exactly. Thanks again to Debbie for the awesome conversation. And thanks to all the amazing people in the Jamstack community that tune in Week after week. Before we get to our sponsor, be sure to like part star favorite or whatever in your podcast app of choice, and spread the word about the amazing people doing awesome stuff in our community. And now for our sponsor, if you listen to season one you're probably aware of take shape by now. But as a reminder, take shape is a content platform for the Jamstack take shape has a headless content management system and easy to use graph qL API, a static site generator and amazing new product called match a service that can tie together multiple API's into their handy graph qL interface if you're doing anything with content on the Jamstack Be sure to check them out at take shape.io slash That's My Jamstack. That's it for this week. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you back here for the next awesome episode. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Intro/outtro music by bensound.com Support That's my JAMstack by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack…

That's my JAMstack

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S2E4 - Obinna Ekwuno on the shift from engineering to the web, Gatsby and the incremental future 21:57

5 years 전21:57

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Quick show notes Our Guest: Obinna Ekwuno What he'd like for you to see: His Egghead videos His JAMstack Jams: Gatsby Cloud | Netlify His Musical Jam: KOTA the Friend | Fela Kuti Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:03 Hello, everyone, welcome to the next amazing episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the age old question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? On today's episode, we talked with the amazing Obinna Ekwuno is a software engineer for Gatsby, a media developer expert, egghead instructor and an accessibility advocate. Bryan Robinson 0:24 Before we dive into that interview, let me take a second to thank our sponsor this week, TakeShape, stick around after the episode to find out more about their content platform, or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information. Bryan Robinson 0:40 Obinna, thanks for thanks for being on the podcast with us today. Obinna Ekwuno 0:44 Happy to be here. Bryan Robinson 0:45 Awesome. So tell us a little about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? That kind of thing? Obinna Ekwuno 0:50 Oh, um, so I am a software engineer at GatsbyJS. I work on the DevRel team. I originally joined Gatsby to work on the learning team. Like building stuff with like documentation, writing some documentation and working on like plugin automating workflows and like all of those interesting stuff, trying to like make like documentation better for like people to, like, get more information out of out of Gatsby. But now I work on like the DevRel team, which is like really cool, because like, I still do some of the learning work, but like also, like more DevRel right now. Um, that's what I do for work. Obinna Ekwuno 1:25 For fun, like, I like to write poetry. So I just, you know, write poems, hang out my friends. I I started getting into gaming a few months ago, my friend gave me his ps4 to like, try out some games. So yeah, that's that's what I do for fun right now. Bryan Robinson 1:41 So what kind of poetry are you writing? Obinna Ekwuno 1:44 I'm mostly like mostly melancholic poems like just, you know, I'm just writing I'm documenting like, life as a Nigerian boy growing up in Nigeria and you know, just just, you know, writing more for my myself, my future self done, like anybody really Bryan Robinson 2:01 Awesome, I believe of everyone that we've, we've talked to you're the first person who said that poetry is what you do in your spare time. So that's, that's awesome. Obinna Ekwuno 2:09 Thank you. Bryan Robinson 2:10 And then with Gatsby, so you said you were originally on the learning team and the devrel team. That's been an interesting thing that I've heard about Gatsby, what's the main difference between, say, the Education team and and DevRel? Because I've always felt that those kind of overlap in some ways? Obinna Ekwuno 2:26 Yeah. So like, there's not like so much difference is because when working out like when I was working on like, the learning team, because we're still trying to like flesh out the DevRel team at Gatsby, so learning was more like, you know, writing documentation, speaking, podcasts, all of those interests interfacing, like the community, so it was kind of like, it was more like DevRel but then at the same time, like actually having to write documentation as part of your job. But, so like, that's like, those, those are like the, the parts are like overlapped but like so that's why it was really easy for to transition from like learning things. There. Because like it was just same thing I started doing originally, but like, you know, with like, Oh, this is not what you're supposed to do full time. Bryan Robinson 3:07 So let's, let's talk about the the Jamstack a little bit. So what was your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack? Or maybe your static sites? How did you kind of enter this world? Obinna Ekwuno 3:16 Yeah, so, um, I think that was like, two years ago, when I had been writing, like, React for a bit. And, you know, it was really, um, it was really because I had to, I don't, I didn't have like a traditional entry into like tech. Obinna Ekwuno 3:30 I studied engineering in school, and like, it was really in uni. And like, it was really confusing to like, learn how to code. So I was writing, like, React after learning, like a lot of JavaScript. And then, you know, someone just came up one day while I was like, hanging out my friends from computer science, and they were like, hey, look at this cool stuff called Gatsby. Like, what is like The Great Gatsby like the movie, like who would name something who would never framework out of like a movie, but then you know, that then I you know, got into like the documentatioon. And you know, just really just kept going from there. So like Gatsby was like my first introduction to like, oh, when I saw that I think the thing that really got me into it was seeing that I didn't have to like worry about routes anymore. The whole the whole put put the file in the page folder and becomes a router. It got it got me. I was like, What? Yes, this is how I want to build Bryan Robinson 4:20 It definitely. Like I when I got my first intro into like some of the React stuff. I just, I didn't want to handle routing. That was like the worst thing about building a single page application. And now with Gatsby is just drag and drop almost Bryan Robinson 4:33 So when you were studying at university, you said you were like software engineering. Were you specifically looking to get into went into the web world? Or were you looking to do other things with that? Obinna Ekwuno 4:44 So um, I was studying electronics and computer engineering, and you know, like having having so I was doing more of like, smaller electronics like, you know, smaller sector boards, how do waveforms work, all of those things. Interesting stuff that I never really paid attention to. Well, but the thing is like with me, like naturally, I'm just really I'm really curious. So at first I didn't even want to like I didn't know what tech was about, I just really just wanted to be a network engineer. So I was learning a lot about TCP and IPs and network layers and all those like interesting stuff, Voice over IP, you know, the cool things for me at that time, then, I got into like tech, when one of my, my classmates was because I was just going to like, the classes to get my degree, like because I was good at math and physics. And you know, engineering just came like, Oh, that's what you're supposed to do. Obinna Ekwuno 5:34 But then when I really go into like, my classmate taught me to write HTML. And I learned HTML, I was like, Oh, my God, then I go, I go to CSS and I'm like, what's sorcery is this? How, how does this happen? You know, so I've always I think the thing that really got me here was like, always wanting to because everything excites me with like, when it comes to like tech, so like, always know, what's the next thing I can do? How can I use this in another way? So like, that's like, what's really interesting That's, that's what really got me into like, where I am now. Bryan Robinson 6:03 Very cool. So obviously working at Gatsby, your day to day deals a lot with the Jamstack. But how specifically, are you using the Jamstack professionally? How are you using it personally? What are you kind of doing nowadays? Obinna Ekwuno 6:15 Yeah, so um, I first like my, like building on stuff like Jamstack was like kind of building stuff for Gatsby was how I got to like the Jamstack. I like now because like, I work on the on the documentation. So like before, you have to actually write documentation, you kind of need to like test out or you're writing about and actually know if it works. So that's like most of the stuff that I do professionally with the Jamstack. So maybe if you're trying to document how a plugin works like you're actually running up a Gatsby, you're firing up a Gatsby demo site, trying to like implement this plugin, seeing use cases, questions that people might have about implementation and all of those like cool stuff. And mostly on testing out tutorials. When you write, you're trying to write a tutorial on how to use this With Gatsby, I would have to, like, you know, have to understand how this works, and then test it out, build it out and then write the documentation for that. So that's like how I work with it professionally. Um, and mostly just like educating people on it. Obinna Ekwuno 7:13 Personally, I have I have a personal sites that have I have been working my friend always laughs at me every time I mentioned my personal site, because I've been working on this site for like, for like, the past year. And the reason why I haven't really competed is that every time I feel like it's ready, I see some other thing I learned. I work on like, Oh, I want to add this to my site and then I just keep I keep test using it to test stuff. I do recent thing that is really getting me excited is Gatsby recipes. So like that's what I was like, oh, cool, how do I you know, just out of curiosity, how do I remove everything in the Gatsby config js and try to make try to see if I can make like a recipe out of like all of those things. So that's so that's how I use it personally, just I use my I use my site, as like a testing field for everything. Bryan Robinson 8:02 Very cool. I've actually seen a lot recently about how your personal site should be your, like development garden. Like you shouldn't think of it as like a final final place for things that just you should be pruning it and planting new seeds and all sorts of stuff. It's a cool analogy. Obinna Ekwuno 8:18 A good a good example would be this a colleague of mine, Josh. Josh writes a lot about his, um, his like, on this personal site and he adds like a bunch a lot of like, awesome features on that. And like I just whenever I think of my personal site, I'm like, I want I want my sites look like Josh is on. Because he just, you know, he works on like the cloud team, I got to be and then every new awesome feature that's coming up, he just uses a site to test it out. So yeah, Bryan Robinson 8:48 So obviously you're working at Gatsby, but what what would you say kind of your jam in the Jamstack?What's your favorite service or product? Or maybe it's like a philosophy what what do you enjoy the most about the idea of the Jamstack Obinna Ekwuno 9:00 I love that like the Jamsttack community is kind of like it because it's like relatively new, per se. It's like a place where people, you know, the entry level is like, it's not it's not so high. And like the community is really willing to like help people learn more about it because the community is actually just green. I think of like the the companies actually like leveraging of the Jamstack like Netlify, for example. It's like a company started in 2014. Gatsby gate became a company in 2018. Most, most of the technologies that we're using and stuff that we're still figuring out how do we want to make this like, for like, the, what's the code for like community, so I love that, like, the Jamstack community is really, um, it's really trying its best to educate and curious people along and make things simpler. Obinna Ekwuno 9:46 Um, my favorite service at this time and I don't mean to sound salesy, but then I really am in love with like Gatsby cloud, to be honest, because like, like, it's done like, I mean, the first time I heard about it, I thought it was I thought something else, like I don't know what it was, but like right now I'm just appreciating what's like what it does, we like build times and how it helps what's it called: developers like interface with content creators and all of that. I also really love Netlify, because like, I could host stuff without even without even understanding what CI and CD, like all of those DevOps, whatever related, you know, and I just really love that like, um, another thing I love about the Jamstack is like, the thing it does with so I can have different services coming to like a website's site without having to like worry about how those services run under the hood. Like I could host images on Cloudinary. do stuff like Gatsby, try new stuff for like, Auth0, you know, just what I need into where it is. Bryan Robinson 10:51 So out curiosity, so obviously run the speed of Gatsby Cloud is kind of important. It's obviously tooled up to run Gatsby? But kind of how have you been feeling? That's a relatively new product. And I don't actually know a whole lot about it like, What? What's been kind of some of the biggest advantages that you've seen playing with it? Obinna Ekwuno 11:11 Yeah, so, um, Gatsby cloud launched like last year. And like, we recently just shipped a new feature called incremental builds, which is like, really what excites me the most, because what incremental builds offices, so usually whenever you have to, like build, like a site, you know, static sites are fast, like relatively fast, depending on how much data you have, like there. It's, it's fast, but then gets me with incremental builds is trying to like push the limits of what we actually call fast. Obinna Ekwuno 11:43 So incremental builds, like what Gatsby does is also you've built a site, and then cool you build a site in like 22 seconds. That's all right. And then you want to make like a content change. So for example, you kind of do like a content change and then usually what will happen is that your site will be Build for every content change you make. But then what incremental builds offers is that for every content change, it really just compares, like the difference between the first build, and like the new edits that you've done. So I like to think of it in the react and the virtual DOM, um, play of how hot reloads of like, Oh, we measure what's what, what change versus what was, and then just build whatever changed. And that will reduce like, build time. Obinna Ekwuno 12:25 So you could have like, the first build is 22 seconds, the next build can be five seconds. And when you think obviously, like five, six pages, it's, it's, you know, it's cool, but then think of it in like 1000 pages, that that would save you like a lot of time and Gatsby also launched something will it build, which is like, a, like a benchmark site to see, to kind of know how many so if I had like 2000 pages on my on my sites, how long would it theoretically take to build this? So you can actually see that and then yeah, that's that's really wasteful. To me like, and it's awesome when you get the opportunity to walk for a product that you really like love that really just makes you happy. So yeah, definitely. Bryan Robinson 13:09 Yeah. And that's like one of the one of the biggest naturally one of the biggest arguments, but one of the one of the strongest arguments against some, like the static site generation stuff is, well, you know, it's great for little toy sites. But when you get editor, enterprise sites with thousands of pages, it can take forever. But if it's incremental, and it's only generating one new page when you do that, that's beautiful. Obinna Ekwuno 13:29 Exactly. Yeah. That's what makes me happy about that's what I love about the Jamstack. Like, we're always just trying to look for new ways to make things better. So when you so when you think when you think this cannot go past this level, boom, it's something else. Bryan Robinson 13:44 Always kind of standing on the last iteration, and making it better for the for the developer to work with it but also, because it's so powerful and because like the Jamstack is so so quick for performance and all sorts of stuff ends up making the the end user happier, too. Bryan Robinson 14:01 So what's your what's your actual jam right now? What is what's in your headphones where you listen to or your favorite artists? what's what's going on there? Obinna Ekwuno 14:08 So, um, um, cuz because like I write like a little poetry, I tend to listen to a lot of like, poets. Mostly I listened to poetry but like, also listen to rap because I like I call it conscious rap was kind of like those kind of rap songs where actually you kind of feel like you're in tune with the artists. And it's not just the beat that you're listening to. So currently, right now, I listen to a lot of Kota the Friend which is like he's he's like an independent artists out of New York. You know, he's rapping about, you know, trying to raise his son, you know, and all of like those really deep stuff and like I really resonate with him. I also listened to a lot of Fela - Fela Kuti, which, which for me, is is like education because like, cause Fela, Fela like comes from like, a place of What's it called, um, being African and being in Africa, so I'm over a more of a introspective person. So I like to like just listen to people that actually just take time to block out the noise. And like, put all of like all the noise aside and just really just be real with you. So that's so I listen to a lot of different fella could see Kendrick Lamar? Yeah, most of like, yeah, my, my music. My taste in music is actually just very random. Bryan Robinson 15:29 Yeah, sure. No, that's me. I think everyone's got, you know, the the certain artists that they that they really like, and they can span multiple, multiple types of music. So I really appreciate like the idea that like, getting in tune with the artists because that's always that's always like a nice thing to be able to like hear someone that is is as introspective or as thoughtful as you are. Obinna Ekwuno 15:53 Yeah. Thank you. Bryan Robinson 15:55 Cool. So So is there anything that you would like to promote that you're doing anything you want get out to the gym. That community as a whole. Obinna Ekwuno 16:01 Yeah, so I tried to like I try to like create like content because, um, because like I'm really curious so I just really just try to like put stuff together and just you know, I blog a lot on on LogRocket. And then also like I recently go into screencasting so I'm like doing all of that to egghead and I just make community resources because I feel like I really feel like as much as the information should be free as much as like you know, content creators actually need like some support but then yeah, that's it just just put out the content because like people because I love like the community really helped me while I was transitioning from being you know, solving a lot of math that I honestly didn't know that I think of it honestly didn't care about. You're just solving a lot of math and then moving towards like a computer science like background understanding abstract syntax tree all of those like awesome stuff like that. My my friends helped me like understand like, it was for my community resources. So I really just, you know, make resources on egghead basically any blog that would like allow me to, I used to write a lot on Scotch. That that was like the first place to actually like, wrote stuff on. Yeah. Bryan Robinson 17:12 Cool. So as you're kind of transitioning from, from kind of written stuff to the screencasting a, how's that been for you and be? How did you learn? Like when you said, like, all these community resources were important. Did you read more? Or are you more of like a visual learner and followed like, screencasts like what you're doing now? Obinna Ekwuno 17:31 Oh, so I'm transitioning from like, transitioning from the roots into like, screencasting. So writing was like, it comes natural to me. Because like, because like, I write a lot of forms. But then screencasting was something I was like what I did a lot of like, a lot of like, you know, iterations with Zac. Zac works at Egghead. Shout out to Zack because that really helped me because I I would do a video I did have like, oh no this. This is nice and I could say, Oh, no, because you know, people are watching this on your phones, and all of that. So, it was it was really frustrating. But then it got to the point where, you know, Zac, Zac had a lot of corrections for me. And I was like, ah, maybe this isn't for me. And then one night, I'm just laying down and I and I say to myself, you know, it really just boils down to how bad you really want to, like, do something to be honest. And then, you know, I just, I just go to did the recording once and sent it to Zac. And he was like, awesome. I was like, What? Obinna Ekwuno 18:28 So, so that and from there, like, I just, I have like, two videos, I don't know. And I have like, three more coming, you know, just really just looking for how to like, do that. And then I think the second question was, how did I? How was it for me learning to code? Yeah. So um, I first like I started off with like the under law. I did this under law training, where I can't remember I'm talking about my work, and then our learning community. So like, they really just go a lot of mentors and I told us Oh, you know, you're learning HTML today, I did a lot of like Google sponsored things on Udacity. And then at some point, like the visual, the visual learning wasn't really working for me because all I got was like, the perspective of people. And I wanted to, like, understand how it worked. So I, I, I started reading like documentation. Like even right now, like I'm learning I'm learning a bit of like view. So before going into like funding masters or trying to find like a course on Udemy I'm trying to get like documentation because I because as much as I don't think every documentation is that great like this, this this has been a really good experience like so I'm more of like, I like to read documentation and then get opinions, listen to podcasts, you know, talk to people all that so that's that's how I learn and and learnings are continuous for me. Because like, I don't I don't really feel like there's a place where you get to be like Oh, yes now and I I know it's all Bryan Robinson 20:01 I know everything now! Obinna Ekwuno 20:02 Yeah. Yeah. Bryan Robinson 20:05 Nice. Well, as you said, like even with the technologies that we're all kind of playing with, there's always something new like, you know, react with hooks A few years ago, Gatsby now has recipes. Like there's always something new. Obinna Ekwuno 20:16 Before create react app, there was Webpack, configuring Webpack for like a react. I did I did that. And then I was like, No, I never went back again. Bryan Robinson 20:27 Cool. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today and kind of share your stories. And I hope you keep doing some amazing things at Gatsby and writing more amazing poetry and stuff. Obinna Ekwuno 20:36 Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. Bryan Robinson 20:40 Thanks again to Obinna for the great conversation. And thanks to you our dear listeners for tuning in Week after week. Before we get to our sponsor, be sure to like heart star favorite or whatever in your podcast app of choice and spread the word about the amazing people doing awesome stuff in our community. Bryan Robinson 20:58 And now for our sponsor, if you listen to season you're probably aware of TakeShape by now. But as a reminder TakeShape is a content platform for the Jamstack. take shape has a headless content management system an easy to use GraphQL API, a static site generator and amazing new product called Mesh - a service that can tie together multiple API's into their handy GraphQL interface if you're doing anything with content on the Jamstack Be sure to check them out at take shape.io slash That's My Jamstack. Bryan Robinson 21:27 That's it for this week. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you back here for the next awesome episode. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Intro/outtro music by bensound.com Support That's my JAMstack by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack…