Podcast appearances and mentions of Phil Hawksworth

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 different than it was in 2015 2016. And like, we expect to see ICD, we expect like these, these server side things that we don't want to have to write. And if you look like the ecosystem has has done that to like Vercel, as a competitor Netlify has many of those things. AWS has amplify now doing a lot of that stuff. Azure has static web apps, I think so like all these. It's interesting to see huge companies, Amazon, Microsoft, like chasing the tail of the little upstart that like said, a front end developer needs these things. Like, let's just give it to him. Raymond Camden 11:39 I agree. 100%. Bryan Robinson 11:42 Seal of Approval. Back in the day, I think at some point we talked about you said talking about harp, I think in the last episode, we might have talked about Jekyll a little bit. And I seen a few of your presentations from way back in the day, I had a chance to see a couple times that a couple conferences talking about different form handlers and stuff like that. But in the 2021 2022 era of the Jamstack. What's your current jam in the Jamstack? What sorts of technologies are you using? How are you putting them together and all that Raymond Camden 12:12 I quickly moved on from harp to other engines heart was good and simple. And I'm really happy with the first thing I saw, because within five minutes, I had stuff going. But I've gone to a couple of different generators over time. And they all have different philosophies. And I have found that my philosophy is that I like a lot of freedom. I like the freedom to write bad code for a sample if I want to, or I need something very unique. I need extremely configured stuff to do whatever I want. Some generators just don't allow that. I don't want to attack any generator. So I'll be vague, but I was using one from my blog for a while. And blog is a huge site. So build times are kind of important. And one of the things I found out is that, you know, in my blog UI, I had like the last five blog posts and my nav. And every time I'd write a new blog post, all 6000 Plus URLs had to be updated on that URLs, files had to be updated, because I was changing part of the UI for every blog posts. So my my quick fix was I'll just make that Ajax, you know, that can load later. It's not crucially important that just a way to drive, you know, more traffic monster on my site. And the generator I was using at a time, competed incredibly hard out but JSON, like it was fine tuned for blog posts and HTML. And I want to output JSON and I spent a day and it was very frustrating. And in in that particular instance, defense, I know it's gotten better at that. But it was enough to kind of get me off that so in general, I look for things that are very flexible. Raymond Camden 13:55 I use Jekyll for a long time I like liquid it again was was very flexible. But the Ruby dependency was a bit of an issue. I always liked using Jekyll I hated installing. It's gotten better, which is nice. But when I ran across 11ty and saw that it was Node based and it certainly wasn't the first one. But it was the first one and that kind of clicked for me. And it had that flexibility in there to an extreme phase. Raymond Camden 14:32 So for example, supporting markdown liquid Jade, handlebars, everything. I felt like I could do anything I wanted to there even if it was a foot gun like it let me do what I wanted. And like since I have started using 11ty, every kind of crazy wild idea I have just plain works because you know Levante is very light. You know, I get For tools, you do whatever, like, a couple weeks ago, I did this really dumb idea of, I want to file I want it to output to PDF. And he gave me the hooks to allow me to, you know, use frontmatter and say this is a PDF, it gave me the hope to recognize that and change the output stream, I used our PDF services to do that. And, you know, again, maybe it's not a very practical idea, but I loved that 11 D allowed me to do that. Well, Bryan Robinson 15:31 so I remember back in my agency life, it didn't happen often. But it happened enough that clients wanted to be able to generate PDFs. And you know, we were a PHP shop, and we had a custom content management system. And so like our CTO, and our developers would work on like, these big, like, monolithic PDF generators, and like, they would use services and like, there's like Doc raptor and stuff like that. And, but it was, it was always dependent on that. And like the idea that you can theoretically hook into any custom content management system, using like 11ty data, JS data files, and you could hook into any service, like like Adobe's PDF service, and then all you're really doing is changing the data. And then using 11ty to create a template, and that template could go somewhere. And that template could be written, I don't know, like, in probably like, in an HTML or HTML, like, you know, system, it means that anyone can generate this sort of thing. As long as they know, a few basics. We're talking about, like making the transition from Jekyll into like, eleventy. I, that was my personal transition, as well. And I've heard a few different people kind of, kind of talk about that. Was it eleventy is Jekyll likeness that brought you to it? And it was just like, oh, it's it, but it's a Node and it allows these other things, or was it actually the extensibility of an actually the configuration of it? Like, what what caused like that perked you up to 11ty, I suppose. Raymond Camden 17:04 All of that, um, I know, specifically, I was looking at Node based static site generators. And I'm like, I recognize that much as I like Jekyll, I wasn't happy with Ruby. So I looked at a couple of them, I think, like ghost, for example. And they just wasn't clicking with me. So eleventy was easy to start with. I think a couple things. The way it did pagination was mind numbingly awesome. And again, I think all the generators out there support pagination, but I don't think any has done it quite as easily as How 11ty did it. So that was a huge, big thing. And the data files, I think, was also really cool, especially being able to do API type calls. And then and just make it available. I think those two features in particular, I might push me over the edge, like everything I'm going to do, for the time being is going to be with this particular Bryan Robinson 18:08 tool. I remember thinking about data in the in the Jekyll world, and I would end up I need to write Jason, I need to write a script that's in my build process that spits out Jason that Jekyll can consume. There might be better ways of doing that. But I have not Ruby Dev. So like, where's my where's my JavaScript? It's in my build step. So yeah, that was that was a big selling point for me as well. I do want to talk a little bit because you've been you've done a little bit of a blog series. 11ty 1.0 is in official beta, a lot of cool features coming out. I'm curious your take on it. And like the the pieces that have you excited in that world, Raymond Camden 18:45 there's a lot. So one thing is the template engine upgrade. And that really hit me coming from liquid. So what you may not know if you're new to 11 AR VR or not use it. It supports all these template languages. But it's important that at a certain version, when I came to it from liquid from from Jekyll, not only the Jekyll have, I believe a newer version of liquid, it had its own added things to liquid. I didn't quite grok that. So I would do things and eleventy that wouldn't work. Also, when you add it back, that liquid has this really, really, really bad default of if you're trying to do something I don't support, I do nothing. I just return an empty string, which you can configure to throw an error instead. But I'll never understand I'm like so I tripped up on that a lot. And so one of the things I love in 1.0 is just kind of catching up the the template engine so the most recent version so I really appreciate that that's it's not it's not a whiz bang type feature but it's a daily life thing that I think is really really great. There's a lot of small Claudia live things like even dynamic ignores having a larger website, I had an ignores file that was a press like 90% of my content just so that my reloads were quicker file based, I could check that into GitHub, because then that would get pushed to production. eleventy just adds a way to to kind of make that a bit easier. Another thing that they just just released is the ability to have a file in one language like liquid and literally embedded different language in there. So one of the things I did early on with eleventy is because it's supported all these different languages, I like the liquid. But it's also a bit prescriptive in terms of how it works. EGS is it is a, it's not a pretty language at all. It reminds me a lot of classic ASP, but it's incredibly flexible. So I one of the things I've done on my blog is I have a static page, which pretty much only I use, but a lot of number crunching and stuff like that, I could have built a lot of eleventy filters and stuff like that, no, I, I just switched the EGS for that page. And I have a very ugly page, because EGS is not pretty. But it got the job done. So the fact that in a 11ty 1.0 I could use liquid for like my main stats, and perhaps just have a block, have it be the ugly block, where I use EGS to do all that crazy number crunching. I like that as long as well. Bryan Robinson 21:32 My, my excitement on that is probably worse than that. But like I'm a Nunjucks person again, like we get to have these kinds of like decisions made on a file by file basis by like nunchucks is very similar to liquid, a couple extra powers maybe a little slower. But the default installation of nunchucks in 11 D And again, that's changing, I actually need to look into the new versions but have fewer filters than liquid liquid does built in. So if I want to handle dates, the liquid installation handles it with a filter, I have to write my own filter in nunchucks, no big deal. But now, I could literally have my nunchucks file and then have one liquid tag that renders a date when I need it rendered and not ever have to worry about it again, not ever have to write that filter. And that's, that's exciting. For me, it's just the fact that it opens up these interesting worlds where you can have whatever also like as a plugin creator, nunchucks, handles, filters and some of the other stuff that or you can do a little bit more like Object Notation inside of it. Liquid, it's space delimited. And it's just kind of like, that's really ugly to me. But like I could then let my plugin be used as nunchucks and not have to worry about it for anyone like they can just bring it in use liquid for everything else. And we're use handlebars or use whatever. Or use handlebars until you need a loop. And then you can bring a loop in via these other ones. But Raymond Camden 22:56 I'm just saying like how freeing it is. And this is not an 11 a thing or I love the one final thing, but it's so freeing, know that I could write code that's going to be run one time only period. And you know, I still try to write proper code, clean code documented code. But I it's so freeing, like I don't have to worry about performance, like it's going to build one time. And then it's done. Like and if it's a little slow, that's okay. And that relieves a lot of pressure from me when I'm building things it's referring to Bryan Robinson 23:30 when when when the performance concerns or performance for your build step. You can be a little bit more lax about it. You don't have to worry about it as much you can. You can render, you don't want to render 1000s of pages, right? Like obviously, that's not great for quick iterations. But you can and that's not the worst thing in the world. Awesome. So let's, let's pivot a little bit and talk about your musical jams. What are you listening to nowadays? I think last time, you mentioned a band called Hatchie I think are they still in your in your listening queue? Or have you moved on to different pastures? Raymond Camden 24:08 i Yeah, I'm not day to day. I have pretty varied things I'll listen to. But the one that comes to mind and just so happens to be one applying this morning. There's a band called Peak Martini. And they're very eclectic. Think like 1930s Jazz and Paris or beatnik kind of 60s. Great background, great party music. It sounds very highfalutin. And I say like I think they imagine without the long cigarette type. That type of vibe but listening to is really kind of cool and relaxing. And one of my favorite features of Spotify is you can like pick a core band or a core song and Spotify just going to read from there. So I've been doing Pink Martini radio on Spotify a lot. It's a really great, Bryan Robinson 25:06 um, I have to check that because I've recently, due to some tick tock videos gotten back into like the 90s arts like jazz scene that was happening. And I could I could use to mix that up a little bit stay in similar genres. Awesome. So is there anything that you're doing that you'd like to promote out to the Jamstack community? Raymond Camden 25:24 Absolutely. And myself and Brian Rinaldi, we are writing a book, we call it the Jamstack book, because we're that eco tip book you'll ever need. We are working on it for Manning. And I assume we could share URLs late. So it's available now and meat, which is manning Early Access Program, which means you get a beta copy of the book, but it is pretty much done. And when you buy me, you get the real book later. So it's totally safe to buy right now. But if you want to wait, it also should be out in 1.0, relatively soon. And I think it's a great book for people who are new to Jamstack because it gives you a variety of different tools and techniques, and also give you some basic examples. So building a blog building a brochure where site but doing ecommerce, and then goes deep into things like adding API's and services and doing serverless functions. So I think it's a great book, and every copy you buy helps me feed my children. So guilt at all, Bryan Robinson 26:30 you know, none, none. And I could be wrong about this. You and Brian wrote something similar ages ago, right? Yeah. So this is like a big, big updated version of all of that. Absolutely. Cool. All right, Raymond. Well, I appreciate you being on the show with us today. And I hope you keep doing awesome stuff help the blog keeps rolling at a once ish per week rate, because it's a lot of great stuff. And I appreciate you being here. Raymond Camden 26:53 Thank you for having me. Bryan Robinson 26:55 Thanks again to our guest, and thanks to everyone out there listening to each new episode. If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review rating, Star heart favorite, whatever it is, and your podcast app of choice. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web. And remember, keep things jammy Intro/outtro music by bensound.com Support That's my JAMstack by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack

This episode has a large focus on the Jamstack, including both Jason and Phil's path into it. Spoiler: Phil says "tiddly" a lot.

Jason Lengstorf and Phil Hawksworth chat about the current state of the Jamstack including React + Jamstack, Distributed Persistent Rendering, building for ease of use, dealing with minor changes and caching, whether Jamstack needs to do all things, and a big new Netlify features announced!

Quick show notes Our Guest: Daniel Olson What he'd like for you to see/remember: Use the term "static" sparingly | Join in the community and share problems, solutions, etc. His JAMstack Jams: Wordpress (headless and/or as a static site generator) | Netlify's build process/hooks His Musical Jam: Poolside.fm Our sponsor this week: TakeShape Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:02 Hello, everyone, welcome to yet another episode of That's My JAMstack. I'm your host Bryan Robinson and this will be the last regular episode of the year will be back to official episodes of The New Year. But we'll be tiding you over with a special holiday slate of episodes where various guests from this past year will be talking about their thoughts on the JAMstack in 2020. Bryan Robinson 0:20 This week, though, we have the COO of a company called DigitalCube. He's a self taught web developer and a JAMstack enthusiast I'm very pleased to have on the show Daniel Olson. Bryan Robinson 0:29 I'm also pleased to have back this week our sponsor TakeShape. You can hear more about their content platform after the episode or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information. Bryan Robinson 0:44 Daniel, thanks for being on the show with us today. Daniel Olson 0:46 It's a pleasure. Bryan Robinson 0:47 So tell us a little about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing. Daniel Olson 0:52 I'm the Chief Operating Officer at DigitalCube. I get to work on all the products we develop and travel a bit sharing some of the work that we do. One of those products I work on is called Shifter. It's a static site generator for WordPress and some might say it's a serverless hosting platform. Another product I get to work on is called Animoto. It's a managed WordPress hosting solution built for enterprise. We're only limits the options that AWS can offer us, which is a lot. But my my role is a bit of a variety show. Like many companies and the growing JAMstack community, we wear many hats. Most days I work on MVPs and do feature development. And the way I like to do that is through customer feedback. So my kind of my main jam is finding gaps where our products don't like cover and then building solutions with the designers and engineers around that. Bryan Robinson 1:44 Cool so what do you do outside of work? What's your favorite thing to do when you're when you're off? Daniel Olson 1:48 What do I do? Also a bit of a variety show. I'm in the kitchen a lot. I make a lot of food. I like to dine out and like You know, try different foods. I'm also a big beer guy, I run like a beer website on the side. And that's kind of my life is around like, you know, enjoying tastes. So if there's something to like something new to try, like if when I when I travel a lot, my co workers like to like push the boundaries a little bit, and they'll try to get me to eat like strange things, but it never really works out because I always enjoy it. Bryan Robinson 2:25 So what's your favorite cuisine that that you've tried? Daniel Olson 2:31 Maybe I don't hate me. Maybe some of vegetarian listeners might be upset. But I did go to when I was in Japan with my co workers after a meetup. Someone asked me if I liked sashimi, which Yes, I love sashimi. But we were in Fukuoka, which I didn't realize that sashimi me has lots of different meanings. And I've learned that in Fukuoka, sashimi could mean raw horse meat. Which is pretty, like common in Japan and in certain regions. So, I mean, you know, I'm game if everyone says it's good, I'll give it a try. And I was very impressed. I learned a ton about this, like, you know, like food category I never really knew anything about or I thought I knew about. But I would go back like in a heartbeat. I would love to do that again. Bryan Robinson 3:22 Interesting. Interesting that that surprised me. You caught me off guard with that one. Daniel Olson 3:26 Yeah, and you can eat all of it. There's certain there's certain pieces or certain cuts that must be grilled. And some of them you can or you don't have to so like they basically bring out like a like a grill. And you can use chopsticks and you just give it like a little bit of heat. For some of the pieces, some of the sausages you have to cook thoroughly. But most of it you can eat with you know, Ginger or rice or like pickled vegetables. It's it's a I think it's a good experience. If you're, if you have the opportunity, I recommend it. Bryan Robinson 3:59 Interesting. Cool. So obviously not not a food podcast, more of a more of a tech podcast here. So let's, let's talk about your, your enjoyment of static sites or the JAMstack, what was your entry point into this kind of philosophy of building sites? Daniel Olson 4:13 It's kind of a funny story. Um, my introduction to static sites was at, I worked at a branding agency for a number of years, and we're pretty small team, one of the other developers I worked with, he was, you know, kind of more familiar with the static sites and the services generators out there. And he told me about them and you know, we are WordPress shop. So thinking about, you know, the value or, you know, what the clients would need. It was always really difficult for me to, you know, jump ship and recommend that to our clients because at the end of the day, they're the ones who have to live with these sites and edit them and, you know, help like grow them. Daniel Olson 4:53 So, you know, writing markdown using like, a non familiar CMS backend other than WordPress. was kind of a hard sell. But we it still was in the back of my mind. But when I went to a conference in Philadelphia, where I'm from, and I met this group of, you know, Japanese developers, and they were working on this interesting product, and they introduced it to me as a "Third Wave". They're like, this is this is going to be the future. And they kept trying to explain it to me, I didn't quite get it. And I didn't actually really understand it until like a year after. But what they were trying to do is to bring some of the approaches that status like static site generators were doing to the WordPress community and like bridging that gap. And it didn't click at first and it really made no sense to me because it was explained as the third wave, but, but it makes total sense in hindsight now. Daniel Olson 5:52 So that was that was my first introduction. It was like I was kind of like I fell into it. But I also was like, living amongst it for For years not really paying attention to it, Bryan Robinson 6:02 So with with that what they were doing was that before WordPress had the API stuff was that before you could go headless with WordPress, or is that they were doing their own thing around that. Daniel Olson 6:12 It was it was kind of alongside so there was these, you know, two communities within the WordPress ecosystem at that time. And it was people who are developing, you know, they're like power users are using plugins to do things. They're doing theme development. And then there's this other track where, you know, they're a group of developers are really trying to push the boundaries of what WordPress can do just as a blogging tool like they're using it as a full featured CMS. And that was when headless really kind of took off the REST API was getting a lot of attention. Daniel Olson 6:41 Some of these other projects, and even plugins, were using the REST API, but it's I think, I call them that like their technology magic tricks, like, yes, it works. And then like you build a little demo, and then let's see how far we can take this magic trick and like you build out these incredibly large sites using WordPress. Completely headless. But it's really just, you know, an extension of that first demo, like, are you doing anything different? It's just the implementation. Daniel Olson 7:08 But when I learned about the the project that these guys were working on, it was totally different. It was kind of a mix between the two. Yes, we want to give users the same experience that they're familiar with in the back end. But we also want to deliver the benefits that these other ideas can offer, like the benefits that jam stack has, or the benefits that headless has. So it was like kind of a cross between the two. But it was the WordPress REST API that actually enabled it. Bryan Robinson 7:40 True. Yeah. Cool. So would it be fair to say that kind of this idea of WordPress headless is where is where you kind of got into everything? Daniel Olson 7:49 Yeah, yeah. And it was, um, you know, we, at the agency I worked at we built a lot of just, you know, demo sites and like little product sites for clients and it at the time, it was like a total experiment you couldn't even do it natively in WordPress, it was an extension like you had to install a plugin to enable the REST API. It was that early. And now it's a part of core and we talked about it. It's, you know, this ubiquitous thing that, you know, everyone's familiar with it if you're in this community, but at the time, it was like, What is REST? What does that mean? And yeah, so it's, you know, I'm, it feels good to be a part of something that I've got to see grow over time. Bryan Robinson 8:30 Cool. And so so I'm kind of curious about about headless WordPress. I've only I've done magic tricks with it. That's about as far as I've gone into that world for, for WordPress in the JAMstack. What are some, some challenges y'all have been overcoming? What are some, some things for people to kind of be aware of if they start playing with this idea? Daniel Olson 8:48 So headless WordPress is I would consider that it's its own category. And the work that I do in the kind of the world that I live in, within like the development community, there's it's really three distinct categories. So you have like traditional WordPress, which is what, you know, people are familiar with that. And then you have headless WordPress which is decoupled. You're building your JAMstack site and using WordPress as your CMS or back end. And then you have static WordPress, which is kind of the in between. So we're using WordPress as a static site generator. So it's that's like its own special category. You're, you're not converting or building a new site using WordPress as your back end. You're using WordPress itself and generating the static site from that. That site itself, it's not there's no Developer Tools involved. It's just native WordPress. Bryan Robinson 9:46 Oh, interesting. So instead of like a cash, you're and then you're building in your build step from the actual WordPress files on a Linux server. Daniel Olson 9:54 Yeah, so it's actually the way that we do it is the the approach is service. So the end result the way that it's delivered. And the product itself is built as service. So we were using AWS lambda. So we're an AWS advanced technology partner. So about 50% of our team are just AWS engineers who have a deep understanding of those technologies and the infrastructure. And then about the other half are WordPress developers. So we work really tightly together to develop solutions that take advantage of what AWS has to offer, and kind of leverage all these capabilities for WordPress. It's not, there's like there's two ways to do WordPress in AWS, you run WordPress, just as a layer on top, and it's just there. And then or you could actually kind of integrate it into the services and just get a lot more of opportunity, a lot more power out of it. But the way that we're doing it is we use the WordPress REST API, which like I said, it was basically that was the catalyst that made this possible. Daniel Olson 10:59 The WordPress REST API the way that we use it, we use that to get to get a list of links from the WordPress site. So we we can, like at a quick glance, see every page that exists by hitting a certain REST API path. And then we pass that to AWS lambda, which then queues up a list of URLs to crawl. And then it crawls each URL seems it to an s3 bucket. And that gets served with CloudFront. So at the very basic level, that's kind of how it works. Bryan Robinson 11:29 Very interesting. And so you're, you're you're still using like WordPress, his own templates and all that, right. Daniel Olson 11:35 Yeah. So if you want to use the themes, same themes and plugins, you are free to use those as long as they there's certain exceptions like contact form plugins, they naturally in the WordPress world, they want to post data back to the WordPress database, which, at that point in time, doesn't exist because you've now created a static site and WordPress is no longer in the picture but There are some like opportunities and shims that exist. One of the I developed a couple of plugins that will swap out like action URLs within forums to send those to third parties, whether it's, you know, jam stack friendly, like forums as a service sites like a forum spree or form kit, or basin or even that with five forms. Bryan Robinson 12:22 Interesting. So I want one things I've always wondered about headless, headless WordPress is the idea that if you're using WordPress headless, and you're doing it like with your own static site generator on the side, you're really getting like 25%, maybe 30% of benefit of WordPress, that sounds like y'all are closer to like, 75 or 80% of all the benefits of WordPress, because I was I was always like, why would you ever use headless WordPress if you're only getting a small portion of the benefit of it? Daniel Olson 12:46 Yeah, and I see that too. And having like, really, like dived into the JAMstack ecosystem, seeing the tools that are out there, it's still growing. There's still a lot of rooms who for it to mature, and they're like things like gaspee the plugin ecosystem is like booming, there's, you know, there's a lot of stuff out there. But there's still more stuff in the WordPress world. So I get why people still want to use it like the theme themes are one thing, but also plugins, like having the opportunity to just search the plugin directory of the 50,000 plus plugins that exist, there's going to be some solution in there for whatever problem you need. And most of the time, it will work in that scenario, like even as a headless option. If it's a popular plugin, they probably have developed REST, like paths for it, to interact with it in a headless manner. Bryan Robinson 13:39 Yeah, but even then, like if you're if you're interacting with it in the headless manner, you then have to build that functionality into your templates unless you're using WordPress as its own static site generator at that point. Daniel Olson 13:48 Yeah, and in that case, you just use it natively, how you want to, you know, experience it naturally in the WordPress world. And then you just click a button and then we crawl your site generate a static version. And then power down WordPress. Bryan Robinson 14:02 Awesome. So So it'd be fair to say that headless WordPress is kind of your jam in the JAMstack, or do you have any other like products or tools, services philosophies that you're really digging right now. Daniel Olson 14:14 Um, I was introduced to. It's kind of funny. It's like, it's a feature that we developed. But I didn't really get much use out of it personally, until a customer had a very unique request. And it was the integration between our product and Netlify web hooks. And I started to use Netlify web hooks, just so you can basically build your static WordPress site on Shifter and you can deploy it to Netlify so if there's like, you know, I want to use Netlify Forms, I want to use Netlify analytics, I want to use the basic auth or I have another application and I want to keep all of my sites in one place. You can do that. Daniel Olson 14:57 But one of the things that I didn't really dive into was there build tools. So when when you do the web hooks, and you can customize the Netlify Builds you can get like really granular with all the different things that happen during your build runtime. And I like I don't know why I just never really got into that. But I, one day, I just kind of spent all day reading about it and, you know, learning about it and testing it. And I was like, blown away by all the options that they have in there. It's kind of it's a, it's a hidden gem. Like I recommend spending a little time reading about it. Bryan Robinson 15:28 Well, I'm nowadays they even have the ability to plug into into the build process. They have variables, you can set up to do a whole bunch of stuff that they're testing out. Right now it's in beta. Daniel Olson 15:40 Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a lot of amazing like fun stuff that's going on. And also the forms and the way the analytics work. It's like It's like analytics is such a difficult thing for a lot of web developers because of ad blockers and like proxies and networks. But if you're running your analytics like Netlify does based on Like the server stats itself, like you, like you're making a connection to this site, whether you blocked an ad script or not, that analytics reporting tool is still going to measure all that data. It's not going to give you like, as much as something like a google analytics that you're allowing to track you. But it's still a valuable tool for developers and even like, you know, if to run your business like what's going on in my application, you can cost optimize and and see what's really happening Bryan Robinson 16:29 And doesn't affect front end performance. Which is great, too. Daniel Olson 16:32 Yeah, it's something that happens naturally, that data is logged anyway for the server itself. So you know, just providing access to it is it's crazy like it's they're providing access to it. It now has become a product. Bryan Robinson 16:45 Yep. Oh, yeah. Gotta find ways to monetize and keep the keep the doors open. I want Netlify around for a long time. Daniel Olson 16:52 Yeah. And keep keep your customers happy. Bryan Robinson 16:55 Exactly. Cool. So So what's going to keep you in the JAMstack? Obviously you It's important you right now, which is great, but like, what's the core philosophy that you're gonna dig into in the next couple years? Daniel Olson 17:06 I am a, my, my core philosophy is the rule of least power. I think that a lot of times we, you know, hit solutions with the hammer instead of like, figuring out a different approach, like every problem is a nail. Like the, the idea of applying JAMstack has, like an approach is really appealing to me because it focuses on something that I also really appreciate. And that's design thinking. So rather than just applying a solution, or you know, throwing more power at something, or making it like overly complicated jumps that can can be quite elegant, because it's using only things that you need. Daniel Olson 17:48 So as opposed to what you know, like WordPress is traditionally a monolith. It comes with a lot of things that you don't necessarily need or may ever use. But JAMstack is like, All right, I'm building this site, I need comments. Just add the comments you need. I need ecommerce right now I'm just going to add ecommerce, but you don't need other features. They don't exist you didn't build them. And that's what I love about the the JAMstack community is it gives us the opportunity to pick and choose and kind of build exactly what we need. Bryan Robinson 18:22 I actually the rule of least power is one of my guiding principles actually wrote a blog post about a year ago on it. One of my favorite things that came out the development of HTML and, and and the web. Daniel Olson 18:34 Yeah, and like I always kind of,I always get stuck like whenever there's a new app or new tool out there, like Yeah, but like this thing does it but also there's no UI for it and it runs faster. And I like I'm just kind of geeking out over that stuff like a Hyper, like Wes Bos on JavaScript courses he uses Hyper a lot. And like, I love looking at it. Hyper is like a beautiful terminal. But also it runs JavaScript and like it kind of takes a lot longer to open then just like my terminal with nothing in it. So that's like, those are my daily struggles. Bryan Robinson 19:13 The new cool versus what's the most efficient for you? Daniel Olson 19:16 Yeah, don't go overboard. Just use what you need and get the job done. It's also I think it's good for me because I work with a lot of customers to on their servers. And like, if you're logging into a server, you don't have the luxuries of your like your customized bash scripts. And these, you know, like pretty UI is like you just have to know what you're doing. And like just kind of using the basic tools to get the job done is has really paid off for me. It's it's taught me a lot. Bryan Robinson 19:46 Having the same tools that everywhere definitely makes it easier when things go wrong in the non fancy places. Daniel Olson 19:51 Yeah, I sometimes I think of it as like a little form of torture for myself just because I'm not giving myself like an advantage but it's it pays off in the long run Bryan Robinson 20:01 definitely alright so so let's let's talk music what's your actual jam right now what what musician or song or type of music Are you really into right now? Daniel Olson 20:11 My my musical tastes vary throughout the day some days I wake up listening to like Wilco on all my Alexa devices just blasting throughout the house. And then maybe by lunch I'll be listening to like little Wayne's the Carter three and I'll just have like genius up like the website genius and just I'm picking apart all the rap lyrics. Um, but yeah, like I I, the thing that I really enjoy right now is and it's the perfect background noise for me. It's this thing called poolside FM. And there's a website for I think it's just poolside.fm but it's a it's a website that kind of looks super 80s and it plays music videos and also music along with it, but the music videos are like clips like old VHS random clips almost like everything is terrible. But I don't know it's just like the perfect background noise when you're like coding or just need something on while you're cleaning the house. And I've they never show like the what's playing are actually I listened to it on my Alexa but they never show it's playing so I'm always like asking my phone like, What song is this Bryan Robinson 21:22 as a little mystery to your life? Yeah. Cool. So is there anything that you would like to promote that you're doing right now that you want to get out in the world? Daniel Olson 21:31 Um, actually, I want to give a shout out to to Phil Hawksworth from Netlify about I want to like throw back to one of your previous episodes and something he said that it's it's funny when I listened to the episode I I've said the same thing in a couple talks and it just resonated with me so I want to call it out again. Daniel Olson 21:52 He he said something he's very careful about using the phrase static sites and I totally agree with that. And the reason that I agree with that is one of my favorite sites jamstack.org, which is kind of like a manifesto for me. It's like we are the JAMstack party. This is what we believe. But the most important part of that website is what it actually does not mention, it doesn't mention any specific frameworks. It completely focuses on best practices. And if you search the site, for the word static, it only appears once. And it says, I'm pretty sure it says probably static. Daniel Olson 22:33 So it's like kind of like, you know, going back to it. This is not, we're not purists. This is an approach. It's a philosophy. And then it's a way to build something better. But yeah, that's kind of that's a that's I just wanted to mention that But yeah, I don't really, I don't really have anything to promote, like we we have, we're in the WordPress community. But we're kind of like we straddle those two things like WordPress and jam stack but I just think that, uh, the WordPress community and also the jam stack community has a lot to learn from each other. I think that Jeff slack.org is a good place to start. I think that really focusing on the approach rather than the tools is something that is really important that that you should do, and that you can learn a lot from. And also just talk to other developers see what they got going on and see what problems they have to solve. Maybe you can help them maybe your experience is valuable. Bryan Robinson 23:26 And we all kind of have different problems. And we find the right solutions for them no matter what the stack is. Daniel Olson 23:32 Yeah, yeah, in in the WordPress world, like I've I've developed plugins, and some of the plugins that I've developed. I tried to build them so that they work in both environments, whether you know, you're running on Shifter, and we create a static site from that from that site for using WordPress. But you can also build that plugin so that it can work natively in a native WordPress and like hosting environment. And I've learned that building Something that applies to both types of like hosting platforms, it actually just makes it more performance overall. And like, you don't need to, it doesn't need to be static, but the way that you've built it, it could be static. And the end result is just more performance. So why not build it this way? anyway?. Bryan Robinson 24:19 Well, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to talk with us. And I hope you keep doing some amazing stuff on the jam stuff. Daniel Olson 24:25 Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it. Bryan Robinson 24:30 All right, it's sponsored time, I want to talk today about a specific feature in TakeShape, which is our sponsor, for this episode. And that's the API Explorer. Inside your TakeShape dashboard, you'll find the Explorer and it's a really great tool for a GraphQL novice like myself, but it also has lots of great features built in, like some autocomplete and built in documentation. It makes it really incredibly easy to find all the pieces of data that you want to include in a GraphQL query, and then it's going to build that query for you. It's a simple copy and paste away from your static site generator. So makes it really, really easy to interact with, TakeShape's API. They have a lot of other great functionality as well, you should definitely go and check them out. And you can do that by hitting up takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack. Bryan Robinson 25:21 I also want to thank our guests, Daniel again, and thank all the amazing listeners in the JAMstack community. Remember, if you're enjoying this podcast, give it a star a heart an upvote or review in your podcast app of choice to help new folks find their way to listening in and with that, we're gonna see you in the new year but I hope you keep doing amazing things in the JAMstack.Transcribed by https://otter.aiIntro/outtro music by bensound.comSupport That's my JAMstack by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack

KBall catches up with Phil Hawksworth of Netlify at JAMStackConfSF to dive deep into JAMStack, what it’s about, where the ecosystem is going, and what is still hard.

KBall catches up with Phil Hawksworth of Netlify at JAMStackConfSF to dive deep into JAMStack, what it’s about, where the ecosystem is going, and what is still hard.

Quick show notes Our Guest: Phil Hawksworth What he'd like for you to see: JAMstack_conf San Francisco: October 16-18 | JAMstack.org/slack His JAMstack Jams: 11ty | Serverless Functions His musical Jam: Toto | Free Code Camp's Radio | Gaz Coombes Phil's post about dynamic 404 pages with Serverless functions Other Tech mentioned Jekyll Netlify Hugo Cloudinary Auth0 Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:03 Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of that's my JAMstack podcast where we are profile amazing people working in this awesome JAMstack community. In this podcast we ask the age old question, what's your jam in the JAMstack? I'm your host Bryan Robinson and today I'm joined by the ever amazing Phil Hawksworth. Phil is a member of the absolutely incredible developer experience team at a little JAMstack company called Netlify. Bryan Robinson 0:37 Hey, Phil, thanks for joining us on today's episode. Phil Hawksworth 0:40 Well, thanks for having me. It's, it's nice to be here. Bryan Robinson 0:43 Yeah, no problem. And I guess let's let's start. Hopefully, a lot of our audience knows who Phil Hawksworth is at this point. But I give us a little introduction. Tell us you know, what you do for work what you do for fun, that sort of thing? Phil Hawksworth 0:53 Yeah, of course. So say as you say, My name is Phil and I work at Netlify. So I'm kind of fairly well as a right in the middle of the the JAMstack kind of world really, I guess, been working in there for a little while. So I work as part of the developer experience team at Netlify. And I've been there for almost two years, I'm I don't quite know where the time has gone. But yeah, I've been there a little while now. But I've I've kind of been working on figuring out how to use Netlify as part of the JAMstack, finding out what people need from it, trying to find interesting ways to use it. And I've been, I've been interested in JAMstack and building kind of static sites, I'm careful of using the phrase static sites, it's so it's a dangerous thing to say. But I've been dabbling in that world for quite a long time, I used to work at an agency. So I did lots of work for doing architectures for different projects and clients there. And I kept on coming back to this approach that I now know to be called the JAMstack. Bryan Robinson 1:49 Cool. So you kind of already partially answered the next question. But your answer your point to the JAMstack was in this agency world? Phil Hawksworth 1:56 Yeah, I think really, anyone who's been doing anything like technical architectures in an agency, where the client often dictates the the kind of platform and the architecture you might use, irrespective of what the problem is you're trying to solve, I was in that world for quite a few years. And more and more often, I'd be thinking, we can simplify this, there's an easier way to build these things out. You know, often a project would have an aggressive lead time, but that didn't always marry perfectly with the lead time for the infrastructure you have to build on. So for quite a long time I was I was really curious about how we might simplify things, how we might pre render things, and then serve them from a much simpler hosting infrastructure. And to be honest, it was things like Jekyll and GitHub Pages that got me into this. I think that's probably an entry point for lots of people over the years. Phil Hawksworth 2:45 I think Jekyll was one of the first static site generators that made things really approachable, and was you know, felt mature and felt like it was well documented and had a nice on ramp, if you could get over one of the two of the wrinkles to do with Ruby. I'm not a Ruby guy. So that usually where I came unstuck, but once you got past that, I found that that was the that was the way in for me. And I got really excited about how easy it could be to generate a site and deploy it onto something like GitHub Pages at the time, which I think was pretty much at the forefront of automating kind of hosting a static site. So that's, that was my route in. Bryan Robinson 3:21 Okay, and how the clients feel about that. Like you said, like, they tend to dictate technology, irrespective of what they're doing. Phil Hawksworth 3:28 Yeah. And it, it really depended on the client. Some, some clients were much more open to it than others. But I found that the bigger the brand, and the big, like the more established they were in the market, the more likely they would be to say, Oh, no, no, that's not for us, we need an expensive thing. irrespective of how complicated the thing is you're making. Phil Hawksworth 3:50 So actually, that that became quite a difficult challenge, I found to to actually persuade people that they didn't need to spend a fortune on complex infrastructure and something simpler could could actually serve the purpose. And that that kind of played into the conversations I started having with Matt and Chris, the founders of Netlify back in the day, as, as they were trying to coin this term JAMstack, because they were having the same problem, you know, I was talking about static site architectures, and they were doing the same thing. And I think it's such a loaded term, the word static, that, you know, that's where the phrase jumpstart was kind of born from this, this, this desire to get beyond the kind of baggage that comes with the term static, which makes people think simple. Phil Hawksworth 4:37 And I think as the the ecosystem, and all of the vendors and tools have matured around this, that's what's takes JAMstack sites to something beyond static, you know, it's beyond what you might think of traditionally a static so that's, that's where that kind of term I think, was was born from, and that was my entry point into as well trying to find ways to convince clients, some of whom would be okay with it, some of whom would need some convincing the they could spend less and go faster, which seems like a sweet spot for me. Bryan Robinson 5:04 Well, yeah. And it's funny, because like, clients assume that the more you pay, the better the service is. And that's not necessarily true. In fact, it rarely, is. Phil Hawksworth 5:13 Yeah, there's, I think there's always this kind of feeling of finding something which is reassuringly expensive. I've definitely been in that world a lot where, by default, particularly the larger brands, who might go to a large, you know, big global agency, which is the kind of place I was working at, they, I think there's an assumption that they, they need the best in class thing, which has the biggest price tag. And often those are the things that are designed to do a wide variety of things for a wide variety of people. And that makes it hard for them to do the right, you know, the one thing that you need well, and so it's, yeah, it's definitely not like a perfect kind of marriage of what you pay more, you get something which is better. Phil Hawksworth 5:59 This is a great example, I think JAMstack's a great example of simplifying and focusing down on the on really what you need to do, and then building that out, rather than trying to use a product which can do everything for everybody, which, as we all know, is hard to do. Well. Bryan Robinson 6:15 Cool. So obviously, you are working at one of the bigger JAMstack companies in the world, but how are you using the JAMstack professionally? How are you using it in your personal life, that sort of thing? Phil Hawksworth 6:26 Well, I certainly am still using it very much in my personal life. You know, any sites that I that I make, either from my own blog, or any of my kind of side projects, what have you, I've got a handful of those. And I'm, I'm very promiscuous, when it comes to the static site generator, I use that I think we all kind of have our have our darlings that we like, over over and those kind of evolve over time. You know, I already mentioned Jekyll as the one that I started with him for a while I was also using Hugo a lot really got into Hugo. Phil Hawksworth 7:00 More recently, I've been using 11ty it on my own site and various kind of hobby sites of mine and kind of sites of side projects. But at Netlify I we also use all of the all of those as well, you know, we use our .com site is built on Hugo has been for quite some time. But we also use things like React Static, which is which I think is an excellent framework for things like headless cms.org, that's with react static and also static gen. Phil Hawksworth 7:35 So those, those are both websites that that Netlify put together so we use those static site generators. Aa bunch of templates and example sites, I use a 11ty on, which is there's all sorts all over the place. And and the only reason I feel kind of safe in doing that is one of these core properties of JAMstack sites in the you know, I don't need maintain that platform, once it's deployed. You know, if I've deployed something in one framework, one static site generator, I know that that's going to just keep working, as long as I don't, you know, I don't need to go back and keep maintaining it, I know that will be be fine. So I feel reasonably comfortable with, you know, trying out different static site generators, here or there. And knowing that once something's deployed, is just going to stay deployed. Phil Hawksworth 8:22 And that's one of the kind of nice attributes of this stack. And the the overhead really is in remembering how to maintain it. And if you want to make changes, remembering the different templates, and syntax is and those kind of things. But that's one of the hazards of being someone like me, who's kind of dabbling with lots of different static site generators and, and trying lots of different things out at the same time. But and I don't know, that's kind of that's kind of fun, it keeps it fresh as well. Bryan Robinson 8:46 So you're experimenting with a lot. So what what is your current jam, right? Like, what what are you really enjoying using at the moment, or, you know, in the coming, you know, few months? Phil Hawksworth 8:58 I feel like a lot of my colleagues, gonna make fun of me, because I'm always going on about 11ty. And I really enjoy it very much. And it feels, it feels to me a lot like Jekyll, in so much of as it's a it's kind of approach and the logic that sits down within it. But it doesn't have that Ruby speed bump that I mentioned. So it's very, very portable, in terms of both the output that it creates, like all JAMstack sites, but also the build environment is very, very quick and easy to get bootstrapped with it. Phil Hawksworth 9:29 So I've been having just a ton of fun with that, especially as the project's been evolving a little bit. And it started to add things like support for JavaScript in the data files. So that's a fairly kind of common convention, I think, for static site generators to have a folder full of data files that you can use in your templates. And I really like the fact that it will let you write those files with JavaScript, which could go off and make a request and return data. So it makes it very easy to pull data in from different points that build time. It just makes it loads of fun. So yeah, I've been having, I've been having a lot of fun with that recently. Phil Hawksworth 10:08 And the other thing I'd maybe call out is some I've been dabbling more and more with serverless functions, which I know kind of aren't necessarily kind of, from a purist point of view, part of the JAMstack, but they're, they're best friends, I think, you know, they complement each other really, really well. And so I've been having a bit of fun playing with things like using serverless functions as a fallback as a 404. Sso for any routes on my page on my sites that don't, that don't resolve to a pre generated page, sending those off to serverless functions instead, which can then dynamically render on the fly, something that's maybe hitting a data source or something like that. So it's an interesting kind of model. I'll publish some some examples of that. Hopefully, they'll be out by the time this is this is this is published as well. Bryan Robinson 10:55 I'm very, very interested in that. That's, that's a concept that I hadn't even thought about. Phil Hawksworth 10:59 Yeah, it's a really, it's really interesting, because I think there's this temptation sometimes to say, well, we could use serverless function to, to render things on the fly. So we're still kind of, you know, not having a web server. And you know, we don't you know, so we've still, we still got that kind of simplicity in terms of the infrastructure, but you're not pre generating them. So I'm always cautious. I like to try and pregenerate as much as possible. So if something fails, it fails in my house, not in the user's house. But it's interesting thinking of serverless functions as a fallback for 404s, particularly if you're hitting something like a database, when you're generating the pages, you know, what if you're adding content to the database, and while the site is regenerating, and maybe creating other pages, your 404s could hit that database directly. And then return pages is an interesting kind of model just to extend the reach of JAMstack. So yeah, I've been having a lot of fun playing with that recently, Bryan Robinson 11:54 And so so where do you you mentioned pre rendering, and how, you know, that's kind of your philosophy on it? Where do you lie when it comes to like pre render, and then taking over that render with JavaScript on the fly on the front end? Phil Hawksworth 12:08 I'm, I mean, I think that was great. I think it's, it's one of those things that, you know, it's all down to progressive enhancement, right? And treating things as, as a progressive enhancement, and deciding where your baseline is, what are you enhancing from, because you could very easily argue that a JAMstack approaches to render an empty body tag with a div with an ID in it, and then everything comes down the wire is JavaScript, and you do everything in the client. That's perfectly valid. And I think you know, it, there's this word again, it depends, right? Phil Hawksworth 12:42 You know, if you're building an application, maybe that would be fine. But I love to try and get as much pre rendered as possible. So that while you're going off and making the request for JavaScript, the user has something to see. And while your JavaScript being interpreted particularly on things like mobile devices, which we know not everyone's got a powerful iPhone in their pocket, there are lots of like, less powerful devices, even if the connectivity is good, the power that's required to pause and execute and do all this stuff with JavaScript can make things a bit slow. Even if we're doing you know, what feels like a performant thing. We're relying on JavaScript a lot, we need to be careful. So I like to pregenerate as much as humanly possible. And you end up in this position where there's a balancing act, isn't there? Phil Hawksworth 13:28 I mean, you've got to think about what's, what's reasonable, and what starts to add complexity for the sake of being a purist, and way that balance up. But yeah, I like pregenerating as much as possible. And then really thinking about progressive enhancement. And I'll always stand by progressive enhancement. I know, I know, there's some debates around that at the moment. But I think that's the right way to go. Bryan Robinson 13:49 So you've been professionally in this like, full on JAMstack world for a couple years now at Netlify. You were dabbling in it at the agency. Other than obvious being gainfully employed in a JAMstack company, what's going to keep you in the JAMstack going forward. What makes you just kind of deep down? know that that's kind of the future? Phil Hawksworth 14:08 Well, I think, I think a big part of it is seeing the, the JAMstack ecosystem. Gah, that sounds like a terrible, like salesy phrase, isn't it but there are so many tools and vendors now, really supporting this and being a part of it, whether that's the explosion in the different types of headless CMSs or things like image services from people like Cloudinary, or Authentication Service services from people like Auth0, there's so many things coming along people doing ecommerce, there's, there's so much. So I think seeing the advancement in each one of those areas, that's keeping it very interesting for me. Phil Hawksworth 14:48 And it's a I think it's a real validation that the approach is starting to reach critical mass, the fact that businesses are being formed and, and funded and you know, established based on these kind of models. And I think that's really exciting. There are so many people looking at different avenues now, here that we can all make use of that keeps it far from dull, and I love playing with all of the new services as they as they, they surface. It's nice. Bryan Robinson 15:18 So I think you might be uniquely situated to answer this question, which I haven't had a chance to ask before, which is, what are kind of the impediments to JAMstack flourishing in the future? Is it going to keep exploding? Are there any things we need to worry about in terms of hurdles? Phil Hawksworth 15:33 Oh, that's a good question. I mean, it, I always, I'm always surprised about how the boundary seems to seem to get put getting pushed back further and further away. Because you know, the more you look at it, the more you think of think of the model as kind of static first and, you know, approach the approach the architecture, as I'm going to assume things are going to be static, unless I reach something that I just can't make static, and then look at the alternatives, as opposed to doing the other way around, where we might traditionally have thought, Okay, well, I need, I'll have a dynamic back-end, but there might be some opportunities to do things that are cached or make static and what have you. And, and I think that's, that's the harder way to approach it, I much prefer doing it the other way and assuming static first. Phil Hawksworth 16:17 So the roadblocks seem to get pushed further and further away. Um, I think the, probably the ceiling that's hard to get through at the moment is sites that have many, many URLs, many, many pages. So I'm talking many hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, that's really tough to do from a pre generated standpoint. And static site generators are getting faster and smarter about that. And, you know, and I know lots of people are working on trying to get beyond the, this kind of hurdle of can be selectively generate different parts of the site. And it's a fairly complex problem, because the dependency graph of you know, all of your templates and pages isn't very nice, isn't necessarily very easy to visualize, or easy to understand. So that's an interesting challenge. But once we, once we get further down that line, and the site generators get faster and faster, I think that opens the doors to bigger and different types of sites as well that maybe have millions of millions of URLs, which at the moment is, is probably a bit of a ceiling for us. Bryan Robinson 17:20 Well, and really, I'm trying, I'm trying to think of what those sites would be other than, like big news organizations. That's about the only thing I can think of don't have millions of your eyes. Phil Hawksworth 17:31 Yeah, I think typically, that's that's the classic example, you know, news, news organizations, or publications that have, you know, many hundreds of thousands of pages. Yeah. And the other one, of course, is sites that have lots of targeted, personalized content, that can be challenging as well. But again, that starts to become one of those points of how you architect it and what you're what what you value. So for instance, Netlify the app itself and Neltify, you know, where you go and configure your sites and all of those things, that has hundreds of thousands of users using it. And they're all using content, which is specific to them, you know, it's the data which is specific to their sites. But it's a JAMstack site. It's a, it's a staticly served React app, which then talks to dynamic API's. And you, that seems like a good model, you aren't giving up the pre generated nature of every page that might then be cruel, callable by search, search engines and what have you. But that's fine. But in that kind of environment, you know, I don't want the admin view of my website, you know, admin console being crawled by Google. So it's, there's a balancing act, and it's trying to figure out what's, what's appropriate and what you actually want. But yeah, so serving personalized content to people and then having that crucibles because you needed regenerated. That's another challenge. But I don't always know if it's actually required. Bryan Robinson 19:02 And on top of that, like most of those personalized things, you don't want crawlable anyway. So you probably right, as long as as long as you are connected in a way that the user gets the content properly, then you're probably pretty good to go. Phil Hawksworth 19:13 Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So it's always a balancing act. And then I'm very cautious about describing anything as a silver bullet. And there are so many different ways that we can approach these architectures with the, with the tools that we've got in the jam stack. ecosystem, there's that word again. There's so many tools and approaches that we can take that we can kind of cut the cloth to suit what we need, I think, Bryan Robinson 19:34 So obviously, I try to keep these relatively short. So I'm gonna go ahead and move into the next question, which is, what are you actually jamming to right now? What what's your musical jam? Phil Hawksworth 19:43 Oh, this is a great question. Well, obviously, Toto is never far from the top of my history. It's amazing how often I fall back to having some Toto being played is particularly good on a Friday afternoon, I think, when I need a little bit of a spring in my step. Phil Hawksworth 20:04 But I one of the things I actually often find myself writing code to is the, the, the code radio that Free Code Camp provided. And if you've encountered that, it's just, it's just a YouTube link. And it's like this 24/7 music that's good to code by radio. And it's kind of nice as well, because you tuned in there, and you can see how many other people are listening as well. So even though you're not interacting in any way at all, you've got this kind of solidarity, which is kind of nice. Phil Hawksworth 20:34 So those two things, but the only other thing I'd probably mentioned his Gaz Coombes, who he used to be the lead singer of super grass going back way, way back. But he's, he's got some albums out at the moment that I really, really like, and kind of keep me keep me interested as I'm kind of writing things and and building code. So yeah, definitely recommend Gaz Coombes, I think called Matador that I've been listening to a lot. It's good stuff. Bryan Robinson 21:03 I'll find that and tuck that in the show notes. So anything that you're you're looking to promote, obviously, you're identified, but anything specific, you want to talk about Phil Hawksworth 21:11 the so there's probably just just two things. And depending on the timing of this, we've got JAMstack conference coming up in San Francisco, on the 16th, 17th, and 18th of October. So who knows, maybe this will squeak out into the world in time. Hopefully it's coming up very quickly. So that's, that's coming up. Phil Hawksworth 21:30 And the only other thing I'd call out is there's now a nice slack community growing for the JAMstack community. And there are already a couple of good places to talk like TheNewDynamic Slack is a brilliant place that I'd recommend to people. But also for people who are maybe going to JAMstack conferences and meetups jamstack.org/slack will get you into a good place for for talking about all things JAMstack, we, we foolishly didn't call it JAMslack, which I think Jake Archibald kind of mentioned was a huge missed opportunity but so be it will have to that's just that's just a mess that will have to live with Bryan Robinson 22:11 and I might be a little too kitschy for some people though. Phil Hawksworth 22:16 Yeah, we've we've stuck with just jamstack.org/slack Bryan Robinson 22:22 Alright. Well, I want to thank you for for taking the time and talking with us today. And and I want to say I appreciate all the all the different content that you put out. Phil Hawksworth 22:30 Oh, that's very kind. Well, thanks for this. It's, it's nice to get to talk. And yeah, I've really enjoyed listening to everyone you've had on so we're looking forward to whoeverTranscribed by https://otter.aiIntro/outtro music by bensound.com

Listen in as the team talks with Phil Hawksworth, Fred Schott, and Jeremy Wagner around the theme of rethinking how we build and deploy web applications. The post Episode 42: Rethinking Deployment appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

Listen in as the team talks with Phil Hawksworth, Fred Schott, and Jeremy Wagner around the theme of rethinking how we build and deploy web applications. The post Episode 42: Rethinking Deployment appeared first on SitePen.

Quick show notes Our Guest: Andy Bell His current big project: Every Layout His JAMstack Jam: 11ty His musical Jam: Lyre le Temps Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:00 Today we have an awesome guest. He's a web designer and developer. You may know him from his CSS newsletter, Piccalilli, his awesome 11ty the starter theme Hylia, his friendly browser checker, mybrowser. FYI, or just his amazing hot takes on Twitter. Let's go ahead and welcome to the show Andy Bell. Andy, how's it going today? Hey, how you doing? Andy Bell 0:17 Okay. Thanks for having me. I'm pretty good. Bryan Robinson 0:21 So that was my introduction of you. But how would you describe yourself? Are you a designer or developer in your own mind, Andy Bell 0:26 I'll say I'm a hybrid sort of buff. So I tend to call myself a web designer these days because even though it's pretty old school term, it sort of describes what I do perfectly. I tend to see projects start finished. So yeah, web designer, or front end developer is tends to do most of the time these days. Bryan Robinson 0:46 Cool. So So what do you actually do for work and for fun? Andy Bell 0:58 And then other guys a chance to have fun because I've got two young kids. Yeah, fund is whatever, whatever includes those two, but yeah, I remember fun from before that. Bryan Robinson 1:11 I got young the same way I got I got three and a half year old, there's not a lot of fun. Andy Bell 1:15 So, I feel for you there. Bryan Robinson 1:19 Alright, so so what was kind of your entry point into this whole like jam stack philosophy and skill and or static sites or wherever you like to call it? Andy Bell 1:27 So, I started with stack size and with Jekyll, a few years ago, I got into Jekyll. I picked up as a solution for really rough agency project. That was, it was super fluid, the brief was so thin you could smoke it. And I just knew that it was going to be a nightmare from from the start. So I suggested, what do we use Jekyll to build it, because if, if I'm going to things change, it'll be a much easier process so that they're going to be really into it. And obviously it isn't it for our personal blog, and all that but is when 11ty came around, where I really started getting into static site stuff properly, really heavily into it, because it's just such a flexible system. And ever since then, I literally use it for everything now. And so yeah, it's brilliant. Love it. Bryan Robinson 2:25 So as a professional Freelancer using it on like your client projects and stuff like that. Andy Bell 2:30 If you're to list of things that 11tycurrently does for me is if prototyping, visual design. And its power in a book is power in the newsletter. And its power in normal client websites, my website, literally everything is now rolling through 11ty in some way awesome form at the moment. Bryan Robinson 2:56 So So would it be safe to say that that kind of 11ty is kind of your jam in the jam stack? Andy Bell 3:03 Oh, absolutely. Yeah. big thick wad of 11ty jam. Bryan Robinson 3:10 There is there any other technologies or products that you're utilizing in the jam stack right now? Andy Bell 3:14 Yeah, so do a lot of stuff with with Node when I do anything that's got like backends. So, I tend to like So this project, called every layer that I work on with Heydon Pickering. Tha t's all built with 11ty but we use Heroku and Node to do the sort of clever stuff. Which is all going to be well by the time this goes out it actually will be live. And so I tend to use that I but I am a slowly get into the survivalist stuff as well in the Cloud Functions, because Netlify made that really easy. So yeah, but really, I tend to stick around in static site world. Yeah, that's, that's where I hang out. Bryan Robinson 3:56 Cool. So what what kind of what actually made you fall in love with jam stack? Like you talked about, you know, Jekyll being your entry point, obviously. Now it's 11ty that's making it much more, I guess, probably fun to work with. Yeah. But what kind of where did you fall in love with some of the ideas? Andy Bell 4:11 I think it was. It's the empowerment thing. So I'm pretty weak with back end technology. It took me a long time to appreciate that. And you can achieve a lot as a as a sort of designer with the JAMstack. And a lot of power is given to you. And you can do a lot for nothing as well. And that's one thing I really appreciate about is that someone can get an 11ty site or whatever they want to use, and deploy it for free, on Netlify and then they own their own content. So that stuff's really appealing. And then I think is going to be really key in the success of JAMstack as well. Bryan Robinson 4:54 I'm kind of curious, cuz I'm a hybrid to like, I'm a designer developer, and I hate the backend. I hate dealing with servers and all that. But I've been doing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for like a decade. How would you talk to a designer, that's maybe getting into HTML and CSS about static sites and about about that empowerment that you were saying? Andy Bell 5:15 Interesting question. And so soon as I just getting into HTML and CSS, I probably wouldn't, I wouldn't introduce them to this JAMstack, because I think it could create some confusion really early, especially understanding because I think when you learn in HTML it's useful to be able to see the document as a as a whole software experience that uncomfortable about the JavaScript frameworks, as well as that there's a there's a higher level of abstraction, I think, causes a lot of confusion for beginners. So but once they're a bit more comfortable and understood HTML, I probably introduce them to 11ty, and then Nunjucks. And so this is now you cannot take this piece of code that you've written in a partial and then you know, introduce it like that, piece by piece. So keeping it as simple as possible. And that's one thing that's really good about, especially 11ty is that it lets you go from zero to naught point one, you know that you don't have to go all in and fully commit to a light Gatsby or something, you can gradually implement it on an existing setup. So you can actually teach it by doing things slowly, but surely, and people can understand what his role is and where it lives. In the stack. Bryan Robinson 6:30 You mentioned, you mentioned Gatsby, I actually just saw a presentation on Gatsby and just it kind of solidified my personal opinions. It looks you know, super powerful, and all that. And I played with it. But the complete abstraction of everything that's going on, I looked at it and said, I've been doing this a long time. My brain doesn't work like that. I can't imagine anyone else getting into it. Yeah. Andy Bell 6:51 No, no, I did. I did a client project with it earlier in the year and just found myself yearning back for 11ty, this is a bit too much. pretty difficult to do. What web web development, this this doesn't really have a role in my stack, especially a specialist. So yeah, stick stick with it. I think while it gives you I don't think you really need it to be honest. But you know, that's just my opinion. Suppose. Bryan Robinson 7:21 Sure. And then I guess beyond that, you know, talking and talking about, you know, newbies or you know, people who, who are maybe making that that advancement from be able to do that static HTML, CSS, maybe a little JavaScript into more, you know, full stack and putting air quotes, no one can hear the radio, it's been more kind of full stack development. Would you still talk to them about more traditional stuff? Or are you all in static sites JAMstack ideology, Andy Bell 7:55 Progressive enhancement is my is my thing. So whatever, wherever you use, as long as what gets delivered to the front end is HTML, functional HTML by default, so if nothing else arrives down the pipe, you've still got usable website that's acceptable and accessible, then it's all good. And you could, you could use whatever you want to do, like you can use PHP can use Node, I don't really care as long as what arrives, if, if the only thing that rises the HTML, it works, and you can use it, and then everything else on top of that is a bonus so CSS great that works now it looks good, you know, and then JavaScript, it's definitely a sort of an additional sprinkling of functionality rather than the whole thing. You know. That's how I always operate regardless of what project is really, even when I've built like React projects is being SSR (Server Side Rendered) to make sure that if the client fails, which it will, there's not, there's not a sort of might about it, there's, there's a will about it, and then make sure they still work. So that all this stuff, so yeah, definitely. Bryan Robinson 9:06 Do you think that the static sites lend themselves stronger to progressive enhancement? Or is it? Is it just a matter of methodology? Andy Bell 9:15 And yeah, I think, I think they might have made that kind of best point a lot easier. And I think that's, that's probably one thing I really like about them and being able to generate what I want -- which is that HTML output -- it seems to be really easy, I think it's almost easier to generate Well, for me, especially to do that with a static site generator, rather than WordPress style, which, you know, it's what I cut my teeth with WordPress, I think even now, if I was to take on the, air quotes, simple project, before I might sling out a WordPress theme, whereas now sling out on the 11ty site, because I think that's now the quickest way to do it for me. Yeah, Bryan Robinson 10:00 That's actually really, really interesting. So I used to work in an agency for about six years, and we had our own custom content management system and all sorts of stuff. But anytime a client couldn't use that, we were just sling a WordPress theme out there. So you think that that potentially, we're getting to the point where it would just be easier to do a quick static site, instead of going picking out a moderate to decent theme and plugging and playing Andy Bell 10:23 I think, I think one thing that is missing and the other is a couple of marketplaces for themes I was just introduced to this thing called StackBit the other day as well, which I thought was really cool, which has that whole methodology going about it and I think that is going to be the the breaking point and the bit that pushes static sites because like people start with seems a lot in world WordPress world especially and I know Gatsby started doing it themselves, well. And I think that's gonna be the key and I really hope something arrives for all the generators like 11ty and Hugo and stuff. I know there's Jekyll themes stuff that are still going these days as well. So I think that might be that the thing that helps people at least starter kits anyway that do initial setup for people because it can be a daunting, you know, 11ty starts with nothing, there's there's nothing in there. It's empty. So I think people I know Phil Hawksworth he he's created a nice starter kit and then obviously I created the Hylia as well. And it's just the fact that like these little starting points that get people into it. I think that will enable people to create these projects quickly and efficiently. Bryan Robinson 11:42 Now, I mentioned I mentioned earlier Hylia you all do you also I think I read somewhere that you have a starter kit that's like a blank starter kit. Andy Bell 11:56 Yeah, Hebra. You might remember from the the WordPress old days where there's a thing called Stackers by Elliot J Stocks. And this basically that but with 11ty. That's how I got into WordPress was I watch Chris Coyier's digging into WordPress screen casts. And then one of the first things recommended was this Stackers theme. So I got really into that. And I always found it really useful, because it just gave me HTML, nothing else. And then I might as well now want to release Hylia, and they went down really well with everyone. And I thought it'd be nice to also give people the HTML only version of it as well, if they don't want to use all the SASS and all that stuff that I've added in there. So yeah, it seems to be it's not not obviously nowhere near as popular as the other one. But it seems to be helping some people out which is good. Bryan Robinson 12:48 Well, that was that was what you said, you know, that Stacker was was kind of your intro into like WordPress theme that That one wasn't mine. But it was a similar idea where there wasn't, I just got like the loops and stuff like that. And then I could edit that sort of thing, instead of having to write from scratch. Andy Bell 13:03 Exactly. And that was the use case, because one thing I didn't like about WordPress themes is like in design was that had the prescriptive setup. And undoing that was really difficult. So being able to, you know, put actual CSS on that, you know, yourself was a big, big selling point. Bryan Robinson 13:22 Do you think there's any any room for looking at like static HTML themes? Do you think that that's going to be something that can fill that gap for for static sites? Or is it just too much effort at that point, even to convert it over? Andy Bell 13:35 Could be, Yeah, I think I think one thing our industry is lacking big, big time on is knowledge of HTML, especially -- and CSS, but mainly HTML. And there's always been I mean, I wrote a post by the day about it on Monday, where there's this theory that a button that's being created with live React Native, or whatever it is, is more accessible when it might be technically correct. But at the same time, there's a lot of caveats to that statement, and I think within this forum, and I see a lot of documentation, a lot of popular websites and code samples using very poor markup. So there's definitely a space for I'd say, lazy developers, you don't want to learn markup, because it is the founding, you know, is the core thing on the website is HTML, you know, you can't have a website without HTML, I think there's space for someone to just do it for them to put out an accessibility fire as I like to call it just reduce one more opportunity for someone to have a miserable experience with assistive technology is, is to give people our best point, you know, the, the correct markup for an article the correct amount of markup for post list or even for like an e-commerce, you know, something like? Yeah, definitely see space for that. Bryan Robinson 15:01 So I don't want to take up a huge amount of your time. So I'll move into the last last couple things. First and foremost, what's your like, actual jam right now? Like, what are you listening to? What's your favorite song or artists that you've got going on? Andy Bell 15:14 I was looking at Spotify before we started and there's this this is called, going to murder the name but Lyre le Temps, and I'll send you a link, put it in the show notes. And it's it's really funky. It's really it's been been on the constant loop for me recently. And while I've been working and doing a lot of design work recently, so it's really sort of suited to that I need I need music that makes puts me in a good mood when I do design otherwise, I do terrible work. So it doesn't really matter when I do development, I can listen to whatever design is a very specific thing that I need. And, yes, I'll send a link to the album. I've been listening to a lot of his career. It's really cool. Bryan Robinson 15:57 And then you me, you got a lot of things I'm sure you can promote. What do you want to promote on the on the podcast today? Andy Bell 16:06 I think because it's especially when this goes out. Me and Heydon have created this thing called Every Layout, and it's something that's really important to both of us. We're really both really into CSS, as you mentioned, are on a newsletter, about CSS called Picallili, which incidentally, is getting report formed on the JAMstack as we speak. But Every Layout is we're trying to distill CSS layouts and simplify them and teach people to simplify CSS as well. I think we, as a as an industry have overcomplicated CSS and we've thrown far too many heavy frameworks and heavy tools at what are actually simple layout problems. And I think this is all a stigma about the modern layout tooling such as flexbox that Heydon and I are trying to solve, break and teach people how to use them. And yeah, it seems to be going quite well. So yeah, that that'll be ready for purchase. When when this goes out so go on and buy it because when you buy it, it means that we can give it for free to people who need it for free. And that's the whole the whole mantra that we're doing with it is that we're using people's purchase licenses to then subsidize people who really need it for free and been able to give it to them. So yeah. Bryan Robinson 17:26 That's amazing. And, and the stuff I've read online that's in there is also amazing stuff too. So you should definitely go Andy Bell 17:35 Every-layout.dev is the URL Bryan Robinson 17:38 and that'll be in the show notes too. Yeah, it's definitely it's definitely worth checking out. We could do a whole episode about it. Have you and Heydon later on. But uh, yeah, it's amazing stuff. Cool. Well, thanks for for taking the time to talk with us today. Andy Bell 17:55 No worries. It's been good fun. Bryan Robinson 17:57 I really, really appreciate it and we'll go from here.Transcribed by https://otter.aiIntro/outtro music by bensound.com

Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan CacheFly Host: Charles Max Wood Joined By Special Guest: Phil Hawksworth Episode Summary Currently the Head of Developer Relations at Netlify, Phil has been a developer for 20 years. Even though he was interested in computers from an early age, he started  studying Civil Engineering in university before changing course and switching to Computer Science. Though he didn't particularly enjoy studying Computer Science, he really liked working with HTML where he didn't have to compile any code and that's when he started thinking about a career in web development. Phil talks about his favorite projects he has worked on using JAMstack and JavaScript. He works remotely out of London, UK and as head of developer relations he spends a lot of time traveling for conferences for work. He doesn't have a 'typical' work day, but when he is not traveling for work he enjoys catching up on conversations on Slack and Twitter about JAMstack and collaborating with the rest of is team in San Francisco. Links JavaScript Jabber 347: JAMstack with Divya Sasidharan & Phil Hawksworth Eleventy JAMstack Phil’s Medium   Phil's Twitter Phil's GitHub Phil's LinkedIn Phil's Website https://www.thenewdynamic.org/ Netlify https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber https://twitter.com/JSJabber https://www.facebook.com/DevChattv Picks Phil Hawksworth: Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity Charles Max Wood: EverywhereJS JavaScript Community

Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan CacheFly Host: Charles Max Wood Joined By Special Guest: Phil Hawksworth Episode Summary Currently the Head of Developer Relations at Netlify, Phil has been a developer for 20 years. Even though he was interested in computers from an early age, he started  studying Civil Engineering in university before changing course and switching to Computer Science. Though he didn't particularly enjoy studying Computer Science, he really liked working with HTML where he didn't have to compile any code and that's when he started thinking about a career in web development. Phil talks about his favorite projects he has worked on using JAMstack and JavaScript. He works remotely out of London, UK and as head of developer relations he spends a lot of time traveling for conferences for work. He doesn't have a 'typical' work day, but when he is not traveling for work he enjoys catching up on conversations on Slack and Twitter about JAMstack and collaborating with the rest of is team in San Francisco. Links JavaScript Jabber 347: JAMstack with Divya Sasidharan & Phil Hawksworth Eleventy JAMstack Phil’s Medium   Phil's Twitter Phil's GitHub Phil's LinkedIn Phil's Website https://www.thenewdynamic.org/ Netlify https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber https://twitter.com/JSJabber https://www.facebook.com/DevChattv Picks Phil Hawksworth: Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity Charles Max Wood: EverywhereJS JavaScript Community

Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan CacheFly Host: Charles Max Wood Joined By Special Guest: Phil Hawksworth Episode Summary Currently the Head of Developer Relations at Netlify, Phil has been a developer for 20 years. Even though he was interested in computers from an early age, he started  studying Civil Engineering in university before changing course and switching to Computer Science. Though he didn't particularly enjoy studying Computer Science, he really liked working with HTML where he didn't have to compile any code and that's when he started thinking about a career in web development. Phil talks about his favorite projects he has worked on using JAMstack and JavaScript. He works remotely out of London, UK and as head of developer relations he spends a lot of time traveling for conferences for work. He doesn't have a 'typical' work day, but when he is not traveling for work he enjoys catching up on conversations on Slack and Twitter about JAMstack and collaborating with the rest of is team in San Francisco. Links JavaScript Jabber 347: JAMstack with Divya Sasidharan & Phil Hawksworth Eleventy JAMstack Phil’s Medium   Phil's Twitter Phil's GitHub Phil's LinkedIn Phil's Website https://www.thenewdynamic.org/ Netlify https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber https://twitter.com/JSJabber https://www.facebook.com/DevChattv Picks Phil Hawksworth: Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity Charles Max Wood: EverywhereJS JavaScript Community

Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan CacheFly Host: Charles Max Wood Special Guest:  Dan Fernandez Episode Summary In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Dan Fernandez, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft. Listen to Dan on the podcast JavaScript Jabber on this episode. Dan went to a programming camp and fell in love with programming. He majored in Computer Science in college and started working for IBM upon graduation.  Listen to the show for Dan’s journey into programming and much more! Links JavaScript Jabber 241: Microsoft Docs with Dan Fernandez Dan’s Twitter Dan's LinkedIn https://twitter.com/JSJabber https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber Picks Dan Fernandez: Microstang: Microsoft helps build a custom Mustang packed with Windows 8 and Kinect JavaScript Jabber 347: JAMstack with Divya Sasidharan & Phil Hawksworth  

Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan CacheFly Host: Charles Max Wood Special Guest:  Dan Fernandez Episode Summary In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Dan Fernandez, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft. Listen to Dan on the podcast JavaScript Jabber on this episode. Dan went to a programming camp and fell in love with programming. He majored in Computer Science in college and started working for IBM upon graduation.  Listen to the show for Dan’s journey into programming and much more! Links JavaScript Jabber 241: Microsoft Docs with Dan Fernandez Dan’s Twitter Dan's LinkedIn https://twitter.com/JSJabber https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber Picks Dan Fernandez: Microstang: Microsoft helps build a custom Mustang packed with Windows 8 and Kinect JavaScript Jabber 347: JAMstack with Divya Sasidharan & Phil Hawksworth  

Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan CacheFly Host: Charles Max Wood Special Guest:  Dan Fernandez Episode Summary In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Dan Fernandez, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft. Listen to Dan on the podcast JavaScript Jabber on this episode. Dan went to a programming camp and fell in love with programming. He majored in Computer Science in college and started working for IBM upon graduation.  Listen to the show for Dan’s journey into programming and much more! Links JavaScript Jabber 241: Microsoft Docs with Dan Fernandez Dan’s Twitter Dan's LinkedIn https://twitter.com/JSJabber https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber Picks Dan Fernandez: Microstang: Microsoft helps build a custom Mustang packed with Windows 8 and Kinect JavaScript Jabber 347: JAMstack with Divya Sasidharan & Phil Hawksworth  

Sponsors KendoUI Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel AJ O’Neal Chris Ferdinandi Charles Max Wood Joined by special guest: Phil Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan Episode Summary This episode features special guests Philip Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan. Phil lives just outside of London and Divya lives in Chicago, and both of them work for Netlify. Divya is also a regular on the Devchat show Views on Vue. The panelists begin by discussing what JAMstack is. JAM stands for JavaScript, API, and Markup. It used to be known as the new name for static sites, but it’s much more than that. Phil talks about how dynamic ‘static’ sites really are. JAMstack sites range from very simple to very complex, Static is actually a misnomer. JAMstack makes making, deploying, and publishing as simple as possible. The panelists discuss the differences between building your own API and JAMstack and how JavaScript fits into the JAMstack ecosystem. They talk about keys and secrets in APIs and the best way to handle credentials in a static site. There are multiple ways to handle it, but Netlify has some built in solutions. All you have to do is write your logic for what you want your function to do and what packages you want included in it, they do all the rest. Every deployment you make stays there, so you can always roll back to a previous version. Charles asks about how to convert a website that’s built on a CMS to a static site and some of the tools available on Netlify. They finish by discussing different hangups on migrating platforms for things like Devchat (which is built on WordPress) and the benefits of switching servers. Links API React JAMstack CMS (content management system) CDM (Customer Data Management) Markup UI (User Interface) Jekyll Progressive Enhancement 11ty Hugo React Static Gatsby Vue AWS AWS Lambda Azure Markdown WordPress Zapier Stefan Baumgartner article RSS feed Picks AJ O’Neal: Prince Ali Ababwa (Aladdin) Node v.10.12 Chris Ferdinandi: Bouncer Philip Morgan Consulting Jonathan Stark Consulting Charles Max Wood: Mastadon Social Thanksgiving turkey Phil Hawksworth: Dripping (solidified meat drippings spread on toast) They Shall Not Grow Old Divya Sasidharan: Fear, Trust, and JavaScript Women’s Pockets Are Inferior Debt: A Love Story

Sponsors KendoUI Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel AJ O’Neal Chris Ferdinandi Charles Max Wood Joined by special guest: Phil Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan Episode Summary This episode features special guests Philip Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan. Phil lives just outside of London and Divya lives in Chicago, and both of them work for Netlify. Divya is also a regular on the Devchat show Views on Vue. The panelists begin by discussing what JAMstack is. JAM stands for JavaScript, API, and Markup. It used to be known as the new name for static sites, but it’s much more than that. Phil talks about how dynamic ‘static’ sites really are. JAMstack sites range from very simple to very complex, Static is actually a misnomer. JAMstack makes making, deploying, and publishing as simple as possible. The panelists discuss the differences between building your own API and JAMstack and how JavaScript fits into the JAMstack ecosystem. They talk about keys and secrets in APIs and the best way to handle credentials in a static site. There are multiple ways to handle it, but Netlify has some built in solutions. All you have to do is write your logic for what you want your function to do and what packages you want included in it, they do all the rest. Every deployment you make stays there, so you can always roll back to a previous version. Charles asks about how to convert a website that’s built on a CMS to a static site and some of the tools available on Netlify. They finish by discussing different hangups on migrating platforms for things like Devchat (which is built on WordPress) and the benefits of switching servers. Links API React JAMstack CMS (content management system) CDM (Customer Data Management) Markup UI (User Interface) Jekyll Progressive Enhancement 11ty Hugo React Static Gatsby Vue AWS AWS Lambda Azure Markdown WordPress Zapier Stefan Baumgartner article RSS feed Picks AJ O’Neal: Prince Ali Ababwa (Aladdin) Node v.10.12 Chris Ferdinandi: Bouncer Philip Morgan Consulting Jonathan Stark Consulting Charles Max Wood: Mastadon Social Thanksgiving turkey Phil Hawksworth: Dripping (solidified meat drippings spread on toast) They Shall Not Grow Old Divya Sasidharan: Fear, Trust, and JavaScript Women’s Pockets Are Inferior Debt: A Love Story

Sponsors KendoUI Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel AJ O’Neal Chris Ferdinandi Charles Max Wood Joined by special guest: Phil Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan Episode Summary This episode features special guests Philip Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan. Phil lives just outside of London and Divya lives in Chicago, and both of them work for Netlify. Divya is also a regular on the Devchat show Views on Vue. The panelists begin by discussing what JAMstack is. JAM stands for JavaScript, API, and Markup. It used to be known as the new name for static sites, but it’s much more than that. Phil talks about how dynamic ‘static’ sites really are. JAMstack sites range from very simple to very complex, Static is actually a misnomer. JAMstack makes making, deploying, and publishing as simple as possible. The panelists discuss the differences between building your own API and JAMstack and how JavaScript fits into the JAMstack ecosystem. They talk about keys and secrets in APIs and the best way to handle credentials in a static site. There are multiple ways to handle it, but Netlify has some built in solutions. All you have to do is write your logic for what you want your function to do and what packages you want included in it, they do all the rest. Every deployment you make stays there, so you can always roll back to a previous version. Charles asks about how to convert a website that’s built on a CMS to a static site and some of the tools available on Netlify. They finish by discussing different hangups on migrating platforms for things like Devchat (which is built on WordPress) and the benefits of switching servers. Links API React JAMstack CMS (content management system) CDM (Customer Data Management) Markup UI (User Interface) Jekyll Progressive Enhancement 11ty Hugo React Static Gatsby Vue AWS AWS Lambda Azure Markdown WordPress Zapier Stefan Baumgartner article RSS feed Picks AJ O’Neal: Prince Ali Ababwa (Aladdin) Node v.10.12 Chris Ferdinandi: Bouncer Philip Morgan Consulting Jonathan Stark Consulting Charles Max Wood: Mastadon Social Thanksgiving turkey Phil Hawksworth: Dripping (solidified meat drippings spread on toast) They Shall Not Grow Old Divya Sasidharan: Fear, Trust, and JavaScript Women’s Pockets Are Inferior Debt: A Love Story

We were able to have a nice chat with Phil Hawksworth in our third episode. After introducing himself and talking a bit about coming to work for Netlify, Phil then answers some questions about the JAMstack, Netlify, the JAMstack Conference, and more.

In this episode, I talk with Phil Hawksworth about growing up as an introvert. He shares how he struggled at times with being introverted and how he then made changes to his life. I love how he followed what was best for him and created a life that fit him. To connect with Phil: https://www.facebook.com/CoachPhilHawksworth/                                http://philhawksworth.com/  

Engineers can build applications faster by using tools that abstract away infrastructure. Major cloud providers offer this tooling in the form of functions-as-a-service, as well as managed services such as Google BigQuery or Azure Container Instances. The term “serverless” refers to these functions-as-a-service and the managed services–because when you use these tools, you are not The post JAM Stack with Phil Hawksworth appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A recording from Script'18 (https://scriptconf.org) Next wave infrastructure - do far more with much less - Phil Hawksworth(https://twitter.com/philhawksworth) Recent years have seen a shift in technical architectures. Building complex services for the web used to be just that – complex. Projects might have demanded a broad range of specialist skills which could stretch even the fullest of full-stack developers. These days we have a growing number of options for how we design, build and maintain the systems which keep our web sites and applications alive. This talk will look at ways to make use of emerging tools and services which can deliver surprisingly rich features and capabilities without maintaining expensive and complex infrastructure. We’ll talk about the benefits in keeping your stack simple, in using the expertise of others, and we'll examine the performance and security benefits of JAMstack and microservices. ScriptConf is powered by: - Dynatrace (https://dynatrace.com) - Fredmansky (https://fredmansky.at) - Karriere.at (https://karriere.at) - epunkt (https://www.epunkt.com) - Microsoft (https://microsoft.com) - Studio Mitte (https://studiomitte.com) - Presono (https://presono.com) - Travis CI (https://travis-ci.com) Photo by bebraw: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bebraw/sets/72157669068490399

Today we're learning about Netlify and joining us is the incredible Phil Hawksworth to share his tips and tricks around it all.

Welcome to ScriptCast No. 2! We met with Phil Hawksworth at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf and went out for some Kebap. With Phil our topics were pretty clear: Styleguides, static site generators, content management systems and microservices. The new JAM stack if you will, though nobody of us can remember what each initial stands for. So enjoy our lovely little chat and try to ignore the sound of some cutlery clinging in the background. And if you like, pay our brand new Script'18 website a visit: https://scriptconf.org -- Tickets are available now and the first speakers will be announced in September. Also big thanks to Sebastian (https://twitter.com/sebgie) and Tom (https://twitter.com/Haroldchen) for joining me and to the magnificent Schepp (https://twitter.com/derSchepp )for providing some recording equipment. Have fun! Links: - Phil on Twitter: https://twitter.com/philhawksworth - Beyond Tellerrand: https://beyondtellerrand.com/ - Script'18: https://scriptconf.org

How To Move Your Coaching Business Online WIth Phil Hawksworth by Will Freemen

How To Level Up Your Online Business With Phil Hawksworth by Will Freemen

In the latest episode of JAMstack Radio, Brian speaks with Phil Hawksworth, Technical Director at R/GA and Eli Williamson, Creative Director at Netlify about Isomorphic rendering in the JAMstack. The post Ep. #8, Isomorphic Rendering in the JAMstack appeared first on Heavybit.

In the latest episode of JAMstack Radio, Brian speaks with Phil Hawksworth, Technical Director at R/GA and Eli Williamson, Creative Director at Netlify about Isomorphic rendering in the JAMstack.

1:00 Intro to guests Brian Douglas and Matt Christensen 2:20 Definition of JAMStack 8:12 JAMStack and confusion over nomenclature 12:56 JAMStack and security, reliability and performance 17:05 Example of traffic spike for company Sphero 18:26 Meaning of hyperdynamic 20:35 Future and limits of JAMStack technology 26:01 Controlling data and APIs versus using third parties 28:10 Netlify.com and JAMStack 31:16 APIs, JavaScript framework and libraries recommended to start building on JAMStack 35:13 Resources and examples of JAMStack: netlify.com, Netlify blog, JAMStack radio, JAMStack SF Meetup QUOTES: “I think in the next couple of years we’re going to see the limits being pushed a lot for what you can do with this.” - Matt “Today we’re starting to see really interesting, really large projects getting built with this approach.” - Matt “If you can farm 100% of your backend off to third parties, I feel like that really limits a lot of the interesting things you can do as a developer.” - Brian PICKS: Early History of Smalltalk (Jamison) React Rally 2016 videos (Jamison) FiveStack.computer (Jamison) Falsehoods programmers believe about time (Aimee) Nodevember conference (Aimee) 48 Days Podcast (Charles) Fall of Hades by Richard Paul Evans (Charles) Jon Benjamin Jazz (Brian) RailsConf 2016 (Brian) React Native (Brian) Book of Ye Podcast (Brian) Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (Matt) Sequoia Capital website Sphero website Isomorphic rendering on the Jam Stack by Phil Hawksworth SPONSORS: Front End Masters Hired.com

1:00 Intro to guests Brian Douglas and Matt Christensen 2:20 Definition of JAMStack 8:12 JAMStack and confusion over nomenclature 12:56 JAMStack and security, reliability and performance 17:05 Example of traffic spike for company Sphero 18:26 Meaning of hyperdynamic 20:35 Future and limits of JAMStack technology 26:01 Controlling data and APIs versus using third parties 28:10 Netlify.com and JAMStack 31:16 APIs, JavaScript framework and libraries recommended to start building on JAMStack 35:13 Resources and examples of JAMStack: netlify.com, Netlify blog, JAMStack radio, JAMStack SF Meetup QUOTES: “I think in the next couple of years we’re going to see the limits being pushed a lot for what you can do with this.” - Matt “Today we’re starting to see really interesting, really large projects getting built with this approach.” - Matt “If you can farm 100% of your backend off to third parties, I feel like that really limits a lot of the interesting things you can do as a developer.” - Brian PICKS: Early History of Smalltalk (Jamison) React Rally 2016 videos (Jamison) FiveStack.computer (Jamison) Falsehoods programmers believe about time (Aimee) Nodevember conference (Aimee) 48 Days Podcast (Charles) Fall of Hades by Richard Paul Evans (Charles) Jon Benjamin Jazz (Brian) RailsConf 2016 (Brian) React Native (Brian) Book of Ye Podcast (Brian) Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (Matt) Sequoia Capital website Sphero website Isomorphic rendering on the Jam Stack by Phil Hawksworth SPONSORS: Front End Masters Hired.com

1:00 Intro to guests Brian Douglas and Matt Christensen 2:20 Definition of JAMStack 8:12 JAMStack and confusion over nomenclature 12:56 JAMStack and security, reliability and performance 17:05 Example of traffic spike for company Sphero 18:26 Meaning of hyperdynamic 20:35 Future and limits of JAMStack technology 26:01 Controlling data and APIs versus using third parties 28:10 Netlify.com and JAMStack 31:16 APIs, JavaScript framework and libraries recommended to start building on JAMStack 35:13 Resources and examples of JAMStack: netlify.com, Netlify blog, JAMStack radio, JAMStack SF Meetup QUOTES: “I think in the next couple of years we’re going to see the limits being pushed a lot for what you can do with this.” - Matt “Today we’re starting to see really interesting, really large projects getting built with this approach.” - Matt “If you can farm 100% of your backend off to third parties, I feel like that really limits a lot of the interesting things you can do as a developer.” - Brian PICKS: Early History of Smalltalk (Jamison) React Rally 2016 videos (Jamison) FiveStack.computer (Jamison) Falsehoods programmers believe about time (Aimee) Nodevember conference (Aimee) 48 Days Podcast (Charles) Fall of Hades by Richard Paul Evans (Charles) Jon Benjamin Jazz (Brian) RailsConf 2016 (Brian) React Native (Brian) Book of Ye Podcast (Brian) Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (Matt) Sequoia Capital website Sphero website Isomorphic rendering on the Jam Stack by Phil Hawksworth SPONSORS: Front End Masters Hired.com

This talk will explore how we can break through some of those limits with the use of a new breed of hosted tools and services. We’ll look at practical examples of how a static site generator can help deliver a modern web development workflow, support a living styleguide, and also pack the kind of dynamic punch that you’d only think possible from bigger application stacks. More info at: https://fronteers.nl/congres/2015/sessions/static-sites-go-all-hollywood-phil-hawksworth

This talk will explore how we can break through some of those limits with the use of a new breed of hosted tools and services. We’ll look at practical examples of how a static site generator can help deliver a modern web development workflow, support a living styleguide, and also pack the kind of dynamic punch that you’d only think possible from bigger application stacks. More info at: https://fronteers.nl/congres/2015/sessions/static-sites-go-all-hollywood-phil-hawksworth

The word is getting out. Great web site experiences require careful development and crafty execution in the front end. Squeezing every drop of performance out of your user's browser is tough, but Steve Souders and friends have mobilized an army, and we are all having a bloody good go. But there is a common threat to doing great work in the front-end. It lurks in the back-end and clients love it. It's the content management system, and more often than not, it stinks. More info at: https://fronteers.nl/congres/2012/sessions/i-can-smell-your-cms-phil-hawksworth

The word is getting out. Great web site experiences require careful development and crafty execution in the front end. Squeezing every drop of performance out of your user's browser is tough, but Steve Souders and friends have mobilized an army, and we are all having a bloody good go. But there is a common threat to doing great work in the front-end. It lurks in the back-end and clients love it. It's the content management system, and more often than not, it stinks. More info at: https://fronteers.nl/congres/2012/sessions/i-can-smell-your-cms-phil-hawksworth