That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Andy Bell on 11ty, static sites, progressive enhancement and more
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
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