That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Andrew Sprouse on specialized services, amazing APIs and a welcoming community
Quick show notes Our Guest: Andrew Sprouse What he'd like for you to see: TakeShape's new Mesh service His JAMstack Jams: Netlify | Gatsby | And of course TakeShape His musical Jam: The timeless Metal of Iron Maiden and the Thai-inspired acousitc stylings of Khruangbin Other Tech mentioned Webhook CMS FaunaDB Amazon AWS Imgix Cloudinary Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:00 Hello everyone! Welcome to another episode of the That’s my JAM stack podcast where we profile amazing people working in this new methodology. In this podcast, we dare to ask the age-old question “What’s your jam in the JAMstack?!” I’m your host Bryan Robinson and today I’m joined by Andrew Sprouse. Andrew is a cofounder and CTO of the amazing JAMstack company TakeShape. Bryan Robinson 0:59 So, Andrew, thanks for coming on the show today. Can you give our listeners a little background, who you are what you do for work and for fun? Andrew Sprouse 1:05 Yeah, great. Thanks for having me, by the way. Um, so I'm Andrew. I'm the CTO and co founder of a company called TakeShape. And take shape builds tools for JAMstack developers. And outside of TakeShape. I like to cook I like to ride my bike. And I like to code. So Bryan Robinson 1:27 very nice. So that not not just coding, but also cooking and bike riding. What kind of stuff do you cook? Andrew Sprouse 1:32 Oh, I'm, I'm very passionate about barbecuing. So any type of you know, charcoal fires, smoking. I have like a wood pizza attachment for my grill. So it's that's like a fun project on the weekends. Bryan Robinson 1:49 Very nice. I'm from Memphis. So I take barbecue very seriously, we might not want to get into strong opinions on that too much. Andrew Sprouse 1:55 yeah, I think you would win on that one. Bryan Robinson 1:59 So obviously, now you're a CTO of a JAMstack company. But what was kind of your entry point into the JAMstack world? Andrew Sprouse 2:06 Yeah. So my introduction to sort of static sites and JAMstack goes back to 2010, when we first started using AWS at work, and at the time, I was working with my co founder, Mark, but at Newsweek magazine on the web team there. And so we found out that you could just put HTML files on s3, and then you could host them, basically with zero effort. And it was super fast. And so that was like, wow, if we could really do you know, the whole website this way, that would be amazing. Andrew Sprouse 2:48 So fast forward, like a few months, Mark left to pursue his own creative agency. And one of the first sites that he did was just some HTML, JavaScript and CSS on on s3. And it was the first proof where it was like it was this site for a charity called the Dobbs stories. And it was this first proof that, you know, you could build a full featured website, just with static files. And so that sort of influenced the way that we started to build from that, then on. Bryan Robinson 3:24 Okay, so So when you were at Newsweek were y'all using anything other than just hosting the static files on s3, were you going bigger? Or was it still like you had your content management system for the news? And Andrew Sprouse 3:33 yeah, so unfortunately, back then, we were using enterprise CMS called, it was called Day CQ5. Now, it's called Adobe, AN so since everything couldn't be static, we would spend a lot of time caching, like doing really robust caching. And so that was kind of like, the website, in effect was static. But it was just being served from a cache as opposed to proactively pushing it out to, you know, s3 or Netlify or something. So we we didn't have the tools back then to be able to make the whole site static. So we had to use this traditional CMS. Bryan Robinson 4:17 I actually worked in a news organization for about six years. And even like the side projects we did, we're still like database driven WordPress driven kind of stuff. And then we had our big content management system stack. Did y'all do any
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