That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
Brian Rinaldi on proving the benefits of JAMstack, content editing and more
Quick show notes Our Guest: Brian Rinaldi What he'd like for you to see: Flashback Conference His JAMstack Jams: Stackbit | Netlify | Hugo Other Technology Mentioned Jekyll Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:02 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My JAMstack, the podcast where we ask the pressing question, what's your jam in the JAMstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and on this week's episode, we sit down with Brian Rinaldi, a developer advocate for Stackbit. Bryan Robinson 0:21 Brian, thanks for being on the show today. Brian Rinaldi 0:23 Thanks. Thanks, Bryan for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:26 The "Bri(y)an" episode. Go ahead and tell it tell us a little bit about yourself what you do for work what you do for fun. Brian Rinaldi 0:33 So I am a developer advocate at Stackbit. So you know, I get to mess around with all the new stuff and I get to do all kinds of JAMstack things and call it work and experiment with it, and write articles about it and speak about it. So it's, it's a lot of fun. But for fun, let's see. I'm mostly I'd say I'm a gamer. I'm a console gamer. So I am on either my PlayStation my Xbox or the Switch playing something Bryan Robinson 1:06 What were you playing right now? Brian Rinaldi 1:08 I've been hooked on Apex legends for for a little while and that's kind of my main game but I still play Overwatch regularly. That's another one that is one of my longtime faves. Bryan Robinson 1:19 I've only ever played on the free weekends they've done throughout the throughout the life of it, but I've always enjoyed it. Brian Rinaldi 1:25 That's an overwatch I'm assuming. Bryan Robinson 1:27 Yeah, because Apex legend is free, isn't it? Brian Rinaldi 1:30 Yeah, it's free. Yeah. So yeah, it's one of those. What do you call? What do they call them? Like fortnite? Battle Royale? Yeah. Bryan Robinson 1:40 Well, very cool. Very cool. So obviously, this isn't a gaming podcast, although I could very easily talk for a long time about that. Brian Rinaldi 1:46 Yeah, me too. Bryan Robinson 1:49 So let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit. So what was your entry point into the JAMstack? Or if it was long enough ago, I guess static site generators and that sort of thing. Yeah. Brian Rinaldi 1:56 It was definitely long enough ago. I was probably an early adopter. I wasn't part of the beginning, but I was pretty early on. It was probably about six years ago that I really got heavily into static site. It's a bit of a funny story how I started. Brian Rinaldi 2:17 Because I mostly started because I was needed to launch the site for work. I had just gotten recently gotten a role at a company called till Eric, which is now got bought by progress software. And we were going to launch a new developer focused site called Telerik Developer Network. And I wanted to to avoid some issues of competitiveness between WordPress and our current CMS solution that we sold. I wanted to just launch the whole thing using Jekyll because I knew some Jekyll and I've been experimenting with it and I got a no. Brian Rinaldi 3:01 So nobody bought into this idea. And then we ended up using WordPress. But I kind of took that as inspiration to dive really, really deeply into disproving how wrong they were in making this decision. And it led to me presenting all over the place about static sites writing a lot of articles about static sites, you know, getting involved early on in the whole community. I wrote a report for O'Reilly about five years ago about static sites. And then I wrote a book with my friend Raymond Camden, about static sites I was about four years ago, I guess now, three, four years ago. Anyway, it's all been, you know, so I was Yeah, I was early on involved in that and, and have been, you know, dedicated to it since even though it's not until recently after joining Stackbit it was isn't necessarily part of my work day job. Bryan Robinson 4:02 And I feel like that's how there's a lot of great developer technology origin stories. It's like, it's like I had to prove them as wrong as I could. Brian Rinaldi 4:11 Yeah, exactly. It's It's definitely been a part of my, throughout my career, this has come up multiple times. Bryan Robinson 4:18 Cool. And I also didn't know that you would, you would partner with Raymond on a book. So what book was that you said about four years ago? Brian Rinaldi 4:25 Yeah, I think it's like three I think it came out like three years ago now. And we but we started running about four years ago. It's called Working with Static Sites. It's I think the only thing other than you know until Netlify released their thing through a O'Reilly it was the only book early had on the topic. We're we're hopeful that we may even get to revisit that because I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anybody who's starting out today. The landscape has changed. So much since the time we wrote it, that I mean, a lot of things will still work but it wouldn't necessarily be the most recommended way of doing things today. Bryan Robinson 5:12 I got you and as a side note to all the listeners out there, be sure to go back I think it's episode three Raymond Camden was on the show, so be sure to check that out as well. Brian Rinaldi 5:20 My arch nemesis Bryan Robinson 5:24 Good natured sparring there? Brian Rinaldi 5:26 Oh, he and I go way back. So it's Yeah, yeah. Hey, we've been friends. Well, not to give not to give too much away. But since we both did ColdFusion Bryan Robinson 5:39 So obviously, Jekyll was kind of that the entry point and into the world but fast forward, you know, six years now. There's been an explosion of all sorts of stuff. Yeah, I assume Stackbit is high up on your on your list of passions in the JAMstack or what are you playing with or are enjoying right now? Brian Rinaldi 5:54 You know, One of the things I like about Stackbit. It is The ability to just; I've been passionate about the topic of, of the editing experience in, in the whole JAMstack for years. Even when I would speak about this, you know, four years ago, you know, it was basically like, "Listen, I know you all think markdown is super easy. And well, you could just you know, if I'm going to launch this site, and I'm going to give it to some editor, I'll just teach the markdown, it's just a few tags, you know, just a little bit of markup. It's really easy." Brian Rinaldi 6:31 And I'm like, but then if you want to do this in markdown, can you do that? No, you can't. So you have to do HTML if you want to do that. And I'm like, and so this now I got to teach you markdown plus HTML, which is not easy. And the whole experience has never been very smooth from an editing person, you know, content editors perspective. Brian Rinaldi 6:52 And I think so one of the things I've been passionate about is now with headless CMS and, or even like, you know, things like Like NetlifyCMS, which has kind of grown into a really, you know, great project. I think that's changed. And we now, you know, we now have the tools to make a really good editing experience with the JAMstack, which to me, that brings that brings us to the possibility of being able to, to, you know, bring this widespread, like, make make the adoption grow dramatically, because that has been one of the things that held the whole system back is, is this ability like even even now, like, oh, OK, I can change it on the CMS uncomfortable with the CMS side of it. Brian Rinaldi 7:40 But then, and then I make that change, I submit and then it's like, Okay, let me sit there and Is it is it live? Is it live? Is it live? Is it live, right? And then it's like, okay, it's like, oh crap, I screwed up. When we go back, you know, we fix that typo is alive, you know, and repeat the whole process. So having been a part of marketing teams and in content focused teams I know like the struggles those that that though they have with these kind of tools and I think we're finally making that transition out of that. Brian Rinaldi 8:13 But besides that I mean honestly I'm gonna I guess you might say old school kind of guy ice I still like Jekyll I still use it. I'd say most of the sites I build are still are in Hugo and I love Hugo and I've been using it for years and I maintain a like a bunch of sites that are built in Hugo. Bryan Robinson 8:36 I said I feel like on the podcast we've been pretty pretty much 50/50 from like that methodology of like the Hugo Jekyll 11ty, the kind of hand HTML to the browser and then 5050 on the other hand of doing Gatsby Gridsome those kind of React or Vue based situation so you kind of fall a little bit a little bit further on the HTML side of things on that on that more static static site. Brian Rinaldi 8:59 More static-y that yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call it more static, I think, you know, you can still do all those things. It's just, you know, it's done a different way. Right. So, you know, one of the things I love about Hugo is just, like everything run so quickly, and I'm able, like, I feel like there's a lot of power in the template writing. And that I can dig into, like, you know, things that, that I I don't have to mess with any frameworks or anything, right. Like, I can build it with a framework. I could not build it with a framework. I'm free to do whatever. It'll work. Yeah. Bryan Robinson 9:37 Whatever you're feeling on that given day. You're good to go. So so out of curiosity, you talked about the the marketing team and that refresh, refresh refresh refresh methodology. Is that constant the inspiration behind that stack bit live thing that the Brian Rinaldi 9:54 Right that's exactly it. So we have like, we already put out a control center that Will that you can get for free right now like you can just add it, if you're on Netlify, you can just add it to any Netlify site. And what it'll do is it'll automatically pick
That's my JAMstack RSS Feed
