That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Francois Lanthier Nadeau on decoupling in the JAMstack (and life), ecommerce and more
Quick show notes Our Guest: Francois Lanthier Nadeau What he'd like for you to see: Snipcart V3 | His blog where he talks about destigmatizing mental health His JAMstack Jams: The Decoupling Philosophy of the JAMstack | Stackbit | Netlify | Sanity.io His Musical Jam: His "Is that Soul I feel in my guts" playlist Other Technology Mentioned Jekyll Middleman Nuxt Gridsome Our sponsor this week: TakeShape Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:02 Hello everyone and welcome to yet another fun packed episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast where we asked the age old question, what is your jam and the JAMstack. Bryan Robinson 0:11 I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and this week I'm joined by the former marketing lead now CEO of the e commerce startup Snipcart. I'm talking of course about François Lanthier Nadeau. Bryan Robinson 0:22 Also back this week is our amazing sponsor TakeShape. Stick around after the episode to hear more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information. François, thanks for thanks for coming on the show today. Francois Lanthier Nadeau 0:37 Yeah, you got it. It's my pleasure. Bryan Robinson 0:39 So I've been following following you on Twitter for a little while, but I go ahead and give us an introduction. who you are what you do for work what you do for fun. Francois Lanthier Nadeau 0:45 Yeah, good. Same thing actually been following you on Twitter for a while to listen to some episodes recently. So yeah, I'm CEO at Snipcart, it's an ecommerce solution for developers and then also the organizer of the JAMstack Quebec meetup that we host here at the Snipcart offices in Canada, in Quebec, Canada. For fun I play video games I read, I listen to audiobooks and podcasts I write, and I try to spend as much time with meaningful people like my girlfriend, family and friends. And that's pretty much it. Bryan Robinson 1:24 And what kind of things do you write? Like, is it is it tech stuff? Or is it not tech stuff? Francois Lanthier Nadeau 1:28 It's actually both. I come from a marketing background. So sometimes, all right, I don't know tactical stuff on content marketing or SEO. But sometimes I'll write more personal stuff. I kind of have this semi official mission of talking more openly about mental health. And I've had some personal issues with this in the past and I try to share stories and tips and lessons regarding this. So yeah, sometimes it's more in that order. Bryan Robinson 1:59 Okay, great and That's definitely a an important mission in tech. There's a lot of people not talking enough about it. Francois Lanthier Nadeau 2:05 Yeah, I think men especially sometimes, sometimes we have a harder time. So I don't know. It's Yeah, I find some some value in Redemption of my own and trying to do that. Bryan Robinson 2:17 Excellent. All right, so So let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit, It's a JAMstack podcast. So what was your What was your entry point into the JAMstack or into the idea of static sites or whatever you like to call it? Francois Lanthier Nadeau 2:30 Yeah, we used to call it something like modern static site. It was Middleman and Jekyll. Mostly that got us into this space. So when we were just starting out as a SaaS, ecommerce, Saas for devs, we were just, you know, trying to get some traction to our site and some signups and stuff. So we were experimenting with different content marketing, strategic And at one point, I was asking our developers about tools they love and our co founder and lead developer, Charles mentioned Middleman. And he was saying that it was gaining a little traction and popularity through the dev community. So we we tried to build a site with it and integrate Snipcart with it. And it went just fine. Francois Lanthier Nadeau 3:23 Yeah, Snipcart is a front end centric, e commerce shopping cart that lives basically just in your front end. And we do all of the back back end logic. So it was a good fit from the start with the JAMstack approach. But it wasn't designed as a JAMstack ecommerce tool. We kind of stumbled upon the whole paradigm and tooling to these marketing experiments, if you will. Bryan Robinson 3:53 Cool. And Snipcart started in what? 2013? Francois Lanthier Nadeau 3:59 Yeah. Yeah, that's about right. Late 2013. Bryan Robinson 4:03 Okay, and and so so through that, that experimentation? Did y'all shift away from middleman? Are you still using that sort of thing when you're playing with your marketing stuff? Or is it in the new? The newer stuff that's coming out? Francois Lanthier Nadeau 4:16 Oh, most definitely. So we try to evolve and experiment alongside the community with tools that were popping up. So we kind of created open source demos and get them repurposed for established tools like Jekyll. But we also, I mean, we also, for instance, experimented with Gatsby when it was just an open source repo with no website, or branding, or it wasn't that big of a deal, you know. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's part of our DNA to try and experiment and have thousands of side projects. Like developers usually do. So we thought we might as well try to harness this into, you know, attraction channel that brings us people and that also helps the community when we do these tutorials and and GitHub repos and stuff. Bryan Robinson 5:15 So obviously, being not necessarily a JAMstack company, but a company that is very strongly tied now into the JAMstack. How are y'all other than the side projects approaching the philosophy of the JAMstack? I'm real curious about e commerce and the JAMstack. I think that's going to help us take take it to the next level. Francois Lanthier Nadeau 5:33 Yeah, ecommerce is... it's a complex based. And you can you can see that just by looking at the wide spectrum of solutions that are offered both to developers and non developers. In terms of influences and application of the actual philosophy, I'd say we, we really embrace or try as much as we can to embrace DX first philosophy. So it's as JAMstack caught popularity and fire and everything because it offered a good developer experience. And that sense, we're kind of trying to do the same thing with Snipcart. And we have been from the start, it's always been a developer first solution, something that is not constraining. It lets you work with the tools you love. And that's lightweight that improves your workflow instead of constraining it. So that that strategic in that approach of like the bottom up influence in terms of business, so we first try to influence and convince a developer that it's a great tool. And then we leverage the developers authority and influence inside a company or towards his client, their client. Francois Lanthier Nadeau 6:55 To make make sure the managers and merchants are on board with that tool. Also. So this this the, the dx is something we're really trying to focus on right now. And you see, it's funny because the dx is great. Like it's important to provide a good developer experience. But then if the end of to some non technical client or some marketing team is done, and they do not have like the ease of use that developer had when they were working on on their stuff, it's not it's not good for the gemstone. It's not good for the old ecosystem was tooling. And that's why you're seeing a lot of tools pop up, to cater to this problem. So editing CMS site building, hosting, one click deploys, all of that stuff is is is layered on top of the the core dx experience of the jam stack. And yeah, we do the same thing with the hosted merchant dashboard. So the developer works with snap cart, they integrate it on a static site, let's say or with a headless CMS. And afterwards, the merchant is off is offered a hosted dashboard to manage the e commerce operations. So they don't have to play with code or get repositories or whatnot to manage your sales, ecommerce. Bryan Robinson 8:25 And so, one of the great things, especially on the developer experience side of thing is this kind of whole host of API's that are available for us. I'm kind of curious for your perspective on on. There's been some pushback from non JAMstack developers about kind of this this fractured ecosystem not fractured, that's a bad word, but like a multi faceted ecosystem. Are you experiencing that with, with people with clients, like oh, well go login to Snipcart for your ecommerce dashboard, but over here to manage the other side. Francois Lanthier Nadeau 8:56 Yeah, that's that's actually a great question and I was talking was, there's this pendulum in tech that I feel is swinging between monoliths and then thousands of SaaS that are fragmented, like you were saying, but so some people would prefer the administration part to be enabled in one single place for their clients. And for these people, if they're motivated, and I don't know, talented in terms of the tooling they're using, they can, of course, integrate a lot of Snipcart functionalities inside a CMS directly. So we expose we have an API for this and we've seen it done on various sites. CMS, like Craft CMS is one of the first that did it well, so there are some plugins for snip card into some other cmss that can help in that regard. We tried to develop them ourselves in the beginning, but we realized it was just a whole mess, like maintaining everything we're developing with the other plugins that are specific to a certain CMS, for instance. So yeah, I'd be lying if I said, sometimes it isn't a pain. But many times, the ease of implementation and customization of Snipcart is a bigger benefit than the pain of having to login into an extra dashboard. Bryan Robinson 10:30 Sure, and I mean, from from my experience in agency world from a few years ago, we would create a Shopify site, but then also use another CMS through the marketing side, and that itself was a pain too. Francois Lanthier Nadeau 10:
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