That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Aisha Blake on accessibility, easier education and musical conference talks
Quick show notes Our Guest: Aisha Blake What she'd like for you to see: Gatsby Days - Feb. 3, 2020 Who got Aisha into the JAMstack: Working as a volunteer, creating websites in Jekyll Her JAMstack Jams: The way it makes teaching easier Her musical Jam: Dear Evan Hansen Soundtrack Other things mentioned Gatsby Title of Conf self.conference Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:03 Hello and welcome to another episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast asked the age old question, what's your jam in the JAMstack? On today's episode, we've got the amazing Aisha Blake. Aisha is a member of the Gatsby learning team, as well as being a teacher, speaker and conference organizer. Bryan Robinson 0:20 Now this episode is jam packed with JAMstack goodness. But before we get into that, I wanted to welcome back our wonderful sponsor TakeShape. Stick around after the episode to hear more about their content platform or go ahead and head over while you're listening to TakeShape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information. Bryan Robinson 0:40 Hi Aisha, how's it going today? Thanks for being on the show. Aisha Blake 0:42 Everything is great. Thank you for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:44 All right. So So obviously, you're on the show to talk about the JAMstack stuff, but go ahead and give us a little introduction for who you are, what you do for work, what do you do for fun and that sort of thing? Aisha Blake 0:52 Absolutely. So I am a brand new senior software engineer on Gatsby's learning team. I am -- I do a lot of things. I do a whole lot of things. I am an organizer for two conferences in Detroit. One is called self conference is half tech talks, half people focus talks. It has really, really great community and one is new. I am also organizing a conference called after one of my favorite musicals, which is going to be a musical tech conference. Bryan Robinson 1:33 What?! Aisha Blake 1:33 Oh, yes. Yes. So all of the performances, they'll be performances are going to be musical and/or theatrical, similar topics to any other tech conference. So the idea is that we're teaching people through performance art. I'm really excited about it. Bryan Robinson 1:56 I'm now like, run through like, how would I do that? Like, because I speak at a few different conferences, how would I artistically render CSS talks Aisha Blake 2:05 It was largely inspired by TailCall Optimization: The Musical, which was a brilliant, brilliant Disney parody. So three different Disney songs, teaching you about tail call optimization. At !!con last year. And I have been surprised like I this is like the intersection of everything I love. And I've been surprised how many people were already doing this kind of thing. Like, it's, it's really cool. Bryan Robinson 2:41 Very nice. And when's that coming up? Aisha Blake 2:43 That's going to be May 7 in Detroit, and self.conference is actually the following two days. So anybody who is interested in attending either one, you will have a little bit of a discount on the second ticket. Bryan Robinson 2:58 Nice, very cool. Alright, so So obviously, we're not gonna be doing a musical here today because no one wants to hear me sing. That's for sure. So let's go ahead and talk about the JAMstack a little bit. So what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the jam stack or static sites? That sort of thing? Aisha Blake 3:13 Yeah. So as far as static sites go, and it goes back to when I was learning to be a web developer, I was a volunteer, a Jesuit volunteer here in Detroit. That's how I actually came to the city. And I knew that I wanted to be a web developer, but I didn't really have I didn't really know how to connect to the skills that I had. So I have an Information Science degree. But I really didn't know how to take the computer science concepts that I had learned and apply them to something that was practical in my immediate life. Aisha Blake 3:57 So during my year of service, I got started. started doing like small freelance jobs. And one of the one of the things that was really helpful was working with Jekyll at that time, and so I did a handful of static sites for people that I found either through word of mouth or through fivrr. It was, it was interesting. Aisha Blake 4:22 So getting introduced to like, the more modern, what you think of is the JAMstack, though, was actually Jason Lengstorf. Jason has been like one of the guiding lights of my career in that he was the one that got me started speaking conferences. But he also actually turned me on to Gatsby. Like, before he even he was working at the company. He was like, hey, yeah, I've been you know, working on this project. The people working out seemed really cool. They're been really helpful. And, you know, then he was working at it. Gatsby for a while. And that was what got me interested in Gatsby as a tool and as a company to begin with. Bryan Robinson 5:08 So, it's a very similar pattern that I've seen a few different times. Hey, I got started in static sites long time ago, it was Jekyll. That's pretty typical. And then, oh, let's figure out what's new. And what's what's really happening. And Gatsby tends to be about 50/50 what I'm hearing from people. So so you, you kind of did you dive in the Gatsby a long time before you obviously got hired very recently by Gatsby. What was your kind of your career pre employment from Gatsby with Gatsby, Aisha Blake 5:38 So I had no professional Gatsby experience before being hired to get speaking. I was working on a react project. Part of the project was in React. It was a really large metrics app that I was working on full stack, our full stack anyway. And so I had react. experience and then sort of on my own, I was like, well, I need a new blog. Well, my conference needs a website. And like, just sort of getting bits and pieces, and really enjoying the developer experience. And so when I saw that there was an opening on the learning team at Gatsby, and it's really this combination, much like title of calm. It's a combination, like all of the things that I love to do in a job. It was, I knew that I would regret not not applying. Aisha Blake 6:30 And on top of that, Marcy Sutton is my manager. Yeah, she's so I have from my entire career been really heavily interested in and, and passionate about web accessibility. And so Marcy Sutton is continues to be now that she's my manager. Bryan Robinson 6:59 Well, and the cool thing It's like you learn all sorts of stuff from someone like Marcy too. like I follow her on Twitter. I didn't even know there's accessibility about hashtags on Twitter until I followed her. Aisha Blake 7:08 Yeah. So it's been really incredible to be able to learn from her. And I can only imagine what's going to happen past my first three weeks on the job. Bryan Robinson 7:19 Sure, yeah. And the amazing thing to me is watching Gatsby specifically hiring people who care about this sort of thing and and there's perhaps a misguided stigma around react that react sometimes isn't always like JavaScript isn't always the most accessbile unless you really know what you're doing. And so I love that probably the premier company that's using react and the JAMstack is focusing so heavily on that. Aisha Blake 7:44 Yeah, and there's definitely a long way to go. To be clear. But the but we do have Marcy, as well as Madeline working really hard to get us to a point where we can say yes, like by default Gatsby is going to be a really great choice for somebody building an accessible application. Bryan Robinson 8:07 So what's a little bit of your of your history with accessibility? Cuz I know that you you have talked about it and worked on it in the past. Aisha Blake 8:14 Yeah. So I got started with web accessibility through. I'm actually wearing the sweatshirt right now a goalball, sweatshirt. goalball is a sport for blind and visually impaired athletes. Okay. And I was for a really long time, a volunteer for the New York goldball team. And before that point, I really didn't know anybody, personally, who needed assistive technology to access the web. And when the guys on the team asked me about potentially making a website for them, which I never wound up doing. I was like, Okay, I could do that, but I'm not sure You're I can't I don't know whether or not that website is going to be usable for you. Because I'm used to building websites from the perspective of a sighted person. And so that was kind of where I started delving into like what it means to build an accessible website and or web application. Aisha Blake 9:25 And so I've started watching watching Marcy Sutton videos, I start reading Hayden Pickering book, and just sort of picking up bits and pieces as I go along. And of course, talking to my friends on the goldball team, like Hey, does this work for you? And it was a really, it was eye opening in a couple of ways. One, I was just learning a lot but also the realization that Lot of actual web developers because at this point I'm, I'm aspiring a lot of, you know, actual employed, web developers are not doing these things. And I was sort of like, Well, okay, well, I guess I know, kind of what I can do what I can bring to the table from the beginning. Bryan Robinson 10:23 The interesting thing to me also is that it's not always even just a employed web developers. It's also web designers like knowing, knowing what to do is a design task as well. And I've managed a team of designers in the past and pretty things aren't always accessible things. Yeah. So yeah, having to think through all that is a is a task, but it's an important one. Aisha Blake 10:43 Yeah, absolutely. Bryan Robinson 10:44 Cool. So so let's let's get back into the jam stack a little bit. Obviously, you're going to be using the jam stack pretty heavily in your job at Gatsby. I assume you're going to be continuing in the jam stack
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