That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Jason Lengstorf on the edge cases, rediscovering common knowledge and much more
Quick show notes Our Guest: Jason Lengstorf What he'd like for you to see: His Egghead courses on JAMstack and Gatsby | His Gatsby and JAMstack courses on Frontend Masters His JAMstack Jams: "But yeah, I'm a big fan of, I don't know, I just like playing this stuff." So here's a list of the stuff Gatsby Svelte Eleventy NuxtJS Gridsome His Musical Jam: "Final Form" by Sampa the Great Other Technology Mentioned Hasura OAuth OneGraph Our sponsor this week: TakeShape Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:02 Hey everyone, welcome to That's My JAMstack, the podcast where we dare to ask the question, what is your jam in the JAMstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and today I'm super excited about our guest. He's a principal developer experience engineer at Netlify and the host of the great video series Learn with Jason. I'm talking of course about Jason Lengstorf. Bryan Robinson 0:22 But before we dive in, I did want to mention our sponsor TakeShape is back again this week. I'll tell you more about them after the interview. But if you're interested in learning more before that head on over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack to find out what their content platforms all about. Bryan Robinson 0:43 Alright, Jason, thanks for being on the show with us today. Jason Lengstorf 0:45 Yeah, thanks for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:46 Awesome. So so I would hope that a lot of people in the audience know who you are, at least from the past couple years, but go ahead and give us a shout about who you are, what you do for work, what you do for fun, that sort of thing. Sure. Jason Lengstorf 0:57 So I am a developer experience engineer at Netlify, which means that I'm kind of in between engineering and Dev Rel. I also host a show called Learn with Jason where I pair program with people in the community. We learn something new in 90 minutes. I am also a occasional blogger I'd write a lot about sometimes about code mostly about the the process of coding so kind of the meta work or the Yak shaving so to speak. Jason Lengstorf 1:30 For fun, I am a I call myself a mediocre bartender. I love food. So I we cook a lot. You know, I'm kind of deep down a rabbit hole, I make my grind my own meat and you know, do that. We make bread from scratch and I like to do cocktail like you know, bartending kind of stuff like that. I make my own cocktails and stuff. It's good. Bryan Robinson 1:51 So what is the tastiest cocktail that you make? Jason Lengstorf 1:54 Okay, the taste is one that I make. I will usually I just make other bartenders, good cocktails. I have I made one up. My partner asked me to make something that tasted like Christmas. And so I did kind of a riff on on like a classic Negroni build, but it was rum and spice liquors. So it kind of has this really Alpine kind of Christmasy flavor. Bryan Robinson 2:21 Alpine like a taste like a pine tree or... Jason Lengstorf 2:23 So the one that I use is called blur Bluebird, Alpine liqueur, which it's got, like all spice and some kind of like fresh herbs and stuff. So if you had fernet Branca? Bryan Robinson 2:35 Nope. Jason Lengstorf 2:36 So fernet Bronco, kind of tastes like mouthwash. This is like a a very, like, tune down version of that. So it's it. It has a hint of pine not like the taste of them. Bryan Robinson 2:48 And what's the what's the hardest thing you've ever cooked? Jason Lengstorf 2:50 Ooh, great question. Um, I would say probably the hardest thing I've ever cooked is. Well, I mean in terms of complexity, just Thanksgiving dinner, because you you effectively have to Gantt chart that you know, you've got one of in one stovetop and 15 dishes to cook. So how do you make sure that everything comes out on time still warm, that you're not like trying to stack something that was supposed to cook it for 50 and an oven, it's only a 325 you know that that kind of stuff is all very challenging. Jason Lengstorf 3:18 In terms of most complicated single dish, I any type of curry dish is really challenging. It's like, well, it it's not challenging in the sense that it is. It's not like French cooking where the the techniques are challenging. It's like a billion and a half ingredients and a lot of them are hard to find or something you've never used before. So there's a lot of like, not only learning how to use a mortar and pestle to make curry but like trying to understand what an ingredient is supposed to taste like. Jason Lengstorf 3:51 Because you know if you've never used like Thai basil or if you've never used Thai seasoning sauce or You know, all these these ingredients that you'll find in Asian food, like, you're like I don't even have the context to know when this is like I don't know what right tastes like so you're making a lot of wild guesses and hoping the end product tastes like the thing that you love from the restaurant Bryan Robinson 4:15 Do you do have to make your own curry powder because I know that's like the best way Jason Lengstorf 4:18 I've done it a couple times and it is definitely amazing it is so much work like it's it's one of those things that I feel like if it would be one of those things it would make sense if you had a bigger family so it's just me and my partner and to make it at the scale that we would need to to justify doing as much work as it is we need to eat it like every day for two weeks. And so typically what I found is that the level of effort that goes into the really, really intense stuff like making your own like making your own gyoza skins for like pot stickers and stuff, quality difference between buying them at the store Making them at home is noticeable. But marginal. The level of effort is totally, totally doesn't justify that little bit extra flavor. Unless you're doing it for like a special occasion. Bryan Robinson 5:12 Even still, I might say depends on how special occasion I guess. Jason Lengstorf 5:18 Yeah, fair enough. Bryan Robinson 5:20 So, so obviously, we're not cooking today other than some delicious jam stack recipes, but, uh, what what is kind of your entry point into the jam stack or in the static sites if you are old enough to deal with that? Jason Lengstorf 5:31 Yeah, so like entry point, like how I got into it. I mean, the way that I really got into it was once upon a time I was in a band, and I started by customizing the CSS for MySpace. That was really what it was, was like customizing my band's MySpace profile. And then I wanted to build an actual website for the band. So I built a, you know, totally in, like TextEdit wrote all the HTML all by hand and then just uploaded into a FTP folder on. I don't even remember what the host was some some cheap hosts BlueHost or something like that. Bryan Robinson 6:09 True static sites. Jason Lengstorf 6:11 Yeah, real like true static site. So I just uploaded something into a folder. It was it was gnarly. It was this table base like this is before that, you know what this was before CSS or before I knew how to use CSS. So what I was doing was doing like table based sliced images, to position things on the screen old school. It was rough. It was rough. Bryan Robinson 6:32 Nice. So So what about modern JAMstack? What was kind of your entry point into into the past like five years of technology? Um, Jason Lengstorf 6:41 so I was working at IBM. And we were dealing with, I worked on IBM's cloud services, IBM Cloud, and we were building dashboards out and a lot of these dashboards it was just a very complicated dev stack, right. So IBM Cloud is microservices. So each team owned a route. So you would own slash dashboard or slash account or whatever. And we owned slash account. So we were trying to speed up we had some performance issues where we were just it was taking way too long to load a page. And when I started digging into the tech stack, what I realized was that the way we had done microservices was to give each team a full node Express server. And then that was setting up these proxies that were wrapping other microservices. And so we had these kind of daisy chained microservices, then and a lot of it was just so that our local build was easy to manage. And you know, I have to like air quote, easy because it was still to get a dev environment setup. You had to add a bunch of environment variables you had to configure nginx on your machine. had to run, you had to have a reverse proxy running. And all this stuff was really, really painful. And all we were doing at the end of the day, was writing a react app that sent off calls to internal API's. Jason Lengstorf 8:13 So I, I attacked this from from two ways. So my first talked to my team about GraphQL. And we wrote a middleware kind of thing. That was a, it was like a normalization layer over internal API. So instead of having to write these proxies in each microservice, we built a normalized graph qL layer so that the the front ends could just call GraphQL. And then once we've done that, we've successfully decoupled them so I started trying to build up proofs of concept where the front end teams weren't shipping node anymore. They were just shipping like static compiled assets. The graph qL was successful. The static shipping was not Jason Lengstorf 8:55 We we hit Like, I mean, there are a million reasons for it, right? Like there's there Lots and lots of people who have very valid reasons for going lots of different technological directions. IBM's got 700 something engineers, or just on that team like on IBM Cloud 700 something engineers, and you know, they're architects at different levels. So I had my what I consider to be incontrovertibly correct opinion. And then there was another team that was doing more stuff with with like, sort of like graph, not graph qL, but like graph databases, and that was very server driven. And so they had what they consider to be incontrovertibly correct reasoning for doing that. And we just ki
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