That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Colby Fayock On Mapping (like… the world), Gatsby, science and more
Quick show notes Our Guest: Colby Fayock What he'd like for you to see: His blog posts His work to help JAMstackers use Leaflet: His Gatsby Leaflet starter Getting started with Leaflet Santa tracker with leaflet NASA GIBS for map imagery His JAMstack Jams: Gatsby | Netlify His Musical Jam: Patterns - Dangerous Intentions Our sponsor this week: TakeShape Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:02 Welcome everyone to another episode of That's My JAMstack the podcast where we explore the inner psyche of JAMstackers everywhere asking the simple question, what's your jam in the JAMstack. On today's episode, we talked to Colby Fayock, a senior front end engineer with element 84. But before we dive into the interview, let me shout out to our sponsor take shape. Stick around after the episode to learn more about their content platform or head on over to take shape.io slash That's My JAMstack for more information. Bryan Robinson 0:31 Colby thanks for being on the show today. Colby Fayock 0:33 Thanks for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:33 Alright, so let's let's start out tell us a little bit about yourself about what you do for work, what you do for fun, that sort of thing. Colby Fayock 0:39 Sure. So I'm a senior front end engineer and UX designer at Element84. For a little bit about us, we focused on bringing remote sensing and Life Sciences data to the cloud. So that's usually like satellite data and health data. But once that's in the cloud, that's kind of where I stepped in and put you eyes in front of that. So some things that I'm working on right now are a dashboard. Colby Fayock 0:59 For testing a commercial satellite, and we're also working on a mapping interface for helping first responders tackle natural disasters like Wow, so like a big use case for that was working with people who were actually in it for the campfire California wildfires. Bryan Robinson 1:16 Oh, wow. Very cool. So I curiosity. You're building interfaces? Do you consider yourself more on the design side or more on the developer side, even though you're working in code, obviously. Colby Fayock 1:27 Yeah, so I definitely am more on the front end engineering side. It's kind of funny because I started off more on the design side, but as I kind of learned and learn, I've just slowly moved the needle to the engineering side. But that said, I still thoroughly enjoy both aspects of it. And usually I'm still the one doing the wires and such on the projects that we're working on. Bryan Robinson 1:48 Cool. Now, what do you do in your in your free time outside of work? Colby Fayock 1:51 So a lot of the times when we when we can figure it out, I like to travel with my wife. We just got back from a trip to Southeast Asia, which was pretty cool. Colby Fayock 2:00 But aside from that, you know, I, I do really enjoy coding, but probably spent too much time watching TV movies. And lately, I've been trying to push myself to write more. So I've been putting a lot of articles up on Free Code Camp. And that actually inspired me from a co worker who kind of gave me the idea that, you know, there's a lot of ways to look at different articles, right, rather than I kind of had that imposter syndrome. But I'm able to get past that. And it's been successful. So far, Bryan Robinson 2:27 I'm a firm believer that anyone who's writing code can benefit from their own blog in the future. Like if you're if you're writing and you saw the problem, write about it, and then you Google it down the road, and you'll be the response. Colby Fayock 2:39 Right, exactly. That's a good book kind of way to bookmark your solutions. Exactly. Bryan Robinson 2:43 And so what's the what's the best place you've traveled or your favorite place to go when you're traveling? Colby Fayock 2:49 You know, Southeast Asia was probably my craziest experience. And I say crazy just because it was so different from anything I've ever been to. But I've been to Brazil cuz my wife is Brazilian and Colby Fayock 3:00 I really enjoy Brazil, the people, they're just so awesome. The food is amazing. Bryan Robinson 3:04 So that's probably one of my favorite places. Go and what's the what's the best Brazilian dish? Colby Fayock 3:10 Oh, man. Well, Brazilian barbecue for sure. Cuz I don't know if you've ever been to one of the Brazilian steak houses in the United States, but it's just incredible. Bryan Robinson 3:19 Nice. Very cool. So let's talk about the JAMstack a little bit. Obviously, that's what this podcast is all about. What was your entry point into this philosophy of the JAMstack or maybe static sites or wherever you want to call it? Colby Fayock 3:30 So it's kind of funny because I listened to a couple of the other podcasts and a lot of people seem to be getting into development from the old MySpace days. So when I was in high school, I would do the I would hack over divs on top of the profile, people saw me doing that and I actually made a little bit of a side hustle out of it, redesigning some people's profiles, but from there, you know, just creating Counter Strike Team pages for the teams I was on. Colby Fayock 3:53 But more on the professional side, you know, down the road. I worked at a an e commerce company called thinkgeek was a geeky niche products Bryan Robinson 4:03 I've bought from thinkgeek in the past. Colby Fayock 4:05 Well, since then, they were bought out by GameStop. But we don't need to get into that. But it was interesting because they weren't a JAMstack site. But we were trying to cash the front, the front end so heavily, where it was just being served statically from fastly. But we redesigned the checkout and basically use the jam site principles of reaching out to their API's and stuff to build that. But it was definitely at the time, since it was still kind of a relatively newer idea for an architecture. It was rough to try to get the convinced that our engineers to support the API's to that fashion because it's traditionally a pearl house. So building out the that's how the pages were typically rendered. Yeah. Bryan Robinson 4:44 And modernizing that stack would have been quite fun. Colby Fayock 4:47 Yeah, yeah. Bryan Robinson 4:49 So kind of so so from there. What what are you currently working and what are your favorite jams, tech technologies or philosophies? What are you using professionally and personally that sort of thing. Colby Fayock 5:01 Yeah. So, personally, when I'm bootstrapping sites, I usually just default to Gatsby. And that if I just because it's, it's so easy, you know, static sites are just much easier to manage from a resource perspective, in my opinion. And, you know, it's super cheap and other buzzwords, like infinitely scalable. But as a primary engineer, you know, I don't need to worry about figuring out the server side server side of things. So I just kind of dumped my static assets. I still have like two WordPress clients, but I've since moved them to lightsail, which has made it a little bit easier since it's more managed on the AWS side. And I joke about the buzzwords part of it, but really, that's compelling for from a customer perspective, right? Because being able to use those phrases like infinitely scalable, secure and cheap is just so valuable, Bryan Robinson 5:46 Especially on like, I'm bigger clients where they're like, worried what if I get a traffic spike? Is the server going to go down? Colby Fayock 5:53 Exactly, and it's a realistic scenario. And even if you have the most complex caching system, things can go wrong. So That's what, that's a big thing of what attracts me to it. But with Element 84, you know, it switches a little bit where we got most of it into s3 instead of using something like natla phi, but we're big AWS house. So JAMstack sites, kind of pulling those five fundamental pillars for AWS, which is like for good software architecture. So it makes it really easy to kind of push that Bryan Robinson 6:24 Hit me with the the five pillars for AWS, I'm not actually great with AWS. Colby Fayock 6:29 So I wrote this down because I had a feeling you would ask me. Operational Excellence security, which is a big one, real reliability, performance and cost optimization. So pretty much exactly. It takes the ticks the boxes of every single one of those. Yep. Bryan Robinson 6:45 Very cool. And so what are y'all doing other than obviously, if you're on AWS, you're pretty much jam packed at that point. How is element a for utilizing this kind of separation and how are you doing like mapping and stuff like that in a JAMstack world so interesting. Colby Fayock 7:00 Maps kind of inherently fit into the whole static site idea. We use a library called leaflet which it attaches itself to a static element inside the DOM. So imagine just a div kind of like you would with a react app, right. Colby Fayock 7:14 And it just kind of plays from there pulling in the API's for things like matte tiles, and any kind of data you want to visualize on the map. But really, we can build out these applications completely static and pull all those API's and stuff around on the client, just like a, you know, normal JAMstack app. Colby Fayock 7:31 But it's, it's made it easy to kind of fit it in there. And it's tough with leaflet sometimes because it relies on the window. So if you're kind of building it within a react application, you kind of have to get some past some of those challenges like particularly Gatsby. When you compile, it runs the code, right? So the window is not available. The leaflet library assumes it is and you can run into competition areas with that. So it has its challenges, but it's it's interesting, and it's provided some really powerful stuff. Yeah. Bryan Robinson 8:00 And we were actually just talking on last week's episode about replacing create react app with Gatsby and how like one
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