That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Tim Benniks on playing, scaling and business in the Jamstack
Quick show notes Our Guest: Tim Benniks What he'd like for you to see: His YouTube interviews with notable developers His JAMstack Jams: Lambda Functions | Connecting various technologies His Musical Jam: Fantastic Negrito Other Technologies Mentioned Gridsome NuxtJS Jekyll Bryan Robinson 0:03 Welcome friends to season two, That's My Jamstack. If you'd like season one, you'll get more of the same out of season two, me talking to developers and designers in our amazing community talking about their passions in and out of the Jamstack. Bryan Robinson 0:15 I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have the amazing Tim Benniks on the show. Tim is director of web development at Valtech, part of the Cloudinary media developer experts program, a speaker and much more. Bryan Robinson 0:27 But before we dive into the interview, I want to welcome back into season two, our amazing season one sponsored TakeShape. Stick around after the episode to find out more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information. Bryan Robinson 0:44 Today, on the podcasts we have Tim. Tim, welcome. Thanks for coming on the podcast today. Tim Benniks 0:48 Thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here. Bryan Robinson 0:50 Awesome. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? Tim Benniks 0:54 Yeah, sure. So as I said, my name is Tim Benniks and I was born in Amsterdam, but now I live in Paris. And here in Paris, I'm the director of web development at an agency called Valtech. Which is kind of a global agency where we do big platform builds, for big ecommerce and stuff like that. And so I'm doing a whole bunch of different web development things and the management and things like that. Tim Benniks 1:21 And what I do for fun changes all the time. Actually, I've been a lifelong musician, so that always stays. I always enjoy making music. But lately I've actually done a lot more content creation and I've been doing stuff like speaking in conferences, so I really enjoy that aspect now like figuring out what gear to use to record something actually being able to speak in front of a camera and not be boring, like so for fun I tried this kind of stuff now. Bryan Robinson 1:53 Cool. Yeah, I definitely I can I can get behind that is once you go down the gear rabbit hole of like audio recording and video recording. There's there's no hope for you anymore. Tim Benniks 2:02 This is a trap. And the worst is, as a musician, I've recorded a whole bunch in studios, but also at home back in Amsterdam. And then when we moved to Paris, I decided to either sell stuff or just gave it to friends who needed it. Because I was going to a small apartment, I couldn't make a lot of noise. So I had this nice stuff. And now that I'm back in a place where I can actually record, I don't have the stuff. And now I'm like, oh, but I don't like the cheap things, because I'm used to all this nice stuff now. So it's, it's a double trap for me. Bryan Robinson 2:35 Nice. So what kind of what kind of music do you do? I mean, we'll talk about what you're into in terms of listening. But what kind of instruments do you play? Or what's your musical style? Tim Benniks 2:44 So I'm a guitarist. And not much more. It's one of those like, if you ask me to sing, it will be awful. But on a guitar, I'm fine. And when I started out, I was like a session player. So I would play anything someone would like and i just i Like that. So I would be like, all over the place in all different kinds of things. But after a while, I noticed I just want to settle for something I really enjoyed, which was blues music, like the old school Chicago, 1960s blues, that's really where it's at. For me, I really enjoy that. And then when I'm on stage playing that it doesn't really matter anymore how technical you are. It's much more about the vibe and the feeling and timing and having fun. And now that I don't play as much if I grab a guitar now I just play that and I'm happy. Bryan Robinson 3:34 Very cool. So obviously not music podcast, it's a Jamstack podcast, let's talk about like, what was your What was your entry point into the idea of the Jamstack? Or maybe it was static sites when you got into what what's your entry point? Tim Benniks 3:46 This is years ago. Now the works jam stack were never uttered at that time. I'm kind of a dinosaur in our industry. And I'm really... I started with all the basics, right? Like what does HTML do and woah we have CSS now stuff like that. Tim Benniks 4:02 And so at one point, I found this thing called Jekyll and it's still around. And Jekyll is this static site generator. I think it's built in Ruby, I'm not even sure anymore. And it was also used for GitHub Pages back in the day. And I always made my own websites with this. Tim Benniks 4:21 Everything at work was always more enterprise level, or more creative or more, let's say let's do a campaign for Chanel. We wouldn't be doing this, we always had like, big enterprise system. So in my own time, I wanted to do something simple that had like super good performance and stuff like that. So I started with Jekyll and I used that for years. Tim Benniks 4:42 And at one point, of course, I was kind of forced into VueJS land because of work. And because I was also always a vanilla JS guy. And I really started to enjoy that more and more and then NodeJS became big and then suddenly there was Nuxt. So next year is kind of it looks like next year, so a little bit on the on the React side. And they had this way to generate your website statically. And of course, when that came out Jamstack existed. And I didn't know it was Jamstack, I just still generated my site statically because it was fast and it was all good. I could have cheap hosting. I didn't get hacked all of that. Tim Benniks 5:24 And my latest one is now that i i found Gridsome and if you're in Vue land Gridsome is great for Jamstack-like projects. And every time I need to to up something that has static content in it and maybe some microservices around it, I tend to use or Gridsome or Nuxt and then just fill it up with some data. And the rest would be way more fancy potentially. But this is still my base. So that's how I entered this this realm of awesome. Bryan Robinson 5:53 Very cool. Yeah, like that. I think that's a for a certain generation of static site people, Jekyll is very much the entry point like that was that was my entry point. We've had a few guests on that said that that was there's all from that kind of background of, you know, I used to write HTML and CSS and I needed something a little bit more and it became Jekyll. Tim Benniks 6:13 Yeah, I truly... I loved their template language and how that all fit together and it felt like black magic back then, because I didn't really care about how it was built. It just worked and it had like a CLI and that was new to me. And it's just pure gold at that time. Bryan Robinson 6:29 Yeah, definitely. Cool. So So nowadays you're you're in Gridsome you're in Nuxt, how are you using it personally, but also like, are you using it professionally now? The Jamstack and Gridsome and all that good stuff. Tim Benniks 6:41 Well, this thing is clearly seeping into work now. So what I'm working on generally are big platforms. Let's say for a client like let's say, EasyJet, which is like a big airplane company or we have L'Oreal that has like 15 or 20 brands that all need websites. And like we have like 3-400 instances of websites in one system. So they all use this big enterprise stuff. And we are seeing more and more that the performance needs. And the KPIs for good websites nowadays are much closer to what a static Jamstack site would do. Tim Benniks 7:19 And also for business, right? Because we are also thinking about performance, scalability, cost uptime of servers. And so slowly but surely this is is going into the work life now. We don't really go fully Jamstack just yet. But things like microservices, lambda functions, cloud connections, things like that. They really come into the picture now. And it just kind of if I just give it a year, and most projects will be some sort of a Jamstack approach. I think Bryan Robinson 7:54 That's awesome. Yeah, I did agency work for about six and a half years and managed a team and It was right before I got fully into the jam stack world. I had Jekyll blog and all that, but I really wish I had dug in and we had started working towards that when I was still in agency lands, I think it would been awesome. Tim Benniks 8:11 Ah definitely, I'm in a place where there's this is still led by big business. And if you have a contract that you pay 2 million for a couple of years, you're not just going to say "Okay, how about we ditch that CMS system and now we go for something else." Tim Benniks 8:26 So what I have to do is find creative approaches to to give them the opportunity to want to change, but not that cost them too much money and that. Let's say we did this recently for Louie Vuitton, which is like a super fancy brand of luxury stuff in Paris. They have this old ecommerce system with like a monolith. And what we did for them is we they knew they wanted to change because one release was like 25 hours and it would not always go right it was fairly challenging and they wanted to release every week. So we lost half our week on releases not even coding. Tim Benniks 9:04 So what they said, we're just going to need to separate the front end from the back end. So we have more flexibility on doing front end changes, design things, A/B testing, stuff like that. And so we came up with a next system for them. That would be its indexing universal mode. So we're not really in jam stack land just yet. But these guys, they now have the opportunity to say okay, so we have this big ancient CMS system behind us, we built on top of that and API
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