That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Jayson J. Phillips the early, intermediate and current eras of the Jamstack
Quick show notes Our Guest: Jayson J. Phillips What he'd like for you to see: The Media Developers Discord | His Live coding on Twitch His JAMstack Jams: Getting back to simplicity on the web | Tools like Netlify His Musical Jam: Bootsy Collins - I'd Rather Be With You | Karen Harding - Say Something Bryan Robinson 0:05 Hello, everyone, welcome to another fun packed episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that difficult question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? In this week's episode, we chat with Jason J. Phillips, Director of Engineering at a 2U, boot camp instructor and a media developer expert. Bryan Robinson 0:23 Before we dive into the episode, I wanted to mention our sponsor take shape, stick around after the interview to find out more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information. Bryan Robinson 0:41 All right, Jason, thanks for being on the show with us today. Jayson J. Phillips 0:43 Appreciate you, Bryan. Glad to be here. Bryan Robinson 0:45 Cool. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? Jayson J. Phillips 0:49 Yeah, so by day, I am a director of engineering for boot camp applications at 2U. We house a lot of boot camps web development. FinTech, UX, and a couple others through extension schools at universities. And so at night, I also teach web development and data visualization boot camps, most recently through the UC Berkeley Extension. And University of Denver was my most recent class. Bryan Robinson 1:18 Cool. So you're doing actual technology for companies that are doing boot camps through schools? Is that right? Jayson J. Phillips 1:25 Yeah. So the team that I that I oversee and manage runs a slate of applications that's for all parts of the learning aspect. So we build tools for instructing as we build tools for our students in our boot camps. We integrate LMS as for our learning platforms, so everything from the student is already enrolled to the student graduating, my team plays a role in their software journey. It's never a dull moment, pretty awesome. Bryan Robinson 1:53 So what do you do for fun outside? Obviously, if you're if you're teaching at nights too, then there's not a whole lot of room for that but what's what's your idea of fun. Jayson J. Phillips 2:00 Yeah. So I tend to run far away from technology for fun. While I do enjoy programming and you know tinkering around on my off time, I tend to be away from the house. So hiking outdoor activities. I'm a big cyclist and runner. I'm still trying to eventually chip away at hopefully running for the half marathons in 50 states I've allowed nine states now. So yeah, I try to make up for all the sedentary sitting at the desk by running myself until I can't run anymore. Bryan Robinson 2:36 Cool, so do you do like competitive or re you just doing it like those half marathons just to do the half marathons? Jayson J. Phillips 2:43 Yes. So my tagline is I don't run fast I run far. So that not competitively but I definitely enjoy a lot of the runs for fun and just to beat my my own personal times and then doing some team adventure races. Like there's a series called Ragnar where it's a team of 12 split between two vans and you run 200 miles over 36 hours. Bryan Robinson 3:09 Wow. I'm out of breath for a mile. And that's about that's about as much as I can go. So that is super impressive. Jayson J. Phillips 3:15 I mean, those races is all about the team. Because again, I run far not fast. So on the wrong team I can be probably very disruptive to a group, but it works out well. Bryan Robinson 3:26 Very cool. So So tell us what was your kind of entry point into the idea of the Jamstack or into static sites or wherever you found your way into this cool community? Jayson J. Phillips 3:35 Yeah, so I think the thing that hit me right away about Jamstack is that my first experience on the web, you know, was all static. Back in about 2001 2002, there was a popular platform called Graymatter written by this gentleman on Noah Gray, and it was written in Perl, but it it would take all your content, as text files and all your comments and actually generate static output for your site. So while the compilation step because it would recompile your entire site. So if you had thousands of pages as a blog, and you know, hundreds or thousands of comments, it would take forever. But once it was done, you had this beautiful site that just ran. It had the notion of templating. So I was like really one of the first experiences I ever got of playing around with a static site in any form. And so jumping back into like the modern era, I think it was around 2013. Before then I'd play around with Jekyll and Octopress for a couple years to replace the WordPress sites I've been working on. And then I dove into Wintersmith and Blacksmith was like some of the firt like early NodeJS, static site generators I've worked on. Bryan Robinson 4:46 So I'm curious real fast, because this was actually a conversation I had the other day about Wintersmith and Metalsmith and all all those kinds of first node static site generators and kind of the idea of like, why didn't those take off? Whereas potentially, like, now we've got stuff like, you know, eleventy kind of taking that role. But then on top of that, you know, obviously Gatsby and, and Nuxt and all that. Do you have any thoughts on that? Like, having used that, I used it a little bit, and it was over my head at the time. But like, what, what do you think about that? Jayson J. Phillips 5:20 Yeah, I think the barrier to entry lowered in terms of the setup, right, so I would say the first time I encountered Wintersmith and Blacksmith and a couple other of those types of sites, it was the same thing. It's like, Alright, this seems like a lot of configuration. I got these crazy Gulp processes or some other build process where now, especially with the advent of create react app and other tools, even in Angular and other ecosystems. It's much easier to get a common set of defaults that are a little bit opinionated, but enough that you don't have to mess with it to get started and you can kind of customize as you go, and I think that is what allowed Jekyll to take off when it first came out. Was that outside of a few hours sensible configuration in a YAML file, you could just write markdown and run it as default. It took very little in the way of getting started with it. Bryan Robinson 6:11 Yeah, the configuration is definitely it was a it was a big pain. I mean, honestly, some days when you're just trying to work on a project real fast, it can still be a pain if you don't actually reach for all these tools. Jayson J. Phillips 6:20 Yeah, I mean, it's, this is like the beauty of the the abstractions that we love building on top of, right, let's say, I really think it was just a maturing of the node ecosystem. And also just now we're within arm's length of a tool in almost any ecosystem now, but especially within JavaScript, Bryan Robinson 6:37 in fact, like the cool thing is like we're seeing projects coming up that are like refactoring Jekyll like there's Bridgetown nowadays. That is, you know, trying to say all right, we need a modern Ruby static site generator and Jekyll is just been around the block a few too many times. Yeah, that's Jayson J. Phillips 6:53 And I love to see it right. I think Jekyll for you know really brought static sites back into the forefront. And also outside of purely technical circles, you know, for other people to actually understand the care about it and see what the benefits were. So I think, you know, as we have these round Robins of, hey, this community is pushing that community ideas further And beyond that, who knows where we'll end up in 2025. It'll probably be something where we think the page gets created and the site's updated in like nanoseconds, Bryan Robinson 7:23 hey, there's that there's a JavaScript library for for reading brain process. So who knows? So I'm also curious. So So you've been you've been doing static sites for a long time with with Graymatter kind of being that that first entry point way back in the day. My first entry point was a little bit later, a few years after that with movable type blue. I'm wondering like, like, obviously, we're way better than those systems were back then. I remember I had a blog. They had thousands of posts for newspaper I worked for and it was like a 40 minute compilation step to deal with that. Do you think? Do you think that that timing was kind of the the downside of the static stuff? And is that is that why you think maybe we went dynamic for a number of years and only now coming back with the speed that we've got? Jayson J. Phillips 8:13 Yeah, I do think it had a lot to do with the company system, when b2, which was like the precursor to WordPress first came out, right, like it was competing with MovableType and a couple others at the time, and those were winning out. But then once someone saw that, hey, you could install this on a server and click a button and now you have a blog. And it starts out right away and you can add post right away. I think that's where the shine of the newness of this dynamic content sites came into play. And then I think there was also the piece of we didn't have, I think as advanced ways, generally available to structure content in static sites, whereas WordPress made that a bit easier to reason. So the tools like Drupal, where you could create structure around your content and understand like, what do I mean, when I'm creating a blog post? What do I mean when I'm creating a static page? And I think we will type in those tools as they moved along that over time, didn't have that really as well along with the long compilation steps. Bryan Robinson 9:17 Well, I know even like, later in the game with WordPress at the agency I worked at, we use a plugin c
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