That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Obinna Ekwuno on the shift from engineering to the web, Gatsby and the incremental future
Quick show notes Our Guest: Obinna Ekwuno What he'd like for you to see: His Egghead videos His JAMstack Jams: Gatsby Cloud | Netlify His Musical Jam: KOTA the Friend | Fela Kuti Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:03 Hello, everyone, welcome to the next amazing episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the age old question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? On today's episode, we talked with the amazing Obinna Ekwuno is a software engineer for Gatsby, a media developer expert, egghead instructor and an accessibility advocate. Bryan Robinson 0:24 Before we dive into that interview, let me take a second to thank our sponsor this week, 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 0:40 Obinna, thanks for thanks for being on the podcast with us today. Obinna Ekwuno 0:44 Happy to be here. Bryan Robinson 0:45 Awesome. So tell us a little about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? That kind of thing? Obinna Ekwuno 0:50 Oh, um, so I am a software engineer at GatsbyJS. I work on the DevRel team. I originally joined Gatsby to work on the learning team. Like building stuff with like documentation, writing some documentation and working on like plugin automating workflows and like all of those interesting stuff, trying to like make like documentation better for like people to, like, get more information out of out of Gatsby. But now I work on like the DevRel team, which is like really cool, because like, I still do some of the learning work, but like also, like more DevRel right now. Um, that's what I do for work. Obinna Ekwuno 1:25 For fun, like, I like to write poetry. So I just, you know, write poems, hang out my friends. I I started getting into gaming a few months ago, my friend gave me his ps4 to like, try out some games. So yeah, that's that's what I do for fun right now. Bryan Robinson 1:41 So what kind of poetry are you writing? Obinna Ekwuno 1:44 I'm mostly like mostly melancholic poems like just, you know, I'm just writing I'm documenting like, life as a Nigerian boy growing up in Nigeria and you know, just just, you know, writing more for my myself, my future self done, like anybody really Bryan Robinson 2:01 Awesome, I believe of everyone that we've, we've talked to you're the first person who said that poetry is what you do in your spare time. So that's, that's awesome. Obinna Ekwuno 2:09 Thank you. Bryan Robinson 2:10 And then with Gatsby, so you said you were originally on the learning team and the devrel team. That's been an interesting thing that I've heard about Gatsby, what's the main difference between, say, the Education team and and DevRel? Because I've always felt that those kind of overlap in some ways? Obinna Ekwuno 2:26 Yeah. So like, there's not like so much difference is because when working out like when I was working on like, the learning team, because we're still trying to like flesh out the DevRel team at Gatsby, so learning was more like, you know, writing documentation, speaking, podcasts, all of those interests interfacing, like the community, so it was kind of like, it was more like DevRel but then at the same time, like actually having to write documentation as part of your job. But, so like, that's like, those, those are like the, the parts are like overlapped but like so that's why it was really easy for to transition from like learning things. There. Because like it was just same thing I started doing originally, but like, you know, with like, Oh, this is not what you're supposed to do full time. Bryan Robinson 3:07 So let's, let's talk about the the Jamstack a little bit. So what was your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack? Or maybe your static sites? How did you kind of enter this world? Obinna Ekwuno 3:16 Yeah, so, um, I think that was like, two years ago, when I had been writing, like, React for a bit. And, you know, it was really, um, it was really because I had to, I don't, I didn't have like a traditional entry into like tech. Obinna Ekwuno 3:30 I studied engineering in school, and like, it was really in uni. And like, it was really confusing to like, learn how to code. So I was writing, like, React after learning, like a lot of JavaScript. And then, you know, someone just came up one day while I was like, hanging out my friends from computer science, and they were like, hey, look at this cool stuff called Gatsby. Like, what is like The Great Gatsby like the movie, like who would name something who would never framework out of like a movie, but then you know, that then I you know, got into like the documentatioon. And you know, just really just kept going from there. So like Gatsby was like my first introduction to like, oh, when I saw that I think the thing that really got me into it was seeing that I didn't have to like worry about routes anymore. The whole the whole put put the file in the page folder and becomes a router. It got it got me. I was like, What? Yes, this is how I want to build Bryan Robinson 4:20 It definitely. Like I when I got my first intro into like some of the React stuff. I just, I didn't want to handle routing. That was like the worst thing about building a single page application. And now with Gatsby is just drag and drop almost Bryan Robinson 4:33 So when you were studying at university, you said you were like software engineering. Were you specifically looking to get into went into the web world? Or were you looking to do other things with that? Obinna Ekwuno 4:44 So um, I was studying electronics and computer engineering, and you know, like having having so I was doing more of like, smaller electronics like, you know, smaller sector boards, how do waveforms work, all of those things. Interesting stuff that I never really paid attention to. Well, but the thing is like with me, like naturally, I'm just really I'm really curious. So at first I didn't even want to like I didn't know what tech was about, I just really just wanted to be a network engineer. So I was learning a lot about TCP and IPs and network layers and all those like interesting stuff, Voice over IP, you know, the cool things for me at that time, then, I got into like tech, when one of my, my classmates was because I was just going to like, the classes to get my degree, like because I was good at math and physics. And you know, engineering just came like, Oh, that's what you're supposed to do. Obinna Ekwuno 5:34 But then when I really go into like, my classmate taught me to write HTML. And I learned HTML, I was like, Oh, my God, then I go, I go to CSS and I'm like, what's sorcery is this? How, how does this happen? You know, so I've always I think the thing that really got me here was like, always wanting to because everything excites me with like, when it comes to like tech, so like, always know, what's the next thing I can do? How can I use this in another way? So like, that's like, what's really interesting That's, that's what really got me into like, where I am now. Bryan Robinson 6:03 Very cool. So obviously working at Gatsby, your day to day deals a lot with the Jamstack. But how specifically, are you using the Jamstack professionally? How are you using it personally? What are you kind of doing nowadays? Obinna Ekwuno 6:15 Yeah, so um, I first like my, like building on stuff like Jamstack was like kind of building stuff for Gatsby was how I got to like the Jamstack. I like now because like, I work on the on the documentation. So like before, you have to actually write documentation, you kind of need to like test out or you're writing about and actually know if it works. So that's like most of the stuff that I do professionally with the Jamstack. So maybe if you're trying to document how a plugin works like you're actually running up a Gatsby, you're firing up a Gatsby demo site, trying to like implement this plugin, seeing use cases, questions that people might have about implementation and all of those like cool stuff. And mostly on testing out tutorials. When you write, you're trying to write a tutorial on how to use this With Gatsby, I would have to, like, you know, have to understand how this works, and then test it out, build it out and then write the documentation for that. So that's like how I work with it professionally. Um, and mostly just like educating people on it. Obinna Ekwuno 7:13 Personally, I have I have a personal sites that have I have been working my friend always laughs at me every time I mentioned my personal site, because I've been working on this site for like, for like, the past year. And the reason why I haven't really competed is that every time I feel like it's ready, I see some other thing I learned. I work on like, Oh, I want to add this to my site and then I just keep I keep test using it to test stuff. I do recent thing that is really getting me excited is Gatsby recipes. So like that's what I was like, oh, cool, how do I you know, just out of curiosity, how do I remove everything in the Gatsby config js and try to make try to see if I can make like a recipe out of like all of those things. So that's so that's how I use it personally, just I use my I use my site, as like a testing field for everything. Bryan Robinson 8:02 Very cool. I've actually seen a lot recently about how your personal site should be your, like development garden. Like you shouldn't think of it as like a final final place for things that just you should be pruning it and planting new seeds and all sorts of stuff. It's a cool analogy. Obinna Ekwuno 8:18 A good a good example would be this a colleague of mine, Josh. Josh writes a lot about his, um, his like, on this personal site and he adds like a bunch a lot of like, awesome features on that. And like I just whenever I think of my personal site, I'm like, I want I want my sites look like Josh is on. Because
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