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Debbie O'Brien on NuxtJS, web frameworks, creating your own framework and more
Quick show notes Our Guest: Debbie O'Brien What she'd like for you to see: Nuxt Content | Nuxt Static | Nuxt Components Her JAMstack Jams: NuxtJS Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:02 Hello, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the timeless question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week on the show, we had the amazing and talented Debbie O'Brien. Debbie is the head of learning and developer advocate for NuxtJS. She's a Microsoft MVP, Google GDE and Cloudinary MDE. Bryan Robinson 0:25 But before we get to that, let's talk about our amazing sponsor this week TakeShape. We'll talk about their content platform after the episode. But if you're curious to find out more right now, head on over to take shape.io slash That's My Jamstack for more information. Bryan Robinson 0:45 All right. Well, thanks for being on the show with us today. Debbie, how are you doing today? Debbie O'Brien 0:48 Hey, I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:50 No problem. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that kind of thing. Debbie O'Brien 0:56 So I'm working for NuxtJS as head of learning and Developer Advocate. So that's kind of pretty cool. And in my free time I'm doing sport because like lockdown makes you fat. So I'm doing a lot of sport, Taekwondo running, cycling anything. Bryan Robinson 1:12 Anything get a little active, right? Debbie O'Brien 1:14 Yeah. Also because we were locked up for like two months. So it's just like, good to get outside and actually do stuff. Bryan Robinson 1:20 Yeah, the best I'm on managing right now is just short walks outside. That's, that's what I've got going. Debbie O'Brien 1:25 Well, it's a good start. Bryan Robinson 1:27 So tell us a little bit more about what you do as kind of the head of education and dev advocacy at Debbie O'Brien 1:35 Yeah, so basically, my job is to kind of like make sure that Nuxt is really easy to use, easy to learn by providing good documentation, great examples, demos, pretty much anything that you would want when you want to like learn something, that you have the right materials, and then we'll work on workshops and video courses, etc. And then obviously, just Nuxt-ifying the world. I mean, the whole aim is that everyone uses Nuxt. They know what it is. Because it's amazing, right? So we just have to like, show it to the world. And then like, everyone would just come on board. Bryan Robinson 2:06 Watch everyone pour right in at that point, right? Debbie O'Brien 2:09 It's easy. It was really easy. Bryan Robinson 2:13 So so what what do you kind of see is the difference between like, since you have both those titles can combine what's the difference between like developer education and you know, Developer Relations or developer advocacy? Debbie O'Brien 2:23 Um, I guess you could say they're very similar sometimes, especially when you're writing a blog post, right? Because you're advocating because you're producing material, but you're also teaching because you're teaching someone something new. So that's why I think they're very much combined. But I guess if you were like to go for a job and learning it doesn't mean you have to be a speaker on a stage right. So the advocate, advocacy ism is a little bit more. Get out there in front of people. I think, you know, be more, don't be shy. Bryan Robinson 2:50 Cool. So, so we'll talk a little bit more about Nuxt here in a second. Because I imagine when we talked about your, your use of the Jamstack. Professionally, we'll talk a lot about that. But what was your entry point into the idea of the Jamstack, or static sites, or whatever that may have been, Debbie O'Brien 3:04 Yeah, so I guess I kind of just fell into it in a way, um, we were working for a company, and they, we had to, like, rebuild the website, it was it was really, really, really slow. And it was development experiences terrible. There's a lot of problems. So we at the time, we researched which framework to use, and, you know, was react or Angular or Vue. But we needed server side rendering, we needed like, you know, good search engine optimization. So a lot of them were a problem for us. And we came across Nuxt. And at the time, they said no, because Nuxt was too young. Debbie O'Brien 3:40 So they basically asked us to build our own framework. So we built our own framework, which was like a statically generated site framework. And we built that which is still in use today by the company. It's an amazing experience to build your own framework, but never do it. Yeah, it worked. Yes, it was great. Yes was fantastic. But you have nobody contributing to it. I don't work there anymore, and nobody's who's going to maintain it? So having a community behind you is, you know, you just need it when you're creating something like that. It was a great experience. But yeah, when we finished it, and we kind of showed it to everyone, we said, Look, this is how it works on it is super fast. And like, the website is still alive today. And it's still super fast. But my recommendation was okay, now that we've built this, now it's time to move to Nuxt. And they said, No, I left the company. I didn't want to work on my framework for the rest of my life. Bryan Robinson 4:38 Yeah, like you said, like creating something like that can be super rewarding, but like long term, it's a problem. Debbie O'Brien 4:44 Yeah, and it has its limitations because you know, if you want to do new things and add more to it, etc. And there was just two of us actually, full time on the project and then a few others that were kind of helping out. So I wasn't the main like the person who was doing all the developing developing work. was working more in the front end side of things and kind of like making sure things work the way they should some more in architecture. So if you take away the person that really built it, which he's now left the companies, well, then you kind of like, you know, I'm not gonna be on my own doing all this No way. Bryan Robinson 5:13 Yeah. Well, and then it's like, if you need to update a feature, do you really want to touch all that code that could then come crumbling down around you? Debbie O'Brien 5:21 Exactly, exactly. I don't know. companies don't trust, like open source, for some reason. But I think that's changed a lot. Now. That was like a couple of years ago. So Bryan Robinson 5:30 Yeah, I hope I hope that there's a nice bit of growing momentum behind, you know, don't reinvent the wheel. Like, let's use open stuff, not close stuff, and most definitely not coated ourselves. Debbie O'Brien 5:41 What a lot of companies do I mean, trivago have their own and it's working perfect for them. And Uber, do they have their own as well? I think it is. So there's quite a few that still are producing their own because it works for them. Because, you know, I don't know. They can do what they want on with a team of developers. And if you have a big team of developers and they're willing to spend time and money because at the end It's money, then yeah, go for it, but it's not necessary. Bryan Robinson 6:03 Well, I also kind of look as much as like, I'm usually gonna derive Facebook overall, like, I like the Facebook model of they needed something, they created the React stuff. And then they said, we're gonna open sources because we sure you know, we really want, you know, the community involved in it. So we have less work to do to Debbie O'Brien 6:20 Exactly. I mean, it's a it's a win win. Right? Bryan Robinson 6:23 Exactly. Cool. So So let's talk about how you're how you're using the Jamstack. Now, now that you don't have to create your own framework, how are you using it professionally? How are you using it personally? Debbie O'Brien 6:32 Yeah, well, before I started in Nuxt, I actually work for an agency and one in my job interview, actually, I kind of said, You know, I want to work with view and with Nuxt. And they said, well, you're going to be in charge. So you can just do the technology. And I was like, I like that. Okay. So I accepted the job because of that, right? And, and I literally Nuxtified the whole company. None of them had view experience, and I taught all the developers view Nuxt it was it wasn't An easy, right, it was a kind of a big battle because you know, you're going into a company that was very back end focused. Debbie O'Brien 7:06 PHP igniter, for example, was what they were used to working with. And you're coming in and you're saying, right, you know, front end is going to take over. And we're gonna, we're going to use Nuxt. And we have all this power now. And it was a challenge. And then, okay, introducing Nuxt is one thing, introducing static sites that was like, you know, why, what do you want to do? What do you mean? What, why do you want to take the server away? What do you want to do that for? Bryan Robinson 7:29 We love our PHP. Debbie O'Brien 7:29 Yeah, so it was, it was really hard work actually convincing people. So yeah, I just fought. I'm a good fighter. I did Taekwondo, so I just kept fighting. And the fighting works, and eventually you win. So we managed to be able to convince the back end team and the, my old boss to basically use Nuxt, and we started using it for a lot of company projects. And when they seen the performance benefits, it was kind of like, okay, so yeah, this is a little bit better. And you know, So we kind of managed to, to basically produce Nuxt websites for pretty much every company that we work to it, which was great. So it was it was a good way of like, you know, Nuxtify the world through the agency. And then I moved on and started with Nuxt. I've only been with Nuxt, three months. So it's quite new. And yeah, it's it's obviously amazing, because now I actually, you know, just get paid to work with Nuxt, whic
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