That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Ohad Eder-Pressman on configuring sites, the minimum needed to do the job, Jamstack as the predominant web architecture
Quick show notes Our Guest: Ohad Eder-Pressman What he'd like for you to see: Stackbit Studio | Jamstack Themes | Keep your eyes on the Jamstack His JAMstack Jams: Simplicity and straightforwardness of the Jamstack | Next.js or 11ty | Sanity | Netlify | Stackbit His Musical Jams: Eclectic from Bossa Novas to Kids Music This week's sponsor: Auth0 This week, we've got Auth0 as a sponsor. While their prowess at authentication is important, they're also releasing a ton of new tutorials and courses on their YouTube channel, including a free course on building a full-stack Jamstack app with Next.js. Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:02 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the timeless question, what is your jam in the Jamstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and today on the podcast, we have Ohad Eder-Pressman. Ohad is the CEO and co founder of the Jamstack company Stackbit. Bryan Robinson 0:20 Before we dive into the interview, though, I want to take a second and thank this week's sponsor off zero, we'll talk a bit at the end about the amazing educational content they're putting out on YouTube. But if you're curious about that Jamstack education, head on over to a0.to/yt for all the videos. Alright, thanks for being on the show with us today. Ohad Eder-Pressman 0:35 Thanks for having me, Bryan. Bryan Robinson 0:40 Cool. So let's start. Let's, uh, let's tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing? Ohad Eder-Pressman 0:49 Sure. So I'm Ohio, I live in work in San Francisco. I'm a co founder and CEO of Stackbit that company building platforms for developers and other stakeholders to produce Jamstack sites very passionate about the Jamstack and kind of involved with the space for a while. What do I do in my free time, I guess hanging out with family families taking up more and more time bigger share of my life. I, I used to grow up on size don't really have a lot of time for that anymore. But I'm very curious person. So you put something in front of me, I just dive in. You know, like, I watched a ton of videos about engineering yesterday, you know, in like how to do construction underwater. So yeah, let's call that a hobby for the next 24 hours. Bryan Robinson 1:43 Sure, sure. I thought so. Are we gonna be seeing some some underwater architecture from Stackbit? Probably probably just watching the videos. Ohad Eder-Pressman 1:51 No, no, no, these things don't always have to intermix? Yeah, I love construction and building things. Very big DIY. Bryan Robinson 2:01 Cool. Very nice. And with the, with the old bonds, I have it, like you grew them, you shaped them, like how many did you have kind of at the most? Ohad Eder-Pressman 2:12 I think I've killed five and then stuff. Ohad Eder-Pressman 2:17 That's, you know, the world gave me a signal and I listened. Bryan Robinson 2:20 Yeah, I actually had one in college. And I kept it alive about six months in a dorm room, and then took it home for the summer to my parents house where it got destroyed, because there was an infestation that happened. And then I never picked it back up. So I was one and done. But it was a lot of fun. It was cool to like, you know, gently clip and gently shape over the course of the six months. Ohad Eder-Pressman 2:39 Yeah, it's very Zen. Very Zen. I love that. Bryan Robinson 2:42 Cool. So what was your entry point into kind of the idea of the Jamstack? Or if you're old school enough into the idea of like static sites and that sort of thing? Unknown Speaker 2:51 Yeah, I actually remember it pretty well. I think it was sometime around 2011 or 2012. And, you know, my background is, as a software developer, mostly self taught, and, and I have, you know, maintain a personal site forever, and have also, you know, kind of maintained personal or semi professional websites for family members and friends and whatnot, I guess we all kind of, you know, have that unofficial responsibility in our life. And so, I was frustrated, you know, I was using WordPress, mostly, and was kind of frustrated by two things. One is just conceptually, you know, engineering wise, or, you know, architecture wise, I couldn't justify to myself, like, Why do I have to deal with posting Why do I have to deal with shared hosting? Why do I need to configure? Why do I need to use you know, even cPanel for things and, and it was, it was frustrating just to have to maintain all of that. In this I mean, if I love minimalism, and you know, bonsai clipping really kind of, you know, gets kind of into the same thing. It's, like the minimum necessary to do something. And the second thing is I just had websites getting hacked. I don't know that all the time, but like, excessively in so so much so that my mind was subconsciously looking for something better. And the what happened one day is I got fed up, and I got this tool. I was on windows at the time, I downloaded a piece of software that simply downloads my entire site, kind of scraped my entire site, and I just dumped it on an s3 bucket and wired it up to my domain and became the happiest person ever and I have like on my website for a long time, I linked to the blog post by Verner Vogel's from the CTO of Amazon from sometime in 2011, where he kind of announced the ability to host websites for myself. Free, which was that really clicked? For me. That was the moment. Bryan Robinson 5:04 I like how it was it was possibly the first, the first WordPress on the Jamstack kind of ideal, export the entire WordPress, HTML and just toss it up on s3 bucket. Ohad Eder-Pressman 5:16 Mm hmm. Yeah, we're seeing some companies do that today as a strategy for people who are still very, very much committed to the WordPress ecosystem, and admin and tools and so forth. But yeah, for me it the gratification was instant. Because you know, like, the moment you do that, you don't have to worry about anything. The next time you do have to worry about something is when you want to edit your site. It's like, hold on, hold on, hold on, what did I do? And so that took me on a journey of, you know, introspection and prototyping, in years of, of just going through different methods of working on my website, which eventually led to a lot of the things that I'm kind of involved with in the Jamstack. Nowadays. Bryan Robinson 5:59 Very cool. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of a lot of tools, a lot of different things you can use. So let's talk about that professional use of the Jamstack. Obviously, Stackbit is a very Jamstack centric company. So how are you? How are you using a professionally what's Jamstack kind of got to do with the Stackbit thing? Ohad Eder-Pressman 6:17 So, you know, I'm a big believer, big, big believer in the Jamstack. And in the concepts of, you know, building sites and serving them statically. And in a very confident that the tooling around all of that is constantly evolving. Stackbit that was born in response to that point in time earlier on where I was, like, how am I gonna edit my website. And, you know, I personally went through a lot in this seven years or eight years that that transpired between 2012 and, and maybe seven years, in 2019, when we started Stackbit, but in essence, that, you know, the Jamstack is a phenomenal way to build website, which is only accessible to developers who are comfortable with the command line. And since I'm very, very confident that it's the it's going to be the predominant way that we build websites, the predominant concept and architecture that replaces lamp, I realized that we're going to need tooling, we're going to need better tooling for developers, we're going to need better tooling for their stakeholders, we're going to need platforms that enable people to create Jamstack sites as easily as it is to create a Wix or Squarespace or even a WordPress site. And, you know, we're going to need tools for marketers and companies who need to do a weak editing to websites that are built in the Jamstack architecture, which you know that Jamstack really hit home on a lot of great benefits, like a great developer experience, and modernize developer experience, the fastest websites in the world, and likely the most secure websites in the world. But at the same time, it sacrificed the world of tooling that is now considered table stakes whenever you talk about creating and editing a website. So if if we really want organizations and people to adopt this, this architecture, we have to give them the tools that enable them to be successful in doing so. And we can't we can't look at something like Squarespace and say, well, that's that's a wiziwig experience. It's consumerized. It's not what we're competing with, you know, I think Jamstack has to compete with that specifically with Squarespace or Wix. But, you know, in general, we have to get the experience to that level and beyond in order to enable this to become the predominant architecture for the web, Bryan Robinson 8:56 I guess. So going forward. The The goal is kind of like we have this developer ecosystem and the developer ecosystem is actually pretty friendly to developers that know about it. But how do we make the Jamstack and all the benefits that the Jamstack brings accessible to those who don't have a developer on staff like so that they can have it as well as we can still have our shiny fancy things in the in the code? Ohad Eder-Pressman 9:19 Well, that or, you know, here's an organization and developers have built a site, right, because developers aren't going anywhere. You know, I, you know, I'm also a big believer in low code and no code, but developers aren't going anywhere. It's just that the work that they're going to be spending their time on is going to be higher impact and more developers, but their stakeholders and let's just call them marketers, for simplification, you know, are going to use othe
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