That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Drew Clements on performance, simplicity, and getting to the fun parts
Quick show notes Our Guest: Drew Clements What he'd like for you to see: Protege.dev - A job board for Junior devs His JAMstack Jams: The simplicity of the Jamstack that allows you to "get to the fun part" His Musical Jams: Fall Out Boy, Pop Punk from the late 90s, early aughts (you know, like the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 soundtrack!) Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask the time tested question, what's your jam and the jam stack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week, we have Drew Clements, a front end developer for Foster Commerce. Bryan Robinson 0:39 All right, Drew. Well, thanks for being on the show with us today. Drew Clements 0:42 Thank you for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:44 Awesome. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing? Drew Clements 0:48 Well, again, my name is Drew Clements. I'm a front end developer with Foster Commerce. We use view a lot on the front end. For fun. I like to play video games. I play guitar. I play paintball. Although I haven't played in a year or two since we've had our first kid. Bryan Robinson 1:06 Yeah, I have I have many hobbies that I have that I have not done nearly as much in the past five years since I had since I had mine. So I totally get that. Yeah. So So what sorts of video games do you play video games? Drew Clements 1:18 I mostly play a bunch of first person shooters. I'm really big on the latest Call of Duty right now. PUBG, all those fun things. Bryan Robinson 1:26 And then you say you're at foster commerce. So I assume that's, that's an e commerce agency or developer. What do you actually do there? Drew Clements 1:35 So we build e commerce solutions for a multitude of clients. Cool. And you say you say mostly in Vue nowadays. Yeah, we for the front end, we use view. And in the last few projects, we've started roping in graph QL. with it. Bryan Robinson 1:51 Okay, very cool. So So obviously, we're using some some semi Jamstack things, at least when it comes to Vue and GraphQL. But what would you say is kind of your entry point into the world of Jamstack? Where did you kind of get into it? Drew Clements 2:04 The entry point for me was when I wanted to probably like a bunch of other developers, I wanted to build myself a blog, because I told myself, if I built it, I would actually write. Drew Clements 2:14 So when I was looking at, you know, different options for how to do that, I came across things like Gatsby in similar frameworks, I didn't really know much about it, I really just kind of dove in headfirst. Bryan Robinson 2:27 Nice. And so so out of curiosity, you you did the technology, you learn the technology to do the thing, right to write the blog. Now I've been through three blogs before I successfully actually started writing, were you able to actually overcome that hurdle and write on the blog. Drew Clements 2:41 I wrote two articles on the blog. That was about as far as I've made it here was here recently, I've been using the dev.to for some of my writing, but I'm actually in the process of rebuilding my blog, I'm not redesigning it. I've already gone down that rabbit hole. But I'm rebuilding it. So I'm gonna be able to use the dev.to platform, kind of as the CMS for my Jamstack Bog Bryan Robinson 3:09 Very nicely, because they they at least there's an RSS feed. And there's probably some other stuff that you can get out of that right. Drew Clements 3:14 Oh, yeah. Bryan Robinson 3:15 Very cool. So so what what kind of technology brought you into the Jamstack? So you said you started researching blog platforms? I think you mentioned Gatsby. But you're also in Vue land. So what are you using nowadays? In terms of that? Or what technologies are you researching? Right now? Drew Clements 3:30 I'm researching ways I can make Nuxt as Jamstack as possible. I really, I really liked the view framework. And Nuxt, I guess, I guess that's server side view. But there, there are some stuff, you can put some things you can do to it. To make it a little more Jamstack. Ease, I'm really trying to look into two ways I can do that. That's part of the research for rebuilding my blog site. It's how I can implement some of those things. Bryan Robinson 3:56 Get it get a static as possible. Like it's as quick as possible, I think. Yeah, I think they're doing a lot of stuff right now around around static routes and stuff like that. So that should be that should be a good investment there. Drew Clements 4:06 I think. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun when I'm still in the kind of the reading and looking around phase I'm, I'm ready to jump into it that Bryan Robinson 4:14 nice. So. So that's kind of personally how you're using the Jamstack. Are you bringing any of that back into your work in e commerce? Or are you primarily working on just a front end with kind of some stationary back ends in place? Drew Clements 4:27 I haven't really had the chance to bring that into any of the professional products that we're working on. A lot of the ones they're just they're larger complex builds that I think we actually within let me backtrack that a little bit within the last week. Within the last week, we've discovered that one of the sites we're building would probably actually benefit from being a Jamstack site. But at this point that the deadlines to close for us Bryan Robinson 4:54 to make that pivot. Yeah, my favorite thing, from what I worked at agencies is discovering a new technology. you're discovering a new a new way of doing something, and really wanting to use it on a client project and then realizing No, we have like, you know, three more weeks left in this project. Okay, quite do that now. So out of curiosity, what you know, without specifics what what kind of things with the Jamstack bring to that project? Is it about like performance, security, flexibility. Drew Clements 5:21 In this case, it would be performance, it's the, there's not a lot of interactivity on the site, there's just a lot of content being generated from a CMS. So from, from a user's perspective, if we could just, you know, grab all that at build time, or whatever that process ends up being, and just generate the static assets of it and hand it to them rather than rather than, you know, there being the front end spa process of it. It would just, it would just give the users a whole lot better experience. Bryan Robinson 5:51 Yeah. And I feel I feel like probably one of the one of the biggest sectors in the web industry that could do well to adopt Jamstack. is e commerce. I feel like some of the tooling isn't quite there yet. Like there are Jamstack type tools for e commerce, but they all feel like they lag behind the the bigger players. Drew Clements 6:10 Yeah, that's, that's one of the things we've been seeing is that it'll be like a nine out of 10 thing like, it has nine of the things we really would like to have. But the 10th one that it's missing, is the one that we absolutely need. Yeah. Bryan Robinson 6:24 I also feel that not just from a Jamstack perspective, but oftentimes just just doing client work like that one thing that we have to have can't use x, y or z framework. Drew Clements 6:33 Yeah. Cool. So Bryan Robinson 6:34 what would you say is your as your current kind of jam in the Jamstack. So obviously, using view or and playing with Nuxt. But what what kind of service or product or philosophy is really keeping you engaged in the way the Jamstack works? Drew Clements 6:49 For me, I would have to say, the the simplicity, or I guess, relative simplicity of the Jamstack philosophy. I remember when I was first starting out, and I wanted to build my own blog. And like, kind of when I was just starting to get like a confident grasp on the front end. I was like, man, I still have to learn all of this back end technologies to actually build something. But then, you know, when I found Gatsby, and I think I looked at Jekyll and Hugo, a couple of other things like that, you know, that just kind of discovered that I could build stuff without having to become a full fledged full stack developer. And maybe part of that was even true before the Jamstack came about. But the Jamstack was, what kind of opened my eyes to that. Bryan Robinson 7:35 Yeah. And there's so many services out there that make it so that you like, even if you just had a static site generator, like, like you mentioned, with Hugo, with Jekyll, you can produce a really nice site. But then if you want to add additional functionality, there's just, there's so many ways to do it without having to, it's gonna sound bad, but without having to learn that like extra piece of technology that the back end requires you want a database, you can just push schema less data to something like fauna DB or something like that. You can just push it out there and have have a cool back end with no, no real effort. Drew Clements 8:04 Yeah. And I was never against learning the backend technologies. I was just so anxious to get something out there that I wanted to do and as quick as possible in it. At that point, it was like, it was something else I'd have to do before I could do the fun part. And I was just really anxious to get to the fun part. Bryan Robinson 8:20 Yeah, definitely. And I mean, myself, being a front end developer in general, I remember, had a portfolio site. This was years and years ago, now that I happen to know a little bit about Python and Django. And so I wrote it in Django, which is, you know, a Python framework. And it works nicely. And it was a learning experience. And then a year later, I needed to update it, I realized that whatever I'd done a year before, had made it so just wasn't going to work. If I push the code live. I was like, oh, okay, I, I can't do anything without breaking both my CMS and breaking my l
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