That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Anthony Campolo on full-stack serverless frameworks
Quick show notes Our Guest: Anthony Campolo What he'd like for you to see: FS Jam - Full stack Jamstack His JAMstack Jams: RedwoodJS His Musical Jams: Radiohead | Bon Iver Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that not so tricky question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have Anthony Campolo. A full stack web developer and RedwoodJS advocate. Bryan Robinson 0:40 All right, Anthony. Well, thanks for coming on the show with us today. How are you doing? Anthony Campolo 0:43 I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. So it's great to be here. Bryan Robinson 0:47 Excellent. I appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? Anthony Campolo 0:52 Yeah, absolutely. So I am a bootcamp student. Someone who is kind of coming to programming from a different area of life, I was originally a music teacher, and then also ran a performing arts summer camp for about four years, and just decided that I wanted to try something else out. And you know, that the journey I got to, to coding is, is long and winding, which we'll talk about a little bit as we as we go on. But um, right now I am at lambda school, and learning full stack web development. And so yeah, that's where I'm at. Right, so your lambda school, you do that kind of full time for a small cohort, right? Yeah. So they have a full time and a part time program. So full time is a nine month program. And then part time is an 18 month program. So I actually started full time, and then switch to part time. So I've, I've done a little bit of both, it kind of just depends on you know, if you're also working to support yourself as well, or if you can really do it kind of full time. So yeah, it's, it's it's nice, because they have that flexibility. So people can kind of choose the schedule that that fits for them. Very cool. Bryan Robinson 2:03 So what do you do outside of obviously, now you're learning to code what's, what's your idea of fun nowadays? Anthony Campolo 2:09 Yeah. So I've gotten just really into open source. And it's the type of thing where I'm doing it both to to eventually help my my career, but it is something that I've really enjoyed. And I've learned a lot about RedwoodJS. In particular, I've spent a lot of time blogging about it. And I've also given a couple meetup talks about it. I did one at Jamstack Denver, and another one for GraphQL Texas. And I'm also now doing some some podcasts. I got both Jamstack podcasts done by Bryans. So that's good. And yeah, so that's kind of where where I'm at now, I'm really kind of deep into into the redwood world. Bryan Robinson 2:51 Very cool. Very cool. So obviously, you're a bootcamp student. So you're picking up development as you go along. But what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack? Was it Redwood? Or was it something something else in the past? Anthony Campolo 3:03 Yeah, so it definitely was way before Redwood and already kind of being familiar with with the Jamstack beta easier to kind of get what Redwood was was going for. But to take it back a little bit. I originally before I was doing any web development stuff, I was actually learning like data science and machine learning stuff, is what I was first trying to get into. And a lot of people who do that type of research, they have their own personal websites as well to talk about the stuff they're working on. And there's a couple where I would scroll the bottom and it would say it was created with Jekyll. And so Jekyll is funny enough static site generator created by the creator of Redwood, Tom Preston-Warner. And so I think that was probably the first time I ever had heard of the term static site. And I ended up not going that route. I ended up just making a WordPress website when I was first getting into like blogging. But then once I started to transition more into web development and learning JavaScript and react in particular that I learned about Gatsby, and so I spun up a Gatsby blog. And I listen to a lot of podcasts. So out here podcast with, with Kyle from from Gatsby, or I'm Matt from Netlify. And so I was I was hearing all these all these people like talking about these ideas, and it was just kind of floating around. So it was it's been a kind of a slow, slow roll into it. But it's definitely it's just like it's a huge, massive thing that's just there. And if you kind of pay attention, it's hard not to poke that bubble every now and then. Bryan Robinson 4:38 Exactly. And so so you said that you were kind of when you're getting into development you were doing you know more on the machine learning side and stuff so that like more computer science II stuff, what's kind of your, your, your plan, where do you want to go with web development, kind of in a post bootcamp world and all that? Anthony Campolo 4:52 Sure. Right now, I mean, I'm really into just kind of like the, the dev advocacy side of it, because I really enjoy creating. In the tutorials, I enjoy going out and talking about these things. And my background as an educator kind of fits really well in that in that niche. And there's you know, there's different kind of corners that that people go for. There's some are kind of more education, focus, some are more outreach, focus, some are more about like, bringing feedback back from the community. And so redwoods been cool, because all the kind of mechanisms for feedback are already in place. So I see myself more just like getting out and explaining it to people like, what is this? How does it work, and then that's like, kind of the whole role that I've kind of monopolized. Bryan Robinson 5:41 Nice, you've got kind of that that arts background, which definitely helps when it's like framing the story of how to do that education, too, that's always a handy thing to kind of have in your tool belt. Anthony Campolo 5:50 Yeah, you definitely need to be able to put things into a narrative for people to really want to, like, pay attention, especially for technical things. But I find that the history of this thing is is so fascinating. And I've actually spent a lot of time writing about kind of this transition from static site generators into the Jamstack. And now even like the Jamstack is turning into something else that we're not quite sure what it is yet. Because we've we've gotten rid of the acronym and now Jamstack is stands for nothing. And it's just kind of like an architecture. And so I'm really interested in those kind of ideas of like, Where is the Jamstack going? Bryan Robinson 6:27 Definitely I think, I think that there are so many new technologies kind of coming out Redwood being among them next JS having like, all these new ideas around what static and and like, server side and what these different pieces bring to the table and how they can kind of be intermingled? I'm kind of curious, like, how does Redwood see itself? Cuz I know it's a it's a full stack front end kind of application builder. But what what's the community kind of see in terms of like, where it's going? Anthony Campolo 6:54 Yeah, so it's called a full stack serverless framework for the Jamstack. So you have the Jamstack part, which is about having your front end be just static assets that you can serve from a globally distributed CDN. And then the full stack part is, how do we get those same benefits attached to the database and the back end? So it's about how do we also get that back end to be distributed globally, which, like fauna, db is doing a lot of really interesting research there. And then you have the serverless part of it, which is, how do you get your whole application to be sort of smushed into just these like AWS, lamda handlers, or, you know, Google Cloud Functions or Azure Functions. So the back end is set up in a way. So it's easily deployable to these sort of Functions as a Service serverless back ends. So it's, and then also, I didn't even mention graph QL. Like graph qL, is kind of what ties the two together. And then so there's a lot of there's a lot of tech that goes into it. And it takes a long time to kind of wrap your head around, which is why I like spent a lot of time writing about it and talking about it. And you know, I have hours and hours of material about it at this point. Bryan Robinson 8:15 How are you kind of pursuing kind of redwood right now? Like professionally, personally, what what are you building with it? What what are the applications that you kind of see optimized around what Redwood can do? Anthony Campolo 8:26 Yeah, so the first thing I did was just go through the tutorial. And this is what I would really recommend everyone who is getting into this, you should just go through the whole tutorial and kind of build out that project because they started with what they call tutorial driven development, which is sort of a play on README driven development, which is another term Tom was using a while ago. And the idea being that you create the tutorial, and then you build the framework to make the tutorial work. And so it's, it's a really crucial part of it. And now that I've kind of gone through that, it what it does is it has you deploy to Netlify for your front end, and then Heroku for your back end, does that have a Postgres database, so I'm really interested in kind of like other deploy targets and other databases you can link it up to so I wrote an article about how to connect it to fauna dB. And then that was also deployed on Vercel. And then there's other people who are doing work with like, the serverless framework, and like Azure, Postgres. So I'm interested in kind of like, now that I know how to build out a redwood project is like, what are the different ways we can deploy it? And what are the different ways that we can get it out actually, onto the
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