That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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REMIX! Tamas Piros on islands architecture, Astro and media usage
Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:13 Hello, everyone, welcome to another stacked episode of That's My Jamstack. The podcast where we ask that best-of-all question, what's your jam in the Jamstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson . And this week, we've got another. That's My Jamstack REMIX. Bryan Robinson 0:32 We welcome back to the show Tamas Piros. Tamas Piro is a developer experience engineer at Cloudinary, and the founder and educator at Jamstack.training. Let's go ahead and dive in. Bryan Robinson 0:54 All right, well, Tamas. Thanks so much for coming on the show again, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you very much for for having me. It's good to be back. Yeah, as I say so. So this is another one of our remix episodes where we're having a guest that was previously on two seasons ago, two years ago, almost to the day on this recording. We talked in 2019. Now, this will probably come out in January, and it's December right now, but it's almost two years. So I guess give us give us an update. What are you doing nowadays for work and for fun, and all that good stuff. Tamas Piros 1:26 Okay, so work didn't change that much. So if people listen to that episode, or people know who I am, then I still work at Cloudinary. The only thing that changed is that I am no longer a developer evangelist, but I am now a developer experience engineer, which is more, you know, esoteric, so to speak. It's a it's a fancy term describing pretty much the same stuff, in my opinion. But I like that now. I'm, I'm recognized as an engineer, which I am, as opposed to just, you know, someone thought that I was a priest, because I'm an eventually. Bryan Robinson 1:58 So evangelist was always a weird title in general. Tamas Piros 2:01 Yeah. Yeah. And and yeah, so it's just more described what I do. But yeah, in terms of that, you know, no, no real, real changes. Tamas Piros 2:09 What I do for fun, I still do, you know, Jamstack, I see lots of stuff for Jamstack, I started to sort of look into what I label emerging technologies, which is, you know, not necessarily relevant to the Jamstack, you know, kind of things like rust or WebAssembly, that kind of stuff. In fact, I've done a lot of talks on web assembly in the past, you know, two years. And it's, it seems to be a very popular topic. But that's, you know, that's not related to jumps. So let's talk about that. Now. Bryan Robinson 2:37 I feel like there's a lot of those emerging technologies play a role in the Jamstack. But it's not actually what a Jamstack person is going to be worrying about. It's just it's happening on the backend, like some of the systems get built in Rust for speed and some other stuff and WebAssembly, maybe one day, because like, that'll can compile down to JavaScript in the end, right. Tamas Piros 2:56 Yeah, I mean, you know, WebAssembly, is what I like to say. And this was the title of my talk as well, which is supercharge your JavaScript into web assembly, right? So JavaScript has API's very similar to you know, you have a Fetch API, you have all these these browser API's. And so there's an API specifically for web assembly. And then you can just have a C++ project or projecting rust compiler down to WebAssembly. And then just to consume it using JavaScript within your browser. And in all these modern, all the modern browsers that are out there today can not only compile and work with JavaScript, but they can also do the same with WebAssembly. Right. So you get this built into every browser that that's out there today, which is pretty cool. Bryan Robinson 3:40 Yeah. And so, so Cloudinary, so Cloudinary. And if I remember correctly, two years ago, you had just started a side project called Jamstack.training, right? How's that been going? Tamas Piros 3:50 That's, that's, that's right. So yeah, I think when we first thought I had one course on there, which was a very generic sort of introduction to the Jamstack. You know, no tech involved, just just me explaining in, obviously, in terms of what the Jamstack is, and then decide became very popular, you know, in this two years, I know have, you know, very close to 2000 students, I have 11 courses up there. And all of those courses are still free. Tamas Piros 4:18 And I am now you know, sort of applying or making some changes to that site purely because I've been doing this for free for two years. And I'm using a platform, I have a domain these costs money. And I see that a lot of people love the content, I did experiment with adding the price tag to the courses. And then signups just literally stopped. So that wasn't that good. It wasn't working. And then ever since the courses are free again, I get the usual, you know, 356 10 signups per day, which is really nice. And so what I'm doing now is I am now accepting sponsors and I'm doing sponsorships. So, I did talk to some companies, but I'm just going to say this here as well, in this recording that if there's any company or anyone who wishes to sponsor, just like the training, I have three packages, you know, you can, you know, just put your logo on, you can have like a custom landing page, you can have your own video course, I can produce a video course for your produce and record a video course there's lots of options. So I would be, you know, I would love to have some conversation with people and organizations about this. And, and also, I'm, you know, in parallel to that, I'm recording a brand new course now. Tamas Piros 5:40 So I'm looking at Astro, which is a, an interesting tool. From from what I've seen, I'm putting together a sample application with it now. And then I'm going to create a another free video course about Astro, just covering these basics. And you know, I'm still not sure what I'm going to build, although I have an idea, Mike is going to be probably a very simple landing page, showcasing the capabilities of Astro. Nice. Bryan Robinson 6:06 So I think it's relatively obvious just from this early part of the conversation, how you're using Jamstack philosophies, obviously, you're teaching a lot of them. And I'm assuming Jamstack training is built using Jamstack technologies, but I kind of want to sidetrack a little bit since you brought up Astro, I've only scratched the surface of Astro, I've done kind of my first lap in it as well, what kind of drew you to wanting to do some some coursework around that. Tamas Piros 6:30 So what I tried to do as part of Jamstack.training was also to you know, pick a number of technologies that seems to be popular, or have the opportunity to become popular. And, and I kind of, you know, mixed and matched the, you know, static site generator with an API with a with a CMS and deployment platform. And then, you know, I said, let's use eleventy, with, you know, strappy and deploy it on on Netlify, for example. And, you know, the, the idea behind Jumpstarter training was always, you know, to teach people how to use technologies, as I said, that have the opportunity to become popular, and I see as shown to be super powerful. And I, you know, I really enjoyed the talk, I think it was I'm forgetting who did the tour, but it was part of the Jamstack conf a couple of months ago,transitional apps, the that one as well. But there was a very specific talk to about Astro, I think like he was like introduction, or introductory talk to Astro. And I looked at I thought this, this is good, this is powerful, you know, how it can bring, you know, react and view components and know JavaScript, and then, you know, have this whole island architecture. And I think, having a course about first of all explaining what this island architecture is, you know, how to do you know, static site generation, and how to just have a React component without JavaScript. And you know, these are very good learning points, especially for the Jamstack. So this is why, you know, I also choose to, to create a course on Astro. Bryan Robinson 8:04 So you, you kind of name drop there, the islands architecture, what does that mean? Tamas Piros 8:09 So the island architecture is really, you know, you defining, it's almost like an advanced way to think about component based development, right. So in component based development, you will have a Navigation component, you have a component for for an image carousel, you have a header, a footer, all the components that basically make up your page, almost like Lego pieces. And it's Island architecture, you kind of take that to the next level. That is this is just my view of it, and my sort of explanation of it. And so you now control whether a, you know, image Caruso, which, generally speaking has a lot of JavaScript involved, probably, you know, it's close to around maybe testing, you know, event handlers for clicks. So, you know, control whether that component or that component, Demetri relative components should be loaded at, you know, at load time at build time, you know, at an idle time. And you can very much control this using gasher, which is really nice. So, you can say, you can just drop in components that are purely for layout purposes. And you can say, well, those do not require JavaScript, and then you just delay the loading of a component that has JavaScript because either is you're not visible on first load. So it's, you know, it's not above the fold content. And so your initial load will also be very, very fast, right? Because you're now almost deferring JavaScript and a component that requires a JavaScript to a later point in time you're not blocking the main thread. And you're just classic web performance. Routers from from there Bryan Robinson 9:44 every I feel like and that was that was kind of a setup question, right? Because I actually am super jazzed about islands architecture. I think it is. Like it's what I'm most excited about for 2022 Tamas Piros 9:55 Testing my knowledge then I feel like university. Bryan Robinson 9:59 No, I was just kind of like what I was like, let's
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