The Overlap
The Overlap
Gatsby, Work/Life Balance, and Building Community with Jason Lengstorf
Jason Lengstorf is an advocate, engineer, and sometimes designer. As "Human Duct Tape", Jason tells us about the little-bit-of-everything he does at Gatsby. On this episode, we talk to Jason about what's new with Gatsby (Themes! Preview beta!), building a positive open-source community, how to connect technology to build awesome stuff, and how important it is to fully disconnect from the day job to stay creative.
Want to hear more from Jason? You can catch him on May 6th at Gatsby Days in NYC.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gatsby-days-nyc-tickets-59556433897
You can find him on Twitter @jlengstorf or catch on Thursday mornings on Learn with Jason at 9AM PST on https://twitch.tv/jlengstorf
Questions? Email us
Tweet us @lovelettersco or @mistertrost
For more episodes + show notes, visit
Alright. The overlap is a show about the intersection of design and front end development. I'm Alex, a front end developer from new haven, Connecticut. And with me as always is my cousin and cohost L.
Elle:Hey, I'm Elle designer from Philadelphia on the show. We share our experience with each other about design and coding. We don't know everything, but we share what we do know and we laugh about what we don't. Today on the show we have a special guest. Jason, I can't pronounce your last name. So how about you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Jason:Uh, okay. Yeah, my name is Jason Lank store and I am currently operating as human duct tape at Gatsby. Uh, which means that I'm doing a little bit of engineering, a little bit of design, a little bit of Dev-rel and a lot of other stuff as well.
Elle:Ah, I love the human duct tape thing. So I've read an article about the Boeing jets and there was actual chewing gum holding something together on one of the planes. Doesn't inspire confidence.
Alex:So that's Jason?
Elle:But that's you.
Jason:Yeah. In a way. I am the chewing gum holding the ship together. I'm kidding. That's not at all what I do.
Alex:Without me everything is screwed. It's okay. Don't worry. No one's going to listen to this. No one from Gatsby will hear this. You're fine. Consider this a therapy session. It's totally okay.
Elle:He works at Hatsbe not Gatsby. It's different.
Alex:Don't worry Jason, we will spell your name wrong so they can't search for it.
Jason:Yeah. Perfect. Uh, I, I don't know if you saw there, Sean Wang from Netlify put this out the other day. There were like four separate podcasts that, uh, that I went on. Yeah. Yeah. All of them either misspelled Gatsby or my name.
Alex:Right.
Elle:By accident or on purpose?
Jason:I think unintentionally. No Way. It's, it's intentional. Yeah, that's definitely by accident. Okay.
Speaker 3:Alex, can you make sure we do both of the spellings right? Cause I'm not a speller.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's just going to be comma, comma, comma. We're, we're going to do Gastby, Gatsby Lengstorf for Langstroth. All of the above was going to hurt all the SEO. Yeah. Jack Langston from Hatsby.
Speaker 2:This is why I had to come up with a, with a pseudonym. I think I'm, what was my name now? Blitz Jackson.
Speaker 4:Blitz Jackson. It's pretty baller. I love, yeah. Yeah. Honestly I think it was like your WWE title or something. I Dunno.
Speaker 2:Well, when I get out of web development and go into like weather forecasting,
Speaker 4:oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Jason:And now we'll go to blitz for the weather, But also like blitz Jackson off the turn buckle with a steel chair. Like that's also, that's also pretty good. So yeah, I think that's, so, Jason, um, could you just briefly kind of tell us about how you got to being human duct tape
Speaker 5:Gatsby? Sure. Um, so I have kind of a weird journey into tech. I started out as a musician and um, we were touring really heavily, like 200 shows a year ish. And I was living in a van. We were driving all over the United States. Uh, also we were making like zero money. We could basically negotiate exactly enough money to get from one venue to the next because that was the threat that we held was like, look, you can either give us enough gas money to get to the next place or we live with you now.
Speaker 4:We,
Speaker 5:uh, during that time, you know, we were functioning band, so we needed merchandise, we needed a website, we needed a coordination with like street teams in different cities to hang posters and all that stuff. And there wasn't really anybody to do it. So I half volunteered, half kind of had to, um, and did a lot of our merge design. I started out by customizing our myspace page and had a little bit of fun with that. So I did that a bunch of times and then started learning more and more about, um, all of it. You know, I was like, hey, like maybe I can build an actual website and maybe I can learn flash so that I can embed our music into the site and maybe I can learn PHP so that I can let the other band members posts, like tour updates. And it was just kind of fun for me, right? Like I kept going deeper and deeper. And then when the band broke up, uh, I realized that I was a terrible musician, but I was actually kind of okay as a, as like a designer and developer. So I started, uh, an agency and while I was at the agency, you know, and, and like I say agency, like at first it was not an agency. It was like me moonlighting desperately trying to convince somebody to give me money to build things on the Internet. But it grew over time into an actual agency. And, uh, while I was there at first my, my role was like talk to somebody and then I would spend a lot of time designing and building a website and the gradient shifted to where at the end I didn't write code or design anything. I was basically like a sales and customer support and management and all the admin stuff that, uh, that I had always thought I would never do. That was like all I did.
Speaker 4:You, you hired yourself out of those positions?
Speaker 5:I, well, I did not realize what was happening. And I hired for the positions, I understood which design and development. And as I found people who were capable of doing those things, I ended up cornering myself into the stuff that I didn't understand. Um, and so by necessity I had to learn how to manage a business and I would say that I did a fair to middling job. Um, and then I got to the point where I was like, okay, I don't like this anymore. Like I'm not building things, I'm not designing things. This is not fun. So I sold the agency and I went back to consulting. Um, and the consulting that I did was kind of using the fact that I have a little bit of sales experience and a little bit of copywriting experience and a lot of design and Dev and the, the team that had hired me was kind of treating me as like a one person r and D lab. So they had me on contract to just try stuff out and take it to market and see if anybody would buy it. And it was, it was like this idea of like MVP, but like really scaled down, cause I can do about 80% of, of any well, of most many jobs and like 50% of others. I'm the Jack of all trades kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Like enough enough that I could limp along to like prove whether or not a thing had legs. And so I did that as a consultant for awhile. It was a blast. It was like the best job I ever had because I just got to do the interesting parts to me. Um, cause you know, I'm the kind of person like I really love like chaos and ambiguity and, and defining problems and figuring out a way to solve them when everything feels like murky and they're my Kryptonite. They've grown needs of rules within which I work and that's my job. But this is what I've been finding that I think is really interesting is like there. So every business has maturity levels, right? And so there's the, there's the, the early phase and you can call it whatever you want. The, the terminology that I've heard recently that I like is a pioneers town, settlers and city planners. And if you look at like the pioneer standpoint, like a new business is completely unmapped territory. So you, you have people who are just into that. They're like, well, what can I invent from nothing? What, what can I create out of the chaos? And so I've always kind of put myself in that category as the thing starts to mature, then you have like the next iteration of people, the, the, you know, the town's settlers and those are the people who see something that has promise and they want to, they want to like build it into what it could be. They want to take it from this concept or this like slightly proven idea into a mature, like it's a thing now. It's, it's real. It's got like[inaudible] people work there and it's like got a system and then like, it can function without everybody being all hands all the time. Or the town has a saloon and a sheriff. Right, exactly. Somebody cleans up the garbage, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, and then as it really matures, then you move into this like kind of city planner mode where it's like, okay, well now that we've got a mature product, how do we, how do we like legitimately scale this? And these are the people who would take like a good business and turn it into like the McDonald's model where it's bulletproof. Like it doesn't matter who's in there, they've got a checklist, they can follow it, they can knock this stuff out and you know, it's in, in every business needs, every type of, of employee. Um, and the hardest part I think is that a lot of times we tend to either over undervalue people at one scale or the other. And also we have a tendency to like miss level people where we'll take somebody who has maybe shown a lot of promise as a pioneer and we're like, cool, we've got this product that's like super mature and we need to make it better. Can you go run that? And then they get there and they hate it that it's a mess. Yeah, exactly. Right. So you, so figuring out like what somebody strength is and where they're going to struggle and then trying to put them in the right place. And this has been a big part of my journey is getting this wrong a bunch of times because I was the guy who went to IBM and flounder, you know, I made a couple big, a couple big improvements and then I got bogged down in meetings and I got mad and I flipped some tables and I like look for something else to do. Um, I didn't actually want a Gatsby is in that framework. Would you say Gatsby's town like sort of has a town that has a saloon and a sheriff and, yeah, I think so. Different parts of Gatsby or at different levels. You know, the, the open source project is pretty stable. We're were like bordering on city planner now. Um, because we are, we're a version too. We've got like a stable team. We've got a great community, we've got lots of processes in place to make sure that we're reviewing pull requests quickly and getting issues answered fast. Um, on the the cloud side, like our commercial business, we're, well we're pretty firmly in the, like maybe transitioning into town settlers, but we've been making stuff up as we go along for the last year. Um, the community, should I explain real quick what Gatsby is? Oh, sure. Yeah. For listeners who might not know. Yeah. So, uh, Gatsby is two things. It's an open source framework and it's a company. So the, the open source framework is a, um, we've been calling it a progressive web app generator. And depending on where you stand, maybe it's a framework, maybe it's a tool, maybe it's a platform, but the, the general idea is because of the way that data has been decentralized and you can use data from, you know, a headless CMS from whatever your favorite Api is, from excel sheets, markdown files, wherever you want to keep it. Um, Gatsby pulls all of that together, puts it into a unified data layer. We use graph QL for that. And then you're able to build out Uis and various app functionality using react, uh, and this graph QL layer together, which we then compile down into static html that once it hits the Browser rehydrates into a fully functional app. So, um, the general idea is that we can take data from anywhere, make a really nice developer experience out of working with that data and building out a, an experience for the end user. So the developer experience is good, the end user experience is good, and we handle a lot of the boiler plate stuff. So you're not setting up and configuring webpack or babble or your build process. It's just going to work. We're going to do, um, industry best practices are kind of baked into it so that if we call it making the right thing, the easy thing, if you take all the defaults and all the shortcuts and only work on the, the thing that you have to work on and none of the boiler plate or tuning, you're going to get an excellent experience out of the box. And that's kind of what we've, what we've built our reputation on it. I think why people are excited about Gatsby is it takes all the Yak shaving out of building websites. You just get to sit down and build something.
Speaker 3:So, uh, what is the difference between the Gatsby cloud and the Gatsby open source?
Speaker 5:Right. So what I just explained is the, uh, the open source like framework. Okay. Gatsby, uh, incorporated or the commercial cloud entity is, I'm a still new, so all we have right now is, is one product that we call preview. Um, but what we're, what we're looking at it as is kind of like when you build a static site, there are things that are like really, really good about that. The developer experience is great. The, the, the Dev ops story deployment, all that stuff is pretty fun to work on. The stuff that's not fun is, what about when you need somebody who's not a developer to be able to like preview content or what about, um, all of these, like, you know, it's a static site, so you have to build that static site and that can get kind of slow unless you do these specific things. So Gatsby commercial, uh, or Gatsby cloud or Gatsby Inc, whatever you want to call it is the, we're providing the infrastructure and the technical domain expertise as a service so that you can like use preview for collaborative, a collaborative early review of content as it changes so that your marketing team doesn't have to set up a local instance of Gatsby. Um, they get a private URL, they make edits to their Contentful dashboard and they see those changes on a preview link that they can share then for review before they have to publish it live. Oh,
Speaker 3:so it's almost, it sounds like it's almost like a, like a staging site where so that like, people who aren't developers can like put their stuff in there and see what it looks like exactly. But the back end of it is built on the technology that Gatsby uses. Yeah, I
Speaker 5:mean we're, we're sort of like running a Gatsby instance in the cloud, like okay. Dolan version on. So, yeah, so like what we're doing is, is handling the, the scaling problems and the, the like the web hooks that you need so that the CMS can notify Gaspe to update so that you're not having to like stop and restart it and all these things that like you can absolutely build it yourself, but you're going to need somebody to work on it like for quite a while and then somebody to it and you have to pay for that infrastructure. So what we're doing is we're basically saying like for roughly the cost of just what the infrastructure would, would put you out for a big company to manage this, you can just have this and it will just work. Um, and we want to do that for additional things too. We've got a backlog of ideas of other ways that we're going to make the process of developing with Gatsby will more pleasant so that you as a developer don't have to think about the devops story or the like monitoring story. You know, we, we've got ideas for maybe we can like do static accessibility in a analysis and like tell you when a regression has been introduced there or you know, the same with her flake. We, we've got a lot of ideas that will slowly be trickling out. We're working on actively now, but like I said, we're pretty wild west at the moment in terms of where things are. We're, we're kind of solidifying a lot of those commercial ideas.
Speaker 6:Gotcha. No, I'm with, with Gatsby. Um, where do you kind of see yourselves in the website marketplace? Like are you, um, and, and if, if you can't comment to this totally fine, but I'm like, do you see yourself kind of coming in as like a newer version of wordpress or a stronger Squarespace or just kind of like a faster Jekyll, like, like what market share with Gatsby trying to capture in the next five years that's, it's already that kind of occupied by something else.
Speaker 5:I would say that were additive. Like, so, okay. The way I think about it is it's very cooperative because basically what we're doing is we're making it easier to use other tools. So like wordpress, um, has a really good offering experience, but there you wise have been kind of, they get some criticism, you know, they, they're a little slow. They're kind of hard to work with if you don't want to write twig templates and you're kind of like, okay, now you've got to do that. Um, same with Shopify. Brutal. Shopify has this amazing inventory management set up for like handling ecommerce. But if you don't want to write liquid templates, then the Ui is kind of a pain. Um, or worse, if you're working at a company where you need both an ecommerce store and a blog, then are you going to use wordpress and shoe horn ecommerce into it or you Shopify and shoe horn a blog into it. Um, and so what we see is like, rather than like taking market share from wordpress or Shopify, we're saying, why not use both? Like, we will make it easy for you to hook the Shopify Api and the wordpress API into that same common data layer inside of Gatsby so that you can build with a wordpress blog and a Shopify powered ecommerce system all on the same website but using modern tools. So it's super high performance and you can find lots of developers to do it. Uh, you know, because developers want to write react and the marketplace for finding a react developer is high. Whereas the marketplace for finding somebody who exclusively does Shopify templates, like it's not small, lots of people do that, but it's, it's smaller than the number of people who can do react javascript in general. Right, exactly. Exactly. So it, so from what you were saying about like wordpress and Shopify and like, like shoehorning these things together, it sounds like Gatsby is sort of the duck tape of Internet tools as well. To circle back to your duck tape human thing. Yeah. Our, our, uh, our cofounders, Sam is, he coined the term content Mesh. And I really like that because it's this idea that content has been decentralized. Like you can, if you want to run a website, you don't necessarily want to have to find one tool that can do pretty good with all the types of content you want. You want to use the best tool for each type of data. If I have tabular data, like I'm going to list out a, uh, like I on my website, I have a list of speaking engagements and I want to use basically an excel sheet for that. I use air table, um, because it's, it's tabular data. And then for my blog, I'm a developer. I like to write mark down, so I use markdown for that. But for, you know, for something else, you know, maybe I, if I wanted to put a, I don't know, I don't know, like a podcast on there, I'm going to want to use soundcloud or Libsyn or something like that. I don't necessarily want to have to like choose between all of those tools. I want to use the tool that I want to use. And what Gatsby does with this unified data layer is it creates, uh, you know, the content Mesh and that content mesh is this idea that we take the data from wherever it lives and create a, like a easy to access normalize layer in through graph QL that all like no matter what source it came from, developers access it in the same way. And that makes it really easy, especially like for agencies now you're not creating like Adobe experience manager specialist and Kentico cloud specialists and wordpress specialist. You just have like javascript developers who know how to write a graph QL query and they're literally capable of working on any platform like brand new platform who cares, feed it into Gatsby and it's going to be exactly the same. So the, the share-ability the portability of skills, the um, the ability to use like a design system, like yeah, write a design system in react and now you can use it on your wordpress site, your Shopify site, your whatever site. Um, and we're, and we're trying to take that a step further with themes, which I think we're going to talk about that in a little bit so I won't launch into it now, but you know, we're, we're really trying to work on this idea of like Gatsby should be kind of the equalizer because we want it, we want it to be something where you're not forced to make these big trade offs of like, you know, data management great, but the Ui is not so good, but this great Ui has terrible data management. So we have to weigh the trade off and choose the one that's best for our business. Like, no, forget that. Use, use the best of both things and we'll be the unifying later. The layer that makes it work. That's really smart. I let the content meshes is exactly the right word actually now that you describe it. Like that makes so much sense. Yeah. Sam's a smart guy.
Speaker 7:I mean you could take credit for that. We're not going to, he's not going to listen to this. Don't worry.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Jason, who's and I am, I am,
Speaker 4:it looks like a Norman Bates situation. Oh Geez. Yes, yes. My Co founder Sam. Hold on Jason. Jason, I can see your face. Okay. It's just you doing a different voice cutting all this snuff on it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:This is finding the editing room floor.
Speaker 4:That's okay.
Speaker 7:This is good stuff. We'd like to have fun. Um, but this isn't fun.
Speaker 4:No, I'm so that's be a serious business. Yeah, I know. I know.
Speaker 7:I'm actually a pretty huge fan and I'm speaking to the basically uh, bringing the data. It does just like the plugins that Gatsby has, like speaking to what you're saying of, you know, you can pull on this, you can pull in that like as we have so many plugins that just like if you want an RSS feed to power your blog or whatever, just you, you grabbed that plugin and you are ready to go. And it's, it's a, it's a fantastic developer experience. I really enjoy it. Um, so do you see things like Contentful and sanity and I'm not trying to leave any of the other, uh, like 20 of them off, but like all, all those kind of like headless CMS is as kind of like the quality content creation experience that wordpress kind of has in their admin panel. But like they kind of lacked that, that solid Ui and the, the fast static front end like is his Contentful that resource for um, non developers to create blog posts and to create that content?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think so. The, there's been kind of a rash of, of headless CMS is, and it's really exciting because it's, it's basically a lot of variations on a theme. So if you look at like sanity, sanity has a focus on like customization and kind of real time and it's very developer focused where you can do, you can customize the dashboard and do all this cool stuff. Um, something like Contentful is really focused on the content creators themselves and giving them a lot of flexibility through these like kind of blocks and embedded, ah, embedded content sections and content relationships, which is, you know, they, it's, it's interesting because they all like more or less, any content management system is doing one thing. It's, it's allowing people to put data into a place where it can be accessed later. Like that's, that's the goal. But each of them does it in a, in a unique way. You know, graph CMS is doing it through this, uh, this very interesting graph, a graph QL layer with, um, kind of block based pages and that sort of thing. Um, the, but each one has, it's, it's, I would say target audience, which is who they're expecting to use it. And you know, depending on what your history is, as you know, a developer, designer, content marketer or whatever, you're going to find one that matches your particular set of needs. Um, or that just like meets your aesthetic. Like, I like the way this one feels to use. And the cool thing about it is that they've built them because they're headless. The intention is that you aren't putting restrictions on the people who aren't managing content and you're saying, yeah, I'm going to manage my content like this. And then you as a developer just access this API and do whatever you want, you can load it into, you know, so we like something like Gatsby or you could just like write a query that says like, Hey, go to this Api endpoint for the headless CMS gave me back my data and I'm going to write custom javascript or PHP or whatever to build out this page. And you know, that's like, that's it. So it's, it's really interesting to see them all doing that. But yeah, I think, you know, it's each, yeah. I don't know. I'm kind of, I think I'm about to repeat myself here. I, uh, that was the original question.
Speaker 6:Um, no, so, so basically like to kind of not rephrase it, but to kind of give a little more depth behind the question. Um, I see people who are currently wordpress developers and they want to get into Gatsby and they want to create Gatsby sites for clients. But those clients are coming to them saying, I want to word press site. Why? Because that's just what you get, right? You just do word press sites. Um, you know, I have a restaurant, I want to have a blog and I just want to word wordpress site and selling them on Gatsby. Um, you know, kind of requires that. All right, well, well once your gone developer like what am I going to be working with? And kind of having that, um, the, the admin panel, the interface of some kind, um, it's kind of necessary to sell those clients on that because they're not going to go in and write and mark down. Right. They're not going to have that ability. So to kind of give them that comfortable user or content creation experience is essential to sell those clients on a Gatsby site versus a wordpress site.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, I I wouldn't even say versus, because we have a wordpress plugin. And so you can, you can let your science use wordpress and then build the Ui in Gatsby. And, and we actually love that, that pattern because we've got support for like plain wordpress as well as advanced custom fields. So like whatever wild stuff you want to do with wordpress, we can support it on, on the Gatsby side. Um, it's a, yeah, so I mean the, so, but you bring up a really valid point, which is that like when you get back to this kind of bespoke world where it's a headless CMS, which means custom code on, on the client side, um, what does that mean for, for the people who would traditionally just build a wordpress site. And I guess the, the, the point that I would make the, I guess the counter argument I would offer is like a wordpress theme is still just custom code and it's just custom code following like a standard wordpress set of instructions. So the question is not necessarily like, what do I do when I want to make changes? Like, sure, you'll still use your admin Ui, uh, and with whether you're using wordpress or Contentful or whatever. Um, the bigger question is what is the network like, what is the, the ecosystem like when I need new things. And this is where I think wordpress really want and why they, why they have such dominance on the internet is that their ecosystem is so robust and it covers everything you want to forum. Cool. We got a wordpress plugin for that. You want to an ecommerce store. Cool. We got a whole suite of, of wordpress plugins for that. Um, anything that you could think of. I want to add a feedback widget. Cool. Install this wordpress plugin. And that's where I think that Gatsby has the potential to really shine because you know, we have I think like somewhere around 800 plugins at the time of recording and they're doing the same thing. Like, you know, like you said, you want an RSS feed, great. We've got to plug in for that. You want to, uh, you want to add Google analytics? Great. We've got a plug in for that. You Want Seo? Great. We've got to plug in for that. Um, each of those things is, is something that we, you know, ecosystem is what makes or breaks a platform. I think because we as the core were like Gatsby team or the wordpress core developers, there's no way we can keep up with scale of demands. Um, so you know, if we want to keep up with that feature development, we need to provide a really robust ecosystem and really robust channels for people who aren't core team members to expand the functionality and the feature set of, of the platform framework tool. Um, and so that's kind of what we're, what we're looking at is like we want the argument over whether you go to Gatsby or wordpress, we don't want that to be an argument. It should be like, yeah, of course you would, like wordpress is a great content management tool and Gatsby is a great Ui tool and both of them have really robust ecosystems. And so like high five, let's rock and roll. You don't have to choose, you don't have to choose between them. You can use them together and you can, you can mash other tools onto your system as well. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I think is like the one, the one thing that Gatsby is uniquely good at is, you know, we, we're not expecting you to mash whatever it is that you want to use into our constraints. Like, you know, wordpress is set up for posts and pages and so anything that you want to add as like ecommerce or whatever, you're kind of shoehorning into a data model that was designed for posts and pages. Gatsby doesn't have any of those preconceptions. So whatever you're adding in, it's like, what do you have? Cool. I'll use that. Um, and that, that makes it a little more flexible for this, you know, this content mesh idea. Um, because it's not coming in with a set of rules or constraints, it's just kinda like it can you, is it data great. We can use that. Do you think that makes it a little more accessible and friendly to designers who aren't necessarily heavy coders? Um, I so I think that Gatsby is more accessible to designers but for a different reason. Okay. Um, so the, the major problem that I see in a lot of development is there's just a huge amount of friction to get started. You know, if you want to build a website and you want that website to use javascript, you know, 10 years ago you would open a browser and you would type something in a text file and you would save it and reload the browser and you would see something change. Um, and that was like how you started open a text file, open that text file on your browser. Now to do this, you have to like, okay, so I have to download something like I have to do to get vs code, I need a command line, I have to install webpack and then I have to write a configuration file for that. And then I have to set up Babel and there's like all of this stuff that has to happen before you can even get hello world on the screen. I don't even know what any of that is. Exactly. And this is the problem, like somebody who wants to wear the website and that's[inaudible]. This is exactly the problem is that we're like, hey, we want people to build websites. And they're like, yeah, I want to build a website. What do I do? And we're like, learn 15 tools and it's not a, that's not a feasible it, we're not, it's not welcoming beginners. And so it leads to this kind of divide where people who don't feel confident in like the landscape of javascript just say, oh well that's probably too hard for me. And then they go for low friction tools. They'll install a wordpress theme or they'll use something like wix or Squarespace. Um, and, and you know, those are great tools because there are almost zero friction to start. You log in through a web interface, you click a couple buttons, you got yourself a website, it's Rupp and running. It does exactly what you want. The catch comes in, especially with stuff like wix and Squarespace, where you hit a certain level of scale and you need to add something custom, you know, you kind of fall off the happy path. And then it's like, all right, now what do I do? And it's extremely high friction to move beyond that. You can either, um, deal with the fact that Squarespace or wix or the tool that you're choosing doesn't do what you wanted to do or you can beat your head against the wall and like mash it into d like force it into submission. We'll or would tends to be the most common case that I've seen is like you have a Squarespace site that grows up with your business to a certain point and then you have this really expensive project to port your Squarespace site to a more flexible framework and it's high expense. Yeah. But if you would have started on a more flexible framework in the first place, that wouldn't be so bad. Right. But the problem is on the other end of that spectrum, something that scales well, so you know, right now with, with like wix or Squarespace, you've got really, really low friction to start and really high friction to scale. Um, but if you look at something like a custom website that's really scalable and all that stuff, it is super high friction to start but low friction to scale. And so what we're trying to do with Gatsby is we want to eliminate that friction at both ends. We want it to be really low friction to start so that you can I in the, in the future that we envision for Gatsby, you'll be able to go to a website, click a button and like spin up a Gatsby website and that, you know, you'll have that like Squarespace, like experience for getting started. But then when you start to scale out of it, your developer can download a fully functional like react and graph QL code base that they're able to customize completely. So it's really low friction to scale. And also under the hood we're doing a bunch of things to make it scalable in the first place we can pile down to static files, you can host it on a CDN. Scalability solved. Like that's, you know, CDNs are built for that. And if you don't need any servers to be running, you don't run into scaling issues because CDNs already solved those for you. Do you mind telling me what a CDN is? Yes. A CDN is a content delivery network, so if you've ever like, uh, a lot of websites will put their images and video files and stuff into, uh, like a Amazon s three bucket or a Akamai or um, fastly is another one. They're, they're these kind of cloud based folders and you'll see it if you look at the URLs for things like if you've ever clicked through a Twitter profile, it will be like, um, something that tw img.com that's Twitter's CDN. They're hooked up to some CDN provider and it just, uh, it, it's basically like, it takes that content and it duplicates it at data centers all around the world so that it's close to the people who are downloading it. And it can be like really heavily cached and it's, um, you know, if the site gets a ton of traffic, it prevents it from getting taken down by high traffic. Got It. Okay. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Like Netlogo by, I'm sorry, I was, I was just thinking like, boy, I'm really glad I actually knew how to explain that because as I say, staff and I'm like, Oh man, I don't know what that means. Can you delivery network
Speaker 7:anywhere in the world whenever you're hungry? I mean, it, um, you, you mentioned the Gatsby ecosystem earlier and really that's kind of, um, I guess it goes hand in hand with the Gatsby community. Right? Um, and I really like how friendly you guys are, um, to contributors to basically, uh, because because Gatsby is open source, you guys are almost entirely built on just people contributing to, uh, the software and to adding onto it. So like I can go in there, I can add some code in and submitted and I am now part of the Gatsby community. Right, right. Can you speak to what you guys are doing to try to get people to contribute and make it such a welcoming community?
Speaker 5:Yeah, uh, I mean it's, to us it's like the community is, is the whole reason that this company exists. You know, the, the, the only reason that we were able to get the funding that allowed us to all have jobs working on Gatsby is because there's such a vibrant community and ecosystem around Gatsby. That's what makes it commercially viable. Um, and so for us, like supporting that community and being a like, uh, I don't even know how you'd want to say it. Like, uh, an amplifier for people in the community. That's like mission number one for us. We, we need to make sure that the people who have put their time in to contributing to Gatsby, the people who are starting to use Gatsby and wish that, you know, something was better explained or a little bit different that they know how to do that and that we are smoothing the path to, to make that possible rather than throwing up arbitrary barriers. And so the way that we look at it is, is, you know, Gatsby is a fairly complex piece of software. Like if you look under the hood at the Gatsby source code, like there's a lot going on in there. Um, I don't fully understand the whole code base. You know, I couldn't just dive into it. Yeah. I mean I think that probably in the entire world there maybe like two or three people who actually like really deeply know the full Gatsby code base and everybody else has like their little, their area that they know well and those are, you know, basically what we want to do is we want to make it possible for somebody to say, well I don't know anything about Gatsby. What I want to help, what can I do? And we're like, well I don't know Kevin, why don't you come in and Nika edit our grammar. Like our docs could always use clarification where you learn in something about Gatsby and the docs didn't make sense. Like add a paragraph that clears up the thing that confused you. And we get that stuff all the time and it like, it snowballs because the person who came in and gets their first contribution, we're going to, you know, we, we do things like we'll offer a an hour of of pair programming to anybody who wants it. You can just sign up through our, our website. We've got a link and you can just get an hour to get involved in open source in some way. If you do make a contribution. We have a hold system internally about how we make sure that we take really good care of especially first time contributors, making sure that we're giving like positive feedback and being like, you know, we, we, we have a whole list of things that we're trying to avoid doing. Like never try to never tell somebody they should know something. Never mentioned that something is easy. Like this stuff is not easy. Like development in general is not easy and so may we don't want to ever imply that it is or that you know, oh if you just look here, like yeah, if I knew to look there, I would have done it.
Speaker 6:Did you read the docs, those kinds of comments? Exactly. Yeah. And so we're,
Speaker 5:we're always looking for like, okay, how can we make this like a welcoming experience? And so we've decided that the way that we can do that is through just like offering trust just to everyone. Like, if you're willing to put your time into Gatsby, we're willing to trust you as part of this community. So as soon as you get your first pull request merge, we're going to invite you to be a contributor to the Gatsby organization. That means that you can close issues and, and label things and, and approve pull requests and all sorts of stuff. We're also going to send a, a, a discount code so that you can get swag from our, our store. They're, the swag is awesome and it's like a thing that's like, okay, well that's the least we can do to, to thank you for putting your time and effort in. Um, you know, and, and like it's, we, we want it to be like, how do we just want to show gratitude? Like we want to make sure that people feel appreciated. Like you spent some time doing a thing, we noticed and we care and we, we're so thankful that you did. Um, and in, in doing that, in, in taking that time and making that effort, what we're seeing is that first time contributors feel welcome and tell other people that it was a fun experience which attracts more people. And so now we, we've got this community that is super welcoming. We, you know, we set the model, we've spent a lot of effort on trying to be the types of people that we want to see in open source. And what we're seeing is that the people who come in, they see that behavior and then they pick it right up. So now we've got this huge network of people being the way that we want open source to be. They're welcoming, they're friendly, they're supportive. Nobody is being mean in our issues. Nobody is talking down to other people in our issues. If they are, I mean every once in a while it'll happen and we just talk to that person and you know, we just coach them a little bit and they almost always immediately correct.
Speaker 6:Yeah, no, I, I found one where someone must have said something and Kyle Matthew is the guy who created Gatsby. Um, like, so all I see is the question, uh, deleted comment Kyle saying, hey guy, please don't do that. Like that's not how we behave. Another deleted comment and then answers below. Like it was quickly policed out in a very courteous but just like, hey, that's not how we roll kind of way. And that like, like that says a lot when you're, when you're searching through trying to find the answer to something and it's being stated we are a friendly opening, open community that welcomed these kinds of things. Please don't behave like that.
Speaker 3:The culture, it sounds like it comes from the top down and that because that sort of culture is being emulated from leadership, people in leadership positions that other people are just following that example and behaving that way as well. And almost self policing in a way. I like it because it, like, I, I'm hesitant
Speaker 5:to say that it's top down because it's honestly like the community is so good that it puts pressure on those of us in leadership positions to, to live up to it and essentially saying it kind of creates like a feedback loop because it's like, well, I don't want to let down the community. And so then I modeled the behavior and then the community sees that and then they model the behavior. And so we've just got this really virtuous cycle of like people doing the right thing and wanting to see each other succeed. I love that. Yeah. It like, it makes, it makes my job so pleasant because I just get to see people being nice to each other all day.
Speaker 3:Oh, up man. I want that.
Speaker 6:Um, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Lag is awesome. And I think that Al would love, um, you guys have this, uh, these pair of sweat pants that are just like Pajama pants, but there's a pretty cool name for them. Oh No, wait,
Speaker 2:we've got the freelance pants, which are my, uh, so I, I can't take credit for that. That's a, that's a Marissa more be special, but that, that is my absolute favorite piece of swag that we have. Um, and, and they've got a cool pattern. Like what is it? So we've got two, we've got, uh, the, there's the freelance pants, which have a kind of like a dark Gatsby logo on a black background. So they're kind of like almost camouflage. You could pretend that you were wearing like grown up pants. And then we have the jamstack jammies, which like bright purple with drawings of toast and Jelly and react logos all over them.
Speaker 3:That's what I was thinking of right now, honey.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And, and people can get those if they contribute like what, like five times or something.
Speaker 5:Yes. Five contributions and you'll get the, the jamstack jammies. Um, that's,
Speaker 6:yeah. You go in and find like five grammar mistakes throughout the code base and you get some sweet swag. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But source things like reward their contributors that way. Some do. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Or none worth talking about.
Speaker 3:Well, no, I truly just don't know. I mean, I, I draw charts all that.
Speaker 2:They're a, they're a handful of them.
Speaker 5:Really. Um, like really supportive things. Like one that I really like is Cyprus, io there a, an integration testing or I don't even know what you'd call them, like end to end integration testing for the most part. But like they're, they're really good at this because if you go and even just like are on Twitter saying nice things about them. I saw a cypress thing, I thought it was cool and I shared it and I got a DM from them and they sent me like a box of a tee shirt, some stickers and like a handwritten note that was like, thanks for being part of our community. That's amazing. And it's, it was like, Oh man, that is so cool. And honestly, like a lot of this stuff is, it's like ideas that I have, uh, accumulated over my experiences through open source every time something made me feel good. Um, so there's a, uh, uh, an organization called crap, I'm gonna get this wrong. Moya I think that is where we took the idea to auto invite anybody who contributes to the org. And then we took some of the swag ideas from a digital ocean who, digital ocean. Uh, I did, uh, an article about using digital ocean and they sent me some swag credit and I was like, oh, that's great. Like, that's, that's such a good idea. I should steal that. Um, but so yeah, they're definitely like a lot, there's a lot of prior art in this space. I think that Gatsby has probably been the most visible about it, but I, I mean, I think we're also the first like, well, no, that's not true. I can't say that I was going to say that we're one of the first like community powered projects to get funding, but there have been a bunch before us. I think maybe we're the first ones to decide that. Like this type of community engagement is, is like a primary way to use the resources that we have.
Speaker 6:Gotcha. Cool. Um, so can we just talk about you for a minute? Sure. Awesome. Yeah. Um, I, I actually stumbled on your site a bunch of months back and not even realizing it until like, we agreed to do this talk or this interview. Um, and I came back to your site, I'm like, all right, I've, I've been here before and I would really stood out to me, um, was just kind of what you had written about hustle and grind and it's, it was really refreshing because right now it feels like there's just a big push to like, you know, as long as you grind and work hard and you just never give up, you'll reach your dreams and that's all you need to do is just work 24, seven and you kind of have a different take on that. So what's your take monetizing
Speaker 5:your hobbies? Like, oh, art, do you enjoy painting? You should figure out a way to monetize that. Yeah, that, that's, I, I've struggled with that a little bit. So like, I mean, I come from a a pretty like traditionally grind yourself into the ground kind of background. You know, and I've seen a couple people talking about this on Twitter and it's hard to disagree with this take, which is that like from where I am, I have the luxury of saying, hey, you should take it slow and like, you know, take care of yourself and don't overwork. But at the, at the same time I have to say like I got to where I am because of the like really unhealthy work ethic that I had. And so the, the thing that's hard to, to kind of reconcile and the argument that I'll make, I actually think that I would have gone further faster had I been more reasonable about the way that I did my work. Because there's, there's a lot of research out there that has just been done over a hundred years at this point. They did the first study on the 40 hour work week back when, uh, the Ford Motor Company was, was studying assembly lines and like how to like at the industrial revolution basically. And so they did study is showing that like people who work 60 hours a week, they get overtired and they, their error rate increases and after prolonged periods of working 60 hours a week, your error rate has increased so much that that extra time you were, that you're working is actually spent correcting errors that never would have occurred in the first place. And he'd just been working 40 hours. And so they, they figured out that like 40 hours at the sweet spot, at 40 hours, you still have some left in the tank, but you're not like, you're not like underutilized. You know, they, I think they tried 30 hours and it was like, okay, well now we're just like, not like people just don't have enough to do. Um, and so, you know, you have like a limit and I think that maybe you could argue that it's different for like what you would need to do on an assembly line versus what you would do working in design development or, or kind of creative work. Um, and I've heard arguments made, the creative work is more mentally taxing and maybe you should work fewer hours. I think if you look at the history of uh, like writers and composers, they would work six hours a day. But those, yeah, the difference is that those six hours were like highly, they were
Speaker 7:super excellent deep work. Yeah. But they also have like weird schedules when you, when you hear the anecdotes of like they would wake up, they would have some tea or whatever, they'd work for like three hours and then like go take a walk for two hours and just, you know, that they would really break it up and it didn't really resemble our nine to five.
Speaker 5:Right. And I actually kind of like, I personally really like that and that's the way that I work a lot of the day. For example, like, uh, on, on Tuesdays and Fridays, I go to the gym and I go to the gym at, at uh, at 10 30, what time? 10 30. And so I get up and I work for a couple hours and then I go to the gym after the gym, I'll go get a cup of coffee, I'll run some errands and I'll come back and start working again at like 1:00 PM and from there I'll work for like another like three hours or so. And then I might like break for dinner and then work another hour or something. And it's like my workday is weird. It's not like an eight hour block. I kind of have like these focused spurts and I found that for me, like that tends to be a really good way of doing it because I'm always like, I'm always trying to balance between like, Oh man, I really want to get back to work and, and like being burned out. Right. So like I always want to quit when I still really want to keep going because then I feel like I want to hit the ground running the next day as opposed to like dragging myself out of bed and then I got to go like, ah, I gotta go back to work today. You know, like I, I had that feeling for a years and I never feel like I did my best work then. You know? And so, yeah, I think it's, I dunno, there's a ton of research on this and it's, it's something that I think is definitely worth looking at. But like if you, if you work too many hours, if you don't get enough sleep, if you don't give yourself distance from the job to let your subconscious work, your, it might not feel like it, but you're actively degrading the quality of the work you're, you're actively preventing yourself from making progress. I totally agree with that. I totally 1000% agree with that. Yeah. You know, it, it's, it's just such a big deal to like creativity happens when you're not staring at a screen. You know, like you, you have to let those connections happen. And those connections can only happen when you're not actively engaged. And so, you know, one of the things that I really liked to do, I live in a neighborhood where I'm about a 30 minute walk from a handful of places. And so I just go for a walk and I don't look at my phone when I'm on that walk. And that 30 minutes a lot of times is some of the most creative time that I spend during the day. Kind of helps me work around a lot of problems. And also I just generally feel better when I like go outside a little bit. Cause you know, I joke that I'm an indoor pet, I'm, I'm not,
Speaker 7:I mean you, you also get some perspective, like your problem is just, you know, if, if you're stuck on something it feels like it's everything when you're in front of the computer and then you walk away for 30 minutes and not only does it kind of, uh, seem to solve itself, but it also isn't as important or as awful. They're terrible as you were catastrophizing it to be. Yeah. That says a lot about you Alex. Yeah. Right. Therapy session. Thanks guys. Yeah. Oh yeah. What
Speaker 5:analogy that I've used that, that I think really like it, it resonates with me at least, is this idea that like when you're working on a problem, you're in it. And so you, you know, that's you like at eye level and you are walking through a maze trying to solve these problems. And like when you hit a dead end, it's like, well, okay, now what do I do? Like I, I'm, this is clearly like I'm never going to get anywhere. Um, and then when you disconnect, when you take that time, it's like being able to lift up to the bird's eye view and seeing the maize from the top down where you can go, oh well I'm here and I can just kind of trace a path through this maze and see where I need to go. And if you don't give yourself that distance, you're always down there like you and you can get through a maze by like blindly turning corners and, and you know, or you can even be systematic about it. And you know, we'll make little chalk marks on the walls or something, but like you can, you can get through the maze by being down in it, but it's not as efficient as like looking at it from the top down and drawing the path. And then just following that path, but you have to give yourself the space to be able to draw that path to, to be able to see the whole thing. How do you balance that kind of workday where you take breaks a lot with your speaking schedule and your travel schedule? Uh, I've had to, I've had to back my travel schedule off quite a bit. My, it was for a while, I would, I was doing like one to two speaking events per month and that was completely unsustainable. I was like, I was getting stuff done, but it just felt like I was always kind of treading water more so than making real progress. I've since moved to a model where I'm trying not to go any more than one event per six weeks. And by following that and like sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. This last month I've had like four travel events in the span of five weeks, which is, but most of the time I've got like at least a month between engagements, which means that I've got a lot of, uh, a lot of headroom to actively work on things. Um, and it's also, I'm very lucky that I've got a great team. So like, you know, I work with, uh, with people like Marcy Sutton and Amberley Romo who are able to like, just pick up the, pick up the projects that I'm working on. Um, and they, they break them down and knock out like huge amounts of work and, you know, they cover for me when I'm gone, I cover for them when they're gone. And so the, you know, it's, it's, I think part of it is just like build a good team so that, have you ever heard the term like bus factor? Uh, so it's, uh, it's, it's an old term. I actually prefer the term vacation tolerance, but it's the idea of like how many people on your team you can get hit by a bus right before your company breaks down. My coworker asked me to stop saying hit by a bus and instead we use the term moved to Hawaii. Yeah. So, uh, I've been trying to say vacation tolerance instead because you know how many people can go on vacation or move to Hawaii. That's another good one. Uh, before the week before all progress halts. And that's something that's been really big for us at Gatsby as we build the company is trying to think about, well how do we let a cofounder, like one of our cofounders has a baby do so how is he going to take a paternity leave? Like what systems that we put in place and what redundancies do we have so that his v we have the vacation tolerance to support him being out. Um, one of our engineering managers just took a week off and the company continued to function while he was on his vacation. We steadily been able to like make sure that nothing is hinged on a single person. That really with work life balance because now if I, if I like I took two days off earlier this week. Uh, we drove out to the redwoods in, in northern California and I was able to just be like, I didn't, I turned off notifications on my phone like nothing got through. I didn't have my laptop for most of the trip. It was locked in the trunk of the car and everything. I mean, the wheels stayed on like nobody needed me. Nobody. I told everybody they could text me if something went wrong. I didn't get a text message. Like everything just kept operating.
Speaker 2:That's good to have a company that also respects that encourages that. That's, that's really important.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean we, we spend a lot of time thinking about like what kind of company do we want to be? We wrote a blog post about it, about like Gatsby's company values. Um, and you know, the, a lot of them are kind of built around that. Like we need to be able as a team and as a company to like have lives. You know, we, we don't think of Gatsby as a family. We don't think of of work as like the highest form of achievement. We think of Gatsby as a collection of super smart people that we really like who are building really cool things, but also where people who have like lives and families and hobbies and stuff and we want to make sure that we remain three dimensional people and not just like work bots. That's awesome. At Gatsby that you're the most excited about. We, so the, so the thing that I'm most excited about with the, or wait Gatsby is, uh, is themes. And the, the reason for that is that like themes are something that as a general concept, like people are fairly familiar with them, like, you know, wordpress themes or Shopify themes where you can kind of get this premade look and feel for a website. Um, and so Gatsby themes do that. But then beyond that, another thing that we're able to do is actually like compose multiple websites together. So if you have a theme that runs your blog, um, and that could potentially use data from wordpress or marked down or whatever, you would install it as like, okay, I have a Gatsby site, I'm going to use the wordpress theme and I'm going to add a wordpress API key. And then you just like let it go and there's no more code to write it just like fires up and you've got a wordpress blog going, but then you're like, hey, we need to add ecommerce. Well, cool. I'll add a second theme. So then you install the Shopify theme and add your Shopify Api key and you've already got style tokens in place. So both of them look and feel the same. And now you've got this like unified blog and ecommerce and all it took is a few lines of of configuration in your Gatsby config to say use the blog theme in the Shopify theme with these Api keys. And so we're, we're kind of building that out. And then when we talked about this idea of like low friction to start and low friction to scale, in order to do that type of work, you don't want to give up control like you as a, as a developer, as a company, you don't want to say, okay well I'm going to use this theme and that means that I'm giving up all control over the thing. But we don't want to introduce a bunch of friction there. Like when you, when you hit a point where you're no longer on the happy path and you want to change out to a, oh I want to modify the way that this, this component works are like we want to change the header or something with a lot of systems, what ends up happening is you hit the Squarespace wall where it's like, oh crap, we can't do that. We need to move to a different platform. Or there's like the create react app wall where create react APP does 100% of things for you. And then when you need to make a change you have to eject and when you eject you have 100% rejected. It's now like your full code base to maintain and manage.
Speaker 7:You're out in the cold. It good luck if, if you didn't know how you got to where you are, good luck going from here.
Speaker 5:Right? And so what we're aiming for with Gatsby is, is a, a concept that we call the progressive disclosure of complexity where you as a site author are able to do, like the happy path is you don't have to change anything. It just works. As you run into things that you want to edit, you're able to selectively eject something. So, oh you want to change that header? Cool. We have something called component shadowing that lets you rewrite the header file and only the header file and everything else stays like tucked away in the theme because you want to change that. Or like if you want to like, I don't know, get into the webpack config, cool. Pop Open the hood, you can customize the Webpack config but you don't have to change all of it. You just change the one setting you want to change. And we compose that together. Um, and it's the same with the themes. Like we want to be able to compose together multiple themes where maybe one theme sets up what the data looks like and the next theme has some like Ui structure, like a design system or something. And then there's a system or another theme that composes on top of that, that's just setting the token so that it's got like a cool color scheme in typography. And so you can just mix and match those things and you can stack them vertically. You can compose them horizontally like blog, ecommerce and whatever so that you've installed them side by side. Um, or you can stack them like data layer, presentation layer, style layer, or a combination thereof.
Speaker 7:Wow. Yeah. I honestly didn't understand themes and I was thrown off a little bit just by the name, not meaning exactly what wordpress means by themes. Right. Like that part did, did throw me off a little bit.
Speaker 5:We've struggled a little bit with that because like there was, we were like, well what, what should we call these? Like what's the right name for it?
Speaker 7:It's kind of like a pattern is how I've been describing it.
Speaker 5:Well, yeah. And we were like, okay, well what are they plugins or are these adapters, are they multiple things? Like are there themes? And then like data adapters. And ultimately what we decided is that like we didn't want to introduce Novo new vocabulary. We didn't want to try to like change the lexicon of, of web development and themes is pretty close to what we're doing. It's just we're doing what themes can traditionally do and a lot more
Speaker 7:themes plus or something. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, and, and so we're, we're just kind of like, it's okay. We'll, we'll, we'll start with the, the traditional understanding of what themes are because that's accurate and then we will like through examples and through adoption hopefully show all the other things that are also possible inside of themes. Well, I think that that's sort of talks to how welcoming you want to be to people because like it's a term that people are already familiar with so they have some context to what that is and then they, as they're already there, they can discover what more it can do. That's, that's the hope. And it kind of goes with that progressive disclosure of complexity again, because what we really want is for the vast majority of people, they're just going to find a theme they like and install it and, and like life will continue. And so for the people who are doing the really advanced stuff, they'll discover that as it becomes necessary, I need to do a thing that this theme doesn't do. How do I do that? Ah, here's a doc that shows me how to like selectively eject this piece of the theme and like change it. Or I need to do some really custom stuff. Or I want to be like an entrepreneur and sell themes. Like what can I, what can I do? Like, yeah, dig in. You're going to find those docs. But for the vast majority of people who will use themes, they'll probably never need to know what themes are, are fully capable of. Right. And so we don't want to overload people by, you know, you, you don't have to learn vocabulary. You don't have to learn a bunch of API surface. You just have to know it's a theme. You want to do a thing with the Gatsby site, cool, install a theme and it's done and then you can go deeper if you want. I think that's so great.
Speaker 6:Yeah, no, and, and the way he explained it made a lot of sense like, like that, that helped me understand it and clear that up. So I, I'm excited for themes now. That's pretty awesome. So you guys have preview coming. Is that in Beta now?
Speaker 5:Preview is in Beta. Um, we're hoping we're working toward like general availability, which is where like anybody will be able to go sign up on their own right now it's a invite only, but you can go sign up for the preview Beta right now if you want. Um, it's currently working with Contentful and we're looking to add a, I think wordpress and Drupal are high on the priority list and we're, we're also trying to figure out how to make it like generally available so that any headless CMS that wants to can add their own preview support. Not sure what the timeline is on that, but that's kind of what the future holds on the commercial side.
Speaker 6:Is there anything else with Gatsby besides like themes, preview or anything else on the horizon you can, uh,
Speaker 5:well, we've got a, we've got a Gatsby day's event coming up in New York City, which I'm super excited about. Uh, we are like, we're starting to do those semi-regularly so, um, you know, we're, we're going to do one in New York City in May. We're going to do one in London later this year, I believe, and we're going to start kind of jumping around from city to city. The, the intention is to eventually make these like pretty common. And uh, so that'll be fun if you're in any of those cities, like come out and see us. I also am, if you're interested in themes and you want to learn more about them, I have a, a weekly live stream. Every Thursday morning at 9:00 AM Pacific, I get on and, uh, I, it's called learn with Jason. So my goal is to find somebody who's smarter than me and then they teach something, uh, over the course of about 90 minutes. And we just live coated. It's a, and one of the ones that's coming up is Henry Su from babble and I are going to work on, we're going to work on building out a theme because he's got a podcast called hope and source and he's launching another podcast and he doesn't want to have to build two websites for it. So we're gonna use a Gatsby theme so that he can run the, well actually Amberley Romo already built the theme and we're going to add some extra bells and whistles to it so that we can, uh, so that he can just kind of like drop in is RSS feed and it'll auto build a website for him, which we're really, really excited about. That's amazing. That's so exciting.
Speaker 7:Yeah, I really liked that idea of just the life coding, building something after, at any minutes and kind of showing it live it, I think it's a refreshing idea. Um, and, and it's, it's kinda coming, it's becoming a bigger thing with programmers going on twitch, like just taking that gaming model and making it into a development thing. I think it's pretty cool.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I was skeptical of it at first. Like I, I'm definitely of the, like, I'm old enough that I missed that cutoff for like watching everything on a stream. And so to me, I was like, I don't get this. Why would anybody want to watch me write code? Um, but then seeing the community that's kind of building up around it and seeing the other developers like Suz Hinton, uh, it goes by new cat a, she is excellent. Like she's had a stream forever. She's got an amazing community. Um, she's always just like building cool stuff and people are really helpful and, uh, it's this kind of collaborative effort, which is not what I expected. I kind of thought it would be more like, you know, here's a, a camera on me and I'm going to do a thing and nobody's really participating, but it's, it's much more engaging than that. And, uh, interesting. It's really interesting too because like I feel like a lot of tutorials and a lot of like prepared videos have, they have a tendency to only show the good stuff, like all of the mistakes, all the flubs, all of the ums and ahs get edited out and see you see somebody at their absolute best. And I think that the live streaming is really interesting because you get to watch somebody who you would maybe hold up at a, at a high level of like, wow, you're an expert. You must be infallible as a coder. Um, and I don't mean to imply myself with that. I'm talking about some of the people who are actually good coders. Uh, um, but you know, you, you watch this person who you would, who you would maybe watch code and think like, Oh, you must be a genius. You must know everything. And then you see them struggle and have typos and hit bugs and have to Google things. And this, this debugging process. And I think that's really humanizing and it helps with the imposter syndrome. It helps with making you feel connected and like maybe you aren't as, maybe you're, maybe you're better at this than you thought. If like if the people that you were holding up at this hike high level are facing the same types of struggles that you face in your day to day coding. Like, Hey, maybe this is not such a big gap after all. Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It sounds like it's humanizing in a way. Like you're watching them make mistakes and you're seeing yeah,
Speaker 5:the whole experience of them code something out. That's so cool.
Speaker 7:When I taught, uh, a big part of the way that, that we would teach is not just to kind of show them answers, but to, to think out loud and think through things and show my thought process so that they can kind of understand how I got to the answer. And when you're actually solving problems for real, live and thinking out loud and explaining what, what you're thinking, that's a great way for people to learn, not just that they are, uh, just as lost as you are, but that you know, how a developer thinks is really important.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. I mean that's the, that's the job, right? Like if you, if you think about what it means to be a developer, you know, the joke is that a senior developers really just better at googling than a[inaudible] and that, I mean, that's like sort of true, but really what it is is that, that the, the senior developers have built better frameworks for thinking about problems and they know the right things to Google so that they can get there fast. You know, it doesn't mean that I've memorized the whole Api for every tool that I use. It doesn't mean that I remember exactly where everything works. It just means that like, I know how to think about that problem now. And so if I can or how to follow that similar train of thought, like what questions should you be asking? How should you be framing this question? That's how you progress in your career.
Speaker 3:I always say click until you break it. Google until you fix it. Results.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, Jason, this was really awesome. Um, if you don't mind, I'd love to close on a quote that l actually found in your website and we just thought it was awesome. I'm quoting you. So, uh, let's figure out how to connect with people who strive to be better, who push themselves and the people around them who don't feel threatened when someone has succeeding. Instead they feel energized to go do more awesome shit. And I think there's just an awesome message. I think you are living it by being the Gatsby developer advocate. Um, yeah, I think you're doing a great job and we really, really appreciate you spending your time with us.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:And I think that's sort of the ethos at Gatsby. Like you're connecting
Speaker 5:tools
Speaker 3:together for people so that they can make awesome shit. I just, I really love that attitude.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I use the analogy all the time of like being the rising tide, you know, and, and I, I believe that should be like our role as people especially is as you know, in my position where I have a little bit of of influence and, and the ability to do things like come on your podcast and people listen to me talk. The, the best thing I can do is lift people up around me and like be kind of an amplifying force or a springboard for somebody who maybe doesn't have that opportunity. Like, how can I, how can I make sure that people who are doing cool things get to keep doing cool things? And that's why I'm attracted to Gatsby as a company is it's like, okay, how do we like take the best of everything out there and let people build the coolest possible stuff with it? You know, I, yeah, I, it definitely is a pretty core to, to me and to the company. I think
Speaker 4:that's awesome. And Jason, thank you so much for coming on. We're so glad that you able to, to spend some time with us. So where can our listeners reach out to you on the Internet? Where can everybody find you?
Speaker 5:Um, I am most active on Twitter and twitch, so twitter.com/jay Langsdorf. Um, twitch.com it was twitch.tv/j links or if, uh, I have a youtube channel where I post all the twitch streams. If you want to go back and watch the previous ones, um, and then get hub is also jailing store. Those are probably the best places or my website has probably a list of all of those as well.
Speaker 4:That's great. Very cool. So send us your questions and comments. If you have questions for Jason, he just let you know where you can find him. Um, I am on Twitter at lovelletters co at Mr Troast and you can follow the podcast at overlap pod on Twitter and a for more episodes and show notes. Visit Overlap podcast.com which has made in Gatsby awesome. I had nothing to do with that. It looks real nice though. Thank you to a Alto and free music archive for the music on our episodes subscriber. You get your podcasts. If you like the show, leave us a review. Wherever you get your podcast, tell a friend if you want to be the rising tide that lifts the overlap of boat that we're all on, throw us five stars thrive. Smash that like button. Oh man, we're going to smash it. All right. Thank you so much for listening. See you in two weeks. Bye. See you in two weeks now. But Jason, really, thank you so much. That was a, that was fantastic.