Forem: Carson Gibbons

Migrating from WordPress to the Cosmic JS Headless CMS

Carson Gibbons — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 18:30:27 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Jamie Introcaso, an experienced Software Developer residing in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jamie is an active member of the Cosmic JS Community and recently shared a blog documenting his migration from WordPress to Cosmic JS using the WordPress Importer Extension. With more community projects on the way, we're excited to interview one of our own for this Spotlight. 😎 Check Jamie out on his Cosmic-powered website, Twitter and LinkedIn, and enjoy the conversation.

Cosmic JS: When did you first begin building software?
Jamie: After graduating high school, I worked as a live sound engineer and bartender for almost 15 years before deciding to go back to school and finish my bachelors degree. During my time working as a sound engineer, I had noticed how much more was being done using technology and software. I have always been drawn to technology from a young age, so that passion paired with the job growth in the industry made getting a degree in computer science an easy choice. I graduated in 2014 and have been working professionally in the field since then. And it has been super rewarding. Everyday I am learning something or even better teaching someone about something to solve a problem.

What is your preferred development stack?
I have mostly worked in the C#/.NET stack in various forms such as WebForms and MVC and that is what I feel most comfortable with. I am starting to try and branch out a little bit more and learning more front end frameworks. It is nice because I can still have the familiarity of .NET using WebAPI and grow my skills using a new front end framework.

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
I would say the project I am most proud of is a MES (Manufacturing Execution System) that was built by myself and two other developers. It was my first time leading and architecting a project from the ground up so that was good and bad and exciting and scary. Luckily I had a great team supporting me. I still would marvel when I would visit the plant and see all these operators using software that I had built. It was definitely a trial by fire experience. I realized that they were not going to shut the plant down during our initial “go live” so I could fix my software! But I also realized that I was up to the task and was able to execute a project and implement it at a professional level.

What made you want to get away from WordPress and shift to a headless CMS?
I initially went to WordPress out of convenience, maybe more so laziness actually. It was just so easy to get a blog up and running. And it was. I had a nice editor to type my blog posts for the world to read. And I could go in and click and add pretty themes and plugins that supposedly improved my performance and caching, basically treating symptoms caused by WordPress itself! It was just madness!

I tried to set up a WordPress development environment a couple of times to tweak my site and it was so frustrating! I can make a UI. I just needed the part where I could host my content and have it delivered to me. That is what led me to looking into the idea of a Headless CMS. For someone like me who was versed in programming applications, it just made sense. The idea of just having something that would deliver my content to me and allow me to implement it in the way of my choosing was so liberating. And have you ever tried to migrate a WordPress site from one environment to another? It’s maddening!!

What's your best advice to a developer mired in WordPress right now?
Ask yourself how much of your development time is spent creating workarounds in how WordPress handles things. How much time have you spent on updates for WordPress? Fixing broken plugins? Rolling back changes and doing database updates? Think about what you could use that time for. Put more time into your site. Create another site. Spend more time with your friends and family. There is a better way. You have all the tools you need to move away from WordPress. More than likely you know HTML and CSS and JavaScript. That is all you need. Cosmic JS has the tools to migrate your posts into their API in a matter of minutes.

What are some technologies you are excited to learn more about?
As I mentioned before I am starting to explore learning some front end frameworks. Primarily Angular is what I have been working on learning. At my current position, we are using it so it is nice to get paid to learn it! I also have a desire to learn more NodeJS. I have used it a little bit, and I just think that deeper learning of Javascript in both the front and back ends will be useful to me in my career. Other than those, I feel like learning other technologies and concepts that help scalability and reliability are the next key things for me to focus on. I think knowledge of things like microservices, containerization, distributed systems and system design are conceptually some of the next things that I will be focusing on learning.

The Cosmic JS Spotlight Series is dedicated to showcasing developers that are building apps using modern tools. Learn how to contribute here. To stay connected with us follow us on Twitter and join the conversation on Slack.

Developer Spotlight: Sumit Kharche in the Cosmic JS Community

Carson Gibbons — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 17:09:35 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Sumit Kharche, a Full Stack Software Developer residing in Pune, India. Sumit is an active member of the Cosmic JS Community, having recently built the new React Static Blog, which is available in the Cosmic JS Apps Marketplace. With more community projects on the way, we’re excited to interview one of our own for this Spotlight. 😎 Follow Sumit on Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub, and enjoy the conversation.

Cosmic JS: When did you first begin building software?
Sumit: I started building software when I was pursuing my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science back in 2011.

What is your preferred development stack?
I have really enjoyed building projects using the Microsoft .Net technologies stack. I’m currently working on a team that uses React, Redux, and Material-UI on the front end and .Net core as backend. Recently though, I’ve found myself really enjoying working in a JAMStack. On the client side, I build static markup with React using React-Static, Gatsby and then provide APIs with Cosmic JS.

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
I built a JAMStack website by myself in couple of days. I chose React-Static, which is completely new for me, as was Cosmic JS. It was very challenging but I learned so many incredible skills as a result. Take a look at the demo.

You’ve submitted apps built in React Static, Svelte and more. How are you finding these new frameworks and technologies?
I love exploring new development stacks and expanding my knowledge. I always love to read about the new frameworks and technologies. Dev.to, Medium, Twitter, etc will always help me in finding the new technologies and also keep me updated. Now, because of the way Cosmic JS simplifies my work, I love to integrate it with different frameworks.

What are some technologies you are excited to learn more about?
That’s a big list. There is so much cool stuff out there I’ve been wanting to get into. Currently, I am excited to explore more about Cosmic JS. Also, I have been eager to get some time to spin up on .Net Core. I am excited about serverless stacks.

Developer Spotlight: Ben Hong

Carson Gibbons — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 13:48:02 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Ben Hong, a Senior Front End Engineer residing in Washington, D.C. Ben wears several hats, first as a Front End Engineer at GitLab, as well as being an active Google Developer Expert and Vue.js community partner. He's also a contributor to VuePress, one of the most popular static site generators for Vue.js projects.

Ben recently helped re-build the new Cosmic JS Documentation using VuePress, so we're very familiar and grateful for his frontend chops. 😎

Cosmic JS: When did you first begin building software?
Ben: I started writing code when I was 10 years old. My dad had purchased an HTML and CSS book and I took to it quite quickly since the only thing required to get started was a plain text editor. I would then attempt to learn JavaScript only to be unfortunately misinformed by the fact that I needed to learn Java first. With the resources at the time, I wasn't successful and it wouldn't be until post-graduate school when I would take a look back into the tech field.

What is your preferred development stack?
My preferred development stack is:

Frontend Framework: Vue.js
Backend Languages: Node.js / Python
API: REST or GraphQL

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
VuePress Blog Boilerplate is one of my past projects that I am rather proud of because of the impact it had even though it was a rather niche problem to solve. It's always a positive reminder of how important it is to document problems that you solve and share it with the rest of the world because odds are pretty good that someone else is trying to solve a similar problem.

Tell us more about being a Vue.js community partner and your area of responsibility.
As a Vue.js community partner, I work with the core team to help grow the community and improve the ecosystem for everyone. The project I am currently helping to lead is Vue.js Events, which is an initiative to centralize Vue.js community events (i.e., meetups, conferences, workshops, etc.) in a single area so it is easier for people to find fellow Vue.js enthusiasts like themselves.

You have some fascinating job posts on your resume. How was your time at Politico?
When I was a UI Developer at Politico, I had the honor and priviliege to work with a great team that would update the technology stack to utilize Vue.js and experiment with technologies like React-Native. Working at a news organization was a unique experience in the way content was curated since deadlines could change depending on what was happening in the world.

What are some technologies you are excited to learn more about?
As someone who tinkers with a lot of side projects, two projects that I've been spending more time on lately is Gridsome and TailwindCSS. Gridsome is an up and coming framework that allows users to build JAM stack websites and PWAs using Vue.js. Tailwind CSS on the other hand, is a low-level CSS Framework that utilizes many CSS architecture principles I believe in and it's been great to see it get so much attention.

What are the latest updates from VuePress?
VuePress is currently in alpha and the team is working hard to get it to a stable v1.0 release. That said, it is already being used in many production sites (such as Cosmic JS) due to the fact that the current features cover most of what users currently need to build incredible documentation sites. Definitely worth checking out for every team building a product that requires documentation!

Developer Spotlight: Jacob Knaack in the Cosmic Community

Carson Gibbons — Tue, 14 May 2019 21:57:46 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Jacob Knaack, a Web Developer and Technical Communicator residing in Seattle, Washington. Jacob is a Front End Developer at restack, a development studio that finely crafts websites and apps. Jacob is also a frequent contributor to the Cosmic Community, having recently built both the Progressive Apollo Blog as well as the Gatsby Documentation Website. Follow Jacob on LinkedIn and GitHub and enjoy the conversation.

Cosmic JS: When did you first begin building software?
Jacob: There’s really 2 answers here. The first time I started to build something via a programming language was in the first grade when I built a website for a science fair. This was in the early 90s so HTML, CSS, and JS weren’t super hot stuff and the site itself looked pretty crazy, as you can imagine a 1st grader would want a website to look.

I first started to build formal software for a living about 3 years ago when I started a programming bootcamp at Code Fellows in Seattle. At the time I was working as a technical writer and wanted to level up my technical skills. I began working on projects that revolved around full stack JavaScript and Python and from there I developed a nasty habit for designing and building web applications.

What is your preferred development stack?
I work almost entirely in the MERN / MEAN stack. So the Node environment is really my bread and butter. Using cloud storage and interfacing the internet of things all using JavaScript is very nice when working in primarily a JS environment, so I’ve really enjoyed working with Node all these years.

I do confess that if I’m working on a personal project, or just something that I’m working solo on, I do love just building things with simple vanilla JS (and nixing the fancy MVC workflows of React / Angular / Vue etc.)

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
A project that I really loved sinking time into was a a piece of software used for performing user market research for a tech company here is Seattle. I built a Python server and a small front end client that would essentially scrape the internet and perform sentiment analysis on social media posts. As a student at the University of Washington, most of my focus was on Psycholinguistics research (think of the intersection of linguistic behavior and psychological processing) so this was something that I very much wanted to grind away at. The project involved a lot of cloud computing services and ended up providing some extremely interesting results, dealing mostly with tweets and posts from Reddit. Fun stuff.

You've contributed several Gatsby projects to the Cosmic Community. Talk more about the benefits you see in using a Gatsby + Cosmic stack.
Gatsby is a great little static site generator and really works well for providing a performant experience for users. Basically Gatsby takes all the data from our source code and API fetching and builds a bunch of HTML, CSS, and JS. This allows content to be searched efficiently and faster with no long load times from enormous JS files trying to dynamically render things. For the developer, Gatsby offers a ridiculous amount of flexibility. For one, built in things like React, Graphql, hot-reloading, routing, and code splitting make the experience just like developing a dynamically rendered SPA (single page application). Performance plus flexibility.

Combine this with a service like Cosmic JS and we can have even more flexibility for the end user. A content management service that lets us define our own schemas and add whatever data we want while letting Gatsby fetch and build that data means we can build fast and performant applications that are able to respond quickly. Now we have performance and flexibility for both the developer and the user as they can control their content through Cosmic JS while also getting a great interface from static files built with Gatsby.

What are some technologies you are excited about or want to learn more about?
Honestly I’ve been excited about the VR space for a while now, and I think developing User Interfaces for VR platforms has a lot of opportunity. I’ve played around with a couple web browser based frameworks for VR and they are getting quite sophisticated now that the hardware is becoming a little more affordable and prevalent. As a React developer I am always burying my head in React workflows. But the possibility using React to create VR components in the average web browser is pretty exciting. It seems like Facebook is trying to make that a reality with React 360, I think formerly React VR. As a psychologist and developer, I’m very interested in learning more about how we can create usable and exciting interfaces for web applications for VR devices.

Migrating Content from WordPress to Cosmic JS

Carson Gibbons — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 18:40:45 +0000

Over 30% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress, yet 64% of developers participating in the 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey say they dread working with WordPress. Top reasons include security, bloat, bad user experience and that WordPress is built for outdated web architectures. If you are currently using WordPress, you probably share these feelings and know that technical bloat and slow page load speed detract from overall user experience.

Cosmic JS is a drop-in replacement for WordPress, providing a web dashboard to create and manage content, and API tools and resources to integrate content into any new or existing website or app. In this blog I'll demonstrate importing WordPress posts into Cosmic JS for integration into a new, modern application. We can accomplish this by simply creating a new Bucket, installing the WordPress Importer Extension and running it.

TL;DR:
WordPress Importer Extension
Performance Case Study: From WordPress to JAMstack

Create a Bucket

Navigate to Settings > Extensions > WordPress Importer Extension

Install the WordPress Importer Extension

Add your WordPress Blog Feed URL

Import WordPress Content

Posts Imported Success Screen

Migrated WordPress Posts in the Cosmic JS Dashboard

Integrate content using the NPM Module, GraphQL, Bash or Curl

Now that our WordPress posts are imported into Cosmic JS, we can check out our content models and prepare the content for integration into a new application using code snippet resources for JavaScript, GraphQL, Bash or Curl. You can easily install a content-ready application from the Cosmic JS Apps Marketplace and import your WordPress posts for deployment with Netlify to measure the page load speed increase.

Conclusion
Liberating developers and content creators from WordPress is a big goal, and the WordPress Importer Extension is a neat tool to help illustrate how flexible, portable and scalable your content becomes when managed with Cosmic JS. If you have any comments or questions about migrating your WordPress content to Cosmic JS, reach out to us on Twitter and join the conversation on Slack.

Developer Spotlight: Raymond Camden of American Express

Carson Gibbons — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 02:05:58 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Raymond Camden, a Senior Software Engineer and Developer Advocate residing in Lafayette, Louisiana. Raymond has extensive experience in the technology space, having enjoyed stints at IBM, Adobe and AuthO prior to becoming a Senior Engineer for Developer Experience at American Express. Follow Raymond on Twitter, GitHub or LinkedIn, and enjoy the Q/A.

Cosmic JS: When did you first begin building software?
Raymond: I began on an Apple 2e (it may have been the +) back in the 80s. My initial reason was to cheat at games (ask me about hex editing for Bard's Tale) but after seeing Tron I was really inspired to become a coder. Boy was reality somewhat different...

What is your preferred development stack?
The web in general. I'd say mainly JavaScript and lately with Vue, but I'm passionate about the entire web stack. My favorite editor is Visual Studio Code (although I was a big Brackets fan for a while). When working on the back-end I'll still use JavaScript and Node.js.

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
I was big into MUD programming (multi-player online text adventure games, think Zork but with multiple players) and I built a framework to enable easier dialog creation and more thematic elements (time passing, etc). The code wasn't necessarily rocket science, but the end result - enabling more creativity - is something I'm really proud of.

Oh - and I built an app that scans your contacts, finds ones without pictures, and assigns a random cat picture. Yeah, I'm pretty proud of that too.

What are some technologies you are excited about or want to learn more about?
GraphQL for one. A lot of my work involves APIs and GraphQL feels like a real game changer. I'm incredibly excited about serverless and have been (slowly) playing with various different platforms and trying them out.

Do you have any tips for new developers just starting to code?
For web developers, MDN Web Docs is the absolute best resource for learning, period. I'm a big fan of Node School as well since I like the interactive problem/solving experience. I'm also a big believer in building something that already existed. As programmers we've got DRY beaten into our skulls and that obviously makes sense, but when I'm learning a new language or platform, I'll build somethingvthat already exists, like a blog. That way I'm focused on the how of building it and not the what. The end result may be thrown away, but it's a great way to spend more time learning then trying to figure out what to do.

The Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series is dedicated to showcasing developers that are building apps using modern tools. Learn how to Contribute to the Cosmic Community (and get rewarded 🎉) here. To stay connected with us follow us on Twitter and join the conversation on Slack.

Developer Spotlight: Ali Spittel of DEV Community

Carson Gibbons — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 17:38:40 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Ali Spittel, a Software Engineer and Developer Advocate residing in Washington, DC. Ali was most recently Lead Instructor at General Assembly prior to scaling back her course schedule to accept a position as Software Engineer and Dev Advocate at DEV Community. When she's not busy teaching or leading the front-end charge at DEV Community, she's directing the DC Chapter of WomenWhoCode. Follow Ali on Twitter or her DEV Community profile and enjoy the Q/A.

Cosmic JS: When did you first begin building software?
Ali: I started writing code during my Sophomore year of college. I had an extra class block to take an elective, and I had heard that computer science was a great one to take. I fell in love with building stuff, and I moved into a teaching assistant role the next semester. I also started taking a C++ data structures and algorithms class, which I worked so hard at but I just didn't understand. So, I decided that programming wasn't for me, and moved down to DC for a political internship the next semester. Then, I fell back into data analysis programming for that internship, which led me into a software engineering career!

What is your preferred development stack?
I think in a dream world, I would write Vue frontends with Django APIs. Python brought me into programming, and it's still my go-to language. Django, and Django REST Framework, has so much awesome stuff built-in that makes building apps fun and quick. For the frontend, I have love for both React and Vue, and I have professional experience with both. I just think Vue is usually easier to get up and running with. For databases, I'm a PosgreSQL loyalist.

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
Though it's not strictly a code project, I'm really proud of my tech blogging. I've only been doing it for a little over a year, and it's been awesome to see it grow and people's response. I also built Learn Code from Us which highlights tech content creators from underrepresented groups in tech, which is something I'm really passionate about.

What were your biggest challenges being an instructor at General Assembly?
Being an instructor is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. Seeing students' growth is awesome. Learning to code can be really challenging from a lot of angles, and getting through that with the students is a challenge as well! It's a truly immersive experience, and it is for the instructors as well.

I only taught fulltime for a year and a half, but we did make two big curriculum changes to fit in better with where we saw the DC market going. We first moved from AngularJS to React, since AngularJS is in the sunsetting process. We also moved from Ruby and Rails to Django and Python, since Python is so well used by the data science community which is really big in DC.

What was the inspiration for joining DEV Community?
I've been a community member for a little over a year, and writing there was a huge part of how my blog gained traction. I really like the mission and the inclusive community that they foster.

It's my dream job! I get to do everything that I love doing -- coding, speaking, teaching, and working with the developer community. I'm very excited about it!

What are some technologies you are excited about or want to learn more about?
I really enjoy working with Gatsby and Vue, so I may try VuePress in the future. I also haven't gotten a chance to play with React Hooks yet, I'm really excited about them!

The Cosmic JS Spotlight Series is dedicated to showcasing developers that are building apps using modern tools. Learn how to Contribute here. To stay connected with us follow us on Twitter and join the conversation on Slack.

Developer Spotlight: Rick Hanlon of Facebook

Carson Gibbons — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 18:31:30 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Rick Hanlon, a Front End Engineer and recent New Yorker that is now residing in London, England working on the front end team at Facebook. Rick is also on the core team of Jest, a JavaScript testing platform. Follow Rick on Twitter or LinkedIn and enjoy the Q/A.

Cosmic JS: When did you first begin building software?
Rick: When I was 11, my dad taught me BASIC. After that I spent most of my time either in the computer lab playing with apps and downloading music on Napster or in my parents basement building websites on geocities and angelfire. I eventually went to college as a math major, but switched back to software after I graduated and joined my first startup.

What is your preferred development stack?
I'm all in on the React / Node / Express stack because it allows you to build sites as fast as we did back when we would FTP php files to webservers, but with rich experiences that push the limits of web technology. On this stack I highly recommend Next.js. The whole suite of tools offered by Zeit are amazing (Hyper, Now, Next, Domains) and with them you can spin up a site in an afternoon.

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
There a are a few projects I'm super proud of. On the backend, I built the entire checkout order system used by SeatGeek to process all of their ticket transactions through a Python API. On the frontend, I managed a team at Kustomer that built a massive React / Redux app that was quick to iterate on with very few regressions, and I invented a few really cool web technologies including a jsx templating engine.

What were your biggest challenges in building apps at Kustomer in New York?
The biggest challenge for me was balancing short term gains with long term strategies. At a growing startup, every project in the pipeline is money on the table so it can be easy to take the easy money. But if you only focus on what's on the table now, you won't build anything to bring more people in the door and suddenly you wake up and the table is empty.

What was the inspiration for joining Facebook? How has your experience been thus far?
Last May I visited the Facebook London office for the Jest Summit. Walking the halls of the office I started to really see myself working here and decided to start studying for an interview. A few months later, I accepted an offer and was moving from NYC to London!

So far it lives up to the hype. I was worried that there was going to be some big company boogeyman waiting for me with overbearing process and structure, but instead I've found Facebook to run like a community of well funded startups. I actually feel more in control of my time and impact than I ever did at a startup, which is both empowering and intimidating at the same time.

What are some technologies you are excited about or want to learn more about?
Like almost everyone I talk to, I'm super excited about TypeScript. Coming from a Java background, I'm a big fan of types and I think TypeScript has nailed the syntax and community support in a great way. I'm interested to see how much of the JavaScript stack TypeScript eats over the next 3 years.

Do you have any tips for working in a new team environment since you just moved countries for this gig?
I have to remind myself constantly that no one is expecting some huge contribution on the first day. Instead, take time to ramp up, get to know as many people as possible, and enjoy the new role while you find where you fit in.

What does the future of React Native look like?
The future of React Native looks a lot more like React than Native ;)

Conclusion
The Cosmic JS Spotlight Series is dedicated to showcasing developers that are building apps using modern tools. Learn how to Contribute here. To stay connected with us follow us on Twitter and join the conversation on Slack.

Developer Spotlight: Leslie Cohn-Wein of Netlify

Carson Gibbons — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 20:51:51 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Leslie Cohn-Wein, a Front End Developer and Austin native now residing in Dallas, Texas. Leslie most recently worked as a Front End Engineer for Canvas United, a New York City-based digital agency, prior to starting as a Front End Developer at Netlify. Follow Leslie on Twitter or LinkedIn and enjoy the Q/A.

When did you first begin building software?
I taught myself basic CSS in the early 2000s in order to customize my MySpace and LiveJournal backgrounds. To my surprise, that experience kicked off an enduring interest in code.

After studying digital media in college and interning at the Denver Open Media Foundation theming Drupal sites for nonprofits, I moved to NYC for a role as a communications manager. I successfully made the transition into full-time front end development a few years later, working at ad agencies with clients like Nintendo, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and Crunch Fitness. I’ve been building software professionally for the past 5 years.

What is your preferred development stack?
I’m a huge proponent of the JAMstack, which is a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, APIs, and markup. JAMstack apps are incredibly performant, scalable, and secure, and go hand-in-hand with our modern workflows.

In the agency world, I found that I was able to get new projects started more quickly by leveraging static site generators like Middleman and Gatsby, which gave me scaffolding, a templating system, hot reloading, and more without all the tedious setup. Deploying to Netlify was as easy as hooking up my GitHub account and pushing my code (full disclosure: I now work as a front end dev at Netlify).

The JAMstack put the power of developing and deploying dynamic apps in my hands, no back end dev or server maintenance required. I am such a fan of developing with the stack that I jumped ship from agency life back in October to join the Netlify team.

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
Aside from my recent work on the Netlify app, I'd have to say that one of my favorite agency projects was a website build for The Parker Palm Springs hotel in California. I worked for a Ruby on Rails shop at the time, so we chose to develop with Middleman, manage content with a headless CMS, and automatically deploy to Netlify with a standard Git workflow.

Building with the JAMstack meant my time was spent pairing with my art director, refining the interactive storytelling experience on the homepage ー not wiring up views or coordinating with DevOps to get a staging site live. I loved working on a purely front end stack with such a playful design, and it didn't hurt that we ultimately won the 2018 Communication Arts Interactive Award for it.

What were your biggest challenges in building apps in an agency environment at Canvas?
Shipping a new, self-contained site every 2 or 3 months was exhilarating, but that process demands an incredibly well-coordinated workflow. Using static site generators to speed up the build process changed the game for me.

In an effort to ship work even faster, we worked on developing a reusable, easily skinnable component library that would help avoid building duplicate functionality for each new project (because who wants to build another hamburger nav, amirite?).

Contrary to popular opinion, we also found that trying out new tech on occasion improved our velocity. Moving from CoffeeScript, jQuery, and CDN-hosted includes to ES6, React, Jest, and npm did require an investment in learning, but ultimately improved our team's dev experience and significantly shortened the QA cycle.

What was the inspiration for joining Netlify? How has your experience been thus far?
I was scrolling through my Twitter feed last year when I saw a retweet from the smart and prolific Amelia Bellamy-Royds about a front end opening at Netlify. I applied immediately.

Joining the team last October was oddly familiar; I'd been in touch with Netlify's support team for guidance several times over the past few years, and had recently worked with the sales team to power up my agency's capabilities. I'm still getting up to speed, but the tech, too, is familiar: the front end of app.netlify.com is build with React, and ー of course! ー deployed to Netlify. So meta.

I just returned from our week-long all hands meeting in San Francisco, where we reviewed the company roadmap and started concepting some of the new features I'll get to help build. Unlike the agency world, the Netlify team truly believes in an interdisciplinary approach ー I have the opportunity to work side-by-side every day with designers, API and platform developers, technical writers, and other front enders to bring a new vision of the web to life.

What are some technologies you are excited about or want to learn more about?
There are too many to name them all! I actually keep a "learning plan" where I outline concepts, courses, and articles I want to dive deeper in to, and have an accountability buddy at work to keep me honest in my progress.

A few of the highlights right now:

Serverless is blowing up, so learning more about functions as a service (FAAS) is high on my list.
New React features like Hooks and Suspense are close to primetime, so I want to focus in on some practical examples.
I've been using GraphQL with Gatsby for many months, but there's always more to master!
My coworker swyx got us into using Cypress for integration tests, and I've slowly been picking it up.
I tested out CSS-in-JS on my last agency project and think it's worth exploring further.
The design team at my last agency was still using the Adobe Creative Suite, so I'm continuing to level up with Sketch and starting to play with Figma and Webflow.

Do you have any tips for working remote in a team environment?
I've been working remotely for over 2 years now and while it was tough to adjust at first, I can't imagine going back. I've found that a consistent routine is necessary; I get ready as if I were going into an office (minus the slippers!), work from the desk in my dedicated home office, and walk my dog Mack over lunch. This has helped compartmentalize "work time" vs "play time" and usually keeps me from pushing sloppy code from the couch at midnight.

A daily stand-up ensures I get at least a few minutes of "face to face" time every day (thanks, Google Meet!). Slack has also been a huge help in this regard, allowing me to "drop by someone's desk" whenever necessary. As a remotee, I believe it's better to err on the side of over-communicating.

Occasional in-person meetups, both with coworkers and in my community, have been priceless for team bonding and combatting loneliness. It's also a great opportunity to step outside your own bubble and keep a pulse on what's happening in the wider world of software development.

Developer Spotlight: Jason Lengstorf of Gatsby

Carson Gibbons — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 22:37:16 +0000

In this installment of the Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Jason Lengstorf, a developer, architect, keynote speaker and occasional designer residing in Portland, Oregon. Having worked previously at IBM and Precision Nutrition, Jason now serves as Head of Developer Relations at Gatsby. Check out the video of the pair programming session he did demonstrating how to use Cosmic JS to power your Gatsby websites. Follow Jason on Twitter, GitHub and his blog and enjoy the Q/A.

Cosmic JS: When did you first begin building software?
Jason: As a teenager, I was in a band, and we needed things like concert posters, merch designs, and a custom MySpace page. I wrote my first few lines of CSS around then, and slowly started doing more and more: I built our first website, learned Flash so I could embed our music, learned PHP and built a crappy CMS so the rest of the band could post updates to the site, and just kept going deeper and deeper down that rabbit hole. Eventually it became obvious that I wasn’t rockstar material, so I stopped pretending to be a musician and focused exclusively on design/code.

What is your preferred development stack?
Right now, I work mostly with React, GraphQL, and Node.js.

What past projects are you most proud of and why?
The first two that come to mind are GrAMPS and the Gatsby swag store.

GrAMPS is a way to allow multiple independent teams to publish GraphQL schemas as npm packages that are then aggregated and stitched together. IBM Cloud, which I was working on when my team and I built it, uses a microservice architecture, which means that a different team owns each piece of the data. This meant that the API surface was hard to understand, largely undocumented, and extremely difficult to keep track of. By introducing GraphQL with GrAMPS, these teams got to keep control of their data sources, but gave us the ability to expose all of the data through a centralized GraphQL endpoint. This was a huge win for everyone inside the company, and it led to much better communication and standardization within the team.

The Gatsby swag store is a Gatsby site where we sell our swag, but it’s also a way for us to give back to the community. Anyone who contributes to Gatsby — whether that’s through code, giving a talk, writing an article, or something else — can log in with their GitHub account and get a discount code for free swag. This is our way of saying “thank you” to the community for all the hard work they put in. It’s only a small part of what we try to do for the Gatsby community, but for me, it’s a really fun way to give back and joke around.

What are your biggest challenges in building the community at Gatsby?
I’m very fortunate at Gatsby, because the community is incredible. I often make the joke that working in developer relations really just means retweeting all the nice things people already say about us.

The most challenging part has been making sure we don’t miss things. People have questions, and when they reach out to us and we lose the message, that sucks. Gatsby is a community-powered company, so we work extremely hard to make sure the community stays at the center of everything we do: how does Gatsby make people’s lives easier? how do we make sure every decision we make is creating a better experience for the community? how do we ensure that our community is a safe and supportive place for everyone, regardless of experience level or background?
How do things change moving from a legacy company like IBM to a bleeding-edge startup like Gatsby?

Both have their perks and problems. For example, at IBM I felt like I spent months asking permission to do a few weeks’ worth of work, which was super frustrating. However, IBM can solve any problem because they have so many incredibly talented people working there, and their resources are… significant.

At Gatsby, we can quickly move toward new ideas with minimal bureaucracy, but we also hit resource limits: I can’t necessarily hire all the people I’d like to for my team, or sponsor every event I’d like to, or spin up an exploratory team to tackle an interesting-but-unproven problem.

In general, the biggest difference for me has been the amount of chaos available to me. I’m the kind of person who loves to be buried in hard problems with fuzzy definitions. I like trying to make sense out of the mess, and identify pathways through tricky problem spaces. At IBM, there are occasional challenges like this — the GraphQL/GrAMPS project was one of them — but mostly things are relatively well established, so the level of chaos is fairly low. At Gatsby, it often feels like everything we do is being done for the first time, so there’s no shortage of chaos. My personality type tends to thrive in the Gatsby environment, I’ve found.

What are some technologies you are excited about or want to learn more about?
I’m really excited about new developments in the GraphQL space, and I’ll always be learning more about the fundamentals: HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript. I’ve also been dipping my toes into “abstract syntax trees”, which are what tools like Babel use to change code from one format to another. It hurts my brain a little bit, but it’s really fun once it works. :)