S2E1 - Tim Benniks on playing, scaling and business in the Jamstack

Quick show notes

• Our Guest: Tim Benniks
• What he'd like for you to see: His YouTube interviews with notable developers
• His JAMstack Jams: Lambda Functions | Connecting various technologies
• His Musical Jam: Fantastic Negrito

Other Technologies Mentioned

• Gridsome
• NuxtJS
• Jekyll

Bryan Robinson 0:03

Welcome friends to season two, That's My Jamstack. If you'd like season one, you'll get more of the same out of season two, me talking to developers and designers in our amazing community talking about their passions in and out of the Jamstack.

Bryan Robinson 0:15

I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have the amazing Tim Benniks on the show. Tim is director of web development at Valtech, part of the Cloudinary media developer experts program, a speaker and much more.

Bryan Robinson 0:27

But before we dive into the interview, I want to welcome back into season two, our amazing season one sponsored TakeShape. Stick around after the episode to find out more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Bryan Robinson 0:44

Today, on the podcasts we have Tim. Tim, welcome. Thanks for coming on the podcast today.

Tim Benniks 0:48

Thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here.

Bryan Robinson 0:50

Awesome. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?

Tim Benniks 0:54

Yeah, sure. So as I said, my name is Tim Benniks and I was born in Amsterdam, but now I live in Paris. And here in Paris, I'm the director of web development at an agency called Valtech. Which is kind of a global agency where we do big platform builds, for big ecommerce and stuff like that. And so I'm doing a whole bunch of different web development things and the management and things like that.

Tim Benniks 1:21

And what I do for fun changes all the time. Actually, I've been a lifelong musician, so that always stays. I always enjoy making music. But lately I've actually done a lot more content creation and I've been doing stuff like speaking in conferences, so I really enjoy that aspect now like figuring out what gear to use to record something actually being able to speak in front of a camera and not be boring, like so for fun I tried this kind of stuff now.

Bryan Robinson 1:53

Cool. Yeah, I definitely I can I can get behind that is once you go down the gear rabbit hole of like audio recording and video recording. There's there's no hope for you anymore.

Tim Benniks 2:02

This is a trap. And the worst is, as a musician, I've recorded a whole bunch in studios, but also at home back in Amsterdam. And then when we moved to Paris, I decided to either sell stuff or just gave it to friends who needed it. Because I was going to a small apartment, I couldn't make a lot of noise. So I had this nice stuff. And now that I'm back in a place where I can actually record, I don't have the stuff. And now I'm like, oh, but I don't like the cheap things, because I'm used to all this nice stuff now. So it's, it's a double trap for me.

Bryan Robinson 2:35

Nice. So what kind of what kind of music do you do? I mean, we'll talk about what you're into in terms of listening. But what kind of instruments do you play? Or what's your musical style?

Tim Benniks 2:44

So I'm a guitarist. And not much more. It's one of those like, if you ask me to sing, it will be awful. But on a guitar, I'm fine. And when I started out, I was like a session player. So I would play anything someone would like and i just i Like that. So I would be like, all over the place in all different kinds of things. But after a while, I noticed I just want to settle for something I really enjoyed, which was blues music, like the old school Chicago, 1960s blues, that's really where it's at. For me, I really enjoy that. And then when I'm on stage playing that it doesn't really matter anymore how technical you are. It's much more about the vibe and the feeling and timing and having fun. And now that I don't play as much if I grab a guitar now I just play that and I'm happy.

Bryan Robinson 3:34

Very cool. So obviously not music podcast, it's a Jamstack podcast, let's talk about like, what was your What was your entry point into the idea of the Jamstack? Or maybe it was static sit