S2E10 - Dan Barak on making your own stack, the maturing of the Jamstack and more

Quick show notes

• Our Guest: Dan Barak
• What he'd like for you to see: Stackbit's offerings, but also reach to Dan out for a conversation about Stackbit or the Jamstack in general.
• His JAMstack Jams: Stackbit | Next.js | Sanity.io | Contentful
• His Musical Jams: Jazz; whatever Spotify plays to keep pace to

This week's sponsor: Auth0

This week, we've got Auth0 as a sponsor. While their prowess at authentication is important, they're also releasing a ton of new tutorials and courses on their YouTube channel, including a free course on building a full-stack Jamstack app with Next.js.

Transcript

Bryan Robinson 0:14

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the intriguing question, what is your jam and the Jamstack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have the amazing Dan Barak. Dan is the co founder and CEO at the Jamstack company Stackbit. Before we dive into the episode, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor, auth zero, we'll talk a bit about all the amazing educational content they're putting out at the end of the episode. If you're curious about that, Jamstack and auth education, head on over to a0/to/tmjyt for all the videos.

Bryan Robinson 1:06

All right, Dan. Well, thanks for being on the podcast with us today.

Dan Barak 1:09

Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

Bryan Robinson 1:10

Yeah, no problem. So tell us a little bit about yourself, what do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing.

Dan Barak 1:16

I'm the co founder and COO of Stackbit. And we're the only platform and for the complete platform for the Jamstack. And so I come from a product background, I've been a product manager at Lyft and Facebook before that, and startups and before that, as well. And for fun, I usually do things that my six year old does, and means like a lot of Legos, riding bikes, and etc.

Bryan Robinson 1:43

Very cool. So my five year old is absolutely in love with video games, which I kind of apologize for, in numerous ways, multiple days a week. But yeah, that's that's pretty much my, my fun twos, oh, whatever my five year olds into right now?

Dan Barak 1:57

Exactly, yes, we just, we just started using the Switch. So he's, he's very much into that.

Bryan Robinson 2:03

That's, that's what we do quite a bit too. You just you watch daddy play, and then daddy gets to actually play video games a little bit.

Dan Barak 2:09

Exactly. Exactly.

Bryan Robinson 2:12

So tell me a little bit about what does it actually mean at a kind of a product company like Stackbit to be, you know, COO, what do you do on kind of a daily basis there?

Dan Barak 2:20

So the COO at a purely technology company, mostly I think, and it's about running the company smoothly. So it's, it's managing most of the of the people and making sure that they have what they need to move forward, and they're not blocked. And they're also, you know, on the administrative side, you know, that everything is a Okay, everybody's has, you know, contracts getting paid, like all that work smoothly, we're fully distributed company across the world. So making sure that part is running up and running. And other than that, is also kind of dealing with no as a co founder, and you also deal with a lot of product coming from a very deep product background. And a lot of the product work is done between my one of my other co founders, like in CO hot Pressman, and we're like working together on the product, making sure engineering is up to date and makes and, you know, has a good roadmap, we obviously have an engineering manager, but in discussing priorities in etc. Other than that, obviously go to market talking a lot with customers and clients, and selling in etc. Like just everything, making sure everything takes Yeah, definitely kind of a catch all, but also some important things along along the the product side as well.

Bryan Robinson 3:48

Yep. Very cool. So you've been at you, you mentioned Facebook and lifts some outside, you know, not to use the word traditional, but definitely some, some older, longer standing tech companies, but what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack, of which sackbut is such a kind of an integral part.

Dan B