S2E11 - Drew Clements on performance, simplicity, and getting to the fun parts

Quick show notes

• Our Guest: Drew Clements
• What he'd like for you to see: Protege.dev - A job board for Junior devs
• His JAMstack Jams: The simplicity of the Jamstack that allows you to "get to the fun part"
• His Musical Jams: Fall Out Boy, Pop Punk from the late 90s, early aughts (you know, like the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 soundtrack!)

Transcript

Bryan Robinson 0:14

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask the time tested question, what's your jam and the jam stack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week, we have Drew Clements, a front end developer for Foster Commerce.

Bryan Robinson 0:39

All right, Drew. Well, thanks for being on the show with us today.

Drew Clements 0:42

Thank you for having me.

Bryan Robinson 0:44

Awesome. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing?

Drew Clements 0:48

Well, again, my name is Drew Clements. I'm a front end developer with Foster Commerce. We use view a lot on the front end. For fun. I like to play video games. I play guitar. I play paintball. Although I haven't played in a year or two since we've had our first kid.

Bryan Robinson 1:06

Yeah, I have I have many hobbies that I have that I have not done nearly as much in the past five years since I had since I had mine. So I totally get that. Yeah. So So what sorts of video games do you play video games?

Drew Clements 1:18

I mostly play a bunch of first person shooters. I'm really big on the latest Call of Duty right now. PUBG, all those fun things.

Bryan Robinson 1:26

And then you say you're at foster commerce. So I assume that's, that's an e commerce agency or developer. What do you actually do there?

Drew Clements 1:35

So we build e commerce solutions for a multitude of clients. Cool. And you say you say mostly in Vue nowadays. Yeah, we for the front end, we use view. And in the last few projects, we've started roping in graph QL. with it.

Bryan Robinson 1:51

Okay, very cool. So So obviously, we're using some some semi Jamstack things, at least when it comes to Vue and GraphQL. But what would you say is kind of your entry point into the world of Jamstack? Where did you kind of get into it?

Drew Clements 2:04

The entry point for me was when I wanted to probably like a bunch of other developers, I wanted to build myself a blog, because I told myself, if I built it, I would actually write.

Drew Clements 2:14

So when I was looking at, you know, different options for how to do that, I came across things like Gatsby in similar frameworks, I didn't really know much about it, I really just kind of dove in headfirst.

Bryan Robinson 2:27

Nice. And so so out of curiosity, you you did the technology, you learn the technology to do the thing, right to write the blog. Now I've been through three blogs before I successfully actually started writing, were you able to actually overcome that hurdle and write on the blog.

Drew Clements 2:41

I wrote two articles on the blog. That was about as far as I've made it here was here recently, I've been using the dev.to for some of my writing, but I'm actually in the process of rebuilding my blog, I'm not redesigning it. I've already gone down that rabbit hole. But I'm rebuilding it. So I'm gonna be able to use the dev.to platform, kind of as the CMS for my Jamstack Bog

Bryan Robinson 3:09

Very nicely, because they they at least there's an RSS feed. And there's probably some other stuff that you can get out of that right.

Drew Clements 3:14

Oh, yeah.

Bryan Robinson 3:15

Very cool. So so what what kind of technology brought you into the Jamstack? So you said you started researching blog platforms? I think you mentioned Gatsby. But you're also in Vue land. So what are you using nowadays? In terms of that? Or what technologies are you researching? Right now?

Drew Clements 3:30

I'm researching ways I can make Nuxt as Jamstack as possible. I really, I really liked the view framework. And Nuxt, I guess, I guess that's server side view. But there, there are some stuff, you can put some things you can do to it. To make it a little more Jamstack. Ease, I'm really trying to look into two ways I can do that. That's part of the research for rebuilding my blog site. It's how I can implement some of those things.

Bryan Robinson 3:56

Get it get a static as possible. Like it's as quick as possible, I think. Yeah, I think