S2E12 - Anthony Campolo on full-stack serverless frameworks

Quick show notes

• Our Guest: Anthony Campolo
• What he'd like for you to see: FS Jam - Full stack Jamstack
• His JAMstack Jams: RedwoodJS
• His Musical Jams: Radiohead | Bon Iver

Transcript

Bryan Robinson 0:14

Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that not so tricky question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have Anthony Campolo. A full stack web developer and RedwoodJS advocate.

Bryan Robinson 0:40

All right, Anthony. Well, thanks for coming on the show with us today. How are you doing?

Anthony Campolo 0:43

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. So it's great to be here.

Bryan Robinson 0:47

Excellent. I appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?

Anthony Campolo 0:52

Yeah, absolutely. So I am a bootcamp student. Someone who is kind of coming to programming from a different area of life, I was originally a music teacher, and then also ran a performing arts summer camp for about four years, and just decided that I wanted to try something else out. And you know, that the journey I got to, to coding is, is long and winding, which we'll talk about a little bit as we as we go on. But um, right now I am at lambda school, and learning full stack web development. And so yeah, that's where I'm at. Right, so your lambda school, you do that kind of full time for a small cohort, right? Yeah. So they have a full time and a part time program. So full time is a nine month program. And then part time is an 18 month program. So I actually started full time, and then switch to part time. So I've, I've done a little bit of both, it kind of just depends on you know, if you're also working to support yourself as well, or if you can really do it kind of full time. So yeah, it's, it's it's nice, because they have that flexibility. So people can kind of choose the schedule that that fits for them. Very cool.

Bryan Robinson 2:03

So what do you do outside of obviously, now you're learning to code what's, what's your idea of fun nowadays?

Anthony Campolo 2:09

Yeah. So I've gotten just really into open source. And it's the type of thing where I'm doing it both to to eventually help my my career, but it is something that I've really enjoyed. And I've learned a lot about RedwoodJS. In particular, I've spent a lot of time blogging about it. And I've also given a couple meetup talks about it. I did one at Jamstack Denver, and another one for GraphQL Texas. And I'm also now doing some some podcasts. I got both Jamstack podcasts done by Bryans. So that's good. And yeah, so that's kind of where where I'm at now, I'm really kind of deep into into the redwood world.

Bryan Robinson 2:51

Very cool. Very cool. So obviously, you're a bootcamp student. So you're picking up development as you go along. But what was kind of your entry point into this idea of the Jamstack? Was it Redwood? Or was it something something else in the past?

Anthony Campolo 3:03

Yeah, so it definitely was way before Redwood and already kind of being familiar with with the Jamstack beta easier to kind of get what Redwood was was going for. But to take it back a little bit. I originally before I was doing any web development stuff, I was actually learning like data science and machine learning stuff, is what I was first trying to get into. And a lot of people who do that type of research, they have their own personal websites as well to talk about the stuff they're working on. And there's a couple where I would scroll the bottom and it would say it was created with Jekyll. And so Jekyll is funny enough static site generator created by the creator of Redwood, Tom Preston-Warner. And so I think that was probably the first time I ever had heard of the term static site. And I ended up not going that route. I ended up just making a WordPress website when I was first getting into like blogging. But then once I started to transition more into web development and learning JavaScript and react in particular that I learned about Gatsby, and so I spun up a Gatsby blog. And I listen to a lot of podcasts. So out here podcast with, with Kyle from from Gatsby, or I'm Matt from Netlify. And so I was I was hearing all these all these people like talking about these ideas, and it was just kind of floating around. So it was it's been a kind of a slow, slow roll into it. But it's definitely it's just like it's a huge, massive thing that's just there. And if you kind of pay attention, it's hard not to poke that bubble every now and t