S2E3 - Jayson J. Phillips the early, intermediate and current eras of the Jamstack

Quick show notes

• Our Guest: Jayson J. Phillips
• What he'd like for you to see: The Media Developers Discord | His Live coding on Twitch
• His JAMstack Jams: Getting back to simplicity on the web | Tools like Netlify
• His Musical Jam: Bootsy Collins - I'd Rather Be With You | Karen Harding - Say Something

Bryan Robinson 0:05

Hello, everyone, welcome to another fun packed episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that difficult question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? In this week's episode, we chat with Jason J. Phillips, Director of Engineering at a 2U, boot camp instructor and a media developer expert.

Bryan Robinson 0:23

Before we dive into the episode, I wanted to mention our sponsor take shape, stick around after the interview to find out more about their content platform or head over to takeshape.io/thatsmyjamstack for more information.

Bryan Robinson 0:41

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

Jayson J. Phillips 0:43

Appreciate you, Bryan. Glad to be here.

Bryan Robinson 0:45

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

Jayson J. Phillips 0:49

Yeah, so by day, I am a director of engineering for boot camp applications at 2U. We house a lot of boot camps web development. FinTech, UX, and a couple others through extension schools at universities. And so at night, I also teach web development and data visualization boot camps, most recently through the UC Berkeley Extension. And University of Denver was my most recent class.

Bryan Robinson 1:18

Cool. So you're doing actual technology for companies that are doing boot camps through schools? Is that right?

Jayson J. Phillips 1:25

Yeah. So the team that I that I oversee and manage runs a slate of applications that's for all parts of the learning aspect. So we build tools for instructing as we build tools for our students in our boot camps. We integrate LMS as for our learning platforms, so everything from the student is already enrolled to the student graduating, my team plays a role in their software journey. It's never a dull moment, pretty awesome.

Bryan Robinson 1:53

So what do you do for fun outside? Obviously, if you're if you're teaching at nights too, then there's not a whole lot of room for that but what's what's your idea of fun.

Jayson J. Phillips 2:00

Yeah. So I tend to run far away from technology for fun. While I do enjoy programming and you know tinkering around on my off time, I tend to be away from the house. So hiking outdoor activities. I'm a big cyclist and runner. I'm still trying to eventually chip away at hopefully running for the half marathons in 50 states I've allowed nine states now. So yeah, I try to make up for all the sedentary sitting at the desk by running myself until I can't run anymore.

Bryan Robinson 2:36

Cool, so do you do like competitive or re you just doing it like those half marathons just to do the half marathons?

Jayson J. Phillips 2:43

Yes. So my tagline is I don't run fast I run far. So that not competitively but I definitely enjoy a lot of the runs for fun and just to beat my my own personal times and then doing some team adventure races. Like there's a series called Ragnar where it's a team of 12 split between two vans and you run 200 miles over 36 hours.

Bryan Robinson 3:09

Wow. I'm out of breath for a mile. And that's about that's about as much as I can go. So that is super impressive.

Jayson J. Phillips 3:15

I mean, those races is all about the team. Because again, I run far not fast. So on the wrong team I can be probably very disruptive to a group, but it works out well.

Bryan Robinson 3:26

Very cool. So So tell us what was your kind of entry point into the idea of the Jamstack or into static sites or wherever you found your way into this cool community?

Jayson J. Phillips 3:35

Yeah, so I think the thing that hit me right away about Jamstack is that my first experience on the web, you know, was all static. Back in about 2001 2002, there was a popular platform called Graymatter written by this gentleman on Noah Gray, and it was written in Perl, but it it would take all your content, as text files and all your comments and actually generate static output for your site. So while the compilation step