S2E5 - Debbie O'Brien on NuxtJS, web frameworks, creating your own framework and more

Quick show notes

• Our Guest: Debbie O'Brien
• What she'd like for you to see: Nuxt Content | Nuxt Static | Nuxt Components
• Her JAMstack Jams: NuxtJS

Transcript

Bryan Robinson 0:02

Hello, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the timeless question, what's your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week on the show, we had the amazing and talented Debbie O'Brien. Debbie is the head of learning and developer advocate for NuxtJS. She's a Microsoft MVP, Google GDE and Cloudinary MDE.

Bryan Robinson 0:25

But before we get to that, let's talk about our amazing sponsor this week TakeShape. We'll talk about their content platform after the episode. But if you're curious to find out more right now, head on over to take shape.io slash That's My Jamstack for more information.

Bryan Robinson 0:45

All right. Well, thanks for being on the show with us today. Debbie, how are you doing today?

Debbie O'Brien 0:48

Hey, I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Bryan Robinson 0:50

No problem. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that kind of thing.

Debbie O'Brien 0:56

So I'm working for NuxtJS as head of learning and Developer Advocate. So that's kind of pretty cool. And in my free time I'm doing sport because like lockdown makes you fat. So I'm doing a lot of sport, Taekwondo running, cycling anything.

Bryan Robinson 1:12

Anything get a little active, right?

Debbie O'Brien 1:14

Yeah. Also because we were locked up for like two months. So it's just like, good to get outside and actually do stuff.

Bryan Robinson 1:20

Yeah, the best I'm on managing right now is just short walks outside. That's, that's what I've got going.

Debbie O'Brien 1:25

Well, it's a good start.

Bryan Robinson 1:27

So tell us a little bit more about what you do as kind of the head of education and dev advocacy at

Debbie O'Brien 1:35

Yeah, so basically, my job is to kind of like make sure that Nuxt is really easy to use, easy to learn by providing good documentation, great examples, demos, pretty much anything that you would want when you want to like learn something, that you have the right materials, and then we'll work on workshops and video courses, etc. And then obviously, just Nuxt-ifying the world. I mean, the whole aim is that everyone uses Nuxt. They know what it is. Because it's amazing, right? So we just have to like, show it to the world. And then like, everyone would just come on board.

Bryan Robinson 2:06

Watch everyone pour right in at that point, right?

Debbie O'Brien 2:09

It's easy. It was really easy.

Bryan Robinson 2:13

So so what what do you kind of see is the difference between like, since you have both those titles can combine what's the difference between like developer education and you know, Developer Relations or developer advocacy?

Debbie O'Brien 2:23

Um, I guess you could say they're very similar sometimes, especially when you're writing a blog post, right? Because you're advocating because you're producing material, but you're also teaching because you're teaching someone something new. So that's why I think they're very much combined. But I guess if you were like to go for a job and learning it doesn't mean you have to be a speaker on a stage right. So the advocate, advocacy ism is a little bit more. Get out there in front of people. I think, you know, be more, don't be shy.

Bryan Robinson 2:50

Cool. So, so we'll talk a little bit more about Nuxt here in a second. Because I imagine when we talked about your, your use of the Jamstack. Professionally, we'll talk a lot about that. But what was your entry point into the idea of the Jamstack, or static sites, or whatever that may have been,

Debbie O'Brien 3:04

Yeah, so I guess I kind of just fell into it in a way, um, we were working for a company, and they, we had to, like, rebuild the website, it was it was really, really, really slow. And it was development experiences terrible. There's a lot of problems. So we at the time, we researched which framework to use, and, you know, was react or Angular or Vue. But we needed server side rendering, we needed like, you know, good search engine optimization. So a lot of them were a problem for us. And we came across Nuxt. And at the