S2E6 - Brad Garropy on the A in the Jamstack, cloud databases, and side projects

Quick show notes

• Our Guest: Brad Garropy
• What he'd like for you to see: His Twitch Streams | His Discord Community
• His JAMstack Jams: Netlify | FaunaDB | The "A" in the JAMstack
• His Musical Jams: Kolby Cooper | Artists on his Daily Texas Country site

This week's sponsor: Auth0

This week, we've got Auth0 as a sponsor. While their prowess at authentication is important, they also just release a free online course for building a full-stack, Jamstack application with Next.js, Tailwind, Airtable, and Auth0.

Transcript

Bryan Robinson 0:01

Welcome back, Jamstackers! It's been a bit of time since last we talked, but I'm so glad to be back with you. You're listening to That's My Jamstack the podcast where we asked a timeless, ageless and incomparable question. What is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week on the show, we have Brad Garropy. Brad is a lead front end developer at Adobe by day and a live code streamer by night.

Bryan Robinson 0:46

All right. Well, Brad, thanks for being on the show with us today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Brad Garropy 0:50

Yeah, absolutely. I'm a recently promoted lead front end developer at Adobe. And the job description basically entails that I build SAS services for the Magento ecommerce platform, as you mean like Software as a Service things or another definition of SAS? Yeah, software as a service. So imagine things like product recommendations or search that can be kind of tacked on to the e commerce store. So what do you do for fun that if that's what you do for work? Yeah, well, definitely for fun, I do a lot of programming and side projects, but away from the computer, I really like to work out I'm into bodybuilding, powerlifting, running, all those types of things.

Bryan Robinson 1:31

Awesome. So so what what kind of, is it like strength training? Is it are you doing like a Olympic league? Like overhead presses for your powerlifting? What what's that entail?

Brad Garropy 1:41

Yeah, like my training splits are typically like this, they start off with one of those powerlifting movements like your, like your bench press, or your squat, your deadlift. And then the rest of the training session kind of focuses around bodybuilding movements like to, to really stress out and tear down the muscles.

Bryan Robinson 1:59

That sounds awful from somebody who doesn't do a whole lot working.

Brad Garropy 2:03

You know, it's funny, I found that a lot of developers actually take well to powerlifting. Because it's a it's usually a very structured program with progression and percentages and numbers. And I think developers just feel right at home when they have a lot of structure to training.

Bryan Robinson 2:22

Yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of a logical, like I said, the progression is a logical thing. And that tends to play well with the way our brains work.

Brad Garropy 2:29

Exactly.

Bryan Robinson 2:31

Nice. So so this is a Jamstack podcast, let's talk about the Jamstack. A little bit, what was your entry point into this idea of other static sites or Jamstack? As we can know it today?

Brad Garropy 2:40

Yeah, it was interesting. I, I started learning web development at a really volatile time, like create react app was just coming out. And this notion of front end frameworks was just really picking up and my entry point into Jamstack, was trying to make my first blog. And I had to think about, you know, how do I source data but still make hosting cheap and free and easy? Yeah. Right. So Gatsby was one of the first tools that I got to reach for I did run Jekyll for just a little bit there. But Ruby, Ruby is difficult to work with.

Bryan Robinson 3:18

Yeah, definitely as a as if, especially if you're coming from like a front end development perspective. And you also often have to do Ruby work, like that just doesn't feel quite right.

Brad Garropy 3:26

Yeah, like my learning path was like HTML, CSS. What is this Jekyll thing? You know? Yeah. So eventually, I kind of switched over to Gatsby and kind of hopped on the train with everybody else about like, this is kind of how you source data and and pre generate pages, which made hosting, you know,