Cloudinary with Tessa Mero

Episode Description

Tessa Mero discusses her role as a developer advocate at Cloudinary, the Media Developer Experts program, and building community in the Jamstack ecosystem.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Tessa Mero, a senior developer advocate at Cloudinary, shares her journey from teaching programming classes at a college to working in developer relations at Cisco and then Cloudinary. She explains what Cloudinary does as an image and video API platform and how developer advocacy goes far beyond public speaking—it's fundamentally about collecting user feedback and improving the developer experience across documentation, product, and pricing. Tessa describes two major initiatives she leads: the Media Developer Experts program, a community of 45 developers who are ambassadors for media best practices rather than strictly Cloudinary promoters, and Media Jams, a community content project that pairs Cloudinary's media API with various Jamstack technologies through searchable, forkable code tutorials. Co-host Christopher Burns offers a practitioner's perspective, sharing how he integrated Cloudinary into Gatsby-based agency work and a startup, and the conversation turns to Cloudinary's video capabilities, add-ons like automatic transcription and background removal, and integrations with services like AWS and headless CMSs. The episode wraps with practical advice on livestreaming tools—comparing OBS, Streamlabs OBS, and StreamYard—and tips on prioritizing goals and strategy over equipment when getting started with streaming.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Introducing Tessa Mero and Cloudinary

The episode opens with brief banter before Anthony introduces Tessa Mero as a senior developer advocate at Cloudinary. Tessa shares that she's been in developer advocacy for about six years and has spent nearly two and a half years at Cloudinary, describing the company's product as an image and video API that lets developers store, transform, optimize, and deliver media assets programmatically or through a user interface.

Anthony notes that their audience of developers likely has some familiarity with Cloudinary and steers the conversation toward Tessa's background, specifically her experience teaching programming classes at a college. Tessa explains how she transitioned from a software engineering role into full-time teaching after quitting her job due to Seattle's brutal commute, covering courses in PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, and XML while actively attending meetups and conferences to modernize her outdated curriculum.

00:03:42 - Developer Advocacy, Feedback Loops, and Joining Cloudinary

Anthony draws a connection between teaching and developer advocacy, prompting Tessa to reflect on how her combined experience in programming, education, and public speaking naturally led her into the role. She emphasizes that the biggest part of developer advocacy isn't traveling to events but rather collecting genuine feedback from users—especially new ones—about the developer experience, documentation, and product, then channeling that feedback into an internal loop across product, pricing, and documentation teams.

Tessa also shares how she discovered Cloudinary through her professional network and was drawn to the platform because it seemed fun to demo and talk about. She contrasts her previous three years at Cisco, a much larger company, with Cloudinary's smaller, faster-moving culture where decision-making happens more quickly. The conversation touches on the nuances of the word "users" and how developer relations teams need to center their decisions around what developers actually need.

00:07:34 - The Media Developer Experts Program and Community Philosophy

Tessa introduces the Media Developer Experts (MDE) program, which she's managed for about a year and a half. The program includes around 45 developers who serve as experts in working with images and video across various technologies—not exclusively Cloudinary users. She explains that some members even use competing products, because the goal is education and community involvement rather than brand promotion, and Cloudinary supports them through sponsorships, event access, and resources.

She highlights Cloudinary's community-first philosophy, noting that the developer relations team prioritizes genuine involvement over logo placement at conferences. Anthony affirms this observation from his own experience, and they discuss the fine line between adding value to communities and extracting value from them. Tessa also notes the strong overlap between MDE members and the Jamstack community, with many attending, speaking at, or organizing Jamstack events and meetups.

00:11:09 - Cloudinary's Origins and the Media Jams Project

Anthony asks how Cloudinary, which predates the modern Jamstack movement, came to invest so heavily in that ecosystem. Tessa explains that Cloudinary started about a decade ago as a consulting group that built web applications, and the media management platform grew organically from client requests until it became a standalone product used by enterprises like BuzzFeed, Nike, and Nintendo. She frames the Jamstack connection through the acronym itself—JavaScript, APIs, Markup—and how Cloudinary fits naturally as the API layer for media.

This leads into a discussion of Media Jams, a community content project designed to answer the common question of how to integrate a media API with a specific tech stack. The platform lets developers filter by technology and use case, then access tutorials with embedded code sandboxes they can immediately fork. Tessa describes it as the team's approach to fast, practical onboarding that benefits authors building their portfolios and developers looking for ready-made solutions.

00:14:56 - Practical Cloudinary Use Cases and Technical Deep Dive

Christopher Burns joins the conversation more actively, revealing that he built Gatsby websites with Cloudinary at his agency and uses it in a startup for image processing. He walks through practical scenarios—from hosting user-uploaded avatars to generating branded Open Graph images for social sharing—illustrating how a media API saves developers significant work with just a few lines of code. Tessa adds that many users initially think of Cloudinary only as image storage, not realizing it can update thousands of images in real time.

The discussion expands into Cloudinary's video capabilities, including automatic transcription with SRT file generation, AI-powered video moderation through Amazon Rekognition, and accessibility features like auto-tagging for screen readers. Christopher and Tessa also cover the file upload widget, integration with cloud storage providers like AWS and Dropbox for backups and imports, and how URL-based transformation parameters—while powerful—can overwhelm developers who just need basic height, width, and quality settings.

00:23:53 - Jamstack Integrations and Managing Code Content

Anthony pivots to Cloudinary's broader Jamstack strategy, and Tessa describes how the company has been integrating across the ecosystem—working with Netlify on plugins, participating in the Vue community, and partnering with numerous headless CMS platforms. She explains that as a media API, Cloudinary naturally fits into every corner of the Jamstack because every technology needs to work with media, making these partnerships and integrations a natural extension of the product.

Tessa then explains her role managing code content for the Media Jams project, which involves coordinating about 20 paid authors and contractors, handling the content pipeline, and developing strategy around which topics and technologies to prioritize. She frames the project as a win for everyone involved: authors build their portfolios and get paid, developers in the community get practical tutorials they can use immediately, and the developer community can even request specific content to be created on demand.

00:27:58 - Streaming Tips, Tools, and Closing Thoughts

Anthony shifts the conversation to Tessa's experience with livestreaming, noting the often-underestimated difficulty of producing good streams. Tessa advises that the most important first step is defining your goal, audience, and strategy before investing in equipment, though she acknowledges that clear video, good lighting, and quality audio are essential minimums. She shares her own ongoing struggle with lighting, explaining how even a high-end camera can look terrible without consistent, well-placed lights.

The discussion compares streaming tools: OBS offers deep customization and Mac compatibility, Streamlabs OBS provides an easier interface with one-click Twitch integration, and StreamYard excels for meeting-style streams but is more limited in customization. The episode wraps with a lighthearted exchange where Christopher accidentally praises Gatsby instead of Cloudinary, leading Tessa to share a memorable story of live-demoing Gatsby's Getting Started page at a meetup and having a site running in under five minutes. The hosts thank Tessa and point listeners to her Twitter, the Media Developer Community Discord, and upcoming Jamstack meetup events.

Transcript

00:00:00 - Tessa Mero

Is it just audio being recorded?

00:00:01 - Anthony Campolo

Correct. We can see each other, but only the audio will go out. Can't see your epic teal screen. It's not quite green screen.

00:00:08 - Tessa Mero

Green screen? I think my color is always inconsistent in my room because I haven't put curtains over the blinds, and I really don't want to hide the view.

00:00:30 - Anthony Campolo

Tessa Mero, welcome to the show.

00:00:32 - Tessa Mero

Hello.

00:00:33 - Anthony Campolo

You are a senior developer advocate at Cloudinary. So why don't you let our listeners know who you are and what you do?

00:00:40 - Tessa Mero

I've been a developer advocate for the last six-ish years. Before that, I was doing a lot of developer advocacy for an open source software community. I've been at Cloudinary for almost two and a half years now and absolutely love it. It's a very fun company and a fun product.

If you haven't heard of Cloudinary, it's an image and video API. It allows you to store, transform, optimize, and deliver your media assets using an API. You can use widgets. You can use a user interface if you're not a developer. Basically, if you ever use images or videos in your web application, you definitely should use some kind of media API to handle all of it and have full control of it.

00:01:21 - Anthony Campolo

With the types of people who listen to our show, they're mostly developers, so I think a lot of them are already going to be familiar with Cloudinary. They'll have at least heard of it. Some may have used it, some haven't. Chris and I have varying degrees of experience with it, so we'll have a lot to get into.

You do tons of advocacy work, which I really love as an advocate myself. You already talked a little bit about your background on a recent Jamstack radio interview, so I would point listeners there. We don't need to rehash that whole story because you just told it very recently.

I would be curious to hear a little more about your experience. One thing you talked about that I thought was pretty cool is that you taught a PHP class. I'd be curious what that was like and what kind of class it was.

00:02:09 - Tessa Mero

I taught a lot of classes full-time at a college. I started as a software engineer, more of a web application developer, building internal engineering tools. This was ten years ago, and I started doing part-time evening classes. PHP was one of the first ones while I had that job, and I actually quit my full-time job. Mostly because I didn't enjoy the two-hour drive in traffic, even though I lived 30 minutes away from the office. Seattle traffic is just horrible, and I quit my job thinking I'm going to spend some time building my own software product and become a CEO of a company and just start my own business.

And then one week after I quit my job, I thought, I kind of don't want to do that anymore. Shoot, I don't have a job, and the part-time evening classes I was teaching called me up and said, hey, would you be interested in working full time immediately? We need you to be working full time. I'm like, okay.

[00:03:04] And that solved that immediately. So I was teaching all of the classes. There was, of course, a PHP class, a JavaScript class. There was a JS framework class specifically on jQuery. Take note, this was eight or nine years ago. They were teaching XML, all of that stuff.

And because the curriculum was so outdated, I started going to meetups, PHP meetups, and going to conferences and workshops and everything I could just to get the latest on the programming language and what's modern with this, and be able to update all the projects and make it more fun.

00:03:42 - Anthony Campolo

That's really cool because, for me, I always think of a very strong connection between teaching and dev advocacy and devrel. To me, the two are very interlinked. But I find that that's not necessarily the case for everyone. Not everyone thinks about the job that way because there's a wide range of things that goes into it. And I'd be curious what you feel like you've taken away from those teaching years into your role today.

00:04:05 - Tessa Mero

I actually never knew I had that knowledge and skill to become a developer advocate. My experience with programming and my experience with teaching, and during all that time I was also going to events and I started presenting at events, and I never thought I'd become a public speaker. But traveling and going to events is kind of a bonus of being a developer advocate. It's not really the main part of the job.

The biggest part of being a developer advocate, aside from educating others on using your product and on best practices in the broader topic, depends on exactly what your team goals are. There's so much more to it, such as getting actual feedback from users and especially new users who have never used your product before, on the whole developer experience and what is their journey using it, and how can we improve the process? How can we improve the product? How can we improve the documentation?

There's just so much to it in developer relations, which is the team name for developer advocates and developer evangelists.

[00:05:08] You have to be able to work with different departments and bring this internal feedback loop everywhere. The product team, you need to bring product feedback. The pricing team, the documentation team, the education team, whatever team you're working with, almost all of them, and it's critical to act on the feedback. The developers are the users. I don't like the word users of the product, and they know what's best for you. Your company shouldn't be making the decisions. It should be made based on what the developers need, what the customers need. And sometimes those two get split up when they're not really separate things.

00:05:50 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. It's funny what you said about how you don't like the term user. I was listening to a friend of mine's podcast, Monarch, and they were having the same conversation that the only time you hear the word users is when you're talking about people using tech and people using drugs.

00:06:04 - Tessa Mero

Right.

00:06:05 - Anthony Campolo

So how did you first hear about Cloudinary?

00:06:08 - Tessa Mero

It was through my network. Someone mentioned that Cloudinary was hiring developer advocates, and I started looking into the platform and was messing around with the API, and I thought, this looks fun. This would be something enjoyable to talk about, to be able to create samples, show people how to use it, and be excited about it at the same time.

Previously, I was at Cisco Systems for about three years doing developer advocacy for them. So it was a big change from a very big company to a smaller company in comparison, and a very different type of product.

00:06:47 - Anthony Campolo

You also talked about your Cisco history on the Jamstack radio interview, and I'll be curious to hear a little bit about the contrast between those two different companies. And as you say, going from a very large, more established one to a newer upstart, what kind of cultural differences were there between the workforces?

00:07:05 - Tessa Mero

The number one difference is how fast decision-making can be. Decision-making is a lot faster. With the bigger company, my department was about 150 people, and my company now is about 280 people all together. And that's growing pretty quickly. I think we're going to be at maybe 380 by the end of the year or early next year. It's growing rapidly. We're getting up there.

00:07:34 - Anthony Campolo

I believe you lead a program for Cloudinary, the Media Developer Experts program. I'd be curious to hear a little bit about that and what some of the goals are for it.

00:07:44 - Tessa Mero

Our MDE program, the Media Developer Experts program, started about two or three years ago, and it started out with an idea. A previous colleague of mine started and launched the program. I took over the program for the last year and a half or so, and we have 45 developers. It's kind of like an ambassador program, but not specifically Cloudinary ambassadors.

They are experts in terms of how to use images and videos in different use cases with different technologies, all things media basically. So they use different APIs. Some of them don't even use Cloudinary, some use our competitors. So it's really not about getting everyone to use Cloudinary. It's more about educating other developers and being involved in the developer communities they're involved in.

We're supporting them in any way we can. Maybe we're sponsoring their podcast, we're sponsoring their events, we send them to events to help them learn more. So we try to make it slightly different from other types of experts program, where they get more value in it than we get value.

[00:08:50] Because one of the things that also attracted me to this company is they put community first, and the developer relations team really cares, truly, genuinely cares about helping other developers and being involved in a lot of developer communities. And instead of sponsoring a conference and just trying to get our name and logo out everywhere, we really get to know the people individually and become part of this community, and we contribute in different ways and countless things. That just makes me love it even more.

00:09:23 - Anthony Campolo

I can definitely speak to that. As someone who has seen a little bit of your work and who has seen Cloudinary out in the communities, it always comes across as very genuine. It's never like sticking yourself out there just to be like, hey, look at me, buy my stuff kind of thing. It's a very fine line to walk with this type of work. People can have trouble knowing exactly where that line is, how to add value, and how to extract value. That's obviously not the term we would like to use, but it's always going to be somewhat transactional. It doesn't necessarily have to be because it's really about building relationships. And that's one of the things that I really enjoy about this job, actually getting to build those relationships.

I'd be curious. Roughly how large is the program? How many people are in it?

00:10:04 - Tessa Mero

We have about 45 MDEs. I'm trying to keep it more exclusive, with private invites. Only when our team gets larger can we bring in a lot more people. There's just so much we want to do with the program to make it even better, but we only have so many people to be able to help with it.

One of my favorite things about the MDE program, one thing that I've been doing bringing people in, is their involvement in the Jamstack community. A large percentage of the MDEs attend Jamstack events, speak at Jamstack events, and a lot of them organize Jamstack meetups and conferences and all types of Jamstack events. It's really exciting. Our company is a big proponent of the Jamstack community. For example, tomorrow there's a Jamstack conference that I will be attending for fun and we are a sponsor. I'm pretty sure we're a sponsor. We sponsor so many events that I lose track of which ones I'm just attending. I think another coworker is handling the sponsorship end of that specific one.

00:11:09 - Anthony Campolo

That's how you and I met, through Jamstack SF. We had a presentation from Stetson that I was involved in. This is when I very first started working at the company, and I have a very long, ridiculous story that went along with trying to build out that project and having an existential crisis around it, and then it ended up being a completely different thing than it needed to be. And then I showed up and was like, all right, here it is. Hope it works. Bye.

It was a very strange experience for me, but it ended up working out. Thankfully, it ended up working out. I would like to get into that, but before, I would actually be curious to know because Cloudinary predates the Jamstack. I think in the sense that it's a fairly old company, and I would be curious how they saw the Jamstack come up and how they thought about it and decided they wanted to invest in it.

00:11:58 - Tessa Mero

That's a really good question. Of course, a lot of people don't like the actual phrase. Cloudinary started about ten years ago. It started out as a consulting service of a few people, building out web applications and solutions for people, and it got to the point where a lot of the customers were saying, hey, we need a way to manage our assets, our media assets. This group of people created a little platform and API to do very simple things.

As more customers had needs, because it was the only one of its kind at that point, the product started growing and growing into its own standalone product. And it wasn't meant to do that, and it just became that over time. Then all of a sudden it just became a company, and they started hiring more and more people over time. Now it's officially a very robust product with countless features. It's crazy how much it can do. We have competitors. There's other video APIs and image APIs out there, but this one's a little different.

[00:12:57] It just has a lot more that you can do if you have more complex projects. And it's one of the number one choices for big enterprise companies to use. There's a lot of companies out there like BuzzFeed and Nike and Nintendo. They all are built with Cloudinary.

So there's a major project that our team has been working on, with JAMstack being an actual acronym for JavaScript, APIs, Markup. We're looking at jam as jamming a bunch of different technologies together. We ran into the situation of people constantly asking, we know you have a lot of examples using Cloudinary, but I'm using this specific tech stack. How do I implement the media API with this? Maybe I want to generate social sharing images using Open Graph API, Gatsby, and Cloudinary. Maybe I want to learn how to make images more responsive with Eleventy. Maybe I want to create an image gallery with Next.js. How do you do this?

Even if you find a tutorial, then sometimes it's just hard to replicate when you have a different set of technologies you're working with.

[00:14:05] Maybe you have a different server environment set up. How do you search and find ways to jam all of these technologies together? We decided on creating a project, a community project specifically for the Jamstack community called Media Jams. It's a really cool application. You go to the site, the first thing you do is kind of select your technology stack that you're using, and then you can select a use case of what you're trying to do. Maybe you're trying to optimize your website better. Maybe you're trying to do very specific things.

You can search it all by tags, and then you'll get a list of tutorials. Each tutorial will have an embedded code sandbox available, so you can immediately fork the code and be able to change and use the code freely. What better way to onboard and use code? That's as easy as that. Doesn't get better than that. So we're really excited about it.

00:14:56 - Christopher Burns

I've been sitting here quiet, listening to a lot of developer relations, and you don't know what I do. I run my own company. I run an agency that made Gatsby websites with Cloudinary.

00:15:09 - short split/interjection

Oh. Ooh.

00:15:10 - Christopher Burns

And then I made a startup that also uses Cloudinary in the background for image processing. So I've been a user of both sides. I think one of the biggest things that we've not spoken about that does really show the reasons why to use these things, these things being a media API such as Cloudinary.

Let's take the user example of me. I build an application. I say you can upload an avatar. It's a favorite one of everybody's. Where do you host it? Who hosts it? Do you want to do any checking on that avatar? Do you want any quality modifications or file type modifications? All of these things are what an API handles, and it does it great.

But let's take a more complex scenario. For my use case, I have these generated pages that are rankable on Facebook and Twitter. So you share it. You see this nice image that gets uploaded to one of these media APIs. And then what is also really cool is the manipulation you can do through these APIs.

[00:16:15] And that is, for example, not only does it show the image our end user uploaded that's hosted on the media APIs, it has our logo on top of that image, especially for Facebook and Twitter. So there's recognition of our brand and our solution that we're working on. That's one of the big things that these solutions can really help with, but they obviously come with caveats, and APIs can be really hard to deal with if you're not a developer. So that's where these user interfaces came in.

I used Cloudinary two years ago before the updated UI, and have since for about a year or two. And yeah, Cloudinary is really, really good. I was introduced to Cloudinary through Gatsby, where I first learned about Gatsby images and was like, we don't want to host our images on Netlify. We'll host them on Cloudinary because they've got an awesome free tier.

Gatsby images was a really good way to shoehorn Cloudinary in. In the best and worst of ways, nobody told me to pick Cloudinary.

[00:17:19] It was plug and play. It was great.

00:17:22 - Tessa Mero

That makes me happy to hear that you have experience working with it and know a lot about it and the value it has. I know the documentation is not the easiest. How do you explain a million things a product can do in the simplest way? It's really difficult without actually showing use cases of how it's being used with code samples. Other than that, going to the documentation site just really gives you all the full details as much as they can.

00:17:49 - Christopher Burns

One of the most interesting things I think about media APIs is that a lot of the parameters are done in the URL in a very specific pattern. Scrolling through the documentation, it's like, okay, Q is to do quality, bar is to do black color, which settings do I need? And sometimes you can get really swamped when all you need to do is set a height, set a width, and set a quality. And everything else can just disappear into the background.

But this is where you ask where these things work really well. Media APIs like Cloudinary work really well in image-heavy e-commerce websites sometimes. I'm going to be honest here. The worst thing about user-uploaded images is not that they could upload something you don't want on your platform, it's that they could upload a 25 megabyte photo. Yeah, that's what things like Cloudinary definitely do help with.

00:18:39 - short split/interjection

We have a very.

00:18:40 - Tessa Mero

Generous free account, and a lot of people use it specifically for image and video storage. And then we started realizing there's a lot of people who think that it's only for storing images, and there's a lot more that you can do, like updating and changing thousands of images in real time just instantly. It's really cool.

One of our authors on our Media Jams app is creating an image generator. It's for conference organizers. You put the name of the speaker, the logo of the event, and their title, and it generates the image for you. Because Cloudinary has image overlays and text overlays, you can choose the font, and it's kind of like a Photoshop in an API.

We also have an integration with Adobe Lightroom. You can do a lot more image enhancing, not just image manipulation and transformations, but a lot of quality enhancements that you can do. It's really neat. I still have so much to learn about it. It's never-ending features, especially on the user interface. We are becoming more of a productization company, and they are launching a lot of different products that make it a lot easier to work with the interface side of things.

00:19:52 - Christopher Burns

One of the things that Cloudinary does really well is you have not just your standard tools like competitors, you also have add-ons, such as don't you have one that can remove backgrounds automatically?

00:20:03 - short split/interjection

Yes.

00:20:04 - Christopher Burns

Pretty cool if you want to provide that to your customers because you have to think about the end-use scenario. You're the developer that's implementing these things, but your users are literally going to be able to upload an image, click a button, and have the background get automatically removed. And for you, that probably took five lines of code to add the button in and send the prop to the photo.

So there's some really powerful things. Something that I've not played around with that I would love to talk about is the video side of the platform. Can you explain that?

00:20:38 - Tessa Mero

For example, you have a recorded video and you upload it. There's a lot of things that you can do. For example, you can create an add-on that transcribes your video and takes all of your audio, automatically turns it into, I think, an SRT file? And you can actually go in and update the words if it's not 100%. Of course, it's not going to be 100% accurate. So you can update the words. You can change the font and style and exactly where on the video you want the transcription to be. You can add a logo to it, or you can just basically, I'm not sure if you can do image recognition on video, but there's a lot of different add-ons that you can do with video.

00:21:19 - Christopher Burns

Can you automatically transcribe the videos?

00:21:24 - Tessa Mero

It's automatic. It's all automatic. You pay. I think the first 30 or 60 seconds is free. And then you kind of have to pay since it's a service that's being used. I'm looking at the add-on list. One of my favorite add-ons is the accessibility add-on called Rekognition.

00:21:43 - Anthony Campolo

Amazon Rekognition that takes pictures and then captions them essentially.

00:21:48 - short split/interjection

Actually, there's a lot of.

00:21:49 - Tessa Mero

Different Amazon Rekognition ones. The one that I really liked is the auto-tagging, which is good for accessibility. It adds tags and makes it so if you can't see your screen, you can have it read to you what the image or video is.

There's also a Google AI video transcription. So there's different types of transcriptions. There's the Cloudinary built-in transcription, and you can also do Rekognition AI video moderation. So with that add-on, it'll just make sure that the video doesn't have anything that shouldn't be on there. Cloudinary likes to keep all of our media assets very clean. You can also create your own apps with Cloudinary video and have it automatically moderated so you don't have to go in and check every single one one by one.

00:22:36 - Christopher Burns

And what's also really good is that if you're building your own platform, we spoke earlier about uploading an avatar. You also provide the tools to upload an avatar. I forgot what the tool is called. You can either upload a file or pull it from Facebook. Is it called file uploader?

00:22:51 - Tessa Mero

Are you talking about the widget, the file upload widget? Yes. So I think that's the 2.0 version of the widget, where it gives you all of the options. You can import from Dropbox and just select a whole set of images with a lot of different options of where your images are being hosted. So it's pretty neat.

00:23:10 - Anthony Campolo

I'd be curious, actually, how you integrate with other cloud services because it sounds like you can use different things from Google or from AWS. And how exactly does that work in terms of plugging into other cloud resources with AWS?

00:23:25 - Tessa Mero

Let's say you make changes to an image. Every transformation you make gets a backup version of that. There's an option to store a copy of every single edit and change so you can go back to any version. Kind of like git commits, where it gets pushed to AWS and you have a copy of everything. So if something happens, all your backups are stored. But I think it works the other way around where you can pull images from your storage.

00:23:53 - Anthony Campolo

Do you have more technical questions, Bernzy, before I go into some more community stuff?

00:23:58 - Christopher Burns

Would you say that Gatsby images really helped the adoption of Cloudinary in the Jamstack?

00:24:05 - Tessa Mero

I think a little bit of everything. We've been dipping our toes in all areas of the Jamstack community. We're talking to different technologies and seeing how can we be part of this. How can we help make your product better when it comes to media? What can we do to work together?

We've been working a lot with Netlify. We're working on getting some plugins released for their Netlify plugins area, and trying to figure out how else could we integrate Cloudinary in a way that gives value to both sides of us being part of the Vue community. We go to a lot of Vue events. I've spoken at some Vue events. One of our colleagues, Maya, I think she created an open source tool for Vue storefronts, Vue storefront UI. I can't remember what it was.

00:24:56 - Anthony Campolo

We can link to that in the show notes. We'll find it.

00:24:58 - Tessa Mero

Yeah, I can find it afterwards and send it to you. But we're involved a little bit everywhere. We kind of fit in all areas of Jamstack. We're a media API and every technology needs to work with media, especially with headless CMS. We've been a big part with integrating with a lot of different headless CMSs, and with more on the list to come. The list in the Jamstack community is growing quickly with what we're getting involved in, whether it's a partnership, integration, or whatever it is.

00:25:28 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, that's a good segue into what I was actually going to ask about, because when we were talking as we were setting up this interview, you mentioned that there's kind of two major things you do. First, which was the MDE program, the Media Developer Experts program, which you already spoke about, but then you also say that you manage code content for the Jamstack community project.

00:25:46 - Tessa Mero

That's the one I talked about, jamming all the technologies together to create that content project. Media Jams.

00:25:52 - Anthony Campolo

Great. And so what does that actually mean, to manage code content?

00:25:57 - Tessa Mero

We need to have a lot of content come in at a very fast rate, and we're a very small team that already has a lot of projects we're managing and responsible for. We have 20 different authors right now getting paid or contributing code content.

So I'm helping with managing contractors and authors and handling the pipeline to get everything in and getting people paid. And just the whole, what's the strategy and where are we going with this? What do we need to do next? Talking about ideas on what topics should be involved and what kind of content we're looking for. We're always looking for more Gatsby content and just trying to figure out what's the next step.

00:26:40 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I would love to hear about that. Then where is your head at in terms of how you want to expand out into the Jamstack, what stuff you think is exciting, and what you're kind of looking towards as the next thing you want Cloudinary to get into?

00:26:52 - Tessa Mero

We want to basically answer everyone's questions. When anyone from any community in Jamstack says, hey, I'm trying to do this with images or I'm trying to do that with video, we can immediately get it set up. Someone creates a code demo for that person, and they're able to use it. And it's a win-win for everyone.

The author who creates technical content, we call a media jam, it helps with their career development. They're creating a portfolio tied to their name, kind of like a blog site, and other developers from the community will learn from them and be able to use their code. And the developer community can also submit and request any content to be created. That's something we can get done on our end and get that up and running. Whatever developers need and want to learn about, we should be providing as a developer relations team. So that's our thinking around what's the easiest way to really onboard and learn quickly how to work with a media API.

[00:27:50] And the focus isn't on Cloudinary, the focus is on the other technologies and how to work with images and video with those things.

00:27:58 - Anthony Campolo

It's very meta because you yourself work quite a lot with media also, not only just developing around media, but you do a lot of streaming. I know you're a big fan of StreamYard, which I've actually started to learn a little bit about recently at my own job. And streaming is hard, much harder than I think most people realize.

So I would really love to get some of your words of wisdom, of what you've learned about streaming. And for people who want to get into streaming themselves, what kind of advice you would give to them in terms of what they need to know and how they can prepare for it?

00:28:30 - Tessa Mero

The number one most important thing is understanding what is your goal of streaming. Who is your audience? Why are you streaming? Are you going to have a set schedule? Are you trying to build a community?

I think people prioritize understanding what is the best possible equipment to buy, and that's one thing I've been doing with a lot of the MDEs who are already in podcasts, who do streams, or who are interested in streaming or podcasting. I've been getting them set up in Cloudinary, sponsoring all of their equipment, or upgrading all of their equipment. So I've been doing a lot of purchasing on microphones, on the best headphones, the best amp, the best everything.

But it's really about understanding what is your goal and strategy before jumping into getting the best possible equipment for what you're doing. It is good and important to have a clear camera, good lighting, and good sound, or else it'll be really cringey to listen to.

00:29:28 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's similar advice I'll give. I'll say there's a certain benchmark that you need to hit and that if you can get to that, it's usually not as much as people think. I usually say you want to go for an AmazonBasics microphone, which should be the very bottom rung of what you would want to do. And then you want to have, usually, a computer camera that is actually fairly clear, but the lighting is definitely a challenge for a lot of people.

00:29:54 - Tessa Mero

I still struggle with that every single day. My lighting was so bad that I would be completely washed out and looked like a fuzzy ghost in my camera. Even though I have a high-end camera, I realized it's not the webcam, it's really the lighting. So I ordered a light. And then I realized the lighting sometimes makes it worse and sometimes improves it. You have to do more lighting, and all the lighting has to be consistent.

And I'm always changing my webcam settings. It's a lot of work on its own just to get the camera to look right, and sometimes you don't have the time to adjust everything and make it look good.

00:30:30 - Anthony Campolo

And in terms of the actual recording software itself, have you messed around with OBS at all or are you kind of all in on StreamYard?

00:30:38 - Tessa Mero

I use OBS. There are two different OBS programs. There's the regular OBS, and then there's Streamlabs OBS, which we call SLOBS. I've used OBS a lot, but it's a very old-looking software.

The reason why a lot of people use the older version is it's compatible with Macs. It has a lot more options than SLOBS. Streamlabs OBS has a much easier interface, and it's a one-click integration with Twitch, whereas you kind of have to put in code and link up both sides. It's more complex and technical to work with. With StreamYard, it's easy. StreamYard is good, and it's designed for that. It also works with Macs and Windows.

StreamYard is good for streaming meetings, streaming meetups, streaming meetup-style events. Streamlabs, I feel like you have a lot more customization you can do with it. Countless customizations you can do with it. StreamYard, you're very limited to what it has, which is only a few things with customizing. So it really depends on which direction you want to go with how you want your streams.

[00:31:51] If you want to get really fancy and do all this cool stuff with Twitch because it's being pushed, Streamlabs OBS and StreamYard are being pushed to Twitch. So your viewers will be on whatever platform you're live streaming on.

00:32:05 - Anthony Campolo

Cool. Well, thank you for going into that. That's very helpful for me and hopefully helpful for our listeners as well. Do you have any other questions, Chris, before we start closing it out here?

00:32:13 - Christopher Burns

No, not really. I think Gatsby is a great platform.

00:32:17 - Anthony Campolo

Cloudinary.

00:32:17 - Christopher Burns

Cloudinary is a great platform.

00:32:19 - Tessa Mero

I was about to say, I agree with you. We're a big fan of Gatsby and would love to have more Gatsby content on our app.

00:32:27 - Christopher Burns

Well, I did mean Cloudinary.

00:32:30 - Anthony Campolo

Chris does this a lot. It's okay. It's very in character for him.

00:32:34 - short split/interjection

I'm a huge supporter. We can talk about Gatsby instead.

00:32:38 - Christopher Burns

I love Gatsby, and it's still one of my favorite things on the internet.

00:32:42 - Tessa Mero

One thing that was really great, I was doing a Jamstack meetup. I think I mentioned this in another podcast, but it's just a really good memory that I have. This was about two and a half years ago, and in the meetup, people were like, I mentioned Gatsby as an option, you know, if you're a React developer, this is a great platform. And someone said, can you show us how it works?

I'd never used it before. I'd never even opened the homepage before. I just knew what it was. And I'm like, well, I don't think we really want to see it. They were like, can you show us a live demo and create something? I'm like, well, you know what, whatever, I'm doing it. I'm going to do this live right now, right in front of everyone. So I opened up the Getting Started page and let them know, this is me getting started. If I struggle, then you'll struggle too.

[00:33:25] And it was less than five minutes. I launched and had a website running. I'm like, wow, I've never seen documentation this easy in my life. It doesn't get easier than how Gatsby does it. It felt very exciting.

00:33:39 - Anthony Campolo

That's awesome. Yeah, that's a really cool story.

00:33:41 - Tessa Mero

I have more respect for a company if they can make their Getting Started that simple for anyone to onboard easily.

00:33:47 - Christopher Burns

Gatsby was my first love of React frameworks. My second was Next and my third was Redwood.

00:33:54 - Tessa Mero

Ooh. I think we have Redwood content too in our Media Jams project. But I might message you later about Gatsby content.

00:34:02 - Christopher Burns

Please do. I still love Gatsby. Gatsby is really great if you're an image-heavy website, as I said at the beginning about the two scenarios. One of them is you just want to host images and then get pulled back through an API. Then it's really, really good for Gatsby. But then when you're on the other hand of now I want to upload images, that's when it's really good for things like Next and Redwood. I see both sides.

00:34:26 - Anthony Campolo

Well, thank you so much for being here, Tessa, and thank you so much for all the work you do out in the community and for the Jamstack and for developers more broadly. We really appreciate it. And I love people who make themselves available and put themselves out there and have a positive presence in the community. So I see it and I appreciate it. It was great to have you here and give you a chance to talk about all the stuff you're working on. And we'd love to get where our listeners can find you, where they can get in contact with you, and any links you want to drop for them.

00:34:58 - Tessa Mero

Sure. I think my Twitter is where I'm most active. Twitter.com. I am also active in our Discord. I have a monitor that I just keep open for Discord. The community I'm in is called the Media Developer Community. It's Discord Media, and it'll instantly join. Or you can click on Add server and type Media Devs and it'll join the server.

Oh yeah, and I have a Jamstack meetup that I'm livestreaming, and I think the next one is going to be first week of June. So meetup.com jamstack.

00:35:41 - Anthony Campolo

And these will also all be in the show notes as well. So if anyone needs to find them, perfect.

00:35:47 - Tessa Mero

Stay tuned, I'm about to announce the next event. That's it.

00:35:51 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And have a good day, everyone.

00:35:54 - Tessa Mero

Thank you. Bye.

00:36:26 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I got some Redwood events going on.

00:36:28 - Tessa Mero

Ooh.

00:36:29 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Always love doing meetups. So hit me up anytime.

00:36:33 - Tessa Mero

It's very addicting. I can't stop, help.

00:36:38 - Anthony Campolo

I know. I once did two in one day. I did React Jacksonville and then React Dallas. I did them back to back.

00:36:46 - short split/interjection

Nice.