Living on the Edge
An in-depth conversation about edge computing, performance, and the evolution of the JavaScript ecosystem
Episode Description
Anthony Campolo discusses his new role at Edgio, compares modern JavaScript frameworks and runtimes, and explores enterprise-grade deployment platforms.
Episode Summary
In this episode of Jamstack Radio, Brian Douglas welcomes back Anthony Campolo for a third appearance to discuss his new developer relations role at Edgio, a publicly traded company formed from the merger of Layer0, Limelight, and Edgecast. Anthony explains how Edgio differentiates itself from platforms like Vercel and Netlify by operating its own network infrastructure with extensive points of presence and direct ISP connections, offering enterprise-grade performance, security, and fine-grained cache management alongside a familiar git-push deployment workflow. The conversation shifts into a broader survey of the JavaScript ecosystem, where Anthony maps React, Solid, and Qwik to Node, Deno, and Bun respectively, illustrating a spectrum from proven stability to paradigm-breaking performance innovations like Qwik's resumability and Bun's Zig-based runtime optimizations. He shares a real-world anecdote about advising an enterprise client on whether a $2 million migration from Next.js to Qwik would be worthwhile, highlighting the practical tensions between cutting-edge performance gains and production readiness. The episode closes with Anthony describing his community work hosting JavaScript Jam Twitter Spaces, writing a weekly newsletter, and running a new livestream called AJC and the Web Devs, all aimed at fostering open source education and collaboration.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Anthony's Return and New Role at Edgio
Anthony Campolo returns for his third appearance on Jamstack Radio and traces his career arc from Redwood community involvement through StepZen and a Web3 stint back to the JavaScript ecosystem. He explains how his existing network of framework creators and JS community connections ultimately pulled him away from Web3 and toward a role where he could leverage those relationships.
He describes how conversations with Edgio's Ishan reignited his interest in the company, and how the platform's history is surprisingly complex — originating as Movieweb, rebranding to Layer0, merging with Limelight, and ultimately combining with Edgecast to form Edgio, a publicly traded company with around 1,500 employees. Anthony positions Edgio as an enterprise Jamstack solution built on its own network infrastructure rather than on top of AWS or Cloudflare.
00:05:33 - Edgio's Infrastructure and Deployment Model
The conversation turns to what makes Edgio technically distinct from other deployment platforms. Anthony explains that Edgio operates its own network with extensive points of presence and direct ISP connections, giving it a fundamental speed advantage over competitors who build on top of existing cloud providers. He contrasts this with the common Jamstack trajectory where teams eventually outgrow hosted platforms and migrate to AWS.
Brian shares his own experience migrating infrastructure to AWS for Elasticsearch needs, and Anthony clarifies Edgio's scope — it handles SSR, edge functions, and static delivery but not databases. He describes the platform's SSR-first philosophy, its CLI-based approach to static builds, and its fine-grained cache management system, noting that framework integrations across roughly 40 frameworks smooth out the configuration complexity for developers.
00:10:25 - State of the JavaScript Ecosystem
Anthony offers a detailed mapping of the JavaScript landscape, comparing React, Solid, and Qwik to Node, Deno, and Bun along a spectrum from established stability to paradigm-breaking innovation. He argues React has stayed relevant through continuous reinvention — from hooks to server components — but carries legacy constraints that newer frameworks address. Solid refines the React model with compilation and no virtual DOM, while Qwik introduces resumability to eliminate hydration entirely.
On the runtime side, he characterizes Bun as a maniacal optimization effort where every JavaScript primitive has been rewritten in Zig for maximum speed. The discussion touches on Deno Deploy's strategy of partnering with platforms like Netlify and Supabase, the open question of whether Bun's Oven deployment platform can compete on features beyond raw performance, and how deployment platforms and frameworks must both be fast to deliver real-world results.
00:18:53 - Enterprise Features, Security, and Customer Base
Brian asks about Edgio's tagline around not sacrificing security for speed, and Anthony breaks down the product structure: Edgio Applications encompasses Sites for deployment, Performance for real user monitoring, and Security for network-level protection. He contrasts this with typical Jamstack platforms that lack integrated security configuration, positioning Edgio closer to the fine-grained permission controls found in AWS.
The conversation shifts to Edgio's customer profile — primarily large e-commerce sites with substantial traffic. Anthony shares a compelling anecdote about sitting in on an enterprise discussion about whether to invest $2 million migrating a Next.js app to Qwik, where the recommendation was to pursue incremental improvements like Partytown instead. He reflects on how this exposure to real production decisions fills a gap that demo-focused developer relations work often leaves.
00:25:19 - Community Work, Content Creation, and Picks
Anthony and Brian discuss the importance of community-driven developer engagement, from Discord communities and Twitter Spaces to livestreaming. Anthony describes his work hosting JavaScript Jam, a weekly Twitter Space and podcast sponsored by Edgio but editorially independent, covering open source and JavaScript news without corporate pressure. He also introduces his new livestream, AJC and the Web Devs, where he pairs with framework authors for simple hello-world builds.
Brian shares his picks — Beyerdynamic headphones and the RODECaster mixer for high-quality audio in podcasting and Twitter Spaces — while Anthony highlights the JavaScript Jam newsletter he now writes and his stream's guest lineup including Ben Myers, Ryan Carniato, and others. The episode wraps with mutual appreciation and a nod to the open source community that brought them together in the first place.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Anthony Campolo
A lot of times, some of the things that people are using, that they're being told are these awesome, fast, edge-native things, are actually just kind of vaporware. You actually have to benchmark these things to find out what they're doing. The ability for developers to connect in real time and share knowledge and collaborate, I think that's really great. And that's a huge part of open source, a huge part of devrel. So now I can do that with the full backing of a massive company behind me.
00:00:28 - Brian Douglas
Hey, this is Brian, and you're listening to Jamstack Radio, a bi-weekly series where we discuss modern web development with maintainers, founders, and developers. Jamstack Radio is brought to you by the leading investor and developer for startups. For more information, visit Heavybit.com. If you're interested in being a guest on the show or if you'd like to suggest a topic, find us on Twitter at Jamstack Radio. Welcome to another installment of Jamstack Radio. On the line, we've got Anthony Campolo. Anthony, what is going on?
00:00:58 - Anthony Campolo
Hey, Brian. Thanks so much for having me back. Third time. I think you said I'm tied for the most frequent guest at this point.
00:01:05 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I think you're tied now with Johannes Schickling, who's one of the co-founders of Prisma. But I want to talk about what you're doing right now because you've been here a few times. I think the first time you didn't have a job, and then you got a job, and then you came on when you had the last job, and now you have a new job. So what are you doing now, Anthony?
00:01:23 - Anthony Campolo
Well, this really brings it all full circle in a great way because the first time I was here, I was talking about Redwood. That's kind of how we got to know each other. I was trying to break into the industry, and I got involved in this open source project, Redwood, and became their de facto devrel person and was going out and doing podcast interviews and meetups and all that. Then I got hired at StepZen to do GraphQL stuff, and then I decided to pivot into the Web3 stuff, and we had a really great conversation about Web3. I was very thankful for that because it was very hard to find people in the Web2 world who wanted to talk to me about Web3 because it's a contentious topic and people have a lot of strong feelings about it.
I loved it, I learned a lot, I met great people, and I still think the space has a lot of great things to do. The reason why I ended up deciding to pivot away from it was really nothing to do with Web3 itself, and more to do with just my actual network, because I also host FSJam. At this point, I've had every single JavaScript framework creator on the show, so I talk to people like Ryan Carniato on a regular basis now.
00:02:31 - Anthony Campolo
So I felt very honored to have these close connections and people who trusted me and seemed to see me as peers, and I felt like I was starting totally from the bottom with Web3. I didn't have any connections. I was learning all the tech, and all of my previous connections and friends were like, "I don't really want to have anything to do with this." So I felt like I kind of bifurcated my life in a lot of ways, and I wanted to consolidate it back.
So when I was originally talking to QuickNode, I was also talking to Edgio at the same time, and Ishan at Edgio, who's actually been on the show, contacted me and was basically like, "Are you sure you don't want to work for Edgio?" and kind of restarted the conversation. I was in a position where I could kind of name my price, and I felt like it would be a good move, both because I knew a lot of the people there already and because I knew that I would get to work more on JavaScript frameworks and the whole deployment kind of stuff that I'd already gotten very deep in.
00:03:35 - Anthony Campolo
And I'd actually already helped integrate Redwood into what was previously called Layer0, now Edgio. So I already knew the platform to a certain extent. All the pieces kind of fell into place. I've been there only a month now, still pretty new, but that's what I'm doing now. And Edgio, for people who didn't really hear it yet, I would call it an enterprise Jamstack solution. I think it's probably the simplest, cleanest way, at least for this audience. It's like Vercel or Netlify, but way doper and for way bigger, faster, more high-stakes, more performance-oriented sites.
00:04:11 - Brian Douglas
Okay. Yeah, I definitely want to dig into that. And I think that sort of enterprise Jamstack is right in our wheelhouse here on Jamstack Radio. Just one quick programming note for folks: Ishan, his episode is 90, so quite a few episodes ago, like almost, I guess more than a year ago.
00:04:28 - Anthony Campolo
What's funny is also on that episode, he's talking about Limelight because Layer0 merged with Limelight. So they were first called Layer0. Actually, they were first called Movieweb, then they changed to Layer0, then they got bought by Limelight. So they were going by Limelight, and then Limelight and Layer0 and Edgecast merged into a single company called Edgio. So it's actually not only a deployment platform, it's also one of the top one or two largest CDNs and video streaming platforms in the world. We've been having this whole Super Bowl thing going on. I see the team talking about the Super Bowl. I would never have people at StepZen talking about the Super Bowl, you know?
00:05:09 - Brian Douglas
Well, so how big is this Borg of companies? How many people work at Edgio today?
00:05:15 - Anthony Campolo
Probably about 1,500.
00:05:17 - Brian Douglas
1,500. Okay. For some reason I thought this was because my context is Ishan, so I thought this was still a new thing. I didn't realize there was a difference between Layer0 and Edgio. So thanks for enlightening me.
00:05:30 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's a publicly traded company. You can buy our stock right now.
00:05:33 - Brian Douglas
Wow. That is amazing. The more you know. I definitely want to dig into, like, I was thinking of Edgio as edge computing. So it's more than edge computing then at this point.
00:05:43 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, the edge computing is a big part of it. The reason why we lean into that in particular is the same reason we had the name Layer0 for a while, which is that we have our own network. This is not us just building on top of AWS or Cloudflare. We are our own network, and we have more POPs than anybody, points of presence. And I am going to slightly butcher this, but we also connect more directly with the ISPs themselves. So there's a way that the traffic is routed that actually makes us fundamentally faster than some others.
So there's just some really deep tech that lets us be very legit, which I was very interested in because I've been using all these deployment platforms for a while, and the DX is super sweet. But I always knew there were compromises that went along with it. You know that when you use Netlify or Vercel, you usually kind of have this idea that you're eventually going to end up migrating to Amazon or something like that.
00:06:44 - Anthony Campolo
But with this, you wouldn't migrate anywhere. You get a really nice deployment paradigm. You get your site up, but then you're on one of the fastest, most legit networks in the world. You're already there and set.
00:06:56 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. And that's one of the things. So I wonder, because we're currently going to, we're actually moving to AWS for some infrastructure stuff, and we've leveraged some other Jamstack tools that have really got us to where we are today. But the things we want to do, so for example, OpenSauced, we currently are indexing a lot of GitHub repos by, it doesn't matter, I won't share our secret sauce. You can definitely hit me up later. But basically what I'm getting at is we're indexing all this data. We want to do magical things with the data to identify, you know, this point, this date, like what happened, and answer a bunch of questions. And our limitation is like when we were using this hosted Postgres solution, we couldn't really dig in to what we needed to, and we needed Elasticsearch.
And Elasticsearch, to migrate from a hosted version like a Jamstack solution, it became a little more cumbersome, and it was sad to leave the tool that got us to where we are today. But for us to move faster, we had to make that decision. So are you saying that with Edgio, I can do a little more custom configurations and choose my own adventure?
00:08:01 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I mean, we don't run databases, so that would still be a thing you would have. Your data would be persisted in a database somewhere, but it gives you everything else. It gives you SSR, it gives you edge functions, it gives you static. And what's kind of interesting is the way that I'd heard Ishan describe it a lot is that he would describe it like, "If you imagine the Jamstack, but instead of static first, it's server-SSR-first," because it's based more around saying, "We want to give you this deployment paradigm where you're just doing git push, and then you get your thing, get deployment branches and all that stuff." But it's not doing a static build. They actually don't run static builds at all. They have a CLI that you can use if you want to do a static build, but for the most part you're actually uploading stuff to their servers, and they have their own conventions around a route file and things like that. That's where you can get really fine-grained cache management.
00:08:57 - Anthony Campolo
So you can configure all your cache headers, and for that stuff it can be challenging if you want to do it from scratch. But what's really cool is that we have integrations with every single framework. If you go to our website and check out the docs, you'll see like 40 frameworks, you know, all the classics. And we have a distinction between what we call tier one and tier two frameworks. So tier one is full support. We keep up with the new releases. And we're always basically on the hottest of things. Like Next.js is going to be the kind of standard for that. And back in the day, they actually invented their own framework called React Storefront. This is not a very well-known framework, but it was a way.
00:09:42 - Brian Douglas
I do remember it.
00:09:43 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. It's a way to implement partial hydration in Next.js. And it was actually making an e-commerce-ready solution for React. So yeah, that's the whole thing about enterprise performance. And I really thought this was the way to go because I've seen this trend play out over the last couple of years, where you have Solid and Qwik and Marko starting to become more popular, where JavaScript devs get that performance is a thing. That is an issue that we need to think about. So if our deployment platforms, along with our frameworks, can help, that's what we need. You can't just have a fast framework and an okay deployment platform, or a fast deployment platform and an okay framework. You need to have both of them now.
00:10:25 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, 100%. And we were having this conversation before we hit record around the React ecosystem and like, is it going through a transition? Is it like, are we getting refocused efforts with Vercel now having the core team members work for them? I'm curious, you have so much knowledge around this space because I know you're connected with Ryan and the Solid team. What is your take on the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem?
00:10:54 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Well, what's funny is actually the first blog post I wrote for Edgio, which we'll put a link in the show notes, was comparing React, Solid, and Qwik and mapping those to Node, Deno, and Bun. So if you think of React and Node, those are the standards there. You know, no one ever got fired for choosing IBM kind of thing. No one's ever gonna get fired for choosing React or Node. And I don't think React is going anywhere. I think React has managed to continue to evolve and stay relevant. React never stayed the same. As soon as people started using it and it picked up, they were like, "Okay, we're going to change this whole thing and make it hooks." Then we started to figure that out, like, "Okay, we got to change this whole thing and make it server components," you know? And every time they've done that, the ecosystem has gone with them, surprisingly enough. So I think what they've done is pretty incredible.
00:11:45 - Anthony Campolo
But there is legacy. There are things that kind of hold them back from being as performant as they could be. So that's where things like Solid come in. So Solid is also like Deno. They've both been around for like four or five years. They're actually really established at this point. And they take the previous paradigm and say, "We're going to look at this, we're going to look at what could be improved, and we're going to tweak those things." So Solid looks a lot like React. It has JSX, but under the covers it's doing different things. There's no vDOM and there's a compiler. There's all this stuff that makes it really lightweight and really performant. Same with Deno using Rust and the general performance kind of mindset and DX and having your tooling be all integrated. But then you have Qwik and Bun, which are saying, "Let's actually not even try to take the last paradigm and improve it. Let's throw it out and build a new paradigm that will be fundamentally faster in ways that they can never compete with."
00:12:49 - Anthony Campolo
So Qwik does this with resumability that allows you to remove hydration entirely. So there is no JavaScript that needs to be booted and loaded. They can just resume the state wherever they were. And then Bun, which is using a completely different programming language called Zig and is basically this one dude who sat down and benchmarked every single line of code that will ever be written in JavaScript and made them as fast as possible. That's kind of how I see Bun. So yeah, it's kind of a question of how cutting edge do you want to be? How much do you want to be on the bleeding edge versus how much you want to stick with nice, safe, stable tech? Lots of good reasons to choose React. Lots of cool new things that you can dive into if you feel the need to experiment.
00:13:32 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. And that's the thing about this experimentation. I appreciate you giving us our state of our ecosystem because Qwik, I've met the Qwik founder, or I guess the co-founder, at Builder.io.
00:13:43 - Anthony Campolo
Builder. Oh, yeah. There's Misko, there's Steve, there's Adam, there's Manu. They are, I think, one of the coolest teams in all of open source right now. I have so much respect for what that team is doing. You need to get them on the show for sure.
00:13:57 - Brian Douglas
I met Misko at the React holiday party a couple months ago, which you asked about Oakland before we jumped on. Yeah, I feel like San Francisco might be back. There's some pretty cool events that are happening.
00:14:11 - Anthony Campolo
I'm hearing.
00:14:12 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
00:14:12 - Anthony Campolo
I'll never be back, but I'll visit.
00:14:15 - Brian Douglas
You had your tour of duty here. But I wanted to talk about experiments in the context of Edgio because I wonder, like, because that's the challenge of things like Bun and Qwik and Deno. Being able to use these cutting-edge technologies, you kind of have to wait for AWS to make it feature-ready. Does Edgio unlock that for users, or are we still kind of shopping around on where we can deploy our own apps?
00:14:42 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, we are running kind of the standard type JavaScript stuff. You're going to be really running Node at the end of the day for your server. There may be a point where we'll give the ability to do things like Deno and Bun, but I don't think that's really a huge priority right now because the network itself is already optimized to run Node very quickly.
And then there's their own kind of edge type thing they're calling edge functions, but they're not exactly, they're not like Cloudflare workers. They're more like a way of configuring your CDN itself through JavaScript. So that is the type of thing you would do if you want to manipulate headers and reroute traffic and do things like that. And then that's actually built in directly to the platform in a way where you don't have cold starts at all because you're not spinning up an isolate or something like that. It's just code that's running. So this is stuff that I'm still learning, the deep infrastructure of this stuff. So some of these explanations are not as tight as they will be in like a month or two. But the main thing is that the whole thing is built around performance.
00:15:58 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, 100%. And you mentioned in passing, like Jarred had sat and rewritten every single primitive in JavaScript in Zig.
00:16:10 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. That's really, it's just maniacal focus on one single metric and then optimizing it, and that metric being time. And once you get into that mindset, then you'll be able to see the difference. And you know, I just learned this working at Edgio: one of our competitors, I won't say which one, is using a very popular edge function kind of solution, and they're not really using it correctly. They're basically just taking it and rerouting it back through their own system in a way that completely defeats the purpose. So a lot of times, some of the things that people are using, that they're being told are these awesome, fast edge-native things, are actually just kind of vaporware. And you actually have to benchmark these things to find out what they're doing.
00:16:55 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I love this. I love where this is going. I'm curious what your thought is on things like Deno. I feel like they have a path forward, like the company around it, you know. What's your thought on Bun? Do they have a path forward? What's their end game?
00:17:10 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I mean, Deno, you've got Deno Deploy. So they've already created their own specific edge function thing. And they're doing good because they're getting picked up by companies like Netlify and Supabase. And so companies are building their edge functions on Deno Deploy and kind of using that as a platform as a service type thing. So that's really good because then it's not just about, like, can I get a bunch of developers to use my thing, which is a really hard thing to do when there are so many options. There are so many great ways to do this. If you can kind of nab some really big players and get them, that's good.
So I'll be curious to see where Bun goes. We do know they're going to build a deployment platform because that's kind of what Oven is meant to be. And because it's so different in terms of the language and all that, it does make sense for them to have to build their own deployment runtime. But yeah, it's just a question of how much room is there really for more deployment platforms?
00:18:04 - Anthony Campolo
And can Bun's performance really win out when they're also going to have to compete on features against Cloudflare and Amazon and us at Edgio? And then you get into network security, and they're not going to handle that stuff, you know. So how much can you get people to buy into a single platform just based specifically on performance?
That's where for me, Edgio, I think of it a lot like Cloudflare is kind of one of the better ones, I think, to compare it to, because it's really giving you that networking layer also, and you can do a lot with DNS and stuff like that, and there's a lot of security kind of stuff built in and more kind of fine-grained, like RUM, real user monitoring. So they aren't just giving you this thing that you can deploy and get a URL. They have all the bells and whistles that you'd actually want to run a production app.
00:18:53 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. And speaking of which, like I took it from the Edgio website, "You don't need to sacrifice security for speed," and I wanted to dig into what that meant.
00:19:02 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, this is cool because we went through the process of rebranding. So we used to be Layer0, and then we had so many different names and stuff. Now we have, okay, I gotta make sure I get this right. There's Edgio Applications, and so Edgio Applications is the large umbrella. And then there are three things that that is made up of, which are Edgio Sites, which is like, you know, you deploy your site, you got the site; Performance, which is the stuff like real user monitoring and getting the performance tuned; and then the security itself.
And I can't speak too much to security yet because I haven't done any of it yet, and I'm not a security expert. That's something that I'll be getting spun up on in a couple of months or so. But what we mean is that it's a single integrated deployment platform, the same way with Netlify or Vercel. They give you the analytics tab, you know, and so they have these other tabs that are there.
00:19:58 - Anthony Campolo
And so they don't have a security tab. There's no way to configure your security on one of these Jamstack deployment providers. That's not really a thing in the way that Amazon lets you configure your security with permissions, all this stuff, and lock things down. So that's really the main benefit, that you have the ability to have fine-grained security control at the networking level.
00:20:23 - Brian Douglas
Cool. Yeah. So I did want to touch on going back to the enterprise-for-Jamstack thing, like who is using Edgio and like when would you approach that? Would you approach this from like, "I just started, I'm in YC" and start looking at Edgio, or are we like, "I'm a big corporate behemoth and I want to start tapping in"?
00:20:45 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. It's funny, I was talking to Ishan about this, and I can say this now because they just got purchased. But when I was working at StepZen, when I started working there, there were zero customers. And when I left, there was a single customer. They've been acquired now, so they're doing fine. But now that I'm at Edgio, we have more customers than we can talk to. Like we need you to start going to talk to customers because we don't have time to talk to everyone. So it's lots of big e-commerce sites, and I love that because I'm finally at the point now where I can work at a company where we are running very legit companies' websites. And it's giving me the ability also to sit in on really high-level discussions.
I was in one discussion, actually, about whether to migrate a Next.js app to Qwik, and whether it would be worth investing $2 million to rewrite this app into Qwik for the performance benefit. And the recommendation, the short of it, is that this tech is eventually going to get there, but it's probably not there yet for the investment you'll be making into it. So it's probably not the best bet yet. But there's ways we can get you that performance through kind of half measures, like with Partytown and reducing third-party scripts. But it's giving me access to the real conversations around the real tough decisions that need to be made with large-traffic websites.
And as much as I love devrel, that's what you don't really get from devrel. It's like you build demo apps, you build sample apps, you build these toy things that are giving people a larger idea of what their applications are going to be. But if you only do that and you weren't someone who also was an engineer first, you're always going to have this kind of imposter syndrome of like, "Okay, I don't actually know how to build a real application though." You know it, even if you try and pretend you can do it. So now I'm actually seeing where the rubber meets the road.
00:22:43 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. The rubber meets the road. Yes. Excellent. Yeah. That's so cool. I mean, it's definitely got to be an honor to discover how big Edgio was, but also the caliber of customer end users of the product. And that is the one thing that when I was working at Netlify, we talked to a lot of those level of companies. Obviously, y'all are competitors to Netlify, but it was nice to see what people can do with the platform and have that conversation with a couple other big-name folks as well.
But yeah, with that, I appreciate you mentioning Qwik. I'm definitely going to reach out to Misko and be like, "Yeah, you got to come on this podcast," because I know he's in my time zone.
00:23:23 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. I would like to talk a little bit about, so that's the enterprise, you know, the company side. But really I think where I'm going to be able to add a lot of value, like right now, today, is more on the open source side and on the community engagement side. They actually have their own podcast called JavaScript Jam, which is both a podcast like this and a weekly Twitter Space. And this is how I got to know Ishan and one of my other coworkers, Scott, is they used to do this on Clubhouse. This is how long they've been doing this. They originally had JavaScript Thursdays where they would do a weekly hangout, and they would just talk about JavaScript news.
So for someone who reads all the JavaScript newsletters, everyone reads the same stories every week and then has a hot take about, "Oh, Netlify bought Gatsby." And so you talk about that. And what was great, though, is that they would have the ability for beginners to come up and ask questions. And I really saw that they very much cared about community and very much cared about having a welcoming space for newbies.
And they saw what I was doing with Redwood getting into open source, and it was like, yeah, this dude is doing something smart in terms of how he's getting into this. So they saw that and they recognized it. And Ishan has been a big fan of FSJam. And I met him originally because I saw him recommend my podcast to someone in the Jamstack Slack, rest in peace. And that's how we got to know each other. And so he just sees me as, like you said, someone who knows what's happening in the area and knows the people and just has a deep passion and interest in it.
So yeah, I'm going to be hosting weekly Twitter Spaces. I'm going to be communicating with more of these framework authors and just figuring out, like, how can we make this platform really work the best for these frameworks and give them the ability to really take them to their fullest potential?
00:25:19 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. And I will say, like what I've noticed from you, and I've told you just a bunch of times, but for the listener, Anthony, AJC Web Dev, is everywhere. He is like the person you want in your livestream chat, answering your random thoughts and questions, looking for that random GitHub repo. Definitely clutch for being part of community. It's nice to see your connections now at a bigger platform to be able to make those connections even spread even further.
00:25:44 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's really fun because I just remember when I was getting into this and it was just so hard, like just learning to code and learning what these projects were and learning how to get a resume and a portfolio and all that. And it was really demoralizing. But now because of Discord communities, which you got me into, the first Discord I ever joined was the Open Sauced Discord because you invited me to it. So there's that and there's these Twitter Spaces and just the ability for developers to connect in real time and share knowledge and collaborate and lift each other up. I think that's really great. And that's a huge part of open source, a huge part of devrel. So now I can do that with the full backing of a massive, well-funded company behind me.
00:26:27 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. That's awesome. And yeah, Open Sauced Discord is still around. We're not reviving it. It's been around for a bit, but we definitely have all been distracted. We've had members leave, members come, and you're.
00:26:39 - Anthony Campolo
Not streaming as much, though I will say.
00:26:41 - Brian Douglas
No, I'm having lots of meetings as of recent. So yeah.
00:26:45 - Anthony Campolo
You can't stream your VC meetings.
00:26:47 - Brian Douglas
That is true. So yeah, for that reason, I haven't had the ability to have a two to four hour block to stream on Wednesday and Fridays. But I will come back after next week. Next week is still going to be busy. And then my commitment is at least going back to one day a week and streaming, because that's where I did my exploration and got to go try out new things, like all this AI stuff. I haven't been able to even build anything yet because I haven't had the bandwidth yet.
00:27:14 - Anthony Campolo
Oh man, we could do a whole other conversation on ChatGPT.
00:27:18 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, well, we'll leave it at that because I definitely want to have, what is it, Logan, who works at OpenAI, to come on and chat about that in the future.
00:27:28 - Anthony Campolo
But that'd be cool.
00:27:29 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. Until then, I actually want to transition us to picks. So you already know what picks are. But for folks who are listening, these are going to be music, the stuff that we're jamming on, jam picks, and could be music, food, or technology related. Nothing's off the table. And actually I threw some picks in before we hit record, and I'll mention them.
So I got these new headphones. They're currently on this, the Beyerdynamic headphones. And I went down this rabbit hole of Wirecutter trying to figure out what the best headphones were, because I was having issues with my Bluetooth headphones, like my Beats. And I just wanted to get some wired ones that I could just have work no matter what. And this was highly recommended, these Beyerdynamics. I don't know what the actual brand is, but literally if you Google it, you'll find these. And it comes in three different styles because they're meant for audiophiles. So it's got the 32 ohm, the 80 ohm, and I think the 320 ohm. And 320 is like.
00:28:26 - Anthony Campolo
A lot of ohms.
00:28:27 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. And it's like if you want to have a powered amplifier, that's why you would have the higher rate. Also your mixers are powered. So if they have phantom power and stuff like that on there, you get a higher quality sound. And I've been using it with this other thing I got, which is called the RODECaster. RODECaster is like, if you're livestreaming, you know this. If you're a podcaster and you just got into it in the last couple of years, you probably picked up one of these because this is highly recommended.
00:28:53 - Anthony Campolo
This is what Scott uses actually for hosting JavaScript Jam. He runs everything through that, so he can use real microphones.
00:29:00 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So that is why I got it, because the Twitter Spaces with the RODECaster and a real mic, it's hands down, it's like night and day, like talking through your phone or your crappy earpod headphones or whatever. It's like my Bluetooth AirPods. The quality is so bad. It's shockingly bad.
00:29:21 - Anthony Campolo
So actually, one of my first interviews with Redwood, I was going through AirPods because I was so broke. Literally, I was driving for Uber Eats, and I remember trying to save up enough money so I could buy a mic for that podcast and didn't make it in time because I was that broke.
00:29:36 - Brian Douglas
Wow, that is amazing to hear the behind the scenes. But what was I getting at? Oh yeah. So I got the RODECaster. I've been doing Twitter Spaces weekly. We've been talking about open source. There's usually like an angle. Today we talked about layoffs and what you can do while you're laid off. Hint: open source.
So it's been a great process because I get a little SD card, which I literally just took out of my computer right here, and I can just upload it to Dropbox. And then one of my teammates just edits it down. So we already have some cool clips that we have from it. So yeah, RODECaster, check it out. Beyerdynamic headphones, check those out as well. You got picks, Anthony?
00:30:13 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, these are going to be very in line with everything we've been talking about. So I mentioned JavaScript Jam is our podcast slash weekly Twitter Space. And it's sponsored by Edgio, and I do it as part of my Edgio job. But one of the things that really appealed to me about what Ishan and Scott were doing is that they don't feel the need to make it a thing about Edgio at all. They didn't even used to say the word Edgio, and I eventually told them, "You guys gotta at least say this is presented by your company, or else people are never going to know. Your boss is never going to accept this." So they really leaned into not exploiting the community and making something that's just valuable and putting it out in the world. And I really enjoyed that.
So we have complete control, and we talk about anything we want. We had Matt on to talk about Netlify purchasing Gatsby, like one of our competitors. And along with that we have a newsletter. So this is all at JavaScriptJam.com, and I'm taking that over now. So now I'm writing a weekly newsletter where I get to give my thoughts on what is happening in the space of JavaScript. This is something I have been wanting to do for a while, but I do so much stuff I couldn't possibly add in a newsletter as another thing, but for my job now, I get to do it. But still they let me write whatever I want, complete creative control. So that's really cool.
So I would say people should check that out. You're not going to be getting a bunch of Edgio stuff at all. You'll just be getting straight news about what's going on in open source and JavaScript and other deployment platforms, and you'll get a very good view of all the things that are happening, ideally. And I also started my own stream. This is something that I had been wanting to do because I had FSJam, where I could bring on people and have these in-depth discussions about these frameworks.
00:32:03 - Anthony Campolo
And that's really cool because I think really getting to pick someone's brain and figure out how they think about this, how they describe it, how they think about what problem they're solving, that's really good. I can sit down and have a nice, in-depth, hour-long interview with these people and find a million things to ask. But you never see the code. You never build anything with it. You don't really get quite as deep into it as you want to.
So what I was doing was writing these blog posts, "A first look at blank," where I would write a hello world application and deploy it with each framework. So that was cool. But I wanted to do essentially what Ryan Carniato does, because what Ryan Carniato would do is he would bring on all these framework authors from Fresh and Qwik and all the hot stuff, and he would build Hacker News, usually with all of them. So I wanted to do that but even break it down even simpler.
00:32:59 - Anthony Campolo
So basically do the high-level projects but with the simplest possible app. So it's like I want to show people how to do a quick hello world, because I think even just that can be useful. So it's called AJC and the Web Devs. We bring on guests from the web world. And yeah, I've already had a lot of really great guests. So the first guest was my very good friend Ben Myers, who some of you should really get on the show if you've never had. He's an accessibility expert and a really great guy. We've had Nick Taylor. We've had Ryan Carniato, Ben Holmes, Travis Waith-Mair. So a lot of these people are in my network and friends I already had. So eventually we'll start expanding out. But Brandon Roberts will be on to talk about Analog. And with that, it's kind of part interview style where I'll do a bit of a podcast thing where I'll talk to them about the project and then we'll just build something like pair programming, kind of like Learning with Jason style.
00:33:59 - Anthony Campolo
I feel like every stream is just ripping off Learning with Jason at the end of the day. So that's basically what I'm doing now. And yeah, I'm getting to do what I always wanted to do, make a whole bunch of educational content around cool open source JavaScript stuff.
00:34:14 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, 100%. There's a few people that I definitely want to have on. Ben Myers is somebody I definitely know through Twitch and the Party Corgi Network. But we literally never chatted outside of Twitch chat or Discord.
00:34:27 - Anthony Campolo
Actually, I had mentioned once I was supposed to put you in touch because he built Show My Chat, which is a Twitch chat library. It's really cool. It's something that you would dig a lot.
00:34:38 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I think I actually pulled it up while I was on stream and was really digging it. I think I actually wanted to build something very similar. But it's the limited time thing, so I've stopped building a bunch of side projects and I'm just focused. I had a conscious effort last summer to only focus on open source stuff. So I gave up on the dream of building my Twitch chat library of stuff, but happy to leverage other people's stuff.
00:35:03 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, you got it. You gotta focus. That is definitely something that I found. I definitely went too hard into, "I want to learn as much stuff and do as many different things as possible." And eventually I was like, "I need to consolidate back down." And once you do that, and you actually find things that are worth focusing on, then you start to see much more returns from continuing to engage and invest in those things.
00:35:26 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, 100%. All right. So that's all the time I have. So we're gonna close out the conversation now. But Anthony, thanks so much for having the conversation, catching us up to date with your current resume and what you're working on. I think it's a great fit. And I think the JS Jam folks, yeah, they do some good work and I do echo. I didn't know they were behind it. I just knew it was a thing that was happening consistently. Until one day Ishan DM'd me and was like, "Hey, we're doing a JS Jam for Jamstack Conf." And I was like, "Oh, that makes so much sense," because yeah, anyway, this is.
00:36:01 - Anthony Campolo
What I'm saying. Yeah. You gotta at least let people know that you're these people from this place, the bare minimum.
00:36:08 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, 100%. So anyway, Anthony, thanks for catching up with us.
00:36:12 - Anthony Campolo
And thank you, Brian. You've been such a huge supporter of me and really an incredible mentor. I have so much to thank you for. So always great to chat with you and get to continue to do these.
00:36:24 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, appreciate it. And folks, keep spreading the jam. That's all we have time for today. If you're interested in being a guest on the show or if you'd like to suggest a topic, find us on Twitter at Jamstack Radio. This show is brought to you by the leading investor and developer for startups. To learn more about Heavybit, visit Heavybit.com.