Open Source Framework Maintenance with Nick Taylor from Netlify

Episode Description

Nick Taylor shares his journey from open source contributor to Netlify frameworks engineer, discussing streaming, developer community building, and the evolution of web frameworks.

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jam, recorded at Remix Conf, Nick Taylor walks through his career path from IT professional to front-end lead at Dev.to to frameworks engineer at Netlify, with open source contribution serving as the connective thread at every stage. He explains how his first pull request to a Meteor app sparked years of contributing to Dev.to's codebase, which ultimately led to a job offer without a traditional technical interview. At Netlify, his team ensures frameworks like Next.js, Remix, and Astro deploy and run correctly, handling everything from adapter patterns to advanced middleware that can personalize server-side markup and prevent hydration errors. The conversation branches into the broader arc of web development—how server-side rendering fell out of favor during the broadband era's client-side-only boom and is now returning through islands architecture, resumability, and serverless edge computing. Nick also recounts how he launched the Dev.to Twitch stream during the 2020 pandemic, grew it from 700 to over 2,000 followers, and continues streaming on his own channel because pairing with guests sharpens his skills and builds genuine relationships. The group wrestles with the perennial DevRel question of measuring ROI when the real value lies in long-term trust and community goodwill rather than trackable metrics, and Nick highlights standout talks from Remix Conf, especially a piano demo that showcased progressive enhancement without JavaScript.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Meet Nick Taylor and His Path to Netlify

The episode opens with the JavaScript Jam hosts welcoming Nick Taylor at Remix Conf. Nick introduces himself as a frameworks engineer at Netlify, where he recently passed his one-year anniversary. He explains that his team's mission is to ensure popular frameworks like Next.js and Remix deploy and run correctly on the platform, covering both build-time and runtime concerns including serverless and edge functions.

Nick describes how the role differs from typical front-end engineering: rather than building applications with frameworks, he's making sure the frameworks themselves work. The conversation touches on what drew him to Netlify after working at Dev.to, where the Rails monolith meant he wouldn't get exposure to serverless or edge technologies that were becoming increasingly important in the ecosystem.

00:03:34 - Open Source as a Career Catalyst

Nick traces his open source journey back to his very first pull request on a Meteor application called Push Pickup, mentioning the site First PR Me where anyone can look up a developer's earliest contribution. He then recounts how Dev.to transitioned from closed source to open source in 2018, and how he became the project's first external contributor after filling out a simple Google form.

The conversation explores how consistent open source work led directly to employment. After an interview at Facebook didn't work out, Dev.to co-founder Peter Frank noticed Nick's tweet and offered him a role—skipping the technical interview entirely because two years of public contributions had already demonstrated his abilities. The hosts discuss how open source functions as a form of technical networking, showcasing not just code quality but also the ability to communicate asynchronously, write good issues, and collaborate with distributed teams.

00:09:25 - Relationship Building and the Open Source Community

Nick and the hosts discuss the social dimension of open source, pushing past the transactional connotations of "networking" to talk about genuine relationship building. Nick highlights how public collaboration demonstrates teamwork skills, asynchronous communication, and documentation habits—all critical for remote work. He gives a shout-out to Becca at Open Sauced, who wrote a post about crafting good first issues using one of Nick's own Remix bug reports as an example.

The discussion circles back to how open source contributions frequently lead to job opportunities, citing Ben Holmes's work on Slinkity as a likely factor in his hiring at Astro. Anthony reinforces the point by recalling how he encouraged Ben to open source his project, knowing the experience and visibility would pay off regardless of whether the project itself succeeded.

00:13:16 - Frameworks at Netlify: Remix, Next.js, and Astro

Nick explains that nearly all of his work at Netlify is open source, including the Remix adapters he built for Netlify's integration. He discusses the adapter pattern used by frameworks like Astro, Remix, and those in the Vite ecosystem through Nitro, contrasting it with Next.js's lack of a formal adapter system. The team built what they call the "Next runtime" to handle deployment concerns around serverless and edge.

He walks through a practical example of Netlify's advanced middleware for Next.js, showing how server-side personalization can prevent hydration errors—like converting UTC timestamps to a user's local time zone before the markup reaches the browser. The conversation then shifts to Astro, where Nick describes being "nerd sniped" into migrating his Eleventy blog after discovering Astro's typed content collections powered by Zod, praising how Astro components feel natural to anyone comfortable with JSX and React's prop system.

00:22:00 - Astro, Fresh, and the Return of Server-Side Rendering

Nick continues discussing his blog migration from Eleventy to Astro, noting how Astro components blur the line between JSX and HTML while supporting a familiar props-based API. The hosts touch on Slinkity's attempt to bring JSX to Eleventy and how that project, though now inactive, opened doors for its creator. Nick then pivots to Fresh, Deno's full-stack framework, which he presented at Node Congress in Berlin—his first conference talk.

The broader theme becomes the industry's return to server-side rendering after years of client-side-only approaches. Nick recalls the dial-up era when SSR was the default, the swing toward SPAs as broadband improved, and the current convergence around islands architecture, resumability, and hybrid rendering. He references a conversation with former Remix team member Chance Strickland about how the industry isn't swinging a pendulum but spiraling toward a sweet spot that combines the best of both worlds.

00:31:00 - The State of SSR, PHP Nostalgia, and Framework Ecosystems

The discussion turns to how nearly every modern framework is adopting or planning server-side rendering support, including Redwood, which has been working toward SSR for years. Nick reflects on how broadband adoption drove the shift to client-side rendering and how the industry is now circling back with better tools. He humorously recalls the LAMP, WAMP, MAMP, and XAMPP stack acronyms from the PHP era, drawing a parallel to the T3 stack naming convention.

The hosts briefly touch on Laravel's resurgence, with Anthony noting that even skeptics are coming around to how well PHP frameworks serve developers today. Nick mentions that frameworks like Qwik with its resumability approach already work on Netlify, and the conversation flows into how the variety of deployment targets and rendering strategies gives developers more options than ever before.

00:34:51 - Day-to-Day Life on the Frameworks Team

Anthony asks Nick to describe a typical workday. Nick explains that while his team uses GitHub issues for tracking since all framework work is open source, the role blends engineering with a support function—adding features to improve framework support while also fielding community issues. He emphasizes that Netlify's commitment to open source was a major draw, alongside the positive impressions left by people like Jason Lengstorf, Cassidy Williams, and Ben Hong.

The conversation evolves into a broader discussion about company culture and how individual interactions shape perceptions. Scott points out that people like Nick serve as the face of the company, and those good-vibes interactions matter enormously even if they're hard to quantify. Anthony, who works for a competing platform, chimes in that he still genuinely admires Netlify's contributions to the developer ecosystem and open source community.

00:40:35 - From Pandemic Boredom to Building a Streaming Practice

Nick recounts how he started streaming on Twitch in 2020, inspired by Jason Lengstorf's Learn with Jason show. Beginning with zero viewers while doing his actual Dev.to work on camera, he eventually hit on the idea of pairing with open source contributors on stream. His first guest went on to reference the stream experience in a job interview. Over Hacktoberfest 2020, he and colleague Christina Gorton turned occasional pairing sessions into a regular Dev.to Twitch stream, growing it from 700 to over 2,300 followers before he left.

Now streaming independently at Nicky T. Live, Nick does weekly sessions where he invites guests to explore their projects or works on his own side projects. He explains that streaming keeps him sharp as a developer by forcing real-time problem solving and comfortable vulnerability with not knowing things, while also building the kind of genuine community connections that have defined his entire career trajectory.

00:49:25 - The DevRel ROI Debate and Authentic Community Work

Scott raises the perennial question of how developer relations work proves its value, noting that many companies struggle to quantify the ROI. Nick admits he doesn't like metrics in general and can't easily answer the question since streaming isn't part of his official role. He illustrates the challenge with a scenario: a casual conversation at a conference might lead someone to become a customer a year later, but there's no way to track that causal chain.

Anthony offers his perspective from three DevRel roles, suggesting that output quality and visible activity serve as reasonable proxies when direct revenue attribution isn't possible. The group agrees that not everything can be reduced to a number, and that the most effective developer advocates are people who naturally build community whether or not it's in their job description—Nick being a prime example of someone who does DevRel as a genuine expression of enthusiasm rather than a mandate.

00:57:37 - Conference Talks, Remix Conf Highlights, and Closing

Nick discusses his growing interest in conference speaking, sharing how his Fresh talk at the Chicago JS meetup was later refined for Node Congress. He credits Brittany Postma for connecting him with the conference organizers, reinforcing the episode's theme that relationships open unexpected doors. The hosts encourage listeners to invite Nick to speak at their events.

The conversation closes with Nick's enthusiastic recap of Remix Conf highlights, singling out Jon Jensen's "Abuse the Platform" talk featuring an interactive piano built entirely with progressive enhancement and no JavaScript. He describes the multiplayer demo across two browsers as a stunning showcase of Remix's capabilities. Nick shares his social handles—Nicky T. Online across platforms—and invites developers to join him on stream to explore their projects together, wrapping up on the same community-first note that ran through the entire episode.

Transcript

00:00:00 - Nick Taylor

It's about to get into it.

00:00:01 - Scott Steinlage

Welcome to JavaScript Jam, y'all.

00:00:04 - Nick Taylor

All.

00:00:05 - Anthony Campolo

Hey.

00:00:06 - Scott Steinlage

The podcast. Welcome. All right.

00:00:08 - Nick Taylor

Am I supposed to say something to you, like do it?

00:00:10 - Anthony Campolo

Yes.

00:00:12 - Nick Taylor

All right.

00:00:12 - Anthony Campolo

All right. That was good.

00:00:13 - Nick Taylor

That was all I got.

00:00:14 - Anthony Campolo

Hello, everyone. Welcome to JavaScript Jam. We got with us Nick Taylor, also known as Nicky T Online. What's up, man?

00:00:23 - Nick Taylor

Not too much. How you guys doing today?

00:00:24 - Anthony Campolo

Good. We're doing good, man. You are our very good friend from Netlify, and you are here at Remix Conf. If you wanna let our listeners know a little bit about who you are and what you do.

00:00:36 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, yeah. So like you said, I'm currently working at Netlify. I recently celebrated my one-year anniversary there. I'm rolling into one year and two months now, I think. I work on the larger team called Ecosystem and the smaller team, which we typically call pods at work. I'm on the frameworks team. So basically my job, and the job of my team, is to make sure that whatever you're deploying there, whether it's Next.js, Remix, shout out Remix. That was a terrible sound bite. Sorry, people. But basically my job is to make sure that whatever you're deploying works. In terms of the framework aspect, obviously there's a lot of teams that make Netlify work, but our focus really is the framework aspect at build time and also at runtime to some degree, in terms of wiring up serverless and

00:01:38 - Anthony Campolo

Edge, that sounds like my dream job. The idea that you could be hired to work on frameworks specifically is just so cool. So how did you find yourself in that role specifically?

00:01:50 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, it just kind of came up one evening. So I used to work at Dev.to, which is... I still love Dev.to. I blog there still, and I pull all my blog posts from there to my own blog. But there was some, you know, Dev.to is a Rails monolith, and I was leading front end over there, and we were doing some cool stuff. We were using Preact, and we were doing kind of bespoke islands architecture, and it was a lot of fun there. But I kind of realized that there were some things that I would never do there just based on the tech stack. Like, I wouldn't really do anything serverless related. Edge was something new to me at the time, so I wouldn't be touching any of those things.

00:02:36 - Anthony Campolo

Where did it run?

00:02:39 - Nick Taylor

So Dev.to itself, because there's Forem, the company Forem, there's cloud hosting that they provide that you can pay for as a client. But Dev.to itself, which is a Forem instance, at least at the time when I was still there, it was on Heroku.

00:02:55 - Scott Steinlage

Wow.

00:02:55 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, Deep cut.

00:02:56 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. So Git push. I mean, it had been working well over there, so I don't know if there was any reason to move, if at all.

00:03:07 - Anthony Campolo

But most people moved off of Heroku because they weren't able to do it for free anymore. Yeah, I cannot imagine they were on a free instance.

00:03:13 - Nick Taylor

No, no, we were definitely not on a free instance at Dev.to. It's a very large site. It's heavily content-based. You know, there's a whole caching layer, we're using Fastly, I believe, and there's a lot of pieces there. But, like, Heroku, and these aren't decisions I made because I was focusing mainly on the front end.

00:03:33 - Anthony Campolo

But I know you also found your way there because you were doing some open source stuff and they kind of like saw you and were like, hey, come on over here.

00:03:41 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, exactly. So I've been contributing to open source since my first PR, I think. I've talked about this on some open source Twitter Spaces before, but there's this website called First PR Me, and if you go to that site, you can literally look up anybody's GitHub handle and see their very first.

00:04:06 - Scott Steinlage

Oh yeah, yeah, I heard him talk about that before too.

00:04:10 - Anthony Campolo

Mine was for Blitz.js. A lot of people probably wouldn't expect that.

00:04:13 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, that's cool. My first pull request was to a repository called Push Pickup, which was a Meteor application. So for folks who've been in the

00:04:24 - Anthony Campolo

space, even deeper cut.

00:04:28 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, Meteor was like a universe — at the time it was called Universal JavaScript.

00:04:36 - Anthony Campolo

They called it Isomorphic, I believe.

00:04:37 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, there's many names. And there was the whole concept of optimistic rendering in there, full-stack JavaScript. Anyway, this particular project — I didn't know anything about Meteor, and they were saying, hey, we need somebody. I was like, yeah, sure, I can do it, not really knowing any Meteor. I was comfortable in JavaScript. Anyways, that kind of started my open source journey. Not to sound too cheesy, but fast-forward to, I think it was 2018. Dev.to was originally closed source, and then at one point they put out a blog post saying they were considering open sourcing the project and looking for people to contribute. So I filled out the Google form. I'm like, yeah, sure, I'm interested. I got accepted, and I was the first external contributor to the codebase. I was still working in IT when it was closed source, but once they open sourced it — I believe it was August 2018 — all those commits we'd done, they just —

00:05:51 - Nick Taylor

They just came because they all went public. Yeah. And Dev.to is where I like to blog. I really like the project. That's why I started contributing to it.

00:06:01 - Anthony Campolo

I was gonna ask, are you someone who's, like, very passionate about blogging?

00:06:05 - Nick Taylor

Not necessarily passionate about blogging. Even now, I wouldn't say I'm a prolific blogger. I do blog, but.

00:06:12 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, a weekly newsletter. Yolo.

00:06:14 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And I stream more on Twitch than I blog, but I can drop a link in the show notes for that. I did like blogging, but like I said, it's not something I did all the time. I just liked the project on Dev.to, so I contributed to it. And I kept contributing for a good solid two years. And then it was, I think, 2019. I was interviewing and I was mutuals with all the founders of Dev.to on Twitter, and I happened to be interviewing at Facebook, and it didn't work out, which is fine. But I cannot imagine you at Facebook.

00:06:59 - Anthony Campolo

That would have been weird.

00:07:00 - Nick Taylor

But it was a cool experience regardless. I got flown down to California and stuff. And then Peter, who's one of the founders, he saw me tweet something like, awesome day. For some reason, he thought I was referring to rugby because for folks that don't know me, I played rugby for many years.

00:07:19 - Anthony Campolo

So the other day I was trying. I thought you were. You did hockey. It was rugby is what you did.

00:07:22 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, no, I am like the worst Canadian. I can barely skate. I'm in Montreal, which is hockey town, and I've literally been to one Montreal Canadiens game. Anyways — is that where you grew up?

00:07:36 - Scott Steinlage

In Montreal?

00:07:37 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. I was there my whole life, aside from university, which I went to out of province — the Maritimes, New Brunswick, which was great. But yeah, he thought I was talking about some international rugby match, like my favorite team or something. And even though I did play rugby a lot and I was big into sports, I'm not like a sports fanatic. I'm not that person sitting at the bar rattling off stats. Anyway, I was like, no, it's not rugby. I showed him the Facebook badge, minus some information on it, and he's like, oh, cool. And then like a week later I said, oh well, in the end, it didn't pan out. And then he was like, oh, by the way, we're hiring. And I didn't have to really interview with him — not on the technical side at least. I'd literally been doing a lot of their front end for about two years.

00:08:38 - Anthony Campolo

That's a huge reason why you'd want to do open source is because you can prove yourself without having to do something like that.

00:08:45 - Nick Taylor

Exactly. And I do want to give the caveat that if you contribute to open source, I'm not going to guarantee that you're going to get hired. But it is definitely a great way, especially if you're new in tech or you just don't have that professional experience. And we can go on a whole tangent.

00:09:03 - Anthony Campolo

I can guarantee you will be more likely to get a job than if you don't do open source.

00:09:07 - Scott Steinlage

It's like coming to events and networking with people. This is the social aspect of it.

00:09:13 - Anthony Campolo

Right?

00:09:13 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:09:14 - Scott Steinlage

And then that's like technical networking. That's what I would like to call it.

00:09:18 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:09:18 - Anthony Campolo

Tech networking technique. Yeah, Tech working.

00:09:21 - Nick Taylor

Oh, shoot.

00:09:22 - Scott Steinlage

We just came up with something. Yeah.

00:09:24 - Anthony Campolo

All right.

00:09:25 - Nick Taylor

But, yeah, I do hate that. Hate's a strong word, I should say. I don't really like the term networking because I associate it with negative connotations, but, like, for me.

00:09:38 - Anthony Campolo

But it sounds transactional.

00:09:40 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, sure. You know, but it is networking, you know, and relationship building. Yeah. You know, I guess whatever the least cheesy way you want to say it. But I love hanging out with people, and it's just a great way. And like open source, like Anthony was saying, not only is your code all public so people can literally see it, but they also, I think the code really is important to some degree because, like, obviously you're trying

00:10:09 - Anthony Campolo

to work in a team.

00:10:10 - Nick Taylor

Exactly.

00:10:11 - Anthony Campolo

Work with others.

00:10:12 - Scott Steinlage

True.

00:10:12 - Nick Taylor

And the other aspect of it is not only is it working with a team, but with everybody who wants to work remote, who might not be working remote right now. A huge aspect of open source and working remotely is being able to communicate asynchronously, you know, so that means documenting a lot of things. So that means, like, if you open up an issue, you know, give as much context as you can about something. Same thing with a pull request.

00:10:36 - Scott Steinlage

Because didn't you just have a new article or something on. On issues?

00:10:41 - Nick Taylor

Oh, and it's not my article.

00:10:42 - Scott Steinlage

I think Becca, like linked to something

00:10:44 - Anthony Campolo

or something, didn't she?

00:10:44 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, my good friend Becca.

00:10:47 - Scott Steinlage

She.

00:10:48 - Nick Taylor

She works at Open Sauced now, which, yeah, shout out to Open Sauced. It's a great project. I always point people there first.

00:10:54 - Anthony Campolo

First Discord I ever joined many years ago.

00:10:56 - Nick Taylor

Oh, yeah. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, no, Becca's running... I'm trying to remember what her official role is there, but I think it's leading DevRel there. I'm not positive.

00:11:08 - Scott Steinlage

But she's been a few months now, right?

00:11:09 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, she's leading the community efforts, essentially, I think.

00:11:12 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And then like, she's doing like weekly

00:11:14 - Anthony Campolo

calls and stuff like that.

00:11:15 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. She runs the Twitter Spaces and she's doing a lot of blogging for them.

00:11:20 - Anthony Campolo

We should get on, actually.

00:11:21 - Nick Taylor

You should definitely get her on. Yes. So she wrote a great post about creating a first issue. She just happened to use an issue I wrote.

00:11:30 - Scott Steinlage

That's what it was.

00:11:31 - Nick Taylor

Okay. Which actually fits in very conveniently with the fact that we're at Remix Conf, because it was an issue in the Remix repository about pretty much when I started working at Netlify. I don't need to go into the details too much, but I basically gave a pretty good detailed explanation of the issue. And then I dug even further because I couldn't figure out what was going on. I didn't end up fixing it, but I gave enough context and debugging information for one of the core team members to actually sort it out.

00:11:59 - Scott Steinlage

Totally.

00:12:00 - Nick Taylor

TL;DR: They were using a fetch polyfill library, because if you're deploying to the edge, it's using something like, on Netlify's Deno, if you're on Vercel or Cloudflare, fetch is native. But in Node land, fetch, even a

00:12:22 - Anthony Campolo

year and a half ago, wasn't native. node-fetch.

00:12:24 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:12:25 - Anthony Campolo

Isomorphic fetch, technically, I think, is supposed to be compatible. Most people weren't using that one.

00:12:30 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, they weren't using node-fetch. I'm trying to remember which one it was. But basically there was something slightly non-standard about it that caused this bug, and again, I'm not going to go into the issue. I can link it into the...

00:12:40 - Anthony Campolo

I already grabbed that link for it.

00:12:42 - Nick Taylor

Okay, cool, cool. But yeah, so yeah, no shit. I felt pretty cool that she used my issue for that, so that's awesome. But yeah, and just saw that today.

00:12:51 - Anthony Campolo

It was so funny.

00:12:52 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, perfect timing. No, yeah, I just want to give her a shout out. I think she's doing really great work over there at Open Sauced.

00:12:57 - Scott Steinlage

Totally.

00:12:58 - Nick Taylor

But yeah, so I know we kind of went a bit on a tangent there, but basically contributing to open source is how I got my job at Dev.to. The actual interview was really just me meeting the team and seeing if, like, hey, can we work together kind of thing, you know? And it was my dream job.

00:13:16 - Anthony Campolo

Rocking the dev shirt right now.

00:13:17 - Nick Taylor

Oh yeah, I am, yeah. Totally unintentional. We're talking about Remix. I got dev gear on. I've got a Remix fanny pack here. Yes, but no, it was my dream job, you know, working in open source and getting paid. To me that's amazing. And now Netlify is my dream job, you know, hopefully. I mean, not that I plan on leaving Netlify, but hopefully every job I go to from now on becomes my next dream job.

00:13:43 - Anthony Campolo

That would be, yeah, the hard one to jump from.

00:13:46 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. But yeah, at Netlify, like I said, I'm working on frameworks, but pretty much I'd say probably 99% of the work I do is open source. So all the things we're doing are publicly available, including the Remix work. I created the adapters for the Remix integration with Netlify. I mean, it definitely had assistance from the Remix team and also coworkers. I just want to give a shout out to Matt Kane because he kind of gave me a bit of a hand at the beginning there.

00:14:17 - Anthony Campolo

Gatsby.

00:14:18 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, yeah, Matt used to work at Gatsby. Netlify has acquired Gatsby, so now we have more Gatsby.

00:14:23 - Anthony Campolo

I actually had Matt Billman on one of our spaces to talk about that back when it happened.

00:14:28 - Nick Taylor

Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that. I think I listened to that one. That was with Ryan Carniato as well. I think.

00:14:32 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, they were both on there.

00:14:33 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good space. Yeah, no, I always love those, those spaces. I was telling Anthony yesterday that fits

00:14:43 - Anthony Campolo

right into your schedule.

00:14:44 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, so I stream... well, I'm streaming twice a week now, but my main stream is on Wednesdays and it's at 5 p.m. UTC. And then basically I get off my stream and then.

00:14:56 - Anthony Campolo

You're a streamer when you're thinking in UTC.

00:14:59 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, well, it's... and that's also just something in terms of working remotely because half my... there's a few I work with on my team currently. Like there's Zach Leatherman, who created Eleventy, and my other coworker... why am I drawing a blank right now? Tatiana. And then the rest are in the UK or other parts of Europe. So basically, you know, in Slack, whenever you say, hey, I'm stepping out or whatever, if I say Eastern time, I mean, they can figure it out, but it's just kind of more helpful to just give a UTC time. And a little pro tip, you can get... there's a few apps for it, but you can get Mac apps that can give multiple times. So I have my Eastern time and my UTC time. So whenever... nice... you know, instead of me always having to calculate it in my head, which it's not complex, I can just look up at my...

00:15:54 - Scott Steinlage

Another pro tip. Yeah, inside of. If you use Google Workspaces.

00:16:00 - Nick Taylor

Okay.

00:16:00 - Scott Steinlage

On Google Calendar, you can add whatever.

00:16:03 - Nick Taylor

Oh, no.

00:16:03 - Scott Steinlage

Different time zones on the left hand side.

00:16:05 - Nick Taylor

Okay. I didn't know that.

00:16:06 - Anthony Campolo

There's also a way in discord to give someone's native time. So you just say, I don't know exactly how to do it.

00:16:14 - Scott Steinlage

Oh, right.

00:16:14 - Anthony Campolo

But it'll like display as whatever someone's time is based on their own computer.

00:16:18 - Nick Taylor

Okay. I feel like I'm supposed to give another pro tip over all of your pro tips now. It's like we're just gonna keep going. Yeah.

00:16:27 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:16:27 - Nick Taylor

Oh, another pro tip.

00:16:29 - Anthony Campolo

By the way, the real pro tip is we all just agree on one single time and stop using time zones. Five.

00:16:35 - Nick Taylor

UTC. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, just say five. That's it. That's all we're... one number. That's it. That's all we got for time.

00:16:43 - Anthony Campolo

Five. What? Five.

00:16:44 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, so we got way up the hill.

00:16:49 - Anthony Campolo

I appreciate you coming into the spaces and just like hanging out. And we've brought you up on stage a couple times, so yeah, like really appreciate that. So I'll be curious, since you work on frameworks, what's your favorite framework and why do all of the others suck in comparison?

00:17:04 - Nick Taylor

So that's like trying to Ask a parent, like, who's your favorite child? That's a question you should never answer. You know, that's why I asked it. I could give it a very ambiguous one. You know, the best one is the one I would of course.

00:17:19 - Anthony Campolo

Solid.

00:17:20 - Nick Taylor

Cool. But the funny thing about working on frameworks is because, like, when I was working at Dev.to, I was doing front end. So we were using Preact and I used other frameworks before that. Like I've used Next.js before and all that. But in my day to day I'm not building stuff with a framework, I'm making sure the framework works. So it's very different. But having front-end knowledge is definitely helpful.

00:17:45 - Anthony Campolo

So I guess like aside from Remix, what are some other frameworks you have worked heavily on?

00:17:49 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, I find Remix super interesting. Do you mean what I've worked on at Netlify right now? Okay. Yeah, we've worked a bunch on the Next runtime. So that's like...

00:18:03 - Anthony Campolo

I know Netlify has put a lot of work into trying to have really first-class Next support, obviously because they want to compete with Vercel.

00:18:11 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. Yeah. Like I don't, I don't really want

00:18:13 - Anthony Campolo

to talk about people get into that

00:18:14 - Nick Taylor

competition or anything, but basically it definitely is interesting because most frameworks have an adapter pattern. So Astro has this, Remix has this. Yeah. If you're using anything with Nitro, which comes from the Vite world, like for example in Nuxt.js, they basically.

00:18:35 - Anthony Campolo

That's so sweet.

00:18:36 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:18:37 - Anthony Campolo

Integration for Edge. Yo.

00:18:38 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, no, that's the thing. It basically handles the like, okay, I'm gonna go deploy this. It just knows where you're gonna deploy for the main ones. Like obviously if, I don't know, say you're a smaller PaaS potentially, or maybe even just some obscure deployment place, you can do your custom stuff. But Nitro is a great way. So if you work in the Vite ecosystem, you can benefit from that. So I think that's super cool. Yeah. You know, for the Next runtime they don't have an adapter. There's different ways you can deploy Next.js, so basically we call it the Next runtime. And a lot of what you do with frameworks is just making sure that it works with whatever you're using for serverless and edge. I'm kind of oversimplifying things, but that's kind of it.

00:19:31 - Anthony Campolo

You want to make sure it like baseline will run on the platform. And, and then the next level is actually making sure that all its bells and whistles and fancy features work like your ISR and your stuff like that.

00:19:43 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, and there's some neat stuff in the Next runtime. We have advanced middleware as well, which is kind of cool. So you can manipulate the markup as it's coming down. You can change props and stuff. So this can also potentially prevent hydration errors. Like for example, say you wanted to have personalization. So say you have a component that... I don't know, we'll go back to time, you know, because we were talking about time a lot. So like, I don't know, maybe the prop is going to render client side as 5 p.m. UTC, but I'm in Eastern time. So I want to show users who have Eastern time, you know, let's show them the time in their time format and in their particular time zone. And you can do this on the client side. The problem, though, is that you would get this flash because you would end up seeing like 5 p.m. UTC, and depending on how fast your internet is, even with fast internet, you'd probably see a little blip where it just kind of morphs into this other time.

00:20:50 - Nick Taylor

So with the Next.js advanced middleware, you can change the time on the server side based on some contextual information, like the time zone, because you have access to the time zone and stuff if you're working on the edge.

00:21:03 - Scott Steinlage

Right, because they're pulling from a certain area.

00:21:05 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, exactly. So you can get the time zone, you can get geolocation information, and so on. So with the Next.js advanced middleware, you can change that markup server side to say it's 1 p.m. Eastern time, not the 5 p.m. UTC that might be stored there. And then not only that, you can also change the props that get rendered. Because for anybody that's worked in React since, I believe, React 18, you'll get this message saying hydration error, the markup doesn't match. And so it's an interesting way to handle that. And you can do other kinds of personalization and stuff. But talking about favorite frameworks, I'm not going to say I have a favorite framework, but Eleventy is really amazing for static site generation. It's what one of my blogs is currently using. I did kind of get nerd sniped into migrating my blog to Astro.

00:22:00 - Scott Steinlage

I think I remember you saying something about that. Eleventy and Astro are like, yeah, it's

00:22:04 - Anthony Campolo

very hard to disambiguate the two. You talk about one, you gotta talk about the other.

00:22:08 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, yeah. And Eleventy is an amazing project and they have a concept of collections, and Astro has this too. I don't know if they took inspiration from Eleventy or not, but with Astro, yeah, they've got TypeScript in there. And I'm a big fan of TypeScript. I'm also a big fan of JSX. As far as I know, maybe there's a plugin, but in Eleventy, my mind's all built with...

00:22:35 - Anthony Campolo

You'd have to use Slinkity if you wanted to get JSX. And Slinkity is a bit of a dead project now. But, yeah, me and Ben Holmes, or mostly Ben Holmes and me, kind of just cheering him on and writing blog posts, were trying to get a JSX thing to work with 11. The whole point is Slinkity.

00:22:50 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, I know. And it's funny you mentioned that because when I was working at Dev.to, I had Ben Holmes on and he talked about Slinkity.

00:22:58 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, really fascinating project. I kind of wish he stuck with it.

00:23:01 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And getting back to... I'm going to go on a tangent again, but in terms of what we were saying about how you can get a job by contributing to open source, I'm almost 100% certain that was one of the main, probably the main reason that Ben... because Ben Holmes works at Astro now.

00:23:18 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, absolutely.

00:23:18 - Nick Taylor

And so basically all that work he did in Eleventy, I think they saw that like Fred or whoever else on the team were like, oh, we gotta. We gotta get.

00:23:27 - Anthony Campolo

You know, and I've been telling you at the time, because me and him obviously were talking throughout that whole process and I was like, you should really open source this. You should really do this because even if it doesn't go anywhere, the experience you're gonna get and the exposure you're gonna get is gonna be so worth it. And like, really, really ended up paying off for him.

00:23:44 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And yeah, so getting back to Astro, you know, because I follow what all the frameworks are doing. It's in my best interest for the work I do. And Astro released typed collections. So basically they're using Zod. You can create schemas and then you can strongly type your content.

00:24:03 - Anthony Campolo

I'm in the process of migrating my blog from Astro one to Astro two specifically to incorporate stuff.

00:24:09 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, yeah. So it was a Friday night and I was just like, ah, this sounds interesting. Let me go take a peek at it. And so I was just like, okay, I have a bunch of markdown in my existing site obviously for my blog posts. So I was like, okay, I'm just gonna pull some in to a bare-bones Astro site. And I just wanted to kind of mess around with the strongly typed... I can't remember. It's content collections, they call it. Yeah, content collections. So I got that working, and then I was just like, okay, well, I'd done a stream on Astro with Ben before, and I was like, well, let me just see if I pull in a Nunjucks template. Because the Nunjucks templates are pretty much HTML with some squiggly brackets for wherever you're gonna inject stuff, like Twig

00:24:56 - Anthony Campolo

or any of those other templating languages that we all love so much. Allegedly.

00:25:00 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. So I just pulled in some things. I was like, okay, so I created an Astro component and then basically I just started converting my whole blog because I was just curious. It's not finished because there's some rough edges I need to sort out, but I found it really easy to work with Astro. I haven't done anything interactive yet. It's literally been just all Astro components, and I think they took some good cues from JSX because it's not JSX, it's an Astro file.

00:25:32 - Anthony Campolo

You use Astro components unless you want to actually write React itself and then you can write JSX. So it's kind of up to you whether you want to do one or the other.

00:25:42 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, exactly. But I'm not positive, because I know you can go with the islands architecture and that's when you pull in a framework to do the client-side stuff. But I'm not sure, in the context of Astro, if you can actually use React only to server-side render.

00:25:56 - Anthony Campolo

That's good. That's a good question. We would need someone from the Astro team to answer that one.

00:25:59 - Nick Taylor

I'm pretty sure it's just Astro components, at least right now. And yeah, so anyways, yeah, it's an Astro file. HTML. I mean, JSX pretty much looks like HTML. It's not HTML. I know, but Astro has the concept of props, just like you do in React.

00:26:19 - Anthony Campolo

That's what I love about using it, is that you can write these Astro components and you almost don't even realize you're not using React or one of these component frameworks.

00:26:26 - Nick Taylor

Exactly. Yeah. So I pulled out some markup out of the Nunjucks templates in my Eleventy blog and then I was, yeah, I was like, okay, Astro has Astro prop. So like, boom. You know, if you've done JSX and React, it's like a pretty natural progression. So I'm probably going to finish migrating my blog because there's just things I like.

00:26:48 - Anthony Campolo

Your blog is.

00:26:49 - Nick Taylor

Oh yeah. Iamdeveloper.com if folks want to check it out. We can drop all that in the show notes if you want. Thank you for the shout out. But yeah, so I think it's an interesting framework. I'm also like, I recently gave a talk at Node Congress in Berlin. I was remote. I couldn't make it to Berlin, but I gave a talk on Fresh, which is a full stack web framework for Deno.

00:27:13 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. What's been the thing that's made you excited about Fresh? Because I remember you did stream with them also and you've been kind of pushing this as one of the cooler frameworks to get into and I think Fresh is very weird. Had a great conversation with Luca from Fresh a long time ago.

00:27:27 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. Yeah. Luca is who I spoke to as well. And he also explained some things about Deno because there were some misconceptions I had. Like I didn't understand what they were doing to convert TypeScript on the server, because they don't bundle anything. There's no build step and we can kind of talk about that. But I think Fresh is interesting. As far as I know right now you can only deploy it to Deno Deploy. Even though Netlify uses Deno, it's not exactly the same as going to Deno Deploy directly. That's interesting, and that's not throwing shade on anybody.

00:28:06 - Anthony Campolo

That's just... you could probably run it in a Docker container.

00:28:10 - Nick Taylor

So I did try to get it working to deploy on Netlify, but I have other priorities and I can't just say, hey, I'm going to go tinker on this for a month. But I really like a lot of stuff in the Fresh framework. It's kind of like the story you're hearing from a lot of frameworks, like SSR, server-side rendering, islands. Yeah, it's the new hotness. But the thing is, for people who have been doing web development for a long time, I started doing web dev in the late '90s. Server-side rendering is how everything worked before. And then there was this swing where, I don't know, I think what happened,

00:28:50 - Anthony Campolo

I had you on my stream talking about SSR.

00:28:53 - Nick Taylor

Oh yeah, that's right.

00:28:53 - Anthony Campolo

We went through like the whole. We did this whole topic. So we'll drop that also in the show notes.

00:28:58 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, and that was kind of funny because we did it with Astro, even though I hadn't really used any Astro. And then I was showing people how you could debug the server-side code, and it was fun. But yeah, like web dev, it always used to be like people make fun of PHP even though people using PHP and Laravel are doing pretty fine.

00:29:20 - Anthony Campolo

I'm literally having that argument on Twitter. Yeah, because Adam. Adam.devis he tried it and he was like, wait a second. Laravel is awesome.

00:29:31 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, yeah. No, I've never used Laravel. The last time I used PHP was PHP 5, which is a long, long time ago. But back in the day I was using LAMP stack or WAMP, which is Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, LAMP if you're on Linux, and XAMPP. Yeah, and then there's also MAMP, which is Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Basically people just liked making acronyms.

00:29:56 - Anthony Campolo

That was the most out of control acronym of all time with all of those.

00:30:00 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, it made me laugh. But.

00:30:02 - Scott Steinlage

But you know that real quick side note, I mean, that's why T3 is what it is, because it's no acronym. Right.

00:30:12 - Anthony Campolo

It's like trying T3 is a bit of a. Throws you for a curveball. It's T3 stands for Theo.

00:30:19 - Scott Steinlage

Right.

00:30:19 - Anthony Campolo

It doesn't stand for TypeScript, Tailwind, TRPC, which is what you would be led to believe if you were a logical person who could think of how these things work.

00:30:27 - Scott Steinlage

Yes, but that way he didn't have to keep renaming it when they changed their stack.

00:30:31 - Anthony Campolo

Right?

00:30:31 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, for sure. But server-side rendering is super popular now. Most frameworks, if they haven't done it yet, are moving to it, including Redwood. We were talking about this yesterday. I think Redwood's got support for it on... I think it's currently on Fly.io only, right now. I'm not positive about that. I think just in my recollection, we're getting

00:31:00 - Anthony Campolo

there slowly but surely. Redwood will support SSR. We had someone open, as maybe one of the first 10 issues on the entire GitHub for it, "Hey, when are you going to support SSR?" Here we are like three years later. We almost have it ready.

00:31:16 - Nick Taylor

That's cool. But it's like everything moved to client-side rendering only. And there was a shift because in the late '90s and even early 2000s, broadband wasn't a thing yet. Like when I was doing web dev initially, I was on dial-up. You know, like if you watch a '90s movie — "Mom, get off the phone, I'm trying to check my email."

00:31:44 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, you couldn't use the Internet and answer your phone at the same time.

00:31:48 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, we had Netscape. It's.

00:31:50 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And then there was other stuff like Java applets. We can put a pin in this because I could probably talk forever about it. But basically, broadband wasn't there yet — or it slowly became available — and people were like, sites are taking too long. I literally used to have to change Gmail to HTML mode. If you don't know, Gmail has an HTML mode if it takes too long to load the page. So picture somebody who has a site or app back in those days — people can't see me moving my hands, but it's like chunk, chunk, chunk, you see the site loading. And so if you could load a minimal amount of the site and then use Ajax — which is what most people call fetch these days — people were like, okay, we can get the page to load fast and then pull down what else we need. And that's when you start getting skeleton loaders and loading screens.

00:32:49 - Nick Taylor

And then we kind of went full tilt building applications only client-side. And there's definitely use cases for that, for sure. But if you're building a website like a blog, a blog shouldn't be a client-side rendered app, because there are other implications like SEO and all that stuff. But now that internet is pretty good — obviously some people still don't have the best internet — it's not even a pendulum swing anymore. When I was talking to Chance... I met Chance Strickland, who used to be on the Remix team. He just happened to be in Montreal one week and we grabbed some lunch. And I was saying, yeah, it's like the pendulum swing. And he's like, it's not really the pendulum swing, it's more circular. You're kind of slowly finding that — you know, like those metal balls you drop in.

00:33:42 - Anthony Campolo

I actually saw... I think Dan Abramov actually came up with this. He tweeted this like a couple years ago. I saw an old reference to that, so I think he might have been the first one to say this.

00:33:51 - Nick Taylor

But yeah, so basically we're slowly getting to what is the sweet spot. We've got serverless now, you've got serverful, so you can serve all these things pretty well. You can still get a good experience. And you have stuff like islands architecture, the hydration story, resumability in Qwik — which is a different approach. I haven't really worked with Qwik. I do understand the principles, but yeah.

00:34:21 - Anthony Campolo

What's the status of Qwik on Netlify?

00:34:24 - Nick Taylor

It works already.

00:34:26 - Anthony Campolo

Brittany Postma had a blog post about it, so it's possible.

00:34:30 - Nick Taylor

Oh, yeah, you can deploy them today. Like, I'm pretty sure my coworker Matt Kane, who's currently not on the frameworks team, I believe he did that integration and this was like a year ago, and we speak to the Qwik team, the Builder folks and stuff. So as far as I know, it works.

00:34:51 - Anthony Campolo

I'd be curious to take it back a step from the technical and just talk a bit about your day to day. Like, it seems like you have a job that's so varied and that could involve so many different things, working with these frameworks, integrating them, making sure they work well. What is a day in the life of Nicky T.?

00:35:09 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. So, you know, the role of the frameworks team is, we are engineering. I'm an individual contributor there, but we kind of have a bit of a support role baked into it. So essentially every day can be different, but we're usually trying to add features to enable frameworks to have better support, but Netlify has.

00:35:37 - Anthony Campolo

Do you have tickets or what does that.

00:35:39 - Nick Taylor

I was just going to ask, yeah. No, we use GitHub. We have GitHub issues and stuff. The reason why we're probably on GitHub is because, at least on the frameworks team, most of it is... well, all the framework stuff is open source. Obviously Netlify has some proprietary stuff, but for all our work I can't think of really anything that isn't open source at the moment.

00:36:04 - Anthony Campolo

It's very cool. And this is one of the things I love about Netlify, is that they are very big on open source, and not just that, they put their money where their mouth is in terms of actually open sourcing the stuff.

00:36:15 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And it's one of the reasons, to just go on a slight tangent for a sec, why I joined Netlify. The other reason was I initially just saw the job posting. I think somebody tweeted it out, maybe it was Jason Lengstorf or somebody else at Netlify. And I'd had the privilege, when I was working at Dev.to, to do a stream with Jason Lengstorf, Cassidy Williams, who neither of them work there now, but they're really super cool people, very down to earth, and they basically oozed good vibes to me when I was just chatting with both of them. And obviously two people doesn't represent a company, but to me, and Netlify in general, because I'd been deploying stuff there before I was even working there, I just... I don't want to say sunshine and rainbows, but just good feels, and even me

00:37:07 - Anthony Campolo

right now, as someone who works for a Netlify competitor, I still love Netlify and will tell everyone it's so great, because both the people are great, the tech is great. I just think in terms of contributing to the open source world and making cool tools for developers, I've got nothing but good things to say about it, really.

00:37:27 - Nick Taylor

Thanks for the kind words. But yeah, it's a combination of... I got good vibes from... I actually even did a stream with Ben Hong, who works there too.

00:37:35 - Anthony Campolo

Oh yeah.

00:37:36 - Nick Taylor

So basically their Vue guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ben, again, getting back to open source, is a core team member on Vue and Nuxt. Those are probably two big reasons that he's working at Netlify as well. Again, there's a common theme here that keeps coming up.

00:37:53 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, I mean, going back to the original question though, like, you know, as far as like, you know, Your day to day. Like I think what you just said about Jason and Cass, was it Cassie.

00:38:05 - Nick Taylor

Cassidy.

00:38:06 - Scott Steinlage

Cassidy, yeah. Like they, they gave you some good vibes. Right. When you were doing some things with them.

00:38:12 - Anthony Campolo

Right.

00:38:12 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:38:13 - Scott Steinlage

And it's like they're the job that you do that we do put good

00:38:18 - Anthony Campolo

vibes out into the world.

00:38:19 - Scott Steinlage

You're the face of the company essentially, you know, in different. In different areas.

00:38:22 - Anthony Campolo

Right?

00:38:23 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:38:23 - Scott Steinlage

So like you're the first touch point potentially by someone. Right?

00:38:26 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:38:26 - Scott Steinlage

And so if you're putting out good vibes, you know, it's good things for the company. So you said two people can't be if the, you know, the company. But it really, you know, that's relationships right there.

00:38:35 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, no, yeah, exactly. And like I said Ben Hong as well. They're all super awesome people.

00:38:42 - Anthony Campolo

And Jason, Cassidy don't even work for Netlify anymore.

00:38:46 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And Jason, he left. I think it was late fall last year. Jason's doing amazing stuff. He's helping.

00:38:54 - Anthony Campolo

He turned Learn with Jason into a company which is so cool.

00:38:58 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And might as well plug him there, definitely check out learnwithjason.dev. He also works with brands and companies and helps make them better. And I forget who I was talking to last night, but somebody was saying because Netlify did this... not Between Two Ferns... what was the video called? It's basically kind of a funny video, about three minutes, showing a worst-case scenario of people trying to just finish a project, deploy it, and stuff. It's black and white on purpose, or dark-themed, and then there's the happy path, which is obviously using Netlify and stuff. But it's done... and yeah, I missed this one.

00:39:41 - Anthony Campolo

We'll have to find that and throw it.

00:39:43 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. Drop it in the show notes. But that kind of thing, I don't know if there were a lot of people involved in that serious production stuff, but I know Jason, I believe, spearheaded that. I'm not positive. But it was basically a super fun project, and that's kind of the vibes Jason gives off and the kinds of things he's trying to do with companies now on his own. You can see that too on Learn with Jason. He's always having fun and stuff. But getting back to the day to day, also we're open source, and when I worked at Dev.to, Dev.to is open source, and one of my favorite things to do is interact with the developer community. This is why, even though I'm not some massive streamer like Primagen or whatever, my lizard brain wants to have tens of thousands of followers. But that's not really why I do it. I honestly do it because I get to meet people and just check out projects.

00:40:35 - Anthony Campolo

I heavily associate you with streaming because you did the Dev.to stream before this. So you want to talk a little bit about how you got into streaming, what it's like streaming, and why you think it's a valuable activity?

00:40:48 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, for sure. So at Dev.to, I started January 2020, and Hacktoberfest 2020 came around. A lot of the team was involved with it, but kind of the face of it was me and my old coworker, Christina Gorton from Lambda School.

00:41:10 - Anthony Campolo

She was a teacher when I was at Lambda School, actually. Yeah, I would go back and watch some of her videos, trying to understand what the hell was going on.

00:41:18 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, Christina's awesome. And if she's ever on the hunt for a new role, definitely snatch her up super quick. So this was also the first year of the pandemic — lockdown. I was working in open source, obviously, so there's nothing I needed to hide. I was just bored one day, and I took a lot of inspiration from watching Jason stream and I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna start streaming. And I started literally just doing my actual Dev.to work on stream. Nobody's watching because nobody knows I'm even there. Kind of weird initially — zero people watching as I'm streaming on Twitch. And then I got this idea: we work in open source, we have people contributing to the codebase, why don't I pair with somebody on stream? So I did that, and the first person I streamed with was, I think, Sylvia?

00:42:30 - Nick Taylor

I'll find it in the show notes. But basically, it didn't necessarily get her her first job, but she talked about it during her interview, actually. Yeah.

00:42:39 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome.

00:42:39 - Nick Taylor

I'm not gonna claim I got her the job at

00:42:43 - Anthony Campolo

all, but, like, it's creating the space for people to have these opportunities.

00:42:47 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:42:48 - Anthony Campolo

And this is the same way I think about FSJam or JavaScript Jam, that just giving people the opportunity to show up and present their work, like, that's really valuable and it can really give someone a platform that they may not have had otherwise.

00:43:03 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And it comes back to open source again. She talked about something I worked on — we converted a Preact component. It was a class-based component at the time. And I was just like, oh, why don't we just convert it to a function component? I'm not saying you should convert your whole codebase just for the heck of it, but I was like, this will be a fun thing to do —

00:43:24 - Anthony Campolo

because it's the right thing to do.

00:43:27 - Nick Taylor

So yeah, I did that. I set up a schedule and put a blog post up on Dev.to saying, hey, if you want to come on the stream and pair, I'll help you get set up with Dev.to on your machine and then you can work on it. I was doing maybe one every two weeks. And then it was summer, so I was on vacation for a bit, but then Hacktoberfest rolled around and they're like, okay, you and Christina will be doing that. I was like, cool. And I was like, well, Dev.to has a Twitch handle — it's called The Practical Dev. If you want to check it out, you can check out the past streams. We can put that in the show notes because Twitch doesn't keep everything on there forever. But I used to put highlights on there. And I was like, well, you use this at most maybe for an event, and that's it. I mentioned that I had been pairing with people on my own stream.

00:44:25 - Nick Taylor

I said, well, why don't we for Hacktoberfest just pair, like, every... I don't know if it was every day. I can't remember how many times we were doing it. It was definitely at least a couple times a week. And that kind of started the Dev.to Twitch stream.

00:44:40 - Anthony Campolo

And I'm just looking at The Practical Dev's YouTube and it's sad because as soon as you left there were zero videos. But I'm like, the recent ones, we got Ben Holmes, we got Demetrius Clark, and we even got me doing StepZen stuff.

00:44:53 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, I even... I can't remember if it was the last one I did, but I think the last one might have been with Sunil Pai when he was at Cloudflare.

00:44:59 - Anthony Campolo

The last one is Stacy Taylor.

00:45:01 - Nick Taylor

Oh yeah, Stacy Taylor. Got to give a shout out to the Collab Lab. I'm a volunteer over there.

00:45:06 - Anthony Campolo

Five from the last is Sunil.

00:45:08 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, but both great conversations. So basically we did that for Hacktoberfest, and because I was doing engineering there — front end — I wasn't DevRel there or anything, but I was doing DevRel regardless. I was just like, well, this was fun and people seem to enjoy it.

00:45:32 - Anthony Campolo

I find that DevRel is something that, and I think we talked about this the other day, some people just have it in them. They naturally do DevRel. Whether they even realize it's a job or not, they just do it. They just exude that kind of energy and they get that there's a certain value to getting out there and communicating and interacting with the community.

00:45:53 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

00:45:53 - Scott Steinlage

Yes, you have exudability.

00:45:55 - Nick Taylor

And if folks don't know me, I'm pretty extroverted.

00:46:00 - Anthony Campolo

Typically quite exuded.

00:46:01 - Nick Taylor

You know, I'm that person that... I did put antiperspirant on today, though. But yeah, we're off the rails now. So basically Ben Halpern, fellow Canadian, the creator of Dev.to, he's like, yeah, you can keep doing it — try to keep it related to Forem, Dev.to. Don't put a lot of work into it. And because I've been streaming for a while now, my setup's a lot better, I have stuff automated and so on. But if you look at the old Dev.to ones, I used to basically stick the whole Discord screen in on there because I didn't —

00:46:57 - Anthony Campolo

I remember this.

00:46:57 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And I could have definitely made it better. It's just that I was literally told — and this is no knock on Ben — it wasn't my full-time work. It was like, you can do this.

00:47:08 - Anthony Campolo

You're just making it work. You're doing it.

00:47:12 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And I was really happy about all the work we did there on the stream, because when I started it with Christina, we had —

00:47:22 - Anthony Campolo

one of my favorite streams. It really was.

00:47:23 - Nick Taylor

And honestly it was my favorite part of my week. And even streaming now — even though I love the work I do at Netlify — streaming is my favorite part of my week. So originally there were like 700 followers on the Dev.to Twitch stream. And then by the time I left, because I was doing it solo for 2021 because Christina had left at that point, I think we capped it at about 2,200 people. So I felt pretty good about that growth.

00:47:54 - Anthony Campolo

2.3K.

00:47:55 - Nick Taylor

Okay. Yeah. Okay. 2.3. Okay. All right.

00:47:58 - Scott Steinlage

Watch out.

00:47:58 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, so I was pretty happy about that, and I was kind of indirectly getting paid at Dev.to to stream, even though there was nothing official about it. But when I joined Netlify, it's not part of my job at all. So I do it on my lunch break.

00:48:15 - Anthony Campolo

You should talk about your current streaming — where are you doing that and what kind of guests do you bring on?

00:48:21 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. So on the current stream, I've been slowly growing it, because I do it once a week — I'm doing it twice a week now actually. My second day —

00:48:30 - Anthony Campolo

Nicky T. Live, you got a sweet domain that redirects to you.

00:48:35 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. So if you check that out, it's still kind of the same concept, basically — hey, Anthony, I was wondering if you want to come on the stream. You work on the Redwood core team. I don't know anything about Redwood. You know, this did happen.

00:48:50 - Anthony Campolo

That's not.

00:48:51 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, exactly. But it's that kind of stuff sometimes. I'm trying to get into a cadence where on Thursdays I'll probably just do a side-project thing, which is probably continuing to migrate my blog. I do have some guests on Thursdays sometimes. But that's essentially the theme of the stream. And I think streaming — I know it's not for everybody — but one of the benefits I've seen is I've just met a ton of awesome people. That's the first big win.

00:49:25 - Anthony Campolo

It keeps you sharp. Like, as a developer, it really forces you to actually be able to think on your feet and problem solve and debug and be aware of how your tools work. There's like a lot of benefits in terms of just like actually making you a really sharp developer.

00:49:40 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And I really enjoy being thrown into the deep end. It doesn't bother me. I know that can definitely stress out some people.

00:49:49 - Anthony Campolo

But if you can get into that mindset — being comfortable showing the world that there are things you don't know, or not being afraid to make a mistake — you need to figure it out, just like all of us. We're all developers being thrown into problems that we may have no idea how to solve. And that's just part of the job.

00:50:06 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, exactly. And it's definitely made me sharper. The benefits I could see too is like just talking about something. I've definitely done a bunch of live coding interviews, and doing something like this gets you in that mindset. Because for live coding, it's not necessarily about getting it working — the beauty of it is it didn't work and you dug into things. And at least my experience on Twitch, and I say this as a white guy in tech, so there's a million problems that I don't have. But my audience is typically... I think I've had one random bot account come in once. But everybody else, it's like, oh no, try that.

00:50:57 - Anthony Campolo

Or oh, you got a chill community. Yeah, chill community.

00:51:00 - Nick Taylor

So it's just fun. And yeah, there are just those benefits I mentioned. But the really big thing is, we talk about code a lot, but as you progress in your career, code becomes a lot less important. It becomes more about the people, providing business value, making higher-level decisions, seeing the bigger picture.

00:51:30 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, bigger picture. Being aware of the context of the code and what you're actually doing and what problems are you solving, as you say.

00:51:36 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, and I mean you still need to know how it works and how to code obviously. But so, you know, this skill set changes as you progress through your career.

00:51:46 - Anthony Campolo

Do you.

00:51:47 - Nick Taylor

I'm kidding.

00:51:49 - Scott Steinlage

You know, actually, real quick — there were several times you guys brought up the value in this, the value in the streaming, the value in developer relations, all this stuff. And so a lot of companies out there have trouble figuring out what that ROI is for developer relations.

00:52:11 - Anthony Campolo

Right. It's not as clear. You can't point to a dollar amount

00:52:14 - Scott Steinlage

you can't point to.

00:52:14 - Anthony Campolo

Right, exactly.

00:52:15 - Scott Steinlage

And so, you know, for working for a company that is so heavily focused on and invested in DevRel, how are you guys showing your ROI?

00:52:26 - Anthony Campolo

How are you determining the ultimate Devrel question?

00:52:29 - Scott Steinlage

I mean, no, really, like, what are your KPIs? Like, because you said you, you're doing this during lunch now. Right. You're not even streaming, getting paid to stream. You're, you know, what are your tasks?

00:52:38 - Nick Taylor

Well, to be clear, I'm not part of the DevRel team at all. Just to make that very clear.

00:52:43 - Anthony Campolo

And this is another interesting thing, is that you don't even officially do DevRel, but to me, like, your work is so DevRel-y.

00:52:51 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. So in terms of metrics, I can't really give you an answer to that because it's not part of my role. I have other things that I have to...

00:52:59 - Anthony Campolo

So you have different things that you're being quote unquote graded on in terms of what are you delivering that are separate.

00:53:05 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. Getting back to the streaming — it's just something I enjoy. I know it does help the company to some degree for sure.

00:53:12 - Anthony Campolo

You just do DevRel for fun. And certain people just exude it — you cannot not do DevRel.

00:53:17 - Scott Steinlage

Well, he enjoys it.

00:53:18 - Nick Taylor

I mean, he said that before. Yeah. I think long term, realistically, I will land in some kind of role like that.

00:53:26 - Scott Steinlage

What's your perspective, even though you're not in it? Not even for Netlify. I'm just saying for a company, period. Like, what would you think would be some great KPIs or how would you prove your value in that?

00:53:35 - Nick Taylor

I honestly don't like metrics in general.

00:53:37 - Scott Steinlage

Well, nobody does.

00:53:38 - Anthony Campolo

But the big, the people at the

00:53:40 - Scott Steinlage

top want to know these things that

00:53:41 - Anthony Campolo

the people who do exude Devrel and get it know that it is, it doesn't have to do with metrics.

00:53:46 - Nick Taylor

Right, right.

00:53:47 - Scott Steinlage

The people who understand it, appreciate it and see the value. Absolutely. But then there's, you know, folks at

00:53:54 - Nick Taylor

the top that... I'll give you an answer that doesn't answer what you're asking. I know people in sales at Netlify, but I also have friends in sales. And the thing is... Joan — his last name is escaping me — Scheffler. He used to head DevRel at New Relic. I haven't talked to him in a while, but I threw some DMs. But I don't know where I was going with that. Basically it's like we're talking here right now and you're potential clients of Netlify, or wherever. We're just having a conversation. I don't think I should be shilling Netlify to you. I'm just like, hey, what's up? How you doing?

00:54:48 - Anthony Campolo

You know, connection that could pay off down the line.

00:54:50 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. You know, that's why.

00:54:52 - Scott Steinlage

So where's the trackability?

00:54:53 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, that's why it's hard to prove that.

00:54:54 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And I don't know how you... because this is not my KPIs or anything, but I don't know how you track that. I could have somebody at Remix Conf here today like, hey, yeah, let's hang out. Oh, let me help you with that. And I'm not even telling them to deploy it to where I work or whatever. It's just like, you know, maybe a year later I bump into them or they become a customer and they say, oh, yeah, well, I just happened to talk to Nick a year ago. He seemed pretty cool and I like what you people are doing here, and I need this now. And so I have no idea how you measure that. I honestly don't. And again, it's not...

00:55:30 - Scott Steinlage

It's definitely the long game, though.

00:55:32 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And I feel for people that have to report on that — how do you do it? I'm kind of glad it's not part of what I have to do

00:55:42 - Scott Steinlage

right now, but I'm glad I did

00:55:44 - Anthony Campolo

this for a hobby. I've been lucky in that I've been doing DevRel now at three separate companies, and most of the time they look at what is your output, like, what is the content you're creating, what are the connections you're making, and does it look like you're actually doing work? And I feel like that's a good kind of stopgap. Whereas you may not be able to point to specific metrics that prove this led to business value, but you can prove you're doing work and that you're producing good content, that people care about that content, and that is, in itself, valuable just because you understand as a business owner what the value of this is. And so I think that this partly comes back to not everything can be boiled down to a number. Like.

00:56:31 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, exactly.

00:56:32 - Anthony Campolo

And it's kind of like an absurdity of, like, capitalism that you could boil everything down to a specific number that proves you did work. And I just don't think that's always the case.

00:56:40 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And I do not have a salesperson bone in my body at all. I have a good friend of mine, Scott — not this Scott. Maybe Scott is a salesman. But my buddy Scotty — if I wanted to go buy a new car, I'd say, hey, Scotty, can you be my wingman? Because they'd give some number out and he'd go, yeah, yeah, but you know you're gonna mark it up, so just throw that in, do this, do that, ding bang boom. And I can't operate like that. The only way I can operate is if I know something is literally amazing. I don't need to sell it.

00:57:35 - Nick Taylor

I just need to talk about it.

00:57:37 - Anthony Campolo

Which brings you back to the frameworks that you intuitively understand and know have value. So you're like, hey, I see this Fresh framework. You intuitively get that it has value, and so you want to go to a conference and speak about it.

00:57:51 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And side note — that talk was actually my first conference talk. I stream all the time, I'm excited to hopefully do other conferences. I'm definitely comfortable speaking to people, through the streaming. I've done talks at meetups, lunch and learns, stuff on Virtual Coffee, which we can put in the show notes.

00:58:16 - Scott Steinlage

So if you want Nicky T. At your event, hit them up.

00:58:21 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, I'd love to talk about whatever. It's just a lot of fun.

00:58:28 - Scott Steinlage

Are you actively submitting CFPs anywhere?

00:58:31 - Nick Taylor

I submitted one to React Summit, the one going on in New York, just because I'm in Montreal, so it's not too far. But I submitted something about Remix for that one. I might submit something else too. I'll see. But I think that was my first talk getting accepted. And I don't know if this is a good pattern or not, but I gave a talk on Fresh at the Chicago JS meetup. Somebody from that community approached me, and so I gave my talk there. I mean, I spent time doing it, writing the talk, but it was kind of slightly unpolished.

00:59:11 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. You can do something for a meetup and then kind of polish it and then bring it to a conference. I think that's actually really smart.

00:59:18 - Scott Steinlage

Good idea.

00:59:19 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And it's... that wasn't the intention when I gave that Chicago JS, sure.

00:59:23 - Scott Steinlage

It just happened that way.

00:59:24 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. I just have to say, it's a —

00:59:26 - Anthony Campolo

great way in general for workshopping material. And I really highly recommend people speak at meetups.

00:59:30 - Scott Steinlage

And there's a lot of value there too. Totally.

00:59:32 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. And speaking of relationships — Brittany Postma used to work with me at Netlify. She's at... I forget where she's working at now.

00:59:40 - Anthony Campolo

It's.

00:59:41 - Nick Taylor

She's working on design systems at a company that's escaping me. But she just DMed me on Twitter. She said, hey, I think you'd be great giving a talk at Node Congress. So she put me in contact with the organizers, and then I submitted my CFP. I still had to go through the formal process — it's not like they just said, Nicky T., you're in. But I just appreciate that Brittany thought of me, because I wouldn't have even known about that conference. And Mr. Nicky T., you don't just

01:00:15 - Anthony Campolo

get to waltz in wherever you want to

01:00:16 - Nick Taylor

say, hey, I'm Nick T. But yeah, I'm definitely interested in giving more talks. I would love to give an in-person talk because that one was remote. Who knows, maybe I'll bawl my eyes out on stage. But hashtag YOLO — you just got to do it.

01:00:46 - Anthony Campolo

YOLO. Awesome. As we start closing it out here, are there other things you want to talk about or things you want to highlight before we start closing it out?

01:00:55 - Nick Taylor

Just kind of wanted to talk a bit about Remix Conf, because we are here.

01:01:00 - Anthony Campolo

We haven't talked about that at all.

01:01:02 - Nick Taylor

No, no. Yeah. Not trying to throw you guys under the bus there. It's just like, it was kind of my first... I say it's my first conference that I'm attending because I'm kind of lying. I went to a Sitecore conference a long time ago in 2016 when I used to work in .NET. And it's not throwing shade on Sitecore or anything, it's just I wasn't... at that point I wanted to go into open source and just full-stack JavaScript, so I was trying to get out of the .NET ecosystem. But I had this opportunity to go there. I'd never been in New Orleans, but my head wasn't really in it. I was there actually just to go to New Orleans. So I kind of say that doesn't really count.

01:01:48 - Anthony Campolo

But I went to Ethereum Amsterdam before Remix Conf last year, so I could do the same thing. Right. Remix Conf was kind of my first conference, but not really. Let's count that Web3 stuff.

01:01:59 - Nick Taylor

Okay. But Remix Conf, it's been amazing here, so.

01:02:06 - Anthony Campolo

Run any talks that jump out. Yeah, I know you've actually watched many of the talks, which I usually don't.

01:02:13 - Nick Taylor

Well, because I guess it was my first conference — air quotes — first conference. I listened to most of the talks. The really amazing talk on day one was from... their name's escaping me... from Netflix. So for folks who don't know anything about Remix, they're all about pushing the web forward, progressive enhancement first, and then you can obviously bolt on JavaScript to make things more interactive. And this talk was so amazing. It was a piano on a webpage.

01:02:48 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah. I saw a lot of people started posting stuff.

01:02:49 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. There's a lot of things you can do with JavaScript to make an interactive piano — reading audio files and so on.

01:02:56 - Anthony Campolo

Is this the... Abuse the Platform. Yeah, Abuse the Platform by Jon Jensen.

01:03:00 - Nick Taylor

Jon Jensen. Yeah. Amazing talk — he had the piano working with JavaScript, but then he showed all the things you can do with just literally submitting forms. No JavaScript, and it was still the same thing. And then he demonstrated two browsers, multiplayer, both of them getting the sound. It was just an amazing talk. Abuse the Platform was a very wild demonstration, but such a great way to showcase all the capabilities of Remix. And I'm not the only one who thought that talk was amazing. I know.

01:03:38 - Scott Steinlage

But was blown away too. He tweeted about it.

01:03:41 - Nick Taylor

Oh, it's.

01:03:41 - Scott Steinlage

Jeez. Wow.

01:03:42 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, it was just amazing. And the fact that it was an interactive piano — everybody knows what a piano is. That's super cool.

01:03:52 - Anthony Campolo

You know, I have to go back and watch that one. That sounds like it's right up my alley.

01:03:55 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, and I enjoyed the React core team panel yesterday as well. I'm not dismissing any of the other talks — there were a lot of great talks. It's just you told me to pick my favorite one and the piano one is hands down.

01:04:10 - Anthony Campolo

Appreciate that. Yeah, no, that's awesome. You want to give your socials and where people can follow you.

01:04:16 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. Yeah. So Nicky T. Online is pretty much my handle in most places.

01:04:22 - Anthony Campolo

Even got nickyt.online now.

01:04:24 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. If you're on Bluesky.

01:04:26 - Scott Steinlage

Wonder where that is.

01:04:27 - Nick Taylor

Yeah, it goes to my homepage, but I'm probably gonna make a separate socials page. But basically, if you're on Bluesky, my handle is Nicky T. Online.

01:04:36 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. On Twitter, you got the alpaca behind Bluesky.

01:04:40 - Nick Taylor

Oh, yeah, I switched it up. Yeah. That's a side note. My brand.

01:04:43 - Anthony Campolo

Exactly. Yeah. The ultimate Nicky T. Branding. The alpaca. I love it.

01:04:48 - Nick Taylor

Yeah. If you head to nickyt.online or iamdeveloper.com, they all go to the same place. You can find all my socials there — LinkedIn, Polywork, Instagram, if that's your jam. Feel free to connect. And if you're ever interested in coming on the stream to talk about a project you're working on, I'd love to hear about it and maybe dig into it with you. And I just want to say thanks to both of you. Love hanging out with you on your Twitter Spaces. It's the first time I get to hang out on the podcast.

01:05:19 - Scott Steinlage

Yeah, man.

01:05:20 - Anthony Campolo

Thank you so much for joining. It's a really great convo.

01:05:22 - Nick Taylor

For real.

01:05:22 - Scott Steinlage

We had fun.

01:05:23 - Anthony Campolo

One. Yeah.

01:05:24 - Nick Taylor

Yeah.

01:05:24 - Anthony Campolo

All right. And I think that'll close it out here.

01:05:26 - Scott Steinlage

Awesome.

01:05:27 - Nick Taylor

All right.

01:05:28 - Scott Steinlage

All right. Thanks, y'all. Appreciate you. See you in the next one.

01:05:32 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

01:05:34 - Scott Steinlage

Peace.