Prismic with Alex Trost
Alex Trost discusses building Frontend Horse, transitioning from teaching to DevRel, and how Prismic's slice-based approach differentiates it as a headless CMS.
Episode Description
Alex Trost discusses building the Frontend Horse community, transitioning from teaching to DevRel, and how Prismic's slice-based approach differentiates it in the headless CMS space.
Episode Summary
Alex Trost joins Anthony Campolo and Christopher Burns to share the origin story of Frontend Horse, a newsletter, blog, and Twitch stream focused on creative front-end development that grew out of curiosity about impressive CodePen creations. Alex explains how the community Discord emerged organically once streaming attracted a core group of regulars, and he draws on his background in education to create intentional learning spaces within his streams, including features that capture audience questions and highlight what viewers have learned. The conversation shifts to his move into developer relations, first at Auth0 and then at Prismic, where he channels his teaching instincts into community-driven content that prioritizes genuine learning over heavy-handed product promotion. A substantial portion of the discussion centers on the headless CMS landscape, with Alex explaining how Prismic's slice-based architecture gives content editors the flexibility of a page builder while letting developers maintain control over the front end. He walks through Slice Machine, a local development tool that streamlines the process of creating data models, generating mocks, and wiring up components. The hosts debate the tradeoffs between traditional platforms like WordPress and headless solutions, touching on accessibility for non-technical users, the value of structured data, and why a component-based shared language between developers, designers, and editors may be the path forward.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introducing Frontend Horse and the Story Behind the Name
Alex Trost joins the show and immediately addresses the question everyone wants answered: why horses? The answer turns out to be charmingly practical — the .horse top-level domain was available, and the branding possibilities were too good to pass up. Alex explains that Frontend Horse encompasses a newsletter, blog, and Twitch stream focused on front-end development and creative coding, all born from his fascination with impressive work he discovered on CodePen.
The conversation also touches on the quirks of novelty TLDs and the importance of still securing the .com as a redirect. Alex shares a running joke he told for a year about .horse being the only animal TLD, only to be corrected by Cassidy Williams that .dog also exists. The hosts riff on how unusual domain extensions still confuse non-technical people, setting a lighthearted tone for the rest of the episode.
00:02:26 - Building a Community Discord That Actually Works
Alex describes how the Frontend Horse Discord came about not as a checkbox exercise but out of genuine necessity. He deliberately held off on launching it because he had seen too many brands spread themselves thin across platforms, creating ghost towns that reflect poorly on the whole operation. It was only after streaming attracted a core group of regulars — people he didn't want to stop talking to once the camera turned off — that a community space made sense.
The hosts discuss how Discord has become a default social platform for younger users, drawing comparisons to Club Penguin and Neopets. Anthony highlights what makes the Frontend Horse Discord special: it isn't tied to a product or open-source project but is simply a gathering of people who enjoy creating and learning together. Alex credits the community's quality to the kind of people creative coding attracts — curious, friendly, and eager to share.
00:07:23 - From Teaching to Tech and the Power of Vulnerability
Alex reflects on his transition from classroom teaching to the tech industry, sharing that while the school system's lack of support for teachers drove him away, the skills he developed there remain central to everything he does. He emphasizes that career changers coming into tech should value their previous experience, whether it's education, spreadsheet work, or anything else, because those skills transfer in unexpected ways.
The discussion turns to how Alex applies pedagogical thinking to his streams, intentionally creating spaces where viewers can share questions and document what they've learned. Anthony and Alex bond over the importance of vulnerability in technical settings — admitting you need help writing a for loop on stream, or asking obvious questions as a newcomer. Alex explains how he sets guests at ease before going live by telling them the chat is supportive and no one expects perfection, a practice he developed after noticing early guests were visibly stressed.
00:13:14 - Stream Setup, Creative Coding, and Design Trends
Alex explains a practical streaming decision: he makes chat visible on screen so that both guests and future YouTube viewers can follow the conversation without missing context. This solves the common problem of streamers reacting to chat messages that the audience can't see, which creates a frustrating experience for anyone watching the recording later.
The conversation pivots to creative coding and CSS art on CodePen, with Christopher expressing amazement at what people accomplish with pure CSS. The hosts then discuss current design trends, particularly the rise of 3D-rendered illustrations made in tools like Blender, which have begun replacing the flat illustration style that dominated startup branding for years. Alex notes that by definition, trends are temporary, and while the 3D style is a refreshing change, it too will eventually cycle out.
00:17:45 - What Prismic Is and How Headless CMS Works
Alex transitions into discussing his role at Prismic, explaining the basics of headless CMS architecture for listeners unfamiliar with the concept. He contrasts it with WordPress's monolithic approach, where the CMS and front end are bundled together, and describes how a headless CMS exposes content through an API that any framework — Next.js, Nuxt, Gatsby — can consume. This decoupling gives developers freedom to choose their tools while content teams manage their work independently.
The key differentiator for Prismic, Alex explains, is the concept of slices — reusable page sections that editors can arrange like building blocks to create new pages without needing a developer. This gives non-technical users the flexibility of a page builder while preserving the performance and customization benefits of a developer-built front end. Christopher shares his own experience testing multiple CMS platforms and admits that WordPress's Gutenberg editor impressed him, underscoring that there's no single right answer in this space.
00:24:16 - Slice Machine, Developer Workflow, and API Options
Alex walks through Prismic's developer experience in more detail, recommending the REST API as the primary way most developers should interact with the platform. He then introduces Slice Machine, a local development tool that brings data modeling out of the browser-based editor and into the developer's own environment, complete with version control. Slice Machine automates much of the tedious wiring — installing clients, fetching data, passing props — so developers can focus on building components rather than plumbing.
Additional quality-of-life features include auto-generated mocks for local development and Storybook thumbnails that give editors a visual preview of each slice rather than just a text description. Alex expresses genuine enthusiasm for how Slice Machine reduces friction, noting that the repetitive setup work of connecting a CMS to a front end is something no developer wants to do for every project. GraphQL is also available for those who prefer it, but the REST-based kits remain the recommended path.
00:28:43 - Headless CMS Tradeoffs and the WordPress Question
The hosts engage in a candid discussion about what headless CMS platforms have gained and lost compared to traditional solutions. Alex acknowledges that no tool is universally the best, and he frames the choice as a matter of tradeoffs: hosted headless solutions free developers from managing infrastructure and plugin updates, but they also remove the ability to directly access and customize the underlying database. For teams without DevOps capacity, that trade is worthwhile.
Christopher raises perhaps the most fundamental challenge — every headless CMS and Jamstack deployment still requires a developer, which means non-technical users like small business owners remain better served by WordPress. The group agrees that the component-based model, where developers, designers, and editors share a common language around slices, represents the most promising path forward. Alex positions Prismic as a component-based headless CMS, arguing that this shared vocabulary makes cross-team collaboration far more efficient.
00:34:45 - Framework Support, Future Plans, and Closing Thoughts
Anthony asks whether Prismic plans to support newer frameworks like Solid, and Alex explains that the team is currently focused on strengthening their most-adopted integrations — Next.js, Gatsby, and an in-progress SvelteKit plugin. He highlights team members Angelo Ashmore and Lucy, who have been refining the Gatsby and Nuxt plugins respectively, and notes that the core JavaScript client works with any JS-based framework, including Astro, even without a dedicated plugin.
The episode wraps with Alex sharing where listeners can find Frontend Horse and Prismic, and the hosts exchange genuine appreciation for each other's community involvement. Christopher sneaks in one final horse pun, and Alex shares a charming anecdote about Cassie Evans seeing his horse-themed browser setup and assuring him he's leaning into the bit plenty. The conversation closes on the same warm, community-minded note it began with.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Anthony Campolo
All right. I'm going off my hotspot right now, so hopefully this will work.
00:00:04 - Christopher Burns
You've not got internet in America. You've gone back in time.
00:00:07 - Anthony Campolo
And it's just because I have a weird living situation. We did a handoff, and I was just like, ah, I'll figure it out later. Alex Trost, welcome to the show.
00:00:27 - Alex Trost
Hey, thanks for having me.
00:00:28 - Anthony Campolo
So I have two separate but related questions to start us off here, which I think are very important. First one is why horses, and then second is horses, why?
00:00:37 - Alex Trost
Most people just ask one question and they're only getting half the story, honestly? So that's a very good way to start it.
For a little bit of context, I think for the 99% of people listening who are saying, why did I choose the wrong podcast here, I run a multi-conglomerate thing. It's a newsletter and a blog and now a stream, a livestream on Twitch called Frontend Horse. We focus primarily on front-end development, especially on creative coding. The domain is frontend.horse. It's called Frontend Horse because that's a domain, and that's really funny to me that you can get a horse domain. So the branding was built in, rather than doing Alex Trost's weekly front-end newsletter. Frontend Horse. Let's just run with it.
So that's the entire reason. I don't know how to ride a horse, especially. Well, I've been on like three in my life. I did fine. I don't think they took to me. The horses didn't seem to especially care for me.
[00:01:33] But yeah, I think horses are a fine animal, and there's plenty of puns and rodeo jokes that you can make, and that's right up my alley.
00:01:40 - Anthony Campolo
Well, you didn't even mention what's funny. I think the most important thing, which is your Discord. That's actually where I've gotten to know you, is the Frontend Horse Discord as well, which I think has come after your kind of branding. And that's, for me, the first kind of Discord I've found that has been similar to the React Podcast Discord, and that is not really based around an open source project. It's not based on a company's product. It's pretty much just a bunch of people who get together and enjoy creating stuff, and enjoy sharing that stuff with each other, and getting feedback and learning from each other.
So I love the Frontend Horse Discord. I think it's a wonderful corner of the internet that I really enjoy hanging out in. When did the Discord start? That was like after the newsletter and stuff like that.
00:02:26 - Alex Trost
The Discord kind of came about as more of a necessity, right? As you're starting things on the internet these days, especially because I started Frontend Horse during the pandemic, so like May of 2020, I'm like, let's start a newsletter. Not much else to do. Starting a Discord is just a thing people do. But I really held off because the need wasn't there. There wasn't that clear need of people asking for a Discord. People didn't seem to want one.
It feels like a lot of people, and this isn't a slight on anyone, but lots of folks start up too much. It's like, oh, we're on Instagram and we're on Clubhouse, we've got a Discord and we've got a Slack, and you can't maintain all that. People show up to one of those and it's like, okay, this is a ghost town. This whole brand, this whole entire thing must also be a ghost town, right? Like they see one thing and they say, oh, this is a representation of the entirety of it.
[00:03:21] So I held off for a while until we started doing a lot of streaming. I just started getting the most fantastic people joining the streams. I was streaming about creative coding, and I'm not a great developer at all in any regard, but I am curious and I like to learn from especially creative developers who make some really cool stuff on CodePen.
If you've ever spent the afternoon digging through CodePen and just finding some stuff where you're like, how is this all CSS? I couldn't do this with JavaScript and with a team of people helping me. How did this person do this, all with just one div? Huh. And you start to dig through, and you're just more curious because you don't know some of that stuff. I started the newsletter around that, where I started asking questions of like, hey, can you show me how you made this incredible piece of creative code? I felt selfish if I did that just for my own knowledge, right?
[00:04:16] Like I couldn't DM someone and be like, hey, teach me this, but you can say, hi, I'd like to write about you in my newsletter. Can you answer some of my questions about it? And they go, sure. Right? Like, and then you feel better and you share it out.
We've been doing that on stream. Some fantastic people have started showing up over and over again, and I didn't want to stop talking to them once the stream ended. So it was like, all right, this is a need for a community that's kind of popping up. I love the way you described it, of just like a bunch of people getting together to share things and learn from each other, and it's not like it's a fan club of the stream or anything like that. It's just we have some things in common around front end development and around being just friendly, nice, helpful people. And hey, let's all kind of hang out.
00:05:02 - Christopher Burns
Discord's one of these things that I've used always in small circles, and then I find out my 13-year-old brother uses Discord. I look at his Discord list and he's got like 40 servers, and each one has loads of people. And he's like, do you even know these people? He's like, no. It's a server, and people join and I chat to people. I'm like, what are these kids doing these days? Just talking to randoms on the internet through Discord. And he's like, yes, yes they do. And Roblox, Fortnite, or Minecraft is normally the connecting thing to all of it, if you have kids. I don't have kids.
00:05:35 - Alex Trost
It's the new Club Penguin, is what it is. It's Neopets or Club Penguin for 2021. Absolutely.
00:05:42 - Anthony Campolo
Neopets. That's a good one. That was way before Chris's time.
00:05:45 - Christopher Burns
I know what Neopets is. Don't you worry. My mom played that. Thank you very much.
But what I did want to say, .horse as a TLD. I don't think I've heard that one before. Now there's no horsing around, it's quite a good one.
00:05:59 - Alex Trost
You got to come out of the gate right away with the puns. It's just how it has to be.
It's actually funny. I thought it was especially a funny domain name because, and I said this exact phrase, I would say this to people, and I had to revise it. I can't say this anymore now, but I would say, yeah, it's a hilarious domain name. There's no .dog. There's no .cat, but they have .horse. They skipped those and went to .horse.
Then one day Cassidy Williams emailed me after I said that in a newsletter, and she goes, yeah, no, no, no, no, there's a .dog and .horse. Those exist. And I was like, I was saying that for a year. I was telling people for a year, like that exact joke of like, there's not this, there's not this, but there's .horse. I was lying to everyone.
00:06:40 - Christopher Burns
TLDs are one of these things. It's like, how have we got to this point? When has it normalized to just be like, in a business use, just be like, oh, yeah. Just go to a website, horseracing.horse, you know, or whatever, racing.horse, and developers are like, wow, this is cool. But other people, people who are not techie, are just like, .horse? Are you sure that's right? What? That goes somewhere?
00:07:05 - Alex Trost
For that reason, I have frontendhorse.com also. Oh, also you got to get the .com. That's just step one of doing anything. If it's available, you get it, but also forward that to the funnier domain.
00:07:17 - Christopher Burns
Or if it's out of your price range, just hope and pray that no one else buys it.
00:07:22 - Alex Trost
Yes.
00:07:23 - Anthony Campolo
So you have a great background in terms of teaching, which for me is something that I always enjoy talking about because I'm someone who is a teacher as well. And you told this story on Jamstack Radio of just loving teaching as an activity, loving that light bulb moment and seeing that in the kids, but then seeing the school system and just being like, well, I can't do this either financially or morally or ethically. It's just not a system you wanted to contribute to. And that was something that I really, really resonated with.
I'd be curious what you feel like you've taken away from your teaching career into this whole new tech thing you're doing.
00:08:00 - Alex Trost
Yeah, I think you summed it up really well with just kids are delightful. Kids are fantastic. The system is not supporting them very well here in America. They're not supporting teachers at all. I think the pandemic just showed that to an even worse degree, just how little support teachers have. And yeah, it's the toughest gig that you could possibly think of. They need all the support.
But in terms of how I'm still using the education degree, it's funny. I have an associate's in design and a bachelor's in education. Doing development is just not at all that, but that stuff comes in handy still. And that's something that I like to emphasize for people coming into tech. Whatever you've done, whatever the heck you've been doing, it comes in handy. If you've been slinging Excel spreadsheets and doing stuff like that, you're gonna understand databases and how to do stuff here in development. Really, no matter what you've been doing, you can bring some skills to the table, especially in the developer relations field.
[00:09:00] I've been using the education background a lot and also with the newsletter and the stream, really thinking deeply about how we learn and the best ways to teach, rather than people watching a thing or reading something and just kind of passively taking it in. Asking questions.
So I've added some features to my stream where people can type in, like, I wonder, can Redwood hook up to a CMS, or is it all just one thing? And then towards the end of the stream, we check in on those questions, and if they haven't been answered, we answer them. And I know that's not a thing where like, oh, every other thing has a chat function, every other stream can do that. But it's more about intentionally carving out that space for it and saying, like, I want your questions. I want you to share those out. We're going to make a special screen just so we can capture those.
And then at the end, you can also share what you've learned, and it puts your name next to it on a specific page. Just creating spaces for those kinds of things and telling the audience this is valued. I want you to be learning here if you want, but this is a learning space and here are some tools to facilitate that a bit more.
00:10:10 - Anthony Campolo
Creating that safe space to ask questions in general is such a huge thing and is what I find has been really valuable as a teacher, because there are certain acts you have to put on, like, oh, I know all the things, you know, because I'm a senior dev. Being vulnerable enough to ask a question that shows your ignorance on a topic can be very hard to do.
You have to make sure that people know that everyone has questions no matter how long you've been doing this. And that's where people like you and me, who kind of come into this and just had to totally start from zero and had to ask every single obvious question that you could possibly think of because we had to learn it all totally from scratch, and we had to be comfortable doing that as an adult coming into this whole thing.
That's one of the things that just makes you really appreciate your whole community and your whole deal. And that's why I enjoy podcasts and putting myself out there as someone who is always asking questions. My job is to ask questions as a podcaster.
I would be curious how you create that with your stream setup, because I think this is something that some streams have a hard time with, is like making sure that the chat is even seen, period. Because I know, like sometimes when you're using StreamYard and you're on a laptop, if you're just sharing your screen, you can't even see the chat. So creating something where everyone can see the chat, that you're responding to the chat, how do you optimize your setup to make that work?
00:11:37 - Alex Trost
It's interesting. It's definitely been an iterative process for the stream.
And just first off, I do want to say what you just said about being vulnerable or just showing I don't have everything memorized. I mean, like, I sometimes need to ask my guests for help writing a for loop just because I don't write for loops all the time. And when I do, I use the shorthand in VS Code. I start typing for, I hit enter, it's done for me. It's small stuff like that where, yes, I can remember, but when you've got a full audience watching you and you're just like, oh boy, that imposter syndrome starts to kick in and you're like, if I can't do a for loop on air, everyone's gonna know. They're gonna know, right? It starts to kind of hit.
Getting comfortable with that and communicating to the audience, hey, I forget stuff. Everyone forgets stuff, right? Like, it's all right. I think that makes everything feel a bit better and also sets the guests at ease.
[00:12:28] I feel like before we go live, I let them know, like, hey, we've got a really supportive chat. They're there to help us out. They always help me out. No one's expecting you to be flawless here. We're just happy to have you. And I want this to be a very low-pressure, but high-enjoyment, kind of experience for you. If we get stuck, it's no sweat.
I didn't do that at first because I didn't know to. It got a bit more intense, and I could tell the guests were a little bit more on edge. But now when I say that, they seem to be fine with the debugging process, and chat is as fantastic as I said, and they come in and help out and it's a lot more enjoyable.
But in terms of setting up the chat so that the guests can see, yeah, that's definitely intentional. And it's also intentional in the sense that I kick my recordings to YouTube once they're done because Twitch doesn't save them more than a couple of weeks.
[00:13:14] And so I want to make sure that you don't get the experience on YouTube of like, oh, good point, chat. Chat, that's a great question. And then the person watching it goes, what's the question? I have no idea. What is he talking about? Because I've experienced that a ton of times where it's just like, that's very funny, chat. That's the funniest thing I've ever read. And you're just sitting there going, what was said? I would love to know.
So it kind of helps out the future viewer and also the guests, because I don't want to have them have 20 windows open. It's just a bit easier that they can see my screen and also the chat.
00:13:45 - Christopher Burns
It's a super hard thing. As you know, live streaming something is really hard. My biggest thing that always annoys me when I'm team viewing with someone or viewing their screen or they're viewing mine is when I say just click that, you know, just click the preview button, and it's like, where's the preview button? It's like, it's right there. When you use something every day, you're like, I can see it. And then someone's using it once in a while. It's like, has it been moved? Where is it? I've lost it. And it's like, it's on your screen.
We're all different and we all learn at different speeds. The biggest thing I've learned since doing this podcast is that the stupidest questions are normally the ones people are burning to know the answer to. Sometimes someone just needs to say it. It takes guts to be like, I don't know the answer to this. Like, I run a fintech company and I'm asking stupid questions about the blockchain. Like, what is this?
[00:14:38] It still personally gripes me. Everybody has different learning rates. It's the [unclear] knowledge, isn't it, that somebody may be really, really knowledgeable in certain areas. Other people may not be. And if you can just help them grow a little bit, then that's really cool.
I did want to go back to the CSS topic quickly when you said about CodePens and you said about like half the stuff people make on them out of CSS. Most of the time I'm like, wait, CSS can do more than border rounding and background color? How do you even do this? Cassie Evans, she's got some really good tutorials, and it's just that thing when you see the end product, you're like, how do they even do that? And then you're like, okay, this is the breakdown. Some of them I've looked at, I'm like, okay, I got it, and now I'm gonna write my own name and be like, how do I do that? Because that's so complex.
[00:15:25] But one of the other things I did want to really bring up is these isometric characters, items that are really the latest fashion trend in design. What do you think of them? Do you think they're here to stay? The quirky of the quirky.
00:15:41 - Alex Trost
You mean like the flat illustrations?
00:15:43 - Christopher Burns
The ones that look 3D, like Josh Comeau? You've got them on your website. Everybody seems to have them these days.
00:15:52 - Alex Trost
Yeah, I think it's definitely an up and coming trend, if not already peaked. I like to think that December of last year, I might have been slightly ahead of the trend, but not by much. It's tough to say.
I don't think any trend is going to stay. I think as soon as you say it's a trend, by definition, it means it's going to go. I think it's a nice change from the flat illustrations. And for anyone who's trying to picture it, it's just basically rendering something in Blender. That's what I use to make the little horse.
Josh, I think, got his originally created by someone else, but then he picked up Blender and now he's using it and he can pick stuff up. And he's a very talented person. Got him on the stream a little bit. I'm pretty excited about that.
00:16:32 - Christopher Burns
I can't remember, but there's an article out there saying, why does every startup look like this? And it's literally the flat design. It's like it's really hard to illustrate people and objectives and personality and emotion. So we all just kind of have these faceless things that are sitting there trying to say something these days.
00:16:52 - Alex Trost
Yeah. Like, how do you show Trello in an image? Right? It's like, oh, you have people picking up giant cards and putting them on a giant wall. Like, that's about as good of a metaphor as people can handle.
00:17:02 - Christopher Burns
It's an artistic representation, especially for things that get even more complex, like how do you do one for e-commerce? Man holding money, man giving away money. And that's why I think, like, isometric, is it called isometric?
00:17:17 - Alex Trost
The isometric is something different. The flat illustration is flat, very obviously, and isometric has a little bit more depth. It's still in that same shape style though, where you're like, oh, these are kind of weird, they're sort of kind of humanoid, but their arms are kind of too long, and that's just the style of it. With isometrics, it's just kind of that same idea but with depth to it.
00:17:45 - Anthony Campolo
I'd like to transition a bit into Prismic, which is obviously a big part of your work now. But before that, I want to mention that I was very excited to see you come on to the Prismic team because I think you do a really good job at this kind of community-focused developer relations role. I love your content, and I love the way you like to approach the streaming and things like that. So I'm sure you're going to do a great job. But I'd love to hear how you found yourself in this role with Prismic.
00:18:18 - Alex Trost
Thank you. Yeah, I've been in DevRel for a couple of years now. I started at Auth0, and that was really my entry into DevRel. Before that, I was teaching. And like you said, that's a pretty normal pathway, because DevRel is kind of like teaching, but for developers.
I was running Frontend Horse at the same time and doing the newsletter and the stream. And I got connected to Prismic because I was doing that stuff. They were looking for someone to do community, and I fit that. It's been great.
We want to make sure that we are working with our community to make the product better. So I do a lot of stream work. We try to bring in guests. We try to make things interesting, and we try to focus on helping people learn. We try to keep things about the community and make it about the people who are doing interesting work.
I think that's a much better way to reach people than just coming out and saying, hi, Prismic is the best thing for all of your use cases, and you don't need anything else, and we're going to shove it into stuff where it doesn't really make sense.
So a lot of the time we're doing creative coding because I'm really curious about creative coding, and my audience likes it. And we don't always use Prismic with those. We sometimes can fit it in, like we did in an Auth0 and Prismic stream with James. That went pretty great. That seemed to fit, but sometimes when it's learning about something else, Cassie Evans comes on and she talks about GreenSock.
[00:20:35] That doesn't really always include Prismic, so it's just because it tends to work that way.
00:20:40 - Christopher Burns
My big first question with Prismic is headless CMS. Two very big buzzwords. How is Prismic different?
00:20:49 - Alex Trost
If someone doesn't know what headless CMS is, first off, if you think of WordPress, that is a CMS that also comes with your front end. So it's kind of like this monolithic architecture that includes everything out of the box, and it becomes kind of a pain if you want to, say, work React components into that front end or just kind of do anything that isn't already within the WordPress ecosystem.
A headless CMS allows you to just use it for your content, and then it exposes an API, and then you can get that data from pretty much anything, whether you want to use a Next.js front end, Nuxt, Gatsby, like whatever your favorite framework is. You can use that and plug it into that headless CMS. Or if you need to send that data to a few different places, if you've got a big company that has a lot of smaller websites, and that API needs to be taken in by a few different pages, that's fine, because that headless CMS is just an API as far as your front end is concerned.
[00:21:47] In terms of what makes Prismic different, Prismic is different because we really focus on what we call slices, and that's really page sections that your editors can move around. So say you have a hero slice and you have like a team slice and a content slice. Your editors can choose which one of those they need to make the page. You're essentially giving them these building blocks that they can then create as many pages as they want, and they never need to call back in the developer to say, hey, we want to ship a new sales page. Can you put a hero at the top and some content here?
They have that ability within the CMS. You might be saying, well, yeah, like Wix can ship a page builder. We're used to page builders with those other kinds of services. But the beauty here is that you aren't shipping a Wix front end. You're shipping your lean, specifically tailored Next.js front end or your Gatsby front end, whatever front end that you are choosing to ship because you're the developer, you know how to do your job.
[00:22:49] The headless CMS gives your editors that power to do their job, and we are making it so that you are shipping a page builder when you ship with Prismic.
00:23:00 - Christopher Burns
I've been on a crusade lately, trying almost all of them. It's been really eye opening in a good way and a bad way of like eye opening, because I also went back to WordPress and tried it with their Gutenberg editor that's now released, and it's just the modern WordPress editor. I was actually blown away by WordPress and like, honest to God, I tried the editor and was like, wow, this is just so easy, to just put content on a page. And I was blown away. I was like, wow, I feel like we've overcomplicated it with these headless CMS.
Then I try headless CMS again because obviously companies build on it, and I'm like, no, I totally get this. This is good, this is great. And then I go back to work. I'm like, no, but this is really good though. I'm building a WordPress plugin for my company at the same time, so I'm editing, testing WordPress, but also editing the marketing stuff on our website.
[00:23:59] And it's just this thing of like, there's no wrong answer. There's no right answer. It's all a delicate dance between marketers who don't know what technology is and developers who love structured data. And that's CMSs for you in my eyes.
00:24:16 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, there's no question there. I'm curious how you access Prismic. Do you have like REST APIs? You have GraphQL APIs, you have something called the Tags API, and then like a custom types API. If I'm someone, I'm a developer, I come to Prismic and I just want to use it. What kind of stuff should I be looking at?
00:24:35 - Alex Trost
We've got a couple kits that make it really easy to query with Prismic. For the most part, I would recommend our REST API. Whatever language you're using, whatever framework you're using, we've got some kind of kit that's going to make it really easy.
We have been working on a new development workflow called Slice Machine. This brings all of the developer process to your local machine, speeds it up an incredible amount, and makes it so that you're building out your custom types, which is essentially your data models right there on a local development environment. You version control all of your data, so that we're basically bringing the things that you would normally do on Prismic.io in the editor there, but anything that a developer would do there, we're bringing that locally so that we can really optimize the editor environment for editors, and then your local development flow so that everything is version controlled right next to your app. And Slice Machine allows you to create those slices I was talking about, those horizontal sections that are essentially big components.
[00:25:39] If you think about atomic design, it's more of a molecule, or more of an organism, that helps to build up your page template. But with Slice Machine, it allows you to quickly create and prototype new slices. And it kind of comes with a lot of the batteries included that you would normally need to then wire up things with your API.
So one thing that I personally don't love doing is having to set up the part of a CMS where I'm installing the client to connect to my repository on Prismic, and then I'm figuring out how to call for that data, and then figuring out how to pass that data down through my components, and exactly how to wire that all up. Slice Machine takes care of that for you, so that it already knows what data you want based on the slices that you've created. It really makes that whole process frictionless out of the box, because that's one thing, as a developer, I don't want to do for every site.
[00:26:39] I don't want to have to set up, all right, got to bring in Prismic now. All right, I gotta install this client. Just having that set up and then giving you mocks out of the box, giving you thumbnails so that when you ship your slice to your editors, they're not just seeing like a description of like image and text slice, which doesn't tell them anything, that describes so many things. Instead, they see a thumbnail of exactly what the component looked like in your Storybook, giving all those tools to the developers to not only make their jobs easier, but to make it easier on the editors.
I'm super excited about Slice Machine. And to kind of come back to the original API question, the REST API is built into that through the different kits that we have. There's a lot of power there. So I would recommend the REST API. GraphQL is there too if that's more your thing.
00:27:31 - Christopher Burns
The Slice Machine, I think, is a really interesting concept. I basically brain dumped and forgot my question.
Do you think that we're in this middle ground where, as we say, a CMS is one about developing it, as in structuring it? It's about the content editors. Is this chaotic good of you have things like Wix and Squarespace that let you just dump elements onto the page and call it a day, or you have this more structured data of like, this is a blog post, here's all the things and the attributes, here's what's required, here's what's not, and it's very rigid. And then when the person says, I want to put the pricing table in the blog post, the developer goes, you can't do that. And they're like, why not? It should just go. It's like, well, the blog post doesn't have the relationship to the pricing table, and the pricing table doesn't know what the block is. And it's just this mess. We've kind of dug ourselves, in my eyes, into a massive hole.
But then things like these vertical slices are kind of, I think, the way out of it. So my biggest question is what do you think headless CMSs have gained but also lost from traditional CMS?
00:28:43 - Alex Trost
What you just said is exactly it. I worked at an agency before Prismic. So having worked alongside editors and clients who come to you and say that kind of thing of like, all right, I went to this company and put that over there, and then you've, like, if you've worked yourself into a corner where you're like, oh, shoot, we can't do that quickly at least, right? Like, yeah, we can do that. It's going to be two weeks of work or whatever.
But yeah, like you just said, the slices method allows that kind of escape hatch. You create what we call a slice zone and put whatever slices in there. You can repeat them. The pricing table, if you want to add that as a potential slice for that slice zone, sure, they can put that in a blog post. They can put five of them in the blog post. Let them have that free rein.
But in terms of what it's gained and what it's lost compared to traditional CMS, I think that there are definitely strengths and weaknesses to both.
[00:29:33] I never want to come out and say that any tool is the greatest tool, because as soon as someone says that, you have to go, all right, this person is clearly selling something. You can't take them at their word anymore. And that's what a CMS is, right? It is a tool.
So in terms of me having to manage, I really don't want to sound like I'm hating on WordPress. I think WordPress is a fantastically successful and good platform, but once again, it's just a tool. I don't want to manage a WordPress instance. I don't want to have to worry about that at all. I, as a front end developer, want someone else to handle that for me. I just want to spin up a repository for my content, say what my content looks like, and get to work doing the stuff that I like, which is spinning up the Gatsby site or spinning up the Next.js site and working on all that part. I don't do backend stuff.
[00:30:26] I want a service to take care of all that stuff for me and not need to worry of like, oh, did WordPress update? That means our plugins are broken and I need to go in and fix that stuff. Having that as not even a thought in my mind is kind of the dream for me personally.
Other people want to be able to get in there and tweak every little thing about their WordPress instance and just get into the guts of that, and I think that would be one big tradeoff. If you're using something like Prismic, where it is a hosted service for you, you don't have to send Prismic to a DigitalOcean droplet or anything. We take care of all that for you.
I think that's a huge benefit, but if someone wants to have that kind of control specifically over the database itself and go in there and fiddle with it, that's definitely a tradeoff that they have to make. Do you have the DevOps capacity or the bandwidth there to handle something if and when it pops up?
[00:31:25] If not, maybe a hosted headless CMS is for you. If so, and that's something that you're interested in, and you need that kind of deep, rich customization, maybe look at something there that you can get your little paws into.
00:31:37 - Christopher Burns
The biggest pro and con that I can see for both of them is one simple word, and that's a developer. I honestly think it is because we look at things like Netlify versus WordPress or any headless CMS, Prismic. One thing all of these have in common is you kind of need a developer to even just click the button to deploy, because if you ask Sharon from the local coffee shop, oh, this whole website's been set up for you, but you just gotta click this one button and log into Netlify, [unclear]. You're pretty much in a dead end, I think, personally.
But that's where I think WordPress has so much market share and so much staying power, is that I'm not a technical person, and I need to put a page on the internet that says my opening hours, and I think WordPress will always be around for that. And in terms of CMSs, I think headless CMSs have come so far in the five years since their inception.
I remember the first headless CMS I ever touched was called Perch by Drew McLellan and Rachel Andrew. I want to say 2014, but I'm not quite sure if it actually was. But this was like this thing. It was like, headless CMS. Why do I need that? And it was at that moment it was like, well, if you want to control everything yourself, that's what you need. But it never really clicked with me until the Jamstack came around.
But I still think the Jamstack is so obtuse to brand new companies, for example, so obtuse to people who are not in the know. If you're not in the know, it's still pretty out there. And there's so many people running your classic LAMP architecture and everything. I think the easiest way to get them to transfer over is this middle ground of like, well, you don't want to structure all your data completely because that gets too hard. You want to structure some of it and then slice it all together. And that's why I think we're definitely going to see massive improvements in this area going forward.
00:33:48 - Alex Trost
We like to think of ourselves as a component-based CMS, a headless, component-based CMS, because we really see that with the rise of React and just with slices and components being something that developers and designers and editors can kind of all have a shared language around, because a lot of times, if you're trying to get those three teams to agree on something, it's pretty difficult.
But if you can say, like, hey, if the editor asks, hi, I would love a slice that shows off our pricing, as you said, the developer can go, all right, cool, I'll get the designer to whip something up. The designer says, here's the new slice. The developer implements it and builds out the data, and then the editor knows that they can add that to the page wherever they need it.
So having that shared language around that component really helps. And I think if you're not moving towards components in that same kind of way, you are holding back your customers. You're holding back the potential for what people can do when they build a website.
00:34:45 - Anthony Campolo
Do you think Prismic is going to look at newer frameworks beyond things just like React, Vue, and Svelte? Like, are you looking at things like Solid or anything like that?
00:34:55 - Alex Trost
I'm looking to get Solid's founder on the stream. I think I need to follow up with him on that. I'm still just getting used to Svelte myself. I'm not the earliest of adopters with stuff, but basically in terms of the kits and in terms of what we really spend a lot of our time on right now, it's been Next and Gatsby. We're starting to get our SvelteKit together. We've been working on that lately, but we want to make sure that those initial kits are as strong as they can be.
We've got a great developer on the team, Angelo Ashmore, who actually was making the Gatsby Prismic plugin, and we brought him in-house and he's been working on it full time and doing a lot of other improvements to our entire kit architecture. And it's been great seeing what he's brought to the team, working along with another colleague, Lucy. And she's been working on the Nuxt plugin, and it's been great seeing those get as smooth as possible because they have the highest adoption rate.
[00:35:52] If most of our users are using one framework, we want to optimize for that. And still, the clients themselves, like I'm building a Prismic and Astro site just in my spare time using just the JavaScript client, is still really nice. So as long as you're shipping JavaScript, you can absolutely use Prismic and enjoy it. It's just for Nuxt, there's a module. I'm not a big Nuxt developer. I think it's a module.
00:36:15 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Nuxt. Their whole ecosystem, they kind of build in their own specific modules. They have like an Axios module, and then they have content modules. And the ones you listed, those frameworks are the big ones to hit for sure.
I'm just always curious because as someone who builds out integrations with frameworks himself, it's always like, how far ahead of the puck do you want to get? You know, because we can see these trends, we can see the frameworks that are coming up, but if no one's using those frameworks yet, then there's really not a whole lot of reason to actually invest in them. But really happy to hear that you're going to get Ryan on for the stream. That's going to be a really good one that I'll want to check out, because it's always very interesting.
We just had him on a couple days ago to chat with him, so very excited about what he's working on, but we're about at the end of our time here. So thank you so much for being here with us.
[00:37:02] As I said earlier, I really enjoy your community. I think it's really fantastic, and I think the work you do is so great. So happy to showcase what you have going on here, and let's get your socials where people can find out about Prismic, where they can find out about you, where they can find out about Frontend Horse. Like all the kind of links you would want to direct people to.
00:37:23 - Alex Trost
Just super quick, like I love having you in the community. So thank you right back. I'm just there. I feel like the community is this big thing that you are a big part of. So thank you for being in there.
So the socials and stuff. Let's see. Frontend Horse is the one link that I'll point you to, to a lot of that stuff. But then Prismic.io is the CMS that we were chatting about today. I'm on a few different things as myself, @trostcodes. That's T-R-O-S-T codes, and then also @FrontendHorse on Twitter. And then if you want to catch any other streams, it's twitch.tv/trostcodes. I think that's most of the stuff.
00:38:00 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. Thank you so much.
00:38:02 - Alex Trost
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This is a blast.
00:38:35 - Christopher Burns
I guess the final thing I can say is how much horsing around do you do?
00:38:40 - Alex Trost
A little too much horsing around. Way too many horse puns.
I actually had Cassie Evans on stream the other day, and before the show I told her, yeah, I don't think I'm doing the horse thing as much as I should be. I should be leaning into it more. And then we started the stream and immediately my new tab window is a collection of horses, just like a random new tab that shows the time and a picture of a horse and a quote about horses. And she's like, I think you're doing it enough. I'm like, yeah, you might be right. So maybe a little, just the right amount of horsing around.