A Bootcamp Students OSS Contribution - OpenSauced

Episode Description

Anthony Campolo shares how he became RedwoodJS's community champion while balancing a coding bootcamp, Uber driving, and open source contributions.

Episode Summary

In this conversation, Brian Douglas interviews Anthony Campolo, a Lambda School bootcamp student who has become an unofficial community champion for RedwoodJS. Anthony explains how he discovered Redwood through podcast listening, particularly a JS Party interview with Tom Preston-Werner, and recognized it as a framework worth investing in early. He breaks down RedwoodJS as a full-stack serverless framework that combines React, GraphQL, and AWS Lambda deployment via Netlify, distinguishing it from similar projects like Blitz JS by highlighting its closer resemblance to AWS AppSync and Amplify. Anthony traces his path from self-teaching Python for data science to pivoting toward JavaScript and React, which positioned him perfectly to engage with Redwood. He describes writing an eight-part blog series walking through the Redwood tutorial, which became the most-viewed content on the Redwood community forum, and parlaying that into meetup talks, podcast appearances, and a paid writing opportunity with FaunaDB. Throughout, Anthony emphasizes practical advice for newcomers: listen to developer podcasts to stay ahead, invest deeply in one project that aligns with your existing skills, show up consistently, and play the long game in building relationships with maintainers — all while juggling bootcamp coursework and driving for Uber to pay the bills.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Meet the RedwoodJS Cheerleader

Anthony Campolo introduces himself as a Lambda School bootcamp student who has carved out a unique role as a self-proclaimed cheerleader for RedwoodJS. He explains how writing a blog series about the framework led to meetup talks, podcast appearances, and eventually cold-messaging Brian to appear on Jamstack Radio.

The conversation touches on Anthony's interest in developer relations and advocacy, particularly the education-focused side of communicating technical projects to people from diverse backgrounds. Brian and Anthony discuss the difference between community management and content creation within the dev rel space, setting up the broader themes of the episode around community building and open source involvement.

00:03:00 - What Is RedwoodJS?

Anthony provides a technical overview of RedwoodJS, describing it as a framework that brings full-stack development to the Jamstack. He walks through its architecture: a React-based web folder for the frontend, a GraphQL API for the backend, both housed in a monorepo that deploys to AWS Lambda via Netlify and distributes through a global CDN.

Brian connects Redwood to other full-stack React frameworks like Blitz JS and notes the emphasis on Jamstack principles. They briefly mention their upcoming Jamstack Radio episode together before transitioning to discuss Anthony's bootcamp experience and how his learning journey intersected with discovering Redwood.

00:05:15 - The Bootcamp Journey and Lambda School

Anthony details his Lambda School curriculum, covering HTML/CSS, React, Redux, Node, and computer science fundamentals over several months. He explains the school's income share agreement model, where students pay nothing upfront and contribute a percentage of their salary after landing a job, capped at thirty thousand dollars.

Brian, himself a former bootcamp graduate, expresses appreciation for these programs. Anthony adds important context about his background: he had already spent nearly two years self-teaching before enrolling, starting with Python for data science before pivoting to JavaScript and React, which gave him a significant head start over students entering with no prior experience.

00:09:28 - Discovering Redwood Through Podcasts

Anthony recounts how he discovered RedwoodJS through the JS Party podcast, part of the Changelog network, where Tom Preston-Werner gave the framework's first interview in March. He describes being immediately fascinated by the project's history and how its full-stack React approach addressed struggles he was personally experiencing while learning React without a cohesive full-stack curriculum.

The conversation expands to include Adam Wathan's Full Stack Radio interview with Tom and the broader discourse around full-stack development being challenged by single-page application architecture. Anthony explains his strategic decision to invest heavily in Redwood as a new project where he could get involved early, betting it would either take off or at minimum connect him with interesting people and learning opportunities.

00:13:12 - Networking, Hacktoberfest, and Community Building

Brian reflects on how getting involved in the React community early transformed his own career, connecting him to employers, GitHub, his podcast, and eventually streaming. Anthony builds on this by noting that knowing who to network with is itself a challenge, and highlights how Redwood has gone all-in on Hacktoberfest, structuring meetups around contribution guidance and celebrating contributors daily on social media.

They discuss the current push toward a RedwoodJS 1.0 release within roughly two months, with Anthony explaining Tom Preston-Werner's philosophy against hype-driven development and the importance of not overselling the framework before it's production-ready. Brian marvels at the serendipity of Anthony's emerging career path despite not yet having formally entered the workforce.

00:16:41 - Finding Your Niche in Open Source

Anthony shares that his first open source PR was actually merged into Blitz JS, not Redwood, after building a project and fixing documentation typos. He explains how he explored both frameworks before going deeper into Redwood, and reflects on the wide spectrum of open source projects from single-person maintainers to Facebook-backed libraries to venture-funded startups.

The key insight Anthony offers is that recognizing which projects are worth investing in requires sustained attention over time — listening to podcast backlogs, watching patterns emerge, and seeing the same influential people surface repeatedly. He draws a surprising comparison between Redwood and AWS AppSync plus Amplify rather than Blitz, arguing that the shared use of GraphQL with serverless lambdas makes them far more architecturally similar.

00:24:01 - The Secret Sauce: Showing Up Consistently

Brian asks about the secret to Anthony's integration into the Redwood community, and Anthony points to the maintainers' responsiveness — small gestures like Peter acknowledging his blog series made a significant difference. He emphasizes that consistently showing up to meetups, events, and discussions while playing the long game builds both relationships and deep knowledge that creates unique value.

Anthony also reveals he drives for Uber nearly full-time alongside bootcamp and open source work. He shares how he leveraged his Redwood knowledge to land a paid writing gig with FaunaDB, connecting the database's origin story at Twitter to Tom Preston-Werner's scaling of GitHub. The conversation wraps with Anthony offering advice to find projects aligned with your current skills and dive deep enough to become a genuine expert.

00:30:37 - The Blog Series and Learning by Writing

Anthony discusses his eight-part blog series on the Redwood community forum, which became the most-viewed content on the site. He explains how it maps to the official tutorial videos — each pair of articles corresponds to one video — but breaks concepts into smaller, more explicit pieces designed for newer developers who need thorough explanations.

He reflects on writing as a learning tool, noting it forces better retention, deeper thinking, and stronger connections between ideas. The series began with original writing about the history of full-stack React, Jamstack, and serverless before walking through the tutorial step by step. Brian wraps up the conversation by directing viewers to the Discord for further questions about RedwoodJS, Lambda School, and open source contribution strategies. The episode concludes at approximately 00:37:26.

Transcript

00:00:10 - Brian Douglas

Here we've got Anthony. Anthony's a member of the Red — sorry, RedwoodJS community. Do you want to give yourself a nice little introduction and tell us why you're here?

00:00:22 - Anthony Campolo

Sure. I'm currently a bootcamp student studying full stack web development at Lambda School, which is a remote bootcamp. It's a very large school that just got a very large amount of funding, so it's quite the roller coaster right now. I started getting into writing articles about RedwoodJS because I thought it was a really interesting project that I wanted to learn more about and potentially get involved with. After writing articles and expanding that into a full series, I then started doing some meetup talks at Jamstack Denver and GraphQL Texas. I've also done a couple podcasts — I was on Smashing Podcast. And then you've been talking today about cold messaging. I cold-messaged you saying, hey, can I come on Jamstack Radio and talk about RedwoodJS? Because I liked the podcast a lot and I knew this was a project in the wheelhouse of what you'd want to talk about, and it hadn't been talked about yet. So I found a couple of areas like that where I knew you'd probably jump at the opportunity.

00:01:45 - Anthony Campolo

And you did.

00:01:46 - Brian Douglas

Yeah. It's funny because you are, I guess, a self-proclaimed advocate — not for the Jamstack, but for RedwoodJS.

00:01:56 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I call myself the RedwoodJS cheerleader. That's what it says on my Twitter. Drew called me a community champion.

00:02:02 - Brian Douglas

I like that term, community champion. Excellent. And Drew is one of the maintainers at RedwoodJS as well.

00:02:09 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, sorry — that's Drew McClellan. He's the host of Smashing Podcast. He was kind of introducing me and dubbed me community champion. But yeah, the area I'm interested in is developer relations and developer advocacy, especially the more education-focused part. There are different corners of the dev rel type job — some are more content creation, some are more community management. I'm really interested in how you get out and actually communicate these projects to people in a way that's concise and useful to them, and how you do that with people who are all coming from different contexts, different backgrounds, who know different tools. It's a fun challenge.

00:03:00 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, for sure. I pulled up RedwoodJS. Since you are the self-proclaimed cheerleader, do you want to give us an introduction to what it is? Then we can circle back into how you got involved and also touch on the bootcamp. But first, let's just focus on RedwoodJS.

00:03:18 - Anthony Campolo

So we say that it's bringing full stack to the Jamstack, and we also call it a serverless framework. If you're familiar with all that terminology, you can get your mind wrapped around Redwood pretty quickly. If you're not, it's a pretty steep learning curve. What you're looking at here with this diagram: your back end is your API, which is the top left, and your front end is your web folder, which is the bottom left — your web folder is like your Create React App. Those two are both contained in a single monorepo, and then that all gets deployed to an AWS Lambda via Netlify. That's the serverless part. Then it can be distributed across a global CDN, which is the Jamstack part. It's about trying to combine all of these different technologies and paradigms to create a full stack solution.

00:04:23 - Brian Douglas

Very cool. Yeah, that's a mouthful, and we see a lot of familiar faces. We talked about webpack when Snowpack was here. I mentioned Blitz JS, which is another take on full stack React frameworks. What's impressive here is the real emphasis on Jamstack. And folks, if you don't know, I host a podcast called Jamstack Radio. I don't do enough speaking about the podcast here on this stream or within my Twitch, but it exists. And Anthony, we do have an episode together that hasn't released yet — I think we're a couple weeks away.

00:04:57 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's past that.

00:04:59 - Brian Douglas

Yeah. So definitely watch the Twitters for that. But can we zoom back real quick and talk about your experience right now as a bootcamp student? What program are you in, how far are you into it? Then we can transition to how you got exposed to RedwoodJS.

00:05:15 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's a full stack web development curriculum. You start off with a month of HTML, CSS, and some very basic vanilla JavaScript, then you get about two months of React and the stuff that comes along with that — a little bit of Redux, a little bit of this and that. Then a month of Node, and I'm currently in the middle of the Node unit. Then you have a month of computer science, which is algorithms and data structures. And then you do labs, which is kind of like an internship. So I'm getting towards the end of the web development part of the curriculum, but still have a fair ways to go.

00:06:02 - Brian Douglas

Okay. And we didn't mention the bootcamp name. Did you want to mention that?

00:06:06 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. So it's Lambda School. It's one of the more prominent bootcamps, I think, because it champions itself on its ISA — income share agreement. It's a type of school where you don't pay anything up front, and then after you get a job, you pay a certain percentage of your income for two years, capped at thirty grand. And if you make below fifty grand, you don't pay. So there are upper and lower bounds to it. Some people get kind of weirded out by it, but I wouldn't have been able to do this without that. That was a big selling point for me, and I think it's really great that these types of opportunities exist.

00:06:50 - Brian Douglas

Excellent. Yeah, as a former bootcamp grad myself, I'm appreciative of these programs and their existence. You can definitely find out more information about the full stack and data science courses. I'm pretty sure Anthony can give you his personal experience about being part of Lambda School in the Discord. We do have a Discord, and that's where we have people waiting — maintainers of different projects that we saw earlier. We also have the stream team hanging

00:07:28 - Anthony Campolo

out and doing stuff.

00:07:29 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, I'm doing all the stream deck things and juggling nine things at once right now. Production isn't too crazy, but I am doing a couple things. What I'm getting at is the Discord is there, Anthony will be there for answering questions, and we're not done with the conversation. I just want to mention that the Discord exists. Yeah, so you're in a bootcamp — it sounds like you haven't gotten to the computer science portion of it yet. Is that correct?

00:07:58 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, exactly. I need to set some broader context here. I had already been self-teaching for going on about a year and a half to two years before I even started the bootcamp. A lot of people who go into bootcamps, at least for Lambda, are people who are going in completely cold — they did the pre-course material and that's it, so they've like written a div. Whereas I had originally tried to learn data science and machine learning, so I'd been learning Python for a while and making very slow progress, and then transitioned to JavaScript and React. I was able to pick that up a little bit quicker because I had already learned a language — I knew enough Python that at least I knew what variables and loops were. And the thing that appealed to me was that in data science and machine learning, there's deep learning, data analysts, data engineers, all these different fractured subfields.

00:09:03 - Anthony Campolo

Whereas in web dev, every single person gives you the exact same answer: learn JavaScript, learn a framework, which framework? Probably React. Everyone gives the same answer. It's like, okay, if I just go down this path and really work at it, then this will get me somewhere. And that kind of coalesced with Redwood being built with React, so I had the right context to get into it.

00:09:28 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, excellent. The pieces you learned ended up being the framework you navigated yourself into. So real quick — backing up to your discovery of Redwood. How did that happen? Did you just hear it on a podcast?

00:09:47 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. If you are able to put in the time to get plugged into the podcast scene in software development, you will be so ahead of the curve. It's crazy. I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts, and JS Party is part of the Changelog network — they're OGs. That was the first interview Tom did for Redwood, in the middle of March. I heard it when it came out, I'd imagine, because I listen to that show every week. It was super fascinating. I'd heard of Jekyll kind of vaguely, and obviously I'd heard of GitHub. So I was reading a little bit about the history and I'm like, wow, this is a really interesting project. And it was also, since it was built on full stack React — I was learning React and struggling with doing anything useful with it because I wasn't really learning a full stack curriculum. It seemed like it was actually solving a problem I was having, in a way that would make sense to my brain, in a way that what they were trying to teach me just wasn't quite clicking.

00:11:06 - Anthony Campolo

And then the next month he did an interview with Adam Wathan on Full Stack Radio.

00:11:13 - Brian Douglas

Adam from Tailwind?

00:11:15 - Anthony Campolo

Tailwind, yeah, exactly. And Laravel. He's a developer god. And he is someone who had already been talking about these ideas of full stack development being challenged by single-page application, client-side type development — how we've had this pendulum swinging back and forth over the last fifteen years or so. He and Michael Chan had a really interesting conversation about this as well, called "React is not a Rails Competitor." So these ideas are all kind of floating around. I found it really interesting and it just had all the right pieces. It seemed like a thing where it was new enough that I could actually get involved with it. So I kind of put a gamble on it — I'm going to really invest in this because it seems like something that could be taking off. And if not taking off, it'll at least be a way for me to meet really interesting people and learn a lot. That's definitely been true. And I was thinking it could also lead to things like podcast interviews and meetup talks.

00:12:25 - Anthony Campolo

And it also eventually did lead to that.

00:12:27 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, I couldn't — I couldn't overstate that enough. I got into React in the beginning, and just by getting involved in the space — we're both here in the Bay Area, so having access to meetups at the time, back when meetups were a thing, has been hands down one of the best things for my career. Not only did that introduce me to my last employer, it introduced me to GitHub, introduced me to my connections to the podcast I run, introduced me to folks in the React and GraphQL space who eventually got me into streaming as well. Those connections — you can't undersell them. They're undersold a lot. Networking is a thing that people think, as a developer, I don't need, but just by contributing to open source you now know who

00:13:12 - Anthony Campolo

to network with. That's kind of part of the problem — you need to actually know who can help elevate you and who is going to work with you. It's hard. That's why it's great to have people like you putting yourself out there saying, hey, this is what we're trying to do with things like Hacktoberfest. I was really glad you asked me to do this, because completely unrelated, Redwood has gone all in on Hacktoberfest. We structured our whole last meetup around Hacktoberfest, went into a long in-depth explanation of how to contribute to the framework, and we've been tweeting about contributors every day. So there are a lot of similarities in terms of philosophy and how we're approaching these things.

00:14:06 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, that's excellent. There's quite a bit of activity happening right now with Hacktoberfest, and it seems like a lot of opportunity for folks. Honestly, there's a lot of stuff unassigned that is ready for someone to say hello.

00:14:19 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. It's worth mentioning that we are right now aiming to get to a 1.0 release by the end of this year — so in about two and a half months, and really more like a month and a half because of the holidays. If you're looking to do something interesting and see interesting work happening, this is going to be it. And then when it hits 1.0, that's when you actually get to hear people talking about it as a real project you can use, instead of this kind of theoretical, "don't use this in production" stage it's in right now. Which makes sense — we don't want to oversell it before it's ready. Tom is very against hype-driven development. So it's good to play it safe. But once we hit 1.0, that's when I see it as the thing to do.

00:15:09 - Brian Douglas

Yeah. Speaking of hype-driven development, that's how I built this. Excellent. Yeah, so that's fascinating to hear. The serendipity level of your career — your career hasn't even started yet and it sounds like it's at an all-time high. What would you attribute to your success in being integrated in a community like RedwoodJS? Outside of just listening to podcasts and cold emailing and DMing folks.

00:15:40 - Anthony Campolo

I would say the biggest thing is just consistently showing up and working on learning it, following it, and continuing to ask questions — what is actually going on here — and digging a little bit deeper each time. The blog post series I wrote took three months to complete. As I was doing that, I would go to the public meetups, and we would have other events that I would go to as well. Anytime there was anything happening with Redwood, I would always go. If you're willing to play the long game and really invest, you build the relationships, but you also build up that knowledge over time. Now, despite my relative lack of programming knowledge, my relative abundance of Redwood knowledge means I know more about Redwood than 99.99% of people in the world. And that's just what happens when you spend months of your life studying something that almost no one even knows about.

00:16:41 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, being earlier in the adoption curve is definitely helpful. I'm curious though — did you have any exposure to other projects besides RedwoodJS? Any contributions that didn't work out as well as what you were seeing with Redwood?

00:17:01 - Anthony Campolo

There's a really funny alternate universe where I spent all this time doing this with Blitz instead of Redwood. My first PR merged into an open source project was actually not Redwood — it was Blitz. I first built out a Blitz project, read through their whole docs, and did typo fixes and simple stuff like that. And then I found out about this Redwood thing. So I knew there were two interesting things worth checking out. I just kept going deeper and deeper into Redwood, and it was the thing I ended up getting really, really deep into. But even before that, I was aware of Gatsby and Next and React itself being an open source library. That's part of why this is so murky now — there are so many different levels, from single-person maintainers all the way to run by Facebook, then small companies that become large companies, and companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:18:12 - Anthony Campolo

You have this really wide spectrum of things under this umbrella term of open source. You definitely have to spend a lot of time paying attention and figuring out what these different things are and how they relate to each other. The only reason I was able to see Redwood as worth investing in is because I'd already been watching these things for a while, and eventually you start to see the patterns and hear the same people coming up over and over again. With podcasts it's especially interesting because some of these shows have ten-year backlogs. You could go listen to an interview with Miško about Angular in 2010 — that's an incredible resource that so few people take advantage of.

00:19:03 - Brian Douglas

Sorry, I was just muted. Still figuring out this whole streaming thing. That's fascinating to hear. Your first contribution was in a project very much like RedwoodJS — when you have Gatsby and Next paired together, RedwoodJS and Blitz JS tend to get paired together quite often.

00:19:23 - Anthony Campolo

Interesting point here though.

00:19:24 - Brian Douglas

Yeah.

00:19:24 - Anthony Campolo

Redwood and Blitz are nothing alike. If you actually build an app with them, you realize there's almost no crossover at all. They're totally different. What's funny is — you know what's almost exactly like Redwood? Building an app with AppSync and Amplify. That is what a Redwood app looks like. Go look at Nader Dabit's recent tutorial. It's so similar to a Redwood app. It's way more similar than Blitz.

00:19:51 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, you said Nader Dabit, Amplify tutorial, and AppSync.

00:19:58 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, Amplify and AppSync. That should pull up the right one.

00:20:03 - Brian Douglas

Is it a video or is it in the resources?

00:20:05 - Anthony Campolo

It's an article that just came out a week or two ago.

00:20:10 - Brian Douglas

Where does —

00:20:12 - Anthony Campolo

It's called Full Stack Serverless. Try that. He also wrote the Full Stack Serverless manifesto recently, which is related to this same idea.

00:20:25 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, this one is from August 19th. We haven't found the right thing yet.

00:20:32 - Anthony Campolo

Let me check real quick.

00:20:34 - Brian Douglas

He does have a video. No, that's not Nader, that's somebody else. Bite size. I am familiar with Nader's work and I've had him on my podcast talking about Amplify in particular and his book. I see a PDF — oh, "Build your first serverless app with Vue in AWS."

00:20:57 - Anthony Campolo

No, yeah, I'm having trouble finding it.

00:20:59 - Brian Douglas

Now while you're looking for that, there's a question that came in the chat: between bootcamp, contributing, and blogging — when do you sleep?

00:21:09 - Anthony Campolo

Rarely. That doesn't account for the hours I spend delivering for Uber.

00:21:17 - Brian Douglas

Wow, so you actually do have a part-time job on top of your bootcamp and your open source contributions.

00:21:23 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's closer to a full-time job, but yeah.

00:21:26 - Brian Douglas

Wow, that is amazing. Talk about the hustle. It makes sense in this time and climate — you definitely want to make sure you're sustaining yourself and able to survive during this interesting time we're living in.

00:21:42 - Anthony Campolo

But yeah — which channel should I post this link in?

00:21:47 - Brian Douglas

You can drop it in the Twitch chat if you have that available.

00:21:53 - Anthony Campolo

You do not have permission to send messages in this channel.

00:21:56 - Brian Douglas

Oh, okay. Just drop it in the Zoom. Well, thanks for the follow to Adita as well. I meant to VIP you — actually, you're the first person who actually needed to do a link. But yeah, you're properly set up now. We don't have [unclear] set up, so nevermind on that.

00:22:25 - Anthony Campolo

The reason why this is similar is because it's using GraphQL, whereas Blitz doesn't use GraphQL. By building your app around GraphQL and using that with serverless lambdas — that's why this AppSync plus Amplify combination is really similar to Redwood. You also have the Redwood CLI, which gives you some functionality similar to Amplify's CLI. Obviously there are huge differences, but in terms of giving you generators and things like that.

00:22:58 - Brian Douglas

Now I'm struggling to find my chat. Here we go. Yeah, we finally made it to the article we were talking about. But what you were getting at, and the reason we brought this up, is the similarities of AppSync and Amplify and how RedwoodJS kind of does a lot of that for you.

00:23:19 - Anthony Campolo

It involves a schema definition language being used to deploy to a GraphQL handler that's one giant lambda function. That's why they say it's full stack serverless — the entire app is basically put into one big serverless function. I think he connects it to DynamoDB. This isn't the exact one I was thinking of. There's another one on AWS's actual website that's more recent than this, but this is like the prototype of that project.

00:23:54 - Brian Douglas

Okay. And I don't know why I'm not following Nader, but we're now following each other.

00:23:59 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. He posts great stuff.

00:24:01 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, indeed. I'm kind of blown away at your story — the fact that you're in a bootcamp, you're delivering for Uber, which I just discovered, and you're so ingrained in the RedwoodJS community. It looks like Jason's coming in with a raid too. Appreciate that, Jason. While we're waiting for this raid to come through, what is the secret sauce? What is it about RedwoodJS and how they ingrained you in the community? Are there certain meetups and conversations happening?

00:24:36 - Anthony Campolo

They were just really responsive. When I put out the very first part of my series, Peter responded and said, hey, I loved reading this. That was really cool. You can't overstate little things like that — if someone is spending months writing articles about your project, just acknowledge them in some way. And if you do that, if it's a good project, they'll let you know when things are happening and when you should be there. Going back to it — these projects are run so differently by so many different groups of people with different motivations. I'm just lucky in that Redwood is run by really good people with really good motivations, I think.

00:25:28 - Brian Douglas

Yeah. And for the benefit of people who just joined us from the raid — hopefully y'all are having a great time with Jason and his guest. We are talking about RedwoodJS and Anthony's involvement with the community. RedwoodJS has quite a few Hacktoberfest issues at the moment, if you're interested in making a contribution. This is the Open Source Contributor Summit too. If you're interested in getting onboarding guides and tutorials, we have a bunch of maintainers hanging out in our Discord right now — open up a tab and ask questions about how to contribute or about open source in general. There are also some pretty cool swim guides as well. Hey, friends, feel free to say hi — you're not interrupting anything. We're here to have a conversation with you too. Yeah, so RedwoodJS — I know they have a standing meeting for folks to stop by.

00:26:26 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Every two weeks they have a public meetup, and they do it through Hopin usually, though I think we've tried out a new service recently. The idea is they give updates on what's happening, and people from the community give presentations about things they've worked on. We had someone recently who integrated Next and Redwood and did a presentation showing that. Then they'll have a time where anyone can just hop on camera and hang out. It's a good time to just chill and talk about random nerdy stuff with them.

00:27:07 - Brian Douglas

Awesome. I can't state that enough. My intro to open source — I'm going to shout out myself one more time. I do have a YouTube channel as well. Jason, thanks for the subs and the gifted subs — wow, I appreciate that. Big fan of what Jason's doing too.

00:27:34 - Anthony Campolo

Jason's amazing. I'm a huge fan of Jason. I actually wanted to contact Jason about doing a Learn with Jason for Redwood. Dreams — hit me up.

00:27:43 - Brian Douglas

Oh, we see the magic happening right now on stream.

00:27:46 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, they already had a Twitter back and forth about it a couple months ago, but it ended up falling through the cracks, I think. But I'm available.

00:27:55 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, I was actually watching Ben [Ilegbodu?]'s TypeScript stream, because I've been trying to shout out to Jason and everything the community brought over and the gifted subs. Ben was talking about TypeScript, and I've been exploring TypeScript and trying to use it. I have one project using TypeScript right now, but it's nice — I always throw these on while I'm working or during the day, and listening to Jason talk to a bunch of people I know from the internet. Yeah, excellent. So while we're waiting for all these sub alerts to come through — I'll switch to full screen. Any other tips for contributing to open source and getting involved in communities for folks who are here?

00:28:49 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I would say figure out what's within the boundaries of your current skill set. Since I was learning React in my bootcamp, I knew that if I was going to get involved with some sort of open source framework, it would probably be something in the React sphere. Even though I'm very interested in Vue or Svelte, there would have been an extra upfront learning cost before you could even start doing anything. So try to find something that's already close to what you know, but that is still kind of new and developing so you can still contribute to it. And if you don't know anything yet, then just pick something you're really interested in and follow your passion. For me, I was really, really interested in the history of Redwood — to tell the history of Redwood, you have to tell the whole history of Tom, going back to the mid-2000s. So there's a lot of

00:29:50 - Anthony Campolo

a lot going on there. Just find something you're willing to really, really dive deep into and learn better than almost anyone, because that's when all the opportunities will open up to you.

00:30:04 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, and speaking of diving deep — we do have a Discord, which I'll continue to plug, because we have folks who are ready to receive all of our guests on Twitch and get you involved in open source. There are a couple of projects represented here. You can definitely find Anthony in the Q&A room — he'll be available to answer questions. I'm curious, as far as Redwood goes, do you have any projects you've built in Redwood? I haven't even asked you this before.

00:30:37 - Anthony Campolo

Sure, yeah. The article series I wrote is essentially me building out the Redwood tutorial itself. The tutorial has more work put into it than any other tutorial of any other framework you're ever going to see. I built the tutorial and basically narrated my thought process as I screenshotted everything. So I was building a thing, but in a predefined path laid out by the docs. After that I saw that FaunaDB had a Write with Fauna program where you could apply and get paid to write an article. And I was like, I want to get paid to write articles — that sounds great. So I said, hey, can I write an article?

00:31:23 - Brian Douglas

It beats living off Uber Eats.

00:31:25 - Anthony Campolo

Exactly. So I said, can I write an article about RedwoodJS and FaunaDB? Because Tom has been talking about FaunaDB since the first podcast interview on JS Party. He was like, FaunaDB could be really interesting for Redwood, because him and Evan have been friends going back to when they both scaled giant Rails apps at the same time. Tom scaled GitHub while Evan was scaling Twitter at the same time. So I'm actually — talk about

00:31:53 - Brian Douglas

He's from Twitter.

00:31:55 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:31:55 - Brian Douglas

Oh, I didn't know that.

00:31:56 - Anthony Campolo

FaunaDB is inspired by Twitter's [scaling failures]. All the Twitter scaling problems they had, and not having any off-the-shelf open source solutions — they tried Cassandra but it didn't work for them. So they ended up building their own thing. They wanted to figure out how to build an open source general solution to this massive scaling, distributed system, database consistency problem.

00:32:22 - Brian Douglas

As you mentioned that — I actually knew that because Fauna was on my podcast. One of their devrel folks was on Jamstack

00:32:28 - Anthony Campolo

Radio, and it was Chris, I think.

00:32:30 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, yeah. I guess you're my number one fan for Jamstack Radio. But yeah, that was actually a while ago — I think it was towards the end of last year. So definitely check that out.

00:32:41 - Anthony Campolo

They did a big push in like 2019. That was Evan on JavaScript Jabber and Software Daily.

00:32:49 - Brian Douglas

And so Jason, he's on board with the RedwoodJS chat. I'll message you and you can loop him in and have the conversation. Also Brian Robinson — I believe that's the same Brian from Jamstack fame. Yeah, and also Sanity IO too. We haven't chatted before but we definitely share the same space. Good to see you.

00:33:14 - Anthony Campolo

I have an interview on deck with both of you waiting to be released.

00:33:19 - Brian Douglas

Excellent, excellent. Sorry, your blog series too — we haven't linked that properly.

00:33:26 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, just go to community.redwoodjs.com.

00:33:32 - Brian Douglas

Is it linked on the side there? It is — community.

00:33:36 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. And if you just sort it by views, it's the most viewed thing ever. Super proud of that.

00:33:43 - Brian Douglas

It looks like it just did a dropdown, so maybe it's community.redwoodjs.com. Yes, I love the subdomains. I don't even know how to — how do you sort by views here?

00:33:58 - Anthony Campolo

So go to — you want to see everything. I forget exactly how you do that.

00:34:05 - Brian Douglas

Yeah, I've got every discussion. There we go.

00:34:09 - Anthony Campolo

There you go.

00:34:10 - Brian Douglas

Views. Got it. All right, we're learning how to use Discourse.

00:34:13 - Anthony Campolo

It's "A First Look at RedwoodJS."

00:34:17 - Brian Douglas

Am I not seeing it? First look —

00:34:22 - Anthony Campolo

I don't know what's going on with your view of Redwood, but I posted the link in the chat for you.

00:34:28 - Brian Douglas

Okay, cool. Appreciate that. I'll make sure folks can also have this, so we're not all confused at the same time.

00:34:36 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, if you just Google "a first look at RedwoodJS" you should be able to find it.

00:34:44 - Brian Douglas

Excellent. So yeah, this is the most-viewed article. Okay. I see the series — 1, 2, 3, 4 — and you sort of — so this is your introduction into RedwoodJS, and you wanted to basically carve out the path for people to get involved, or just yourself?

00:35:03 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's a good question. It's one of those things where I kind of just started doing it and it just kept going. And because the tutorial was just so well done, I never hit a roadblock, so I just kept going. I kept following the tutorial and I would write up to the point where it felt like a natural length for an article. The tutorial is broken up into four YouTube videos, each about fifteen to twenty minutes. The eight parts — after the introduction, which is all my original writing about the history of full stack React, Jamstack, and serverless and what all those terms mean and setting the context — after that, parts one through eight each correspond to one video. The first video covers the first two articles, the second video covers parts three and four, the third video is parts five and six, and the fourth video is parts seven and eight. So it kind of chunks it into slightly smaller pieces.

00:36:07 - Anthony Campolo

For example, in the YouTube series, the fourth episode covers both deploying your app and setting up your authentication. Whereas I have part seven as just deploying and part eight as just auth. I think it makes it a little more manageable for a newer person who really needs each concept broken down specifically. I wanted to take the tutorial and make it absolutely as explicit as possible, so that it would be impossible for someone not to be able to follow along. And it was also just an exercise in learning it for myself, because I knew writing it would be a really good way to learn. People talk about this all the time — actually having to write something out helps you retain it better, think things out better, and start to make connections between ideas better. And then you have this huge repository to go back to at any point. So I can follow that now and build up the project again in like ten minutes. And then also wanting to

00:37:09 - Anthony Campolo

— I knew that by doing this it would also become something other people could hopefully find use from. And some people have. They've tweeted at me and said they got a lot out of it. You always want to have more resources, I think, because so many people have different learning styles that connect with different things.

00:37:26 - Brian Douglas

Yeah. Excellent. So I realize we're actually right on time — actually a little over time, but I enjoyed this conversation, folks. Anthony's going to transition over to the Discord, so if you want to chat with him or have any questions — we don't have any time for questions today, but if you want to learn about RedwoodJS, learn about Lambda School, which you're currently a student of, while also doing all this contributing to the project and building community — which is super exciting and I love to see — thanks for chatting with us and giving us so many nuggets on how to get involved in open source.