Next.js 12.2, Open Source, and Community Building with Lee Robinson

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Lee Robinson, the VP of Developer Experience at Vercel. We take a look at some new or now stable features in Next.js, like middleware, the image component, and ISR. Both Vercel and WP Engine support a lot of open source projects as a part of their strategies, and we dig into why that's important and good for the web in general.  Last we discuss many of Lee's ideas on how to build developer communities at both the global and local scale.

Lee's Twitter
Lee's Website
Lee's Post on DX

Transcript

Fran Agulto: Now.
Jeff Everhart: All right, all right, welcome to the headless wp podcast my name is Jeff everhart.
Jeff Everhart: My co host friend and I are joined today by Lee Robinson, the VP of developer experience of Vercel.
Jeff Everhart: lee's been on the podcast before so if you're interested in hearing a little bit about his background or its origin story be sure to check out that episode.
Jeff Everhart: Since next js continues to be a really popular way to create headless wordpress sites, we wanted to have Lee back to discuss some of the recent updates to next js.
Jeff Everhart: That launched from version 12.2 and just to sort of discuss the basic state of the Open Source javascript ecosystem so fran Lee welcome today how's it going.
Lee Robinson: Thank you so much for having me i'm really excited to be here and chat with you all happy to be back lots of good stuff to talk about.
Fran Agulto: And i'm doing really well it's Christmas in July, for me, because.
Fran Agulto: I follow I follow up i'm a fanboy love next year, yes stoked germs.
Lee Robinson: yeah i'm really excited to talk about this i'm happy that y'all are familiar with next yes and for cell and have been keeping up with some of the stuff that we're doing and yeah we see so many people choosing to use wordpress with next year, so it makes so much sense.
Fran Agulto: yeah and it's interesting because, like as i'm looking over in my mind, you know things that i'm going to do with my next content for headless wordpress utilizing next to us and pretty much that's all.
Fran Agulto: This might cause like a stir on the Dev Twitter ecosystem, but I love next as i'm and I love what it does, I love the developer experience as a front end framework for me when I stand up right out of the box.
Fran Agulto: i'm some some questions I had for you is like you know with the release that just came out.
Fran Agulto: And things that like it has the first thing I wanted to ask is you know what are some use cases that you've seen that you might have done on your own or that you've seen in the wild for middleware and is, are we could start there yeah yeah.
Lee Robinson: yeah let's do that so let's let's start with middleware so just to reset on what middleware is basically.
Lee Robinson: A lot of folks are probably familiar, who have been doing web Dev for a little bit with the concept of middleware in express js which was.
Lee Robinson: hey I want to add some logic for all routes in my application, I can kind of put it into this Compostable chunk and add it as needed, and there was even a great mpm ecosystem of packages that you can.
Lee Robinson: kind of add on.
Lee Robinson: The idea with middleware next yes, you know middleware is is a word that can mean a lot of things it's used in a lot of different ways.
Lee Robinson: The way I think about it in next she is is it's kind of like route middleware or routing middleware.
Lee Robinson: So you want to run some code essentially that can run before you navigate to the about page or the contact page and maybe you want to run it on some routes or maybe you want to run it on all routes.
Lee Robinson: And it's really powerful because it enables developers to have full control over basically whatever logic, they want to do with the Web standard request and response objects I get in a request.
Lee Robinson: I can you know have some response that comes out of a middleware and maybe I want to add some headers maybe want to rewrite maybe I want to redirect.
Lee Robinson: The origin of middleware I guess is that we've been talking to the next, yes, customers for many years now, and one of I think and slowly we've added.
Lee Robinson: bits of the functionality that are common use cases for middleware into next year itself, but then there was always those well what if I want to do this thing it's just a little bit different than what the default is they need that escape hatch right.
Lee Robinson: And that's The great thing about middleware is that you put the power back in the developers hands to write whatever logic, they want with code and really get the full flexibility.
Lee Robinson: In their application so tangibly what that looks like and how we see customers using middleware getting really excited about middleware.
Lee Robinson: is especially for e commerce customers or media site customers there's a large emphasis on personalization and a B testing.
Lee Robinson: So the cool thing about pairing middleware with something like is our are incremental static generation that will get into.
Lee Robinson: For a B testing is I can get the flexibility of having a really dynamic site, you know, maybe I if this person has visited my site before I want to send them to a completely different experience.
Lee Robinson: Or maybe i'm rolling out some new feature that I want to only show to a specific subset of people.
Lee Robinson: You can do that, while still being able to have the option of basically rewriting to a static page, so you can get the performance benefits like it was a static site, while still having that flexibility to.
Lee Robinson: You know, to answer the request of the team who's trying to make things more personalized and more dynamic and.
Fran Agulto: wow.
Jeff Everhart: that's awesome and.
Jeff Everhart: yeah i'll jump in just a second because I gotta say.
Jeff Everhart: He mentioned express in there and how you sort of modeled it after the express middleware API and if somebody has done some express development in past that's literally the first words that were out of my mouth yeah I tried, I was like wow this feels exactly like express this is awesome.
Jeff Everhart: And so, just to give everybody kind of like another.
Jeff Everhart: example of how middleware is used our files js library which sits on top of next js.
Jeff Everhart: actually use the middleware beta to proxy site maps so essentially look at that requested, are they are they looking for like sitemap xml and if they are would go out to your wordpress origin.
Jeff Everhart: Get the xml parse that you know revise a little bit and then ship it back, and so it is super handy but definitely all nailed the API design, if what expresses what's your model.
Lee Robinson: mm hmm.
Lee Robinson: That is.
Fran Agulto: So it's interesting for me, being a little bit newer as far as my coding experience and coming in with like, so if I was to get hired at a.
Fran Agulto: Company as a software developer i'd probably be junior to mid right and I probably lean on the likes of Jeff or you leave I was on YouTube and going hey How does this work again and so.
Fran Agulto: With middleware versus like because you think of things of in places right, especially with servers of origin.
Fran Agulto: And if you're.
Fran Agulto: running a function on a on a Lambda server somewhere it's somewhere.
Fran Agulto: But something at the.
Fran Agulto: edge at the cdn layer where you're you're almost like doing that, like because that's another thing with the edge functions.
Fran Agulto: With edge middleware is that, basically, and please educate me guys is that just pushing middleware to the edge layers and all that is or am I misunderstanding, the concept.
Lee Robinson: yeah yeah so middleware by default it's a it there's two different ways to talk about it there's middleware inside of next yes and then there's just more in general edge middleware on the purcell platform.
Lee Robinson: So we start with next yes next yes is open source framework, you know, a ton of people who use it to self host on their own infrastructure or build some kind of custom wrapper on top of it, I think.
Lee Robinson: If I remember correctly, I think both lift and doordash have like their own framework on top of next js that like extends it with.
Lee Robinson: was basically like.
Lee Robinson: Company defaults you know they want to have their own lifting setup and their own.
Lee Robinson: code generation and all that other stuff so for teams like that you know they're you know, maybe they're hosting on their own infra or maybe they're doing something custom.
Lee Robinson: They still want to be able to use middleware right so it's open source that works out of the box when you use next start.
Lee Robinson: by default it's deployed to a single region so let's say your self hosting your next yes APP in US East on aws right your middleware is going to run inside that region.
Lee Robinson: This is part of the value proposition that purcell is providing which is.
Lee Robinson: by default with zero configuration if you deploy your next yes active resell.
Lee Robinson: We say that's great But what if we could also run your middleware and process those requests it every edge around the world, close to where your customers are at so if i'm in Australia.
Lee Robinson: And I make a request to my website ideally those rewrites and those redirects and that logic that is going to be affecting that incoming request.
Lee Robinson: The closer physically geographically in the world that that happens, the faster the response time is going to be for the user visiting the site so, then those things are getting pushed out to Australia, you can do your redirects you right there and it's going to be faster, for your customers.
Fran Agulto: manly if I could like paint over my face the mind blown emoji.
Fran Agulto: Thank you for that explanation.
Jeff Everhart: That was.
Lee Robinson: Added in post processing a good a good mental model for me that's helped is a cdn or a content delivery network has historically been used to.
Lee Robinson: Basically cash versions of html javascript CSS files everywhere around the world, and it was mostly only the read of those things, so I want to have it faster when I read some file from a cash.
Lee Robinson: And in CD ends made it really easy like for cell to just deploy your APP and automatically put your code in every region around the world.
Lee Robinson: edge compute or an edge network is the right aspect of that as well too.
Lee Robinson: So you want to read and write some dynamic code in every edge as well, maybe you want to.
Lee Robinson: You know, do the redirects to the rewrites or some kind of custom logic, or even you know, in the future.
Lee Robinson: Allowing you to integrate deeply into storage solutions or you know even today have access to http so maybe you want to call out to a reddest store and store off some data in that edge as well to it really gives the power back to the developer.
Fran Agulto: That is super slick that yeah, that is, that is definitely awesome um so and I know we got a.
Fran Agulto: We got some limited time, so let me ask the next question then Jeff has.
Fran Agulto: Something lined up, but for the for the moving next to the image component in next.
Fran Agulto: Is there anything people should be aware of regarding the image component, we in and forgive me if I because I I was trying to catch up and read up on the latest release as far as next image, but is there anything different about it, is it just more flexible for the yo.
Lee Robinson: yeah so to reset on the problem images are an extremely hard challenge to tackle on the web and the majority of the web is made up of documents that have lots of images in them.
Lee Robinson: yeah he frequently see people deploy images that are you know too large they're not optimized they're not serving the correct size, based on the visitors device or.
Lee Robinson: You know the visitors preferences or they're not taking advantage of the latest features of the browser so maybe Google chrome you can do a new image format like a fifth that's even smaller and helps you get better better page load times.
Lee Robinson: So really what the goal of the image component and automatic image optimization index js is is to try to make that as easy as possible for the developer experience of I want to include an image, how much can I rely on a framework.
Lee Robinson: and on my infrastructure to optimize those images and help keep my performance great because.
Lee Robinson: I want my framework to make those decisions for me okay visitor is in chrome let's give them the latest image format let's give them a bit okay they're on a mobile device.
Lee Robinson: So let's serve up a smaller sized image we don't need to give them the 3000 pixels wide right and make those decisions for me to help me get the best performance so that's.
Lee Robinson: that's the image component in general and, with this new version it's now we've we've.
Lee Robinson: we've basically been listening to feedback on the image component, since we originally released it, you know, over a year ago.
Lee Robinson: and basically the overwhelming feedback was this is amazing, this is helping us transform the performance of our applications and really get great korba vitals are a way of tracking real user performance.
Lee Robinson: But we want to have more flexibility with how we style, we want to have more flexibility and go back to the roots of the html image tag.
Lee Robinson: So this new image component is really our response to this feedback trying to listen to the Community and say okay let's let's give you the best of both worlds here.
Lee Robinson: we're going to give you what I like to think of as the Web native solution the browser has progressed so much where things like lazy loading are built into most modern browsers I think it's like safari 15 or something is is what support is there.
Lee Robinson: So if we can rely on that we actually ship less javascript because we don't have to have this custom react code that is necessary to lazy load images.
Lee Robinson: So, by relying on the web platform we're able to actually delete code and provide a better experience to.
Lee Robinson: To end users so that's that's the whole reason for this new component.
Lee Robinson: And I think in general, if you view zoom out a little bit and you look at the similarities between this image component.
Lee Robinson: And the edge work that we've been doing the common theme is routing ourselves and refocusing on the web platform and web api's.
Lee Robinson: Because with the image component right like the Web platform has evolved so much crafts browser support for so many things is better than it's ever been.
Lee Robinson: And we can lean on the web platform to really help us get great performance and provide great interoperability for developers.
Lee Robinson: same exact thing with middleware when i'm using requested response in middleware it's just the Web API that you've probably used somewhere else.
Lee Robinson: And you could even go look at the mdm docs if you want it and still have the same signature for how you use a lot of these things so it's just it's a refocusing on standards and interoperability between platforms.
Fran Agulto: That is called of that thing.
Fran Agulto: Fantastic yeah cuz there's a standard standard ization.
Fran Agulto: beam that, as you were talking well, you might my Dev mind was like yeah this all makes sense, trying to just make it that much easier so we're not pulling a bunch of different docs at any given time, and we have like 20 you know tabs.
Fran Agulto: Trying to reread it's just like one standard so it's like essentially what graph que El did with the API spec and the layer of that so yeah very cool.
Jeff Everhart: yeah and I think you touched on something there about like the Web platform coming along and absorbing these really good ideas and integrating them into the platform.
Jeff Everhart: And so that I think leads us in a little bit into the next question that we have for you, so the last time you were on the podcast.
Jeff Everhart: It was on the heels of the announcement that versatile was going to sponsor rich Harris, to work on felt felt kit sort of full time and I think since then we've had, like other frameworks like remix and solid js kind of bust onto the framework seen.
Jeff Everhart: in a big way and last time you were on you talked about the idea of frameworks being inspired by one another, which I totally agree with, and the idea.
Lee Robinson: That yeah.
Jeff Everhart: You know, when we do this, the Web wins as a whole, so if you can kind of continue, and maybe share with us how you see those ideas continue to play out like over this next cycle.
Lee Robinson: yeah first ones felt it's been really fun to get a work with rich very smart very, very humble very empathetic person.
Lee Robinson: And just a great engineer and watch the progress of spelt kit and and really the Community just embrace spell it's been amazing i've been.
Lee Robinson: Just dabbling was felt more and more, and I really like a lot of the ideas inside of spell.
Lee Robinson: we're about to release a spell kit course that one of the Members on my team staff has been working on it's been super fun for me to like go through that and learn more about spell kit because.
Lee Robinson: It just challenges, a lot of the ideas that I had already in my head about the way that react works and the way that next yes work so.
Lee Robinson: I love that because it helps me helps me become a better web developer by understanding how all these different tools work together so.
Lee Robinson: i'm really enjoying spelt kit and excited for the 1.0 release there in terms of like the larger state of front end frameworks it's really interesting because you start to notice this trend which kind of goes back to what I was talking about, which is alignment on the web one framework.
Lee Robinson: Well there's two two interesting things to talk about the first one is fresh, which is a framework created by DEMO.
Lee Robinson: And it's it's you know it's also extremely new, but you look at it and it looks very similar to next js.
Lee Robinson: But instead there's no mention of node js because, with that oh it's you know it's this new version of node js it's it has a new take on how to build for the web and, if you look at api's it sounds a lot like what i'm talking about with.
Lee Robinson: The request and response and these these standard api's that you probably already know how to use or you can easily look up the documentation for.
Lee Robinson: And then you look at another tool it's not it's not really a framework but it's in the same space, which is called been which was recently announced and.
Jeff Everhart: i've seen that.
Fran Agulto: yeah been.
Lee Robinson: bicycle yeah.
Jeff Everhart: Okay super fast.
Lee Robinson: It does a lot of things and the the the main theme, I guess that's interesting from bond is it's it's.
Lee Robinson: Rather than you know implementing some kind of proprietary things it's again aligning with in this instance, like javascript core like just the under underlying ways that you can use the javascript language.
Lee Robinson: So the common the commonality between all of this stuff is that developers want to be empowered to write it or learn at once and right everywhere, and this recently this recently actually works super well.
Jeff Everhart: That needs to be on a shirt somewhere.
Jeff Everhart: yeah learn.
Fran Agulto: That.
Lee Robinson: yeah this it's funny because it actually became very real, to me, I was, I wrote something in a.
Lee Robinson: spelt kit APP and I think it was like how I was setting the headers on a response, and you know just the the Web response, the headers object that you can return, and then I was using middle where i'm like oh yeah I already know how to do this, like it's just the Web response like.
Lee Robinson: You can just slap these headers on here, I already know.
Lee Robinson: How to throw this cash control head around and that's really exciting, for me, because I feel like i'm becoming a better web developer by learning these platform api's.
Lee Robinson: So it's it's kind of this transition slowly away from the reliance on node js I don't think node js realized, it was going to.
Lee Robinson: evolve to the the bedrock of the lot of web infrastructure, as it has today but critically, I think the big difference in where next jazz is going and maybe some of these other frameworks are going is that.
Lee Robinson: We were really excited about the world of edge and alignment with the Web platform, but we also understand that people aren't going to be able to rewrite their Apps overnight.
Lee Robinson: And they might not be able to move away from the node js or the massive mpm ecosystem right away so next yes his approach is like.
Lee Robinson: This new stuff very cool we're going to help teach you about all this new stuff but the same time, maybe you're working on a really large react application it's been in production for years you don't necessarily have time to go like rewrite with the.
Jeff Everhart: latest hotness brand new.
Fran Agulto: Framework yeah.
Lee Robinson: you're just trying to get your job done right and maybe you want to try some of this stuff but, again, time is limited, so what next is doing is it's it has now a concept of a runtime.
Lee Robinson: So you can tell your next APP I either want the whole thing to work in node or want the whole thing to work on the edge runtime and going further, you can actually do that on a per page or a per API basis, so if i'm building a.
Lee Robinson: You know, massive next yes APP.
Lee Robinson: Massive react application I upgrade to the latest version of next year, so i'm like wow all this edge stuff sounds really cool I kind of want to start trying it out.
Lee Robinson: and seeing it actually had a conversation with one of our partners and for sell customers play at scale, they have a really awesome service database and they were like yeah we just started using.
Lee Robinson: edge API routes for one extremely small piece of our application like just one super small thing.
Lee Robinson: And it was cool because they didn't have to rewrite their whole APP they didn't have to change frameworks.
Lee Robinson: All they did was just update to the latest version and they could slowly start trying out this new stuff and critically, I think, from.
Lee Robinson: Like from an engineering standpoint, make sure it was better like just just because we have this new stuff and edge is cool and it sounds exciting.
Lee Robinson: it's good I think for for teams to be empowered to like try it out run some tests check the latency like is this actually making an improvement If yes, then, absolutely you can slowly move over more stuff but being grounded into like experimentation, of that I think it's really important.
Fran Agulto: yeah that makes total sense, because I think there's there's that thing where.
Fran Agulto: You have that dopamine hit not even just an engineering or development, but just as a human being, when a new hotness comes out y'all you know they mean a new hotness and you're like oh that new hotness might optimize me better whatever it is you're doing, and in this case it's web development.
Fran Agulto: But you don't realize that moving over to that new hundred there's a there's a little bit of a learning curve, but then you have to shift your old hotness to the new hotness and then there might things might break and stuff like that so.
Fran Agulto: yeah that's yeah yeah.
Lee Robinson: Well it's.
Lee Robinson: I was just gonna say one one thing that we've been impressed on us as as developers as web developers, especially as front end developers, especially is the landscape is.
Lee Robinson: always changing there's always new tools there's always new developments happening, and you can either take a pessimistic or an optimistic view on that the pessimists will say.
Lee Robinson: there's so much turn the ecosystem, this is bad, the optimist will say these new tools are challenging.
Lee Robinson: You know what makes a great experience and ultimately helping push the Web forward so my part of my job, and part of what I hope to leave an impact on the Community.
Lee Robinson: is making sure that I properly explain the trade offs of some of these things, because you know for sales talking a lot about edge I think edge is awesome there are trade offs like you might not want edge, you know.
Lee Robinson: Maybe you wouldn't expect you know leave from purcell to come on like actually don't use our product.
Lee Robinson: For like.
Lee Robinson: it's true like you might not want to use edge compute for some stuff so it's important for me also, while I talk about all the latest cool stuff is also refocus on like.
Lee Robinson: yeah, this is another tool in your tool belt similar to like how you still might want to use node js and in.
Lee Robinson: Next gen it's like this is cool it's it's in your tool belt, you have this framework that's enabling it, but here are the things you should consider when you're making a decision like that.
Fran Agulto: yeah and it's it's always one of my mentors.
Fran Agulto: Who who's over at nettleford Jason link store if he always tells me fran when a developer ask you what should I use, especially when they're going for and what do we do headless wordpress or traditional wordpress hmm two words y'all it depends.
Fran Agulto: depends yeah and it really does depend to your point Lee like upon the use case what they're using the stack the organization, the company as a whole.
Fran Agulto: What their marketing teams are used to using what their do they have javascript all that stuff goes into like these kind of decisions that you have to make when.
Fran Agulto: you're evaluating what, what do you actually use, and is it necessary, as the new hotness necessary, is it not what whatnot so you're using you're not yeah and.
Jeff Everhart: And I think there's an interesting thing in there to leave from what you said about sort of your responsibility to the current users of next js because, like obviously that's sort of the front runner.
Jeff Everhart: front end framework, if you will, right, you have lots of people already using it, and so it's tough like So how do you balance that.
Jeff Everhart: whenever you kind of got this responsibility to these.
Jeff Everhart: People who are already using it, and then you also want to be innovating because I find like.
Jeff Everhart: Where a lot of corollaries there to the way that I view, like the wordpress Open Source project like they have a huge commitment to backward compatibility large user base and so like you've got to balance these two things as the you know the de facto front runner.
Lee Robinson: yeah I think there's two things to talk about there one is for cells Open Source efforts in general, and then to how we think about that in sort in terms of next yes so.
Lee Robinson: First, just for cell in general, one of the reasons why I was really excited to join the Brazil team, you know, two years ago now, was purcell was a company that I looked up to.
Lee Robinson: In terms of investing in the Open Source ecosystem and making tools for developers so since the beginning of resell back in the 2015 2016.
Lee Robinson: Next, yes, came out in 2016 and, at the time the Brazil team was putting out just a ton of great open source software not only solving their own problems, but also helping push the ecosystem forward and that's been a core.
Lee Robinson: fundamental part of however cell operates from day one, and still today and putting out lots of great open source software and.
Lee Robinson: what's really interesting is not only have we been building.
Lee Robinson: Our own software we've also been you know, helping support the ecosystem and bringing in folks who love open source as well, too, so I recently had a tweet where I said.
Lee Robinson: You know, for cell engineers have helped create or maintain.
Lee Robinson: All of this open source software and I asked in one of our slack channels and people are just like sounding off with so many amazing packages, some of them I didn't even know about.
Lee Robinson: And it really just blows my mind how this this collective of people who really care about building an open web platform and like open source software support that have volcan collaborated towards purcell so that's like.
Lee Robinson: that's purcell as a whole, but then, specifically with next yes it's it's grown so much since 2016 and especially in the last slide.
Lee Robinson: years.
Lee Robinson: rocketship.
Lee Robinson: really taken off and to do that, like you said there's a responsibility from you know, for me, leading the developer experience of the tool and of our company.
Lee Robinson: there's a responsibility to make sure that it works, just as good when I self host it as when I deployed oversell and I think what's critical there is like.
Lee Robinson: We have to have a kind of a hard stop it's like if you make a new feature, it has to work in next yes Open Source like it's not like we're going to build a proprietary.
Lee Robinson: For sell only next js feature the model is next yes works great self hosted and you, you should still consider using it self hosted it's great that way to.
Lee Robinson: resell is like next yes, plus plus like you can you can deploy it with additional features like let's say image optimization right, you can host it self hosted and it works.
Lee Robinson: But then when you deploy to purcell you can optimize images around every region in the globe so it's kind of like a single region to multi region model.
Lee Robinson: Depending on how far you want to optimize and then critically to a lot of folks know about purcell in terms of next year, yes, but we really support any front end framework.
Lee Robinson: Whether it's you know whether it's the next or the spirits of the world, so we have a responsibility to to be agnostic to all of the really cool frameworks that people are building and supporting today.
Lee Robinson: And having zero configuration support for them when they land so, most recently, I think the last one we added support for with shopify is hydrogen.
Lee Robinson: You can now know that with.
Fran Agulto: These your configuration he.
Lee Robinson: And it uses edge functions to like.
Lee Robinson: server render which is super cool.
Lee Robinson: So it's a it's a dual responsibility to.
Lee Robinson: Support the ecosystem and provide infrastructure for all of these cool frameworks.
Lee Robinson: As well as making sure that you know the many next yes customers who self host and they run on their own infrastructure, like they still come to me, sometimes and ask questions, and I still want to help support them, even if they're not using versa, like.
Lee Robinson: I still have a commitment to them.
Jeff Everhart: And you know, and I think that's important because you just use the word customers, even though they're not paying you and I think having that same responsibility to serve them is really important, and cool.
Lee Robinson: yeah I mean some of my like some of my absolute favorite next yes customers to you know they don't host on for sell and that's okay i'm not going to you know blow.
Lee Robinson: out their.
Lee Robinson: Their choice because maybe there's you know some internal reason that they've chosen not to that's totally fine I still want them to succeed with the tool, I still want them to have a good experience, I still want them to.
Lee Robinson: be able to talk to our team and make feature suggestions and like get their bugs fixed.
Fran Agulto: Man yeah not only a kick ass developer, but you're an amazing human being Lee.
Fran Agulto: That is awesome, I think, and I honestly believe, and I look.
Fran Agulto: it's funny because this kind of just segues into the question I was going to ask, but we could just overlay on it in in the open sources open source of wordpress and next yes on how both our companies Lee.
Fran Agulto: or people that have this mindset, just as you displayed of kindness toward even if you're not hosting on us, but you're using our open source tools.
Fran Agulto: And our software, we will still help you and we're compelled to help you because, just for the overall in our industry, the overall Internet and the web.
Fran Agulto: We want people to become developers, we want people it doesn't matter what you use we're just stoked to help you all, because the bigger we grow as a whole unit it's just good for the entire yeah industry so yeah but.
Jeff Everhart: it's great to see a lot of other companies adopt that posture as.
Jeff Everhart: Well, because, like when I look at you know something like ghost cms like that's another.
Jeff Everhart: good example of a.
Jeff Everhart: Company that's built on top of an open source, you know you have.
Jeff Everhart: strappy Open Source kind of then also this paid SAS products so it's it's really cool to see.
Lee Robinson: I think an important thing to to to emphasize is like part of the reason why I joined diverse team and why I really love working with all the.
Lee Robinson: folks is like I truly believe that we're building a world class product and i'm happy every day to go advocate for and tell people, you should check out purcell.
Lee Robinson: Does that mean that sometimes people will use for cell yeah.
Lee Robinson: Absolutely and that's Okay, but I do believe and i'm excited about advocating that we are building something that's good and that benefits the Web So for me, it makes the.
Lee Robinson: almost like the the ethics of it easier it's like if you're going to choose yourself, I feel really confident like you're going to have a good time and I want to help support you on that journey.
Lee Robinson: I feel the same way about next yes like, if you want to put next js on your own.
Lee Robinson: Your own infrastructure, like maybe you have you run your own servers or something in your in your in your warehouse like that's awesome like we still want you to be able to upgrade and build with the latest tools.
Jeff Everhart: awesome yeah that's fantastic.
Jeff Everhart: So we'll switch gears a little bit, and this is maybe a question that I selfishly and maybe fran are a little bit more interested in having answered than our users.
Jeff Everhart: But you recently wrote a fantastic article on the importance of developer experience dx.
Jeff Everhart: So I was hoping, you could talk with us a little bit about the relationship between developer experience and developer relations.
Jeff Everhart: And then, also in that article, you mentioned a strategy of going both hyper global and hyper local and was hoping, you could kind of elaborate on what that looks like for your team.
Lee Robinson: yeah let's let's start with the last part the hyper global hyper local one is is really interesting because Dev rel as a as a whole, and as the industry has changed a lot post, an event in 2020 it's like.
Lee Robinson: it's like voldemort.
Lee Robinson: Day.
Fran Agulto: Now yeah.
Lee Robinson: I just like that thing that happened.
Lee Robinson: 2020 that everybody knows about.
Lee Robinson: yeah but since then, I feel like the role of of Dev rel or developer advocates has changed a little bit especially I was kind of confronted with this.
Lee Robinson: In the return to developer conferences in person developer conferences, because for the last two years, you know we've been doing so many online events.
Lee Robinson: And everyone was so excited to get back in person to go to these events and now, after going to you know, a handful here in the past months.
Lee Robinson: it's it's very interesting because, while they're off while they are like very excellent and it's a great way to meet with your community, it also makes you understand the value of interaction with your online community to like.
Lee Robinson: That part was probably underserved prior to everyone, realizing how important it was to connect with people all around the world, so I think now you're seeing.
Lee Robinson: A lot of developer teams developer relations teams when they announced a conference or an event, you know it's it's online and in person like hybrid is probably something that's going to be here to stay.
Lee Robinson: And the focus is on providing the best experience for your entire global audience, because you probably if you're building a developer tool and you probably have a global audience of people because developers are all over the world now.
Lee Robinson: And you want to help all of them succeed, but then you also want to provide these great local experiences for the pockets of developers who want to get together and collaborate in person.
Lee Robinson: it's not as feasible to you know fly people all over the world into like one location for some massive event, nor do they maybe even want to do that, so I think there's a and also going even further on that.
Lee Robinson: I think that there's sometimes even better engagement and better community when it's a smaller event like a 50 person 100 person thing versus like 1000 person thing.
Lee Robinson: You can really get closer with some of those people and have a different experience.
Lee Robinson: So the way i'm thinking about developer relations and where i'm wanting to take in the future is still keeping a focus on like.
Lee Robinson: satisfying the entire global community of people in the purcell community in the front end framework communities like next yes and like helping them be successful.
Lee Robinson: But then also we've been doing, like hyper local meetups in different cities, and we hope to kind of bring that around the globe to different areas, and like really.
Lee Robinson: engage with developers in their community in smaller settings and like get back to just like the roots of like building these cities developer communities.
Fran Agulto: You know what Lee I think that is an excellent approach in the way we outreach as Dev X you just gave me an idea, because just thinking out loud here.
Fran Agulto: I have our front end framework he's a he's an engineer here his name is blake he maintains the House next door is open source.
Fran Agulto: framework that we have here at wp engine, he told me when he asked me, he said hey leave robinson's come on your podcast I was like yeah dude i'm super stoked he's like I was in Austin.
Fran Agulto: And I went to the versatile meetup and it was super fun, I was like oh man I I didn't know you were in Austin, but it was super small, but he said it was just really like that much more rich, because it was that small group I don't know when they're in Austin but.
Fran Agulto: yeah but yeah I think man austin's a tech hub I probably should host one, but let me know when you're back in Austin we it would be fun to meet up in person and catch some dinner or something here in town.
Lee Robinson: yeah absolutely yeah I think we've been kind of slowly validating that this like a local meetup approaches, is what we want to do, and so far I think we've done, you know.
Lee Robinson: Four or five of these and they've been really successful for us to figure out how can we engage with the Community, how can we get people back together in person in a way that makes sense that's focused on like providing value to them.
Lee Robinson: At the same time also thinking about like our bigger events like next year's conference that will happen later this year and, like thinking about how we get the entire global community engaged and excited about that.
Fran Agulto: When is the next conference.
Lee Robinson: We haven't released the official date yet.
Lee Robinson: But it will be.
Lee Robinson: It will be later this year, hopefully.
Lee Robinson: Within the next month, there will be some communications on that so we'll see it's gonna happen, we can get the we can get the excitement going I think people, some people might have assumed, there would be an event there's usually one every year but yes it's definitely happening.
Lee Robinson: it's gonna be fun.
Fran Agulto: Let me ask my boss if he'll pay.
Jeff Everhart: Can I know that.
Jeff Everhart: All that is fantastic because it's like I do think your Riley like the nature of those larger events has certainly changed forever.
Jeff Everhart: Like I think the hybrid thing will always be there and I do imagine, I haven't been doing in person event, since the beginning of coven, but I do imagine.
Jeff Everhart: For the in person attendees it has sort of changed the environment and the atmosphere, to have these kind of two simultaneous tracks going.
Jeff Everhart: But also i'm with you that I think the local environments might be a little bit underserved now I just moved to a new area.
Jeff Everhart: Like just bright before this I was like let me go see what what Orlando javascript is doing, and it was like I found their meetup page in their last meeting was marked as cancelled in like march of 2020 and just.
Jeff Everhart: Since then, so I do feel like you know that is a really noble effort to come and try and revitalize some of those local meetups because I do think that, in a way, they can be a lot more thoughtful and impactful, especially when you have fewer people.
Jeff Everhart: And hit the wall, at the same time, like I also remember a line from your article where it's like the content creation pieces key now.
Jeff Everhart: I think that that's really important that we've always had this global audience and perhaps those people were underserved with the previous model of developer advocacy because I can remember.
Jeff Everhart: A couple of my early interactions with Dev advocates or evangelists early on in my career and that's what it was it's like they were the kind of sage on stage person.
Jeff Everhart: walking you through a DEMO at a large conference and like they would fly from here to there, and so it says it's called a swatch that stuff shift in real time but.
Lee Robinson: I was.
Lee Robinson: Saying one one note on that I think is.
Lee Robinson: That the the in person conference speakers are still incredibly valuable and it's like a very unique skill set to be able to do that well.
Lee Robinson: But then you're also contrasting that against this new generation of creators that people who were born on the YouTube videos of the world, the tech talks of the world like the short form videos.
Lee Robinson: And even like Twitter videos like.
Lee Robinson: it's it's a such faster distribution of content to get it out to people and the medium and the format of that content is a lot different.
Lee Robinson: it's kind of wild when you realize that you can get the same amount of REACH, sometimes by putting up a five minute YouTube video about something as spending a month prepping for a talk.
Lee Robinson: And person it like makes you.
Lee Robinson: It makes you more selective on the hyper local hyper global thing it's like well if i'm gonna go with this big hyper global thing like maybe it should be distributed in a different medium, you know.
Jeff Everhart: yeah for sure if we can circle back, I know I peppered you with a couple of questions all at once, but do you think you can talk about how you view the difference between developer experience and developer relations.
Jeff Everhart: Just how those two things together.
Lee Robinson: yeah I think Dev rel is kind of a it's a pillar or a part of developer experience it's.
Lee Robinson: Maybe a subset of what I think about developer experience as a whole, it also depends on the type of company you're working at like for developer focused companies.
Lee Robinson: I think that these two are extremely closely related, if you are, you know if you're building a company, where you just have an API on the side.
Lee Robinson: The developer experience of that is important, but the developer relations might actually be the most important thing, because.
Lee Robinson: it's just trying to draw back people into using this like.
Lee Robinson: you're not an entirely software company you just have this one API versus like a developer first company or a Dev tools company like the developer experience is the bread and butter of everything that you're doing and.
Lee Robinson: The developers are your customers really.
Lee Robinson: So when I think about developer experience or dx I feel like.
Lee Robinson: it's really about education community and documentation are like really some of the three ones I think about the most there's some other things in there, too, like the type of examples are templates that you create but by and large, we spent a lot of time today talking a lot about community.
Lee Robinson: Education, we haven't got into as much, but I think it ties back to the Dev rel piece, and like how you're actually getting.
Lee Robinson: Your content into the world and how you're structuring it to make sure that it's valuable for people of all different skill levels.
Lee Robinson: And then documentation is is one that I think is so critical for Dev tools is just making sure that it serves both the reference use case, as well as the learning use case.
Lee Robinson: And the reference use case is like.
Lee Robinson: I think about next jess a lot, which is you know someone else may be made the decision to use next yes for my job I show up at work.
Lee Robinson: I didn't make this choice, but I hit a bug and i'm trying to solve it, so I go to the next, yes website I don't care about anything else other than how I solve this bug like.
Lee Robinson: Just tell me.
Lee Robinson: just give me the information I need give me the code that I can copy paste and just fix my thing and then I want to go home and go to bed like that's all I care about.
Lee Robinson: And you have to think about those type of.
Jeff Everhart: they're like semi angry at you.
Jeff Everhart: There why I use ah.
Fran Agulto: i'm just trying to get my kids to soccer practice, let me give me the code.
Fran Agulto: yeah.
Fran Agulto: All right, um we've got about 10 minutes so i'm going to squeeze in these last two questions for you Leah and respect to your time and we really appreciate it, but so.
Fran Agulto: Obviously at wp engine we're trying to make wordpress not left in the dust, if you will, with the purpose built headless cms is because i'm going to make an assumption, here we have you used wordpress before.
Fran Agulto: Yes.
Fran Agulto: you've used wordpress everybody's messed with it.
Fran Agulto: Right even my mom has typed in content in the block editor but anyway.
Fran Agulto: anyways I was wondering man and, in your opinion, maybe one or two on like features or functionality, is it might need what might need to do wordpress as a headless cms in order to not be left in the dust with the jam stack movement decoupled.
Fran Agulto: Modern home web architectures, what do you, what are your thoughts on that.
Lee Robinson: So one thing that I find really interesting and it it relates back to this all i'll start off with this is the concept of.
Lee Robinson: dark matter developers they've it's been referenced in a lot of different ways, but it's basically like the.
Lee Robinson: The folks who are using your tools that maybe aren't on github discussions and maybe are on social media, but they have to use it for their job every day.
Lee Robinson: And when I think about wordpress I think a lot about these types of developers, because the sheer.
Lee Robinson: volume of people who are building and shipping wordpress sites today is enormous it powers, a large part of the web and a lot of these developers are happily using the tool.
Lee Robinson: And they're not really engulfed in some of the the things that we talk about a lot of the time.
Lee Robinson: So what's interesting for me and how I see wordpress evolving in the future is you have this whole community of.
Lee Robinson: Of developers maybe some of them are tuned into some of these new ways of building for the web, some of them are kind of happy with where things are at right now.
Lee Robinson: And as they look to move into this world maybe they like to root it back in like tangible product requirements so maybe i've got a hosted wordpress site.
Lee Robinson: Serving millions of visitors, a month it's been running since 2005 and it's been going great for a while.
Lee Robinson: And now we just got this requirement from our you know from the business side that we want to improve the performance.
Lee Robinson: of how fast pages load and also improve the search engine optimization because we're getting outranked by one of our competitors okay Those are two like very tangible products.
Lee Robinson: or problems to solve, so now, as this developer, maybe they haven't been in tune with some of the things that are happening, they know they have wordpress they have.
Lee Robinson: Thousands, maybe of content editors who are in their writing stuff maybe it's like a food blog or something they have a whole team of people, just like shipping wordpress stuff and they have all these custom wordpress plugins.
Lee Robinson: it's just it's like a multi year multi million dollar project if they were to try to move from wordpress to another cms or another editor.
Lee Robinson: And they don't it's not really worth it for them like they're getting value out of wordpress the part that they're concerned about is the front end performance and seo.
Lee Robinson: So, then they there they start reading into this, they learn about the headless space and they say okay How are people building headless today.
Lee Robinson: Well, the most common way that people are building something greenfield brand new project is probably with react, and if they're choosing react, a lot of folks are choosing next yes.
Lee Robinson: And I think that that's why we see a lot of a lot of folks building with a headless wordpress next yes stack.
Lee Robinson: They are revisiting this ecosystem after you know some time away and a lot of these things have matured and stabilized a lot where Now you can you know within.
Lee Robinson: I don't know within five minutes you can deploy a next js headless wordpress template you can swap in like some API keys to hook up to your wp engine instance.
Lee Robinson: And like you're kind of off to the races like on working on your monetization effort.
Lee Robinson: And you can start testing the performance of your new version versus the old one, and then it makes a pretty clear case to the company like yep this is definitely faster, this is worth the investment like let's keep pushing this direction.
Fran Agulto: yeah I, and I, and I agree with that wholeheartedly and I think that's the approach that we've made here in trying to make it.
Fran Agulto: Because I think at the end of the day, like you, nailed it on the head it's that those enterprise level organizations that have like maybe a marketing team and content editors have 200.
Fran Agulto: Right and they're just used to the content, editor and the wordpress experience I think it's essentially in order to keep up with the D couple jam stack movement as well, is making it more developer friendly because it's already marketing friendly honestly it's it's already.
Fran Agulto: Content editor friendly, the more developer friendly, we can make it, especially with like wp graph que well but Jason ball here and all those things.
Fran Agulto: I don't I I honestly to your point I don't think it's going to be less than that I think it's just going to go sale along right with the.
Fran Agulto: And this might be like I might get like negative likes on this on Twitter, but I think it's going to flow along right with like the sanity the content fools the.
Fran Agulto: graph cms is of the world that's my opinion but anyway.
Lee Robinson: I mean, as I said, look at it from a pure market share perspective, like all of these companies who are using wordpress on a long enough timeline.
Lee Robinson: A decent chunk of them are going to be considering moving to a headless solution it's just it seems inevitable, to me, and maybe i've maybe i've you know drank the Kool aid, a little bit too much.
Lee Robinson: like that.
Lee Robinson: That that seems like.
Lee Robinson: The trend that i'm seeing, and I think that what's interesting is that trend can also exist well other net new.
Lee Robinson: Whether it's a sanity or other similar solution the world well, those are also serving other really interesting needs you just can't the gravity of wordpress is so compelling because of how well it serving content editors to know.
Jeff Everhart: And I think the other valuable insight in and what you said is about the dark matter developer.
Jeff Everhart: Because we definitely have a tendency to think of the people that we see represented on like.
Jeff Everhart: Twitter and YouTube and things like that, and all the while under the surface there's this whole other part of the iceberg that you're not even really.
Jeff Everhart: Aware exists, and I can remember, Chris coy from CSS tricks wrote an article about headless wordpress a couple years ago and whether or not it was niche and at that time just the gatsby source wordpress plugin had like a million plus downloads and so it's like.
Jeff Everhart: Can it be niche if there's a million people using this.
Jeff Everhart: And that's only one friend, you know, like that's just gatsby.
Lee Robinson: So my favorite example of dogmatic developers is Facebook groups i'm in.
Lee Robinson: Like various Facebook groups and, like the people who post on there, they have just completely different needs and requirements, then the type of people that you see even on like github discussions are.
Lee Robinson: On Twitter like they're very much focused in like here's the problem I have like i'm just trying to get my stuff done I don't care about the new latest feature really I just I just want to figure out.
Jeff Everhart: trying to get to soccer practice.
Lee Robinson: yeah yeah.
Jeff Everhart: yeah yeah.
Fran Agulto: i'm Lee we have about like two minutes last fun question.
Fran Agulto: Myself and our audience probably wants to know so when you're not coding, or if you're like frustrated and like, why is this not working, and you step away.
Fran Agulto: From the computer, what do you, what do you like to do to clear your mind how fun, is it running rock climbing What do you do Lee but besides listening to Leon bridges.
Lee Robinson: yeah well music is a huge part of my life I listen to a lot of music and I also like to play instruments i've been playing guitar for a really long time and something I really enjoy doing.
Lee Robinson: I also in terms of like physical activities i've really been into biking cycling lately I like to go to the gym when i'm just trying to blow off some steam to.
Lee Robinson: Try to stay tried to stay healthy try to stay active as well as I can, and then in terms of just like personal stuff too like spending time with my wife and with my family and with my friends.
Lee Robinson: try to make sure I have that good distancing when I need it, I can i'll be on vacation this Friday so that'll be fun.
Jeff Everhart: Oh you're.
Fran Agulto: And you're completely when you're on vacation but you literally you don't touch it you don't look at github you don't be you just decompress and to now.
Lee Robinson: To get it's funny.
Lee Robinson: When you look at my github contribution history it's like a lot, and then, just like literally nothing for a week, not a single that because when I tune out i'm like i'm going on vacation this week, like goodbye.
Lee Robinson: I shut down all my stuff and I just never think about it, and that works really well for me to like recharge and reset because when i'm on.
Lee Robinson: I give it my all I like I really try to do my best work and then, when I need to break and I need to recharge I go on vacation for a week and I go sit on a beach somewhere and have a Margarita and just kind of relax.
Fran Agulto: Right well right.
Fran Agulto: You don't be kind of i'd be stokely like.
Fran Agulto: So there's you know Austin Texas is like the self proclaimed live music capital of the world.
Jeff Everhart: It really is on the Sixth street is that it fran.
Jeff Everhart: night and.
Jeff Everhart: Oh do every band in there was better than any other live bar band i've ever seen as fantastic.
Fran Agulto: It would be awesome if we're self hosted a meet up with Lee and then we played like a.
Fran Agulto: yeah after just go see you leave plenty of it.
Lee Robinson: sounds awesome start practicing now.
Jeff Everhart: i'll come bring my guitar will do some Leon Brittan is covers.
Lee Robinson: That that'd be fun.
Jeff Everhart: yeah well on that note, we definitely want to be respectful of your timely again thank you so much for.
Jeff Everhart: Coming on, we had a great discussion today we touched on a lot of different interesting topics.
Jeff Everhart: And we're really happy to have you here.
Lee Robinson: So yeah.
Jeff Everhart: thanks again.
Lee Robinson: Thank you for having me.
Fran Agulto: And I probably will ask you back, so thank you Lee.
Lee Robinson: i'd love to come back.
Jeff Everhart: Alright cool to.
Lee Robinson: See ya yep.