Hello, everyone, Welcome to an episode of your own I hope today. I'm Gussie and I'm joined on the panel by Page.
Hey, everybody and t J.
Everyone awesome, and our guest today is Billian Magida. Hi, Di dear, Hi, let's talk about maybe you telling us a bit about yourself, why you're famous, what you do development, and yeah, that kind of stuff.
Okay, I'm not sure famous. Okay. My name is Dillion and I'm from Nigeria, a software engineer and a technical writer. Currently work at this dot and I write on a lot of publications, a lot of organizations. I write with free cood, CAUMP, I write with Lord Rocket and a few other places. And I think that's the basic about me.
So, in terms of your writing, is there any kind of things or topics you like writing about or enjoy.
Mostar As a software engineer, I write about or I love writing about everything I learned, but mostly I write about web development because that's my speciality. And I also have a major focus on the front end. So you'll find a lot of articles around front end technologies, frameworks, practices around frame around front end generally cool.
So one of the articles you wrote about recently was about building a source Paul gats Bie, and maybe we could maybe look at that a bit. So in terms of gats be itself, for people that maybe don't know about gasp, you can maybe talk about gats to itself as a platform and what you can do with it.
Okay, gads b is a React framework, is built based on React. And the beauty of gads B that I know is that it's a static generator. Two, it's just
for building or use for generating static sites. So you have your or you have your javascripts, you have every of your assets, and then they're just compound together to create those static sites and then busily about gat to be again is it uses graph Quo, which means within your pages, you can query notes that I created inside of your application or from other plugins, so you can query those notes and then build your application based on those notes.
So I'm pretty familiar with gatsby. I actually built my own personal website with it, and one thing that I've noticed about it is that it really it takes advantage of the plug in ecosystem that has kind of sprung up around it. It seems like whatever you might need in terms of links or Google fonts, or analytics or whatever. There's probably a gasty plug in for it. But I've never, certainly never really looked under the hood of the plugins
to see how they're built. So I'd love to hear how you you know, how you got started, what you needed that there wasn't a plugin for, and then how you went about building one and adding it into the ecosystem.
Okay, yeah, I forgot to mention that gadsby has a very large plug in ecosystem. Almost, if not every everything you need links images the team. The team at gads b they are also creators of some of these plugins,
and they optimize the sites in various ways. So for me before what I had been using plugins right from when I started, because even when you're starting, you're already starting based on one or two of the most important plugins that are necessary for building your site, or one of which is the gads be transformer too, there are a few very important ones when starting off. So when I started, I started installing plugins and I got the
most everything I need. Like, if I needed something, all I just have to is go online such a gads bee this, and then there is a plugin for it. So my first attempt at creating a plug in was I didn't really need to do something. I just wanted to explore plugins. I just wanted to create a plugin of my own. And the first one I created was for I don't know if you're familiar with Depth Too, blogging platform for majorly web or regioly software engineers. So on
Depth Too. When writing articles using the markdown, you can there's something they call liquid tags. So liquid tags are a beautiful way to embed services on your on your blog, so you can embed twits, you can embed code pens, and instead of you know, going onto code pen and then copying the embedded code, you just use this liquid tag. Start with a calibrase and with the calibrese then the code pen and then maybe the link of the code pen, and then in the built blog it has the embedment
of that code pen. So when I saw that, I I was building my gats peer application, my own personal blog, and I wanted to embed all of these services too. So instead of going online to copy the embed code, I thought about creating my own liquid bags, but for gads be applications. So it was while doing that I discovered how how interesting or how fascinating it was when during your own pluggins. Yeah, that was my first experience with creating my own plugging.
Oh, I mean I first came across Gatsby. I think it's a couple of years ago when I was doing that typical thing of a developer trying to do a new blog, and you get more excited about the process right of doing the development and creating a blog. And one of the things I struggled with back then was understanding how it all works. And maybe it's probably changing now. I'm guessing in terms of new material and new tutorials, but in terms of getting started, how easy is it now?
Just say, in terms of some he wants to build a blog right and page as we already, but how easy do you think it is now in terms of getting a blog up there and getting started content and everything else.
Well, with a lot of bloggings created and a lot of templates created of course by the community, it's very easy. In fact, if you do not have a design of your own, you can just go to the Gatsby side and you can just duplicate the templates, have it's in your own name, and then you have your blog already. So it's very very easy. And a lot of templates are still they're still being created for blogs, for e commerce websites, for a lot of other use cases.
Yeah, I would. I would definitely say that that is the case. On the Gatsby website. They even have a thing that they call Starters, which is hundreds of gas starter websites that people have built, and they're for everything.
There's ones that work for blogs, there's ones that are set up for e commerce, there's ones that are The one that I used was called an Advanced Starter, and it has a whole bunch of stuff built into it or already kind of I guess, set up plugins for SEO and plugins for sharing, and plugins for discuss if
you want to have comments. But what I really liked about that one in particular was even though it had all of this kind of configuration set up, it had no styles, so you were able to then completely take control of how you wanted it to look. And really I added a bunch of stuff, I removed a bunch of plugins that I didn't care about. So there's there's something for everybody, regardless of what you're looking for. There's ones that are set up to run on aws. There's
ones that have authentication. There's ones that integrate with different CMS systems already. There's if you if you can tell like what you're looking for, or if there's some you know, buzzwords that you're trying to hit, you can probably find it as a category under these starters. So it's really
really helpful in that regard. Yeah, the gats B side is pretty cool, although I know that next is like really gunning for them in addition to its server side rendering and its ability to be flexible enough to be a full application as well. So it'll be interesting to see how they continue to compete with each other and improve because of it.
I'm curious too, So the blog post you wrote is about a source plug in, so is source there referring to the content itself? It's going to drive like a blogger. I'm curious what sources in this context?
Okay, source context of SOX plugging is our quality feature. Oh it technique. It's just a technique for pulling content from various sources, so you can either pull locally or pull externally from another website from an EPI. That's just what the SCE means.
The gotchet so it would be like I want to use gas By to build my site, but the content itself is in wherever right, some other platforms some of the a p I.
Okay, so I'm guessing this is all kind of part of the jam stack, right. I feel like funtended and fun tend them. I think so with regards to the whole kind of ecosystem, I know that page mentioned next what is it? What are the options out there? And why does gats before you stand out compared to next years or other thing? It's got to be used for this kind of thing.
Oh well, when you look at next years, in my own experience, next year is more performance or specifically for server side rengering. Of course it does start excite generation. But when you look at Gatsby and next year is in my experience, if you want static static assets at the end of the day, Gatsby has a lot of support for that. I mean that is even their their main their main product. But when you're looking at server
side rendering, then you can go next years. So of course you hear a lot of arguments about next years doing all that gats It does. But in GADS with defense, I will say gads we has a lot of things that makes them exceptional. Once it comes to static side generator, one of which is the source plug in, and then another is the plug plugging ecosystem, you see a lot of plugging. So if you're doing static sites, in my opinion,
next years doesn't come as closed as Gatsby. But once you're doing anything server side, then next year stakes doing.
Oh yeah, I'm looking at the gas library right now and the website it says you've got more than twenty one hundred product for actually building your different websites. So clearly a lot of work has gone into the community to So if somebody wanted to learn how to create the first plug in and what you give them based on your own experience and what they've gone through so far.
Well creating a plugging first, It depends on what you want to do. There are transformer plugins transformed plugging as the name as name means, it's just you're transforming an asset, you're transforming data, you're transforming and image. There are also source plugins, and those are the two common ones. I don't know if there are any other category. So, and the guard beside has documentation on this. You can try some advanced stuff too, but that would heavily depend on
how you understand the way these plugins work. So if your greatness source plugging, there is a there is. They're just basic information you need and and the rest is up to you. There are optional tools you can use. There are optional methods that the Gatsby to expose this if you're interested in them. But then at the very basic level, the documentation provides enough information that you need in creating any plugging, except you're trying to do something that they were in prepared for.
So, Dillian, I'm looking at your personal website now, did you build this with Gatsby?
Yes, that's my very first experience with Gatsby.
Nice. I would have been disappointed if it had been anything else, I think. So, I see on your about me page that you're actually the founder of a thing called the Web for five. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is.
The word for five was a platform I created specifically for writing my own articles. And the reason I created that was delion Miki. That it's called my personal website wasn't exactly a blog, like. It's my own personal space for writing stuff. So I can write about personal life stories and I can also write about articles so I needed this other space where it to be strictly web development articles, no personal story. And then also I was hoping that I would get authors, guest authors that will
join me on that platform. And the reason why it's named web for five years, I wanted to really demystify web topics there. Although people commonly misunderstand me. They think that it's meant for five year olds, but it's that's not possible. But the main idea was just demystifying it to this smallest level that anybody could understand.
That's very cool, so kind of like I'm five on Reddit.
Yeah, that's it nice.
I like this actually quite a bit because you're you're covering I'm just looking. So we put the link to it in the show notes. But things like document fragment and the dom parameters and arguments, substring and slice methods of strings, like these are topics that I think are super valuable and you don't see covered very often, right, Like, this isn't a super hip or trendy thing to cover,
but it's actually super useful. So this is kind of a I'm sort of fascinated by the site of people looking through.
That was goal. My goal is to touch all those small topics that you really don't see often and sometimes they exist, but you're not just outwagh that there is something like this. It just creating websites.
Yeah, the file input field and depth. I think I need to bookmark this one. These are like the I swear like that's one of the great and horrible things about the web is like there's all these little like nooks and crannies for things that have been around for a while, and some of them are just completely shrouded in mystery that we just try to ignore. But sometimes you need to know some of this stuff.
Yeah, I mean I definitely second that because we I think it's the thing where once you've been in coding for a while, we forget that sometimes that kind of basic elements and always that will cover it. Or maybe you might have used it in a project briefly or don't fully understand how it can be used elsewhere and the power of a particular feature set or whatever. So I mean, in terms of you're writing, then how do
you decide what you write and what your process? Do you do an outline first and then maybe working for a few weeks, do you have like a calendar that you have your articles that you're writing about and how to kind of go about the process of if you're writing for various blogs and websites.
I have one. I have my personal trailok board where I dropped my arctical ideas. So this icol inspirations. They come sometimes when I find when I experience a bog and then I go on Google and then maybe it takes me a lot of time in finding the solution. So when I finally get the solution, I write about it so that anyone using anyone who experiences the same
now has an article that clearly covers that bog. Then some other inspirations when I discover some tools I never knew existed, or some APIs, maybe dumb APIs I never knew existed. Once I come about them, I try to just I just try to let the public know that such tool exists and this is how to use them. And a very good example was the web share API. I never knew there was a web share API. Whenever I wanted to add sharing features to my applications, I have to go to Twitter and copy the template RL
and go to LinkedIn. But when I discovered the webshare API, the navigator, how it connects with your mobile applications and giving you access to share on WhatsApp, on Facebook. I wrote about it, and I think till now I think that's my highest viewed article because when I hear it on Sweeter, people were like, wow, so this existed. So sometimes when I discover amazing twos like that, I write about them. And then sometimes I write about articles that I want to learn. I want to know how they work.
So maybe in my workplace or maybe I'm just going around the internet and I see, for example, the fragments. When I saw the document Fragments, I really didn't know how they worked. So I had it on my board that I was going to write about it, and then that caused me to make a lot of research and then I find a little bit about it.
That's very cool. I'm still clicking around on your website. You have you have written for a bunch of publications, like you said, log Rocket, dev Dotto Vonage. So I'm curious how did you get in with those publications or free code Camp. Did you submit articles to them? Did they come to you with it? Like? How how does that go for anybody who would be interested in potentially writing for things like this in the future.
Well sometimes I've had one occasion where they came to me, but for most others, I'm the one applying. And the reason why I love writing in various places is I don't just want to have my contents in one place. I believe frequent Camp has their own audience, log Rocket has their own audience, so, you know, an attempt to reach out to everyone's audience. Then I try to spread my contents around. But for anyone trying to apply some
of them, they have their right for our speech. Freqal campus years, log Rocket has years, associates, and few other places I have they have theyears. And sometimes when your articles want someone to cover your articles somewhere, they reach out and they're like, okay, so your article here and I would love you to write for us, and this is what we have if you're interested.
Awesome. And in terms of your article so far, are there anyones that are kind of highlights to you beside the oaring API you've done or log Rocket trapic Cote Camp And how is that kind of benefited maybe your your career and let you maybe have more exposure and learning even more than you already.
My favorite article at this point. The one on the top of my head is one of the first article I wrote for log Crockets, and it was understanding cues in no GS. And the inspiration behind the article was I learned about queues from a tutorial was watching, and then when I went on line to find out more information, I discovered that at that point I couldn't find any article. Even up to the second such result of Google, I couldn't find any article that was specifically for no gsq's
apart from the one in the note documentation. So I wrote about it. And when I wrote about it, I realized that people didn't even know that People didn't even know that they were accused like this in no GS and even up to you now, I still get feedbacks from friends and they're like, Okay, I went on Google or searching for no gsq's and your article came out first. So for me, it gave me a lot of understanding.
It made me understand a lot of how NUGS works, how it handles asynchronous operations, from reading files to making API requests. It made me understand more like the in depth of no GS. And also I believe with that article it has made a lot of people online know how NUGS works on that wood.
Okay, so I'm totally guilty. I do not know what no gsqs are and now I'm very curious. So could you explain what like no jsqs are and like why your average developer like, like what knowledge that could help you do well?
Looking at it from the top le, they may really not help you because when you go to no years, you just call your APIs, you just radio files. You just perform every of these as synchronous operations, and you really don't care how no year has handled them. All
your concern about is no years eventually handles them. But the article is relevant when you really want to know how no JS works, and maybe in some cases where you're trying to understand why this operation was completed before this other operation, then the article be of good health because the relevance of cues is no JS expects you to do a lot of asynchronousity, and the cues is just its own way of ensuring that there are no conflicts.
It's its own way of ensuring It's just like a law or a policy that guides how asynchronous operations are handled in no years, So you really may not need it for development, but maybe for interviews or maybe just understanding how Nutchas walk that school be very relevant.
Yeah, I can see that because I've definitely written, like usually when I touch nodes stuff, it's like quick, one off scripts to do something, and so there's definitely been times where it's like I do not know what's happening here, but like, as long as my script finishes and does what it needs to do, it's like great, right, But I could totally see how once like you're writing things that need to stick around and be like production ready, Like, I can see why you might need to know that
rather than just hoping for the best. So I'm curious, Actually, you mentioned that you balk about things that just come up and you run across. I'm curious what your day job is, because you seem to run across some absolutely fascinating set of topics because I've found it very interesting just seeing the things you've come up with. So I'm curious, like what your day job is, what sort of things you work on, because this is pretty interesting stuff.
But well, before I, before I got working at my current company, I was a freelancer and I didn't really have many clients, so it's just past now project. So then I didn't really have much doing. I could just get an idea and in a week I would make
my research and I would write. Then when I got my job my articles, I started writing articles during weekends, so I didn't really have much time during the week, or if I had any time, I would just you know, write them pieces by pieces by pieces till the final till the final version. But mostly I shift them to weekends so I could just wake up on Saturday and then go to my board and see something I pick up, and between Saturday and Sunday, I have them waiting and then I share them during the week.
Looking on your profile, also, you're building something called Schoolmark.
Yeah, it's my own small startup.
Cool cool Yeah, So I mean it says it's an online market for business. Moment in the German schools. Maybe maybe just how you were about building it and as well.
Okay, so in Nigeria you have a lot of online markets, online stores, but I discovered I and my partner we discovered that for all of these stores, there's really okay, the main inspiration was right from our university. Before we finished. We discovered that when people want to go about advertising their products. They share with friends, they share on their worsapp statues. There really was no formal way of advertising
their products around the school. And of course, when I'm sharing my product on my worsapp statues, it's only my mutual contact gets to see those products. For non mutual contacts to never know unless my friends helped me share that status. So me and my partner, we we found the need to create an online store, even though it had the same services, same features, like every of these online stores, wanting to create a own online store that
would be specifically for schools. So say you're in school and you have a small business that you are making a life off with, then you can just go to that space and then have your products there. And then the beauty about school Mat too is we are still working on We're still hoping for the platform to get very recognized such that once you step into when in school and you want to buy something online, you don't have to ask questions. You just go to school Mat.
So it's an online store having most of the features you find online and other stores, but specifically for schools.
Cool and.
Well, that's very cool, and of course my first question is what tech stack are you using for it?
Okay, I'm using next Ja yes on the front end, amusing next Jase and typescript on the front end, and amusing no Gears and Mongo or Mongos for the back end.
Also, you've got both gus next Experience in and about.
Yeah, I do.
So how has it been so far? Is it? Is it live so that people can start trying it out?
Yeah, it's actually live. We are at the stage of promoting and marketing because we we haven't really gotten the recognition that we're looking for, but we are. We don't expect an instant recognition, so we are going gradually depending on the resources that we have.
That's awesome, very cool, And I'm guessing in terms of the front end aspect of it, how did you go about planning and the architecture, the kind of component design and are using mid docs, moll backs for managing the state or how come together?
Okay, so the architecture was very influenced by how in my crorent company we worked on a project where we use next years extensively, and before working on that project, the site was just built with React. So of course I had some SEO problems where my pages weren't properly indexed. So when I saw how next gas was used immediately after the project, so I just took all of that experience,
the architecture, the way the files were arranged. I just took all of that experience to revamping the whole site. So that was it for state management. I don't have much state management going on, just state within components. I don't have global state management. I haven't found the NEEDI yet for that. Maybe I'm not doing things the right way, but I haven't found the NEEDI yet. For that. I used the SSR as I need, and then I do the front end navigations and speed management as I also need.
I don't think that there's anything wrong with not having
pulled in reducts or another state management tool. We had Mark Ericksson on the podcast a few weeks ago, and he's one of the creators or one of the maintainers of reducts now, and one of the things that we talked pretty extensively with him about was the fact that people are jazzed to pull reducs in at the earliest possible time that they see they might need it, and usually it's way too soon in the project, and a lot of times it's very unnecessary and something like context
would suit their needs just fine. So I think you're doing the right thing by not over engineering this early on.
Actually at the point I'm wanting to have reducs in. But the way next years is built, or do we build next years app? Sometimes he's very had well. In my experience, he's very hard having shared stuff like shared functions, especially when you're doing serva arrangering stuff, because every page when you're doing serva arrangering, every page has its own server arrangering feature where you can pull from the server
or have things statically. So if you're trying to have a maybe a higher order component or something shared with next Year, sometimes it comes off very difficult, and in order to avoid that stress, you just leave it till maybe you very much need.
It makes sense to me.
So you mentioned that you took some learnings from your current role next Years. Maybe what kind of things are talking about in terms of the structure of your application? What tips did you kind of get from your next sist us?
And Okay, so with my little experience of next Years, I didn't really know how to work with get service props, which is the function for doing server rendering reading pages, so I didn't really know how to work with that and are regarding folder structure, all I did was have components, folder and maybe a vieusfold that we have all of the pages. I also saw how Typescript was used before
while using typescript. Before I only know of okay number string, I didn't really know of interfaces, I didn't really know of types. So I also how Typescript was used extensively in the project such that even your intelligence shows you the props of a component and it warns you instantly when you violiate any of the types you have declared.
So the three main things I learned was how to perform server side rendering operations which get server side props and folder structure, knowing how to properly have your comp names, have your containers and then have your pages, and the typeescript. That was where I lend a lot of the Typescript knowledge that I used today for interfaces for prop types. Before I use prop types, react, prop types, sport. Now I use typescript for everything.
Awesome and remind me it's been a while since I've touched next Day. As the get server side props is that I'm trying to remember exactly what that does. Is that like get data from your server so that it could be like almost like statically injected. Am I remembering that right?
Yes, you're getting You're getting data from your SAVA and then you can inject that data as props to your page components.
Okay, so then when I refresh or when I like request my components, I'll get back like markup that doesn't have to go get the data because the data is already kind of exactly.
That's the beauty of next years. You get it even before the page shows on the web browser.
Okay, cool?
I mean, is there anything else you want to maybe talk about that that we haven't talked about yet.
Or well I was hoping i'ld hear more on the gads bieceus plugging. Sure, sure, okay, So, like I said, the gads be source plugging allows you to pull contents from various sources. Could be locally and it could be from an API. As long as there's a service providing those contents, you can pull them and then your site creates those static assets based on what you have pulled. So with the source plugging, for example, you're building a website like the article I wrote towards using hash node.
So say you're building your own blog. You want to have your own blog with your own styles, with your own header, with your own navigation. But then you have a lot of articles already on hash node and you don't want to rewrite all of them again. So like I showed in the article, you can create your source plug in and you can use hash notes API to pull your articles through that API. And when you pull it through the IPI, you create GRAPHQR nodes from the
data you have pulled. And then after creating graph car notes, let's say in the blog path, in the block page of your website, you can use graph cr to pull all of those articles you've written and then you can display them on the front end, so you can display that on the front end and then add it to whatever articles you're going to write on your own space. So that's the way it works. The graph your API
is the gap PAPI is a graph your API. So you use a graph cr service or a graph cr library to cureerate that API, and then you get the articles and then you display them on your website. And then the way got we also works is once you add any article to hashnote, you would have to rebuild your website so that it pulls the fresh data coming
from hashnote. And you can also create a tool, if possible, such that once you write an article and it goes to hashnote, a build is automatically run on your own website so that it pulls the fresh data.
So hashnote I think it came up in a previous episode as well, but I think it's basically like a blogging platform, right, I'm curious, with a very large community, I'm curious what is the advantage of writing say on hashnote versus just like having a bunch of markdown files in the same repo as your actual gats B side.
The reason I don't see any difference. The only difference I see is distress involved in having to pull every of those articles. Tress involved in having to write or copy and paste every of those articles in your own space. So instead of going through that a source plug, it would be a very handy.
Too, saying like if you already had things that hasal it's far easier to pull them. Then I see, like manually create mark damn files.
Yeah, okay, yeah, last time I looked to dimestack or
building sites using these tools. One thing I saw was that a lot of people saying, having your data I think like either WordPress or hashald in this in this instance, or I think other sides like content full, I think, and then using a toolet CAATs which I just pull it later and basically allow you to keep your content and kind of back end if you like in WordPress, but then your front end is and reacts, and I'm guessing with them with gats that line of thinking is
being quite heavily moted, I imagine, and is being targeted as okay if you have your stuff, like like you have a national for example, and you go into a company. Because for me, I'm thinking more in my first job for a developer ours a journalist, and I know that back then we would write our stories and like a
same as system. But then because we had no kind of control in terms of how the funding looked, and because the tools then were quiet kind of archaic and quiet old, we couldn't maybe take advantage of the newer things that you're allowed to like react, angler and netview whatever.
So I'm guessing with a gats be tool, if I had a a blog or a complete website in WordPress, for example, I could use GATS being to basically pull that data out of WordPress and then using GATS we be able to make it maybe use the tools that GUTS we have that maybe I might have an old system.
Yes, but that will also depend on how much information Press releases. So what Press mainly release texts through the IAPI, They may release images, so depending on the types of data that they release, that would determine what you can pull and use on your own platform.
Yeah, and I think it's pretty It's a pretty commonplace thing to have content not in markdown files because we on this color are all developers and like tossing markdown files and like a GitHub repos like seems like no
big deal. But Carl you mentioned like journalism, like most places that write content, the people that write it or review it or edit it don't want to manually update markdown files or like they have tools for writing, for editing, for processing, for proof reading, all these types of things. They have these platforms for this. So I like the this.
This is like an appealing workflow to me because then the developers that are working on the site can just use your plugin or use whatever gats be workflow to just pull it in from those other platforms that are probably more familiar or more suited to hold to other people that aren't like the React developer persona.
And the benefits when you look at CMS is with CMS you can manage drafts. You can also if possible, add reviews or maybe add comments. You can invite someone tols look at something. But if you are doing everything as a markdown, the only way you can manage draft is if you haven't pushed the master yet, because once
you push the matter, it appears on your website. So I think that's the benefit of CMS is handling your your every of those assets, some veios and then just pulling them into yourn application.
Yeah. I mean, as long as you're probably more than one person working on a site or working writing articles, you're probably going to want some sort of a headless CMS like WordPress content or yeah, WordPress content for sanity, there's it seems like there's a new one every day.
But personally, I'm one of those developers who wants complete control over my content because most of my content right now is on Medium, to be completely honest, and I've realized that while that's great for generating new readership and reaching people. If Medium went down tomorrow, I would be completely out of luck for all the hours and words
that I have put on that website. So I'm actually in the process of taking all of my Medium articles very slowly and making them into markdown files that I have complete control over. So now if GitHub goes down, then I'm out of luck. But then pretty much the rest of the Internet will be out of luck with me, so we'll all be starting over from scratch at that point.
But yeah, that's the I guess the biggest drawback is that you're depending on somebody, some source outside of yourself for holding onto that valuable content that you've made.
It's the page. What you need to do is you need to write a Gatsbee played again that scrapes Medium right and turns it into markdown files. It's clearly right that that sounds not that bad.
I mean, there it could be that also sounds like it would take me probably twice or four times the time.
Then just cop I believe there should be a Ghatspie, so it's pluggin for Medium already there is.
I should just say page like hours and hours of her life potentially.
Right now. For my blog, which has been neglected heavily, sadly and needs a lot of love. And I've been inspired that page is efforts actually to make her make her blog look much much nicer. Am using ego at the moment, which is obviously in the one Boy. I think I think it's a built using go if I'm correct, and yeah, and I've been thinking about I need to change it and also shift my content from death Dorto at the moment, which is where I'm when I do blog by write on there. But I also want to
have my own space on the internet. And initially I was quite skeptical of Gatsby because I felt like it just was adding a lot more, adding a lot of quickity. But I think having talking to you did it, and also seeing pages work, I think I might give it a go now actually, and and see where it takes me, and hopefully I'm able to come back maybe in a few months time and say, yeah, it's worked.
I've done it, so if it makes you feel any better, Carl, I've been working on this blog since April of last year on nights and weekends and when I had free time, so it took me quite a while. Until I felt confident enough with it, you know, looking decent, functioning on mobile and desktop, to where I finally pushed it live into production, which was the beginning of March. So yeah, don't feel bad at all. This has been a long time getting to this point where it looks pretty good.
So it might be a few more months.
Then. With personal websites is you're never just satisfied. You want to have a bookmark feature, you want to have darc moved, and until you do all of these, you don't want to probably it.
And then you see something cool on someone else's site and you're like, oh, I shouldn't have that too, Yeah, how did they do that?
That is funny? Like I'm jealous somehow jealous of everybody else's personal website, but I always think my own is trash, right, Like Kilian, I noticed you you have on your site you're like about page. You have just a fun little animation on your profile picture which I saw that I was like, oh, that's super cool. I should totally do that or steal that, or I should have cool ideas like that awesome.
So I think we can probably shift into the pig position now and just it's basically a section where we just choose either something we've seen on nine eighteen article or maybe books have been cool that you want to share with them everyone else. So maybe Paige can start of us with the picks this week.
Absolutely so my pick for this week is for everyone who has batteries that power vehicles. It could be a car battery, maybe a boat, motorcycle, anything like that. And it's actually a battery charger slash conditioner. So if you've ever noticed, sometimes if you haven't started something up for a while, it'll have a hard start. That's usually because the battery has built up some acid in it that's making it difficult to start, or it just needs really
to be put through its paces. And there's a product called Optimate which does high performance battery chargers, and because my husband has a company with equipment, he's quite familiar with these. But this is a great little tool and you can attach it to any type of battery, car battery, like I said, a lawnmower, really anything that has kind of a typical battery set up, and this little attachment will run the battery through its paces and basically break
up any acid that it might have that's making it start. Hard. It will just kind of bring it back to almost like new conditions if it was a brand new battery and it's you know, depending on which one you get, it can range anywhere from about forty bucks to you can get ones that can do all sorts of different sizes of batteries twelve volt, twenty four volts and larger
for commercial use. For you know, a few a couple hundred dollars, but it's been really great for extending the life of my own car's batteries and for some of the equipment that he has but hasn't turned on for a while. So if you ever need something like that, I would definitely recommend checking out these optimate chargers because they're they're pretty legit.
Problem too with VON equipment because our lawn stuff only you only need it for like five six months out of the year here, so when we started back up, it's constantly an issue like who knows what the battery's going to do.
So, yeah, that's exactly what this kind of stuff is built for. When they work really well, awesome.
Let's go to TV.
I'm going to pick a framework called remotion. It's this I just saw it a couple of weeks ago, and it's basically a framework that lets you build programmatic videos and React. So probably the best example I can think of is like, if you're a Spotify user, you might know that they give you like this little visualization of the songs you listen to in the last year. But so it's like a video file, but like it's unique
to the person. So the framework is for building videos with React, but it's not like a video editor, so it's not like an iMovie sort of thing. It's basically like you're creating a set of animations and at the end tool turns it into an MP four video file. So it's it's kind of cool because you're making videos, but you can use like React so you can like dynamically bring in data for driving this video, which is something like you'd never do in something like iMovie or
something like that. So I'm going to link to the framework, and I'm also going to link to a chat I did with the guy behind it, because it's one of those things that like it sounded cool, but it didn't click for me, and then when I saw him actually like use the thing, it sort of blew my mind a little bit. So I'll recommend that and I'll toss it in the show notes.
Yeah, I'm looking at the website. It sounds wow cool actually in videos, definitely check it out. Awesome And yeah my pics for today. The first one is there's a newslesa which is jam stacked and it basically gives you the latest news in the kind of gamstack ecosystem. So it has articles on how to do things and Gatsby has stuff about x JS basically over the kind of jumps like key kind of besk issues, right, So it's quite cool if you want to be if you want to be up to date with the latest news in
Downstack's world. And the second and more fun pick is barbecues. So over here in the UK we have been allowed to actually meet outside because we've been in lockdown since December last year, and only I think two weeks ago they actually allowed us to meet outside in up to six people at a time. And I had a barbecue this weekend just to finally celebrate being able to come up in the open and have the social life and
this in these kind of strange times we're in. And I've got a link to a video that has on YouTube about basically how to have barbecues in terms of how to clean a barblagol because that's the one thing I really hate is cleaning afterwards. And I've been basically trying all kind of techniques using baking, soda, vinegar, soaking it in more gar, soaking it and putting it in the newspapers, peeling a grill with an onion, or before you was doing a barbecues and potatoes to actually make
the grow not stick to the meat. So basically, yeah, if you if you're looking forward to the barbecues this summer, that video can help you on your way. So that's for me, let's go to do it. And what for us this week?
Okay, I didn't prepare for this, but recently, that was Monday, I looked into side press. You are testing the framework. I've heard a lot of good things about it. I've had a lot of people say it's useful end to end testing. But the reason why I haven't used it
before was I didn't really know what to test. So in where I work, we're working on a I made some changes and then I had to write some tests for those changes, and in the presse of writing those tests, I realized or I discovered a few things that I could also test for on my own website. So I top Cypress on Monday, and I love development experience of Cypress.
It's with it presents you a Chrome instance, and on that Chrome instance, you can literally see each and every process, or each and every step of the test that feels all that passes. You can also take snapshots of when this particular test passed and this particular test failed. So if there's anyone who haven't tried it yet and you're looking and getting into UI testing, UI testing, then you should check out Cypress.
Oh.
I think we actually had an episode, was it two or three weeks ago? So we were actually spoke to a developer actually about testing in depth as well, and I think we touched upon Cypress, the Selenium and other different tools as well.
So yeah, I'm a huge fan of Cypress. My team is is it. It's so easy to get started with. That's a great teck awesome.
So if anyone wants to get in touch with you, Delian, either online or through Twitter, is that what what's your hard on Twitter? And what's your website where people can kind of get in touch to say hi, ask questions.
I think I can share it in the chat section that's Twitter and.
Who as well for anybody else wants to have a look at it.
Yeah, I think there's only two relevant ones.
Most reallyvant Well, thank you so much for your time today, and then we would appreciate it, and thank you for hoping we see that gets to be actually is an option now on the bit on the on the on the edge, and then page push me a bit. But now if you probably push me, I'll be americ at that.
Thank you very much for the invitation. So it's nice sharing all of this, and.
Thank you one and we'll see you again next time.
Thank you later.