Ep. #122, Living on the Edge with Anthony Campolo of Edgio

Brian Douglas: Welcome to another installment of Jamstack Radio. On the line we've got, again, Anthony Campolo. Anthony, what is going on?

Anthony Campolo: Hey, hey, hey, Brian. Thanks so much for having me back. Third time, I think you said I'm tied for the most frequented guest at this point.

Brian: Yeah. I think you're tied now with Johannes Schickling who's one of the co-founders of Prisma. But I want to talk about what you're doing now because you've been here a few times and I think the first time you didn't have a job, and then you got a job. Then you came on when you had the last job, and now you have a new job. So what are you doing now, Anthony?

Anthony: Well, this really brings it all full circle in a great way because the first time I was here I was talking about Redwood, and that's kind of how we got to know each other. I was trying to break into the industry and I got involved in this open source project, Redwood, and became their defacto DevRel person who was going out and doing podcast interviews and meetups and all that. Then I got hired at StepZen to do GraphQL stuff.

Then I decided to pivot into the web3 stuff and we had a really great conversation about web3. I was very thankful for that because it was very hard to find people in the Web 2.0 who wanted to talk to me about web3 because it's a contentious topic and people have a lot of strong feelings about it. I loved it, I learned a lot, I met great people and I still think the space has a lot of great things to do.

The reason why I ended up deciding to pivot away from it was really nothing to do with web3 itself and more to do with just my actual network because I also host FS Jam and at this point I've had every single JavaScript framework creator on the show so people like Brian Carniato or people I talk to on a regular basis now. So I felt very honored to have these close connections to people who trusted me and seemed to see me as peers, and I felt like I was starting totally from the bottom of web3.

I didn't have any connections, I was learning all the tech and all of my previous connections and friends were like, "Ah, I don't really want to have anything to do with this."So I feel like I bifurcated my life in a lot of ways. I just felt like I wanted to consolidate back, so when I was originally talking to QuickNote I was also talking to Edgio at the same time. Ishan at Edgio, who's actually been on the show, we'll talk about him in a second.

He contacted me and was basically like, "Are you sure you don't want to work for Edgio?" And restarted the conversation, and yeah, I was in a position where I could name my price and I felt like it would be a good move both because I knew a lot of the people there already, and I knew that I would get to work more on JavaScript frameworks and the whole deployment stuff that I had already gotten very deep in.

I had actually already helped integrate Redwood which was previously called Layer0, which now is Edgio. So I already knew the platform to a certain extent. All the pieces fell into place and I've been there only a month now. Still pretty new. But yeah, that's what I'm doing now. Edgio, I didn't really say yet, but yeah, I would call it as an enterprise Jamstack solution. I think that's probably the simplest, cleanest way, at least for this audience. It's like Vercel, Netlify, but way doper and for way bigger, faster, more high stakes, more performance oriented sites.

Brian: Okay, yeah. I definitely wanted to get into that. I think that enterprise Jamstack, that is right in our wheelhouse here on Jamstack Radio. Just wanted a really quick programing note from folks, Ishan, his episode is 90, so quite a few episodes ago. Almost, I guess, more than a year ago.

Anthony: Well, it's funny because also on that episode he's talking about Limelight because Layer0 merged with Limelight. Actually there were first called MoveWeb, then they changed to Layer0, then they got bought by Limelight so they were going by Limelight, and then Limelight and Layer0 and EdgeCast merged into a single company called Edgio. So it's actually not only a deployment platform, it's also the top one or two largest CDNs and video streaming platforms in the world. We've been having this whole Superbowl thing going on. Talking about the Superbowl, I would never have people at Step Zen talking about the Superbowl.

Brian: So how big is this Borg of companies? How many people work at Edgio today?

Anthony: Probably about 1,500.

Brian: 1,500? Okay. For some reason I thought this was... Because my contact is Ishan, so I thought this was still a new thing. I didn't realize there was a difference between Layer0 to Edgio, so thanks for enlightening me.

Anthony: Yeah, it's a publicly traded company. You can buy our stock right now.

Brian: Wow, that is amazing. The more you know. Definitely want to dig in, so I always think of Edgio as edge computing, so it's more than just edge computing then at this point?

Anthony: Yeah, the edge computing is a big part of it. The reason why we lean into that in particular is because the same reason we had the name Layer0 for a while, which is that we have our own network. This is not us just building on top of AWS or CloudFlare. We are our own network and we have more POPs than anybody, Points of Presence.

I am going to slightly butcher this, but we also connect more directly with the ISPs themselves so there's a way that the traffic is routed that actually makes us fundamentally faster than some others. So there's some really, really deep tech that let's us be very, very legit which I was very interested in because I've been using all these deployment platforms for a while and the DX is super sweet. But I always knew that there was compromises that went along with it.

You know that when you use Netlify or Vercel, you usually have this idea that you're eventually going to end up migrating to Amazon or something like that. But with this, you wouldn't migrate anywhere.

You get a really nice deployment paradigm, you get your site up, but then you're on one of the fastest, most legit networks in the world so you're already there instead.

Brian: Yeah. It's one of the things, so I wonder, because we're currently going to... We actually are moving to AWS for some infrastructure stuff and we've leveraged some other Jamstack tools that have really got us to where we are today. But the things we want to do, for example, Open Sauce, we currently are indexing a lot of GitHub repos by... It doesn't matter, I won't share our secret sauce. You can definitely hit me up later.

But basically what I'm getting at is we're indexing all this data, we want to do magical things with the data that identify at this point, at this date, what happened? And answer a bunch of questions. Our limitation is we were using this hosted PostgreSQL solution. We couldn't really dig in to what we needed to and we needed elastic search and elastic search to migrate from a hosted version like a Jamstack solution.

It became a little more cumbersome and it was sad to leave the tool that got us to where we are today. But for us to move faster, we had to make that decision. So are you saying that with Edgio I can do a little more custom configurations and choose my own adventure?

Anthony: Yeah. We don't run databases, so that would still be a thing. Your data would be persisted in a database somewhere. But it gives you everything else, it gives you SSR, it gives you edge functions, it gives you static. What's kind of interesting is the way that I'd heard Ishan describe it a lot, is that he would describe it like if you imagine the Jamstack but instead of static first, it's server, SSR, first because it's based more around saying, "We want to give you this deployment paradigm where you're just doing Git Push and you get your thing, you get deployment branches and all that stuff. But it's not doing a static build."

They actually don't run static builds at all. They have a CLI that you can use if you want to do a static build. But for the most part you're actually uploading stuff to their servers and they have their own conventions around route file and stuff like that. That's where you can get really fine grain cache managements, you can configure all your cache headers.

For that stuff it can be challenging if you want to do it from scratch, but what's really cool is that we have integrations with every single framework. If you go to our website at Edg.io and check out the docs you'll see 40 frameworks, all the classics. We have a distinction between what we call Tier One frameworks and Tier Two frameworks. Tier One is full support, we keep up with the new releases and we're always on the hottest of things like NextJS, which is going to be the standard for that. Back in the day, they actually invented their own framework called React Storefront. This is not a very well known framework, but it was a way to-

Brian: I do remember it.

Anthony: Yeah. It was a way to implement partial hydration in NextJS and it was actually making an eCommerce ready solution for React. So yeah, it's the whole thing about enterprise, performance, and I really thought this was the way to go because I've seen this trend play out over the last couple years where you have Solid and Quick and Marco is trying to become more people where JavaScript devs get that performance.

It's a thing that is an issue that we need to think about. So for deployment platforms, along with our frameworks can help. That's what you need because you can't just have a fast framework and an okay deployment platform, or a fast deployment platform and an okay framework. You need to have both of them now.

Brian: Yeah, 100%. We were having this conversation before we hit record around the React ecosystem. Is it going through a transition? Are we getting refocused efforts with Vercel now having the core tier members now work for them? I'm curious. Actually, you have so much knowledge around this space because I know you connect with Ryan and the Solid team. What is your take on the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem?

Anthony: Yeah. What's funny is actually the first blog post I wrote for Edgio, which we'll put a link in the show notes, was comparing React, Solid and Quick and mapping those to node, Dino and BUN.

So if you think you have React and Node, those are the standards. No one ever got fired for choosing IBM, kind of thing. No one is ever going to get fired for choosing React or Node. I don't think React is going anywhere.

I think React has managed to continue to evolve and stay relevant. React never stayed the same. As soon as people started using it, it picked up they were like, "Okay. We're going to change this whole thing and bring in hooks." Then once everyone figured that out they were like, "Okay. We're going to change this whole thing and make it server components." And every time they've done that, the ecosystem has gone with them, surprisingly enough. So I think what they've done is pretty incredible, but there is legacy, there is things that hold them back from being as performant as they could be.

That's where things like Solid comes in, Solid is also like Dino. They've both been around for like four or five years, they are actually really established at this point and they take the previous paradigm and say, "We're going to look at this. We're going to look at what could be improved and we're going to tweak those things." So Solid looks a lot like React. It has JSX, but under the covers it's doing different things. There's no vDom and there's compiler and there's all this stuff that makes it really lightweight and really performant.

Same with Dino using Rust and the general performance mindset, and DX, and having your tooling be all integrated. But then you have Quick and BUN which are saying, "Lets actually not even try to take the last paradigm and improve it. Let's throw it out and build a new paradigm that will be fundamentally faster in ways that they can never compete with." So Quick does this with resumability, that allows you to remove hydration entirely so there is no JavaScript that needs to be booted and loaded. They just can resume the state wherever they were.

Then BUN, which is using a completely different programing language called Zig, which is basically this one dude who sat down and benchmarked every single line of code that will ever be written in JavaScript and made them as fast as possible. That's how I see BUN. So yeah, it's kind of a question of how cutting edge do you want to be? How much do you want to be on the bleeding edge, versus how much do you want to stick with nice, safe, stable tech? So lots of good reasons to choose React, lots of cool, new things that you could dive into if you feel the need to experiment.

Brian: Yeah. That's the thing about this experimentation. I appreciate you coming on and giving us the state of our ecosystem, because Quick is something I haven't... I met the Quick founder, or I guess the co founder at Builder.io.

Anthony: BuilderIO. Yeah, there's Michiko, there's Steve, there's Manu.

Brian: Michiko, that's it. Yeah.

Anthony: They are, I think, one of the coolest teams in all of open source right now. I have so much respect for what that team is doing. Yeah, you need to get them on the show.

Brian: For sure. I met Michiko at the React Holiday Party a couple months ago, which you asked about Oakland before we jumped on. Yeah, I feel like San Francisco might be back. There's some pretty killer events that are happening.

Anthony: That's what I'm hearing. I'll never be back, but I'll visit.

Brian: You had your tour of duty here. But so I wanted to talk about experiments in the context of Edgio because I wonder, because that's the challenge of things like BUN and Quick and Dino. Being able to use this cutting edge technology, you kind of have to wait for AWS to make it feature ready. So does Edgio unlock that for users, or are we still shopping around on where we can deploy or BUN apps?

Anthony: Yeah. We are running the standard type JavaScript stuff. You're going to be really running Node at the end of the day for your server. There may be a point where we'll give the ability to do things like Dino and BUN. But I don't think that's really a huge priority right now because the network itself is already optimized to run Node very, very quickly. Then there's their own edge type thing. They're calling it edge functions, but they're not like CloudFlare workers. They're more like a way of configuring your CDN itself through JavaScript.

So that is the type of thing you would do if you want to manipulate headers and reroute traffic and do things like that. That's actually built in directly to the platform in a way where you don't have cold starts at all because you're not spinning up an isolate or something like that. It's just code that's running.

This is stuff that I'm still... the deep infrastructure of this stuff, I'm still learning how it works. Some of these explanations are not as tight as they will be in a month or two. But the main thing is that the whole thing is built around performance.

Brian: Yeah, 100%. You had mentioned in passing Jared had sat and rewrote every single primitive in JavaScript into Zig.

Anthony: Zig, yeah. That's really it, it's just maniacal focus on one single metric, and then optimizing it, and that metric being time. Once you get into that mindset, then you'll be able to see the difference. I actually just learned this working at Edgio, one of our competitors, I won't say which one, is using a very popular edge function kind of solution and they're not really using it correctly.

They're basically just taking it and rerouting it back through their own system in a way that completely defeats the purpose. A lot of times some of things that people are using that they're being told are these awesome, fast, edge native things are actually just vaporware and you actually have to benchmark these things to find out what they're doing.

Brian: Yeah, I love this. I love where this is going. Actually, I'm curious what's your thought on things. Dino, I feel like they have a path forward, the company around Dino. What's your thought on BUN? Do they have a path forward? What's their endgame?

Anthony: Yeah. With Dino you've got Dino Deploy so they have already created their own specific edge function thing, and they're doing good because they're getting picked up by companies like Netlify and Superbase. And so companies are building their edge functions on Dino Deploy and using them as a Platform as a Service type of thing. So that's really good, because then it's not just about, "Can I get a bunch of developers to use my thing?" Which is a really hard thing to do when there's so many options, there's so many great ways to do this.

If you can nab some really big players and get them, that's good, so I'll be curious to see where BUN goes. We do know they're going to build a deployment platform, because that's what Oven is meant to be. Because it's so different in terms of the language and all that, it does make sense for them to have to just build their own deployment runtime. But yeah, it's just a question of how much room is there really, for more deployment platforms and can BUN's performance really win out when they're also going to have to compete on features against CloudFlare and Amazon and us at Edgio?

Then you get into network security and they're not going to handle that stuff. So how much can you get people to buy into a single platform, just based specifically on performance? That's where for me, Edgio. I think a lot like CloudFlare is one of the better ones to compare it to because it's really giving you that networking layer also and you can do a lot with DNS and stuff like that and there's security stuff built in, and more fine grain RUMM, Real User Metric Monitoring. So they aren't just giving you this thing that you can deploy and get a URL, they have all the bells and whistles that you'd actually want to run a production app.

Brian: Yeah. Speaking of which, I took it from the Edgio website, you don't need to sacrifice security for speed. Now, I wanted to dig into what that meant.

Anthony: Yeah. This is cool because, as I said, we went through the process of rebranding so we used to be Layer0 and then we had so many different names and stuff. Now, gosh, I've got to get this right. There's Edgio Applications, and so Edgio Applications is the large umbrella and then there's three things that are made up in that. Those are Edgio Sites, which is you deploy your site, you got the site.

Performance which is the stuff like real user monitoring and getting the performance tuned. Then the security itself, and I can't speak too much to the security yet because I haven't done any of it yet and I'm not a security expert. That's something that I'll be getting spun up on in a couple months or so, but what we mean is that it's a single integrated deployment platform. The same way with Netlify and Vercel, they give you the Analytics tab, and so they have these other tabs that are there and so they don't have a security tab.

There's no way to configure your security on one of these Jamstack deployment providers. That's not really a thing in the way that Amazon let's you configure your security with permissions and all this stuff, and lock things down. So that's really the main benefit, is that you have the ability to have fine grain security control at the networking level.

Brian: Cool. Yeah, so I did want to touch on going back to the enterprise for Jamstack thing. Who is using Edgio? And when would you approach it? Would you approach this from like, "I'm in YC,"and start looking at Edgio? Or are we like, "I'm a big corporate behemoth and I want to start tapping in"?

Anthony: Yeah. It's funny, I was talking to Ishan about this and I can say this now because they just got purchased, but Step Zen. When I was working at Step Zen, when I started working there were zero customers. When I left there was a single customer. They've been acquired now so they're doing fine, but now that I'm at Edgio, Ishan is like, "We have more customers than we can talk to. We need you to start going and talking to customers because we don't have time to talk to everyone."

So it's lots of big, eCommerce sites and I love that because I'm finally at the point now where I can work at a company, where we are running very, very legit companies' websites and it's giving me the ability also to sit in on really high level discussions. I was in one discussion, actually, about whether to migrate a NextJS app to Quick and whether it would be worth investing $2 million to rewrite this app into Quick for the performance benefit. The recommendation, the short of it, is that this tech is eventually going to get there but is probably not there yet, for the investment you would be making into it, and so it was probably not the best bet yet.

But there's ways we can get you that performance through half measures like with Partytown and reducing third party scripts. But it's giving me access to the real conversations around the real tough decisions that need to be made with large traffic websites. As much as I like DevRel, that's what you don't really get from DevRel. It's like you build demo apps, you build sample apps, you build these toy things that are giving people a larger idea of what their applications are going to be.

But if you only do that and you weren't someone who was also an engineer first, you're always going to have imposter syndrome of like, "Okay, I don't actually know how to build a real application though." You know it, even if you try and pretend you can do it. So now I'm actually really seeing where the rubber meets the road.

Brian: Yeah, the rubber meets the road. Yes. Excellent. Yeah, that's so cool. It's definitely going to be an honor. I just discovered how big Edgio was, but also the caliber of customer, end users of the product. That is the one thing when I was working at Netlify, we talked to a lot of those level of companies, obviously. Y'all are competitors to Netlify.

But it was nice to see what people could do with the platform and have that conversation with a couple other big name folks as well. But yeah, with that, I appreciate you mentioning Quick. I'm definitely going to reach out to Michiko and be like, "Yeah, you got to come on this podcast." Because I know he's in my timezone.

Anthony: Yeah. And I would like to talk a little bit about... that's the enterprise, the company side. But really I think where I'm going to be able to add a lot of value right now, today, is more on the open source side and on the community engagement side. They actually have their own podcast called JavaScript JAM which is both a podcast like this, and a weekly Twitter space. This is how I got to know Ishan and one of my other coworkers, Scott, is they used to do this on Clubhouse, this is how long they've been doing this.

They originally had JavaScript Thursdays where they would do a weekly hangout and they would just talk about JavaScript news, so for someone who reads all the JavaScript newsletters, everyone reads the same stories every week and then has a hot take about, "Ooh, Netlify bought Gatsby," and so you talk about that. What was great though, is that they would have the ability for beginners to come up and ask questions, and really saw that they very much cared about community and very much cared about having a welcoming space for newbies. They saw what I was doing with Redwood, getting into open source, and Ishan was like, "Yeah, this dude."

Like with you, you saw what I was doing, like, "This dude is doing something smart in terms of how he's getting into this." And so they saw that and they recognized it, and Ishan has been a big fan of FS JAM. I met him originally because I saw him recommend my podcast to someone in the Jamstack Slack, rest in peace, and that's how we got to know each other.

And so he just sees me as, like you said, someone who knows what's happening in the area and knows the people and just has a deep passion and interest in it. So yeah, I'm going to be hosting weekly Twitter spaces, I'm going to be communicating with all these framework authors, and just figuring out how can we make this platform really work the best for these frameworks and give them the abilities to take them to their fullest potential.

Brian: Yeah. And I will say, what I've noticed from you and I've told you this a bunch of times, Anthony is so... AJCWebDev is everywhere, he is the person you want in your livestream chat answering your random thoughts and questions, looking for that random GitHub repo. Definitely your clutch for being a part of the community. It's nice to see your connections now at a bigger platform to be able to make those connections spread even further.

Anthony: Yeah, and it's really fun because I remember when I was getting into this and it was just so hard. I was just learning to code and learning with these project forums, and learning how to get a resume and a portfolio and all that. It was really demoralizing. But now because of Discord communities, which you got me into Discord.

The first Discord I ever joined was the Open Sauce Discord because you invited me to it, so there's that and there's these Twitter spaces.

There's the ability for developers to connect in realtime and share knowledge and collaborate, and look each other up. I think that's really great, and that's a huge part of open source, a huge part of DevRel and so now I can do that with the full backing of a massive, well funded company behind me.

Brian: Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, Open Sauce Discord is still around. We're not reviving, it's been around for a bit, but we definitely have all been distracted. We've had members leave, members come.

Anthony: You're not streaming as much, though. I will say.

Brian: No. I'm having lots of meetings as of recent.

Anthony: Yeah, you can't stream your VC meetings.

Brian: That is true. Yeah, so for that reason I haven't had the ability to have a two to four hour block to stream on Wednesday and Fridays. But I will be coming back after next week. Next week is still going to be busy, and then my commitment is at least going back to one day a week on streaming because that's where I did my exploration and got to go try out new things like all this AI stuff. I haven't been able to even build anything yet because I haven't had the bandwidth yet.

Anthony: Oh man, we could do a whole nother conversation on ChatGPT.

Brian: Yeah. Well, we'll leave it at that because I definitely want to have Logan who worked at OpenAI to come on and chat about that in the future.

Anthony: That would be cool.

Brian: Yeah. Until then, I actually want to transition us to picks. You already know what picks are, but for folks who are listening this could be music, stuff that we're jamming on, Jam Picks. Could be music, food, technology, related. Nothing is off the table. Actually, I threw some picks in before we hit record and I'll mention them. I got these new headphones that are currently on, they're the Beyerdynamic headphones.

I went down this rabbit hole of Wire Cutter, trying to figure out what the best headphones are because I was having issues with my Bluetooth headphones, my Beats. I wanted to get some wired ones that I could just have work, no matter what. This was highly recommended, these Beyerdynamics. I don't know what the actual brand is but literally if you Google it, you'll find these. It comes in three different styles because they're meant for audiophiles. It's got the 32 Ohms, the 80 Ohms and I think the 320 Ohms, 320 is-

Anthony: A lot of Ohms.

Brian: Yeah. If you want to have a powered amplifier, that's why you would have the higher rate. Also your mixers are powered, so if they have phantom power and stuff like that on there, you get a higher quality sound. I've been using it with this other thing I got which is called the Rode Caster. Rode Caster, if you're livestreaming and you don't know this, if you're a podcaster and you just got into it in the last couple of years, you probably picked up one of these because it's highly recommended.

Anthony: That's what Scott uses actually for hosting JavaScript Jam. He runs everything through that so he can use real microphones.

Brian: Yeah, that is why I got it, it's because the Twitter spaces with the Rode Caster and a real mic, hands down, it's like night and day. Talking through your phone or through your crappy AirPod headphones or whatever. My Bluetooth AirPods, the quality is so bad it's shockingly bad.

Anthony: Actually, one of my first interviews with Redwood I was going through Airpods because I was so broke, literally, I was driving for Uber Eats and I remember trying to save up enough money so I could buy a mic for that podcast and didn't make it in time because I was that broke.

Brian: Wow. That is amazing, to hear the behind the scenes. What was I getting at? Oh yeah, so I got the Rode Caster, I've been doing Twitter spaces weekly, we've been talking about Open Sauce. There's usually an angle. Today we talked about layoffs and what you can do while you're laying off, hint, Open Sauce. Yeah, it's been a great process because I get a little SD card which I literally just took out of my computer right here, and you can just upload it to Dropbox and then one of my teammates edits it down so we already have some cool clips that we have from it. So yeah, Rode Caster, check it out. Beyerdynamic headphones, check those out as well. You got picks, Anthony?

Anthony: Yeah. These are going to be very inline with everything we've been talking about. So I mentioned JavaScript Jam is our podcast/weekly Twitter space, and it's sponsored by Edgio and I do it as part of my Edgio job. But one of the things that really appealed to me about what Ishan and Scott were doing is that they don't feel the need to make it a thing about Edgio, at all. They didn't even used to say the word Edgio, and I eventually told them, "You guys got to at least say this is presented by our company, or else people are never going to know.

Your boss is never going to accept this." So they really leaned into not exploiting the community, and making something that's just valuable and putting it out in the world and I really, really enjoyed that. So yeah, we have complete control to bring on anyone we want to talk about anything we want. We had Matt on to talk about Netlify purchasing Gatsby, one of our competitors. Along with that we have a newsletter, so this is JavaScriptJam.com, and I'm taking that over now. So now I'm writing a weekly newsletter where I get to give my thoughts on what is happening in the space of JavaScript.

It's something I had been wanting to do for a while, but I do so much stuff I couldn't possibly add in a newsletter as another thing. But it's for my job now so I get to do it. But still, they let me write whatever I want, complete creative control so that's really cool. So I would say, people, check that out. You're not going to be getting a bunch of Edgio stuff at all. You'll just be getting straight news about what's going on in open source, JavaScript, and other deployment platforms. You'll get a very good view of all the things that are happening, ideally.

I also started my own stream, so this is something that I have been wanting to do because I had FS Jam where I could bring on people and have these in depth discussions about these frameworks. That's really cool, because I think really getting to pick someone's brain and figure out how do they think about this, how do they describe it, how do they think about what problem they're solving, that's really good. I sit down and have a nice, in depth, hour long interview with these people and find a million things to ask. But you never see the code, you never build anything with it.

You don't really get quite as deep into it as you want to, so I was doing it as I was writing these blog posts, A First Look At Blank, where I would write a Hello World application and deploy it with each framework. So that was cool, but I wanted to do essentially what Ryan Carniado does because what Ryan Carniado would do is he would bring on all of these framework authors from Fresh and Quick and all the hot stuff, and he would build Hacker News, usually, with all of them. So I wanted to do that, but even break it down even simpler.

So basically do the high level projects but with the simplest possible apps. I want to show people how to do a quick Hello World because I think even just that can be useful. So it's called AJC And The Web Devs. We bring on guests from the web world and, yeah, I've already had a lot of really great guests. The first guest was my very good friend Ben Myers, who is somebody you should really get on this show if you never have. He's an accessibility expert and really great guy. We've had Nick Taylor, who you know.

We've had Ryan Carniado, Ben Holmes, Travis Waith Mayer. So a lot of these people are in my network and friends that I already had, so eventually we'll start expanding out but Bryan Roberts will be on to talk about Analog. With that, it's kind of part interview style, we'll all do a bit of a podcast thing, we'll all talk something about the project and then we'll build something, like para programming kind of like Learning With Jason style. I feel like every stream is ripping off Learning With Jason at the end of the day. So that's basically what I'm doing now, and yeah, so I'm getting to just do what I always wanted to do. Make a whole bunch of educational content around cool, open source, JavaScript stuff.

Brian: Yeah. 100%. There's a few people that I definitely want to have on. Ben Myers is somebody I definitely know through Twitch and the Party Corgi network. But we've literally never chatted outside of Twitch Chat or Discord.

Anthony: Actually, I had mentioned once, I was supposed to put you two in touch because he built Show My Chat which is like a Twitch Chat library. It's really, really cool. It's something that you would dig a lot.

Brian: Yeah. I think I actually pulled it up while I was on stream, and was really digging it. I think I actually wanted to build something very similar. But it's the limited time thing. So I've stopped building a bunch of side projects and I'm just focused. I had a conscious effort last summer to only focus on Open Sauce stuff, so I gave up on the dream of building my Twitch chat library of stuff, but happy to leverage other people's stuff.

Anthony: Yeah, you got to focus. That is definitely something that I've found I definitely went too hard into, "I want to learn as much stuff and do as many different things as possible." And eventually I was like, "I need to consolidate back down." And once you do that though, you actually find the things that are worth focusing on, then you start to see much more returns from continuing to engage and invest in those things.

Brian: Yeah, 100%. All right, so that's all the time I have and so we're going to close out the conversation now. But, Anthony, thank you so much for having the conversation, catching us up to date with your current resume and what you're working on. I think it's a great fit, and I think the JS Jam folks, yeah, they do some good work. I do echo, I didn't know they were behind it. I just knew it was a thing that was happening consistently, until one day Ishan DM'd me and was like, "Hey, we're doing a JS Jam for Jamstack Conf." It was like, "Oh, you're? That makes so much sense."

Anthony: That's what I'm saying. Yeah, you got to at least let people know that you're these people from this place. It's the least, bare minimum.

Brian: Yeah. 100%. So anyway, Anthony, thanks for catching up with us.

Anthony: Cool. And thank you, Brian. You have been such a huge supporter of me and really an incredible mentor and I have so much to thank you for, so always great to chat with you and to get to continue to do these.

Brian: Yeah, appreciate it. And folks, keep spreading the jam.