Ep. #66, Studying The Stack with Anthony Campolo

Brian Douglas: Welcome to another installment of JAMstack Radio, on the line we've got Anthony Campolo. Welcome, Anthony.

Anthony Campolo: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm such a huge fan, I'm really glad to be here.

Brian: Awesome well, I'm flattered.

Honestly I know people listen to this thing and I keep putting these things out and I'm just happy to talk about the JAMstack, which is why you're here.

So do you want to tell the listeners what your expertise is and maybe a little bit about your background?

Anthony: Yeah absolutely. So, I'm someone who's coming to this whole coding, programming world from a different background.

So I originally studied music and I was a music teacher for a little while and I ran a performing arts summer camp for a little while called Ucamp I describe it as like "School of Rock" in the woods, but then they also have like film and dance and it started as a theater camp originally.

So that was a lot of fun. But I eventually just kind of wanted to do something different and got really into coding originally through kind of machine learning, data science stuff and was learning Python.

But I didn't get a whole lot of progress there cause there's you know, a lot of challenges and I eventually kind of looked more towards like the web development, JavaScript's side and now I'm studying full stack web development at Lambda school.

And I got really into RedwoodJS and have been writing articles about it and just learning a lot about the framework and it's yeah, it's been great.

I've learned a lot and I've gotten really into the whole open source movement and the JAMstack 'cause Redwood is this idea of full stack JAMstack. How do we take the ideas of the JAMstack and extend them throughout the whole stack.

Brian: Okay, yeah. And just for dad jokes and everybody who's waiting for me to say this, when you say it's a "School of Rock" in the woods, it also could be like "Camp Rock," which is the Jonas brothers.

Anthony: Yeah that's a, that's probably what most people would think of.

Brian: Yeah it depends on, you're showing your age, gen Z or millennial.

Anthony: Yeah thoroughly millennial here.

Brian: So I'm curious to dig into RedwoodJS and sort of like understand what you mean by that sort of fitting in the jam.

Do you want to give us like an overview of what the stack looks like there and like how it sort of fits?

Anthony: Yeah, so it's called a full stack Serverless Framework for the JAMstack.

The idea being that it has a React front end that's statically delivered by CDN.

So something like Netlify and is using AWS Lambdas under the hood and then uses GraphQL to talk to the back end.

So it's a full JAMstack application that can be basically deployable with just GetPush.

Brian: Excellent yeah and I heard Netlify and then some Lambdas too as well you just said, Netlify functions or were you specifically deploying this AWS.

Anthony: Yeah, so Netlify uses AWS Lambda under the hood.

So, if you follow the Redwood tutorial, you deploy to Netlify, but it has alternate ways to deploy it.

You can do it with like the serverless framework and they just figured out how to do it with Docker.

So now you can do it on just like an EC2 or any sort of container you want. It's deployable in almost any fashion at this point.

Brian: That's interesting, and I know you had just mentioned that you are currently learning in Lambda school or did you complete it?

Anthony: Yeah no, so I'm still a student.

I was learning a lot of this stuff before I started a lot of people, I think who go to bootcamps, they get the idea they want to learn to code.

Then they go to the bootcamp. And so they're going from complete zero.

Whereas I came in already having spent like a year trying to learn Python and then like probably six months or so learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript your web fundamentals and a little bit of React.

And then mostly the bootcamp was like a really React heavy thing.

They say it's full stack but it's three months of front end and one month of back end.

So it's kind of like front end curriculum with a little bit of back end tacked on at the very end.

So I've been kind of filling in the gaps of the back end knowledge.

I've learned more about how to actually create a full stack application from learning Redwood than I did from getting my full stack web development kind of bootcamp thing.

And it's not that it hasn't been valuable, I've learned a ton of stuff don't get me wrong, but it was kind of a gap there.

Brian: Yeah and it sounds like a testament too as well because I imagine most Lambda school students are not coming with the experience that you came with a year and six months web development on your own, but also Python on your own.

So because you had that you were able to bypass all the beginning stages, you're able to go to the next level of actually getting the stuff in production and even having an experience like the Serverless Framework which it sounds like you have at least been exposed to, and even with Netlify, you're able to sort of dig slightly deeper, and I think so I'm actually a bootcamp grad as well.

So I went through a program roughly seven years ago and-

Anthony: What was your curriculum at the time? Was that like Ruby on Rails?

Brian: It was Ruby on rails.

Anthony: Yeah.

Brian: It was full stack at the time.

So back in 2013, Ruby on Rails plus jQuery was full stack.

And that was beautiful because I was able to breeze through the basics of the Rails tutorial, and then move on to actually doing what you're doing.

So I was able to like touch the AWS steps to S3s and EC2s and figure out that in addition to also at the time Heroku is probably just the main focus on a lot of the boot camps in deploying stuff.

Anthony: Yeah that's, we use Heroku at my bootcamp and the Redwood tutorial uses Heroku as well.

Brian: Excellent. Yeah, so I'm, I'm curious about this, like RedwoodJS with its sort of coupling of the front end JavaScript framework and also couples with the back end as well.

That it seems like there's a movement.

And I actually had Brandon from Blitz.js actually on the podcast a couple of episodes ago.

And what's fascinating is that when I learned React like roughly five years ago the whole mantra was like, this is a library. It's not a framework, it's a library.

You can make all the decisions you want and then that's what people did.

And everybody was like, you can go with the minutiae of like trying to figure out like, Oh, do we do double quotes, single quotes, but like, take that to the point of React and like, how are you going to structure your Redux, you know, I was going to call them containers.

Anthony: Just where you put your files like what your folder structure is all of that.

Brian: Yeah so I think the community figured that all out and they all had very strong opinions.

And now we see this sort of like, I don't want to say an explosion.

It's like a handful of React frameworks, where all the decisions are made for you, and the goal is literally just get the thing up and deployed and start working on the business side of whatever the site is or the app is.

So it sounds like Redwood is in a similar vein where I could walk in with a lot of opinions, but those don't matter.

Like I can sort of ship an app with Redwood, is that what we're looking at?

Anthony: Yeah, the idea is that it's going to be something that you can both develop very quickly, iterate very quickly and then deploy it and get it up very quickly as well.

So, that's definitely what it's aiming for because it's trying to take all these new tools we have and integrate them in a way that makes them a little more beginner friendly, a little more approachable, so things like GraphQL and things like serverless and all these ideas that are floating around and are hard to kind of piece together.

And I find it really fascinating because if you look at you had React, GraphQL, Relay, and then the Flux architecture which people kind of created their own libraries from, all this stuff was kind of released by Facebook piecemeal, and now people are trying to tie these all together in a way that's like coherent. That's kind of how I look at it.

And you have something like Blitz, which is built on top of Next.

So you have a framework and then a framework on top of the framework.

Whereas Redwood's kind of owning the whole space that Next and Blitz would do together.

So, it's a question of like, where are you in the stack and how many layers you want to go with it?

Brian: Yeah and I think it's up to the developer to decide or perhaps the developer's manager to decide.

Anthony: Yeah they sure have choices yeah.

Brian: Yeah but I like the fact that I can now, because I'm at the point where I'm in my career, where I don't really care about, you know where you put your folders and how that structure works.

You tell me what it is and I'll figure it out.

And I want the opinions at this point even though I have sort of like my career's grown alongside of React and I've seen the transition of how there was a tweet that went out a couple of weeks ago this week actually around the evolution of React by year and how people wrote components 'cause it seemed like every React Conf, there is like a new way to write your components and like, that's great but also like I don't want to rewrite my entire React code every time there's a change.

Like I'd love to have a framework sort of dictate updates when those need to happen.

The beauty of the things like Ruby on Rails is that they didn't write the code for you, but they almost did.

But if you kept within the quote and quote Rails like I can migrate, at least I can today I can migrate from different version of Rails.

I know some people are probably sitting here in Rails 2. whatever apps or 3.2 apps.

And like, no, this is not the way it is, I can't upgrade because the path is broken.

But I think nowadays I think a lot of frameworks have figured out we should make sure companies and businesses are not stuck or SOL because we made a weird decision.

Somebody shot out a framework that made a lot of those decisions for everybody.

And it's still chugging along with everybody else behind but I won't punch down and mention that framework.

But I guess what I'm getting at is I'm curious of your onboarding because again, you're currently in Lambda school.

I just want to make that clear for the listener.

You're still in the bootcamp, but you're not only using probably a tool that our framework that's not taught in the bootcamp, I assume. Is that correct?

Anthony: Yeah this is stuff I'll learn on my own because I listen to a lot of podcasts like this one.

And when it first came out, Tom did a podcast, with Blitz.

So he did JS party in March, full stack radio in April and then Software Daily front end first Shoptalk and the Whoppy radio which was like a only 24 hour thing that happened all at once.

Yeah I listened to all six of those. That was kind of like where I got all the ideas of how it worked.

And then I went through the whole tutorial and wrote essentially a blog series documenting me going through the tutorial.

So it's called a first look at RedwoodJS and it's 12 parts.

The first four parts is like the history and what is JAMstack, what is serverless, and why do people want a full stack React framework at all.

And it's like how the history of React and all that.

So I was really interested in just the history of the framework and spent a lot of time writing about that.

But then the tutorial itself is super approachable because this tutorial is kind of what drives the project.

They call this tutorial driven development where they created the tutorial and then wrote the code to make the tutorial work kind of like-

Brian: That's amazing.

Anthony: README during development, as well as the Play on which as you would write your README, and then you make your code fit your README.

So it kind of guarantees that there's a way for people to progressively learn the framework 'cause there's a lot of things you have to learn to use it.

You have to learn GraphQL, and I didn't really know how to use GraphQL before doing this, you don't learn GraphQL in the bootcamp either.

Brian: No.

Anthony: So you are kind of revealed how to write GraphQL queries and then how to create a GraphQL schema definition language, and it's starts by generating a bunch for you.

And then it has you build a contact form, so you learn how to basically create in the Redwood way after it generated a bunch of stuff for you.

So it's really fascinating, and I really just think it's whole different way of thinking about the use of tutorials.

'Cause we get now that docs are really important. I don't think I can make that argument anymore, but having a really good core tutorial is still kind of a thing that a lot of projects don't have.

Brian: Yeah, and even going back to the mantra of Rails.

And I know Tom, he did a lot of Rails back in the day.

He built GitHub using Rails, but you can't really sleep on those tutorials because that's what really drove Rails and the it's sort of forefront of like actually being taken seriously.

Which is funny because it was like the blog in 15 minutes video that DHH made.

But like getting one of those tutorials out in the open and like having it click for people to say, "Oh, this is the hands-on experience that I can now get my feet wet, I can actually understand this."

And it sounds like you just went back to the history of RedwoodJS and what was the original name of RedwoodJS? I think I asked you already.

Anthony: Yeah so it was first called Hammer.

Brian: Hammer that's right.

Anthony: Yeah and then it was, there was some conflict, so they changed it to Redwood, but I like Redwood and it fits me well because my camps were in the Santa Cruz mountains which is where the Redwoods are.

It's like the Redwoods that Tom was referencing.

Brian: Excellent. Yeah I mean, it's nice that I think the Hammer name was also apt too as well. I remember it was something tongue in cheek as well.

But I guess what I'm getting at is like the fact that someone can actually understand the library is huge.

Like there's one thing that I tend to complain a lot when I'm live streaming on Twitch, is the Twitch API because they build a lot of stuff around that just to engage with the community.

But the API is kind of like a lot of the tutorials that I find you integrate the API, you get your token and then you do like a console.log, and then that's it.

There's very few tutorials that actually go beyond that. And it's, perhaps I haven't found them.

But yeah, it was kind of like, wow, this is amazing.

Like everybody's building on top of this thing, but it doesn't get past the hello world and then you're on your own.

And it just seems like a lot of opportunity. Listeners, if you want to build stuff on Twitch, please write a blog post or a tutorial.

But what, I guess, what possessed you to actually write these blog posts too as well?

Cause like perhaps was it the free time you had since you already knew the basics or?

Anthony: Yeah, it was me wanting to get into some sort of open source framework and like learn something substantial because I'm aware of, there's a lot of interesting things happening.

Like, you know, Vue3 just dropped. So you have a whole other set of frameworks built on top of Vue. You have Spelt and Sapper.

And so, once I kind of gotten the lay of the land like understood where the interesting projects were I was like, okay, well I learned React so I should stay within those boundaries.

That's what I understand at this point, at least.

And so you had Redwood and Blitz and you had Gatsby and Next, which were at this point three or four years old, really established.

So it seemed like I could have more of an impact getting into Redwood. And it was just the most interesting it seemed really fascinating. And I thought the history was interesting, I thought that tech and how it was being used was interesting. I had heard about all of these things that it used like GraphQL and Lambdas, but I didn't know anything about them or how you would even use them, you know. So I don't know, it just kind of hit all the right points and it just seemed like the thing to go for.

And so I just started doing it, and it was easy to keep doing it cause this tutorial was so great.

And I was basically just following along with that and kind of writing and then referencing the docs and then kind of explain things about Way or explaining things that I felt aren't really explained in this tutorial, like what you do with the scaffold command it gives you the whole CRUD interface.

And I sent a whole blog post just explaining all that code and that's something that's not even in this tutorial at all.

I kind of expanded upon it as well. And yeah, it's just, it's been really great.

So I mostly just needed it to learn it and it turned out to also be a good way to contribute back I think.

Brian: Yeah and I'm curious of now with all this content that you've been writing, your relationship now with the core team of RedwoodJS, because now at this point there's a team involved and contributors. Tell us about like how you sort of interact with the actual open source project as a whole.

Anthony: Yeah, so they are very open to getting community involvement.

They are consciously trying to get as many people involved and to you know, get them engaged.

And so they saw that I was putting these out and they responded well they would kind of tweet back at me when I would tweet them.

So you know, Twitter is, you know, you can't discount Twitter and how easy it makes it to connect with people and kind of just ask someone.

So they have public meetups and I would go to those and then they have contributor calls and I've just started going to the contributor calls and you just kind of have to just show up, you know, it really is just a matter of if you just show up and you don't have to contribute back a ton.

Like I'm not pushing code but by doing these kind of blog posts and now I'm doing like podcasts and I've done a couple of talks as well.

So I'm kind of, I called myself the RedwoodJS cheerleader and Drew called me the community champion I think so yeah, I just am trying to like kind of tell people about it and let them know like my journey with it and what I've gotten out of it and why I think it's interesting and people should at least know about it.

Brian: Yeah, I mean, that's, it's fascinating if I was in your shoes seven years ago when I got in the industry, like I didn't have and in with any sort of open source project, or even know, even have the foresight to even go and participate in the community by providing content.

Like, my focus was Streamline, Ruby on Rails, make sure I understand that.

And again, Ruby and Rails, wasn't at the sort of infancy that RedwoodJS is.

So like you sort of got in at an opportune time to be able to contribute and make huge impacts to the community.

And again, like, as I'm saying, like looking at the scope and you named all the frameworks I can think of, whether you talk about built on top of React and on top of Next.js.

So like just being a part of that sort of next wave of React's libraries or frameworks.

Anthony: Yeah there was another one actually Bison that I think is really interesting and people should check out what it has that Blitz and Redwood don't have is it has CI, it has continuous integration built-in by default.

So I think that's really fascinating.

Brian: Yeah how is that? How does that run? I'm curious how you would embed the CI into your framework.

Anthony: I think it's just because if you use it with GitHub you can do it with GitHub now.

So when I tried to push a DocFix to the README, I found a typo in the README, these are the types of things I push into the repos and you have to have CI because you have to give it like semantic whatever you have to say it's a DocFix, like doc colon, and then do the thing.

So yeah, that was super interesting. And that's a level of sophistication that the other ones don't so.

Brian: Wow and that's huge too, a reason why I need to actually check out Bison at this point now.

But I'm also curious, like I get the engagement with the open source team and like I think that's huge, especially at your beginning stages of your career, but I'm also curious how this has play into your current learning at Lambda school.

Like, are there other learners at Lambda school that are involved in open source the way you are?

Anthony: I have a buddy who is kind of getting into some of this.

He's really interested in Spelt some I'm kind of trying to nudge him in that direction his name is Corbin.

But Lambda is massive they have like 3000 students, I think at this point.

And I engage with like a dozen people in my Lambda experience.

So it's really hard for me to say anything about what other people are doing.

I think a lot of people, they see open source especially because we're learning React.

So the fact that we're learning open source tools it means that you have to be aware of it, 'cause when they're explaining these tools to us, they have to reference people who created them and where they came from and like all this stuff.

So we're learning Node, we're learning Express and we're learning React. And so everything we're learning is they're are open source tools.

So people, you know they know who like Dan Abramov is and stuff like that.

But the idea of participating in open source is where there's still that gap.

Brian: Yeah and is this a full-time program? Or the folks do this a part-time?

Anthony: You can do either. I started full-time and then switched to part-time.

So the full-time is nine months part-time is 18 months. So it's made to be very flexible.

And it's really the idea of trying to give the opportunity of learning to code to anyone, 'cause it's also an IFA income shared agreement.

So you don't pay anything upfront. And then you give a certain kind of your income for the first two years.

And some people are really weirded out by that, but it's has been the only way that I could've gone to a bootcamp like this.

So for me, it's worked out well. And, you know there's challenges whether there's difficulties especially with remote learning that are kind of inherent to the medium, but the way they tackle it and the way they structure things they're at the forefront of like how you can do this at all.

So, it's been a fascinating thing to see and participate in and I think it's been good.

Brian: Yeah and is it all self-paced learning, like interacting remotely or do you have like classes you attend?

Like I'm pretty much unfamiliar with Lambda school. I just know it exists and that's it as far as I know.

Anthony: Yeah totally, yeah it's pretty involved.

So if you're doing full time every day, you have a two hour lecture and then a project you have to build and then a one-on-one with your team lead where you're essentially grading your project from the day before.

And so if it's part time it's just that, but it's spaced out every other day instead of being every day.

So you have a day of lecture and then you have a day of just working on a project and being graded and then you have a day of lecture and so on and so forth.

And then each month is a unit, at the end of each unit you do a build week and in the build week you kind of build a project.

The build week is a total cluster. It's a, very few build weeks I think succeed.

I think people learn anyway but it's really hard to actually get your final project shift and functioning because it's getting all these tools to work together with beginners trying to use them is ridiculous.

Brian: Yeah well, as someone who writes code for a living, it's also very similar in the full-time world.

Anthony: Yeah I can imagine.

Brian: Yeah there's some projects I've just been stringing along for the past weeks on top of weeks and I've got a lot of open-ended projects, but you know, that's just the life of a developer and yeah, thanks for actually going through the Lambda school structure too as well because I was aware of it, I didn't realize it was so big.

It also seems kind of open-ended like where you can have the freedom to go do something like this and still sort of show up for these part-time meetings as well.

And I think one thing that's also interesting is like the fact that you now have access to professional engineers as well for RedwoodJS which you mentioned that there's a public forum and then there's like contributor meetings.

Can you explain?

Anthony: There's a discord.

Brian: Oh and a discord as well.

Anthony: Yeah so there's a lot of different ways to kind of get involved.

For the calls is for people who are kind of like consistently contributing but anyone can kind of get involved.

There's no qualifications you need or barriers behind it you basically you get involved and they'll invite you to it.

Brian: Yeah that's pretty cool. And then can you just briefly talk about the contributor meetings and like who leads the meeting?

Do you, do they talk about issues with the Docs and the tutorials or stuff like that?

Anthony: I mean, it's kind of fluid depending on who's there, because like I said it's they will pretty much bring anyone into the meeting who's contributing.

So everyone's introducing themselves kind of saying who they are, what they've done with Redwood stuff like that.

But yeah, if you want to know more about that, you should talk to David.

David's like the community lead and he kind of speak more to like the whole bigger structure and how it all works.

But yeah, it's basically just like trying to like have a space where we can connect and see what everyone else is doing and ask questions and then also kind of like get to know each other at the same time.

So, it's really just trying to figure out how do we like work together in this kind of like remote environment and make it worthwhile for everyone.

Brian: Sounds good. Yeah anything else you want to talk about Redwood before we transition to picks?

Anthony: Let's see. One other thing that I would want to talk about just because this is, you know, JAMstack is a really popular kind of database in the whole JAMstack area is on a Db.

And so I built out this project of connecting Redwood and Fine Db, and it was really great because I learned a whole bunch about the framework that I didn't learn from the tutorial, because one thing we didn't really talk about is that if you go through the tutorial and you kind of use Redwood the way it's normally used, Prisma is really heavily integrated with it which is the query builder, and it's a little bit like an RM.

So that does a lot of your work with the database, but you can actually take that out and then hit a database that has a GraphQL endpoint.

So HANA since they have a GraphQL endpoint, you can do all of your queries and mutations just through that.

So I've kind of just figured out how to get them to connect together and also totally serverless.

So it was the idea of Redwood right now even though it's a serverless front end you still end up connecting to a Heroku Postgres back end.

So your database is not serverless it's not like distributed globally the way you'd want like an actual full stack JAMstack. So by using FineDB, which uses the Calvin protocol and Raft and all this other stuff underneath to basically get distributed transactions and distributed consensus. You can actually get your globally distributed database as well.

So I think that's super interesting.

It's like interesting from a theoretical point of view, and it's also something that just like tinkering, figuring out how to make no one had ever done before.

So yeah, that was the thing I did.

Brian: Cool and where do you write your blog posts? Like where can folks find the these links?

Anthony: Yeah, so dev.to/ajcwebdev. Ajcwebdev is my Twitter handle.

My GitHub it's, if you do Ajcwebdev.netlify.ask you can get my actual blog, but most of my writing is kind of distributed equally throughout all of these.

So you'll, you'll see the same stuff everywhere, but yeah and the actual Spanner post was published on Spanner's blog cause they have the right respanner program.

Brian: Oh nice.

Anthony: And that was the first time I ever like written professionally and was paid to write professionally. And it was really cool.

They helped me like figure out the outline and the topic and it was a trip. It was really cool.

Brian: Very cool. Yeah so hopefully listeners check out your devto posts.

There'll be links in the show notes too as well which will have all your links as well.

But with that being said, thanks for chatting about RedwoodJS.

I'm going to transition us to the picks these are jam picks things that sort of get us going, keep us happy in these times.

And I see you actually have some picks. Do you want to share your picks first?

Anthony: Yeah absolutely. So the first one is FSJam. The Twitter handle is FSJam org like FSJam org.

This is something that Christopher Barnes is working a lot on, and it's the idea of full stack JAMstack but in a larger idea than just Redwood.

So looking at these other frameworks like Bison or Blitz, or even frameworks in other languages or other frameworks aside from React that may be doing these kinds of ideas.

So yeah, that's a thing that we're kind of getting to start putting more content and effort into that I think is going to be really interesting and kind of more broadly look at this idea of what it means to build full stack JAMstack.

And then I also have some music picks.

So I was a musician before getting it to code.

So I obviously have tons and tons of love for music.

And I want to recommend a couple of kind of like modern almost jazz artists that I think people would actually really enjoy.

'Cause it's not what you would think, it's a lot different.

So The Bad Plus is their a piano trio, so piano, standup bass and drums, and they do jazz stuff but they also do covers of like popular songs.

So they do like a "smells like teen spirit"cover. They do a "Ironman" cover. That's really, really cool.

And yeah those guys out and then Marco Benevento is also kind of like a jazz piano trio, but instead of being all acoustics it's electric bass and the piano player runs, he runs his piano through effects pedal so he kind of used it like a guitar player would use the effects pedals to create these like crazy electronicky sounds.

It's really great. Both of those guys Bad Plus, Marco Benevento I saw at Yoshi's back in the day, which is like one of the best jazz clubs in the world and in Oakland.

So yeah, super, super highly recommend both those. And then the last one is Fang Island.

These guys have the best description for their music.

They say that their music sounds like everybody high-fiving everybody.

So it's just like really happy, good fun, get together kind of music. So yeah, those are my picks.

Brian: Awesome yeah, I love those picks. I'm definitely going to check out some of these jazz groups too as well.

And I've actually never been to that jazz club too as well, and I live here in Oakland.

But yeah I'm going to mention my pick. First pick is JAMstack handbook.

This is a book that I saw coming through the Party Corgi Network. The individual is actually going to be on the podcast really soon.

Anthony: I've definitely seen this.

Brian: Yeah so I love that this Jan stack content is coming out and folks are sort of like stepping into this jam and sharing their sort of gems and knowledge.

So, definitely check out that book and then also check out the feature episode that we'll have.

And then the other one is going to be, so I'd mentioned previously on this podcast I have a YouTube channel that I've been sort of like shepherding during now that I work from home a hundred percent and leveraging some of this free time to do some stuff.

So actually the question was proposed on Twitch of all places. Someone asked how I got my job at GitHub.

And the story is long. So I kind of condensed it into like, this is what happened, and now this is where I'm at and you can do it too.

So I created a video, I sort of condensed it and sort of had some preamble of how I got to where I am just in general.

And it really just comes down to some of the stuff you had mentioned as well it's like this writing blog posts, putting yourself out there.

Like I am a bootcamp grad, I didn't have a CS background, I learned Ruby on Rails and then eventually got in open source.

And I think a lot of those things helped set a foundation.

And I think a lot of times people can be allergic to hearing that information saying that I should just be able to apply for jobs and get them.

But what I'm getting at is you don't have to do this.

Like you don't have to write a blog post, you don't have to go attend these meetings with RedwoodJS, but because you don't have to, it means not a lot of people do.

So it's a easy way to set yourself apart.

And I found so much correlation in this conversation and learning how you sort of are now coming up and eventually like you'll probably end up doing some really great things or perhaps you might be contributing to Redwood full-time, who knows.

But I just want to share that video because I shared my story.

You just shared your story and just want to encourage anybody listening to just put yourself out there, join an open source project, write a blog post.

Do both of them, do none of them, you know, pick whatever path you'd like.

So with that being said, Anthony I appreciate you coming on and chatting with us and listeners keep spreading the jam.