Ep. #74, Redefining JAMstack with Debbie O’Brien of NuxtJS

Brian Douglas: Welcome to another installment of JAMstack Radio.

On the line we've got Debbie O'Brien, which based on your accent and your name, I imagine perhaps you hail from Ireland?

But you can introduce yourself.

Debbie O'Brien: Hey, Brian. Yes, of course.

I am Irish, but living in Spain in a beautiful island called Majorca.

Brian: Excellent.

Debbie: Thanks for having me on the show.

Brian: Yeah, it's a long time coming.

I think we were actually supposed to speak at an event together and the event fell through.

Actually, I'm not even sure how much of the event was organized, but you've been on my radar for a bit.

But also, it turns out, you reminded me, we met in person in Spain at Full Stack Fest.

Debbie: Yes.

Brian: So a couple of episodes, I had Nuria and Josep, they both worked that Codegram, and they're based in Barcelona.

And Codegram hosted an event called Full Stack Fest, so we ended up meeting like the last day at the end of the event.

But we also, I think we talked previously before then too as well.

Debbie: I was very impressed by your talk.

You did an amazing talk with basketball in it, and I wanted to do a talk with Taekwondo in it, and you inspired me to give that talk.

So yeah, thanks for that.

Brian: Oh yeah, you actually did give the talk too as well.

Debbie: I did, yeah.

Brian: Excellent. That's awesome.

Debbie: Not on that day. I wrote the talk later and then I gave that talk on performances and JAMstack and Taekwondo.

Brian: Excellent. Yeah, I'll have to go back and, drop me a link so I can go watch that too as well. I got some time today.

Debbie: I will.

Brian: So you work as a Developer Advocate, is that your title, at Nuxt?

Debbie: Yes. Head of Learning and Developer Advocate at Nuxt. Yes.

Brian: Okay, excellent. So you weren't working there prior when we met, correct?

Debbie: No, I was in an agency doing agency work.

Brian: Okay. Awesome.

I'm glad to meet you at the beginning of your DevRel, evangelist, jumping off point, because now you're prolific.

You have a YouTube channel, tons of conferences I've seen in the last year that have been remote.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: I've definitely seen your talks and you've educated me on all things Nuxt.

But I'm curious, how did you get connected to NuxtJS and take the role as head of learning and advocacy?

Debbie: I was kind of already doing that role without getting paid for quite a long time.

Brian: I see.

Debbie: As we always are, right?

Brian: Like a true developer advocate.

Debbie: Yeah. And I was working for the agency.

So basically, I was giving Nuxt talks at conferences, and the agency were very good to me, they let me go and speak at a lot of conferences, which was great.

And I was trying to sell Nuxt to every single client we had, so I was very much involved in Nuxt in every way.

And literally, I was at conferences, I was doing all sorts on the documentation as well, and just doing the open source work.

And then, obviously, Nuxt for me was like a dream, right?

But you can't work for Nuxt, because it's not a company, it's open source.

And then in February last year, they got funding and became a company.

So they approached me and kind of said, "Hey, we want you as Developer Advocate and come and join our team."

And I was like, "Of course."

And that's pretty much how it happened.

Brian: Yeah, that's excellent.

I didn't notice they got funded, so once I started seeing you give talks, I'm like, "Oh wow, she works at Nuxt. I didn't even know they were a company."

Because I've known, was it Sebastien, and then the other founder who I-

Debbie: Alex.

Brian: Alex, that's right. I've known them because of Nuxt, since it sort of got shipped years ago.

And I've been following and paying attention, but didn't see that funding announcement.

I'm curious to understand the separation between the open source project and the actual full-on company?

Debbie: Yeah, it's kind of hard to explain it.

Because if you count to working day, I'm probably even more involved with the maintainers and the open source community, which basically, how can you describe it?

The company, we get paid, and the others don't get paid.

And I work a lot with the people that don't get paid and do amazing work for Nuxt, right?

Brian: Yeah.

Debbie: But yeah, we do have the company.

It basically means that Alex and Sebastien don't have to go out and do consultation to bring in the money to pay bills, because now they have the funding behind them so they can concentrate more on Nuxt, pay some people like me and Pooya and others to do amazing work so that Nuxt can grow faster, because it needs to.

Otherwise, it's just two people and maintainers. It's always hard, but it is an open source framework.

So Nuxt is open source, and then we have some internal projects that we kind of create and do.

Nuxt will always be open source, so we'll always have the open source community who help us and the maintainers who always help us.

And recently, we actually started using the sponsorship money that Nuxt gets to sponsor the maintainers.

Recently, we used GitHub sponsors to actually just sponsor people who are helping us to contribute to documentation, plugins, et cetera.

Which is nice to give back as well.

Brian: I love that model too as well.

Because a lot of people think of GitHub sponsors as like, "Okay, these maintainers will now be able to have full time jobs."

But when you have a company entity, which is Nuxt, they're able to reroute that funding back to other people who potentially, maybe there's a maintainer or a contributor that might not have the sort of, like everybody doesn't know who they are.

But everybody knows what Nuxt is, so that way they're able to funnel that money to people who are providing that impact and that contribution.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: And also, if that's the case, even if you're up and coming and you just want to get involved, it's a good way to continue to provide contribution.

Debbie: Yeah, completely. This happened to me with Webpack, actually.

Brian: Oh, really?

Debbie: I did a lot of contributions with Webpack, and I created the page Why Webpack, which was a lot of work. Why Webpack?

And that was a massive contribution. And they ended up sending me money to say, "Thank you for your work."

And I was like, "Wow, this is so cool."

And it just makes you want to give more to open source, because you're receiving and you feel like, "Oh my God, I've just got this so I want to give back."

And I think that's what open source really is about.

Brian: Yeah. It's really about sustaining the community in providing, not value, but recognition where it's due.

I wasn't aware of that, your contributions to Webpack too as well.

And I do know about the conversion from the 2.0 docs where they just basically blocked the shipping of Webpack 2.0, because there was no documentation.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: So it's always something that's hard to get folks to leverage it.

I was actually testing Webpack 5 on my project, because they had a call out on Twitter of like, "Hey, could you test Webpack 5 on your project? Let us know if there's any problems."

Same thing with React, React 17. Same thing.

It's hard to get people to give you feedback directly when maybe some people aren't paying attention.

Perhaps people can provide this DevRel support, community advocacy, just making aware that there are things like, "Why Webpack?" is a great question to be answered.

Debbie: Yes.

Brian: But perhaps the maintainers who are working on Webpack full-time, don't have that context to provide that?

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: And you were able to provide that, probably from your agency work, where you were constantly selling people on this latest and greatest and how to build modern JAMstack applications.

Debbie: Yeah, and we had to learn it.

We were learning Webpack to use it, then use that skill to help other people also learn why they need it, right?

Brian: Yeah. And speaking of which, I wanted to take a step back too as well.

Because we never actually said what Nuxt is, we sort of jumped into the conversation.

Debbie: Doesn't everyone know what Nuxt is?

Brian: Yeah. Did you want to explain what Nuxt is and what people are using it for?

Debbie: Sure. Nuxt is a framework built on top of you, so it's very similar to NuxtJS if you know React.

And the idea behind Nuxt at the very start, was to allow server side rendering of your single page applications.

It was originally created for that purpose, but obviously, it's not just gone into the JAMstack direction, the static site generation has been there for years, but now the JAMstack community has grown bigger and there's a better awareness of it.

So the static site generation is kind of like, it's not taking over server side rendering, but it's definitely gotten a lot more popular.

And we do have something coming up very, very, very soon, and that will, it's going to be so exciting.

I don't know if I'm jumping questions here by answering this now, but we'll go into it now, because it's exciting.

Brian: Yeah. I'm excited.

Debbie: Yeah. You know when you have your JAMstack application and you put it on Netlify or GitHub pages or whatever?

Brian: Yeah.

Debbie: And then your customer says or the boss or the manager says, "Yeah, but we want service side rendering. Because this one page, this one page, needs to get data every hour or whatever."

And then you kind of go, "Right now it can't be JAMstacked, just because of that one page."

So what if you could have a hybrid mode where you could basically say, "This page is going to be server rendered and it's going to be done through server less functions."

So you can still put it on GitHub pages and you have that server less server side rendered page on GitHub pages.

That's what's coming.

Brian: Oh. I'm looking forward to that. Actually, there was a question today.

For context, we hosted an event called the GitHub Africa Meetup. It's essentially a meetup on meetup.com.

We do it for mainly all of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Folks participate and developers.

Someone presented on GitHub pages, and someone asked a question on that.

And my answer was a Nuxt app.

I don't know if you know, but stars.github.com is a Nuxt app.

Debbie: Exactly. Yes, I do.

Brian: And you're also a GitHub star.

Debbie: Yes.

Brian: And we basically have rebuilt Netlify internally at GitHub through GitHub Actions, essentially.

When I say rebuild Netlify, it's not every feature.

It's basically just the deploy pipeline, the deploy preview process.

It just happens to be a GitHub Action, because we don't use Netlify for, I don't think, any projects today at GitHub.

But I needed that functionality to be able to review GitHub pages and sites.

So, that's what that is.

But, I love the idea of having just one site, perhaps your landing page or documentation page that might need to be server side rendered, because maybe you're doing some weird inline editing repel thing that needs to be dynamic.

I love that idea. We're seeing the definition of JAMstack is sort of being redefined in front of our eyes.

Debbie: Yep.

Brian: Where everybody sort of thought statically generated sites, and now we're seeing statically generated sites powered by server less functions, powered by sometimes servers, depending on how you manage your database and all this other stuff.

But we're being very creative. I just had Evan You on the GitHub Twitch channel and we talked about Vite.

Debbie: Yes, I was watching.

Brian: We saw Vite actually take the development processing time, and we're now looking at like almost zero seconds for hot module or loading.

I'm curious actually, in Nuxt, is there plans to incorporate Vite into the roadmap?

Debbie: Yes, but only in development mode, because it's not production ready I think.

Brian: Yeah.

Debbie: So, who knows in the future. But at the moment, we need Webpack for performance.

And Webpack is going to be there for the production build.

And you can use Vite if you want to. You might not want to, but if you want to, for development.

So that's going to come in Nuxt 3, but it will be awhile before we get that out.

Brian: Okay, yeah. And now, for the context of the listener, because I jumped into another thing without explaining it, Vite is a development build server.

It's a nice alternative to Webpack server, and it just takes a different approach.

If you're solving a problem now in 2021 that was solved in 2016, you'll be able to have another approach.

Evan You has taken another approach to it, which is really fascinating and exciting.

It's just moving the web forward.

Speaking about moving forward, stepping back into your agency background, what was the allure to do things like Nuxt and the JAMstack?

What was the value proposition you were sharing with customers?

Debbie: I think it was just I was involved in so many companies that were just doing things wrong.

And I don't mean that in a bad way, but they were.

And you kind of look and go, "Look, I need my front end to be front end and I needed to be mine and I want to own it. And I want you to do your cool backend stuff on your own, out of my code base. So if you can do that and let me do my stuff, we'll be happy ever after."

And that was the battle I was fighting.

Obviously, the more I got and the more I won it, and we had our front apps, then it kind of was like, "This is a JAMstack application, so why are you paying to put it in Microsoft servers? Why are you paying servers? You don't need to pay servers. We can actually just host this for free. So now the cost is free, so why are we not doing this?" And then we had the whole backend coming along saying, "No, but we need servers. You can't just have an application without a server." It's like, "Of course you can."

And actually built a project, which was a booking engine as part of a travel agency website.

And the booking engine needs to be dynamic, it needs to go and get data, it needs to find the hotel, it needs to do all that.

And I built that as a single page application inside the static site.

So you can actually exclude pages. And they didn't need to be like, you know, for a search engine optimization.

So I was able to always give a solution. I'm like, "There's always a solution. We don't need server side rendering. If you want to use it, you can, but it's not always necessary."

So yeah, it was me fighting battles, basically. I like fighting battles.

Brian: It's again, going back to the, "Solve problems."

There are some solve problems that we could continue to sort of leverage standing servers and EC2 instances and stuff like that, but there's a cheaper version of that, and that's the JAMstack.

I think as your customer sort of came to revelation, it sounds like they don't like spending as much money as they would when hosting a random server?

Debbie: It's more performance.

So when you show them the performance benefits, which converts to money, so it's about again with money, it's just a win-win.

So it's like, "Come on. This is going to be cheaper, it's better, and you're going to make more money."

Brian: I guess then, let's shift gears and let's talk more about your engagement with the community.

What ways does a developer advocate for an open source project engage with the community?

Debbie: It was planned out to be very, very, very different.

And I started my job in April, and what happened in April? We were all locked up.

So the interview process I had and all the meetings we had of like, "This is what you're going to be doing and these are all the places you're going to be traveling to," that went out the window.

And all of a sudden you have to kind of go, "Okay, what do we do now?"

Obviously, the conferences were all going online, so we had to go into the online and kind of reinvent yourself in an online manner.

Brian: Yeah.

Debbie: So really it was like, what can we do to reach and spread the word of Nuxt when we don't see people anymore?

Things like live streaming, YouTube channels, collecting with other dev advocates so you can appear on their channels, trading content as much as possible, and just trying to reach out to the community.

It was hard at first, but I think we're doing a lot better at it now.

Brian: Yeah. And it's funny, because we've gone through very similar paths, as I do DevRel at GitHub, so I saw my plan of where I was going to be in travel completely disappear.

We were going to spend a lot more time in APAC and Japan and Singapore.

And I was looking forward to that too as well, because I had not been to Singapore before, and that trip got canceled.

Debbie: I know, so many plans.

Brian: Yeah. But I mean, I've seen you, and I mentioned this in the beginning of the podcast, I've seen you on YouTube and I've seen you on Twitter, and your content, it's really picking up.

You happen to have the answers for a lot of the questions people have with Nuxt, and I think it's a breath of fresh air to see your content, but also see other DevRel content.

Because I think in the first time in my entire DevRel career, I'm now consistent because I'm not traveling.

Normally if you build a content strategy, "Yeah, I'm going to write this blog, I'm write this video. Or I'm going to do this live stream."

It's like, "Oh, well I have to travel."

So ramp up, go get packed up, I'm going to be out of pocket in a hotel room.

I can't really do tons of stuff. I could probably be on a podcast, but I can't host my own podcast.

And then I go back, I have to take at least a day of like travel, get back in the situation.

Debbie: To recover from the speaker dinner.

Brian: Yeah, exactly.

Hopefully our bosses are not listening to this podcast, but now it seems like we can literally have a plan be consistent and really execute on things that are not just conference talks.

Actually, I'm curious to hear your thought, because I know you just joined the DevRel community.

You were doing it already, but you just joined officially with Nuxt.

What's your outlook on the future of DevRel, now that there's a vaccine, things are opening up, there are conferences planned this year towards the end of the year, so that will happen, but what's your insight in the future of your DevRel career at Nuxt?

Debbie: I think a lot of people are opening up conferences, which worries me a little bit, because I'm like, I want to kind of say, "Yay, cool. See you in September."

But I don't want to think like that.

I did that last year and thought November was going to open up and then you just cry and you go, "No."

So I kind of have it all like, this year is just not going to be conferences and maybe next year we'll do, I'll just figure that out next year and deal with that when I come into it.

Brian: Yeah.

Debbie: But I do think this DevRel year, so like last year, 2020, was the best year of my life career wise.

And it's where I grew the most, because I had the time to grow.

Like you said, you're not traveling so much, you're not going anywhere.

And I was able to connect to a lot of people, because a lot of people also wanted to connect because they also had time to connect and they also wanted to do things.

So we did a lot of stuff together, and that was kind of really important.

And I think DevRel in the future, I mean, once we're all allowed out, I mean all, like America is going to take longer I think than other places.

Brian: Yeah. In this case, America not first.

Debbie: Yeah. So I think when we can actually all get out and do stuff together, we're just going to be all crazy and we're going to travel so much for a couple of months and we're going to burn out and then we'll be like, "Oh my God, I want to go back to the virtual world. Anonymous."

But yeah, I think there'll always be, like we've got connections with our YouTube channel.

I'm not going to stop doing that just because I can travel.

Because I've reached people in countries that I would probably never, ever have been able to travel to, or they would have never been able to travel to a conference.

And I think we've reached a lot of the communities, and I think that's going to be a massive improvement for developers in the future.

That you're going to have the African community, the South American community, the Indian community, that don't have the money to do or go anywhere, and you're connecting with them, so why stop and just go to the conference in America where all the people have the money to go?

Brian: Yep. Now I am all for that too as well. I feel like the impact you can make at DevRel is, it's so much larger.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: Because we all over-indexed on, "Everybody get to San Francisco at least once a year."

And that's where you make the deals, you get on the podcast or you meet the people that are hosting the podcast or at the conferences, you get on the speaker panels.

That's nice. I mean, I'm in San Francisco, I love that.

I love that I have access to everybody. I don't have to travel.

But I also love the fact that now I have access to the places like you mentioned, India and Africa and Asia.

And getting the word out to those regions, in those communities, has kind of been very mind opening, but also mind-bending.

Where now, my approach is similar to yours where I don't think I'm going to stop doing video on the internet, because I think as far as impact, I do have a strategy which I'll share as a pick later on, and we'll talk shop after the podcast about strategy too as well, but I'm just curious more, like what can we expect?

We know about this, is there a name for this feature of this sort of server less side render, this one page thing?

Debbie: Yeah, I think it's called Nitro. Nitro? Nitro?

Brian: Okay.

Debbie: My Es and Is, like Veet and Vite. Sometimes you don't know how to pronounce things these days with the French words, right?

Brian: Yeah.

Debbie: It's going to be actual engine of Nuxt 3, so it's what Nuxt 3 is going to be built on top of.

Brian: Okay, excellent.

Debbie: It's like a new engine.

But it's going to be available in Nuxt 2, so it's kind of like, you don't need to wait for Nuxt 3.

This is going to be ready.

When this is released, it might be already out there or it might be just about out there, you'll just have to keep checking Twitter, but yeah, that's exciting.

Brian: Yeah. And where can people, you said the Nuxt Twitter account is a good place to follow and keep up to date with Nuxt?

Debbie: Yeah, definitely follow Twitter, because we always send out tweets and stuff, and we live on Twitter.

I mean, everyone lives in Twitter these days. It's the new bar.

Brian: Yeah.

Debbie: And yeah, just like our blog posts as well, we'll publish something or just kind of keep up with the community.

Discord as well is where we publish all the notifications, in our Discord channel.

Brian: Okay.

Debbie: And we have that coming out, we have the Image module coming out, which is amazing.

So it's going to improve your performance a hell of a lot.

You'll be able to use WebP images, loading, change the sizes, and just do all kinds of super crazy cool things.

Yeah, there's so much coming out. It's going to be fun.

Brian: Okay, yeah. I mean, I love the advancement of the view community, I love the advancement of the Nuxt community.

I didn't even know about the Image plugin.

But also, I love that those are just like, you opt in, you're building a Nuxt app, maybe you want to do a blog or a documentation site.

But one thing that I always am bad at, is actually performance and optimizations.

I used to be good at it when I was a full-time engineer, now I'm just kind of like, "Ah, let's just throw this out there. And if people complain, I'll fix it. If they don't," which is a horrible way to program, so apologies upfront.

But I like the fact that you have these built-in tools in the framework that I could sort of just opt in and be like, "Okay."

The one thing I do well is accessibility and make sure that I actually have tests for accessibility.

So I'm good there. Performance, not so much.

Debbie: So me and you could work together really, really well.

Because I'm really good at performance and I'm not so good at accessibility, so let's team up.

Brian: Yeah, we should. Honestly, I'm throwing this out there, we should do a collab YouTube video and we can talk through.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: I should have you on the GitHub stream as well and we could talk through that.

Debbie: Yes. I'll fix all your performance issues and then you can fix all my accessibility issues.

Brian: Excellent. Well, before we continue planning the strategy for the rest of the year for our DevRel, is there anything else about Nuxt that you want to share that maybe we didn't bring up?

Debbie: We have new things coming.

I probably shouldn't tell you this, is going to be a surprise, but there's a lot of new things coming.

I think you just have to kind of keep watching out, because we're going to be dropping little bombs here, there, and everywhere. So just be ready.

Brian: Okay. Excellent. Yeah, I was on a call with Sebastien maybe a couple of weeks ago, and I'm excited about the stuff you all are shipping, which I think is not public information.

But everybody, follow the Nuxt Twitter account, follow Debbie, and also everything Nuxt.

Debbie: Yes.

Brian: Also, sorry, one more thing I just need to ask about Discord.

How are you liking Discord for interacting with communities over Slack?

Debbie: I prefer Discord actually.

I don't know why, but I have it open all day and we have rooms, so you can actually just jump in a room and you can see that other people are in a room, so you can kind of jump in and join them or whatever.

And then you can live stream and show them, share screen or whatever.

So yeah, we actually use Slack for the company and Discord for the open source community, so we're kind of using both.

I think Slack is good, it's very professional.

And Discord is just very cool. Open source needs cool, so I like Discord.

Brian: Excellent. Slack is business and Discord is where the party's at.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: That's how I can digest that. Cool.

So speaking of the party, I'm going to transition us to JAM picks.

These are things that we're jamming on.

I definitely appreciate you educating us on Nuxt, educating about your involvement in the community and where people can sort of stay up to date.

I'm really excited about those features.

Debbie: Yeah, actually also I should mention, on the JAMstack Explorers website, there's actually a free video on learning Nuxt.

Brian: Oh, nice.

Debbie: So if you have 30 minutes time, go onto the JAMstack Explorers website, and you can just get started with Nuxt for 30 minutes.

Brian: Oh, excellent. And did you create that as well?

Debbie: Yes I did. Yes.

Brian: Okay, perfect. Yeah, that's actually something that has not been mentioned on the podcast yet. Explorers.netlify.com?

Debbie: Explorers.netlify.com, correct.

Brian: Okay. Explorers.netlify.com, check it out if you want to know everything about the JAMstack and getting started with a couple of different projects, different libraries as well.

So yeah, thanks for contributing that to the community.

And then speaking of which, we will go to JAM picks.

These are the things that we're jamming on.

It could be food, movie, music related, it doesn't matter, it just happens to be something that keeps you going through the day.

Actually, you already have picks. So why don't you go first?

Debbie: Okay. So Billy Yang is one of my favorite people right now.

He's like my new mentor. Billy Yang is this guy who is incredible.

He's American and he's doing a lot of videos of trail running.

So I've been doing a lot of trail running recently, and I want to be better at trail running.

Now, he does 100 mile runs. I'm trying to do 100 kilometers in a month, he does it in a day, so we're very different scale.

But when you listen to him and listen to what he says, and there's one video I really recommend, which is Life On Your Terms.

It's all about things like, money doesn't make you happy, and just because you want this doesn't really mean that you're going to be actually happy with what you have, and really just go out and live your life. Everything is an adventure and everything should be lived to the max. And now especially, after the whole lockdown and COVID thing and whatever, I really believe in this even more. We just need to live every moment we can.

Yeah, so I love watching his stuff. He really inspires me.

And he inspired me so much that now I go running in the forest and then, I have my video camera with me, and I stop and I take little videos, and it's on my YouTube channel and it's called Debs In The Forest, and I give like dev tips while I'm running in the forest.

Brian: That is excellent. And also, perfect. It's on brand for you.

You get a little bit of Debbie, but also a little bit of the forest, and a little bit of developer tips and tools.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: I do tips and tricks, but I always do them in this room, in this blank room, so not as exciting.

Debbie: It's fun. Sometimes I'm like saying these things and it's me talking to myself and then I just share it with the world.

Brian: I mean, the best tips are the ones that you have to tell yourself all the time.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: I mean, it's the age old thing of you write a blog post so that way future self can find that blog post when you search for the same answer.

Debbie: Yes.

Brian: So like, how do I do accessibility in Nuxt apps?

Write that blog post so that way next time you Google it, it's just right there for you.

Debbie: Yeah. And these tips of the moment are more about personal growth and pushing yourself to do more and believing yourself and stuff like that.

But it could just happen that I might start doing developer things or start actually writing code or something or who knows.

I just started it, and it's so much fun and I love it and people are watching it and saying, "Oh, we need more of this."

And I'm like, "Great. I'm going to do more of it."

Brian: Awesome. Well, I just have one pick and I sort of alluded to it earlier, and I don't think I've actually mentioned it on this podcast yet.

This pick is actually an interview I did on another Heavybit podcast, which is called Developer Love.

I was on episode one with Patrick, and Patrick is the CEO and co-founder of Orbit.

Which actually, that should be a pick in itself.

Orbit is a great tool if you're an open source maintainer.

You actually get insight on who's chatting with you, who's involved in Discord, who's involved in your Twitter, who's responding to your discussions and issues.

So definitely, if you're not using Orbit, sign up for the beta.

I think they're still in beta officially, still.

It's a great tool for if you're a DevRel at a company or if you're doing DevRel on an open source project. Orbit.love is there TLD.

But the podcast, it's funny because I was chatting with Patrick just in general about the product, because we were testing it out and I was using it for my personal projects.

And he invited me on the podcast, because he's like, "Hey, I'm going to do a podcast, talk about DevRel and the concepts and how people engage in community."

And it's funny, because I get people reaching out to me all the time about that episode.

And I think I was just so raw and open about my approach to DevRel.

As long as I've been doing this podcast, I've been doing DevRel, so about almost five years at this point.

And I've never, ever been part of like a core DevRel community or individuals.

I always had sort of been my own lone wolf, not realizing that there were other people doing this job.

I just happened to be an engineer that kind of got pushed into doing DevRel, and just kind of enjoyed it.

I've always kind of done DevRel at the beat of my own drum.

That's what the podcast is about, it's just me explaining what my intuition, why I do DevRel.

And that's sort of the cliff note that you could take away from it. DevRel is about creating other DevRel folks.

So if you have users who are really excited about your product, what can you do to engage them to make them your future coworker, the future DevRel person that you see?

Which I love that it's serendipitous that I met you at that conference and we had a very brief chat and we talked about your talk.

All I want to do is help other people, not just use GitHub or Netlify or the JAMstack, I want you to be comfortable with writing that blog post and making sure that future you can Google that tip and see Debbie running in the forest and then talking about developers tips and tricks.

Debbie: Yeah.

Brian: So, I love it. Perfect way to end the podcast, in serendipity.

Debbie, thanks for coming on, talking about Nuxt and sharing the insight about, I guess, your view point from the forest and in the community.

Debbie: Thanks for having me.

Brian: And listeners, keep spreading the JAM.