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So at the time, I think I would have really loved the opportunity to work with TypeScript, which is now readily available. It’s becoming more and more popular because it gives you that structure. It gives you that IntelliSense. It gives you that familiarity with what you're actually working with. So I think back in the day, that probably would have been one of the big things, but it's here now.
And the other one was just that sort of support from an IDE or a text editor perspective. Because when I started, I was using Sublime, and there was no IntelliSense. And there was no help for what you were doing. But VS Code has made that so much better now that I guess a couple of things I would have asked for a few years ago have come a long way.
Ali: With Jamstack and Serverless and now working at PlanetScale, you're probably thinking a little bit more about security and teaching with more security in mind. And you had mentioned this is something that you were super interested in and that you had thought about. And I'm super curious to hear when you're working on your content; how do you integrate security into your work? And what are your thoughts on security with Jamstack and Serverless?
And then 2021, there was one big one in particular which was me highlighting an extension in VS Code that could kind of replace Postman. So Postman being a client that you could send HTTP requests, and Thunder Client was just a new extension that I came across. And I think I just happened to have the exact right wording and thumbnail for people to be really intrigued.
And people were talking about Gatsby so much for their personal sites. And so, I decided to rebuild my site in Gatsby and go through that experiment. And since then, it's just been continuing to build more and more demos, continuing to build stuff and tools for myself like my blog. And then it turned into working full time at Auth0, being able to tie that into talks that I would give and videos that I would do. So getting really interested in all the different frameworks.
I started working at FedEx as a software developer, so I wasn't doing content on a regular basis. And a couple of years in there, I just realized I really missed it. I missed being a part of the community. I missed going to meetups. I missed creating content and started to pick back up on that. So I started creating YouTube videos. I wrote articles for a platform called Scotch.io that has since been acquired by DigitalOcean.
And there are like a million different definitions of what static content means. But a lot of it became really focused on these static site generators, Gatsby being a big one, Hugo was one, Eleventy is one, Gridsome is one. There are lots of these frameworks that were built for statically generating pages.
And that stuff seems repetitive but also, it's so valuable because web development changes so much every single year. So it's worth giving people that refresh. Or they do a crash course on Svelte when it first came out, and now there's SvelteKit. And SvelteKit, at one point, will finish being out of beta, and then now that will be a thing that warrants its own maybe very similar tutorial but highlights those differences. So I think one, reusing that content and updating that content on a yearly basis is still really valuable.
And sometime in 2019, maybe the summer of 2019, a friend of mine showed me Netlify and how to deploy a site there and how easy it was. And that was really interesting for me. And then I started looking at okay, well, I've got this blog...maybe this was even 2018. But I had this blog that was on WordPress. And I'd heard so much about static site generators. I had just started learning React not too far before that.
And then, later on, I can refer back to that video to say, "Hey, if you want to learn more about how environment variables work in Node or how arrow functions work in JavaScript, go back and watch this video. Otherwise, we'll go ahead and continue to move forward." That way, I get to repurpose my content and reuse it by pointing people back to it. And then I have the ability to not explain all of those details every single time but give them a resource for the people that need them.
Next.js, I think, is a really cool example of the combination of static site generator as well as server-side rendered pages. So you can do everything that you want to there. And I just see the Jamstack as the developer experience is really top-notch. You can get started using all these different services for free. So it's very accessible for people to build stuff and actually launch stuff and just iterate on it.
And that stuff seems repetitive but also, it's so valuable because web development changes so much every single year. So it's worth giving people that refresh. Or they do a crash course on Svelte when it first came out, and now there's SvelteKit. And SvelteKit, at one point, will finish being out of beta, and then now that will be a thing that warrants its own maybe very similar tutorial but highlights those differences. So I think one, reusing that content and updating that content on a yearly basis is still really valuable.
But then what's interesting is you can combine them too where you can do everything on the server but then add on top of that with client-side JavaScript as well. So that I think has been really fascinating for me as the Jamstack has evolved to what are the different ways that we can handle authentication? What are the different ways that we can protect our applications? And how do we mix them in a way that makes the most sense for the thing that we're actually building?
And there are like a million different definitions of what static content means. But a lot of it became really focused on these static site generators, Gatsby being a big one, Hugo was one, Eleventy is one, Gridsome is one. There are lots of these frameworks that were built for statically generating pages.
And there are like a million different definitions of what static content means. But a lot of it became really focused on these static site generators, Gatsby being a big one, Hugo was one, Eleventy is one, Gridsome is one. There are lots of these frameworks that were built for statically generating pages.
The other thing is basic stuff. As I create a tutorial, having a GitHub project for them to go and check out that code. Because if they're following along with the tutorial and typing it themselves and they have one little small typo, they're going to be stuck. I may not see their comment on YouTube if they ask one, and then they're just kind of screwed.
And then 2021, there was one big one in particular which was me highlighting an extension in VS Code that could kind of replace Postman. So Postman being a client that you could send HTTP requests, and Thunder Client was just a new extension that I came across. And I think I just happened to have the exact right wording and thumbnail for people to be really intrigued.
And people were talking about Gatsby so much for their personal sites. And so, I decided to rebuild my site in Gatsby and go through that experiment. And since then, it's just been continuing to build more and more demos, continuing to build stuff and tools for myself like my blog. And then it turned into working full time at Auth0, being able to tie that into talks that I would give and videos that I would do. So getting really interested in all the different frameworks.