Chris Biscardi is a consultant with a lot of experience building cool stuff we love to use: MDX, Docker, Gatsby...
We talk to Chris about his career so far and lessons learned, as well as dive into some juicy details on how some of our favorite frameworks work under the hood.
Plus... Gatsby themes! Themes are more useful than just reusable UI like a Wordpress theme, they're a more sane way to package and maintain configurations and dependencies in Gatsby.
Ever updated a Gatsby starter? 😱
Themes make that process better. 😎
Chris is also passionate about improving the tech industry and doing better by junior devs as a whole. We couldn't resist diving into the junior dev dilemma for a minute on this episode.
Chris also loves Rocket League, and we talk about that too!
Show Notes:
- 1:11 - Chris Biscardi introduction
- 3:13 - Chris’s history with Gatsby
- 3:45 - Consulting VS Freelancing
- 5:07 - After actionscript
- 7:07 - What is GO and Erlang good for?
- 8:39 - Should a JS dev learn GO?
- 10:14 - What is Gatsby?
- 12:22 - Can you use Gatsby the same way you use React?
- 13:26 - Customizing Gatsby
- 14:14 - Differences between Gatsby and Next
- 17:50 - How does Gatsby query data?
- 19:30 - Gatsby and headless wordpress
- 20:23 - Hitting an API at runtime
- 21:40 - Auth in Gatsby
- 22:16 - Gatsby more than a standard static site generator
- 23:51 - What is MDX?
- 26:23 - How Chris started working with MDX
- 30:27 - Gatsby source pages and MDX
- 31:05 - Chris’s work on themes
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33:22 - What are Gatsby themes?
- Watch Chris speak at Gatsby Days NYC about themes - YouTube
- 35:26 - Using themes to build sites with design tokens and shadowing
- 37:34 - More on shadowing
- 38:15 - Making themes accessible and GUI based cli
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44:27 - Gatsby theme docs
- Building a Gatsby Theme live - video
- 47:23 - Chris talks about junior devs
- 49:55 - Chris experience with companies that only want senior devs
- 52:12 - Hiring new VS senior devs
- 55:11 - Interviewing in Tech
- 56:36 - Interview whiteboarding
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1:01:00 - Where to find Chris and his projects
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1:03:00 - Nerd minute
- 1:07:46 - Chris talks about building a new computer