Noel Minchow: Hello, everyone. Welcome to PodRocket. This is Noel, hosting for the first time. So, welcome. Today, Alex Trost, is that right? Alex Trost: Trost. Yep. Noel Minchow: Trost is joining us. Alex is a Dev Experience Lead at Prismic and the creator of Frontend Horse. How you doing, Alex? Alex Trost: I'm good. And I had no idea this was your first time. It's also my first time. So we're going to go through this together. This is really cool. Noel Minchow: Yeah. I've co-hosted before, but Kate gave me the reins today. So here we are, we're rolling. Alex Trost: I wish I could say I co-guessed, but unfortunately, this is my first time. Noel Minchow: No worries. Alex Trost: Thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. Noel Minchow: Awesome. Of course. Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll get through it. I guess maybe to get us rolling, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, how you found yourself as a dev experience lead. Alex Trost: Yeah. So in the third grade, no. So I'm the developer experience team lead, over at Prismic. I'm sure we'll get into what Prismic is and everything. In my free time, I run Frontend Horse, which focuses on creative development and creative coding, CodePens, all that kind of stuff. And it encapsulates a community and a Twitch stream and a blog and a newsletter. It's just a whole bunch of stuff thrown together, but it's a lot of fun and I'm a frontend developer by trade. But before that, was an elementary school teacher or primary, for you across the pond, out there. Not you, Noel, I assume. And also, before that was a graphic designer, so have a couple of different backgrounds before programming that I still try to work into things and teaching and design and art and programming. It's all one big interest now. And so, that's a bit about me. Noel Minchow: Nice, nice. Yeah. I feel like, with frontend developers in particular, I find a lot of them have educational backgrounds, especially those that land in these dev experience roles. Alex Trost: Yeah. Noel Minchow: I don't know if it's just that sense of empathy from being an educator historically, or what it is exactly, but I feel like that's a common pattern I see. Alex Trost: I've definitely seen that quite a bit. I know quite a few educator... Or former educators who are this isn't sustainable as a career, but I still want to be that person who is teaching. I think you nailed it with empathy, where you have to have that to teach and developer advocacy, developer experience is that kind of a role. Noel Minchow: Yeah. Cool. So I guess with that, would it make more sense to jump into Frontend Horse first, from here? Alex Trost: Sure. Yeah. Noel Minchow: Cool. Yeah. So what is it? Tell us about it. Alex Trost: Yeah. So Frontend Horse, first off you might be... Let's just start with the fact that I do not own a horse. I am not a horse person. I never was a horse girl growing up, and I just always thought that .horse is the funniest top level domain, or TLD, that you can get. There's .invo, there's .org. There's all kinds of.. .horse, you can't beat it. So as I was trying to come up with a newsletter name, Alex's Weekly Digest of Frontend Finds, doesn't have the same ring and it also doesn't have the branding built in. So to go frontend.horse, it's just... I don't know. Noel Minchow: Yeah. It's memorable, for sure. Alex Trost: The puns are there. Just the puns that you can run with. Noel Minchow: Yeah. It's great. I love it. It's so weirdly specific and why is that at TLD? Who knows, but it's there. There you go. Alex Trost: The horse community cried out and someone answered the call. So thankfully that happened, but getting that horse bit out of the way, what is it? It is basically, four things at this point. And I touched on them briefly. I think the thing that it is most now, is a Twitch stream and a community. I always waffle back and forth, because people might know it for the community or the Twitch stream. Let's at the Twitch stream since that's what I started with. Basically, the Twitch stream, we bring on creative developers and just any kind of frontend developers. And they show us how to make something incredible, we can make a bouncy castle in SVG. Someone came on and taught us how to make a Three.js hamburger drum kit. Alex Trost: So the hamburger morphs into a drum kit, because we had a whole theme and you can play it and it's playable. And it's just really over the top, the fun parts of the web. Not so much the, how to build your SaaS and how to profit from internet business. That's never been my deep interest. So Frontend Horse always focuses on, how can you do something just really wacky or just really gorgeous with web tech. And so, we get some fantastic people on, to teach us that stuff. And so, that's the stream, the Discord community, just friendly bunch of folks that started out just hanging out in the stream chat, realized I like talking to these people, but they all go away after the stream. So let's give that a home and it's been going for, I don't know, maybe seven months. I have no idea, but it's been going strong. It's a wonderful, friendly place if people are looking for a way to learn more about frontend development, just have a nice place to chat with people or ask questions. I recommend it, as the person managing it. Noel Minchow: We'll be sure to get links to both in the show notes. Cool. So people can come discover. Alex Trost: Cool. Noel Minchow: Awesome. But were you one of those people that, I don't know, has been lamenting the early weird days of the web more and that's what led to the inception of this? Or what got you here? Alex Trost: Yeah, definitely a bit. I've always enjoyed that part of the web where, it's weird. It's just weird for the sake of being and weird, or it's just beautiful for the sake of being and beautiful. Just the creative aspects of the web. Not as much that money making aspect. I went from graphic design to teaching. I never had that, I got to get rich kind of thing in me. So I've always been drawn to those parts, but what actually got me making Frontend Horse, because it started as a newsletter. What got me into it was scrolling through CodePen, and CodePen can be a mix of, "Oh this is a useful snippet for how to do something practical", or it can just be the most nonsensical, coolest thing you've ever seen a button that does, five wild things that you would never pull into a real website, but it's, "Wow, this is cool." Alex Trost: And digging into that code, because that's the beautiful part about it, is that so many websites you see, "Oh my gosh, this is gorgeous." But the code is completely buried in minified JavaScript and you can't even begin to rock it. But CodePen, it's just there, there's the map and you have to dig in and find it or dig in and try to read it and understand it. And so, I would spend a ton of time just going through and being like, "How are they doing this?" And then finding it out was such a dopamine rush of, "Whoa, that is a cool technique. I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know that was a JavaScript library. I didn't know that was a CSS property. What?" Alex Trost: So, that was fun. And then, becoming friends with these people who are making these awesome CodePens and asking them, "How, how were you doing this?" And then having them break it down and being like, "That's awesome. More people need to know about this. I can't let this be just niche information that only I... I can't bear this weight. This is too cool. I have to tell everyone." So it started there and just became a thing where, if I make a newsletter, I get to tell lots of folks about this cool thing. And I get to talk to the creator of that cool thing and ask them, "How do you make cool thing? Tell me about it." And I get to tell other people, so it became almost an excuse, like this, I'm seeing through you, PodRocket, you get to talk to not me, but lots of other cool people, because if you were to go, "Hey, Scott Hanselman, I want to talk to you for 30 minutes." Alex Trost: He'd be like, "Ah, I'm a little busy." But if you say, "Scott Hanselman, come on our podcast." Boom, you got them, that's the thing. Same thing with the newsletter. You're able to ask people for their time and you get to learn. And it's awesome. So that's where it started, just curiosity around creative coding and wanting to put that code out to the world and say, "This is really neat." But also, teach. Noel Minchow: Nice. So when you started the newsletter, were you mainly just going through the pens and finding cool snippets of code that you could share and aggregating them and sending them out, or from the get go, did you know that you wanted to talk to the creators of these things and have it more of a dialogue? Alex Trost: Yeah, it was definitely the second one, because there are a lot of good newsletters that already say, "Check out this CodePen. It's gorgeous." But none of them were saying, "Check out this CodePen. Here's what they're doing. Here's how they're doing it. Here's that trick. And here's the technique that you can walk away with. It's the specific SVG filter and this is how they're animating it." I wanted that. That's the part to me where, I'll get other newsletters and I'm like, "Cool. But now you've wasted my afternoon because now I have to go in, and my curiosity isn't saded there, because I need to know." So I figured if there's anyone else out there who's also like, "How are they doing this? There's no JavaScript in this CodePen what's going on?" This is that TLDR kind of thing for them. Noel Minchow: Yeah. That's super interesting. I feel like I've been in that seat of discovery many times as well. And we're just like, "Wait, how was this working? You click one of the tabs up there and the CSS tab is empty or the JavaScript tag. It's like, "Wait, what Yeah, my mind is blown right now. Alex Trost: Those are some of my favorites where, I think so many people look at those and if you don't open the tab, you can probably go, "Eh, I've seen the stuff like this." But then you realize, no, that's not an image, that's just CSS or whatever. And you're like, "Whoa." You do that double take. But if you just see it at a glance, you're like, "Yeah, cool picture." It's like, no, no. So yeah, that's the fun for me. Noel Minchow: So when you were coming up with this newsletter, who did you have as the target reader in mind? Were you like, "I want to focus on frontend devs who are already pretty acclimated and they'll understand what they're looking at." Or were you trying to make it super approachable for someone who hadn't been in that space for very long? Or who were you envisioning reading? Alex Trost: I think it's always been a thing of, if I'm not learning a thing from it or if I can't add anything here, then it's not really worth covering for the most part. Back to CSS art a little bit, beyond a few key techniques, there's not a ton that you can explain from CSS art piece to CSS art piece, where once you get a few of those key things of backgrounds with linear gradients and drop shadows. Once you get that, it's pretty much like, all right. You know how to walk, now walk for 500 miles. So it's just persistence. And so, those I'm like, "Ah, that's cool. It's awesome. But I have nothing to add there." Because it's just that, yep, just keep doing that one thing for a long time and do it well. And so, that I usually skipped over, but I did it for myself, honestly. I was always the audience of, if I find it cool, if I am learning something from it, then it'll probably make it. If neither of those happen, it's not going to. Noel Minchow: Gotcha. So was that your main driving force in picking topics? And is it still how you decide what to talk about is, the stuff you find cool and novel? Alex Trost: Yeah, I think so, because once you find a few SVG filter pens, it's tough to be like, "This person's using a new SVG filter." There's only so many and they don't add them pretty often. So it becomes a thing where it has to be used in a unique way or used with some new combination of other attributes and just like, "This is a cool thing. Look how they're using this." Noel Minchow: Nice. When you started, was it a video medium at all? You said it was a newsletter. So was it just a text interview or what was that like? Alex Trost: It was just honestly, me DMing people on Twitter and going, "Hey, this is awesome. Can I ask you some questions about it for my newsletter?" Noel Minchow: Nice. Alex Trost: So no video for a while. And then, around February of last year, of 2021, I started to say, "Hey, want to come on and make cool stuff on Twitch with us, live?" And that's when the video aspect of it started, and in between there, I started to write blog posts because newsletters got a little bit limited in what you can include. I got pretty demo heavy where it's like, "Here's this cool CodePen and here it is de-structured. And I would break down the parts and you can't really embed CodePens in emails. So it became...yea. Noel Minchow: Yeah. That makes sense. How'd that transition to a live video format go? Was there anything weird, unexpected there that surprised you? Alex Trost: So, the first time I did it, went live, hyped it up in the newsletter. Didn't realize that Macs are really a pain in the butt with taking audio from one app to another. And so, actually had to hold the phone up to the microphone as I talked to my guest. And so, that was just lots of weirdness there, but mainly technical difficulties. But in terms of having people build stuff live, no, I think for the most part it was what I expected, but I think people really enjoyed it. And there weren't a lot of other people doing that sort of thing of watching people just make fun, creative code for the sake of it on Twitch. I don't know. Noel Minchow: Yeah. No, that makes sense. Was the community element, the user interaction or viewer interaction, was that how you expected it to feel as well? Was there any surprises on that front? Alex Trost: I think it was surprising just in the sense of what developed from it, because the people who read the newsletter, respond to it, share it, aren't always going to be the people who are in the Twitch stream or in the Discord and chatting there. So it's cool having lots of different mediums, because you get different types of folks, people who share the blog posts on Twitter. I don't see them in the streams too often, and vice versa. So it's just interesting being able to hit a lot of different people and talk with a lot of different people in that sense. Noel Minchow: Nice. Do most viewers or at least people that are in chat and stuff, do they seem like they have similar dev background experiences, or are there more beginner level questions you find being asked? What does that look like? Alex Trost: That's the cool thing is that, somehow I've attracted lots of different people. I never built with a Eleventy before doing the stream, but had a big Eleventy community suddenly, just pop up around Frontend Horse, just with a few folks who really liked it. You've had Ben Meyers on the podcast and Ben Holmes. I'm sure lots of others that I'm going to forget right now. But all people who found themselves in chat, part of the community and different walks of... I was going to say life, but different focuses. Some people don't even do that much frontend. They're more backendy but they are curious, and some people are complete beginners and they're there to ask questions. Some people, like Kevin Powell will be in the chat helping and answering questions and stuff. And it's cool the diversity, because you can always go, "Hey, I don't know what's going on here. Does someone know?" And there's a good chance that someone's going to bail me out. Honestly, the entire stream, when I stream solo, it's just chat bailing me out of, I don't know what I'm doing and chat's there to help. It's pretty wonderful. Noel Minchow: It's like para programming with 100 people over your shoulder. Alex Trost: Basically, yeah. Noel Minchow: Yeah. Nice. That's awesome. I feel like that's always a super cool experience, and I think one that a lot of professions don't have. I don't know, the privilege of having this like, oh, all these people will be online and just work on this thing together, just because it's interesting and everyone's into it, is a super cool thing. Alex Trost: That collaborative, creative opportunity just hopping on, creating a generative piece in CodePen and having the chat there to riff on ideas with you and add to it, seems so cool. Noel Minchow: Yeah. Super, super cool. Yeah. So, you mentioned a little bit of web tech. You said Eleventy first, there was a group that seemed super tied to it that has found their way to the stream without you having really any experience there. I'm curious about... So the actual website for Frontend Horse is super cool, it looks really nice. Did you do most of that work yourself? Alex Trost: Yes. Yeah. So I did the 3D work on, there's some images around the site, I did those in Blender. I don't design as much as I would like to anymore, and I'm very slow with it. So the design of that took months and months and months, but the only thing I didn't design is the logo. I got a designer friend to make the little scripty thing, but designed that. And then, the site is built in Gatsby. I need to enunciate, Gatsby. It's been a fun thing where I got it out the door, and then I haven't updated it, it needs an update because the homepage doesn't even mention the stream or the community or anything. It says it up at the top. But anyway, I won't critique my own site here. I easily could, I could break down every bug there is. Noel Minchow: Yeah, no, it looks great. And the reason I was asking about Eleventy was, that was my next question was, were you using a generator for it? Because it looks really nice. Alex Trost: Yeah. I started with Gatsby, or I was building with Gatsby for a while. These days I use more Next.js and I'm interested in things like Astro. Noel Minchow: Nice. Alex Trost: There's so many cool things out there. Noel Minchow: Yeah. There's so much, so much to explore, for sure. I was also curious, I feel like your horse, the logo you were talking about reminds me of the Gumby logo. Do you know Gumby? Alex Trost: I can see that. Yeah. Pokey Noel Minchow: I feel like it's a very similar... Pokey, yeah. I think that's right. That sounds right. Anyway, that was the first thing I thought of, I don't know. I don't know if there was any intent there or not. Alex Trost: No. And I don't know if anyone's ever mentioned that. So I'll have to Google afterwards to see how much their lawyers have grounds, because they keep sending those cease and desist, but I just rip them up. Noel Minchow: Nice. Very cool. Yeah. Again, we'll be sure to get links in the show notes to all these channels. Alex Trost: Yeah. Noel Minchow: With that, I want to talk a little bit about Prismic as well, just because you spend a lot of time there, maybe to frame the discussion for listeners. What is Prismic? Alex Trost: Yes. So listeners might know Prismic as a head... Sorry. Yeah. As a headless CMS, but I think of us more as a headless website builder. But to start with, in case the listener is isn't familiar, headless CMS is basically a standard CMS without a frontend. so if you're familiar with WordPress or any other CMS, typically, there is the back-end and the frontend and they are tightly coupled. And once you publish in the editor, it shows up on the frontend, and to get something like a Next.js or thing else there, can be a pain in the butt. So headless CMS just gives you all the goodness of that editor interface without tying you down to anything, it's just an API. Alex Trost: And so, it's nice because you're not tied to that monolith of a WordPress or a Squarespace where, you've got this thing that it's really hard to decouple. And as a developer, you can then choose the best tool for the job. If you are a Next.js Developer and you know that your client or your company should use Next.js, For this project, it's the best tool for use case, you can do it. You can wire up Next.js to that headless CMS. But that's not always great for editors to have just a headless CMS, because editors love the page builder attributes of a Squarespace. If you're someone who just slings content all day, you don't want to wait for a developer to build you out a new page or to create something new for you. Alex Trost: You want that experience that a Squarespace or a Wix gives you, because you can just grab components, move them around, build out your page, see what it looks like and go, "Yep. That's what I want." And within an hour, have a brand new page up and editors have to turn on a dime to take care of sales or opportunity or whatever. So they want that, developers want the modern toolkits of Next.js or SvelteKit or any of those. And so, you want the best of those both worlds. And that's where a headless page builder comes in with Prismic, where we have this concept called slices. And if you look at a standard landing page, what do you see? You see at the top, you've got a hero. Alex Trost: Pretty much always the hero, the texture on the left, the picture on the right, or some combination of that. Below that you might have a group of logos. So there's another section right below that, these are the companies that trust us. Below that it might be testimonials. And you see those same sections on every site. And then, there's content blocks. And so, Prismic calls those sections slices, you slice your website up into these slices. And as a developer, you're not focusing on building the entire page. I don't have to worry about the hero flowing into the logo cloud or any of that. I'm just building this slice. And as a React developer or as just a modern JavaScript developer, that's super familiar to me. Alex Trost: I'm familiar with component based website architecture. So building out a section for a logo slice, I know how to do that. And I know how to take in an array of images or whatever. I know how to model that out and build that slice. So developers get to build a whole bunch of these slices and hand those to the editor in the Prismic editor, and say, "All right, here's all the slices you need. Go build pages." And then editors can come in and just say, "All right, for this, I'm going to go with a hero. I'm going to use the variation where the text is centered. Ooh. And then put content below that, and then put an image grid and mix and match, move those around, reuse those slices." Alex Trost: And so, then you get the best of both worlds. They get to build the page exactly how they want it. Developers don't have to try to troubleshoot a Squarespace frontend or something. My God, having to dig into the proprietary code of a Wix. I don't want to do that. I want to use Next.js, and God forbid, you have to integrate with something else. I want to use a frontend framework that I know. So every everyone's happy that way, because you are shipping that page builder with slices and it's just a great experience. Noel Minchow: Nice. So is the editor component then, part of Prismic offering where, a person who links content all day, I think was the phrase you used, something like that. Alex Trost: And that's what they put on their LinkedIn. That's not me. Noel Minchow: Yeah. Right. It sounds like something that someone in charge of that would [crosstalk 00:27:14]. Exactly. Yeah. So, is part of the appeal of Prismic versus another headless CMS that, there is more of a focus on that editor experience to make it less clunky? I put text into a text box and hit enter, and then I wait for a bill. Then I go look at it and see if it turned out correct? Does that question make sense? Is that part of the sell, of Prismic? Alex Trost: Yeah. So, even just having to wait for the build, that's common with a lot of... If you are building with Gatsby, it's a static site generator that does hydrate over with React, but it can be tough to get previews in there. With Prismic you do have live previews. So as soon as the editor goes in, they can throw some images in, hit preview and don't have to wait for that build. Because honestly, having been at an agency, you can't tell an editor, "You have to wait five minutes to see if this thing looks right." You can't, good luck. They're going to say, "Get me off this. I don't want to use this." Alex Trost: It's the flexibility for editors. They want to be able to ship without ever bothering developers and developers don't want that either, developers don't want to get called in to do a really boring task of, "Hey, I need a page where instead of the image being above the text, it's actually below the text." What a boring ticket to pick up for a developer. That's not a complicated problem that they can feel good about solving. So yeah, give the editors the power to just move that slice below that other slice and there you go. You're set. So everyone's happy with that setup, because it's just flexible. You just have this area where the slices can be put in, moved around, removed, whatever. Noel Minchow: Cool. Gotcha. So, is Prismic opinionated then, in the frontend hosting piece as well? Is that how you guys facilitate those real-time views during editing? Alex Trost: Oh, so preview, no. But with previews, it works a certain way and we have clients that actually, my team, the developer experience team is responsible for and I haven't touched them, but my team has done a really good job of making these kits just a dream to use. So I feel like I can brag about it even though I didn't write a line of the code. So, getting previews is really easy with these kits, but if you were to try to get previews in a language we don't support or something like that, you're on your own. Alex Trost: You can make it work, but no, in terms of go do it with Nuxt go do it with Next, go do it with whatever, you just basically have to ask for a different version of the content. So you're typically asking for the master branch essentially, instead you just go, "Hey, I got this preview ref, I'm going to go get some preview data and display that." It's really a great way to handle previews, but it's not too much work for someone to implement it on their own. But in terms of supported frameworks, it's no work at all. Noel Minchow: Nice. Awesome. Okay, cool. I was just, even for my own sake, trying to make sure I had a full handle on the slice of that stack that you guys are taking ownership of. Because, I feel like everyone's aiming for a different subset of that headless JAMstack world. Alex Trost: Yeah. Noel Minchow: Cool. So you mentioned it briefly in there, your team and what they're in charge of. Can you elaborate on that? What is your role specifically charged with, as a dev experience lead and what is your team's focus? Alex Trost: Yeah, so the developer experience team at Prismic, first off, we are growing, so anyone out there. But we handle the SDKs for connecting to pretty much anything with Vue, with React, if you want to bring Prismic data into your website, our kits make it a lot easier. And we just keep building new, best practices into those SDKs. So it's like, "Hey, what if you made it easier for people able to have a source set and to specify the way that this works?" Boom, it's now part of this helper library, and it's really easy. And we just keep thinking about it in terms of how can we make the best practices, almost tough to avoid. And I think a lot of other great products, like Next.js are doing similar things where they'll nudge you or yell at you if you're not following certain SEO practices or adding alt tags to your images. Alex Trost: So things like that, we're constantly trying to make those kits better, so that integrating a CMS into your Next.js app is just incredibly easy, into your Next app. We have a great Nuxt module. So part of the team is focused on those things, both the integrations that users will pick up and use, but also working internally to create better tools. Well, yeah... I guess it's all external facing at the end of the day, but for the next quarter or so they're going to be working in internally, to make our local development environment, or rather our local development tool, which is called Slice Machine. And you can guess why it's called that, it's the machine that helps you make slices. To me, it just makes sense. To make that even more powerful and just make it easier to bring on new frameworks into Slice Machine, because right now, as we're building this new tool out, that one is only for Next and Nuxt. Alex Trost: But talk to me June July-ish and it should be floodgates open up to a lot of other frameworks, which we love and want to support. So that's just part of what my team's working on. We also handle the blog, we also handle the community and we also handle events. We're doing live streams and just trying to make Prismic as a community, as a platform, a good place for developers, for freelancers, for agencies to be a part of. So it's awesome working on this team. I don't know what I'm doing on the team, man. I'm managing, trying to get stuff out of their way, but also doing the streams, like I said, focused on hiring, but also focused on Slice Machine and working on the developer experience there, and finding out how DX is a lot like UX. And this needs to make the developers as efficient as possible. Let's make this button behave differently, let's make this more clear. All that stuff has been really fun lately. So I've been doing both in external and internal role yeah, with Prismic. Noel Minchow: Gotcha. Nice. Very cool. I am curious, you touched a little bit on community, building there. How would you compare the community building around Frontend Horse and Prismic, because I imagine it feels pretty organic with Frontend Horse, because you're not tied to a product. People who are interested in this thing are there. Do you also find that to be true with Prismic, or is it a little bit more nuanced in how that community comes together? Alex Trost: Yeah, it's interesting. So we actually have a great community manager in Eric, and honestly he's been a great resource for me, as I stumbled into community building. It was never a thing where I'm like, "I'm going to make horse puns and grow a community." That was not the day one plans. But it's just like, all right, this is, this is happening. I should figure out how to do this now. And he's been great to ask questions about, because he's an absolute pro in terms of building community, helping people, just facilitating community. I don't even know how else to say it. I don't have synonyms, because I'm not that great at it, but he would have synonyms left and right. Noel Minchow: He's got the vocabulary... He's got the vocab down. Alex Trost: Oh my. So many words, all the words. No. Noel Minchow: It's important for communities, all the words. Alex Trost: Yeah. If a community runs out of words, that's when you know that community's done for. Absolutely. Noel Minchow: Exactly. Totally. Alex Trost: It's definitely interesting, because I think you touched on something real there with Frontend Horse, I'm very clearly, not selling anything. And with Prismic, we're also not trying to sell a thing, but also, it's tied to a company and the company is not just me and say whatever I want with Frontend Horse and it's this organic thing that springs up with the community, with Prismic. It's a lot more listening and hearing what the users need right now, what they need to be successful, what they've been looking for. And so, we've been acting on those things. Alex Trost: We are actively trying to build out with ways to showcase our developers better where, before we weren't doing as good of a job at saying, "Check out these cool freelancers, they built these awesome sites. Look at how good these are." Or, "This person wrote a tutorial showing you how to make a Nuxt and Prismic app." Awesome. We love this, promoting those sorts of things and building the community up that way, wasn't something that we were doing as much. And we are working on getting better at that and just doing a lot of listening. Where with Frontend Horse, it was just like, these are the shows that I'm putting on. These are the things I'm already putting out in the newsletter and the blog. And you just attract those sorts of people, naturally. And I don't have to listen to complaints or... Not complaints, but concerns or needs as much and be like, "Ah, I need to fill this niche." Or, "I have to a address that demographic", is just a, "Hey, if you're here, you probably like creative coding and fun and puns, horse puns, most of all." So that's the key there. Noel Minchow: Nice. Yeah. That makes sense. You answered my next question as well, which was, how do you guys determine what to focus on next, as that dev experience team? But I feel like it makes sense. When you have strong community building happening, it's just organic, we know what users want, because we hear about it all the time. Alex Trost: Yeah, it's a bit of both, where you still have to keep an eye on the mission because, not to pull the old Henry Ford quote, but if you listen- Noel Minchow: Right. It's about horses, right. Is there a horse thing in there? Alex Trost: That's the only quotes I know. So I was going to say, wouldn't have built the car, would've built a faster horse, which I think was still a good idea. I think we should go back to the drawing board there, but anyway. Noel Minchow: Yeah. Alex Trost: Where's this faster horse? We won it, but no, I think it's important to hear what the community needs and also bring them along and don't lose them, as you're saying, we've got this new idea, headless website builder. We would've just built a better headless CMS or just continue to iterate in that space without creating this new thing of, "What if developers did and have to build every single page and every single page type, we just opened it up to the editors." So, yeah. Nice. It's a bit of both. Noel Minchow: Nice, awesome. Cool. Alex Trost: Just to add to that, I think one of the key parts is, we use the product and I feel like so many, not companies... But I feel like so many things can get lost if you're just focusing on shipping the button for the thing, and you never use the full flow of a product. If your users are feeling different pains then you are, as the person who created the little toggle or whatever, because they have to use it in the context of creating an entire website or whatever the product is that you're working on. So if you're not an actual user of the product, you're not going to find the stuff that slows your users down or frustrates them or make them leave. And so, that's the key thing about the developer experience team is that, we're using it and we're saying, "Oh, it'd be so much nicer if this actually did this." That's the key. Noel Minchow: Yeah. For sure. For your users, it's not the thing that they're spending 40 hours a week looking at, it's like, "I do this twice a week and it's annoying when it doesn't work and it's a whole different ballgame." Alex Trost: Yeah, exactly. Noel Minchow: Yeah. We're very much about that, here at PodRocket as well, because we have web properties, it's great when we use the tool on them to understand the pains users are feeling and everything. So we're all about that user tool and you'll understand the pains of the users. It's great for testing and user empathy and all kinds of stuff. Alex Trost: And coming up with new ideas. Noel Minchow: Exactly. Alex Trost: You're like, "I wish this did this." Noel Minchow: Yeah. For sure. It's super, super helpful. Cool. Awesome. Well, I feel like we've covered a lot so far. Is there anything you're excited about in web dev at large, in the next six months, next year? Alex Trost: Yeah. So I've been looking at Astro and Remix and SvelteKit as the three frameworks that I'm just like, "Ooh, if I had an hour more each week, I would be just getting into those and really building things with those." I actually do have an Astro site, but I just don't feel like I build enough with it. But those frameworks, bringing in those, I don't know, not new way of doing things. But with Astro, it's the Island's Architecture with Remix. I don't even have my head around it entirely, but it's just falling back to good old, this is the way the web works. Why are we reinventing things? And then, SvelteKit with just being Svelte and coming in and just being great. Alex Trost: I actually have an Astro-Svelte site. So if people aren't familiar, Astro allows you to pretty much run with any... It can be React. Vue, Svelte, I think Solid. They don't care what you throw at it, but Astro is an awesome framework that lets you bring whatever you want... So sorry, lets you write with whatever you want, and then it just compiles down to no JavaScript unless you opt-in. So you can build an entire or page in React, and then spit out a just HTML and CSS site. And you might be like, "Why though? Why would you do that?" I like JSX or I like Vue, I like that templating. I don't like Nunjucks and I don't like writing just pure HTML. We have these things for a reason. Noel Minchow: Yeah. There's nice abstractions there. Just the developer experience, in and of itself, I feel like is enough. There's so much tooling around the pipelines and just everything. It's just like, "Oh, yeah, of course" Alex Trost: Right, but at the same time, my static text and image site doesn't need to hydrate over every time. So why am I shipping JavaScript at all? Or I just have this one little button at the bottom that, if someone clicks it does a JavaScript thing. Only ship JavaScript for that component. That's such a cool idea and a cool concept. And Astro just has a lot of really neat ideas around that. So I am pretty big on Astro right now, but once again, I want to get into it. And then, there's CSS subgrid and container queries and just so much cool happening in the CSS world. I'm excited for web dev and everything that's coming. It's all good. Noel Minchow: Yeah. Totally. I feel like I keep seeing it as, I keep asking people these questions. I keep talking about it. I keep seeing it pop up on Hacker News. I need a new project to go play with Astro with, to justify really getting in the weeds and understanding. But I'm with you there. Nice. How about Frontend Horse? Anything new coming, stuff you're excited about? Alex Trost: So my favorite stream so far has been the Holiday Snowtacular that we did back in December, the community got involved, helped to come up with the designs and it was a full community effort and it was four hours, just one big, super stream. 12 guests, had Scott Hanselman, Chris Coyer, Casidy Williams, just all these big, wonderful people. And back to back to back to back, just this wonderful thing. And we raised the $10,000 for charity, had a bunch of great sponsors and it was just so much fun to see everyone come together to build this thing. And so, we're doing one in the summer, either June or July, we're planning it for. Alex Trost: So, going to be another big thing, hoping to raise more, but I'm not going to commit to that thing, because I don't want to say... But yeah. The winter stream has been the highlight of the community so far, for me. And oh man, just cool graphics made for it. It's just been a lot of fun. So, summer, we're looking for a summer one and then a winter one again, every six months, just do a really big stream, raise some money for charity. It'll be a good time. Noel Minchow: Nice,. I guess, if there are people looking to get involved and jump in, is there anything you'd point them to in particular? Check out the Twitch stream, check out the Discord, anything else? Alex Trost: Yeah, I think dropping in the Discord and dropping a horse pun or two is the best way you can get involved. Noel Minchow: Nice. Alex Trost: But it's on Twitter, @FrontendHorse, and sign up for the newsletter. There's lots of vectors into the whole thing, but it's a super friendly Discord. You don't have to even drop a pun, we'll just say hi to you. Noel Minchow: Nice. Cool. Awesome. Anything else you want to shout out or plug, point listeners too? Alex Trost: No, I just want to say thanks for having me and always fun to chat about the community. Always fun to chat about Prismic. So really appreciate you in inviting me on. Noel Minchow: No, of course, Alex. Yeah, it was great chatting. Thank you for answering all my questions and getting in the weeds a little bit. Alex Trost: Yeah. Noel Minchow: Yeah, it was great. Thanks. Audio: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. You can find us @PodRocketpod on Twitter, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review on Apple podcast. Thanks.