Sam Bhagwat
Sam Bhagwat is the co-founder of Gatsby, a popular framework for creating content experiences.
He is also the author of Modular: The Web's New Architecture. If you're not sure how the terms "headless," "decoupled," or "composable" might affect your content work in the future, the book can help you understand these concepts and the technical ecosystems that enable them.
We talked about:
the Gatsby origin story (we recorded this just before Gatsby was acquired by Netlify - more on this below)
his book, Modular: The Web's New Architecture
the tech and design trends driving the adoption of modular architectures
the ways that modular architectures help different kinds of businesses - merchants, publishers, and marketers
the "solar system" of different classes of development tools that support modular architectures
workflows and practices that support the federation and orchestration of modular systems
the future of content roles in a modular landscape
the benefits of thinking of content both as data and as code
how coding practices like version control and multiplayer collaboration are likely to be adopted in the content world
how the emergence of a search utility like Algolia shows the benefits of modularization
his hypothesis that the move to full modularity may retrench a bit in the near term as parts of CMS functionality are re-bundled
the excitement he sees around "new integration and orchestration ways of pulling our existing pieces of the puzzle together" - including Gatsby's new Valhalla product
a note regarding the Netlify acquisition that Sam shared shortly after our interview: "The news this month in the Jamstack world is Gatsby joining Netlify. We hadn’t finished the acquisition talks when Larry and I recorded this episode, so unfortunately we couldn’t discuss them. But our conversation should give a lot of insight, since we’d joined Netlify for a lot of the reasons Larry and I talked about. The last decade of the modular web has been about creating the right primitives. The next few years will be about integrating them together and making them easier to use."
Sam's bio
Sam Bhagwat is a principal engineer at Netlify. He’s the co-founder of Gatsby and author of Modular: The Web’s New Architecture. Prior to founding Gatsby he was an early engineer at Plangrid and Zenefits. Sam lives in Sacramento with his five-year old son and three-year-old daughter.
Connect with Sam online
Twitter
email: sam at gatsbyjs.com
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/z3pb2uUHt1U
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 136. For most of the history of the web, content practitioners have managed their work in integrated content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Adobe Experience Manager. Many organizations are moving away from these monolithic products to headless CMSs that are a part of an emerging modular ecosystem for building web experiences. Sam Bhagwat's new book, Modular: The Web’s New Architecture, can help you understand and navigate this new way of working with content.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 136 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Sam Bhagwat. Sam is the co-founder and the Chief Strategy Officer at Gatsby, which is a... Actually, It's not a static site generator. What do you call Gatsby, Sam?
Sam:
I would call it a modern JavaScript framework for content sites.
Larry:
For putting sites together. And your role there, you co-founded it and you're now the Chief Strategy Officer. A couple quick things. What led you to found Gatsby and what is being a chief strategy officer there entail?
Sam:
Yeah, so rewinding back a few years in 2015, my best friend Kyle Matthews created an open source JavaScript framework to build websites based on React. So this was really early in the React days and it started taking off, among developers that were kind of excited to build with this new framework. And Kyle was very early in that community, very much felt that React would be the future of web development. I started getting involved as Gatsby became more and more popular and one day we just turned to each other and said like, "Let's make a company here. It seems like we should be doing this." And that's how Gatsby as a company got started.
Sam:
So these days now, fast forward five, six, seven years and it's pretty clear that React and modern JavaScript is going to play a huge role in web development. I think that's pretty broadly accepted. The Jamstack, the composable web, the modular web, goes by a number of names, is getting just a ton of mainstream adoption. And so right now at Gatsby I mostly spend a lot of time with our customers and prospective customers helping people understand how to put all these different pieces together.
Larry:
And one of the ways you've helped people put it together is with that book you wrote. You just wrote a book recently called, Modular: The Web's New Architecture: (And How It's Changing Online Business). Did that book arise out of all that education you've been doing?
Sam:
Pretty much. I mean, we were having a lot of conversations with folks who were getting into this world and folks had come from a lot of different backgrounds. Some folks had come from the content world, some folks who come from ecommerce world, some folks would come from more of a startup engineering world. And each of group of folks understood certain things about the architecture but also didn't understand certain things about the architecture. After we had a lot of similar conversations, we wanted to tie it all together with a little bit of the history of how all these pieces came together, as well as a practical guide of how to use the different pieces together.
Larry:
And I love that. I mean, there's a lot to about the book, I'll just say. I really appreciated it and enjoyed it. But one of the early in the book you talk about the rise of the modular web and you talk about all these things that we're all kind of aware of, but they've come together in a way that creates the need for modularity. Can you talk a little bit about some of the key inputs into that?
Sam:
Yeah, I mean I think there's almost like a Fellowship of the Ring kind of moment here where you just get a lot of different groups that coming together that are aligned in a lot of different veins. For example, the rise of kind of JavaScript on the web, especially the JavaScript ecosystem, the importance of web performance, the SEO update that Google did a year and a half ago I think is maybe the best example of that, mobile especially and the need for performance on mobile specifically. There's a lot of design trends that have come along that that's sort of taken a while to shake out with mobile that are pretty important. The cloud and SaaS in general. The proliferation of all these kind of services for search and authentication and of course have the CMSs. And just the proliferation of all these different services.
Sam:
So there's a number of different threads. I mean then the gradual steady rise of the ecommerce over the last decade being another piece. And so there are all these really different pieces of the puzzle that when you put them all together have created this environment where it's now possible to assemble a system for running your website and your online presence from all of these different pieces where that was much more difficult to do five or seven years ago.
Larry:
Right. And all those things you mentioned, just cloud and SaaS provides an infrastructure for a lot of this stitching together. It's so interesting to me because JavaScript was around for 20 years before it really took off. Was it the React framework do you think that really... I don't follow that world very closely.
Sam:
There were a couple things. So the 2000s were kind of a lost decade for JavaScript in a lot of ways. But starting near the end of that decade, there was just a bunch of different things that happened at the same time. There was an open source kind of standards committee that kind of got their act together after a long time and agreed on some sort of syntax improvements that really helped move the developer experience forward. There were things like Node, so the server side run time and NPM as a package management system that also originated around that time. And there's been a lot of things since the React and Vue and similar kind of component based frameworks that came around the middle of the decade that kind of accelerated that trend. But I'd say that, really, the movement and maturity of JavaScript started around the beginning of the 2010s.
Larry:
Which is also the same time that mobile is becoming a real issue to deal with. And if I recall correctly, that's around the time that headless CMSs kind of became a thing as well. I wonder if there's a chicken and egg thing there. Did these things emerge because they were needed because of each other?
Sam:
You never really know. But you're right though, I mean cloud and SaaS happened at that time, JavaScript started to get good, and mobile happened at the same time. In some ways those trends just stack on top of each other in terms of driving momentum for this modular world that we're in now.
Larry:
Yeah, and that's the point. Regardless of the exact sequence and relationship between all those things, it's clear that there's a need for a modular architecture for the modern web. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? A lot of my listeners I think are come out of publishing and journalism in places that probably just have a WordPress site or Drupal or maybe an enterprise site and they may have seen a Jamstack site or something like that.
