Headless { Creator Podcast }

In today’s episode, we talk all about Microcopy, what it is, why it’s important and how to manage it in a headless CMS, with my guest Melissa Burfitt, a Senior Content Designer at Nationwide Building Society. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. What kind of writing have you done in the past? Define Microcopy. What are design patterns? What are design patterns based on? What are some examples of microcopy beyond websites? What about microcopy for iOT devices like Alexa? What is the difference between a microcopy writer and UX writer? Tell us about the team of microcopy writers? Who comes up with the rules for Microcopy? Define and giver an example of accessibility. Tell us about the 2 types of error messages? Describe the details of what an error message needs to accomplish? How does personalization affect error messages? Are field names microcopy? How does a particular industry affect the microcopy? What tips do you have about taxonomy and categories? Tell us about form based content? Are there specialized tools for microcopy testing? Tell us how you monitor and refine content post live? How do you maintain content? What success criteria do you use for your KPIs? Tell us about microcopy and mobile devices? How important is the percerption of fast in the UX experience? Who in the web team needs to understand microcopy? How does a content author write with the brand voice in mind? What other tips do you have for microcopy writers? What resources do you recommend to keep up with microcopy?

In this episode I’ll be chatting all about testing web apps and APIs, with my guest Diego Aguilar, a software engineer focused on cloud development with Contentful, Javascript and AWS and other headless technologies. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. How did you get into headless technologies? How is the market in Mexico for headless technologies? Define code testing. Tell us about the testing process and life cycle. What are some requirements for testing? When should tests be written and who should write them? What is TDD? What's the difference between a QA and tester? What should and should not be tested in code? What kinds of test can. a developer perform? What are some common issues seen in test cases? What are some of the common issues seen in API testing? Can you give some examples of side effects in testing? How does API testing differ from Web App testing? Explain how to test a mobile app? What is Lighthouse from Google? How do you test headless CMS driven app? Tell us about testing tools. Are there tools focused on testing APIs? How do you test integration with internal systems? What is an assert? What is a test runner? Is there anything beyond test runners? What is black box testing? What is white box testing? What is the difference between positive and negative testing? What is regression testing? Any final testing tips?

In today’s episode, I chat with Vic PHan, a DevOps engineer, all about DevOps, what it is and why you should know more about it.  We cover the methodologies of DevOps, what tools you should use and how companies can adopt a DevOps mentality. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. How did you get into DevOps? What is DevOps? How is DevOps different from Agile? What should developers know about DevOps? How is code checked? What are some popular DevOps tools? Why is AWS so popular with DevOps? What are the phases of DevOps and the tools associated with them? What are some of the benefits of DevOps? What are some challenges with DevOps? Why is security so important to DevOps? Is DevOps only for cloud based companies? How can companies implement DevOps? What are some DevOps resources people can use to learn? What is continuous integration? What happens with code after it's checked into GIT? What is continuous delivery? What is continous deployment? What is configuration management and its role in DevOps? Give some examples of configuration management. What is continuous monitoring? What is circuit breaker methodology? Is DevOps a.high preassure job? What is infrastructure as code? What is content as code? What is the role of GIT in DevOps? Are there other tools similar to GIT? What is Jenkins and how is it used in DevOps? What is Selenium and how is it used in DevOps? What is Docker? What are some continuous monitoring tools? What are kubernetes? What are some tips for someone trying to get into DevOps? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* Vic’s Twitter (https://twitter.com/vicphandevops)

In this episode we continue our conversation (started in Episode 27) all about advanced CSS techniques with my guest Mark Ryba, a senior developer at SmartBug Media with over 6 years of front end development experience in the marketing space. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* How does CSS work with Javascript? What are style components? Does CSS support variables or conditional statements? What is a CSS pre-processor? Do you need to compile CSS created with a pre-processor? What are CSS post-processor? Do you normally use CSS pre and. post processors? What does BEM mean and do? What is the CSS box model? How are units handled in CSS? Tell us about the position element. Explain CSS selectors. What are class selectors? What are ID selectors? What are CSS properties? What are contextual selectors? What are CSS sprites? What are pseudo elements? What are mixins? What are vendor prefixes? Should a developer use CSS animation or JS animation? How do you delcare element states in CSS? How do we optimize CSS performance? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* Mark on Twitter (https://twitter.com/markryba2nd) Mark on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-ryba/) SmartBug Media (https://www.smartbugmedia.com/)

In this episode, I chat all about CSS with my guest Mark Ryba, a senior developer at SmartBug Media who has over 6 years of front end development experience in the marketing space. In his current role he develops middleware microservices, websites and web applications.  He’s also very passionate about using advanced CSS techniques to create great user experiences. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. Define CSS. Why is it called CSS? What's the difference between inline, in file and external CSS? What is the industry best practice when embedding versus external CSS? Can CSS be used for Mobile and iOT devices as well as web? Can CSS be used for animation? What's the difference between plain CSS and a CSS framework? Why do CSS Frameworks exist? What is a grid system in CSS? How does responsive design relate to CSS? What's the float layout? Tell us about Flexbox? Tell us about the Foundation CSS framework? Tell us about Tailwind. Which browser supports which framework? What is prefixing in CSS? What happens to CSS that is not supported by a specific browser in that browser? How do you debug CSS? How do you keep up with the latest in CSS? What do you love the most about CSS? What do you find most challenging with CSS? What would you like to see in CSS 4? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* SmartBug Media (https://www.smartbugmedia.com/) Mark’s Twitter (https://twitter.com/markryba2nd) HubSpot (https://www.hubspot.com/) CodePen (https://codepen.io/) CSS-Tricks (https://css-tricks.com/) Bootstrap (https://getbootstrap.com/) CanI Use (https://caniuse.com/) BrowserStack (https://www.browserstack.com/)

In this episode, I have a conversation with my guest Cyril Garcia, an incoming iOS Engineer at Pandora Media, all about iOS development.  Learn what you need to know to get into iOS development, the difference between UIKIt and SwiftUI and much more! ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. How did you get into iOS app development? What YouTubers helped you on your journey to becoming an iOS developer? How many iOS apps have you developed so far? What was your monetization model for your iOS apps? Tell us about the iOS tech stack. What's the difference between Objective C and Swift? Is Swift the way to code iOS apps moving forward? Tell us about Swift for server side coding? Is Swift open source? Tell us about XCode. To develop iOS apps, do you need a Macintosh? Tell us about UIKit. Tell us about SwiftUI. Is the future UIKit or SwiftUI? Is UIKit more visual then code? Someone starting today in iOS development, should they focus on UIKit or SwiftUI? What version of iOS does SwiftUI requires? Can you use Swift to write for all SDKs? Can your Swift code be written once and published to multiple type of devices? What are your thoughts about React Native and Flutter? How can you get data from Contentful into an iOS app? What's your relationship like with a designer of an iOS app? For someone getting into iOS development today, what's the most important tip you can give them? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* Cy’s Twitter (https://twitter.com/_ByCyril) Sean Allen YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/seanallen) Paul Hudson YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmJi5RdDLgzvkl3Ly0DRMlQ) Mark Moeykens YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChH6WbyYeX0INJjrK2-6WSg) Swift.org (https://swift.org/)

In today’s episode, we focus on the Atomic Design System, what it is, how to use it and why it’s important for building scalable web apps with my guest Juan Manuel Flucha, the Chief Technology Officer and one of the co-founders of Reign, a software design and development company . ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. How large is the technology market in Chile? How did you get involved with Contentful? How big are headless technologies in Chile? What is a design system? Why are design systems important to web development? Are there different company design systems or industry standard design systems? Tell us about the Atomic Design System. How is the Atomic Design System different then other design systems? Who created the Atomic Design System? What are the pieces that make up the Atomic Design System? Can templates be reused? What are the benefits of the Atomic Design System versus a regular design system? How does the Atomic Design System take into consideration Mobile vs. Desktop? Do you have molecules specific for each context? How can we use the Atomic Design System for content modeling? What are some of the tools available for creating Atomic Design Systems? Tell us about PatternLab? How does the Atomic Design System relate to the actual technology to implement it like React? To support multiple languages, you would create multiple Atomic Design Systems, one for each language? Does the Atomic Design System take localization into consideration? How are Atomic Design Systems maintained? What are patterns and pattern libraries? What's the future hold for design systems and specifically, the Atomic Design System? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* Juan Manuel eMail ([email protected]) Juan Manuel’s Website (https://www.reign.cl/en/) Google Material Design (https://material.io/design) Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/) Atomic Design System (https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/)

In today’s episode, I chat with Kent So, a product owner for site search at Rogers Wireless, one of Canada’s largest telco, all about Search, Contentful and Content Modeling. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. How did you get involved with Contentful? Define search for us. How can a company maintain good search quality? What is recall? What is relevancy? What are some attributes that affect relevancy? Tell us about curating rules? How would entonation affect a search result? What makes a good search experience? What are some tips for shortening the search journey? What is "type ahead" when it comes to search? Tell us about personalized relavency and how is that different from regular relevancy? How do you strike the balance of customer insights and invasion of privacy? What is a "conversion"? What is a "call deflection"? How can a company use conversion and call deflection to improve their customer support? What's the hit to the bottom line of call deflection? How should search work with iOT devices like Alexa, Siri and others? How does structured content help our content become discoverable? Explain the relationship between search and content. How can we merge multiple sources to display one set of results during a search? What is an ETL process? What is federated search? Define taxonomy? How can you use taxonomy to integrate multiple content sources for unified search results? When creating your content model, how do you balance your author needs, your developer needs and your search needs? Why use an indexing engine instead of going directly to the source, such as Contentful using their API? What are some search engines developers should consider? What are the best way to get content into a search engine? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* Kent’s Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentso/) Algolia (https://www.algolia.com/) Elastic Search (https://www.elastic.co/) Solr Search (https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/6_6/overview-of-searching-in-solr.html) Chatbot Podcast Episode (https://anchor.fm/contentful-creators/episodes/E15--A-Conversation-about-Chatbots--Jordi-Torras-eh2172) Algolia Search Podcast Episode (https://anchor.fm/contentful-creators/episodes/E2--A-Conversation-about-APIs--Decoupling-and-Scalability--Matthew-Foyle-ec03v3)

In this episode, our conversation is focused on TypeScript, how it differs from JavaScript and how you can get started today coding it with my guest Jeffrey Parrish, a web applications developer who’s been creating web apps in JavaScript, NodeJS and TypeScript since 2006. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background Do you consider yourself a full stack developer? What do you enjoy the most, front end or back end development? What front end framework are you using? Does React, Angular and Vue support Typescript? Define TypeScript for us. What is a transpiler and how is it different than a compiler? How do transpilers work? What are the main differences between TypeScript and JavaScript? Why does TypeScript exist? Tell us about Intellisense and TypeScript. What's the biggest benefit to using TypeScript? Which IDEs support TypeScript? Is there a trend of frameworks moving into TypeScript support? Why is typing an important feature to have in JavaScript? Does TypeScript help developers write code with less bugs? Give us an example of typing error in TypeScript. What is the "any" type in TypeScript? Why does TypeScript offer the "any" type? What is the "unknown" type? What are type guards and how do you implement them? What are some of the disadvantages of TypeScript? What kind of things can you configure in a TypeScript configuration file? Can you configure TypeScript to not accept the "any" type? How do you configure TypeScript for both front end and back end development? How can we get started with TypeScript? What are components in TypeScript? What are user defined types in TypeScript? What are built in types in TypeScript? What are mutation types? Can you take a Javascript project and convert it into TypeScript? How are variables created in TypeScript? Is the best practice to strictly type a variable in TypeScript? How are class modules different from components? How is scope handled across modules and classes? What are access modifiers? What are generics? What's the future of TypeScript holds in your opinion? What would you like to see removed in future versions of TypeScript? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* Jeffrey’s Website (http://jeffreyparrish.net/) NPM (https://www.npmjs.com/) TypeScript (https://www.typescriptlang.org/) RedMonk Index (https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/07/27/language-rankings-6-20/)

In today’s episode, we talk all about image formats, DAM integrations and how to manipulate images using the Contentful Image API with my guest Allen White, an interdisciplinary designer and developer who works at Contentful as a solutions engineer. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. Tell us about the different kind of image formats we should be concerned with. Tell us about the JPEG compression. Tell us about lossy versus lossless compression. Tell us about the PNG image format. Tell us about the WebP image format. Tell us about the SVG image format. How do you create SVGs? What tools can you use? What are some challenges when working with SVGs? How do you work with SVGs in Contentful? How can you animate an SVG with Javascript? How can you use the Contentful Image API to convert an SVG into another format? How are RAW images different from all other formats for the web? How can you make images responsive and what does that mean? Tell us about Contentful's face detection feature in the Image API. Can we have 1 master image and have the Contentful API generate the required images depending on the viewport? Does the Contentful Image API cache images? How and where are images stored in Contentful? Give us an overview of the Contentful Images API. Can you use the CPAPI or CDAPI to retrieve images? Tell us about progressive JPEGs. Tell us about 8 bit PNGs. Tell us about GIFs. Can we use the Contentful Image API on images not stored in Contentful? How can we integrate Contentful with other DAMs? Tell us about external image APIs. What do you see as the future of Image APIs? What is Lazy Loading of images? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* Sara Soueidan (https://www.sarasoueidan.com/) Figma (https://www.figma.com/) Sketch (https://www.sketch.com/) Can I Use (https://caniuse.com/) ImageOptim (https://imageoptim.com/mac) Allan’s Image API Blog Article (https://www.contentful.com/blog/2020/07/20/creator-guide-to-image-file-formats-and-why-they-are-important/) Allan’s Website (https://allanwhite.design/)