Jon Henshaw interviews YouTube creator Mark Ellis about starting his video tech reviews channel, diversifying revenue beyond YouTube with his reviews site, building different audiences, and growing a solopreneur community.

Kirk Schwenkler is a Solutions Architect for the Developer Platform at Cloudflare. Lots of our architecture at WP Engine uses Cloudflare in different ways, as I’m sure many other tech companies do as well, so we wanted to have Kirk on to unpack some of the interesting things that Cloudflare can do for you and your projects. We dive into some of the…

Daniel Roe is on the framework team for Nuxt, a Vue-based full-stack framework. Some of our most popular content is on Nuxt and headless WordPress. A new version of Nuxt, Nuxt 3, reached a stable release late in 2022. This new version comes packed with feature upgrades and Daniel has graciously agreed to join us to help us learn more about this new…

Jonny Harris is a London-based WordPress developer specializing in large-scale WordPress projects and runs the Spacedmonkey consultancy. Jonny has been developing websites for over 10 years. He is most known for his open-source work in WordPress core, where he’s worked on things like Gutenberg, multisite, and the REST API. His list of former client…

Jon Henshaw interviews Hugo Gameiro, founder of Masto Host, about how he initially got into SEO and later founded a managed hosting platform for Mastodon. Hugo also shared what it was like during the Twitter migration initiated by Elon Musk's erratic behavior and what he thinks the future of Mastodon and the fediverse will be.…

WordPress blocks have come a long way since Gutenberg was first released as part of WordPress 5.0 in 2018. Today, the focus is on styling and editing blocks, and using blocks for all parts of a site, not just the content area. This includes block patterns, block templates and template parts, and the theme.json configuration file. In this episode of…

In this episode, Fran and Jeff catch up with Jason Bahl, the creator of WPGraphQL to discuss a new caching extension for WPGraphQL. Jason is a figure in the headless WordPress ecosystem that likely needs no introduction, but the group discusses some of their early experiences with headless WordPress. WPGraphQL Smart Cache makes a user's GraphQL que…

In this podcast episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Rob Humar, the head of web development at Dexertos, the world's largest esports publishing platform. As a media company, Dexertos does around 60 million monthly page views. Rob walks us through some of the details of the Dexertos tech stack, which includes Next.js and headless WordPress using WPGraph…

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Sam Bhagwat, the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Gatsby Cloud, about the modular web and Sam’s new book. The group spends some time talking about Gatsby’s origins and how it serves the use cases of the content web. During the conversation, Sam provides a good overview of the architectural patterns t…

Web analytics are a fantastic tool for content editors, but a deeper look into the topic shows they can provide significant insights into UI, UX, information architecture and much more. In this episode of Delicious Brain Waves, we’re joined by special guest Christina Inge, an expert on web analytics, content strategy, and SEO, and the CEO of Though…

In this episode, Jeff and Fran chat with Salma Alam-Naylor, a Staff Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify, about the state of the JAMstack ecosystem. We kick off the discussion by exploring the values of learning in public with tech blogs and dig into Salma's background in music and teaching. You can read Salma's evolving thoughts on frameworks …

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk to Fred Schott, the co-creator of the Astro framework. Astro is a newer JavaScript framework that focuses on creating super fast content-focused sites. There is a ton of love in the JS community for Astro, and we dig into Astro's origin stories and some of Fred's background with build tools. Astro aims to reduce …

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Chris Wiegman, the Engineering Manager of the team working on WP Engine's Faust framework. During this quarter, the Faust framework has undergone a massive overhaul and Chris spends some time sharing details on those updates: Moving from GQty to Apollo for data fetching Implementing WP routing and template h…

Headless WordPress has been steadily gaining in popularity, especially among enterprise-class organizations. But how much do you really know about it? In this episode of Delicious Brain Waves, we’re joined by special guest Jason Bahl, Principal Engineer at WP Engine and the creator and maintainer of WPGraphQL, to help us understand the current stat…

In this episode, Fran and Jeff catch up with Colby Fayock, a previous guest and a Senior Developer Experience Engineer at Cloudinary. This episode touches on how Cloudinary can help developers offload, optimize, and transform images using their APIs or use their WordPress plugin for a native integration with WP admin. The group discusses how they s…

In this episode, Fran and Jeff catch up with Matt Landers, the former manager of WP Engine's Dev Rel team, and discuss his new role in developer relations at Google Analytics. We take a deep dive into some of the major differences between the current iteration of Google Analytics (UA) and the next evolution of the platform (GA4). PSA: The current v…

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Alexa Spalato, the co-founder of Gatsby WP Themes, a company focused on building out Gatsby themes made to work with headless WordPress. We learn how Alexa got involved in tech, discuss some of the details of the headless theme market, and get some updates about her future as a Developer Relations Engineer i…

By WP Engine Developer Relations

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Lee Robinson, the VP of Developer Experience at Vercel. We take a look at some new or now stable features in Next.js, like middleware, the image component, and ISR. Both Vercel and WP Engine support a lot of open source projects as a part of their strategies, and we dig into why that's important and good for…

The tech sector often puts up unique challenges for women in the industry. In this episode of Delicious Brain Waves, Sanjucta Ghose and Sam Munoz discuss their experiences as women in the software industry. They highlight the challenges, pros, and cons of careers in development and how to encourage more women to become developers. Advanced Custom F…

In this episode, we get things up and running for Season 3, with just a few changes. First, we've rebranded the podcast slightly by changing the name. Second, we have new co-hosts for the show. In this intro episode we dig into Fran and Jeff's backgrounds and talk about their developer origin stories. We're really excited about some the guest we ha…

JavaScript is a critical part of modern WordPress, but some backend developers may struggle with “learning JavaScript deeply.” Ross Wintle and Ahmed Hussein discuss their own journeys, and how they’ve come to enjoy modern JavaScript development. WP Engine and Delicious Brains Delicious Brains announcement WP Engine announcement WP Engine questions …

With WordCamps set to return to an in-person format for the first time since early 2020, Iain Poulson and Jonathan Bossenger take a look back at their own personal experiences with WordCamps, with a special focus on the first ones they attended. They share their greatest highlights and offer advice for both first-time WordCamp attendees and the fol…

Stephen Diehl is a London-based software engineer working in the financial sector that has written and been outspoken about why Web3 is economically and technologically a terrible idea. In a 40-minute interview with Jon Henshaw, the two discuss the religious fervor surrounding Web3, why crypto is repeating history and will end badly, and how Web3 i…

We close out the year with Lee Robinson, the director of developer relations at Vercel. Lee talks about the current Next.js landscape within headless development, Rich Harris joining Vercel to work on SvelteKit, and whether Vercel will shift their frontends more towards SvelteKit. Headless WordPress resources: https://developers.wpengine.com Links:…

Alex Moon stops by to hype Gatsby 4. How did Gatsby 4 an up to 10x rendering speed? How is Gatsby future-proofing against React? They also talk about how well Gatsby plays with Faust.js. Links: What's new in Gatsby 4 Rendering patterns podcast episode Want more headless content? Go to https://developers.wpengine.com/…

Kellen and Grace bring in WPEngine's new Developer Relator Brian Gardner, Founder of StudioPress, Co-creator Genesis, to talk about building development communities. Links: briangardner.com Twitter @bgardnerBy Kellen Mace, Will Johnston

The De{Code} podcast welcomes our new host, Grace Erixon. Kellen and Grace talk about Grace's development history.By Kellen Mace, Will Johnston

Will bids the De{Code} podcast adieu and reflects on his headless development journey.By Kellen Mace, Will Johnston

The DevRel team invites JSON Bahl back onto the pod to discuss Gutenberg. Jason talks about the benefits of Gutenberg, what's lacking in Gutenberg's current implementation, and what implementations exist for rendering Gutenberg in headless WordPress. Links: Gutenberg and Decoupled ApplicationsBy Kellen Mace, Will Johnston

Solutions Architect Alex Moon stops by the De{Code} pod to talk rendering in front-end development. Links: The When and Where of Rendering React's server components Netlify's Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR)By Kellen Mace, Will Johnston

Will and Kellen give their predictions and dreams for Next.js conference 2021. What will happen on the 5th anniversary of Next.js? Increased support for Core Web Vitals? Support for Deno? What about running the Next.js API at build time?By Kellen Mace, Will Johnston

In our latest podcast episode, Ahmed, Iain, and Ross discuss the hotly contested topic of whether people entering the web development field need a proper Computer Science (CS) degree. They talk about the challenges, pros, and cons of having vs. not having a CS degree, what they think of coding Bootcamps, and how they landed their first jobs. Show n…

The Atlas Content Modeler teams hop on the pod to discuss the new open-source tool. Links: Github: https://github.com/wpengine/atlas-content-modeler https://developers.wpengine.com/blog/what-is-atlas-content-modelerBy Kellen Mace, Will Johnston

Kellen and Will welcome Phil Crum from the Web Agency 10up. They discuss whether 10up plans to go all-in on headless WordPress over traditional, how the discovery phase with a client determines whether headless is right for them, and using Gutenberg in a headless architecture. Links: Phil Crumm website: https://philcrumm.com/…

Have you ever heard of Core Web Vitals? Kellen and Will teach you all the basics, including how to get a good Core Web Vital score, Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. They also break down how to measure your website against Core Web Vital principles and what tools could help you out. After you listen, don't fo…

Kellen and Will give a crash course in styling for the web. They go over traditional CSS, SASS, and CSS -in-JS. They also discuss how front-end frameworks account for styling and where UI libraries such as Charka and Material fit into the modern web.By Kellen Mace, Will Johnston

Kellen interviews Greg Rickaby, Director of Engineering at WebDevStudios. Greg explains why WebDevStudios embraced headless development (1:30), how an open-source contribution to Next.JS lead to the creation of WebDevStudios' Next.JS starter kit (9:30), and how WebDevStudios' might utilize Atlas and other technologies in the future (1:13:12). Links…

In this episode, we take a short detour from very strictly developer or business-focused discussions and instead turn our attention to personal task management. Thomas McGee, our Video Producer, joins Jonathan to discuss the ins and outs of their morning productivity routines. They discuss the details of their individual morning process, how they p…

Kellen and Will welcome Jacob Arriola from Zeek to discuss Headless WooCommerce. Jacob tells us why WooCommerce over other e-commerce solutions such as Shopify (4.18), how WPGraphQL and WooGraphQL can be used together (19.10), and the experience of building an e-commerce site the headless way and what tradeoffs had to be made to accommodate WooComm…

The team announces the new open-source WP Engine Headless WordPress framework, Faust.js ™. Upcoming Event: Learn how to set up, build, and deploy your headless WordPress site with Faust.js and Atlas - https://events.wpengine.com/event/092db3a9-7e28-41d2-ad7e-cbb16e653eb2/websitePage:5bbe0ca6-fd0c-4e77-b99b-de21baff9062 Resources: Faust.js site: htt…

While many folks think of JavaScript as a “modern” web programming language, it is, in fact, only a year younger than PHP. In this episode of the Delicious Brain Waves podcast, Iain chats with WP Migrate developer Ahmed about the history of JavaScript. Ahmed takes us through how JavaScript came about, why it was almost universally hated at one poin…

We invite Cassidy, Ben, and Tara from the Netlify DevRel team to talk about using the Jamstack architecture with Headless WordPress. Cassidy mentions a few examples she's seen of React + Headless WordPress sites. Tara shows off a site that uses "Jamgular" (Jamstack with Angular). Ben breaks down how developers are using Vue in conjunction with head…

Did you know you can have custom content types in WordPress? Will and Kellen breakdown what content types WordPress gives you out of the box (1.01), how you can extend the types of content in WordPress(21.50), and the Atlas tool that could make creating custom content easier(54.30). Links from this episode: WordPress database: https://deliciousbrai…

To kick off the new season of the De{Code} podcast, Will and Kellen have an epic conversation about authentication in headless WordPress. They give an overview of all the authentication strategies that exist in WordPress (6.40), a breakdown of how to leverage WordPress's cookie-based authentication (37.18), where in the stack auth occurs (52.11) an…

In the latest episode of the Delicious Brain Waves podcast, Jonathan Bossenger and Ian Jones share their experiences using Linux operating systems for full-time development. Ian has an extensive history of using Unix and Linux systems but developed primarily in Windows before moving to Apple desktops in 2003. In 2017 he decided to try a Linux lapto…

As the DevRel team says goodbye to the esteemed Matt Landers, Matt and Will introduce the De{Code} community to Atlas. They explain what Atlas is, Node Engine, custom content types, and the future Atlas framework. Atlas: wpengine.com/atlasBy Matt Landers, Will Johnston, Nate Archer

In this episode of the Delicious Brain Waves podcast, Brad and Iain chat about the recent Delicious Brains acquisition of Advanced Custom Fields. Taking a deep dive into the process, they cover everything about the acquisition, from the first discussions with Advanced Custom Fields creator Elliot Condon, how Brad evaluated the product to determine …

Drew Baker, technical director of Webby award-nominated web agency Funkhaus joins the podcast to talk headless. He talks about Funkhaus's experience deploying headless WordPress for clients with everything from WP GraphQL and Nuxt, how Drew's clients enjoy their fancy decoupled sites, and what might make headless more enticing to clients. Drew's Gi…

We pit WPGraphQL and REST API against each other. Which has better performance? How easy are caching and file uploads? Which one works best with headless WordPress?By Matt Landers, Will Johnston, Nate Archer