Talking Drupal #503 - TD Cafe #002 - John and Jason

John: [00:00:00] So one of the topics I was gonna, I was gonna touch on was just Drupal and how Drupal connects. People like across, across different geographies.

John: What's going on, man? What everything and nothing at

all. I don't know. I understand that a hundred percent. Maybe even 200%. So you were just in Germany, right?

Jason: Yes. I was in Dusseldorf, Germany. Was giving a talk at Beyond Teller End, which is honestly one of my favorite conferences.

What is that? I'm not familiar. It, it's a very design focused event. It started out, as something that was particularly web focused, but it's really kind of grown over the years to encompass a lot of different aspects of creativity and design. Still some [00:01:00] very web related, but the guy that started it, mark Tela a lot of people may not realize he is also the co-founder of Smashing Conference, along with with Vitally so, he's actually been involved in a lot of stuff that people are way more familiar with. But beyond Teller end, he runs usually at least twice a year in the fall in Berlin which is where I spoke back in 2019. And then and this one in Disseldorf, which is actually much closer to his hometown. So this was really fun because I got to take a bike with me.

I gave a brand new talk, which I, wait a

John: second. You shipped a bicycle? I took it with me on the plane. Explain to me how that works.

Jason: That actually was so much easier than I thought it was gonna be. It's the first time I ever tried it. But there's this brand of bicycle case called oru case, O-R-U-C-A-S-E, that you take both the wheels off and the handlebars and the wheels go next to the frame in the [00:02:00] bag, and so it brings the dimensions of the bag down.

To fit as checked luggage. So I actually, that's had no extra fee.

John: Freaking awesome. I mean,

Jason: yeah, and it just, you know, because the bike's pretty light anyway. It's got wheels on the back, so you just like towed it into the airport and like check it. I, you know, tossed an air tag in there so I could keep tabs on where I was.

And that was brilliant. Came out, you know, and I just had to get a little bit larger cab to get to the, you know, to get to the hotel. But, the organizer helped me out with all that and it was super easy. Set the bike up and I actually got to ride three times while I was there, one of which was a hundred mile ride to the Netherlands with Mark two days after the conference.

So that was, and this other guy, Hans, who was amazing too, was really really a good day.

John: Wait, you didn't measure that in kilometers?

Jason: Well, I do my cycling computer's set that way. But you know, I figured I would get merciless teasing from you about it, so

John: Fair enough.

Jason: But but the thing that I was [00:03:00] really excited about is it was a brand new talk that was very different for me.

This was a talk about well, I don't know. I don't think I've given a talk not about web typography in over 10 years. Sure. And and this was about, about the role of curiosity in design and very much motivated by my dad who passed away about a year and a half ago. And also inspired by my brother who teaches philosophy and has started to incorporate.

Teaching about curiosity as one of the sort of intellectual virtues in his class. And, and when we started talking about that, it kind of spurred my thinking about this. So I ended up interviewing a bunch of folks and I. I've had a lot of great stories to tell and, and I think it went really well.

And I'll actually be giving that again at Evolve Drupal in Boston in a few

John: weeks. Oh, I'll, I'll see you there. I'm actually in talks right now with the organizers to figure out if I'm, if I'm gonna be speaking and if so what I'm speaking about. [00:04:00] And I think right now we're. Batting around the idea of a panel maybe.

We'll see, we'll see what happens. Cool. But I'll definitely be there. Awesome. Even if, even if I'm not, even if I'm not speaking so funny air tag story. This morning I went to my oldest son's science fair at his school. So everybody in his class has a, has a, a topic that they do. And then they, they, I.

Present on it and whatnot. One of his classmates did an experiment where they put an air tag in a, in a bottle and put it in the, in the ocean or well in the bay. And and then tried, tried to track the air tags, kind of like, you know, how it drifted based on, you know, the moon's, the moon's gravitational pull.

And my son was telling me that like they put it in the water and then like they weren't really able to track it. You know, because I, I know a thing or two about technology. I was like, well, yeah, [00:05:00] 'cause it has to ping off of the iPhone. Like the air tag itself does not have the ability to kind of like send its location to a satellite.

I. So I'm like, once you put that thing in the water, once it's far enough away from an iPhone, like it's not really gonna tell you where it is. So the, it was interesting to see his, his data points and, and they were, they were slightly I, I think there was maybe some embellishment on how, how the, the flow was.

But I mean, I thought it was a really great idea on, on like principle, but I was kind of like. No, that's, that's not gonna work that way. 'cause there's no, there's no satellite positioning on an air tag. Yes,

Jason: well you have to do it in the summertime when there's lots of other boats out on the bay. That would actually be really super interesting to see.

Right. Floating past all these other boats and just like happened to like get these random little pings. I will say that would be pretty good.

John: Air tags and luggage are super, super helpful. So we, last year we went on vacation in California and our bag stayed at [00:06:00] LAX for like three weeks. But I was like, I know exactly where the bag is because I can see it, I can literally see it in the airport.

And eventually it got, it got back. But, you know, the air tags and the luggage is definitely definitely important. I can see that.

Jason: Yeah, I, I mean I've, I've heard some, I, I've heard some real horror stories with bikes. I mean, everybody does this and they, and they're like, but. I'm on this plane and this bike is definitely not on this plane.

Can we do something before we take off?

John: Yeah. That's my, that's my favorite to be like, oh, hey, my, my luggage is with me. Great. Perfect. That means it's at least on the airplane.

Jason: Yeah. Actually, it reminds me of a time many, many years ago my friend Dan and I had a web design company. It was actually before.

Before I went to work at Adventures and Oh, okay. And when we met so early early two thousands, we were on our way to San Francisco to exhibit at Macworld. Oh, cool. And we had all of [00:07:00] our like, display stand graphics packed up in what was basically like a, a, a golf club case. Mm-hmm.

But it was this like ugly, bright blue.

I don't know. It's whatever we had gotten from the company when we ordered everything from it. And, but that color really worked in our favor because we were on the plane and I was just happened to be looking out the window and I see this luggage cart you know, one of those luggage trucks, like all the trailers and everything, like headed to the plane next to us.

And I saw that, that case on there and I was like pulling somebody over and I was like come and, and I got a flight attendant and I was pointing it out on the window and sure enough, that was our trade show booth. About to get on another plane. And because of that we, they were able to get somebody from the ground crew to go get it and get it on our plane before we, we pulled back that, that was, that was a very near miss.

John: Yeah. You never want not, you never want to show up at the trade show without your, without your stuff.

Jason: [00:08:00] Oh, man, we, yeah, we, we saw that and boy, that would've been really sad.

John: It's interesting the other day. So I'm a, I'm, I'm doing some work right now in the hospitality industry. And I was actually thinking back to our work with Marriott when we worked at Adventures and just the other day I was, I was reminded of that and I was like, oh man, I remember, I remember that.

Like that was my, that was my first like, you know, intro into like Drupal in like, in like the real world. I was like, man, that's, that's real interesting.

Jason: That was pretty slick. I mean, that was in, I don't know, 2008 and we had like two different themes that, two different URLs pointing to the same Drupal site and had that sort of Marriott.

Theme that we had created for them that they swore couldn't be done.

John: Yeah.

Jason: And then that, that was, that was pretty fun. I mean, just from a, like, [00:09:00] try something new and and see if we could pull it off kind of perspective.

John: I always, I've always remembered reminded of it when I go to the Renaissance in in Boston, 'cause of the 6 0 6 Congress.

Yep. Which is not the name of their hotel anymore. But I will never, I, I will always remember that. Yeah. Kind of got me thinking though, like you're not doing a ton with Drupal anymore. I'm wondering do you miss, do you miss the Drupal work?

Jason: I, I missed that aspect of the system, part of it. So, I mean, I, you know, work on the design system at Chewy and we our design system gets applied to a bunch of different things, actually, including a Drupal based site.

PET md is a content site that still runs on Drupal with this react front end for our design system. And that was one of the first things that sort of proved out our theming model. So that was, that was pretty cool. I mean, we have like separate [00:10:00] typography and color and everything that's applied, but the same, same components that we're using elsewhere.

But you know, it's the, what I love about what I loved about working with Drupal particularly with the paragraphs module and, and that whole way of constructing content. It was like this natural extension of the design system itself

John: mm-hmm.

Jason: Of like turning the content into other elements in there, and then being able to do some really interesting and flexible ways of building up content using that, that method.

And I, I mean, I use that in so many different things. I mean, the, the system that we built for the state of Rhode Island. Was, you know, using that same kind of principle of like building up chunks of content that way. And yeah we're able to teach that really easily to a whole lot of people and that was, it was really very satisfying.

So yeah, there's definitely aspects of [00:11:00] like, whether it's honestly, if it's, whether it's Drupal or, or something else I matters maybe a little bit less, but certainly have a fondness for it. I mean, you know, I had just, when we met, I mean, I, I hired you because you knew Drupal and I was just bringing that into into adventures.

So we worked on the CVS Caremark site together, and that was a really, a really super interesting time. So that, that was 18 years ago. And, and we just, we've, we've built a lot of neat stuff with it.

John: 18 years. That seems like, seems like a really long time. And I see. I always think like it was just, just yesterday.

But I guess, I guess not. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, the new stuff that they're building in Dr. Drupal now, so obviously like they had layout builder, which mm-hmm. I don't know. Was the Rhode Island system based in layout builder or are they still using paragraphs? No, we, [00:12:00]

Jason: it was still.

Not quite where we needed it to be.

John: Yeah.

Jason: To use it for content level stuff. It was great for page level stuff, but Yeah, but not not in the, the way that we used paragraphs. I, I feel like we actually used a little bit of both, but it's, honestly, it's, it's been a while. So, I mean, we, that was in 2020 in 2021.

John: That also does not seem that long ago. I feel like I'm like, oh yeah, they just built that thing last year, right?

Jason: Yeah, no, it's so I mean, I've been at Chewy now for three and a half years, and a lot of water has gone onto the bridge in that point, in that time.

John: Yeah, that is true. I well, so where I was going with that is like what they're doing now with Experience Builder and Drupal is like very cool and ties very tightly to like a component-based design system and.

And being able to have that kind of level of flexibility, [00:13:00] which I think is I think is cool. Like, I, I mean, the last project I worked on was, was a full, you know, component-based design system. Mm-hmm. And it was using Layout builder. The experience builder had, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't on the market yet, but, and it's just like, I, I don't know.

Like I look at, I look at companies that are not building their websites in that way, and I'm kind of like, what? Why? Why are you not doing this? Like, it makes so much sense and it. There's so much benefit to it as far as like, you know, test once, use everywhere and like, you know, scalability and SEO and all the, all the other things.

I'm like, I don't know. I, I like you know, I wanna get on my soapbox and, and just tell, tell the world like, Hey, you guys gotta be doing this stuff. 'cause it makes a lot more sense. But, you know, I don't know. People don't tend to listen. I guess.

Jason: You know what I, what I've what I've learned is, you know, at, at, at.

Much larger organizations with more distributed teams. The [00:14:00] benefit is huge, but it's also like getting adoption is a real challenge. I mean, it does not matter how many times you say it, how many lunch and learns you do, how many webinars you record. Like you have to repeat things at least three or four times more than you thought.

And I mean, yeah,

John: I mean you probably see this too. Yeah. But I think like when you have organizations that have multiple brand silos, right? Mm-hmm. They're worried about losing control. They're worried about losing budget, right? They're worried about you know, losing, losing flexibility. And I'm like, that's not, like, that's not the point here.

The point is like, you better use of your budget, you know, in a lot of cases more flexibility and like putting you. Furthering control. It's just systematizing it so that it's more efficient and works better.

Jason: Well, and I think, and that's, that's where, that's where the skill of the architect like really like, makes or breaks it.

Because that's, you know, what [00:15:00] kind of flexibility are you building in makes all the difference in the world. And, you know, we, we struggle with that at, at, at Chewy. But but I think everybody, everybody does. 'cause I mean, it's one thing, I mean, we know there's a million ways to build things, so, yeah.

So whether it's paragraphs or, or you know, the, the block editor and WordPress or ex, you know, experience builder, whatever, it's, you know, like they're, they're calling it now in Drupal. That's like you have to. Understand, like you have to take the time to understand what the needs of these different teams are

John: mm-hmm.

Jason: In order to make something that will be flexible in the right ways. And that, and that was what was so helpful with our design system and building out our design tokens. So that was the first layer of flexibility that we needed for, for brand was to have three very different things to work on at once.

And I feel like that's kind of, that should be [00:16:00] the rule is if you, if you're gonna build a system like this, you can't just build it with one expression of it in mind.

John: Mm-hmm.

Jason: Three. Like that gives you enough variety. We had enterprise stuff that needed different spacing and different typography and it needed to be much more dense.

So we had to be able to work on that inside the components and between them. The the PET MD had very different much more expressive typography, so that had a very different content site versus a commerce site. And then our storefront you know, so those were the three different models that we, we had to make sure our components themselves and the, the, the theming layer were flexible enough and.

And we're adding to that now and, and building even a, a, a greater degree of flexibility into it. Because now we are getting into applying a lot of this not just on the web, but also applying it in the apps and hybrid [00:17:00] contexts and, and what do we want to do there? Like should that actually feel a little different than mobile web and mm-hmm.

And our answer is, is probably yes. For, at least for some things. And, and and so that's, you know, that's, there's a lot of layers to what we mean by flexibility because that's not even getting into content modeling and, and content construction and the authoring workflow and, and all of those things are, are super important too.

John: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's validating because I always, whenever I go into a, a new client, I'm like, listen, you need to. You need to start an MVP phase with three brands, four brands, like whatever your biggest, most complicated brands are, like start with them. Because if you can build it for those three people and get it to work for those three people, then everybody that comes after in theory should be, should be able to use this.

Right. And then it, you know, for me it's always like adopting, like I always, I always look at it to two things, right? One is. Governance. Right? Because like, [00:18:00] literally like the technology is like not that important. Like we can build anything if we have enough time and money, right? It's the governance and being able to get everybody to play by the same rule book.

Right? And then the other aspect you, you touched on tokens already. I think, I mean, I think that's, that's kind of a no brainer is tokenizing things for colors, fonts. Mm-hmm. Those customizable bits is super important. And then like, you know, I always go back to governance 'cause I'm like you gotta, you gotta get the, get the governance in there.

And then the last piece is the open source model. Like, I always like to say like, Hey, we're gonna adopt an open source model here, where if a brand needs a feature, they can come and say, Hey, we need this feature and we're gonna kind of pull the, pull the audience. Right? Oh, everybody needs this feature.

All right. Well, I mean, that's one of the, one of the benefits that you know. I see of, of the model is that like multiple brands can kind of pool funds to get more complex features built into the platform. So I don't know. Yeah, it's [00:19:00] interesting. It's interesting to me and I know like there are a lot of people building like yourself, building great design systems and, and that sort of thing.

So I don't know. Hopefully, hopefully it catches on. We'll see.

Jason: Well, I. That's, you know, we, so we call it a just, that's our contribution model, but it's the same, you know, the same idea, you know, that I think we're all looking at how does it work on drupal.org and you know, you have initially you know, five modules that do something kind of similar, and over time they kind of merge and morph and the popular ones keep growing and something dies off.

And. And that's okay. And that's, that's healthy. And, and so, even within an organization we might have you know, a number of different, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna pick on like some of our internal applications. They all use this different, like very visually [00:20:00] similar left hand navigation, but everybody's making something.

The first step is to have everybody put it all in one storybook so we can kind of see it all, and, and then let people pick and choose and, and then, you know, over time like that starts to, to winnow itself down naturally. And you can then say like, okay. What's, what would it take to make one that satisfies the needs of, of these three that seem to be pretty popular?

And, and that's another way that you can work your way into a design system without having to do everything upfront, because not every organization can do that.

John: Yeah.

Jason: You know, we've, and, and you and I have done things like this where we have arrived at what is effectively a design system. Yep. But we didn't get there by building it all first.

We actually kind of collected these things as we went and then made them more abstracted. And, and, and that's, you know, in Drupal it makes that, it kind of makes it easy because you're talking [00:21:00] about, I. You know, elements of a content model, you know, we've added this field, well, we have this template to, to display this field.

Let's, let's copy it. And that's the, the simple first way to go. And then eventually you know, some of us got to the point of like using pattern lab or something else where we, we literally had one template file that was being called in all these different places. And, and that's, that's the other way that you can arrive at a really well.

A really well tested design system because you've distilled it out of all of these other, other uses. I mean, it's great if you have the time to figure these things out ahead of time and, and know, okay, I have all the flexibility that we need here and all this stuff, but sometimes you just actually need to pave the cow path and look at what people are already doing and say like, okay.

We know we've got three teams that do these things. That's like Dan Mall's rule for design systems. You know, I think like if it's needed in at least three [00:22:00] places, okay, that's a candidate for inclusion in the system. And and doing that with the design system components. And then the next thing is the coded components.

So, you know, we, we have. We have stuff in Figma. It's all driven using Token Studio. So like all of, you know, all of the use of color and typography and all of that is, is driven that way. So is Token Studio

John: a Figma thing?

Jason: It's a plugin in Figma that was actually started by a guy works at GitHub, I believe, and.

And so we've been using it now for three years since before it was Token Studio. And along with plugin to store all of the tokens in in their native JSON in GitHub. And so when we work in Figma, we're defining everything there, and then it gets pushed into in, into the GitHub repository.

And we now have via another. Plugin. [00:23:00] We have a workflow on GitHub that goes through Style Dictionary and spits it out as CSS custom properties mm-hmm. For that gets consumed by our React components and all of that is actually pretty automated now. So yeah, we're actually able to create new themes.

They just have to do one little bit you know, manually to sort of stitch together the typography and spacing and stuff like that. Yeah. And that's, that's been working incredibly well to allow us to make a change and then within one sprint it can, you know, go through the whole deployment process and be available to everybody.

And, and when I say everybody, there's, you know, there's hundreds of engineers and a whole bunch of different application teams and, and everybody's consuming the same set of tokens. So, it's, we're really excited about how well it's working now.

John: Interesting. Are you guys are you guys using storybook?

Jason: We are. So, we so I work on the, on the product design side, we manage [00:24:00] sort of everything on the Figma and Token Library. I. And then and so, and we use zero height for the documentation of our, of our designed components and patterns and how you use it and content and all that sort of thing.

And then storybook is sort of like where all of the, the React components are housed. And we have a, a partner team that well actually. Actually run by Al Stefan who used to be a UX engineer at Acquia. That's how I met him, was at DrupalCon Chicago. In 2011. He was, well, one of the reasons why I knew the job that Chewy was gonna be a good one is he had moved there and taken over the team that built that builds the design system.

And I knew he'd be a good guy to work with.

John: That's interesting. So, I don't know. I don't know. I had some, I had some ideas of, of what we were gonna talk about today. And, and you're, you're hitting on a lot of, a lot of 'em. Yeah, so I mean, like storybook to me is, is great because it does allow for [00:25:00] that kind of that natural like, it allows you to bring kind of all of the things together, right? Like the, the tokenization in the design system, the, the selectable fields within Drupal, the actual design system output and all that stuff. And you, you really can kind of show folks a real, I don't know, a real powerful end product by saying like, Hey, look in your CMS you can configure these five fields and you can do it, you know, it provides you with these five different, you know, component layouts or options.

Right. Hmm. So I always, I always think, I always think story storybook's interesting in, in that regard. But yeah, I, I don't

Jason: think I've ever encountered it, like connected to a, a Drupal site that that's super interesting.

John: Yeah. I mean, so there are guys that are connecting it, but I mean, I think my, my, I.

Frame of reference is really just as like, you know, dropdowns within, within storybook that are just mm-hmm. Mirrored, mirrored to Drupal, whether it's in a block or in on a content type. Yeah. But you [00:26:00] can, you can connect it. There, there are plenty of, plenty of case studies mm-hmm. Out there. Mm-hmm.

I've never, I've never had the pleasure. But yeah. You know, the last project I worked on, we actually built all of our components in storybook so that way. A same thing you guys are doing. Like you have the React right there, you can pull it into whatever app you need, but also then the brands that we're building kind of mm-hmm.

Could see how the components worked right before they actually got into the CMS, so they could kind of plan out their content a little bit better, right?

Jason: Yeah, we do. What I love is we have a theme switcher. That's built into it. So in storybook, when you're looking at any given component, you can see, well, this is what it would look like on PET md.

This is what it would look like on the storefront. This is what it would look like in an enterprise application. And yeah, it's a, it's, it's really cool. It's, it's super helpful.

I've been to a lot of tech events over the years, but Evolved Drupal really stands out, and the next one is coming up on June Fix in Boston. What I really love about this event is that it's small enough that you can [00:27:00] really talk to people, share ideas over coffee and not get lost in the crowd. But at the same time, it actually brings together a great mix of people from higher education, healthcare, nonprofits, government, and agencies, and everyone's sharing practical ideas about design digital strategy.

Of course, Drupal and adjacent Technologies. There's gonna be a full day of sessions, lightning talks, and opportunities for networking with the whole community. And if that sounds like your kind of vibe, you could get all the [email protected]. Hope to see you there. I.

John: It's interesting. So one of the topics I was gonna, I was gonna touch on was just Drupal and how Drupal connects. People like across, across different geographies.

And and like the other part of that is like how people kind of like move away from Drupal, but like, still it connects us all, right? Mm-hmm. So like. You know, you're, you're doing design systems working for Chewy. I always think of like Kaleem Clarkson who's running [00:28:00] his own like remote work and consultancy company.

Like he he and I had the pleasure of working together at Oomph and like, he's, he's a, you know, an pretty active. Community member Jeff Eaton actually just pops mm-hmm. Into my head because he kinda left the community to run his own like content strategy thing. But now they, they just got acquired by Contentful, so.

Mm-hmm. He's working for Contentful now, which is like. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that, but like, I'm like, oh, well, you know, like, you know, slowly and surely Drupal is just kind of like migrating into all of these things and you know, and then I think of, I think of Ellen, right? Mm-hmm. So like Ellen, mm-hmm.

Worked, worked in Drupal for a long time. Worked in account management, was also my boss at one point. That's my wife

Jason: that he is talking about. For context for our dear listeners,

John: for context. And like now runs, you know, a, a home, home Goods, is that what you would call it? A home goods shop in Providence?

Yeah. It's, which is like, yeah, it's Home decor. Home decor.

Jason: Home decor and fine [00:29:00] art.

John: There you go. Which is awesome. And it's like, not dr related to Drupal at all, but like, still like every, everything comes back, like, everything comes back to Drupal.

Jason: Well, it's, you know, the thing about. TrueUp is, I mean, you get so, so Alan was a natural in, in getting to sort of pick up concepts and site building and, and things like that.

I mean, we worked together for four years at a startup and then with our own business before she went to went to oomph. And, and you know, getting used to that. System and that way of working with stuff meant that when when she and, and her sister wanted to launch Stewart house we looked around, well, she did a ton of the research and, and said, okay online and in store.

We're gonna have a physical location. What's the platform? The answer was Shopify with point of sale and, and stuff. But [00:30:00] so, you know, we set things up and, you know, within a week or two she had the whole inventory system built out and, you know, all of this stuff was already there with their vendors and all this stuff, and.

So then when I, you know, sat down to, you know, look at putting the, the site together it was super easy to do. I mean, all of these concepts transfer, I mean, you have a lot of the same ideas in terms of like how you interact with the theme builder and, and the content and you, you know, structure everything that way.

They're all really easily transferrable concepts and. And so, you know, with, you know, adding in our branding and, and, and typography and stuff it's, it's worked out beautifully and they've now been, you know, open online for almost two and a half years. Physically coming up just on two years each month.

And it's been great. It's been wonderful to see and, and a [00:31:00] lot of her knowledge and confidence in handling all of the all the e-commerce stuff really came from, I. All the time that she spent in the Drupal world.

John: It's funny 'cause I always recommend Shopify like it to, to folks starting off a new business.

Like I love Drupal and, but like, I mean, Shopify to me, anytime I use Shopify to buy from a a, a company, I'm always like so impressed with the platform that I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so easy. Like, everybody should use it.

Jason: Well I think, you know, what I, what I typically tell people is if you, if your focus is commerce.

With a side of content, then Shopify is great. Like there, you know, I still don't, wouldn't say that their content management tools are what I would want. When I say content management, I mean like the more, well, the flexible things we're talking about with experience builder or paragraphs or whatever.

Yeah. Like that doesn't, it doesn't really exist in the same way. Like it's much more. [00:32:00] Limited in what I can do. Yeah. Which, which for most people who are running an online store like that is more than enough. Like having a blog, like it can look perfectly good. And and, and that's totally fine. So I mean, I wouldn't wanna knock that.

But you know, if it is a content site that happens to have a little e-commerce and that's totally different, like, you know, setting up something in Drupal or integrating. Things together is, you know, is definitely the way to go. If, if it's much, if that's, if that's the side dish, you know, is is the commerce piece of it?

John: Yeah. I mean, I think. I don't know. I, I, I can see, I, I, I see, I, I see both sides of it, and I think you could, I think you could, like, you could say, Hey, I'm gonna use Drupal for my content and Shopify for my, all my, my store and Pim like, you know, back office stuff. But like, I don't know, for a certain that only makes sense for a certain size of size of business.

Jason: Yeah, yeah. No, [00:33:00] that's totally true. But, but you know, coming back to what you were saying about the, the Drupal world connection, I actually had a great a funny story. Just from last week in Germany this guy, Mario Rader reached out to me on Blue Sky the week before I was heading over there. And I was so excited because I met him initially at Future Web Design in, in probably 2011 in New York.

I was speaking there and then I saw him again at DrupalCon in Munich two years later. Huh. Or one year later, and I think it was 2012. And and so, so we've been, you know, we've been friends for a long time, at least, you know, a little bit in person and then, you know, always, you know, connected online.

Super nice guy. I've not seen him in over 10 years. But it was like no time had passed. You know, we had such a great time last week. Got to hang out a bunch and and it was just, you know, those connections. Those connections hang around, like they're really good, like all the people we mentioned [00:34:00] are, are good friends.

But but this was another one that like really just kind of came up last week and it was somebody that I, I had not gotten the chance to see in person in over 10 years.

John: I was actually so I was gonna wear my DrupalCon Austin shirt. Today. And then I got lazy LA earlier in the week when I pulled it out and was like, no, I'm not going back to get another shirt.

So I just, I wore it, but I was like, you know, that that was the first DrupalCon I went to. And you and I went together and it was you know, it was, it was great fun. It was great fun. So again, more, more Drupal connections.

Jason: Yeah, I, I, the, the in-person stuff. For events is something that I realized more and more I missed so much over the last few years.

John: Yeah.

Jason: I mean, I was a little excessive in 2019. I think I was at 20 events in that year.

John: That's a lot.

Jason: I think I counted, it was like nine countries. It was a lot. I mean, it was, I. [00:35:00] I was away way, way more than I should have been.

John: That's good. I mean, that's good travel. Like you're, you're getting to see a lot of stuff, but like,

Jason: I, I did, I mean, and I loved the travel, but, but that was too much being away from home and, and then during the pandemic I don't think I realized how much I was missing that piece of things until at some, I don't know, I was in a conversation with, with someone.

You know, it was now, now a couple years ago, but it was, you know, a couple years into the pandemic. And, and what I realized was that the biggest part of my friend group socially were people that I knew through conferences and, and a ton of group events. So like people that, you know, we were super close with from all over the world at, at, in these different events.

And then all like the other like design events that I was speaking at and, and that sort of thing. And there would just be people that I would. Spend really intense, wonderful quality time with multiple times a [00:36:00] year at these different events in all these different countries. It was just all gone. And, and so, you know, I have a, there's like we see you and Laura, um mm-hmm.

And there's like a handful of two, three other people that I see regularly. But all the other people that I had like social time with. I just like, it was just gone and, and so getting back involved in going to some different events I'm really excited that I've got another one in the fall that I think we'll be able to announce soon.

That'll be, so I, I want to try to get back into doing, you know, maybe three, four conferences a year just to get that connectivity back with, with people that, that really mean a lot to me, that I just don't get to see that much.

John: Yeah, I can under, I can understand that, definitely. So flipping to the opposite end of being connected to people and, and talking about being connected to machines ai, are you using it?

Jason: We're [00:37:00] looking at a lot of stuff.

John: Yeah.

Jason: You know, I,

so I definitely am. Maybe a bit more on the skeptical side. But fair. But, but that's, that's just as it relates to me.

John: Yeah.

Jason: I don't want it to do my writing. I love to write and like, that's part, that's how I think. Oh man.

John: So that's, so that's, that's where we differ greatly because Sure.

Jason: That,

John: but that's, that's

Jason: okay.

You know, I think.

John: I write things in like, you know, Miro boards and stuff like that. That's, that's kind of my, my way of thinking. But like, man, if I can tell a, give AI a prompt, like, Hey, I need a paragraph on this topic with this, this point of view. Go and it produces it. I'm like, yes, thank you. Thank you for, no,

Jason: I need this.

I, yeah, like I need, I, I realized that was complete scribbles, but but that's, it's just. It's how I work through ideas.

John: [00:38:00] Yeah.

Jason: It's how I sort of clarify my own thinking about stuff is you know, every time I like write it and rewrite it and then, then transfer it over to Evernote or, or, or wherever.

I, you know, I, I, it's not that I don't think it has this utility for a lot of people. It does. Yeah. I know that uses in. Coding and code reviews. Definitely a lot of interesting applications there. Oh. Summarizing pull requests. Can you do a pretty brilliant job Yeah. Of, of stuff like that.

John: So I will say I did see, I did see DRES had a I.

He used Claude Claude code mm-hmm. To make, make updates to a module. Like there was some, like, you know, a PHP standard update that came out mm-hmm. Or something that he needed to make. So he, he asked Claude code to do it and like just the, Hey, yes, I've updated these three sections, and like being able to summarize, here are the update.

Mm-hmm. Like, I was like, okay, that's. Flipping cool as hell. Yeah. And like, yes, I agree. That's a great use. I don't know. I [00:39:00] still think like there needs to be human code review, but

Jason: that's just me. Oh, ab absolutely. It's not about I think it's not in the uses that I've seen, it's not about replacing the human review.

It's collating everything and pointing out what you should review.

John: Right.

Jason: And so, so it's not, and and, and this is just a one application that I, I see people, you know, working with just in my world. The, you know, the other thing, something that like, so here's, here's my take, is that I think that too often because of the hype, people are aiming too high in what they're trying to do with these tools when.

We are, we are missing the profoundly mundane aspects that could be incredibly valuable. So think about something like e-commerce where you are bringing in products from thousands of vendors and you want to be [00:40:00] able to display and compare those products and you're getting product information from those vendors.

And it is not in any way a structured, normalized schema.

John: Right.

Jason: Does not exist. Right. So what could we do? We could train a model on looking at all of these things by category and then mm-hmm. Use it to help normalize those things. Because one of the most used features, so probably the most used feature in any e-commerce is reviews.

The next most used is probably comparison.

John: Mm-hmm.

Jason: And so when you don't have a good normalized set of things to compare, like that really damages the customer experience and it damages the usefulness of, of, you know, what you're trying to, to to provide. And, you know, this isn't anything that's specific to Chewy.

This is just like general practices. If you look at Bay Mart or Nielsen Norman or whatever, like this is for how people behave when they shop online and, or in person too. It just, [00:41:00] that's, we don't we have physical boxes that we pick up and we look at that stuff's not always available to us. So, you know, if you look at good e-commerce sites, so like Best Buy actually does, has some pretty neat things in their product comparison where they can allow you to hide all the things that are the same.

And so like, okay, like all these features are the same. I don't need to see that. I wanna see what's different. And you can actually get that view in their product comparison tables. And I think that's, that's really super useful.

John: I think like you're, you're onto something there, but I also think like, it just like.

Data analysis. Like I, I want AI to be like Jarvis from Iron Man, right? Where it's like, Hey, Jarvis, like let's do like draw, you know, we put this data up on the screen, compare these aspects of the data, figure out what like I'm, and like there's a human in the, in the loop, right. Asking it to do these things.

Yeah. [00:42:00] But then like sometimes I feel like where we are right now is like, we have kind of like the front end of Jarvis where we can ask it to do stuff. But then it's like the the, the robots that were in Tony Stark's lab where like, you know, he's flying the suit and he lands and the, and he's not on fire, but the, the robot sprays him with the flame, flame fire extinguisher anyway, right?

Like. We have the ability to kind of build these smart models and to be able to do all of this stuff, but like, it's still, it's still just a, just a machine, right? It's still gonna make, you know, false claims. It's still gonna, you know, say, you know, things that are not necessarily a hundred percent accurate.

Jason: Yeah. And, and I think that's why I think we're trying to use it for the wrong things. So, so going back to, to product comparison, like that's a safe application of the model to fix things like capitalization and different spelling, and you could create word synonyms and [00:43:00] stuff to, to kind of bring up a better set of features to compare.

So that's one thing, but that also means you could use it to select stuff. I don't know if you are hearing Leo barking incessantly to my loft. I'm hoping that Zoom is canceling this stuff out. I'm

John: now noticing it slightly, but it's not, it's not it's not that, that, that noticeable. No.

Jason: Uh uh So, in any event you know, using it for like product selection, like now, like in more of a chat based experience, you could say, I want something.

That is like this but not that. And, and it can then surface these things that you could pick through. So it could be more of a tapable experience to say like, I like this attribute and this one are more important to me. Show me stuff that has all these show me stuff that does not have this because my pet's allergic to chicken.

And you know, so like there's an experience there that you could create [00:44:00] that the AI model can help drive, but it's, it, it doesn't have to be the decider. It doesn't have to be like, it doesn't have to have, you know, original thought here. Yeah. It needs to be an assistant that really can help. Narrow through these things very quickly.

It's doing data,

John: data analysis, you know, like in a Yeah. A much more efficient and, and quicker way. Right. And it's funny 'cause you're, you're looking at it from like a front end user. And I would, I'm actually thinking about it more from like a store owner admin where like, it would be great to walk in and be like, Hey Jarvis, show me last week's sales reports and the five top selling products and like.

You know, hypothesize, why those are the top five high selling products. Right. And like see what it comes back with. Right.

Jason: Well, and that's, so tho those are the kinds of things that I think are much more within reach for systems like this where you could say like, look at these data inputs, look at my sales look at social media mentions, look at, [00:45:00] you know, look at at these few different sources.

And then it could come up with some interesting things for you to consider. I

John: will say that social media writing is a great use of ai. 'cause like, I literally despise writing on social media, but like telling AI to like chat, GPT is my best friend when it comes to social media posting. 'cause I'll be like, write a social media post about this and it'll go, here you go.

And I'll go, eh, that paragraph's kind of, that, that sentence is kind of garbage. The let's change this. Okay, good, good enough. Let's go post.

Jason: Like, that's fine. I think there's really something like if you, if it's that. If it's that painful, a process to post something on social media. Let's look at the word there, social, like if this isn't like, then maybe why do it?

I don't know. Well,

John: so yeah, it's painful, but it's just painful because I don't wanna like, I don't know, I don't wanna put the mind space into like create, crafting the perfect message. Right? It's a lot easier to just [00:46:00] say, here's my idea, make it make me sound smart. Right. As opposed to like, let me, let me Yeah.

Painstakingly figure out each word.

Jason: Yeah. I, I have, I've, I'll be honest, I have lately been going with just posting less on social media. Definitely way less active. Yeah. Than I, I used to be.

John: I am not. Active is like an understatement for me. I mean, I, I think I, I, I get to like one or two blog posts a year and then I post about them on social media.

Yeah. I'm much more of a re a repost at this point. Which, eh, whatever. I mean, yeah. You can, you take the good with the bad, I guess. All right. Well, I have got to run. I know you also have got to run, so, and we're, I think we're running in opposite directions, but we should definitely try to get together soon for some, for some dinner and some drinks and you know, continue the conversation.

Jason: All right. It's good talking to you, John.

John: Always talk to you later. All right, [00:47:00] thanks.