Prioritizing the Team Over the Tool with Jason Lengstorf

Jason Lengstorf built up an audience on YouTube by doing unscripted live coding and sharing his mistakes with his community. He credits his background as a musician and frontman of an emo band for helping him get comfortable with looking foolish in front of people. As the host of Learn With Jason, he believes there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing a web development tool, as long as the decision is based on the team’s experience and the situation that the tool will enhance. Jason shares his experience and lessons learned at IBM where they allowed teams to use any tool they wanted. This resulted in different parts of the platform being built with different frameworks and the need to standardize. In this episode, Jason talks to Chuck and Robbie about the importance of choosing the right web development tool for the job, the adoption possibilities for Astro, and what the future holds for open-source developers. Key Takeaways [00:33] - Introduction to Jason Lengstorf, Host of Learn With Jason. [05:03] - A whiskey review: Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond. [15:06] - Jason’s opinion on Tailwind and how to choose the correct web tool. [22:16] - What makes Astro powerful? [29:16] - Funding open-source projects. [44:19] - How Jason feels about Redwood JS. [47:44] - Incorporating TypeScript in personal projects. [50:17] - Jason’s interests in pajama pants and burgers. Quotes [15:34] - “You should use whatever you can convince your whole team to use. A lot of the discussion about which tool is right or wrong is sort of missing the forest for the trees.” ~ Jason Lengstorf [16:46] - “If you have a group of people who have an expertise or a lack of expertise, then the tools you choose should be polyfilling for where they’re at and allowing them to use their strengths.” ~ Jason Lengstorf [20:53] - “The only way that you can really use a tool wrong is if you’re dragging people kicking and screaming against their will into using a tool. You’re just setting yourself up for failure.” ~ Jason Lengstorf Links Jason Lengstorf Twitter Jason Lengstorf LinkedIn Learn with Jason Learn with Jason YouTube ErgoDox EZ Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond Buffalo Trace Distillery Ezra Brooks Bourbon Evan Williams Bourbon Pappy Van Winkle Febreze Bacardi 151 Tailwind CSS JavaScript React JS BEM Netlify IBM Cloud Backbone JS Angular Vue jQuery Astro Gatsby JS Svelte Next JS Internet Explorer Facebook Vercel Remix Preact JS Qwik Jason Miller Andrew Clark Zach Leatherman Eleventy Ryan Carniato Kyle Matthews Render Fly Hydrogen Rich Harris Oracle Tom Preston-Werner Shopify Cloudflare Solid JS Lululemon Red Hat NPM Microsoft Google Homebrew Open Collective Planned Parenthood Redwood JS Rails Tanner Linsley TanStack The Burger Show Hot Ones Nuxt JS Parks and Recreation Amboy Chat GPT Connect with our hosts Robbie Wagner Chuck Carpenter Ship Shape Subscribe and stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Whiskey Web and Whatnot Top-Tier, Full-Stack Software Consultants This show is brought to you by Ship Shape. Ship Shape’s software consultants solve complex software and app development problems with top-tier coding expertise, superior service, and speed. In a sea of choices, our senior-level development crew rises above the rest by delivering the best solutions for fintech, cybersecurity, and other fast-growing industries. Check us out at shipshape.io.