Jason Lengstorf is speaking at Epic Web Conf 2025

What is up, everybody? I'm so excited to be joined by Jason Lengsdorf today. We're going to talk with Jason. He's one of my good friends for years. We've known each other for a long time. Jason, why don't you introduce yourself to the rest of the crew here?

Sure, so I, what do I even do anymore? So I've been an engineer for a long time. I've been building for the web for over 20 years now. I got my start in an agency environment. I was building local business websites, moved on to be a front-end architect at IBM, ended up working in open source

at places like Gatsby and Netlify. And these days I have moved into more of a dev rel for hire or even like marketing for hire position where I make TV for developers at a company I started called Code TV. That's awesome. There's a hop, skip, and a jump through all of that. You've got a lot that we could talk about.

And like I said, we've known each other for years and I do remember when you were at IBM. So this is long time, long time. Yeah. So yeah, very cool. You are not gonna be speaking at the conference. In fact, here's the story. Back in October, I think it was,

I came on your web devs challenge. We did a Santa Claus themed thing because it was published in December. It was so fun. It was really one of the best experiences that I've had in this industry. It's just super, super fun. And I knew it would be.

I'd been watching all of the episodes before. I was very eager to be a part of it. And so I've just since then been thinking, how do I get Jason to do one of these things at one of my events? And so you mentioned on X the other day that you're coming to the conference and I'm like, oh, this is so perfect.

So we managed to get somebody, a sponsor to get you to come. I'm so thrilled. So yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about what this web dev challenge thing is all about? Yeah, so the concept behind the web dev challenge is that I work with a company and we come up with a challenge

and then we find in season one, it was four devs. In season two, it's gonna be six working in teams. So it'll be three teams of two devs. And we give them 30 minutes to plan and four hours to build a web app from scratch. This time at Epic Web Conf, we're gonna be doing a challenge with Mux and it's gonna be a really good time

because in addition to the show, so we're gonna have the six devs who are part of the show, we're also gonna open this up and let anybody who wants to participate. So if you want to, the day before Epic Web Conf, we're gonna be at a yet to be determined location, but you're gonna be able to come in, join the challenge and then have your own 30 minutes to plan

and four hours to build. You can work on it on your own or you can bring a friend and work in a team. It's your choice. And you're gonna be able to do the same challenge. And we're gonna pick a few of those projects to demo on stage with the other devs from the Web Dev Challenge crew. It's a whole lot of fun. You get to learn something new. The challenge is really funny. We're working with the Mux team today.

It's gonna be a really good time. I'm not gonna spoil the surprise just yet, but it's gonna be a lot of fun if you wanna come and be part of it. And that will then end up on Code TV and on the Code TV YouTube sometime in probably April or May. Very cool. Yeah, I'm super looking forward to that. For those who, for folks who don't know,

Mux is a video distribution platform. So you upload videos to them and they'll take care of transcoding and all the stuff around that. And they even have React components and web components and things for displaying the video. Really great platform. And anybody who is going through the Epic Web Workshops,

Epic React, all of those video players are Mux. So yeah. If you're a supporter on Code TV, the early access episodes are all delivered by Mux as well. Oh yeah, it's excellent. It's super, super good. It's great. On that note, if you haven't watched any of the Epic, or I keep saying it's the Epic Web Dev Challenge,

but if you haven't watched any of, they are Epic, any of these challenges, then you should absolutely go through it. You just updated your website and now it's like a Netflix site sort of thing where you can go and choose this series. I think it's way cool. Yeah, yeah. Codetv.dev is the website.

We just launched the whole redesign. It's super fun. I'm working with, so I built the site on my own and now I have Joel Hooks, who Joel Hooks and team are also behind Epic Web and Epic React and Total TypeScript and a bunch of the courses out there

that are just wonderful experiences. And so Joel and team are gonna be helping me just manage all of the amazingly challenging work that happens behind the scenes when you're running something that has members and payment processing and customer support. And there's just a lot of stuff that happens

that if you don't have extra help, it piles up and you never get any work done because you're always doing the admin stuff. So I'm very, very excited about that. We built it in Astro. It's running on Clerk and we got Algolia in there for search. We're using Stripe for payments.

We're using Sanity for content management. It's been Mux for video, Cloudinary for images. It's a really interesting site. The whole thing's open source if you wanna see how to build a really complicated Astro site that does videos and memberships and payments and all that kind of stuff.

But yeah, tons of fun to build and hopefully tons of fun to use. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you took all the sponsors for the Web Dev Challenge and just applied them to the website too, which is cool. The upside, I guess, of working on something like the Web Dev Challenge is I get to audition a lot of tools

and build something real with them. And then I come away with like, I know how to build this thing now and I have a problem that I need to solve that's related. And so I think it kind of proves the thesis of the Web Dev Challenge for me, which is that one of the hardest things is to get the time to just learn a pattern.

And even if you learn it in a silly way, you've still learned the pattern. So finding ways to have fun and give yourself a time box area to learn some code lets you kind of open up some new pathways so that when you're moving in the future, even four hours of experience with something like Clerk was enough for me to know that it was gonna solve a problem in a way that I could get through

to what I wanted to be working on very, very quickly. So I installed Clerk, it took me like an hour, and then I was just on to the rest of my code. I didn't have to think about my auth logic and stuff. So similar with the other tools that I worked on, it was like, okay, you're gonna let me get from point A to point B very, very quickly so that I can work on the hard thing,

which is how do I build a Netflix-style site in Astro, which there weren't templates or previous examples of that. So that was the hard part and I wanted to figure that out. I didn't really wanna have to think about where do I put the content for my, what's my CMS, what's my user layer? And so, yeah, it was nice to be able to pull on

that experience of having done the challenges. Yeah, I love that too. I'm glad that you brought up kind of the thinking behind the Web Dev Challenge and it's more than just entertainment for all of us. I always say it's like Great British Bake Off, but for web developers.

That was the exact pitch that I used when I was trying to get it made. Oh, yeah, it's perfect and that is what it is, but it's more than that because it is an opportunity for at least the participants to try something that they've never really done before and get better, which is one of the reasons why I was so excited

to participate and it was better than I expected. It was just so lovely and it is actually like the Great British Bake Off, where if you watch that, people are helping each other the whole time. They're like, could you hold this or could you, do you have any more of these or whatever? That was my experience in the Web Dev Challenge

was like people were helping each other out. It's not so much a contest as it is a challenge and I just think that's wonderful and the hackathon portion, I think, is really interesting too. Can you describe that a little bit more because I think that will be more applicable to the people watching. Yeah, so we do two different types of hackathons.

There's gonna be one that happens in person at the same venue that we're filming the episode in Salt Lake City and if you are coming to Epic Web Conf, just come in a day early, you can come in, do this challenge alongside us and whoever's gonna be there. We're still working on casting, but I'm very excited about the people

I'm talking to right now. We're going to give you the challenge. You can work on it all day. You're gonna have support from the Mucks team. There'll be people there to talk you through the tools. You'll be working on the same clock that everybody in the show is working on. We'll eat together and then afterward, Mucks is actually gonna keep that same venue

and turn it into the opening party for Epic Web Conf. So this is great if you want to meet the people who are coming to the show. You wanna learn something new, kind of a hackathon experience, but without the, you know, it's not competitive. It's more collaborative, more fun and if you wanna make a new friend, like meet somebody that's maybe,

if you're more of a back-end dev, maybe you find somebody who's more front-end and form a team and work on it together. It's a great way to challenge yourself, to learn something new and then we'll do the exact same thing remotely once the episode goes live. So when we launch the episode in April or May, then we'll also do a remote version of the hackathon

where you can take the challenge and submit your work and what we'll do with that is, for people who submit, we'll do, you do a call with me and kind of demo the work. We'll put those together into clips that we'll share through social media and stuff and then we'll also, for the first, for the first like X number of people,

we have some giveaways and goodies to, you know, just as like fun little thank yous for being part of this challenge. Love that, yeah. And to be clear, what does it cost for people to come? Because the day of, we're also doing the workshop, my workshop, that will be, that actually costs money.

We have the, Neon is also doing a workshop that morning and that is free, so what does it cost for this? It is free if you wanna come and participate. You just bring yourself, bring your laptop and get ready to build something. Very cool, and people should plan on being there

from like 9.30 or 10 till the evening for the party? Yeah, I think it'll start about 10. I'm working on the specifics of the schedule right now but I think it'll be about 10 to six would be my guess is about how long it'll take and then the party will start about 7.30. Very cool, very cool.

Well, that is super, super exciting, Jason. I do want to ask you also, because you will be at the conference, you're like, you'll have this and it'll be great and it'll be amazing and then you'll be done and you can just be at the conference. And what is it about conferences that gets you traveling all over the place to go?

I think for me, it's, I've built my entire career in many ways through in-person experiences and when I was brand new to the industry, I had been working as a solo agency developer. I had kind of started my own little freelancing agency. I was working for smaller companies.

I didn't have a professional network to speak of. I had a few people in Montana and at the time I was living in Missoula, Montana and there was a group called Montana Programmers. There were like 14 of us and we couldn't have a programming specific group because none of us used the same programming languages,

a couple of them used Java, I was using PHP and JavaScript, somebody else was using C, so we couldn't really have a JavaScript group because it would just be me by myself. So we would just kind of talk about what we were working on and we'd talk about broader patterns and stuff and I realized if I wanted to get more out of my career,

I was gonna have to go to where the devs that were doing the stuff I wanted to do were. So I remember very, very early, I reached out to Chris Coyier and I asked him if I could write an article for CSS Tricks and he agreed and then I was able to use that to get connected to the speakers or the organizers of Future of Web Dev,

I think it was called. And so then I got invited to speak at one of those and then I was like, dang, that was so much fun that I started attending them without speaking and I would meet people and the thing that was interesting is I met people who were just like me. They were devs, regular jobs, weren't at fancy companies

or didn't have great industry connections, we were just people, we were just hanging out at these events that now, 10, 15, 20 years later, these devs are like senior directors at places like JPMorgan Chase or the executive VP of something something or whatever it is,

like they've all progressed because careers are long, right? And so people that I met because I liked them and they became my friends have moved on to become very influential and they can open a lot of doors now. And so I've always thought of events are this place where you can just go be a person

and if you go there and you make friends and you have the perseverance to stick through the years that it takes to build a career in a network, you kind of can't fail because you'll just keep making more friends and those friends have friends and those friends get promotions or new jobs or whatever it is and you just get opportunities

that you never would have gotten if you'd stayed at home. And so I have very firmly believe that taking the time to spend time in physical spaces has sort of been the secret to my success and I don't know how I would have done any of the things that I do now

if it hadn't been for that effort spent doing the time in person. That is so well said. 100%, the perspective is very needed to realize like some people say, well, I don't go to meetups

because they're always just like a bunch of beginners there and I want something more advanced to talk about. But like those beginners will not be beginners forever and it's those relations, and like also they're human and like so you do want to care about people

but like just from a purely I need to optimize my time and like think perspective, I have, I know a lot of developers who started in the industry after me and so there was a time where they were the beginner and I was the experienced one and now they've surpassed me in certain areas

and it's a really rewarding relationship just from that selfish perspective. Well, and I think that the important thing that I've always considered is like if somebody comes up to you and it's clear that they want something, you're already on guard. You don't really want to, like it feels transactional and that doesn't feel good. If somebody's just there

because it's fun to know somebody new, then you're willing to help them in a way that you wouldn't if it seemed like they were coming to just like slide you a business card, right? And so I think the thing about networking is that the best networking shouldn't feel at all like networking. And I think if people are looking at it as like

I need to go build my professional network, great. Think about it like going to make as many friends as you possibly can. Don't worry about who's got the title, who's got the access, who's got the company on their business card. Think about who can I make friends with because nobody's, like everybody changes jobs

every 18 months now. Like network with everybody, I promise you. Everybody you know will be at a different company in two years and it's gonna be something interesting and if you keep in touch and if you be a good friend, every one of those people whenever they change jobs is gonna, somebody's gonna say, oh, you know who we're looking for is like somebody who's really good at X. They're gonna go, you know who I know

that's really good at that and then you get an email, right? And it has nothing to do with whether or not you sent them the right, like here's my resume, right? Like, hello, thank you for coming to this meetup. I would like to extend my professional network by giving you my business card. Like, no, go be a friend and if you're a friend, it will pay you back 100 fold,

I promise. Yeah, way into that, absolutely. And Jason, while we're there building our networks or just becoming friends with people, what are the sorts of things that people can come talk with you about that would get you just really excited to chat? I mean, I think at the end of the day, I really just wanna be a philosopher.

And so if you wanna talk about having a career that you enjoy, being excited about going to work, taking calculated risks on how you can live the career that you want and that you think you can do, even if you're not 100% sure how it would work. I love those conversations. I love the ideation.

I love thinking about what things could be like if we just had the courage to try. So come find me, let's talk about it. Oh, I love that. That makes me think of Aaron Francis and his try-hard studios. I love that. I do. Aaron and I, I think, are kindred spirits in that way. I love his outlook

and very much identify with a lot of that sentiment. Yeah, I fully expect to see the two of you just chatting it up over at Epic Web Conf in March. Well, hey, Jason, thank you so much for participating in Epic Web Conf in a very big way. I really appreciate your support in coming out and I look forward to all of the people

who are gonna come and meet you and get to know you and become friends with you. So thank you so much for coming out. Yeah, of course. Can't wait to make new... Yeah, of course. Can't wait to make some new friends. See ya.

Jason Lengstorf

making tv for developers at CodeTV

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