An interview with Filip Rakowski from Vue Storefront

what is up everybody welcome back to the channel so today as every time I'm coming to you from my home studio in Paris only today we are in complete lockdown due to the Corona fires raging outside our doors I'm speaking to you while everybody outside is blissfully ignoring the band and therefore spreading the disease much further I'm a nurse I'm a trained nurse so I'm a little bit allergic to people who don't understand this stuff so I'm okay I'm not gonna rage too much about this there's no use people just have to start listening anyways today's video is with Philip from few store front he is the creator of few store front and he's also a senior developer at de Fonteyn in Poland so this video is recorded at the Fuji as Amsterdam conference a couple of weeks ago so I'm doing this video in a collaboration with the front end love conference we go quite deep into why Philip thinks you need a few storefront and what his vision is on e-commerce in the future so before you jump in beware the camera angle on the video is not great we actually have two microphone poles right in our faces because actually for some reason the the other guy that was filming the other angle something went wrong so the file was corrupted and so we couldn't use basically the nice angle so try to ignore that place because the contents are actually really cool I'm super excited to have interviewed Philip so let's roll that intro hello if you live welcome are you hey team yeah I'm really fine like I slept till 11:00 today wow did you go hard last night or were you just tired well not that hard to be honest I will say to be tired because you know the ldren aligned ah yeah sure so we know this I didn't say your last name right mm-hmm so can you say the way it's supposed to be said maybe you can say it and I will tell you if you were wrong okay let me just I have in here so I'm gonna read it Philip Rakowski almost Caracas but it's like oh so it's it's shorter yeah it's like I think it's pretty common I brought like to have this ski surnames yeah okay even like if you have watched crimes of green the world have you watched it I know the name but I don't think I have seen this is any franchise based on Harry Potter so this is this is a second part of this I think on the first part also Rose guy called Kowalski okay so it's like I mean in English all of the same story like like Rakowski Kowalski but it's like in Polish just record ski ok so it seems a bit shorter learn as I interview all these people from other countries I was butchered their name that's fun to do here for real yeah like for me when I hear surname like I'd say in French or in that it's really hard for me I'll be like I have I don't even have any idea how to say this yeah we have those funny things like an O and then E is short so and then we have a I and a J which is a mm-hmm those are not sounds that English people make for example it's can you everyone yeah I actually think like you don't you don't hear it that often in the TV so you don't really know how to do it like for example for German surnames even though I never know German I more or less I think I can figure out how to spell it not not for other countries well it's not so bad right we're all the same in the end but um so so you're polish and but you work all over the world like we have phone calls together about work difference and you have people in the u.s. you notice any cultural differences quite many even though I like I think like you know right now during this all this globalization the differences are not that visible like especially between European countries and even between European countries in the u.s. because like everything is more or less similar okay but what I notice is like Polish people not only Polish people actually there are more countries like this but we don't have this that does not the sense of political correctness political correctness and is very easy to offend other people even though we don't want to because our sometimes like if you want to be funny our essence of humor is a little bit of rutile I'd say okay yeah so I think it's the same with Germans actually so this is why I really like spending time with her months we had clients recently from from German company and a really really good time because they had exactly the same sense of humor as we know it's a really good icebreaker actually because if you if you punch someone like with such a joke and they won't feel offended it's actually pretty good on building relations yeah yeah maybe it's not the best way to try it but like I think immediately tells you that you will have fun with this person okay let's go because in the Netherlands what I notice is like who you are and what you do is relatively separate so if you give feedback on something you did it is okay fix it mm-hmm and it's not like I step on your heart mm-hmm I bet when I'm in France that's much more connected so I've had by accident had people cry because give feedback to their work in the Dutch way okay and I've noticed with people from Poland you're also quite direct about that do you think it's similar yes like I really like the directness I really hate when I'm you know talking to people and we're agreeing on something or the smiling all the time and then after like few weeks I'm receiving an email oh well you know we wouldn't do this like I had this Ruka meeting so much time we're commenting so much emotions to something and like for me it's kind of a lie oh yeah but I I also get it that some cultures or doing it like that so I'm not trying not to take it personal no that's the whole thing because it's not personal it's just the way they act right so you co-founded few store front that's correct why you co-founded yes yes with my boss Peter this is great so why did you think that was needed so I actually had to talk about that do they at this half of the stock but basically like I'm working at the commerce industry and it's full of heavy enterprise software yes and developers developer experience especially front-end developer experience in this software is it really sucks like if you take platforms like Magento even WooCommerce even PrestaShop which is not that bad like it's usually a PHP template that has HTML has some JavaScript but this is this is not the front-end development as we know this is the front-end development like 10-15 years ago right now everything is headless right now we are using modern frameworks and this is actually an environment where we feel confident where we can utilize our skills as much as we can and we can do this in this very popular and surprise ecommerce platforms so the way of doing this was going headless so utilizing the API but still getting this still using this modern technology front-end stack and I think it was really needed because many companies were doing had those applications but it wasn't that popular and also in our case like we decided that we we should create something that is reusable not something that's you know when you're creating a headless applications usually starting from scratch even though like every commerce application is the same half homepage category page product page check out like the base is the same the inner stuff starting the customization sauce the point of doing the site from scratch so we started we storefront and made some kind of a boilerplate we made it open source and people liked it so they started using it we started adding features then we started figure out okay so so many people are using it so we need their way actually to start to figure out how to add this new features already existing projects so then it stopped being a boilerplate and started being framework and you know after that we're kind of industry standard for Magento and we aim to be industry standards for every other platform right now and I think the fact that it became so popular even though we haven't pushed it that hard exactly the reason why it was needed so there's this one gap I always find when you go headless because I work in this industry with the big companies that do the big ecommerce and stuff and next to doing just ecommerce also have a lot of content pages like stories behind product stuff like that and when we go headless we experience this gap for the content editors so a content editor when it's a big monolith they just write some content they hit publish and see directly on the website huh how do you bridge that gap by being headless because when your headless its first has to populate everywhere and maybe there's not a nice way to preview what you've just you know content editor Oh actually that's not entirely true I mean like yes the biggest benefit of headless is they can combine every service that you like you can combine all the services or different different tasks in one application but also they're usually not that well integrated as you said as in native task force but fortunately this is changing like for example story block they have a really nice visual preview and also a em4 react and for angular they also have visual preview of the content even though there is SP a maybe the developer experience in am is not as good as in story blog but like all these platforms i think they're slowly realizing that headless is a future so they need a better way to integrate the headless tools it's not only like a big JSON that you're just getting and you're on your own companies are trying to also a little bit better experience and this is really cool like i i don't think it the gap you mentioned is not that big right now okay so it's closing in using yes diffusion so looking at what you guys have done you're super successful with that and it seems to be working really well so what if i or someone else who is less experienced wanted to start a company like that or just make a product where do you start so I would say like if you have a problem and you want to solve it just solve it just started like when we started with serpent it was like two and a half year ago and to be honest we had no idea how to build headless applications we had we had no idea how to use view and our code was far far from being even good but we started doing this and it turned out it is needed so the if you're scared about the quality of the product or stuff like that don't be scared about this because Danny's better than perfect so it's better yeah it's better to start and then to correct then not to start because you're worried that it wouldn't be perfect and that was exactly our case like as outer of this software I'm very aware of all the Suites weaknesses and you know when I want to improve it I mostly see this witness's but our users they mostly see this good parts of the software so I think I think like my advice would be just to start not to worry about anything and I think it will pay off ok that's important so people should listen to this yes definitely yes there's a lot of procrastination going on with people with a big idea but they never do anything so start small and just try yes exactly and so this goes a little bit the same with conferences because you basically every conference I speak you speak and then I always see you speaking on more and I know how hard it is to write a good CFP for example how to get into a conference so what are some quick tips that you have to actually get into those conferences yes so you already asked me about that like some time ago and to be honest like I don't have a very clear answer and I don't have like a very I don't have any magic unique way of writing my CF piece when I'm choosing the topic and I'm trying to choose a topi that would be interesting to people but also not so mainstream like if there is something that people could easily learn from documentation or they're like hundreds articles about that I'm not making talks about this because I don't think it's like something that people benefit from and it's also not something I would benefit from because actually your speakers are choosing talks for what I have learned we're talking with them and also from my personal experience this is usually a topic that you want to go a little bit deeper that you want to understand a little bit more so I think I'm just choosing the right topics that are pretty unique and not very not very easy to grasp from the internet like I was speaking a lot about web performance especially invidious and there are no good materials about that like there are few tutorials but they're very like oriented usually around certain feature which is usually like lazy loading rouse access sometimes you can you can find tutorials where you have some instructions how to lazy load Bewkes but generally this is like a very very basic stuff so even combining all of this together into one thought it's a nice idea so I would suggest picking a topic that is important to you and that you feel confident in and that doesn't necessarily need to be some kind of you know bomber or like something that everyone knows about okay and what do you think is the most important part of your talk that make the audience like oh I want to see this thing is it like a properly written title or sit maybe just your name because you did that many times or is it like a description or the design of your slides what what do you think makes that so success I think it's all it's always a title okay just like where people are browsing the agenda you're browsing the titles they're really reading the description so if you see the title and you see oh okay so this is the topic I have no idea about and from this title it seems like I would learn it okay then I would go to such talk okay so title it is yeah I flew this also like you know the writing description for CACFP is pretty easy like I'm writing bullet points actually what would be in this talk and what people would get from it I think this is very important like not to only write you an app script abstract of what you will be talking about but what people will get from it okay but that's actually a really good tip I don't think I do that so I just start doing it so when you look at let's say your Twitter feed it's all looking like whatever you touch goes into gold it's not like this no I know but it seems like it in and this is what you do very well that's clear and I all because for my own experience I know that doesn't happen always well so can you talk about what is the stuff that you're not posting that makes you actually so good at what you do because you cannot just be successful because then your life is super boring you never get really good do you also have some challenges that actually make you better than like to make you what you are now so like this question is pretty broad yeah but maybe I will tell you about the story of Technology recur aspects of this store found because a lot of people actually is kind of connected to the previous question because a lot of people think that you need to learn how to build software before building it and to be honest I think it it's not exact it's not exactly right because you can also build software and learn on this and then iterate on that and start from scratch and build something and that was exactly what we saw I'm not like 100 percent satisfied with how it looks we made tons of mistakes and those were the mistakes that made us try go many many things and complicated our development hugely we also lost some clients because of that oh wow so we made a lot of mistakes on the current you store found and we need this a lot of time to fix that and we learn on this how to build software properly so it's I think it's very important to make these mistakes and to make them like even to make really hard mistakes learning how to do things properly if you're complicating kind of stuff for yourself you know software then you think more about that you think more about the perfect architecture also like you have kind of like PTSD you really don't want to end up in this situation again so you're really trying to figure out how to do everything properly to never end up in this situation again so I think maybe maybe it's not exactly the answer to the question because I can think about this I can find such situation right now because this is like very very broad question but just don't be afraid of making mistakes because they like inevitable just try to learn as much as you can from them we are trying to do this and we are like totally open with all the weaknesses of our software we are totally open if everything is worth being wrong and this is the time you okay to admit I'm like people sometimes especially in our industry they're sometimes scared of admitting them stay because there is like a common misconception that everyone should know everything especially the senior developers that they shouldn't make any mistakes and that's not true like you're a human and you're making mistakes like what makes you a good developer is learning from these mistakes like for example if if I I have people in new products for example in core of you storefront those are very very good people and they are making out of insects at the beginning and I'm correcting them we were arguing but after some time like usually after two three months I don't need to supervise them because they already know all the concepts they learned about them we argued about them so they understood them so now they don't need supervision and it doesn't mean that they just came to the project and they knew everything they made a lot of mistakes but I learned on them pretty quickly and this this ability to adapt I think makes makes a good developer oh this is profound I think that's true I'll eat exactly the same way I always say fail fast and fail forward right it's not like you're doing a heart rate monitor software yes you know we're selling handbags it's very different so I always ask this one it's one of my favorite ones is there something that you are really really good at or you think that you you are like there has to be an expert but something that you really like that actually nobody knows about you so I was finding judo when I was much younger and our string is like four and a five or five years I was in national team yeah and I was drink like five six times a week and I was pretty good at it quality right I think they're really high quality in so they were I think we we also have Olympic champion bonus to LA but rights now it's not the the situation is not so clear because of course like every time there are successes there is also money and when there is some money there are problems okay but like overall II the level of drilling Poland I think it's pretty cool so I was trying it for this five years I think I was pretty successful unfortunately I had an injury that I had an injury that actually forced me to stop okay yeah but I also learned on this like actually doing any sports build the spirits like seriously especially when you're young if I would have a kid I would definitely force that kid to do some sports yes just learn what it is like to lose or to win all by themselves so I have one last question you go to all these conferences what do you do with all the stickers so I'm not a very organized person even though I may seem to be and I'm actually putting those Kitty stickers everywhere like even recently where we had a hackathon three days ago and one guy asked me do I have any stickers and you know I didn't get anybody purpose but I just checked my backpack you know and I got like 20 of them in different places so I had cloud in everyone's view as we saw from a certain - I was not if I was all of them from different conferences some of them when even two years old so the answer is like I'm putting them in places actually in my case they are they go in a drawer or they go on my wife's laptop but she has no idea what they are so she has like the gitlab fox like five times she has no idea what yes it is good I'm putting some of them on my xbox but yeah but I ran out of space like your stuff on your xbox actually I don't have any any sticker from Microsoft on this Xbox okay ironically ironically exactly but I have a double yes oh boy there they go but dude thanks for this I know we're running a bit long but this is super great thanks a lot for talking yeah thank you very much for inviting me hey Mike thanks