122: Matt Biilmann - Architecting the Netlify Dashboard with React and Redux

In this episode of Fullstack Radio, I talked to Matt Bealman, the CEO of Netlify about the architecture behind the Netlify dashboard, which is probably one of my absolute favorite apps that I get to interact with on a daily basis. This is Fullstack Radio episode one twenty two. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Fullstack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wadden. And today, it's my pleasure to be speaking with Matt Bealman, who is the CEO of Netlify. How's it going, Matt? Good. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I'm really excited to talk to you actually because, Netlify is sort of my go to, kind of example application when I wanna just kind of see what I feel what I feel like, how good an app can actually feel to use on the Internet. And I know, like, your core product at Netlify is creating an incredible sort of hosting and deployment experience for people building all sorts of, modern websites. But I think something that haven't seen anyone, talk about at least in detail is sort of the Netlify dashboard and web app itself because it's it's it's truly an amazing experience. It's probably my favorite, app that I interact with on a daily basis. So, if it's, all good with you, I thought it would be really interesting to sort of do a deep dive into sort of how it all works and how you guys have made it, as excellent of an experience as it is. Absolutely. And thank you so much for the for the kind words. That's, that's that's really encouraging to hear, especially from for the team that's actually put in a lot a lot of that work of of building out the the UI and the application. Yeah. Absolutely. So I guess maybe the best place to start, as far as I have been told by the people at Netlify that I spoke to when sort of trying to arrange this conversation, you were the one who initially broke ground on, like, the the dashboard sort of web app application. Am I right in thinking that? Yes. Yes. That's that's true. So Netlify originally started the company with with me and Chris, my my cofounder, building the the initial version from from scratch. So, so the very the very, very first early predecessor was, was BitBalloon, which was like a a simpler tool in the same space, right, for for deploying front end. It didn't have the CICD component and so on. Right? And originally, when when when I bootstrapped that, it's it's started out as like a c natural application and then merged into a a rails application. And and and back then, the the UI was actually built in in sort of the traditional rails approach where where where the UI was part of the application and so on. Right? And and I felt that really, like, I sort of kept kept running into the constraints of …