Here’s what AI can’t do (yet): The Future of Content episode 50 with Jim Vomero

• Editorial experience matters: Great backend design prioritizes content creators’ needs, not just system architecture.
• AI is transforming — but not replacing — key website features: FAQs, navigation, and search will evolve, but human design thinking still leads.
• Smart content equals smart AI: Structured, up-to-date content plus thoughtful metadata improves AI-driven tools and recommendations.
• Taxonomy management is getting an AI boost: AI can help reduce the effort of building and maintaining content taxonomies, but careful oversight is still essential.

Rethinking the editorial experience

In this episode of The Future of Content, I chat with Jim Vomero, Senior Engineer at Four Kitchens, about something that often gets overlooked: the backend editorial experience. While much of the focus in web design goes into the public-facing side, Jim emphasizes how important it is to design backend tools and workflows that make life easier (and even enjoyable) for content creators.

Drawing on YaleSites, a recent web platform project with Yale University, Jim shares how our team prioritized the authoring experience above all else — focusing on self-service, clear guidance, and empowering users instead of boxing them in with rigid rules. The result? A more flexible, friendly, and productive platform for thousands of editors and site admins.

What AI can (and can’t) do for your site

AI is shaking up everything from FAQs to search. As Jim explains, tools like ChatGPT have the potential to replace traditional site navigation and search functions by delivering personalized, conversational answers in real time. But while that’s exciting, it doesn’t mean we can hand over the reins just yet.

AI systems still depend on good content. Well-structured, well-maintained information — plus metadata and prompt design — is what allows AI tools to work effectively and provide useful responses. Without that, even the most advanced AI can’t deliver meaningful results.

Taxonomies, recommendations, and the future of content

One of the most promising applications of AI is in simplifying tasks like taxonomy management and content recommendations. Instead of spending weeks debating the “perfect” category or tag structure, teams can lean on AI to suggest meaningful groupings and associations — often doing a better job than traditional, hand-coded queries.

Jim shares how his team is using AI prompts to fetch relevant content dynamically, freeing up time and reducing the complexity of building recommendation engines manually. It’s an exciting glimpse into a future where human creativity and AI automation work hand in hand.

Want to learn more?

If you’re curious about how AI is changing the way we create, manage, and deliver content, don’t miss this episode of The Future of Content with Jim Vomero. Tune in for practical insights, real-world examples, and a fresh look at what AI can — and can’t — do today.

• Jim Vomero on LinkedIn
• Todd Ross Nienkerk on LinkedIn
• Four Kitchens’ YouTube channel
• The Future of Content on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else

Note: The following transcript was automatically generated, then lightly edited by a human. It may contain errors.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

Welcome to The Future of Content!

Howdy everyone. I’m your host, Todd Nienkerk. Today, we get an engineer’s perspective on content and content management. Our guest is Jim Vomero, Senior Engineer at Four Kitchens.

We talk about building a better admin experience for CMSs and how AI is impacting web design and development. AI is impacting web design and development. For example, AI will fundamentally change your website’s navigation and search functionality and may finally eliminate that pesky FAQ page once and for all. It’s hard not to think about AI these days and all the things that AI is going to do, but there are still.

Before we get into all of that, because we can spend the whole time talking about AI there are, believe it or not, still some things that AI isn’t involved in. There are still some things we can do without AI getting involved, and I know that one of the things that you’re really interested in is something that you’ve been talking about for a long time is building a better admin or a better editorial experience, and so I’d love to hear about some of the things that you’ve been talking about and advocating for in that space.

Jim Vomero:

I’m so excited to finally be able to put this towards some of my projects too, because we use Drupal. Drupal has been our go-to solution for so many projects and it has this rich site building experience where you can customize the backend to fit your content workflows, to fit your organization, your needs, to tell your story. But rarely do we put the same thought that we do on the frontend discovery and design onto the backend editorial needs. And so I love that on my most recent project we’ve been able to interview our site authors and editors and understand what are their blockers, how do they interact with the site, what’s their relationship to the website and what are their pain points and been able to prioritize the authoring experience above all other parts of the site. So if we’ve ever had a fork in the road of: Do we want to use this type of a layout builder or that type of an integration? Well, the first lens we look at is the authoring experience, and it’s led us down a couple of unique paths and I think it’s helping us create something where it’s not just easy to create content, but it’s actually fun. I use a lot of these web-based tools: the Wix and the Squarespace. I don’t know if it’s good to name them, but I like to try them every year and they’ve gotten rid of those barriers to entry and I want to be in the same space. But it’s hard to do that with larger enterprise CMSs that have a lot of reasons for complicated content workflows.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

What’s the big barrier that holds back something like Drupal, in particular — and maybe, to a slightly lesser extent, something like WordPress — from being super-friendly with editors and admins to be, you know, fun? To make content creation — dare I say it — like page building. I probably shouldn’t say that — it becomes kind of a political issue — but that makes working on your website fun. What is that? What’s the big barrier that stands in the way?

Jim Vomero:

Sure. These platforms are built on more than a decade’s worth of engineering decisions, and, so, as someone who’s been a site builder and is now an engineer, I can tell you by looking at the site: “Oh, that’s part of an entity queue, and they’re using taxonomy as part of a first-in-last-out queue.” Wow, did I just get computer science geeky on that? And I hate when I start working with my content creators and I realize that they’re demystifying the Drupal architecture and they start using words like “node” and “taxonomy” and “entity relationships” and the “views” and “renderer engine.” If you have to learn how the system works under the hood, I suppose it’s great for you if that helps you feel more empowered, but to me it’s gut-wrenching. I feel like I lost. I don’t want you to have to look at the site and think: What is this thing working under the hood? No, it’s just content. I want to edit it. How do I edit a menu? How do I edit that thing in the footer? How do I change my display state or my background color? You shouldn’t have to learn the inner workings of it, but unfortunately these are tools built by folks from software engineering more than UX professionals, and so there’s a lag of that user feedback, of making it kind of friendly and able to just jump right in and feel productive. I really enjoyed the concepts of layout builders and compostable content, and I see future concepts of layout builders and compostable content. And I see a future — and not too distant future — where we can just sort of generate content on the fly and feel happy for it. You know: pick an icon, and all of a sudden it generates something that looks kind of what I was expecting.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

So… Is part of the problem, then, that so much of the backend interface is built simply to reflect the underlying data model?

Jim Vomero:

Those artifacts are always going to be present, and I would even add to it that the interfaces are pretty generic out of the box. When you work with a system of extensions, and it’s designed for personalization, it’s also kind of generic out of the box. And so if you want to be a brand ambassador, we have to be responsible for carrying those frontend design practices into our backend and not allowing the default dashboard to be the one that you assume is going to be useful to your content creators.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

And so this project that you’ve been working on recently — and this is one that we actually discussed in the last episode —  is for a large university. It’s a web platform that will eventually power thousands of websites, and so there’s a very large constituency that needs to be taken into account. What are some of the interesting takeaways from interviewing and observing the site admins and the editors and the content creators? What were some interesting takeaways or things that you didn’t expect going into this project?

Jim Vomero:

One of the biggest give-and-takes has been around governance and ownership. We want to really trust our content creators to produce the best content. It’s certainly part of their job, but when you talk about thousands of sites, there will be many people where they might only contribute to their website one day a month. It’s not top of mind, and even if they went through a training, it’s not something they do every day, so they’re not going to retain that. So the idea of self-service became a guiding principle: How can I get in and feel impactful without needing in another browser tab, step-by-step instructions? And the give-and-take has been as product owners. Do we want to enforce rules for best practice — mind you, enforce rules that only allow certain types of content — or do we want to trust our team? Do we want to relax the constraints and let them put whatever content they may want? And so a good example of that has been using a module that does a character count, because we know that for this particular spotlight component, right around 400 characters is where the design best shines. And so having a character limit where it starts to drop down and say you know 40, 30, 20 characters remaining for best practice — but it doesn’t cut them off. The little counter goes red and just gently warns them — “You’re really pushing the limits of what this component should do. Maybe you should try something else.” — has been a way to help them in that self-service. Help them feel a little more empowered — “Oh, I’m using this tool correctly” — without forcing them into something where they’re counting every individual word and trying to rewrite their language to hit a 400-character limit.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

In other words, it doesn’t cut them off, it doesn’t stop them, but it does maybe start to count backwards and say, “Oh, you’re 5, 10, 15 characters over the recommended limit, but we’re not going to stop you.”

Jim Vomero:

That’s exactly right. I’ve worked on sites that were the opposite, as far as governance goes, wanting to really hone in on the best type of a landing page. Where we had a component called “intro text” and the intro text could appear on a page, and there could only be one of them, and so it was just a larger version of text. It was a larger lead, and stylistically it was interesting, and so a content creator might want to put one at the top of the page. And then they put one on the bottom of the page because it was a nice outro, but the system would send an error on save: “Oh, sorry, you can only have one of these.” And then they would remove the outro and unsave, and it would say: “Sorry, it has to be the very first thing on the page. You cannot have a banner image before it.” These constraints just left the content creator feeling dejected. They had to learn these mechanics that were really artificial business requirements. There was no reason you couldn’t use this component on the bottom of the page, other than a very well-intentioned content architect decided you could only have one on the page, and it had to be at the top. So for this project, we’ve tried to trust those content creators more for two reasons. One, it’s their job. I want to get out of the way. I’m going to trust that they’re going to find ways to use these components that I never imagined. And the second is: I don’t want to scare them away. I want them to embrace the platform because they will always find a workaround anyways, right? There’s always going to be a way to abuse these components. So instead of trying to artificially create something foolproof, let’s just create a friendly environment where they feel safe to play around.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

Interesting. So it is sort of the tendency of systems— Well, systems of software, of platforms, to be limiting or maybe even prescriptive in their approach, to say that you must do it this way, or you can have this but no more, or here are your boundaries. But instead the approach that was taken was: This is our recommendation, but you’re allowed to do things outside of this recommendation, things outside of this recommendation, and it’s maybe that friendliness creates more enforcement in a way, because by allowing people to go outside of the lines they actually stay inside them in a way. Is that the thinking?

Jim Vomero:

I think that’s part of it. The content tools are designed to be flexible, and if we try to limit what they’re capable of doing, we’re going to limit the stories that can be told. So staying out of the way and then watching how people are using these tools has been great for the iterative process. And we get to see how people are pushing the limits of these tools and then iterating from there. Learning from it. Prioritizing that iteration process. The other thing that has gone very well is the use of example and sample and templated content. So we’re currently adding a feature that when someone wants to add a new page — and this is a Drupal site — they have the choice: “Do I want to add a blank page” — that’s a normal Drupal “node add page” — “or do I want to add one from a template?” And so we’re given a prompt of: Is it a landing page, a frequently asked question page, a lab page, a program page? And if they create one of these, they’re given not lorem ipsum but directed content — some copy that shows the best use of that component. So almost implicitly they’re getting an idea of: What is a good character limit? What are good images to use in this space? What are the best colors to use next to each other to get this cool landing page design? And I’m hoping that this satisfies another need where— I always feel like a frequently asked questions page is a loss, as a content creator,  I feel like I’ve lost my user if I need that. But if folks are going to create it, and they’re going to create it, at least we’re able to give the best example of a frequently asked question page.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

Well, speaking of content that may not exist in the future — like frequently asked questions, things that might replace it — let’s get into AI. When I think about what AI can replace in the future, frequently asked questions is one of those things that almost immediately comes to mind, because an FAQ is exactly the kind of content that, you know— It really does have a place, and it has a place because it’s the junk drawer. It’s the place where nothing else— It doesn’t belong anywhere else, but it has to belong, it has to go somewhere. Maybe it doesn’t go in this section of the site. It doesn’t go in this section of the site, it doesn’t go on that page, or it’s really important, but you can’t really figure out how to bubble it up anywhere else. It’s that place in your house where you got to put that thing, but that thing doesn’t belong anywhere else. But you just know it’s there, right? And you kind of have an intuition that, well, that’s probably where I’m going to find it when it comes time to look for it, right? So you wind up putting it in the FAQ. So AI to me is— The FAQ page is going away because AI, in a ChatGPT-style interaction— If you’re interacting with AI in the format of a chatbot, and you say, “Hey, I have a question. What’s the answer to my question?” There goes the FAQ, right? It’s gone because the AI can just answer that random, junk-drawer question for me. I know that you have some feelings about other things that can go away as AI becomes something that is increasingly integrated with websites and workflows. So I’m curious to hear: What are some of those other things that might be a thing of the past in a few years?

Jim Vomero:

I’m so excited for this because: If there are two features that I feel like I reinvent the wheel over and over again, it’s website navigation and it’s site search. And they’re necessary, right? We’ve trained our users to use these tools — although I guess I’m one of those that will end up googling it just to get to your site. I find the backdoor to the content. But a lot of folks are still using that menu where they’re using the site search. And one of the biggest problems with this is: Your user has to understand your organization. To even get started, they need to get in your head and often even understand the hierarchy of how your organization works on a flow chart to know: Am I in the right subsection? Am I on the right microsite? Because I don’t know your language, I don’t understand the jargon that I would need to know to even figure out: Am I in the right spot of the site? And AI has—

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

And especially in the world of higher ed, where it has also kind of a self— And I can’t tell you — you and I have both experienced this — but back in the day, when I was actively working on client projects and in Discovery Phases and things like that —  it also becomes a self-fulfilling kind of thing, where departments and offices and programs also need to see themselves reflected on the site somewhere, and a way to do that is to put them in the navigation or to put them just somewhere on the site in the footer or someplace. And so not only does it become this game of: “Well, the people who are building the site understand the structure of the website — and therefore put me in the nav.” It kind of gets reinforced in those two directions. And yet, as somebody from outside of the org, you care about neither. You just want to get the information that you need and you want to get out, right?

Jim Vomero:

Even as a site owner, you end up seeing different uses for that content. So a faculty profile is one I’ve built time and time again. And it becomes valuable for recruitment. And this is often the major goal of a higher ed site, but not always — that you want to feature a prominent researcher or someone that you might get to work with if you join that academic program. And that faculty person might have their profile as part of the lab they represent. But that lab has a different goal: They’re trying to generate money and donations. Make connections with other corporations. They’re trying to promote the events of that lab. And that lab is part of an academic program, and that academic program is looking for prospective students. So even jumping through the levels of that menu hierarchy, you’re finding different audiences with different goals. So any way you can flatten that or get rid of the manual, “having to click through” to find “where’s that content,” “where’s where’s my spot on this site” is a dream. And site search has always fallen a little short because it’s keyword search. And with AI now, we’re searching by meaning more than we’re searching by the actual words used on that page. And we’re also allowing a lot more personalization. So, if I can see from a chat history that somebody is a community member, the types of content I’m going to surface when they ask a question might be different from a prospective student or a recruiter.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

I don’t know how related this is — and particularly with higher ed — but one of the more interesting realizations or trends or something that I’ve seen related to AI and search that I’ve come across recently is: I was talking with somebody who runs a fairly well-known SEO company, and this person has been has been broadcasting the message for a few years now that they feel that backlinking as as a methodology for enhancing your search results is an obsolete practice, which is kind of heresy, right? That’s how the Google algorithm— That was Google’s main innovation in the search space: the idea that if your page is linked to more often and from more highly reputable websites, then your site is considered to be more highly reputable, and it creates this positive feedback loop. But it also works the other way, where if you are not reputable, and you are linked to from other not very reputable sources, it creates a downward spiral. But that’s how you could develop a higher page rank and how your page could bubble up in results. One of the ways, but that’s kind of how they got started. But he’s saying that that doesn’t really matter anymore. That with the proliferation of AI — but in particular, this idea of meaning and the association of meaning, and the way that large language models (LLMs) are built, and the way that terms and word associations work in multi-dimensional vector databases, and how things get associated in those ways — that backlinking is not as relevant and is, in fact, maybe obsolete. Instead, what matters is where your organization name or your relevant search terms are placed in relation to other terms that you want to be associated with — just out in the world — and they don’t have to link back to anything at all. So, if your company name or your university name or your product name — or whatever it is — exists somewhere in a press release or a tweet or wherever, out in the world, and it’s next to the words that you want to see — like “good” or “innovative” or whatever it is that you’re trying to link it to — that matters more than a link back to your product page. How that is going to impact search and all of that in the future is just so fascinating. But I can’t help but wonder: Are we going to see something like the rise of PR (public relations) and getting people to mention you and talk about you off-site and not even care about linking back? Who cares about that anymore at this point? So not only maybe are keywords not necessarily relevant in a search context where somebody’s trying to find what you want, but even linking back won’t be all that useful in a broader Google search context, which is pretty wild.

Jim Vomero:

I’ve lived through so many SEO wars, and there’s great propaganda, as you know. There’s a whole cottage industry around this, and it’s something we try to keep a pulse on in everything we do. There’s a lot of meta information for everything that we create, and I see it becoming much more valuable, and we’re already implementing it in some of the places — media, for example. It’s fairly normal to upload an image, but now we’re at a place where we have to wonder: Should we do some image recognition? Or if we have some audio files hosted, it’s always been a chore to have a transcript of the word spoken or, for a video, a description of what’s going on, even outside of the language being used in that video. This is now really useful meta information, and it’s one of the neat things about how the vector databases search based on meaning. We’re taking, maybe through some natural language processing, not just the keywords, but what their saliency, what their relevancy is, what they kind of coalesce to as a meaning, and we’re putting that in the database. So if we can take that video and generate several different types of metadata, including taxonomy words and other types of tags — that seems valuable, and it’s created a shift for me, because, as someone who’s taken on a lot of big projects that often start with: “Whoa, you have 15 years worth of content. We need to pare this down. Are you sure you want to migrate all of this to your new site? Does this have any value? Are you sure you want to migrate all of this to your new site? Does this have any value?” I often ask that hypothetically and with every intention of helping the group get rid of things that were becoming a liability. Content that was competing with itself. If you had 1,200 extra news stories of past events, did that help? The answer now is: Maybe. There is something to be said for deep wells of content that you control on either your main brand site or even past event sites, making it relevant for how you describe your business in the future. So I’m hoping to see some good direction as the search engine giants start to use these data, because I don’t have a good answer of what we do with all of this metadata I’ve been collecting.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

You mentioned earlier, when we were preparing for this, that one of the things you were looking forward to with AI and large language models was— Well, the opportunity to cut down on the effort required to govern taxonomies. With huge backlogs of content, with these large migration projects we work on, a lot of effort goes into figuring out the taxonomy — either trying to translate a previous taxonomy to a new and better one, or having to merge them together, or figuring out who’s responsible for that, or trying to combine them. But there are all kinds of AI tools out there that let you simplify that or automate that in some way. Are there techniques or anything in particular that you found that work really well, or do you just — and I mean this in a good way — throw up your hands and just let an AI have at it? What’s the best way to handle taxonomies in an AI and a generative AI context?

Jim Vomero:

I am leaning into that latter approach right now: Let’s see what AI can do for us. One of the things that has always been a chore is writing recommendation engines. If your goal is to maintain someone’s time on your site — they’ve read through one article and you want to have other recent posts or other posts of interest — writing some sort of formula that, in the end, is a database query takes some work. And it’s usually the business owner deciding: “Do I prioritize this type of a term relationship, or is newer content better? Is there some content that I always want to push to the top of the list?” And we come up with these database queries that may or may not be impactful, and we do some content experiments. Years ago, we worked on a public television station website where we were trying to make it the “Netflix of PBS.” I think that was our tagline.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

That was the directive, yeah.

Jim Vomero:

And I think it was fantastic, but it was a constant game of taking these thousands of video clips and shows and videos that were clips related to that show. How do we tag them in a way that kept engagement? And what happened all too often was the same content would start to appear in the bottom or the sidebar of every page. Because without a careful plan on how to use that taxonomy, you ended up swaying it too far in one direction, and you didn’t get a lot of diversity. If I can instead write a prompt to fetch 20 news articles that are relevant to where this reader is right now in their journey, and to see what AI can come up with, I actually have the belief right now that AI will do a better job than any query I could program. It’s just a starting point. We’re getting better and better at the prompt engineering of that and being able to do sort of multimodal, multi-shot requests for content, but it’s been liberating to not have to write these database queries that, in the end, don’t have large performance gains.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

You know, I hadn’t really thought about using an AI prompt in that way, but that makes a lot of sense, because the way that a lot of these prompts are structured, they intentionally do not give you the same results twice. So you could, in fact, ask the same prompt in a content personalization context and not get the same results twice. That would work really well!

Jim Vomero:

And we still have the ability to change things. You can add more things to the prompt context window and say: “Well, this time of year graduation information is more important. We want to lead with that.” If it makes sense. And you can nudge it in the right direction. But, yes, it’s kind of liberating letting go and not overthinking the problem. And maybe most importantly, I don’t have to have a group of project stakeholders spending weeks thinking about the perfect taxonomy when really they’re not the ones editing the site day-to-day, and they’re often less informed than your authors and contributors. So you always had this issue where the taxonomy took a lot of thought, a lot of bike-shedding, unfortunately, put into a taxonomy that may or may not be useful long-term.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

One thing that I want to touch on before we start to wrap up is: I’ve heard you say that a lot of organizations don’t use their CMSs as their canonical content engine, and instead they just use it as a place where they publish their content. Their CMS becomes the last stop on the tour — it’s the last step that they take before it goes out in the world. And that seems, to you, like a missed opportunity. I’d love to hear more about: What is the missed opportunity for you? What could a CMS be if it weren’t simply the place where they just drop everything into fields, hit “publish,” and walk away?

Jim Vomero:

This is a tough one for me because I really love the omnichannel and decoupled architecture. I love microservices. So the idea of having a content repository, as an engineering nerd, is exciting. I can have all of this data manicured and looking perfect — and now I can push it out to build custom landing pages for my email campaigns. I can use it to generate microsites on demand. I can have it power digital assistants — I won’t name them, so no one listening has their assistants go off — but having all of that in one place is exciting for me as an engineer. But realistically, the tools that we use to manage our content change so regularly. It is like the technology Thunderdome — has been my whole career. Maybe it started out with 37signals with Basecamp: Everyone was using it, and then we started saying, no, we’re going to ship this back to Jira. Or now we’re in this other space for content moderation. I want to respect that every industry has their own tools, and they want to use the right tool for the job. And especially the cloud-based ones that pop up have a lot of energy and a lot of utility. However, when I spend so much time working with a group and getting to understand their internal workflows, what makes them tick — “Oh, you’re the graphics person in the creative services group? And you are someone in charge of accessibility? Awesome, you want to audit these…” — I want to build a custom dashboard for every one of these persons so that when they log in their site, they don’t just see a list of recently published content — they can see something that validates what their job is at the organization. And the best way I can do that is to centralize operations where it makes sense. And I recognize that WordPress, and maybe a lot of the other simple server platforms, is not a great place for collaboration — real-time writing of content — but AI actually is making it a lot better to start early and to generate content. Do your ideation in the CMS and stub out a bunch of articles — being able to pass that on to the other people in your organization. So, the tools are ripe to do more of these content workflows in the CMS. It changes my job, now, from instead of making lots of websites to just maintaining lots of APIs — and that’s actually exciting. It’s liberating. Let the content people do what they do best. I will make sure that whatever artifacts you generate get assembled in the right order, whether it’s a question-and-answer chat service, or a digital assistant, or a landing page using a JavaScript framework.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

All right, I have two questions for you. The first one is: Where do you see the future of content headed from your perspective?

Jim Vomero:

I am enamored with the low-code and no-code solution, and I can’t wait for the day when the app stores of the world maybe relax a little and they allow people to generate apps without writing complicated language. I am so excited for that day. We’re so close. And if we can just get Apple on board — I’m not sure they ever will. That is exciting because I grew up in a time where I was making GeoCities websites, and I had all of these fun things. I was putting my content out in the world, and somehow it’s actually gotten harder now that you need a database, and you need all of these things, and you have to learn Java and complicated languages to make a simple web app. It shouldn’t be that hard. So that is one thing I’m really excited for.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

And what would that look like? So for you, then, would the equivalent be the ability to create a web app, or do you mean an app on a device? What do you mean specifically?

Jim Vomero:

Well, the lines are blurring. So there are some websites that will track what native apps versus web apps can do right now, and they’re getting closer and closer. But for a lot of very good reasons, especially thinking about, let’s say, Apple’s business model, they want to keep websites separate from a native app, and they want to have control of their App Store. But there are no-code website builders right now, and we could make that a native app and have access to your time, your temperature, your GPS position, and you could probably do some fun, very interactive things without writing code. So I look forward to the day where someone who’s comfortable dragging and dropping components around — or maybe drawing something in Figma — can click an “export” button and have some fairly reliable code. That boilerplate code doesn’t excite me. I’m never going to be a gatekeeper that’s like: “No, no, no! You can’t create something with a database! I need to do that!” I fully embrace people being able to own how they want to represent themselves in digital spaces.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

So it’s just straight Canva to app — there you go. Like Canva, but for apps.

Jim Vomero:

I think we can be there. Now, there will always be a need to talk security, to talk performance, and there’s going to be levels of this, but it should be approachable. I don’t think there’s anything stopping us from making this happen.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

No, that makes sense. You know, there is a part of me that really does miss— I still miss GeoCities and the neighborhoods. Boy, it was easy. Boy, it was fun.

Jim Vomero:

It was just easy to get started. You didn’t need to know what Kubernetes was or talk about microservices.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

It does seem like it’s gotten harder. You’re absolutely right, it does seem— Even as a professional who’s done this most of my life, it seems like it is harder now than it was then, when I was a teenager. All right, okay. Question two: What’s a piece of content that you’ve been enjoying lately? It could be a book, it could be a trend, it could be a medium. What’s something that you’ve come across lately that you particularly enjoyed or thought was interesting?

Jim Vomero:

Oh, and this can be way off-topic?

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

It can be way off-topic.

Jim Vomero:

I have been a die-hard listener of the Chompers podcast. That’s right. This is a twice-a-day toothbrushing show for anyone with kids. It is a guided meditation as you brush every part of your teeth while they teach you interesting facts about the world around you. We just finished “gross-out week,” and it was delightful. It actually got me thinking a little bit more about evergreen content like— This is a podcast. We just picked any random episode. There’s thousands of episodes.

Todd Ross Nienkerk:

Oh, that’s fantastic. Alright, Jim. Thank you so much. It’s truly been a pleasure.