0:00

Welcome to syntax today. We've got

0:03

some tips and advice that we

0:05

wish we knew sooner. Scott and

0:07

I have been around the block.

0:09

We've been in this industry long

0:11

enough. We've seen many things, trends

0:14

come and go. And I feel like

0:16

we are, are wise, you know, I'm starting to

0:18

get a little bit gray, my beard. Yeah. Um,

0:20

I think we have a little bit of wisdom

0:23

to see it. So we're going to go through and

0:25

give you 13 web

0:27

development tips, advice that we

0:30

wish we knew sooner as we go through

0:32

our careers. How

0:40

you doing, Scott? Oh man, I'm doing, I'm doing good.

0:42

I got some, a little bit of gray in the beard,

0:44

but no, no gray up top just yet. But

0:47

my, my body's feeling it was I've decided to

0:49

enter the red bull BC

0:51

one qualifier, which is like the breaking

0:53

world championships and there's a qualifier in

0:55

Denver and I don't. Anticipate

0:58

not, not only not making it through, but

1:00

not making it through the, the U S

1:02

finals even, but you know what, like

1:05

it's not the, the West U S

1:07

qualifiers, not often in Denver. It's, you

1:09

know, often in California or wherever. So

1:11

it's like, you know what it's here.

1:14

It's this Thursday. I'm going to

1:16

take the opportunity to do it and I'm just going

1:18

to try my best. And who knows how far I'll

1:20

get, uh, at this advanced age of, of 38, this

1:22

might be one of my last chances to

1:24

do something like this, but I, I was going to

1:26

ask that like when, at what point

1:28

do you stop break dancing? Oh,

1:31

me never, but like, you know, competitively in

1:33

a, like there are people who, who break

1:35

into like, you know, fifties and forties and

1:38

stuff like that, not competitively, but they just

1:40

do it because you can like, pair it

1:42

down to what you're doing, you can always

1:44

do like less intense things where you're not

1:46

like spinning around and stuff like that, but

1:48

I feel it in my body was I

1:51

like on Thursday for practicing, I ripped an

1:53

entire cal or an entire quarter size callus

1:55

off my hand entirely. So I have a

1:57

giant hole in my hand right now, which

1:59

is. a perfect time to do that right

2:01

before a big competition. So my body is

2:04

not stoked about it. But yeah, this is

2:06

my chance, right? This is my one chance.

2:08

And you know what? You have many chances

2:10

to fix your bugs, but you should get

2:13

those done fast. You should fix

2:15

them fast. You shouldn't take you

2:17

many chances, but let's say you fix a

2:19

bug and you market as resolved

2:21

in your century. Well, centuries going to let you

2:23

know if you, yeah, it's going to, centuries going

2:25

to let you know if it's not actually fixed

2:27

and if you get a second chance to fix

2:30

that bug and hopefully it doesn't take you a

2:32

third time, but sometimes it does. Sometimes it takes

2:34

you a third or fourth time. You think I

2:36

finally got it this time, but century lets you

2:38

know, did it, did it get, uh, is it

2:40

a regression? Did this bug that you had marked

2:42

as fixed now is this broken again in a

2:44

new build? It can keep track of all your

2:47

builds and all that stuff like that. So, uh,

2:49

check it out. That feature because

2:51

sorry, I'm, I'm cutting off your ad read

2:53

here, but I like that feature because I

2:56

sometimes you have those like really weird ones

2:58

where you're like, what is causing that? And

3:00

you have, you got the bread crumbs up

3:02

to, up to happening in it. And you think,

3:04

I think I know what happened

3:06

here and you fix it and you, you send

3:08

it off into the sun and you click on

3:11

resolve and you hope you never see it again,

3:13

but sometimes you're wrong about that and it comes

3:15

back and, uh, they say, if you

3:17

love something, you set it free. Yes.

3:20

You, you, you set, you set that, uh, bug

3:23

free. It was actually, um, you know what

3:25

is very funny. There was the, uh, there's

3:27

that meme going around that clearing error code

3:29

does not repair car is a sticker on

3:31

a like car diagnostic tool. I

3:34

posted a photo of my century and it

3:36

says marketing resolve does not fix the bug

3:38

because it doesn't often, uh, fix the bug.

3:40

So yeah. All right. Check it out on

3:43

central.io/syntax, sign up and get two months for

3:45

free, let's get into it. Here are 13

3:47

web development tips. We wish that we knew

3:49

sooner. Number one is that no one is

3:52

all knowing we often have this idea of

3:54

other developers, maybe it's people that we work

3:56

with, uh, people that we

3:58

see online, people that are on YouTube.

4:01

YouTube, people that we think know everything.

4:04

But in reality, this

4:06

industry just has too much.

4:09

There's too much. There's too many

4:11

niches within this. There's too many

4:13

paths that you can go down,

4:15

whether it's your front end, your

4:17

CSS completionist, your Ruby person, your

4:19

Go person, your HTML

4:21

guru, accessibility, JavaScript, UI,

4:23

React, Svelte, all this

4:25

stuff. There's too dang much

4:27

to know in this industry to

4:29

know it all. Nobody knows it

4:32

all. And because of that, we often hear

4:34

a lot of things, and through the course

4:36

of doing this podcast, we've gotten a lot

4:38

of comments in our, the question form about

4:40

imposter syndrome. I have imposter syndrome. I feel

4:42

like I don't, you

4:45

know, I'm not at the same level as my

4:47

coworkers or I'm not at the correct level for

4:49

this job, but at the end of the day,

4:51

nobody knows it all. Everybody is

4:54

that brilliant, except for a small

4:57

handful of 10X developers, and

4:59

we're all just figuring out as much as we

5:01

need to learn at any given point to complete

5:03

our work and our jobs to the best degree

5:05

that we can. Exactly. I

5:08

think when you see people with

5:10

the confidence in knowing what they

5:12

have, what that comes from is

5:14

enough experience where they think they

5:16

can figure it out. I specifically

5:18

remember in my career, sort of

5:21

getting over that hump of like,

5:23

Ooh, this is a very hard

5:25

problem. I might not be able

5:27

to do it too with enough

5:29

time and being able to talk

5:31

to others. I

5:34

think that I can eventually figure out

5:36

how to sort of tackle this type

5:38

of thing. Yeah. Next

5:40

one, you will often see

5:42

developers with extremely strong opinions

5:44

and you might look at

5:46

them and say, Hey, that

5:48

person is super smart. But

5:50

almost always when people are

5:53

extremely opinionated and aggressive against

5:55

something, they are either

5:57

masking their skills, their own skills, because because

5:59

they've done something some way their entire life

6:01

and they can't possibly fathom why you would

6:03

do something another way. They're doing it to

6:06

make themselves look smarter. I saw this quite

6:08

a bit when I was teaching a boot

6:10

camp. People would

6:12

popo certain technology

6:14

stacks because they thought it looked it

6:17

made them look like they know what

6:19

they were talking about or they're just

6:21

a straight up ace hole. You

6:24

see that a lot as well. People just

6:26

are are just not nice people. So

6:28

whenever you see somebody with extremely

6:31

strong opinion, don't think, Oh,

6:34

I must follow exactly that opinion.

6:37

Take their advice. It probably is good

6:39

advice, but just know that there's

6:41

ebbs and flows. There's come and

6:43

goes with web development and they

6:46

are probably being very aggressive about

6:48

their opinion for one of those

6:50

reasons. Yeah, that's such a huge

6:52

thing. I do think oftentimes

6:54

too many times in this world, we

6:56

look at people who are the loud

6:58

est and we say that person knows

7:00

what they're talking about. They are loud.

7:02

They they are very committed to their

7:04

bit. They are so committed to their

7:07

bit, but oftentimes like, you know,

7:09

people who are that committed to their strong

7:11

opinions, like you said, they're they're one. They

7:13

could also be insecure. They could also be

7:15

insecure that they don't know these things. I

7:17

don't know Svelte. So therefore I'm going to

7:19

say Svelte sucks just because I don't know

7:21

it, you know, and I don't want to

7:23

act like I don't know it. So I'm

7:25

going to act like I'm I'm better than

7:27

it or I'm above it. And I think

7:29

that's often like a big time thing that

7:31

people do. They don't even just straight up

7:33

try it. So yeah, yeah, people

7:35

with strong opinions are crazy. I

7:38

got into a fight with somebody on Reddit last

7:41

week where I posted a video

7:43

about using display grid to overlap

7:46

elements. Yeah, it's a great technique.

7:48

Yeah. And he

7:51

went off on this like rant about

7:53

awful for performance in X, Y, and

7:55

Z. And I was like, it's it's

7:57

not awful for performance. I like I

8:00

check. It's 60 frames a second and

8:02

it paints once when the page loads

8:04

and all these things and whoo,

8:07

and like I was getting kind of

8:09

upset because like this guy was being really aggressive and

8:11

then I looked him up and like You

8:15

know just I looked up

8:17

their reddit history just like 18 years

8:19

of being an ace hole online You

8:22

know and there's probably some sort of

8:24

personality disorder down the down the tube

8:26

there somewhere But holy smokes the

8:29

best thing you can do in reddit is look

8:31

at somebody's post history because if they're arguing with

8:33

you about the most

8:35

mundane things or like Just

8:38

trying to start out there are people who

8:40

like you said their entire post history

8:42

is just Exhausting starting

8:44

arguments over nothing for no

8:46

reason whatsoever There's a lot of

8:48

people like that on on Twitter too, and you know what I do I

8:51

give them the old mute mute those

8:53

folks I I use the mute very generously if

8:56

I see too much of anything

8:58

on on Twitter I'm mute mute mute.

9:00

I do not care about your opinions.

9:02

I Too much

9:04

too strong for me. Yeah, and it's also

9:06

like the unfortunate thing

9:08

with with Social

9:11

media is that these extremely strong

9:13

opinions? It

9:15

does super well, you know super well And

9:18

the like like even my like

9:20

I when I posted that CSS grid

9:22

thing I I intentionally said it's almost

9:24

always better to use this over absolute

9:27

and I Intentionally was very opinion about

9:29

that because I wanted it to do

9:31

well, but like should do I use

9:33

absolute positioning? Absolutely. Yeah,

9:35

I know no nothing. No

9:37

no absolutely. Oh I

9:41

know what Wes I You know,

9:43

we both mentioned we're a little without sleep today No,

9:45

I did not that did I didn't clock that at

9:48

all. So I'm very sorry about that by

9:50

the way your grid technique for people who Who

9:53

didn't watch that video where you overlay

9:55

two things with the grid areas? Yeah,

9:57

that technique is the single best technique

10:00

for transitioning between two things, because if

10:02

you position absolute and then transition between

10:04

two things, you then have to worry

10:06

about their heights. You have to worry

10:08

about position relative to the container and

10:10

then setting the heights because when you

10:12

go position absolute on something to

10:14

then fade in something else so that way you

10:16

don't get things popping in and out. It

10:19

messes with the position and display. So

10:21

snaps up. So I'm

10:23

talking about like the the like

10:25

transition, the new transition API. What's

10:28

that? Just in general, you're

10:30

saying something about things. I mean, yes.

10:34

And in specifically, I wrote a wrapper that all

10:36

it does is put those things in a grid

10:38

column one just to do the transition like that.

10:40

That's all it does is put the right. I'm

10:42

going to need a that's

10:44

a video right there. I'm going to need a video

10:46

from you on that there. Got it. Yeah.

10:49

Scott tip. Yes. Wait,

10:52

why don't you call them Scott tips? Oh,

10:55

what? Oh, that's

10:58

good. Now

11:00

that's way better. All right. We got you.

11:03

Yeah. What's the branding man for

11:05

sure? I can't believe we're seven years in and we've

11:07

never discovered a Scott tip. Yes, I know. I know.

11:10

All right. Well, we got from what other tips you

11:12

have. Yeah. Using tools

11:14

to help you is not a bad thing.

11:16

A lot of times people will talk about,

11:18

you know, I did this

11:21

straight up like raw CSS or

11:24

raw HTML or raw JavaScript

11:26

or whatever. I did this completely

11:28

by myself with no help.

11:30

I didn't use any stinking AI to

11:32

build this. I wrote it myself and

11:35

like sometimes you do like you

11:38

can move faster with tools. Now,

11:40

obviously there's caveats there. If

11:42

you're building something that's long term, you want some

11:44

artists in code, you want some stuff that you

11:46

know exactly. It's going to be super performant. It's

11:48

going to be super clean and whatever, but it

11:51

depends on what the job is. And sometimes you

11:53

need to get the job done and sometimes tools

11:55

can help you. There's so many tools out there.

11:57

And you know, we've seen this all the time. Throughout

12:00

the history of programming in

12:02

general, there's always going to be people

12:05

grumping about tools. When SAS came on

12:07

the scene, there was a huge, like,

12:09

I don't need nesting, but I'm

12:11

sure they're using nesting now that it's in

12:13

the browser. You know, so, or variables,

12:15

even. I don't need variables. They're in the browser now,

12:17

and they're incredible. You got to use them. So tools

12:20

help you. Now, obviously,

12:22

there's nuance there. Don't spend a lot

12:24

of money on tools that, where

12:27

you're just spending money on tools and not

12:29

being productive and things like that. Or, you

12:31

know, death by a thousand services, etc. But

12:33

tools can help. When you're

12:35

learning a new technology, whether it's a

12:37

new piece of CSS, new server side

12:40

framework, something like that, you approach it

12:42

with a mixed dose of skepticism and

12:44

open mindedness. Because especially

12:47

like, man, the TikTok comments sometimes, when

12:49

you post about something new, is

12:52

just the most awful

12:54

people who think that we should just wrap

12:56

it up and stick with

12:58

absolutely everything. Or

13:00

just people not understanding that there

13:02

are situations where this would really,

13:05

really help you. But

13:07

then on the flip side is like, no,

13:09

like don't absolutely grab every

13:11

single new piece of technology and think

13:13

it's going to be amazing. Give

13:16

a little bit skepticism. What about performance

13:18

with this? You know, is

13:21

this going to be an issue? Why would

13:23

I possibly need this? I find that people who

13:25

are sort of on both sides, trying

13:28

to understand the story are

13:30

the healthiest in their learning

13:32

journey. I like the way

13:34

you said, understand the story.

13:36

Things exist for a

13:38

reason and people like

13:40

things for a reason. Sure, hype trains

13:42

can get out of control where people

13:44

are going to act like something like

13:46

Zod is going to, you know,

13:49

save their life in some sort of way.

13:51

But in reality, like these things are just

13:53

solving a problem. And sometimes they're solving a

13:55

problem that you don't have. So you could

13:58

look at that and say. Why

14:00

would I need this? Therefore, I think

14:03

this bad. I don't

14:05

need it. Therefore bad. You know, it's like that's

14:07

not how it works. Maybe I just don't need

14:09

it or maybe it is bad. Or maybe you

14:11

never had that problem doesn't mean that other people

14:14

don't have that problem. You know, like I

14:16

posted about sub grid on on TikTok

14:19

the other day and I had so

14:21

many people have the comments were so

14:23

it's just tables. It's not

14:25

just table. Table like, of

14:27

course not. Like if it was just

14:29

tables, then it would

14:31

be that. And then the other half of the comments were I

14:34

just stick with flex box and it's no,

14:37

it's not. It

14:39

does something totally different than flex box. And of

14:41

course you can use flex box for some things

14:43

and they have their own use cases. But

14:46

it makes me so frustrated where people are like, oh,

14:48

that was a mistake. That looks like something we don't

14:51

need. Probably we took the smartest

14:53

minds of web development,

14:55

put them on for years

14:57

developing the specification, and

14:59

they totally missed that we had tables already.

15:04

I just threw a gif in the show

15:06

notes. This is Tim Robinson yelling tables. Yeah,

15:10

I know. I feel you, man. It is wild

15:12

about that. How people they take

15:15

those approaches and I didn't realize that TikTok

15:17

was going to be like one of the

15:19

most toxic commented places on the planet. Yeah,

15:21

it's because it's like a drive by. It's

15:24

just drive by whatever and like the

15:27

snarky comments get rewarded, which also I

15:29

don't mind because the

15:31

more the comments, the better the video

15:33

does. But it's amazing how many people

15:36

are. I

15:39

think it's that they're scared that things are

15:41

changing and they have to keep learning. You

15:43

know, this stuff is changing very fast right

15:45

now and their livelihood

15:47

is at stake if they do not keep up and

15:49

that there's a bit of like fight or flight there,

15:51

I think. Yeah, it often comes

15:53

down to either insecurity or

15:56

tribalism around your tools. My

15:58

tools are the best. best

16:00

tools because they work for me.

16:03

Uh, and therefore other tools are bad tools. Here's

16:05

one that I really like is that

16:07

things, this is very personal to

16:09

me, but I'm sure to other people as

16:12

well, things make more sense the more you

16:14

actually use them and that goes along with

16:16

the last one, but in reality, like sometimes

16:18

I look at some tech and it on

16:20

surface feels like it's too much

16:23

or it's too

16:26

verbose or maybe again, it's solving a problem

16:28

that either I don't have, or I didn't

16:30

know I had. And the

16:33

more I try it, the

16:36

more I will understand it. And

16:38

even in terms of like anything

16:40

from JavaScript, just straight

16:43

up to, you know, SQL learning

16:45

these things, the more you work

16:47

with them, the more you won't

16:49

even think about it. It's just going

16:51

to become second nature. There was points

16:53

in my career when I

16:56

was learning action script. And I was

16:58

just like, I expect it to work

17:00

this specific way and it's

17:03

not. And I'm like, why doesn't that work

17:05

this way? This thing is so hard. And

17:07

then now if I were to look back

17:09

at that code, I'd be like, why in

17:11

the world would I've ever expected this variable

17:13

to exist? Yeah. I'm defining it in the

17:15

function. Why would I expect it to exist

17:17

outside of the function? But it's just one

17:19

of those things. When you learn things at

17:22

first, it all looks foreign, just like the

17:24

first time you go into somebody's house. You

17:26

don't know where anything is. And then

17:28

the second time you're there, you know, know a

17:31

little bit more. And, or if you live there,

17:33

now you have every square inch of the thing

17:35

memorized. You know, all the baseboards, you know, all

17:37

the rooms, you know, everything, you know, all the

17:39

imperfections and all that stuff. So the

17:42

more you spend time in things, the

17:44

more you're going to understand them. I,

17:47

I feel like on that same note,

17:49

I have not understood the technology or

17:51

not understood the use of it. And

17:55

the more I do this, I realized like

17:57

even like CSS modules, I'm feeling that right

17:59

now. We had a question the other day of like,

18:01

why didn't you like CSS module? I was looking at that question. I was

18:03

like, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe

18:06

I'm wrong about that. Maybe I just didn't

18:09

understand. And then I was, I was writing

18:11

some code the other day. I go, yeah,

18:13

I kind of see it. I kind of see,

18:16

I think I might have been wrong about this,

18:18

you know? Really? And it was

18:20

just because I had not. I

18:22

think as I had not hit that situation

18:24

where I had wanted it. I

18:27

think, you know, I'm still, but I'm, I'm

18:30

open to, to being wrong about that

18:32

type of thing is. Maybe

18:34

I just don't understand the use case for this type

18:37

of thing. The people are not making these things because.

18:40

Yeah. Well, I think that leads

18:42

really nicely into the willingness to

18:44

change your mind is a strong

18:46

skill. Maybe you were wrong because

18:48

you didn't totally understand it at

18:50

first because that is exactly that

18:52

be open to, to being

18:54

wrong. Know that you can

18:56

be wrong. And oftentimes you are wrong.

18:58

I've been wrong 10,000 times. If

19:01

you go back and listen to the history of

19:03

this podcast, I'm sure I'd say some stuff that

19:05

I was very wrong about over and over again.

19:07

So that's part of

19:10

growth. You should look at

19:12

things you thought in the past and be

19:14

like, what was I thinking? Because that is

19:16

a sign of personal growth. Also,

19:19

when I'm like trying new things and I'm like

19:21

you say, you're frustrated, it doesn't work in a

19:24

certain way. I often

19:26

think. Hmm. Are

19:29

is this so different because somebody like do

19:31

I really need to take a step back?

19:33

Like you look at the effect library, you

19:35

know, there's obviously very smart people that are

19:37

building that type of thing and I look

19:39

at it and I go, that doesn't make

19:41

sense to me. Or that is a totally

19:43

different way of, of coding my

19:46

applications. I'm not sure, but I don't,

19:48

I don't, I don't write that off.

19:50

As soon as I saw it, I

19:52

go, I'm not writing that off because

19:55

I think that people are thinking in

19:57

different ways to approach their problems. And

19:59

maybe I need to to

20:02

think that way as well. Yeah, big

20:04

skill. Doing

20:06

is better than reading or

20:08

watching. And this is

20:10

hard from for people like me and

20:12

Scott who build courses. We

20:15

have a podcast and you

20:17

can get stuck in this hole of

20:19

trying to consume and research when at

20:21

the end of the day, absolutely

20:24

nothing beats just going off

20:26

and building something. You

20:28

really need to start writing the code.

20:30

There's no better way to get better

20:33

in your job than to simply just

20:35

build things. Yeah, that's so

20:37

true. And I, you know,

20:39

because you can look at something and think

20:41

you understand it. You can look at something

20:43

or watch a tutorial and

20:45

follow along with the tutorial. Yeah. And

20:47

think you understand it. But you're on

20:49

the happy path there. You're on

20:52

the everything is hunky dory because I got

20:54

a definitive map of what

20:56

I'm doing. But the moment that

20:58

all of a sudden you're like, well, now

21:01

I got to go slightly to the left

21:03

here, slightly to the right in

21:05

your. Oh, wait a second.

21:09

Where am I? Where am I going? What am I

21:11

doing? And if you just

21:13

start exploring, you know, you get a better

21:16

lay of the land here. I'm going

21:18

metaphor crazy today. But you're understanding specifically about

21:20

like all the little edges, all the little

21:22

the little wrinkles, the things that you

21:24

don't hit in the happy path. And that

21:26

is where you truly pick up like

21:28

what you can do, what you can't

21:30

do, where are the boundaries, what, you

21:32

know, what does not work. And

21:35

to me personally, before

21:37

reading, you know, every inch of

21:39

the docs, I will work on

21:42

something. I'll hit an edge and

21:44

then I'll look at the docs to find

21:46

that edge. And that's a much better way

21:48

for me personally to explore a topic than

21:51

just read top to

21:53

bottom, watch a video or whatever, because you're

21:55

not going to hit those edges unless you

21:57

hit them in a real world scenario. That's

21:59

the same reason. why CSS like

22:02

spec authors want you to try the

22:04

things in the browser as soon as

22:06

they have a shipped version, because the

22:08

people that write the spec for pop

22:11

over or a bunch of the new

22:13

CSS, they have to just sit

22:15

there and think about how this works because

22:17

they can't actually build with it. And then

22:19

they say, please build, please

22:22

build things with it so that before

22:24

the spec is finalized, we know those

22:26

edges that you're hitting. Yeah, seriously.

22:29

So asking questions is good. I

22:32

can't tell you both from like

22:34

a rubber duck debugging standpoint as

22:36

well as different people's approaches to

22:39

problem solving how important asking questions

22:41

is. So whether you are on

22:44

Twitter, whether you're in a discord, whether

22:46

you're on like a stack overflow, being

22:48

able to say, this is my problem. This

22:50

is what I've tried. How why

22:54

is this broken or how should I approach

22:56

this is is invaluable because the

22:58

rubber duck debugging point is often you'll

23:00

fix your problem as as

23:02

you type out the question and explain what

23:04

you've done. It forces you to think through

23:07

the steps and often I'll find myself going,

23:09

oh, I know what

23:11

I did there. But also just

23:13

sometimes people will follow

23:15

up with questions of like, like, why are

23:17

you even doing that way or what's

23:20

wrong with X, Y and Z? And you go, oh, that's

23:24

that's a great I'm so glad somebody has

23:26

a different perspective than I do. Yeah. Asking

23:28

questions is go to, you know, I was

23:31

never the type of student that

23:34

would ask questions in class, in

23:36

high school or college or anything.

23:39

I'm not a hand raiser. So

23:41

for me, like it is

23:43

tough in social

23:45

situations to ask questions of a

23:47

group and things like that. But

23:49

it is a superpower. And I

23:51

admire the people who are able

23:53

to ask questions because those people,

23:55

their brains are way more engaged.

23:57

They're, they're like thinking of the

24:00

edges. They're they're looking for these issues and

24:02

they're they're trying to get answers themselves. It

24:04

is a a monstrous skill to build up

24:06

and grow. And that's why I'm thankful for

24:08

a couple of things. I'm thankful for, you

24:11

know, chat rooms, IRC, that is, you know,

24:13

some IRC rooms could be a little hostile,

24:15

but asking questions as long as you were

24:17

open to them is always, you know, depends

24:19

on how you're asking these questions. You can't

24:22

just be like, this sucks.

24:24

Why is it like this? You know, that was

24:26

a surefire way to get like a little time

24:28

out in the IRC room or something like that.

24:30

But I personally, it's something

24:33

I've been using chat GPT and

24:35

Claude for because you do have to be a

24:37

little careful there in terms of like what the

24:39

answer is. You do have to back it up,

24:41

but you can ask LLMs to say like, I

24:44

have this bit of contextual

24:46

knowledge. I see other

24:48

people are doing it this way. What am

24:51

I missing? And those types of things, LLMs

24:53

could give you some good answers sometimes on

24:55

that stuff. You know, sometimes I'll say, is

24:57

this a thing that people actually do? Yes,

25:00

it's a thing that people actually do. People

25:02

actually implement off of this way for these

25:04

reasons. People do this for this reason. And

25:06

because of that, and that even if that

25:09

is like, you shouldn't take that obviously at

25:11

its word, it's a LLM, you should go

25:13

verify that. But it's good for that initial

25:15

question, that initial verification. If there's one thing

25:18

that I really miss about working in an

25:20

office is asking my deskmate a question about

25:22

my code or question in general, something that

25:24

I've spent an hour bashing my head against.

25:27

Look at this. What's wrong with this? Oh, you

25:29

spelled import wrong. I

25:33

have one of those the other day. Oh man, Wes, you

25:35

know, you think that you're immune to that kind of stuff.

25:37

And I was just, man, it was

25:39

like a one letter swap. You

25:41

know, my dyslexia killed me on that

25:43

one. It was a one letter swap.

25:45

And for some reason my ID was

25:47

not giving me a red squiggly. And

25:49

I'm just pulling my hair out. Why

25:51

is this not working? You know, you

25:53

goop it up the word. Yeah,

25:56

that's I often find that as well, where

25:58

the tools didn't catch it. And

26:00

I think like, man, I love

26:02

these tools because those little

26:05

head bashing moments are certainly a lot less

26:07

than they were 10 years ago. Pacing

26:10

that stuff into the AI

26:12

chat is it's really good at catching those types

26:14

of things. No, do you notice anything

26:16

weird about this? Paste. Oh, OK.

26:19

Totally. I was debugging our

26:22

desktop app and, you know,

26:24

Apple logs or there's these

26:26

massive dumps of who knows

26:28

what. And I was just like, where

26:32

in this massive dump of questionable

26:35

logs is something that is going wrong here?

26:37

And then it sounded for me. I was

26:39

just like, yes, thank you. That's

26:42

that's amazing. Love love that.

26:45

Here's one that I think is

26:47

oddly controversial, which I don't understand

26:50

is everyone doesn't learn the same

26:52

way. It's so funny. You know,

26:54

I see people who make their whole their whole

26:56

thing like learning styles don't exist.

27:00

Their entire brand, right? Is learning styles don't exist.

27:02

And let me tell you, I

27:04

do not learn the same way as a

27:06

lot of people. I can't read a

27:09

blog post. I can read source code and

27:11

learn. I can't read a blog

27:13

post. I can't read like docs

27:15

straight up and learn. Well, like we mentioned before,

27:17

getting my hands dirty is a good way for

27:19

me to learn. But also listening.

27:22

Our brains exist in a different

27:24

way. You know, we all have different strengths,

27:26

whether that's if you ever got an IQ

27:29

test done, you would know that there's, you

27:31

know, your your short term memory, your long

27:33

term memory, your auditory, your visual, your all

27:35

these things. There's all these different ways that

27:37

our brains have different strengths of and

27:41

knowing at least identifying being able

27:43

to say, hey, this

27:46

is a little bit easier for me to learn this way.

27:49

I'm going to actually stick in that

27:51

in that method of learning

27:53

things because it is way

27:55

more advantageous and time safe

27:57

for me to instead. of

28:00

bashing my head against this giant blog post

28:02

to understand the thing to select it all

28:04

and say read it for me. That's

28:07

a that's a good way to understand.

28:09

So just pay attention to making sure

28:11

that you know exactly like what

28:14

is going on when you're learning things. Yeah.

28:16

What is my learning style is probably

28:18

something that is well worth digging into.

28:20

A lot of people love watching tutorials,

28:23

right? And I make tutorials,

28:25

but do I watch them? Absolutely not.

28:28

It's just not my learning style. You know what

28:30

my learning style is that I figured out the

28:32

other day, Scott? What's that? The Balkan

28:34

breakfast. Do you know what this is?

28:37

I've never heard of this. So Balkan

28:39

breakfast is I saw this tick tock

28:41

where you sit down with like

28:44

peppers and sausage and cheese and toast

28:46

and eggs and lettuce

28:49

and a cucumber. Just just

28:51

whole versions. And you

28:53

just like grab, take a bite, grab something

28:55

else, take a bite, grab something else, take

28:57

a bite. And it's

28:59

it's wild because it's like you don't like cut

29:01

and prepare something. You're just grabbing and

29:04

taking bites out of everything. And then at

29:06

a certain point, you've had breakfast. And I

29:08

thought, like, that's how I learn is

29:10

like I'm just view source,

29:13

get hub sample blog post.

29:15

You know, I'm just like, even

29:17

when I'm when I'm cooking as well, my wife is

29:19

just like, are you following a recipe? I was like,

29:22

I read six and I'm just

29:24

going to go for it, you know? Yeah,

29:26

I don't sit there and exactly follow a

29:29

recipe. I'm simply just dipping into a thousand

29:31

different things. And I go, I think

29:34

I get it. I think I understand how

29:36

to go ahead. Yeah. Oh, man. I got

29:38

to tell you one time this is actually

29:40

a funny story. There's a company attempting to

29:42

acquire level up tutorials at one point. And

29:45

the person I was interviewing with it about it

29:47

was like asking me I was right about to

29:49

give my talk, which was about how

29:51

to learn how I learned things quickly. And part

29:53

of that talk was identifying your learning styles. So

29:55

they were asking me a little bit about my

29:57

talk because they just wanted to get to know.

30:00

me. It was it was like a it was

30:02

like a CTO of some company and I'm

30:05

not going to identify who but I

30:08

was telling them about this talk. I was telling them

30:10

about how you know how you identify your learning styles

30:12

and whatever. And before I even said that he was

30:14

like, Oh, that's so cool. I'm writing a book about

30:16

learning styles right now. I'm like, Oh, really? Tell me

30:19

about your book. I'm like thinking we got a connection

30:21

here. Let's let's explore this. And he's like, Yeah, my

30:23

whole premise of my book is that learning styles don't

30:25

exist and everyone learns the same way. And I was

30:27

just like, Oh, boy. Oh, you

30:30

are not going to like my talk. You

30:32

are. This is not going in the right

30:34

direction. I thought I would say it was

30:36

a early red flag about that entire

30:38

conversation. That's good. One

30:42

hot take I have here is you don't need

30:44

a SAS for everything. And often

30:47

I feel like a lot of people who are learning

30:50

or doing something from scratch these days

30:52

are piecing together eight different sasses

30:54

and like the big one. And you'll you'll

30:56

love this one is off. Right. Like you

30:58

can write your own off. And if you

31:00

need those features, yes, of course you can

31:02

move to that type of thing, but you

31:05

will die a horrible death at the

31:08

helm of mouths monthly active users. So

31:10

like it's easy to grab a whole

31:12

bunch of these services and piece them

31:14

together to build your application. But what

31:17

you don't know is that it will

31:19

get extremely expensive. These services are drug

31:21

dealers. And as soon as you get

31:24

to any sort of scale, you are

31:26

going to be very

31:28

expensive. Of course, they're they're very handy

31:30

and things like that. But try

31:33

to build it without those services

31:36

at first and you will learn a lot

31:38

and save a ton of money. Yeah. Yeah.

31:40

Not everything needs to say. I know people say I

31:44

would rather have my day back. That's a

31:46

crazy thing to me that people say on

31:48

Twitter. It's like I would rather not waste

31:50

a day on off a waste

31:52

a day. Bro, I waste days

31:54

on crazy things. And my

31:57

app is still like, exactly. Existing and

31:59

still growing. You could waste a

32:01

day on building your own auth

32:03

to save yourself X amount of

32:05

dollars in long term my least

32:08

Favorite Twitter posts by

32:10

far are the ones that are

32:12

like I launched in one week And here's the list

32:14

of 20 services that I used I

32:16

use this for this and this for I'm much

32:18

like Good luck. Yeah,

32:20

sure you might make enough money here and

32:22

there whatever But like the moment you get

32:25

real users that could come back to bite

32:27

you or guess what you're gonna get a

32:29

rug pull Somewhere you sign

32:31

up you'll you get your data spread out

32:33

amongst a hundred different services Some

32:35

of which at some point what was it

32:38

was it planet scale that did a rug pull? Yeah,

32:40

that at some point they'll say oh, yeah By

32:42

the way that that thing that we were giving

32:44

you for free for a hundred users now for

32:46

a hundred users You're gonna have to pay 19

32:48

bucks a month. All right, 19 bucks a month.

32:50

That's just one more slash, right? And

32:53

and that's how it goes. I there there

32:55

are so many things that people spend money on that

32:57

I find to be Shocking. Yeah,

32:59

I would much rather have that $20

33:01

a month in my pocket and spend

33:03

a day of my time doing authentication

33:06

Yeah, no getting it's I

33:09

saw levels I owe Describe

33:12

it as a like a VC pump

33:14

and dump where the first couple

33:16

years. Absolutely. Everything is free and then Once

33:20

the the VCs want their money back

33:22

things start getting a lot

33:24

more expensive and at that point It's it's too

33:26

hard to move off of that type of thing,

33:28

you know, it's just I I'll

33:31

tell you right now Vimeo twice the price on

33:33

me and I got a shit. I got to

33:35

move off of Vimeo now, you know and render

33:39

Jacked the the price on me. I think it's like

33:41

doubled the price something like that. I forget what it

33:43

was but Price

33:46

on that went way up and I thought hmm.

33:48

Maybe I should have should have been doing my

33:50

own services and what I do

33:52

is I go I'm just gonna keep pulling it

33:54

paying it because Yeah, I feel

33:56

like moving off of that thing and they

33:58

realize that yeah, that's That's even

34:00

like Bluehost. I have had a Bluehost for

34:02

like 15 years and

34:05

I got that

34:07

was like the last holdout of this is affordable. You

34:09

can host as many websites on you want it. And

34:11

I got an email the other day being like, we're

34:14

going to start charging you because you have too

34:16

much stuff on there, you know, by the gigabyte.

34:19

And I had like, they only give you

34:21

20 gigs now because they realize people

34:23

are hosting 30,000 websites on on a one

34:25

$8 a month plan. You

34:29

know what, Wes is like, man,

34:32

I people don't get it either. I don't know

34:34

if it's newer developers or what, but there was

34:36

like some comments in some regard on like a

34:38

coolify thing we did about a VPS and and

34:40

somebody is like, yeah, sure. It's $5 a month

34:43

now. But what happens when you get an influx

34:45

of a massive amount of users? Well, let me

34:47

tell you the price does not all of a

34:49

sudden go up. Your

34:51

thing will either go down or you'll

34:54

adjust it yourself because that's how the

34:56

cloud services work, right? And

34:59

then you'll be like the ones that like they don't

35:01

set a limit for how much you can spend with

35:03

them. They'll say, oh, wait, you got a massive influx

35:05

of users. All right, pay up time to pay up.

35:08

That doesn't happen if you own your own stuff or

35:10

whatever. And granted, yes, there are

35:12

benefits to all these things. A lot of

35:15

the services have real benefits. But

35:17

at the end of the day, you're paying for it. Yeah, like on

35:20

the flip side, a lot of businesses

35:22

would rather have their

35:24

website stay up and pay a whole bunch

35:26

of money. You know Kanye West talks about

35:28

your clothing brand. Totally.

35:30

You kind of rather your site stay

35:33

up so you can capture that traffic

35:35

versus unless nobody buys anything and

35:37

then you get charged. Yeah, then you're then

35:40

your pooch. So it's a delicate

35:42

dance for sure. And I'm obviously

35:44

a big user of these different

35:46

sasses. But you got to be

35:48

careful with what you're doing. Measured

35:51

approach. Know what you're getting into. Yeah. And what

35:53

you need to do sometimes is you don't need

35:55

to worry about scale for your three users. Just

35:58

know that if you do need to. to

36:00

scale up, you likely can. You

36:02

will probably see it coming if you do get

36:04

a crazy influx of users.

36:06

Yeah, maybe you should have something

36:08

in in place. Like, for

36:10

example, I'm on render. If I wanted

36:13

to, I could increase the number

36:15

of you can even have them auto

36:17

scale as well. So I have like

36:19

some hard limits in there where at a

36:21

minimum, I have two servers running, but at

36:23

a maximum, I have five. So you can

36:25

scale up to if you do need

36:27

that type of thing. Totally. Yeah. Or

36:29

even like this, worst

36:31

case, you can simply just power it down, the

36:34

drop, drag the drag, the amount

36:36

of memory and CPUs and then start it

36:38

back up again. And it'll be expensive, but

36:40

at least you can get up and

36:42

running so you can figure out load balancing. Yeah,

36:45

it won't be expensive if you're on Het'sner

36:47

because holy cow, they give you a lot

36:49

for your money. Oh, yeah, I need to

36:52

get a Het'sner. But

36:54

I run about 100 things on

36:56

my like four dollar a month

36:58

Het'sner. Yeah, ARM server. And it

37:00

is like it's not sweating

37:02

it at all. It is wild how many

37:04

things I just throw into this. Oh, I

37:07

need a back end. Let me just install

37:09

pocket base in one second. Yeah. Alongside of

37:11

my 800 other pocket base installations. I'm I

37:13

am dying. I've had the spool of fiber

37:15

on the side of my house for two

37:17

months now. And every day I

37:19

check if I'm they haven't haven't turned it on

37:21

yet. But as soon as they turn it on,

37:24

like I'm kind of tempted to just rack a

37:26

little server in my basement, like I

37:28

have a home server, but like maybe something that has like

37:30

an arm chip in it. I

37:32

wonder how much you could could do, because once

37:34

I have like a three gig upload, you could

37:36

I did quite a bit on my 50 megabit

37:39

upload when I was doing my receipt

37:42

printer thing. It ran all night.

37:44

No problems on a dev server. Yeah.

37:49

Here's a good one. Learning the fundamentals will always

37:52

pay off. Sometimes the fundamentals do feel like they

37:54

are too heavy or that it's too in the

37:56

weeds or it's two things that

37:58

you don't have to worry about. I'm using.

38:00

a framework, why would I care about how

38:02

events work in the Dom? I'm,

38:04

you know, I just, I just write my

38:06

own click and it works, you know, but

38:09

understanding how it all works, understanding, you know,

38:11

what exactly is going on in a use

38:13

effect, understanding what exactly is going

38:15

on in the browser with the APIs, with the

38:17

paint and all that thing that you can save

38:19

you a ton of time down the line. Anytime

38:22

you have an issue with anything, you might be

38:24

able to reach for one, a lighter solution. You

38:26

might be able to debug it faster. You might

38:28

just generally understand what the heck you're doing and

38:31

why you're doing it so that way when you

38:33

are doing it, you

38:35

know what you're actually doing, right?

38:37

That's such an important thing that I think

38:39

people just, they follow tutorials, they do whatever

38:42

they don't learn exactly what's going on. And

38:44

it's important to know what is

38:46

going on in your application. How

38:48

does hydration work? How does authentication

38:50

work? How do forms work? Uh,

38:53

all these things, there's just an infinite amount of

38:55

things. Dive in. Know

38:57

how these things work, but then

39:00

use a framework or library to

39:02

do it. Yes. Is the approach,

39:05

right? Like one,

39:07

one I see a lot is anytime I

39:09

post anything with CSS, people say, Oh, can

39:11

Tailwind do that? And I think, yes,

39:14

of course Tailwind can do that. It's, it's

39:16

CSS. Like I honestly think there's some

39:18

people that don't understand that Tailwind

39:21

is CSS. It's just Adam wrote

39:23

it for you instead of you writing it.

39:25

You know, like it's still at the end

39:27

of the day. So it can

39:30

do like, obviously there's some spots. It can't do

39:33

specific stuff, whatever. But like, yes, of course it

39:35

can do it. It's CSS at the end

39:37

of the day. It's not its own styling language.

39:39

And there's nothing stopping you from writing CSS with

39:41

it. You don't have to

39:44

use the utility classes for everything. You can

39:46

use actual CSS, actual CSS. People get mad

39:48

when I say that. So you can use

39:50

CSS. You even use actual CSS. When

39:53

I say actual CSS, I think like

39:55

you're writing class, you're writing properties. You're

39:57

writing utility classes. Yes.