No one cares anymore?

Welcome to Syntax City. We had a potluck episode. That's where you bring the Wes, we bring the answers, some awesome stuff we're talking about today. What is document dot design mode even for? Did you even know that this was a browser standard? Feeling anxious about the future of your career. Feeling sad that I care so much about the code. Does that even matter anymore? Right? Should I update? As we got a wiener Node in and said, I'm not updating anything anymore. You know? No more updating. I'm sticking with what I have.

Refactoring.

Someone's got motion and GSAP.

What do you do in that that situation? Right? How do should you refactor into one? And, finally, I just want my team members to care. My team members genuinely do not care about integration versus end to end and all these things. How do I get them to care so that we can write better code at the end of the day? If you got a question, go to syntax.fm and click the Pollock button. Submit it to us. If you got a question or you got anything you want us to to cover, type it in the box. We'll answer it on an upcoming episode.

Alright. So let's get into the first question here. It's from Wei.

Why is it so hard to find good front end devs? My company is hiring, but everyone I interview doesn't know the difference between PNG and JPEG or what the purpose of a bundler is.

It feels like everyone out there just knows a little bit of React and has very little in the way of web fundamentals.

My gosh. Yeah.

Front end is hard. Oftentimes, I feel like front end is looked down upon in a weird way, whether that is because people don't like CSS or HTML or they don't feel like, it's difficult Wes, arguably, I think I mean, front end's gotten, like, crazy in terms of breadth of things you have to understand, but also you have UX considerations.

You have to have accessibility considerations. There's just so much there.

Speed, performance, all kinds of stuff.

And

anybody who has been part of this industry kind of pre the React boom and stuff like that would know that, you know, you used to work on front ends and all this stuff, and then all of a Node, developers became really in demand. And what happened? A thousand and one boot camp sprung up Wes all they teach you is here's how to make site with React. Okay? We do a create React app. We make things click. We make things open. Here's maybe a little bit of CSS. Here's to install things. That's the front end to some of these folks. So there was a huge boom of boot camp graduates who really didn't ever have that full experience of working on real projects that really matter with the team over the course of time when web fundamentals weren't just something that you, something that would be nice to have. It was like something that you had to have to make anything that worked across browsers and actually was shippable. Right? So, Wes, I think it's really just that you need to keep looking.

Front end developers who are skilled are out there, and they want jobs.

But at the same time, there's a lot of folks who did just do the boot camp thing and never really, got the breadth of experience that you would need to be considered a a good, well rounded full stack front end dev. Yeah. I also think he's probably not offering enough money if you're if you the type of candidates you're you're finding

don't know the difference between a PNG and a JPEG or know what a bundler is. Right? That's there's a wide gamut of of people in in that regard. So you're either looking in the wrong place or

not offering enough money because there are tons of very good devs out there, but Could also be a location thing. Yeah. I remember the very first, front end job I got.

The my boss who had interviewed me was like, oh, you were the best app it was my first job, and it was like, you were the best applicant because you knew about CSS tricks, and you knew about this, and you knew about that. But, everybody else I interviewed, like, didn't know any of that stuff or didn't care or wasn't looking at blogs or weren't staying on top of the industry or whatever. And that was way back in, you know, 2011.

So

Real quick. Amsterdam.

We are going to be at Amsterdam for a Syntax meetup on June 10. This is going to be a part of the opening party for JS Nation and React Summit. These are awesome conferences that are happening on June 11 and June 12, and you don't have to get a ticket to these conferences to come to the Syntax meetup.

You can simply just go to syntax.fm/meetup and grab a free ticket for that. But we highly, highly recommend that you also come to the conferences. Some of the the brightest minds in the industry are gonna be at this thing, so check it out. Jsnation.com, react summit. You can get a combo ticket. Use coupon code syntax for 15% off. Again, that's syntax dot f m forward /meetup for tickets to the Syntax meetup. And then, also, you go to jsnation.com and reactsummit.com to grab tickets to the conference. We'll see you there. Peace. Next question from Hugh Mungus, good name.

Design Node. It's a weird property I never see used, but seems like it could be useful. Why was it added to the spec? What's the what problem was it solving? Does it serve Vercel purpose today, or is it some vestigial artifact of the old web? So design mode is essentially if you type document dot design mode equals true, Wes essentially just makes the whole DOM content editable. And every every six months, somebody figures this out.

It's a really good tweet if you want a tweet to go to go viral. Tweet. Because Yeah. It's it's like, what? The browser has this thing where you can just turn it on, and then when the the whole document is contentedible, literally, every text node, you can just click on it and type and delete and and whatever.

And then under the hood, what it's actually doing is it's it's modifying. It's adding and removing the HTML and the the text and the text nodes.

So it's no different than just doing a content edible on the entire HTML document. So, like like, why is it there? The content edible

was are you eating the I'm sorry. I have to stop you. Are you eating, the web here? Content? Content edible? Content

editable.

It it was added I think it was added to the browser with the hopes of, like, we would have this, like, GUI Wes you can just, like, make this really rich text interface, and you can just click into it and and type in in what you want.

And and the reality is that, like, WYSIWYGs are extremely hard. We've seen many, many WYSIWYGs over the years of, like, how do you make something where people can simply just click where they want and type and drag and drop and resize and all of this stuff? How do you how do you make that but, like, make it, like, manageable and, like, still still nice on the on the back end? And we've seen many people try and fail, and it's it's not something I ever wish on myself. So I I think the idea with adding it was that we would have this, beautiful gooey. And I I don't think we've really seen that pop up. Anybody who's doing it has to implement a whole extra layer on top of it. But why do we have it? I Node know. It's it's useful in many cases where if you just want to simply modify a web page, if you're taking a screenshot, if you wanna do something, just pop content editable on the same thing, and and it'll rip.

Another thing is, like, I have, like, invoices and receipts when people buy a course from me. And what always happens is somebody says, can you add this VAT number to it? Can you change the name of it? I put the old address in it. Like, I'm not gonna get it approved. It's all it had so much just busywork of people saying my invoice doesn't have the right information on it. So you know what I did? I slapped the content editable on that thing and said, change it yourself.

Wes whatever you need to do to get your boss to be happy with your invoice, go ahead and add it.

And that stopped all those all those emails from coming in. So there's certainly good use cases for it. Yeah. Yeah. I ended up doing that too, especially just because, like you said, that was, like, such a huge

such a huge customer service thing. Like, I need this on my invoice. I need this on mine. It's like man.

They they love putting numbers on things and yeah. It has to be exactly.

Yeah. Content editable. This is, this is an embarrassing thing for me to admit, but I didn't realize that with, like, a, Vercel API, I just figured it was like a browser feature or something, not like a API that every browser has. For some reason, I just thought it was like, oh, it's a Chrome feature. Oh, no. No. I don't know why. Not that. This is a big part of

of HTML. Oh, design Node. Not content editable. I knew content editable. Oh, yeah. That's kind of cool because you can use, like like, command b and command I to bold and italics. So if you want, like, a quick and easy way to edit your some text and save that HTML out, it's great. It's it's when it starts getting a little bit more complicated and you have, like, new, like, if you hit enter, it adds, like, spans, and and then you oh, there's too much space in there. Before you know it, you've made Notion, and you can't move Yes. So you can put a line in between two images.

It's like Microsoft Word. And the Notion does feel like Microsoft Word when you're working in it. I'm like, god. And, like, I don't I don't envy the people that have to build

on have to build, like, the the editing experience inside of Node because, like, yeah, I've never seen anybody do it good. I've never ever. And, like, the the probably, like, Obsidian is pretty good, but that's so much more stripped down.

I don't know that there is any good interface. As soon as stuff gets complicated and as soon as you have all these different features and all these little edge cases, that must be a nightmare to work on the the WYSIWYG engine behind Node.

Yeah. I know. It it's so funny. I'm currently trying to teach, my wife, Courtney, how to use Obsidian.

And she's getting it, but it JS. Yeah. It's it's not as friendly as Notion even though it feels like it is to me as a developer who's used to working in those types of interfaces forever. Yeah. Yeah.

Sick. Alright. Next one here is I want to work with people who genuinely care. My current organization is full of developers who don't care about the platform or code quality. They make no architectural decisions and just keep pushing code that isn't well thought out, well tested, or even looks good. Hey. You your coworkers might just be an AI because this is sounding a whole hell of a lot like an AI to me.

Management talks about customer complaints and the need for better code, but the senior engineers don't care either. They write poor code themselves. For context, we're a Scott up with about 50 developers. 50. That's yes.

That's not the worst part. Another senior developer and I actually care about engineering quality, and we've tried to drive a lot of improvements, but they keep getting pushed back. The team always finds faults with our suggestions or comes up with vague reasons not to support us.

A lot of opinions I hear don't hold up. For example, they insist on writing end to end tests for every small thing we ship. I've explained why integration tests would be more effective and that end to end tests are slow, costly, frank flaky, and a lot of the times, it won't scale. I even shared articles from Kent c Dodds, but they won't listen to feedback.

The hard part is that the product is gaining real traction and growing fast. I don't want to walk away from a high growth company, but the this people problem is genuinely stressing me out and holding back my growth.

I want you to consider something here. I want to work with people who genuinely care. I want you to consider something. You might not be right on everything.

I'm just gonna I'm just gonna throw that. I'm not saying you aren't, but you might not be right about everything as much as you think you are. Personally, I prefer end to end Wes for everything. Me? I prefer end to end Wes for everything, and other people might too.

Sure.

Costly.

Timely. Those types of things. Potentially flaky. Yes. All of those things. All of the above.

But, man, I got a lot more value out of end to end Wes than I do in Can you explain the difference for the audience? The difference between an integration test and an end to end test?

Yeah. An integration test, tests exactly what the name suggests. It tests how things integrate with one another. So systems and how they integrate, where a unit test tests one single unit, like a small unit, like a function. An integration test is more or less testing the pieces and how they fit together, where end to end Wes is testing as a real user using the app. So many times, especially on the web, end to end tests are done via some with something like Playwright or Cypress, which I haven't heard of Cypress in a while now. I know people probably use Cypress, so most people have landed on on Playwright. But what those are doing is it's writing the test code is running your app in a browser and clicking around and using it like a a user would. So, therefore, it's kind of the ultimate integration test because it's the whole system integrated in my mind. It's one step away from having, like, a guy that just checks it for you.

Yeah. So that was the red flag for me that was like, maybe maybe they do have good reasons for things. Node I I I genuinely know what it's like to work with coworkers who don't care as much as you or have, pushing poor projects out or or in my case, it was oftentimes they don't have the pixel attention to detail that I had. So I would see coworkers push out a client's site, and I would just be like, you didn't even do this? Like, you didn't even check this? And that was, like, frustrating for me to be in that and those were, like, agency projects, though. So it's like, okay. Those those those things are gone the next week or whatever. I don't have to think about it. It's not a a big old project that the whole everyone's going to have to work in. I think the biggest thing that your team needs to get on the page with in in is a set of standards in hard enforcement, things like, things that, like, robots can do to to to tell you what the problems are, like linting stuff or or hard guidelines, things that, like, block code of a certain type for making it into the repo.

But this problem will not ever fix without the management, the engineering management taking control or even believing that it is a problem.

So, one, I want you to consider that other people might have valid opinions.

Two, I want you to talk in a nonaggressive way, a nonjudgmental

way Yeah.

To your engineering manager and express some of your concerns. That's tough for a lot of people, especially people with coding egos. I know best. I'm doing it this way. They're not doing it the right way.

This isn't a they're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. It's a, hey. I've noticed these things in our project, and I have some concerns for these things.

Do you think it's worthwhile for us to establish some guideline practices and enforce them Yeah. In some kind of concrete way? Yeah. I think

what's happening here is you're you're probably stomping in being like, we should do things x, y, and z way, and they're having a hard time caring. And if you ask yourself why don't they care, it's probably because fast growing Scott up peep everybody's got a lot on their plate. Everybody's always busy, and they don't want some little wiener coming in and telling them Wes should be doing things differently. We have to change how it is because you have to just say, okay, well, now we have to figure out this new way of doing things. And I'm now I can't ship as much code because I'm trying to figure this out. Node you're breaking things and, it doesn't maybe it doesn't work as well.

That's extremely frustrating. So what you need to do is to to just simply like, this is so much easier with AI. It's just like, go spend some time figuring out how you can fix it, and then just bring it to them. Bring the problems that you have. Be like, hey. Customers are complaining about x, y, and z. Here are three times when we drop the ball and it made us lose money or customers or whatever.

And then here here's my here's my here's my solution. And this is why it's gonna be easier. Right? It's gonna it's not going to be harder. You're not gonna have to learn a whole bunch of new stuff. It's simply just going to be easier. It's gonna be faster. It's gonna be better in in every regard.

And if you can can do that rather than complaining and rather than trying to be a drag on their energy, but you can Scott energize and move them along, I think that that's gonna be the move.

Yeah. The biggest times that I've ever been annoyed with somebody giving suggestions, valid or not, is when they're giving big wean Node big wiener energy, I would say, their their energy JS.

Yeah.

Yes.

That that to me is a it's it's always that, like, okay. I get it. Whatever. You know? Like, it's just a personality thing at this point. Boils down to. Yeah. You're probably not approaching it in a great way, and that's that is is just as much of a skill that you have to learn as figuring out where your semicolons go or whatever other developer skills that you have.

Yeah. Yes. Laura says, I inherited a code Bos that historically has used motion for Node animations.

Motion is really cool. Motion dot dev.

But recently, it looks like they also added GSAP.

Is it reasonable to keep both, or should I make an attempt to consolidate to just one? What should I look at to determine which one may be better? There are some recent animations that also use three JS, as well if that's a factor. The three j s stuff probably is is a totally separate bag of worms because, Bag of worms. Yeah. You Node, like, that's a different bag of worms. I would probably leave that out of it. That's probably, like, more three d stuff.

Although, I don't know, it depends on on what kind of animations they are. Maybe they can't be converted. I certainly would move them into a single library.

It depends on on how many and if it's gonna be worth it. But if you've got pages where you're loading both libraries on there, it the animations probably don't feel very consistent either. I'm a big fan of of both of these. I would probably look at the motion has been, like, cranking lately, and I'm very I love everything that they've been putting out, both in terms of, like, their defaults, but also the library, the the UX behind all of that. And I don't think there's any better time to to do a refactor with all of the AI we have right now being like like, if you're on two weird things, you can just ask the little robot to go through your code Bos and find a list of every single thing that is written in GSAP and figure out a plan to move each of those over, to motion. I think that's a very easy thing to do, and that will significantly simplify your code base.

Yeah. Yeah. This is, this JS, another one of these tough ones because it's like yeah. Ideally, you wouldn't wanna have multiple of these libraries in here doing the same thing, and they're both very capable.

So it's like, yeah, which one should win? Whatever.

Do JS I wonder, like, how many people Yarn using. You you've inherited a code Bos.

So if this is the if you are the only person working on this code Bos, ThinLite Yeah. Just pick which one you like more, and they're both good libraries. And if you're not the only person, have a powwow about it. I do I'm the type of person who makes an effort to just drop what they're doing and clean this stuff up Yeah. Even if that's not the most reasonable answer,

me personally. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe c l's. Don't be a wiener.

You may be, there's maybe a good reason why people have done both of those things. Also, maybe not. Then maybe somebody just vibed a bunch of stuff, and it just added GSAP by default. You're right. There might be a good reason, but I, yeah, I don't I can't think of too many things that motion

and GSAP, like, don't have overlap in necessarily.

But that's me. I haven't used them both extensively. Okay. Next one from Bill Baboozyzy.

Bill Baboozyzy.

You got it. How would you say that Wes? How would you say that? Boboo z.

Bob boo z z. Yes.

Please do a YouTube video where you are given a piece of CSS code but are not allowed to run it. Instead, you must use a visual editor like Figma or a drawing tool to recreate what the final design will look like purely from reading the code, then see who has made the best version closest to the original. We did it. We did it. We will end that video. Thank you for submitting this because I I had forgotten where I had seen the suggestion. I thought it was in a YouTube comment, but I could not find it.

And then we found it in the potluck submission.

That was super fun to do.

Super fun, super challenging, especially because the drawing tool that we used was terrible and hard to use, so that just made it even more fun. And then we also have done a video where we are coding a design and don't get to look at the rendered output of the code while we're doing it. And that's going to be releasing on a Friday video as well.

Probably by the time you're hearing this, it will be on the Syntax YouTube channel. If you wanna see that, it was it was a blast. And CJ, set us up for some really fun moments.

Charles says, not a question. Just a thanks. In a recent potluck, you talked about interview threats.

Opened a Node and challenge this Sunday evening and immediately saw the red flag. So let me pause for a second. We're talking about how, Adib Hana, he went through some, interview, and they sent him, like, a thing to Npm install. And he he paused for a second and ran it through Claude and realized there was, like, a post install malicious hook that would have, like, totally nuked his computer and stolen all of his crypto and did all these awful things.

And and we mentioned it a couple episodes ago. And and, this person is Charles is saying thanks because I opened up a coding challenge this Sunday evening, immediately saw the red flags, Google Drive, ZipLink, API key, weird API key, follow-up emails, strange spelling and formatting.

I hope I would have noticed before your episodes, but I never know. Thanks. So, mate, you Scott think, like, the scammers can get the, like, weird spelling figured out by now, you know, with all the technology we have. If the fact that your your English is broken and not very good, like, that that's the dead giveaway. Like, even at Century, we do these, like, phishing email things where we have training we have training to, like, learn how to detect a phishing email, and it's often, like, if it's written in poor English. And, like, I I it's almost the opposite now. And now if something is way too polished, that sets off my red flags And thinking, oh, someone someone ran this through, and it'll all

so good. And and people still don't see that the Node dashes are dead giveaway.

Oh, the em dash is the the least of the worst. I just see it in absolutely everything now. You know? It's not just this stuff. AI tells. It is crazy that everyone knows that it's an AI tell, yet I still get things with em dashes

twenty four seven. I don't know if everybody does. Like, I think we're we're in it. I went to a a fair the other day, in, like, a our Scott, small town, you know, and they have all these different vendors, and they're selling stuff or their signs and stuff. And, man, oh, man, have they they found out about Chat GPT, man. All of them. All the signs, all the logos of all these things, all of the write ups of these. It's it's unbelievable how much it has, like, shook, like, small town or not not necessarily small town, but it's like it certainly has reached the the outer nontechnical group, and it's the greatest thing to them. Because remember when we first figured out about it and you go, wow, it's Scott putting, like, you know how exciting that was initially? And then you get jaded and realize all these things. Yeah. Yes. I know. But good. Jay, if you guys are interviewing, certainly, before you Pnpm install or run any code in, like, a test that they give you for an interview, just give it a quick scan.

Run it through cloud, something like that, because there's it seems like this this is going around. Stay safe out there because things are getting really real. By the way, we are I I wanna call attention to this before I read the next question. We're doing live streaming over on the Syntax YouTube. Now typically, it's going to be on Mondays, but some of them have been on Thursdays due to holidays, etcetera. But we are gonna be doing a weekly livestream over on Syntax YouTube Wes we're sharing with you, interesting things that we found over the past week. So if you want the same kind of style that we're talking about in the podcast but in a lightning up to date, then, like, we're talking about stuff that just happened that morning on there, check out our live streams because we're gonna continue to do those, and we'll take a look at any projects and stuff you want us to look at. And even CJ Reynolds joined us that whole time as well. Alright. Next one here. Just trying to provide bytes for my family.

Hey, guys. Thanks for the awesome show. You really helped me stay up to date on the latest and greatest trends in JavaScript and LLM technology.

Currently, I am a mid Vercel software engineer at a large enterprise company, and I'd like some advice on leveling up.

Most days, I'm trying to be efficient and productive with my time. Deadlines make it difficult to focus on learning while working. All too often, I feel like a code monkey. Wes, I remember that term. The code I we used to I used to work at a place that had a code monkey room that was like you could just go and and work free from form out of the code monkey room.

Thankfully, I'm not using LLMs as a crutch. I try to spend at least thirty minutes learning something new every day.

How can I learn the deep or core knowledge of software or web tech that will make me indispensable in my career? What would you recommend? Building courses, reading docs, all of the above. Now this one is tough because there are different answers here. So if if you're focusing primarily on what will make you indispensable in the future, then your best bet is to stay on top of all of the latest AI stuff, honestly.

The the techniques, the skills, the stuff that other people might not be getting deep into, you're gonna be competing with people who are just straight up using, you know, chat GPT or cloud code and and whatever. So having, like, a good handle on all of those things is always going to be helpful in the future at the this very moment. Yeah. That said, that might not be the stuff that gets you excited to learn. I think that's a huge gap in the way people try to learn things JS they try to learn things because they feel like they should be learning blank instead of because they're excited to learn blank.

So you need to figure out what excites you, and then use your time to dive into those exciting things. You'll pick things up faster. Maybe you can sprinkle in some more boring things into the exciting things.

The the number one tip that I have for learning things is to pick projects of stuff that you would like in your life, stuff that you would get excited to be able to use or to to have like, even if it's just like a a little robot lighting up when you click a button on a website. Right? If that's exciting to you, those are the things you're gonna wanna spend your time on because they can really push you forward into creating, into exploring new avenues, and exploring new ideas.

And oftentimes, that process is, like, what opens our brain up to, picking up big concepts and things that we might not have dove into before.

Yeah.

I think about this a lot because I love love learning things, and I I find my learning happens in two ways. First, I do what's called, like, surface area learning, meaning that, like, you're on Twitter, you listen to podcasts, you're reading blogs, you're you're just, like, kinda scanning everything out there just to kinda understand what's out there. What is the surface area of this? Reading documentation, understanding what the different APIs are, what the different texts are, what the different frameworks, languages, all of that stuff. Right? That that's very surface Vercel, just understanding what's out there.

But that only gets you so far. Like, there's there's a lot of people out there that simply just know about everything, but they don't know, like, the nitty gritty of, like, why you might want to do something. And it's it's only once you go and build something in those several specific areas do you realize, oh, this is why people are are are so fed up with that. Like, you might be, like, looking at, like, the LLM landscape right now and be like, why are there so many harnesses right now? Mhmm. And, like, why are there so many different ways to do x, y, and z? Why are people trying to reinvent memory in in? And it's because those people have gone deep with some of the other solutions and have hit the pain points. They've they think that they can do a better job because they understand it it deeply. And I I feel like a lot of people aren't going deep anymore and and then real like, learning things and actually hitting edges and having to, like, think and solve real problems.

People are just very high surface level. I understand what's out there. I can use the LMs to do whatever I want. So I think it sounds like you're doing a pretty good job at, like, the first level, which is, like, understanding what's going on. You'll see this podcast. I think the second level is picking a couple things that you are interested in, and that may be like, I think it's probably a very good point to become the custom Yarn, clogged code skills, cursor, whatever at your company. If you're a mid level at a huge enterprise company and you become the guy that has figured it out and has the sickest setup and you can, like, show everybody you're gonna have a lunch and learn, that'll start to spread. You Node, like, that's probably the thing right now to to focus on and and to go deep on. So figure it out. Go go download, Hermes or go get your get pie. Get a custom thing set up, not because that's what you wanna use, but because I think by implementing several of them going deep, you're gonna truly understand it, and you're gonna be able to bring those solutions to your company.

Yeah. Hit edges and try to smooth those edges on repeat.

Column says developers won't like hearing this. Buckle up, guys. You're not gonna like hearing this, but I generally don't update software unless I'm forced to.

Column, seemingly harmless updates have ruined enough native apps for me that I'd rather avoid them entirely. I have few reasons. Yeah. There's certainly enough people on Adobe Photoshop c s two because they don't want don't move my cheese. I know where all my buttons are. Apps are getting absolutely massive. They add invasive features that take away from the experience and can't be toggled off. Reels YouTube shows. Yeah. Can we talk about how awful the YouTube homepage is recently? Yeah. There's, like, three good video and then games for some reason.

Who's playing games on YouTube? I don't understand that.

I don't understand that. Do you get games on your you have YouTube Premium, so maybe yours is different, but mine is a hellscape.

Yeah. I don't. Yeah. But even if you look at, like, the the explore section of the sidebar on YouTube JS just, like,

a list full of things people don't care about. Explore, shopping, playables, like, what are we doing? Yeah. So he says, example, I got a new phone, the latest ad ridden version of a simple guitar tuner, that I had used for years and was installed, and I had to find a new app. Unfortunately, where I live, local communities communicate via Facebook groups. I know I know this all too well. Everyone's always anti Facebook.

That's where everything goes down is Facebook groups.

There is no way to see local road conditions without seeing a shrimp Jesus or a deer on a trampoline. He's talking about, like, AI memes or whatever. I need OpenCloth to check Facebook for me so I can avoid seeing shrimp.

Jesus. For a long time, I used web versions of Facebook and Instagram because the apps were much more pnpm down, but they eventually added all of that invasive features.

So true. Man, this drives me nuts. Instagram? Like, you can't pause a video on Instagram.

Yeah. You can't scrub. Not easily. Sometimes, I'd you have to, like, hold the you have to, like, swipe sideways and, like, just let me pause the video. It's unbelievable.

Anyways, this is not the rant the rant thing here. However, since I'm a developer, I'm also on the other side of it. I want users to update immediately when I ship something. How do you reconcile the tension? Am I rational to avoid updates? Is that a normal behavior from the public up the the general public? I've been making more of an effort recently. I keep my browser updated, and I sometimes scan change log for important security updates or features that I might want. For the most part, I still prefer early versions.

What's the problem? Is it me? Well, Gollum, I think he might be a little bit of a wiener.

But I I certainly understand where you're coming from, where sometimes you don't wanna update because it's it's getting Wes.

Or, like like, I always complain about the warp update. They put this huge update button on top of my warp, and it ruins my videos all the time. And it drives me nuts because we've been using the terminal for, what, thirty years, forty years Node, however long terminals have existed.

I don't need to update until tomorrow. It can wait. I'm doing l s dash l. I don't need to update my terminal immediately. And and I understand from their point of view because there's bug fixes, and now people are complaining because something is broken. Like, a lot of times, these updates are simply just fixing bugs that people are hitting. Right? But then, also, there's they're changing stuff and and who moved my cheese.

I think that you're probably being a bit of a wiener here. I think in many cases, the updates are trying to make the app better. In many cases, the the the updates are fixing bugs.

And if if I'm I I often try to catch myself being like, I don't wanna update. I don't wanna learn something new. Like, I was we were talking about before this thing. I learned DaVinci finally, the video editor. I was on ScreenFlow forever.

Every single update, it got a little bit more bug ridden. It got a little bit more broken, had a couple more things that were annoying. And then I was like, I just need to bite the bullet and, like, finally learn this DaVinci and and move on over to it. So you have to, like, kinda catch yourself being like, do I not just wanna update because it's like, this is now more work for me to learn? Sometimes it's worth worth that. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah. Well, I mean,

you are asking the guy who is currently running beta versions of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, who chose to build a tool that we actually need to rely on in alpha software, you are asking the wrong person because, bro, I update things to a fault. I update constantly. It's a absolute miracle that I have not gotten pwned by any Npm anything because I I'll be checking updates every day. I'm just just constantly checking updates and running updates.

And I will tell you, it makes my life so much harder.

When I had an Android phone, I used to flash all kinds of third party OSes on there all the time, and Courtney would be like, your phone is never working.

Why don't you just leave it on the one that's coming from Google or whoever? And I my gosh. I just cannot do that. So I Sanity, column column, I cannot get behind the behavior of not updating your things. I like the new stuff. Even if the new stuff is broken or hardly working, I like the new stuff. And I'm usually a UI defender of Wes UI changes happen. It's almost always for good reasons.

That said, this latest Mac OS is just straight garbage.

In terms of the UI stuff, it is No good. Nasty work. No good. And I'm not usually a hater on that kind of stuff. So I don't I don't I don't know what to tell you. I think you're being probably a bit of a wiener. I think there's a good healthy boundary of just updating your stuff when the update comes in, and I think that's probably fine. But it is it is so funny. I I think there is a type of person who is Scott, uncommon, who's just like, this is it. This is all I want. I'm here. I'm happy. Don't move my cheese, etcetera. Yeah. I get it. I get it. But my cheese. Move it. Unfortunately, not the

the world that we live in. Things are moving. Things need to be updated.

New features need to be added.

It's it is frustrating when your your cheese has moved, but, like, one alright. This is the Wes Sanity Show.

Tweet deck or x Node you use you do you use that to to surf? I have been, like, a TweetDeck user for I use it. Since it since it was an Adobe Air app. Like Mhmm. I remember that. Fifteen years.

And I'm like, I would consider myself like a power user of this application.

And one thing they did is they moved they took DMs out of it. And now you gotta go to x.com and click on the chats and put the stupid little code in.

And I just realized I had I think I missed, like, 200 DMs from people.

Probably 90% of them were spam, but there Wes still quite a few good ones in there that I had totally missed. And it's because they they moved my cheese, and that wasn't my normal workflow of checking my DM Wes because I used to just have a column of DM requests that I would just scroll over to, and I totally missed it. So that's I I do understand when it's like, why did you make this thing worse? You know? Why did you take away a feature? But if you're loud enough, they they they'll take it out. Like, Twitter removed the ability to have, like, dark Node, be able to select dark mode.

They just they went entirely based on your your Bos, and people raged because they're like, no. I want my phone to be light mode, but my Twitter to be dark mode.

And and they reinstated it, so I was happy about that. Yeah. If I Node if my cheese isn't moved frequently enough, I feel like Yeah. They're doing they're not doing anything? There nobody's doing anything. This thing is dead. It's it's cooked. It's Yeah. That sounds it feels good. We just got a new, we use Riverside. They just rolled out a new design today. There's a couple bugs in it, but it feels good. You know? I'm happy that things are nice. Yeah. I'm happy.

Yes. I'm happy. Alright. Next one from Patrick.

The rapid evolution of AI is killing my spirit as a developer. Crafting code and solving problems has been the best part of this job for fifteen years for me. Now the more I adopt different AI workflows, the more anxious I get about the future, both for the dying love for this job and the fear of becoming irrelevant.

I know that this is a quite common feeling that many devs share right now, but I'm curious how you guys feel about this as people seem to really love the craft.

Patrick, I really love the craft, but more than the craft, I love solving problems.

And the thing about AI workflows that make me feel bad is that the nondeterminism in solving problems makes me really stressed out. I really love that. In coding, I I know exactly what to type or where to look to solve problems. I solve them. They're done.

With AI, it often feels like, alright. I have this problem in my AI setup, not just with my code, but with my AI setup. It's not doing the things that it's supposed to be doing or that it's been told to do, or it's trying to use, different tools when it has a read and write tool built into it. Like, those types of things make me actually angry. Like, I get frustrated in like, that's what I when I'm thinking about, like, my joy being, massacred in this job, it's strictly because the my ability to solve problems has decreased because of things not respecting the determinism that I like.

That said, I think you need to take an approach for this that there are just new problems to solve now. There are new problems to solve. There's a whole host of new problems to solve, and it's your job to solve those problems if that's what you want to do.

And and with that, again, there's crazy new browser APIs to explore.

There's crazy new workflows to explore.

And, yes, AI is different. It's very different than how we used to work.

But in the same regard, you're still solving problems, and you're still taking on challenges, and you're still using technology, advanced technology to make and do cool things on the web. So in those aspects, I think you need to look at it holistically as like, we are able to do a whole lot of cool things with the advent of LLMs and coding, and we are able to solve problems like never before.

How can I use these tools to fuel that excitement rather than to let it kill my spirit?

I think that's where you need to be, Patrick. Yeah. Patrick, you're not being a wiener here. You're probably the first person to today that's not being a wiener. And You're Scott. I have a lot of empathy for you, Patrick, because I feel you. Yes. I I would be lying if I said I wasn't wasn't bummed about the, like, dying of of lots of the stuff I love. You Node, like, understanding closures or, just like the, like, Deno, tricky parts of programming that I feel like I understand deeply are now many parts of them are just now irrelevant. It doesn't matter Yes. That I I I understand how, like, the closures and things work JS much anymore. Certainly, they still still matters to a point, but I don't think it matters as much, not nearly as much as it. And even just like things like Scott the syntax error, it's a game that we we do on our live shows.

It doesn't matter anymore that we're good at spotting the syntax error. I don't I don't think it does, that you're really good at understanding where the curly bracket goes.

But does it matter if you are good at,

what's a good game? It doesn't matter if you're good at Settlers of Catan or something like that? It doesn't matter. It's still fun. True. Right? We'll continue to do it because it still is fun. And I think, like, what I've seen over my career of, like, teaching people to code is that you kinda had two people. You had the people that were just learning to code because they had an end goal.

I want to learn JavaScript because I wanna build something. I wanna make something. I have this idea. I simply I I want a job because coding pays well. You know? Like, I saw all of it of people that simply just, I wanna build something. I want to get that job, and I'm going to learn code because that is and then you have the other people JS they they're using code because they they just love writing code. They love solving problems. They love the learning new things and the ESLint intricacies of it.

And the people who use code to simply get to that end goal are stoked right now because Yes. They didn't necessarily love coding, and and that's that's totally fine. You you maybe you loved a business or you loved a project, and learning code was simply the means to the end there. And now that has has changed.

And then the people who who simply just loved coding are feeling a little bit bummed out right now because it's like a lot of their identity and self worth self worth is kind of, diminished.

So I think that's that's totally fine to feel that, and I think a lot of people are feeling that right now. But like Scott says, there are so many more new exciting things, to sort of tackle. If you are simply looking at AI and being like, my job before was to build this thing, and now instead of building the thing, I type into the Bos, and it it builds the thing. And that's that's the way it's gonna be forever.

I think you're you're wrong there. Right? It's it's totally what we are doing is is changing, and you have to sort of buckle up and realize that what your career is is like, what you're going to be doing day to day is is going to look dramatically different in the in the next couple years.

Yes. Solving problems, still gonna be the same thing, but the areas which you dip into and the the kind of the stuff you dip into is going to going to look a lot different. So that's kinda my thoughts on that. In in in some regards, it sucks because it's everything is changing, and you're you're worried for your job. And in some regards, it's it's really exciting because now you can start like, there's so many areas of my life where I'm like, oh, now I can like, I was always into, like, microcontrollers and whatnot, but, like, I I can get way more into it now, knowing that I'm a technical guy who can solve problems and I'm pretty good at thinking, but now I have this new superpower.

That's a really exciting way to do it. You Node, video editing is another aspect of it as well. You know, I'm using Cloud Code to build DaVinci Resolve plugins right now, and I don't think that that's something that I would have been able to do before that. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel that. I think that was very well stated.

You know, there's so much there. We we, those of us who really care about this craft have spent a lot of time and energy into this craft.

So yeah.

That sucks. It. I get why people are much more than welcome. You know? Plumbers. Scott

of plumbers are are switching from what Wes it? Switching from, like, copper to, like, pecks and, like, encrypting them. And it doesn't mean that copper's gone. And in fact, there's lots of people who are I would totally want copper, but, like, that, like, amazing skill of being able to sweat a joint and perfectly seal it up. And you get these guys come in with their little Milwaukee tubes. Yep. You Node, like, this stuff changes all the time. Like, the only constant in life JS change, and, unfortunately, you have to embrace that.

Adapt or die. Node. Alright. Well, what a positive note to end on. Wes, let's talk sick picks and, shameless plugs. West, do you got any sick picks for me today?

Hi. I got a sick pick. I don't know if I have sick picked this in the past, but I'm gonna re pick it again. And this is what is referred to as a plastic welder.

So if you have ever have something that's plastic that breaks. So, namely, the thing that always breaks for us is the bins in our fridge. You know? The kids grab on them, they crack, and then they start to sag. Or, like, we had, like, a wheelbarrow that had a crack in it, and it was, like, starting to open up. One of those. Yeah. Yeah. It happens all the time where plastic stuff breaks, and you can't, like, super glue it together because that doesn't work. So what this does, this plastic welder, is you have these, like, staples that let's see if I can show the camera if you're watching the video. You have these, like, squiggly staples, and you simply just press the button, on the on this gun here, and it will heat it up, like, immediately.

And then you just sink the staple into the plastic, and then you let go, and the plastic rehardens again. And it works so, so well. It's unbelievable how good this is.

And it's it's one of these tools that's, like, I don't know, $30, $40 to buy. And it's it's saved us, like, hundreds of dollars in buying, like, bins and wheelbarrows and just stuff around the house that you can't just simply glue. You need to, like, physically it needs to be mechanically put back together. Melted.

Wes.

I love this. Yeah. I I mean, my wheelbarrow is currently

cracked, and I was like, oh, what do I got to get a new wheelbarrow? I've had this thing forever. Yeah. Well, I I literally picked up one off the side of the road. Something I do all the time. You. Yes. JS it you? I will drive, and I see stuff on the side of the road that people are throwing out. And then I stop and look at it and go, I could fix that because you you look at it and go, it's it has a crack in it. Right? People you crack it. You throw it in the garbage. Right? But I I love fixing things. So this is a very, very good tool for that.

Yes. Word. I'm going to sick pick a couple of things, one of which is USB LEDs.

They are great for your car and your car like, it there's parts of my car that get really darker either in the back seat that would be nice to have a little LED shine in there. And these things are just little USB with an LED on the bottom. They light up little spaces. You can put one in your server rack or something. Is it is it just like a little like a little puck, or is it like a strip? It's simply just it looks like like a dongle, like a really thin a really small dongle with an LED that you can change colors or have it automatically change colors or whatever on there.

It's really simple. Just pop it in there and lights up spaces. So, like, dark spaces that have USB but no light that works really well. I'm I put them in my Yarn, put one in my wife's car Yarn her her glove Bos and stuff. And they're light sensitive, so they only come on when it's dark out or whatever. Great. Yes. They're really nice little things.

And then another car thing, Wes, is I got a wireless CarPlay adapter, and I would have thought I don't know Node. I would have thought these would have been more expensive, but it's $29.

And you just pop it in the USB. My USB and my Ionic has for the CarPlay USB adapter, is, like, in the weirdest spot, a place you would never ever wanna keep your phone. So because of that, I just never use the CarPlay for it. And so I just got a wireless CarPlay mini dongle, plugged it in. Now I got wireless CarPlay. That's neat. I wonder if those are good or not. JS Works. I installed, like, a head unit in our van that had

wired and wireless. And you're right. The I put the wired one in the glove box, but it had a wireless. Wireless is the best. You just simply just get in your car, and it connects.

Yeah. And I I even like the Hyundai UI in my head unit and everything, but the I would much rather have Google Maps support because, like, the maps is fine. It has traffic. It has those types of things, but I would much rather use Google Google Maps. Especially, iMessage. We have the Tesla model y, and it has, like,

SMS integration, and it's garbage. It doesn't work half the time.

It doesn't like, somebody reacts, and it's like, Caitlin, send a message. And it doesn't say what it is if it's, like, just an emoji and, like, come on. It's awful.

And I just want iMessage integration or, like, Waze. You know? Tell me where the cops are so I can slow down. Tell me where the cops Yarn. Yeah. So I can hide my drugs. No. Whatever.

Okay. I got a shameless plug for you, Wes. Yes.

My wife has been doing a podcast. She's a a doctor of psychology. She taught in schools. She ran a testing center for kids, and she's taught master's level human development courses. And now she has a podcast about parenting. So if you wanna hear a podcast where it's, scientific parenting tips done in a way that's fun. In fact, our our latest episode JS the time of recording this was on board games and, like, which board games are actually educational for your kids, different board games for different age groups, and how the idea of, like, a family game night, a regular family game night can build all kinds of awesome skills within your kids. So check that episode out. It was a lot of fun. Don't don't people

listening, don't be a wiener and let your kids play board games.

That's board games are awesome. Don't Wes don't even know what the benefits are. Build resiliency.

It's building virtual amongst your family Sanity time. Kids love

playing Sorry and board games and whatnot. I just I can't do it. They, they play with with mom. Yeah. Do do it for the kids.

Scott, this your face is not f m. It says twenty twenty five in the footer.

Blame that on Transistor.

Oh. Oh, I got a I got a text from,

Justin Jackson just this morning. I'll, I'll send him a message. Well, I'm updating it. There JS a way for me to update it, but I never even changed that. So I never set that in the first place. Much. Yeah. That podcast is Phases. Check it out at Phases FM on YouTube or phases.fm.

Alright. Please submit us your questions. Go to syntax.fm and click on the potluck button. Submit your Wes, and we'll answer it on a future show.

Peace.

Peace.