Soft Skills Tips

and Wes Bos. Welcome to Syntax. This is the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. We've got an awesome one for you. We've actually done a a lot of coding heavy shows lately, so we thought we'd switch it up and give you a soft serve. Scott came up with this idea, a soft skills episode called the soft serve.

And rather than focus on Node specific soft skill, we're just gonna go through some a couple different topics, productivity, finishing projects, planning, communication, career, and skill advancement, just to sort of touch on things that we've learned over the last couple Yarn and might help you out in different areas of your life. So it's kind of like a potluck in that we're going all over the place, but it's a soft serve potluck.

Yes. And there nobody brought anything else. It's just Yeah. No one brought anything. We just Bos cream maker, and we're just pull pulling the trigger on it.

Today, we are sponsored by Century and FreshBooks. We'll talk about them partway through the episode.

I've already introduced Scott. How about how are you doing today, Scott? I'm doing pretty good. Yeah. Just just hanging out. Yesterday was my birthday, so I am 34 years old now, officially. Happy birthday. May. Our birthdays are very close together. Yeah. I know. Node.

It's weird. Yeah. I know it is. It is funny.

I have the same birthday as my dad, so that's always a lot of fun. You know, we can do happy same birthday. And then, some some jerk decided to really test my security in my site and try 20,000 stolen credit cards, changing his IP address.

So IP banning wasn't working. You know, obviously, it was banning him, and, he was just changing. And then email banning Scott working, just changing the email. I don't know if he has a host of stolen emails or whatever this dude's deal is, but none of that charges got through. So it's like our our fraud tools are good enough to catch all this stuff and ban him. So, like, what does he get out of it? I don't get it. Just trying to ruin my birthday, I guess. But,

yeah, that's how it is. That's a bummer. I'm sorry. Hat sucks.

Yeah. It's okay. I mean, I'm getting him. I added him on LinkedIn, so that was fun.

Oh, that's good.

Alright. Well, let's dive into the 1st soft skills topic we have here, which is productivity.

So that's probably the biggest thing you want to be as a developer is, how do you get faster? How do you get better? How do you take the amount of time that you have and, have more output or or use the time that you do have wisely? That's kind of like a never anything, I think, for a lot of industries, and I feel like it's especially prevalent as a developer.

So what do you do? What tools do you use? What tips do you have for being a productive developer?

Yeah.

So we often talk about time. Right? Time being the enemy, but it's really like energy. Right? Because a lot of people have the time to do all sorts of stuff, but they run out of the the energy. So for me, being productive is all about utilizing that energy correctly before my energy stores are depleted. Right? And so for me, setting up and getting prepared for, like, a nice base of knowing what I'm doing is always the most essential thing for me to be productive.

So number 1, the very most important thing for me to be productive in the entire world is to create a prioritized to do list at the start of the day and go through that and do not veer away from that unless, of course, there's some sort of an emergency.

So a to do list really relies, in my opinion, on having a good system to make that to do list useful. I used to do list to to do this and, to do is to do this to do ESLint. And, and I prioritize everything p 1 through p 4 priority Node, meaning that JS the most important thing, and that it should only be 1 p 1 per day. It JS, like, the thing I have to get done that day. Everything else is just sort of tertiary side project to that. And then I, from there, follow the whole eat that frog methodology Wes you take on your most difficult or most important task of the day and then go top down and accomplish it there and then sort of refactor at the end of the day for what things need to carry over to the next day or reschedule entirely?

Yeah. I'm very similar to that. We've talked before how I follow the getting things done mindset. I use an app called Things, and I've got a bunch of different sort of areas, like different projects and things like that. So, the way that I use that app is that I have the inbox, and then I'll just anytime there's something in my head I need to do or need to work on or need to fix or whatever, I'll just dump that thing into my things, and then I'll drag them into the related project. And then for each project that I have or or not necessarily a project, but it's generally just like an area of life. So whether that's a rerecord or my personal website or a specific might be an actual project that I'm I'm working on or even just things like I use it for my personal life as well. It's just, like, things in the bathroom that need to be fixed. Or, like, I find myself But before you said it, that need to be fixed, that that was again to be a really interesting sentence.

Things in the bathroom.

No. So, like, I find myself with, like, 20 minutes of free time every now and then, and our house is full of tiny little tasks of things that need to be fixed or reorganized or whatever. And when you have 20 minutes, it's just, like, crippling thinking of all the different things that you have. But if you have a list of quick little fixes, then you can go into that. It's just called adult life on mine.

And then I'll I'll sort that. I don't use p 1 through p 4. I just kinda sort them in order at which I think I'd like to tackle them, and I try to either sort by what I can get done, like, what I'm feeling like, or probably the better way to do it is to sort by agony.

So things that I am procrastinating, things that I don't want to do, usually in my life, that is around responding to important emails that need Yes. Responses and booking travel. Those are the 2 hardest things for me to do. You and I are of the the same cloth in that regard. Yes. Those are my 2. In fact, what's so funny is that recently, Courtney has taken over the task of scheduling all of my travel because she's just so annoyed with me for not scheduling things or not. She's just like, are you if you get that done yet, I'm just gonna do it. Just forward me the email, and I'll do it. And it's changed my life. That's key. That's super key. I I need to do something like that just because I always keep putting it off or, like, I get all these invites to different conferences, and I can't do them all. So I need to, like, look at all of them and figure out which one I can go to and timing and projects and, like, oh, it's, getting it all into some sort of system definitely makes that much easier.

Yeah. You know what? It's funny. I had a idea for a book, and somebody took my idea for that book. Somebody took it. I knew they would. What is it? I I announced this, like, 2 years ago. I said, you Node, what would really because dropping swear words in book titles is, like, super hot. Oh, yeah. And I was thinking, oh, you just need a reimagining of getting things done, but just change the title to, get beep done. And then, yeah. And guess what? Somebody did it. The it's like that's a that's a guaranteed moneymaker. I don't know. I just should have pulled it. That there'll be another thing on this whole thing about just starting things. But, yeah, I I think giving an actual to do list, regardless of priority or whatever, is totally essential to get things done, in my opinion.

Next on here is get things out of your brain. I don't know about you, but, like, my brain is just an idea factory. It pumps out all these sort of ideas, and one will move from to the next to the next. And the next thing you know, you've forgotten 1 or or you forgotten the idea. So I I use tools like Notion religiously to just jot down any idea I have. Get it out of my brain, put it on the paper.

That way it's out of my brain and I no chance of forgetting it, and it's there. I can come back to it later. I can elaborate on it. I can brainstorm on it. I can do all sorts of stuff, but just getting it out of my brain onto Notion or wherever is is so essential to me. I always make sure, like, especially with my phone, I'll have it handy to just pop open Notion, quickly add something even if I don't wanna work on it at that moment just to get it out of there. Yeah. I I do that as well. The the whole term is out of your head into your system

or onto something. That also is helpful if you have a racing mind when you're trying to fall asleep. I personally don't have this. I can just shut off really easily, which is not. Jobs.

But some people are just like they're just like, I can't fall asleep because I'm thinking of absolutely everything that's going on, And I find for if I do ever have that, it's very rare. I just sort of put them into my system. I have lots of ideas. I write them down. It's just a nice thing to have them out of your head into your system. You know that they're they're written down somewhere, and you can revisit it in the morning. So I think about writing it down or typing it down for me JS is very

helpful. Totally. And sometimes it it puts my ideas ESLint different perspectives because I'll have an idea in my brain. And this idea in my brain seems like this golden shiny object. And I just say, oh, I I need to do this thing, and then I'll write it down, and I'll go to sleep. And the next morning, I'll read it, and I'll be like, that's a dumb idea. Why would I ever think that was a great idea? But just, seeing that it gave give you that ability to reframe it and look at it objectively.

I've always often heard, use the term a second brain. I don't know if you've heard that term before. So this is another tip I have JS use a tool like Notion as a second brain.

So this is less idea based and more Wes, like, knowledge based. I recently realized that I was looking up the same things, you know, multiple times, like, oh, I have this question for my accountant. And it's like, I know I sort of know the answer to this, but I don't know know the answer to this. And I feel like I've maybe asked them before. Mhmm. So what I've I've started doing is really creating a list of or a, a database of things that I've learned, essentially, things that are essential that I'll wanna come back to, and I refer to it as my brain. So, like, whether it's, like, fitness based stuff. Okay. Here's the truths that I know about cardio strengths, whatever. Here are the truths that I know about my tax preparation, contractors, business management, those kind of things. And I could just go back and review those at any time rather than going to Google and looking up a new source and having to parse a blog post or whatever. I can review my own note that I I wrote. I think this is pretty essential for me because, of course, I don't have a great memory and a great recall, but I I do generate a lot of ideas, and I do research a lot. So being able to essentially use a tool like Notion as a second storage for data is huge for

me. Yeah. I've I do this as well, especially when I'm talking to people that are doing things for me, like, real estate, law, accounting.

These are not my areas, and I need to remember them. And they're expensive. Yes. They're very expensive. So I take copious notes whenever I'm on the phone with somebody, And that's one thing that I love about having, like, Bluetooth headphones or phoning from your computer that you have both of your your hands free, and you can just sort of go to town making notes. I have, and for probably 10 years now, I just kept all my notes in markdown. I've had little brief stints with Evernote and Notion and a 100 different little apps, And then I find myself, like, Node. Even things like I have a pizza recipe that's in Evernote. Every time I want it, I have to, like, download the Evernote app or, like, reset my password. I'm like, like, this is annoying. Like, I wish that it was all just in markdown. And I found that although it's probably not the best experience for viewing them, it is the best experience for me keeping it long term and and whatnot. And I know there's there's actually an app that I'm working with someone right now to turn my JavaScript beginner JavaScript course into text, and they are using an app, Notable. They are using this app called Notable, which allows you to view and also author if you want your markdown.

It seems pretty cool, and you can just, like, point it at a folder of markdown files, which I thought was pretty nifty. So I might be looking at that. Do you know,

we did that in my electron course on level up tutorials. We built basically that app. It was like a, here's a folder of Markdown files, and then you Oh, yeah. A visual editor for Markdown files. You did open source. I remember you made that cool little icon for it. Right? Yeah. Made a cool little icon. Looked like a composite Node composition notebook. Yeah. That's that is great. Yeah. It's true. Like, that's not that that's not that difficult to do. Right? You just got a bunch of markdown files, and you can display them. Yeah. You can run that matter with some yeah. If you wanna do front matter, or you can just have a system like the file names or we I think we just did file names in ours, but, yeah, it's super, super easy. I think markdown is a a cool tool for that because, again, you can just move it into so many places, turn it into blog post, turn it into a Gatsby site in 2 seconds. Who cares? Yeah. So a couple more here would be 2 batch related items. For instance, I've been doing this Scott Tries YouTube series where I try different web services, and I released 1 a week. And it may seem like, oh, hey. How JS Scott putting out so many videos? Well, I batch all those together. So I record all of the Scott tries for a month in one day, and I edit them in one Node, and then I publish them and schedule them on YouTube, and then I just don't think about it for a month. And so by doing that, it allows me to work on one thing without switching context, which is one of the reasons why everybody hates meetings because they you know, they're working on something. They have to go to a meeting, switch their context, change their brain, change what they're thinking about, and then come back to it. So, obviously, I hate meetings for a lot of those reasons that everybody else does. But by batching the like related projects, whether it's doing all my email at once in the morning

or anything like that, JS just hugely useful to me. I do this with my taxes. One thing I have to do every year and, actually, unfortunately, now every quarter JS to download every single receipt for every single online service that I have, and it's it's 1,000 or not 1,000, probably hundreds of receipts. It's a lot. Yeah. And I just do it all in one day. It's like my receipt day, and it takes, I don't know, maybe 4 hours to log in to every single thing, and I have to download all the seats. But being able to batch it all into Node day makes it so much faster because you're sort of in the headspace. You can think of all these different things that's going on and highly recommend doing that.

So the next step we have here is just recharge when you need it. So there's obviously diminishing returns.

One thing I've noticed over and over is that, just exercise in general is a huge productivity hack. Like, I'm here trying to get the best keyboard shortcuts that I possibly can when you realize that I just wasted 15 minutes watching a silly YouTube video. You know? And, like, probably, if I had gone to the gym that day, I would have been a little bit more fresh,

and I would be able to Or even watch YouTube while you're at the gym.

There you go. I did. I actually haven't I actually never done that. It's usually because I'm doing, like I need to do more, like, cardio or something like that where I'm just, like, on the bike or something like that. I'm usually, like, doing weights or doing something where I can't hold the phone. Maybe someone should just follow me around with

a What you should build is like a hat that, like Yeah. That, like, that holds the phone down from the bill. I think I just made another $1,000,000 here, to show business ideas with Scott. Or just like, one of those VR things? Yeah. VR thing. Just shove a screen right in your face. Yeah. Yeah. Because you could just over I guess that's what Google Glass was trying to do. Hey. Hey. We, we we put a, one of our old TVs in the gym, and it's been, like, awesome because I'll put on YouTube or hockey games, whatever. Oh, yeah. I'm just like, oh, yeah. This is great. Just put on a YouTube playlist and crank through some code stuff or whatever.

Jealous of that. Yeah. Because I find I just do podcasts for that reason because, yeah, it's it's beneficial. But, like, there's a lot on YouTube I'd rather be watching, when I'm working out. Good tip. Yeah. Last 1 would be,

to have a system and stick to it. People are really good about setting up systems and then sticking to it for half a month, like, 15 days. And they're just like, you know what? I had all these great ideas, and now I'm out. So stick to your system. Hold yourself accountable to it. Stick to it every single day, every single month.

Next one we have here is about finishing projects. So this is the next category we have here. I would like to think that I'm, like, pretty good at finishing projects.

I've put out, I don't know, a couple of different things already this year. Not necessarily, like, full blown courses, but just little things like that uses .tech.

And, I'm working on my website right Node, and my tip is just to sort of go all in. So, like, if I look at my personal website, I've been working on this thing for a year, and it's not ever gonna come out if I keep poking around at it for a couple hours here, a couple hours there because I find that the like we said earlier, the ramp up to for me to get into the context and also just, like, in designing, I sorta get in the feel of the website, I just need to do it, finish it, and put it out.

So what's worked well for me in the past, whether it's a tiny little open source project or personal website, something like that, is just go all in on it for a couple days.

And, also, it doesn't have to be, like, absolutely perfect. I think a lot of people are afraid to release something if it's not a 100% perfect or they're not totally happy with it, and that time will will never come. And I I think that goes for for client work as well. Client work, you obviously have a hard end, but you just gotta get it done and and figure out a way to to make it work. So I'm just going all in and out for a couple days and and making things. Like, I'm not gonna do pagination.

I got lazy loading on the images, so it's not a perf issue. Just scroll to the bottom if you wanna see them all. I'll probably do pagination at some point, but it's not I can't do it right now. No time for that. Yeah. I know. And then that's the whole thing. It just get get it out. And then, I mean, that was the whole the whole premise of the,

in general, just minimal viable product stuff that was very hot a few years ago when when Scott ups started doing that. But for me, I have the hardest time staying focused on something. And I've made a commitment via LevelUp Tutorials Pro to release a course every single month. And I have done that now for, like, what, like, two two and a half years of of learning course every single month. So it might come as some surprise that I've a really hard time finishing things, considering I finish a course every month. But I have to because I, am selling that.

And if I, yeah, if I don't get that out, then that's a big problem. So holding yourself accountable in those sort of ways to finish projects and, like, really stick to your guns is just endlessly important for me specifically.

But I do have a hard time really finishing things and staying focused. And so for me, it's all about doing a little bit of something every single day if you are having a hard time getting focused with it. And so, like, I always used to think about this writing papers. I used to procrastinate writing papers. I'm a terrible writer. I, tested into English as a second language for my college writing class. They thought I couldn't speak English, so they put me into English as a second language. And so, I was now looking forward to my freshman level writing course, and what I realized really quickly is if I do a page every single day and then edit, do a page, edit, do a page, whatever, it was so much better than trying to do it all at once, obviously.

But if you maintain that ability to chip away at this bigger thing, this big scary thing, it becomes less of a scary thing over time. That's a good point. You just have to really, really stick to those guns to do that. I also have a hard time really keeping myself accountable for things long, long term. I don't know if you've read any of the 37 signals books,

Rework. I've read the Rework. Yes. I've read Rework. Not any of the new ones, though. So if you if you don't Node, Jason, is it Fried?

Fried. Yep. Friedman? No. Not Friedman. Jason Fried? Jason

Jason Fried. Let's look it up.

Jason Fried. Sorry. David,

Denonemeyer, Hanson.

I never said their names out loud, so I'm so sorry.

They're they have some really excellent books. But Wes I read recently well, I read it, like, maybe, like, 6 months ago and then 2 months after that, I've read it several times now, is it doesn't have to be crazy at work. And one thing they talk about is how they have this whole process of working on a specific feature for 6 months.

And they have a ESLint, essentially, for all of their features. And it's not to get this thing essentially done, but it's sort of like, here is the end of what we're gonna do is we're gonna only work on this one thing for 6 months. We're gonna or 6 weeks. Sorry. Not months. That'd be ridiculous.

We're gonna work on one thing for 6 weeks straight. At the end of that, do a post mortem, whatever, reassess where we're at, and then pick the next thing. Do that Node singular idea for 6 weeks and the whole all hands on deck to do that. And that, to me, has really changed how I plan around some things because I had such a hard time. We weren't we weren't shipping any features. We would be like, alright, we got quizzes we're working on. We got courses we're working on. We got blog posts. Oh, wait. Hold on. Let me let me upgrade types or let me use TypeScript now. Okay? We've Scott rewrite everything in TypeScript. Oh, wait. Hold on. Let me, do everything in hooks for Apollo Calisk. We're like, these things would just jump in the way, and it's totally my fault. So Eric Sartorius, our developer who works on the site with me, was just like, listen, If you suggest anything that is not what we're working on, I'm just going to say no.

And he's been so good about that. I'll be like, hey. I just pushed this update to this branch. It should be like, why are you working on that feature?

Oh, yeah. You're right. Okay. Gotta Scott get back to what we're working on. Yeah. That's that's always very tempting to do that because it it feels like you're being productive and you're going off on a new tangent. But, generally, you're just starting things that will never be finished or distracts from the main the main idea of of what you're trying to get across. So that's that's a really good point. I should should maybe apply that a little bit myself as well. It feels like you're being productive is the best way to describe it.

But if you want to actually be productive and not just feel like you're being productive, you wanna make sure you have a good hearing exception handling tool. Then I'm talking about Century Sanity century dot I o. You're gonna check out century at century Scott I o. Use the coupon code tasty treat, all lowercase, all one word. You're gonna get 2 months for free of Century. And let me tell you, this is the perfect type of tool for those of you who do want to get things done because it really checks all of those boxes of stuff that we're talking about in this episode by giving you clear, actionable items to work on, giving you the code, the release, the attach. You can you can basically really nail down every single issue your site or service is having and then troubleshoot it, knock it out, mark it as fixed, do all that stuff. So that way, you can keep track of exactly what's happening and have that crystal clear visibility into your application. So check it out at century.i0 Coupon code Sanity treat, all lowercase, o Node word.

Alright.

So, this one's really, not good for me. This next one is called planning, planning tips. And, I'm a terrible planner, so much so that my wife has had to step in and start planning things for me because she's getting too frustrated with my planning skills.

I think this this kinda comes back to productivity and and just writing things down.

So when I have a project or I have something that seems seems super big. And so I'm gonna use my, like, beginner JavaScript as an example. That, to me, was probably the most daunting project because the project was teach newbies JavaScript.

And JavaScript is huge. There's so much to teach. There's different ways that you can teach people. There's, like there's just, like, just trying to distill down what is JavaScript and what should you teach them, and in what order was was really tough. So I found that being able to write it down in a way that makes sense for the content works well. So I got this new app called Node. Mindnode.

And it's like mind mapping, brainstorming, and it's really neat because you can just create, like, a node, like, a raise. And then you can go into arrays and say, like, you can break it down into methods, and then you can, like, go, oh, some of them are immutable, and some of them are mutable. And you can it's it's much better than just I found markdown, which was what I previously used for everything because I could only go, like, 2 or 3 levels deep with markdown before it just became a giant mess, and you should see the mind node. I think I've tweeted it at some point. Maybe I should tweet it again. That's just the layout of this course was, like, 6 levels deep, and every single topic that it had was broken down into multiple subtopics, and, that really helped me plan them. And every time now that I work on a course, I use this app. It it doesn't have to be my note. It just has to be some sort of mind mapping software. You could do it with actually, I wouldn't recommend doing it with pen and paper because I so quickly change things. Right? Yeah. Lose track of it or yeah. Yeah. You lose track or, like, you're like, oh, no. You know what? Array methods.

Like, Node thing that it did was I put all the, like, looping stuff in with arrays, and then I was like, you know what? This this JS has its own section called looping and iterating that goes with the 4 loops and all that. So I moved it from there, and all I do is drag and drop it rather than have to cut and paste text or erase stuff. So big fan of mind mapping software for planning.

So my node is kinda blowing my my mind node right now. I, I'm all in on this. It looks like it's only even, like, 2.40 a month for their their subscription plan, which I was just using something called Whimsical on a, Scott tries video for the 1st time, and it does very similar things.

But whimsical, they do, like, flowcharts in addition to what's up? Did Node go to,

like, base how much?

So Myndonode is free for a lot of it, and then there's Node plus, which is 2.49

a month. Oh, I bought oh, that sucks. I bought it when it was, like, $20 for the entire app.

Yeah. No. Oh, another thing to make you bleed every month? Yeah. No kidding. It looks like there isn't a ton of stuff. Well, I guess there is. So either way, I was looking at Whimsical fairly recently and really impressed by it. But it looks like my note has basically most of the stuff that I would use out of Whimsical. And guess how much Whimsical is? How much? $10 a month Oh. For a month. Mapping software. That's a bit my well, it also looks like it does wireframing, flowcharts. Yeah. But, like, I don't need that. So I don't need it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Check out MineNote then. Yeah. This JS what I need it for JS MineNote. And they they have a so I I really feel for my Android people because I always used to hate stuff like this. I would come here, and they'd be like, we have an app, and then be like, no. It's just Ios app. And I'd be like, yeah.

Now I'm feeling a little less bad about this, but I'm gonna use this mind Node. This looks fantastic. Like I said, I was using whimsical to do a lot of planning like this, and I I really do think that mind map is such a good brainstorming tool. I I just really think it's a good brainstorming tool. For me, planning in general, though, I need my calendar. I need my calendar to be up to date, to be accurate, to be complete.

If there is anything that needs my attention whatsoever, needs to go in the calendar, or else it's just not gonna happen. I Scott block off time. I have to do all those things. And if I don't, again, my wife and I, we lose especially track with the kids now. It's like, oh, you were supposed to do this today. Oh, shoot. I had to do this today, whatever. Just gotta keep it all on the calendar and make sure everything's in there.

Simple but effective.

Another tip we have here for planning is I've said this before. Write it down. So another sort of example is that it was my JavaScript 30 course. I had 30 things that I wanted to make, and trying to think of what to make is one of the hardest parts about building a course.

That's why everyone makes to do apps because that's the only thing that someone can think of that adds content and deletes it and edits it, you know, like, that that kind of thing. So what I did for it took me over a year of just casual thinking of, I should build something like that or, oh, that's a cool example on that website. I should build something similar to that or that's a neat UI trick. We'd be able to replicate that. And if I were to sit down and try to think of 30 things, they would all suck. But if I take a year of it just being passive and writing them into my to do to do app or markdown or whatever every year, then I think that's why that course JS done so Wes. It's just because the things that you build in it are really fun, and I I owe that all to just writing them down. And I probably had, like, 70 things, and most of them were awful, but 30 of them were pretty good.

Yeah. I know that, like, to me, it's just really especially for for project planning rather than, like, time planning, I do that with all of my courses.

When I come up with an idea for a course, like, even just like a very broad idea for a course, the very first thing I do is make a Yarn for it in Notion that says, here's this course idea, and I put it into a kanban board of potential Vercel in progress, completed, shelved.

And these are my course ideas. And right now, I probably have, like, 40 course ideas that aren't complete. So that way, whenever I'm like, oh, I need a course, I can start looking for 1. But when I come up with the course, I typically have those ideas, like, ready to go, and ready like, for instance, I don't wanna give away some of my secret sauce, but let's say I have a a course ready here. And when I initially came up with it, typically, I have a vision for what it's going to look like in my head. So, therefore, I'm just gonna start writing notes that very first moment.

And that way, all of my cards at least have some context to them, and then I can have these notes here. And that really follows back to the chip away a little bit at a time because then, when you when you approach this thing, it doesn't feel like this daunting task. It's something that's been sort of on your brain for a while.

So next section section here is going to be communication skills, and these are really taken for granted by developers.

It's funny. My my brother was always in logistics for his whole career. He's my older brother JS a couple years older than me. He's now a project manager at a creative agency. They do a lot of Drupal stuff. And so it's funny that he's now in the creative agency world as a project manager, people I've worked with directly before, and I think he's primarily working on email campaigns and stuff. But he'll be he'll be telling me horror stories of developers that he's had to work with in the past year. Okay. This person's like this or, you know, these developers are just so rude to the client. We can't bring them into the meetings. And you know what? He is not the first project manager that I've spoken with that, has been a friend of mine or somebody I've worked with that had the exact same experience.

I have a friend who works at another not an agency, but like a, they're like credit card processing. And I hear all the time, our developers make the worst excuses for not doing things, and they just they're just rude to the customers, rude on email, you know, just generally, that is not good way to be. Like, that is not a good way to be. So communication skills for being developers, it it it's going to do a lot for you as a person, but it's gonna do a lot in your career. Because if you're somebody that people want to work with, then they're going to want to work with you more, hire you, give you promotions, all of those things. And they're gonna say nice things about you when you do job interviews elsewhere. So you're gonna need to work on your communication skills. This 1 first one I have here, I think, is a a big one for me. We, as developers, I think we are often optimistic about our deadlines and timelines. Right? You say, oh, I could get that done in a couple weeks. So, yeah, that might as such. I could do that. There's a couple throw some divs on here, slap some CSS in there, and we're done. Right? It almost never works out the way that we expected. So I have 2 tips here, and 1 is to be honest with yourself and upfront about deadlines. If this thing is really gonna take you 2 months, don't say it's gonna take 1 month just so you can look good. Be honest about how long you think it's going to take or how long it could take. Number 2, give yourself padding in this regard. If you think it's gonna take some amount of time and you have a little bit more time to give, Sanity. Pad that thing. Because if you deliver early, people are gonna be happy. And if you deliver late, people are gonna be upset even if that delivery date is the exact same thing.

My tip that I have here for communication is don't let people expect more frequent communication than they should. So Yes. This goes both for clients as well as as anyone, really, that's emailing you is that they shouldn't you don't don't train them to expect an immediate response or don't train them to expect a text message. Like, I get this all the time. I get people try to like, they get my phone number, which I post for phone calls, but they, like, text me at, like, 2 in the morning or something like that. Or what else happens? People find my Facebook and message me on there or or Reddit message me and, like, they just find all these different avenues to to try to get a hold of me. And I just don't reply at all because I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna start using okay. This is another avenue which people know they can they can try to get a hold of me. Same thing with email from clients. Like, if you reply on, like, a Saturday night, boom. You've just, you've just told your client that, you're available.

You're available on Saturday night, and now they're starting to expect that kind of thing. And then they same thing with people that send, like, follow-up emails, like, 3 hours after they send it. That immediately just gets put to the bottom of my list because they're like, that's no way to treat somebody and expect to get a, an email back right there. So I'm awful at responding to emails. I know that, but I'm fine with it because it's not really my business.

I'm trying to make courses here and teach people to code, so that's fine. So just things like, like, schedule an email to send the next morning. There's lots of tools out there. Like, it's totally fine if you're if you're replying to an email at Saturday night because you have it in your head and you wanna get it out of your head into your system. There you go.

But schedule that to send at a at a certain time and just work hard to train people that you are not available Wes because at the end of the day, the communication is very important, but it is not your job unless you're a project manager to do this communication. Your job is probably making websites if you're listening to this, and that's where you should be spending a lot of your efforts and time. Totally.

A couple of tips I have here for communicating, all this stuff is super important to me too. I think, like you mentioned, don't make yourself available. I'm so bad at that. I'm on chats. I'm on hangouts. I'm on this. I'm on that. I'm I'm just opening every app to chat with people on Instagram, whatever. I like I'm I'm so awful at that. I need to be my friend. Instagram's the Wes. I get like, because it's like a Saturday afternoon, and then someone sends you a screenshot

of their coding problem. And I'm just like, like, I can't like, how am I supposed to the code on my phone, first of all? Like, how do you like, Instagram is a phone only thing. Anyway, I'm ranting here, but, too many avenues to be contacted.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Limit those avenues. I I like, a couple of things here. Typically, I like to like, when people email you, it's really hard to convey emotion ESLint and any of that stuff over email. Sometimes I read some emails, and I think this person is just pissed off. They're just angry, and they might not be. And so it's hard to do this, but I think you should always assume the best intentions when somebody is sending an email unless they're they're calling you names or something. I would always assume best intentions or that maybe somebody JS having a rough day and it's not you, whatever. There's there's a lot of different, like, reasons why this email could seem salty to you or angry or whatever.

So, basically, I like to assume good intentions, and I like to respond with good intentions for the most part. Somebody's being a jerk to me, totally, I'm not gonna have any problem either just not responding or being a jerk back. But, you know, for the most part, give them the benefit of the doubt. You know, people work hard and and they can often be upset for any number of reasons.

I also have don't be a jerk to clients or coworkers on here with yeah. Specifically, do not be a jerk to your coworkers because those are your people. Those that's your team. Right? And even if you don't gel personally with some of these people, you gotta have their back. They're they're your team. You're on the same team. You're all working together to accomplish these goals. So, you know, if you have a client that's being a a jerk to one of your coworkers, stand up for them or whatever. But in the same regard, just try not to be rude to anybody. Here, we're all just, you know, needing a little bit more kindness in our lives to each other. You know? Yeah. One more tip I have about the assuming good intentions is,

trying to take cross cultural differences into account because I often will receive emails, which I'm like, wow, this this guy's a jerk.

And then you realize, like, oh, I even Scott one time somebody emailed me and was, like, trying to, like I think that they're trying to, like, joke around.

Yes. JS, like, as me and you do on the podcast, but they just, like they they warp dropping f bombs and saying, like, hurry up and and putting emojis everywhere. And I was like, wow. Like, you don't have to be such a jerk. And then he replies, like, I'm so sorry. I was trying to and it was a guy from India, and he just, like, had totally lost in translation the how to joke around with people and not be a jerk. Like, there's a fine line there, and then, certainly, I get that all the time. I often have jokes, and they're just like, totally lost on people from other countries because that sort of humor doesn't translate.

So you always have to remember that type of thing. Yeah. It's funny. I just got a

I just got a that's weird saying this. I was like, oh, let me see if I can pull up my YouTube to see some comments or some good intentions are are intended. And, the the very first one, I'm gonna say this guy did not have I just got this, a couple of minutes ago. This guy did not have good intentions. He says, I just lost 15 minutes of my time. What the heck has this guy not updated the repo? Seriously.

Oh, I'm so sorry that my free content that you had to change the the import slightly really upset you, mister Giorgio here. So, no. You know, sometimes it's okay to just be a jerk and, jerk back to these people. I've been responding to some of these lately, like, you know, somebody who's just like, this guy totally sucks, and I'll respond to it. How kind of you, Mark? You know? Just like a a nice little, nice little response. It's yes. Ex exactly. Right?

Sometimes it's okay. I've been going crazy with the block button on Twitter lately, and, Oh, yeah. I've I've been getting a couple emails of, like, hey. I actually really love your stuff. Sorry. I was totally joking.

And, like, it's just, like, lost on, even on Twitter. It's lost on me. You know? The someone says something they're trying to be funny, but I'm just like, what a jerk. And I hit the block button, and then they emailed me like, hey. Can you unblock me? Because I actually really like your stuff. I was just I was just joking around. So,

that's maybe something I need to to take into account. Although, like, there's a lot of jerks on Twitter too, and I I rightfully block a lot of them. I've been I really love blocking people on YouTube. If somebody drops any sort of swears on my channel, we're an educational channel. You drop some I'm bummed to block you. I'm just not even gonna bother. And I had some guy who was being a jerk, like, super jerk to me, and I looked him up on LinkedIn, and I'm ahead of on LinkedIn. And he sent me a message saying, I know why you added me on LinkedIn. I'm so sorry.

Like, I was having a bad day. I deleted the comment. It was super rude of me, and I didn't have to say anything, and I got an apology. Bad. Oh, man. I didn't have to say a single thing.

Yeah. LinkedIn has been good for me with that lately. That's been a a fun little fun little move I I picked up. Oh, I need to start doing that because LinkedIn has has no other value to me than Professional network. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's great. I'm I'm taking that. That's

great. So, okay, next section here is skill and career advancement, which is obviously something we've covered a lot of times on this channel.

I love these kind of topics. You know, I'm all about this. So one of my favorite ones is FDD.

Every time I come up with something, I give it a a an acronym for driven development fun fun driven development.

I also have hobby driven development. I have a whole bunch of these. But fun driven development is just Wes you wanna learn something, find ways to make it fun because, you know, when you're something JS fun, it you're gonna go back to it. So whether or not it's attaching something that's already fun and attaching to it like we talked to before about hobbies or, like, picking things to learn that are actually fun, making a video game or something that you enjoy.

Make it fun, and it's going to fuel your drive to learn it. Next Node we have here. This is funny. Scott typed this as I was typing it, and it was hilarious. It's it's share what you learn, and it's a bit of a cliche, but I honestly find it super helpful both for me because you can get tips from other people as to how to how they attack the same problem, but, also, just it's such a good thing to be able to share what you learn. So I wrote a script the other day that went off and, scraped all of my blog posts from the WordPress API and saved them to markdown and then also downloaded all the images and did the same for all my Twitter hot tips and expanded any short URLs. And that's a pretty specific thing to want to do. But I still shared it online because people are just like, Like, how would you download npm p 4 from Twitter without getting blocked or or something like that? So Mhmm. Just being able just just put it out there. People love to read this type of thing. They love to sort of dig into little ideas, and and more often than not, it will maybe spark something in their head for what they want in there. So just sharing what you learn, that's how I have gotten my entire career to this point.

It's literally just Same here. Being an open book and sharing what I know to people even though I'm for sure not an expert on absolutely everything.

It's it's worth it. It's been my entire career. I started LevelUp tutorials to show things in Drupal and, SaaS or whatever that I didn't feel like the documentation existed, but there's these things that I just learned. And I was like, oh, let me just share this. Maybe somebody looks at this the same way that I'm looking at it. Share what you learned, and it will take your career to places that you have never imagined. Every single job interview I've come up to, they will be like, oh, you created 700 video tutorials on YouTube? And, wow. Okay. Well, you kinda know about this stuff. Hey. I saw this video tutorial aren't sharing like, if you aren't sharing, you're hunting for all that knowledge and whatever, and you have to tell people. You have to, like, legitimize your skills there. But if you have all this content out there, they're they're legitimizers for a job interview or a career advancement.

Big, big, big. And that that doesn't have to be necessarily code. No. It it can be just tweeting out something you have, writing a little blog post. Whatever it is is just if you learn something, put it out there in the world because somebody else is gonna stumble across it in some point, and that's what keeps the world turning.

I just recently started doing this, a weekly series on code blogs, and it's like I'm writing this code for Vercel up tutorials anyways.

People often ask me about my site. So now every time I need to do something sort of original or unique, I just turn on my camera and record a video. Okay. Here, I'm converting this component from React Spring to Framer Motion, and we're gonna talk about it. Or here, I had this jinky issue where my code was dropping to 10 FPS. Let's talk about how I fixed it. And it doesn't have to be anything major or polished. Just put it out there,

and if it could help people. That's what my last, like, 5 YouTube videos have been because I'm like Same here. I'm trying to be like, I wanna keep doing YouTube, but, like, I don't wanna I don't necessarily have time or want to create custom content for YouTube.

And at the same time, that's just sort of live coding is becoming much more popular.

So anytime I run into an issue or, interesting way to tackle something, like, I learned about Cloudflare Workers the other day, and I didn't record the entire thing, but I had gotten it to a point where I was like, I would like to tell other people what these are and and how they work. So just for a quick little video, I think that

it's interesting that we both sort of landed on the the same thing JS just sharing what you Node, whether it's on Twitter, YouTube, podcast. You get it. And, I mean, that's both how we created our our careers, LevelUp tutorials. You know, Wes Boss, your blog Scott still come up all the time when I Google things. And this podcast and all, it's just like everything that we've done really follows this, and it has really changed things for me. So if you share what you learned enough, maybe it's going to blossom into a full on business, or maybe you're just bringing in some ad revenue. And to do that, you're gonna keep track of all that stuff in your new cloud accounting software, which is FreshBooks.

Yes. I just spent.

Oh, I I like, not that long. Maybe 4 or 5 hours in FreshBooks, which is the most I will ever spend in it all year. I generally just hop into it and check on invoices a couple times a month, but I had to generate reports on, invoice details, how much money came in, how much money went out via expenses, all the different currencies that I have, all the different taxes that are in Canada that I had paid out so I can get them back.

And that was awesome because I just logged in and, generated all those reports. So if you are using FreshBooks to keep track of your expenses and send out your invoices and track your time, when it does come time to, working and doing all of your taxes, it is actually pretty smooth to be able to just export all those things. My accountant loves it. So check it out, FreshBooks .comforward/ syntax, and use the syntax code in the how did you hear about it section. It's gonna get you a 30 day unrestricted free trial. Thanks so much to FreshBooks for sponsoring.

Thank you.

Alright. So okay. Continuing this career advancement, we're getting a little tasty here so we can move this forward a little quicker. But don't those of you who suffer from imposter syndrome, don't let the progress of others get you down. People learn things at faster rates. People some people don't even necessarily learn things at faster rates. They just like to pretend that they do or or talk about the stuff that they're learning to a greater extent than maybe they are. And so don't let the progress or perceived progress of other people make you feel bad about your own progress. As long as you're working towards your goals, you're going to get there. Just keep grinding at it. Keep working. Yeah. And you do you and just keep doing it. You see that on Twitter a couple weeks ago, people were sharing their, like, salary and how long they've been voting for. And, like, that was just, like, a flex contest for sure. Think that's helpful. Yeah. Only people that

warp making more than, like, $140,000.

And there's some people posting like, oh, I just made 4.50 and things like that. And I for sure know that most developers are not making that much money. And I know that that I I could sort of have a Scott of a vibe of people being like, this is kind of a bummer. Like, I don't make that much. Totally. I don't make that much money. And, also, there's a lot of people that were like, I'm making 4.70, and I've been a developer for 6 months and things like that Wes I'm just like, oh, man. Like, I've been a developer for forever, and I don't know. I don't think I could ever make that much if I go went and got a job at one of these companies. And then you all see, like, who's the developer behind CodeSandbox? Let's see here. It's, Ives Van Yarn built code sandbox.

That guy's like, I don't know how old he is, but he's not been a developer for very long and just created this, like, amazing code sandbox.

Next level stuff gets a Node running in the browser, like it's no problem. And I see that all the time Node that I'm like a old guy in the industry. You see these people that just out of nowhere,

start building these amazing open source projects. So don't compare yourself to to others. I think for most people, you don't make as much money, and it takes a lot longer than you think. Yeah. Everybody's on their own journey. Right? And Yeah. Be be proud of your own journey and work for it, but don't don't compare yourself. A big one for me is tracking my progress on things. If I'm going to want to learn something, I wanna make sure that I'm staying on target and tracking my progress to make sure that I know exactly, how far along I am or if I need to refocus or redo this or redo that. Like, I wanna know exactly if I'm able to do all of the things that I want to do. So track your progress. I I like to use an app for, like, habit tracking specifically.

This is a little bit more habit tracking. But if I want to advance something or change something in my life, whether or not it's in code or a specific skill, I put a I put a little thing in my tracking app, which is called streaks. It's the one that I use for Ios.

I used to have a tracker that we talked about on the show for Android before in the past. But I say let's say I wanted to, stretch every day. I then have to click stretch. Okay. I stretched every day, and I this holds me accountable. I love these systems. I love the charts where I can see that I've, you know, done it every single day of this month or I did that or whatever. It keeps me going. Right? I need a habit tracker for that using my habit tracker.

Every day I know. Every morning, I get a notification that says floss, And I just have have started to ignore. I still floss every now and then, but it's not working for me. I need something something else. I need, like, money on the line, I think,

or the health of my teeth. I think there is an app that if you don't meet your goals, it sends you, like, put the money in, and if it you don't meet the goals, it just sends it to a friend of yours or something. So if you would like to learn how to floss, Wes, you can set me up on my own.

Yeah. Yeah. You can just send me money every time you don't floss. I'm cool with that. What like, what's a reasonable amount of, like, money to lose for not flossing? I would say, like, $10.

Ten grand?

$10. Just just like sending over the wire. $17? Well, we Wes got a bathroom remodel we gotta do, Wes. I think $10 is appropriate.

Ten grand. Okay.

I'll have to sell a few things.

Okay.

I'm just looking around my office. Yeah. Right? You just don't wanna buy a paper shredder. Yeah.

Next thing I have here, I I wasn't really sure where to put this, but I see it from a lot of people that they say, like, I want to do what you do. I want to do x, y, and z. I wish I could start a YouTube channel. You're so lucky that you get to do this. And, like, one thing that popped up a little while ago is that I was just asking for people who do workshops because I get people email me all the time, ask me to do workshops for the company, and I do as many as I can because I love them. I just I can't possibly do all of them, and a lot of them are very far away. And and I can only do it, like, 1 or 2 of those a year. So, I was just ESLint, like, hey. Like, who else does training out there? And then I sort of followed that tweet up with saying, like, hey. Like, you should get into training if you are interested in it because, doing, like, workshops for corporations, like, you go into their company Mhmm. As well as you go to conferences, they pay super well. And if you can create course content, that takes a long time. But if you can create, like, a a React workshop and a Vue workshop and a CSS workshop, then you can just go into these companies and and give these workshops, and they pay super well. So, like, a bunch of people were like, oh, that's super interesting to me. I would love to do that. And I got, like, a tweet the other day from somebody and said, like it was, like, 4 months later, and they're like, man, I'm taking my 1st steps to actually doing this. And because a very few people actually just go ahead and do it even though I said this is a very clear opportunity.

Supply and demand is very outspaced right now,

and companies have major budget to to do these types of workshops. If you could just go ahead and start doing that. So it's just 1 person out of the, like, 15 that said, oh, I would love to do that. Actually, I had started taking steps towards it. And I thought, like, that just shows that you just have to, like, start putting 1 foot in front of another. And if that's something that you wanna do, then start doing it. Make a website. Make a make Node training course and start emailing around saying, hey. I'd like to offer this course. Yeah. And it's cliche at this point, but the the whole saying, you know, the best time to plant a tree Wes, like, a 100 years ago, and the 2nd best time is right now. Yeah. Like, that that's a great quote for a lot of things because, honestly, you just wanna get started. And even if you you you just start digging a tiny little hole, at least it's getting started with something. And I I do think that's an important thing to just you you can do so much more than you give yourself credit for. You just gotta start doing it and start trying it, fail along the way, and learn a whole bunch. So that's really all I have in this soft serve episode. I like this. I feel like we could do more of these. I I I have a lot more. Like, I could go I could go for hours on this kind of stuff JS what I love.

Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I I we don't do a whole lot of these soft skills. But if you have a topic that you'd like us to sort of cover and not necessarily that we're experts, but we certainly have thought about it a lot ourselves, and we can share our own experiences, just tweet us at syntaxfm or pop it in the potluck question. We'll see them there as well, and, we'll certainly do some more episodes in the future.

Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Let's get into our sick picks. These are our picks that we find to be sick. These are the things that we like, we, think Yarn interesting or exciting. I have a YouTube channel for you today, And this one, I can't necessarily say that this is going to be everyone's cup of tea or cup of soft serve, if you will, because it's a music channel. It's not a music channel. It's a channel that's uploaded a bunch of harder to find Japanese music of a genre of city pop, which is not something I really know a whole lot. So to avoid really making a jerk of myself but trying to describe this genre's history or anything, I am going to post 1 album in particular that I have been just Node nuts on. And while I'm listening to this album, so many thoughts came through my mind about what it sounded like. If you've ever played the video game Wave Race 64, it's like sort of cheesy jet ski music, that is what this album sounds like. It is awesome.

And so it it's so funny because I come up with all these TypeScript, and then I looked in the YouTube comments, and just about everybody is saying the exact same things. Oh, this sounds like it could be in Mario Kart. It sounds like Wave Race 64.

Somebody says, it's that right in that weird place where the eighties met the nineties, and it does. It has this very specific eighties aesthetic but, like, totally nineties.

Somebody says that's like being stuck in an elevator for 46 minutes and having a great time watching the weather channel, and the groove is just too real.

It is a very interesting genre of music. And the best part is it's sort of, like, jazzy and instrumental, and I could code to this all day long. This, to me, is like perfect coding music. So if you think that you would like to listen to the Wave Race 64 soundtrack for days on end, then check out this channel. If that does not appeal to you, then you probably won't be into this.

That's awesome. I am going to sick pick the Amplify Alien router. So this is a a new router from Ubiquiti. They full disclosure, they sent me this for free. Are you being paid for this advertisement Wes? Not being paid, but did definitely got a free wicked router.

So what it JS, basically, a it's a it's a wireless mesh network router. You can buy 1 or you can buy 8 of them and hook them all up, and they'll they'll all operate in mesh. But it's Wi Fi 6, which Wi Fi 6 has a whole bunch of benefits including, like, faster

I think it goes up to gigabit over Wi Fi. And It gets close at least, because we talked about this before. At least got to 600 or 700.

Yeah. It gets up to, never mind. Yeah. It gets up to 7,000 7685 megabits.

So Wow. Yeah. And, also, if you've got, like, tons of devices on your network, like a bunch of phones, bunch of security cameras, doorbells, things like that, that king I watched a video on how Wi Fi 6 works and and how broadcast works. And so, basically, I took this Amplify Alien router, and I installed at my parents' house because the Wi Fi coverage at their house was was not good, and my dad needed a better router. So I installed this at his house. And first of all, the thing looks really cool. It's got, like, this glowing green underneath it. It's got a little screen on the front where you can see what's going on with how how fast upload and download are going, which is pretty cool. And then there's a really nice application where you can manage all the different devices on your network, and you can set like, I I always set our TV and any other streaming device to have priority over other network traffic. Totally. So that'll go faster. But the coverage is good. My parents used to have 2 wireless routers, and we didn't even put this in mash. We only had 1, and it covers the entire house, which is a pretty big house. So I was pretty happy with that. It's a pretty nifty little thing. If you're looking at the next gen of routers, I would definitely check this one out. It's one of the few

Wi Fi 6 routers available at the moment right now. Yeah. You should hop on the call with Amplify and say, hey. I got another place in Denver that I'm wanting Wes of these. Hook them up. Hook up, mister Tolinski.

I want this. I'll get my people to talk to your people. It's it's pretty cool. I so I have the Amplify HD right now. We should do, like, a whole networking show because I got a bunch of gear from them, and I'm just testing it all out. And, I've previously talked about the Amplify HD, which I've had for a couple years. I've been really happy with that. And then they have, like, another, like, pro line, which is all their Sanity stuff. Interesting.

Yeah. Networking show. We'll do it.

I'm a I'm a be into this. Because I've been I like my Google Wi Fi, but I'm getting a little frustrated with it because it's you can't do the, like, the VPN on the whole network. You can't do a lot of that stuff that you would like to do with maybe a more advanced router. I also find my network getting slower over time, and then I have to restart the entire network. And then all of a sudden, it's fast again, or I get speeds again. And it's just through the Wi Fi router, like, everything Ethernet is fine. But, like, let's say, after I restart my router, the signal in my gym is 5 stars or whatever, and it works fine. But before I do that, it's like, 1 star, like, having a hard time connecting. So I have really no idea what's going on with Google Wi Fi. It's kinda making me frustrated lately.

Yeah. That's one thing I wanna do is put a VPN on the router itself, and, this Amplify won't do that. This is like a more of a Node gamer system, and their Sanity stuff is more prosumer or actually is professional professional equipment. And and on those, you have a lot more control over the entire network, which is cool. Like, I went to school for telecom, so I actually love to geek out about this type of stuff. Mhmm. It's cool. Alright. Shameless plugs. I'm gonna shamelessly plug my beginner JavaScript course at beginner JavaScript.

Use coupon code syntax for $10 off. I'm going to shamelessly plug my animating react with Framer Motion course, which I just launched. It's so cool.

Let me tell you this. This product that I made that I'm trying to sell you on is so cool. No. This is a really cool course that I did about animating React with Premiere Motion. We do all sorts of practical things like creating Node, Then we get into some of the golden animations that are really hard to do, like animating height auto, animating unmount and router changes, and orchestrating large scale animations. It's so cool. So level up tutorials.comforward/pro.

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Peace.

Peace.

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