Potluck - RIP Firefox? × Safari × Changing Careers × Regression Testing × Google Analytics Alternatives × Malicious Github Users? × Mac vs Windows × More!

and Wes Bos. Welcome to Syntax. This is the podcast with the tastiest web development treats.

Today, we have got another potluck for you.

This is actually we're kinda, like, in between seasons right now. The last episode you listened to was Scott and I saying the next episode will be a new season, but then we also realized we forgot to record a extra episode or 2.

So we're in between seasons right now, and we've got another Pollock for you because we took, like, what, like, a month off, and the the Pollock questions have just been coming in. So we'll get into it just a sec today. We are sponsored by Century and FreshBooks. We'll talk about them partway through the episode. How are you doing today, Scott? Hey, I'm doing good. In between seasons

here, season 1.5, whatever you wanna call it.

Yeah. I'm doing I'm doing good.

It's gonna take a little bit to get back into the podcasting, but I've been doing a lot of recording, so it's not like I haven't haven't been talking into a microphone. I'm excited to get into some of these pilot questions. It seemed like there was a lot of great stuff in here. So, yeah, do you wanna kick it off with number 1?

Yes. A Wes. And this is something I've got a lot of questions about. From low key JS what are your guys' thoughts on the Mozilla layoffs and how it will affect developers? So if you didn't hear, Mozilla, because, they said because of coronavirus, their their income, has dramatically dropped, And they had to lay off, what, like 25% of their workforce, which was something like 250 devs.

It looked like all of the people that were were laid off, they worked in dev tools. They worked on the browser. Like, the entire team that works on Firefox's dev tools was just laid off. And all the folks that work on MDN, the docs, were laid off. A lot of the developer advocates, the people that work in, CSS working group and and all that, they were all laid off, which is a huge blow to, I think, just the web development in general. And I just kinda have this, like, sick to my stomach feeling about it. So thoughts about that? I I think that's a a major bummer that Scott of the 1 company that we we always sort of relied on to to keep it real and, like, sort of keep that flame alive because they're really the only, company against Google. I guess, like, Apple has their own browser as Wes, so maybe that's not that's not entirely true. But I was kind of bummed to see that, especially because, like, the entire dev tools team was just laid off. And I'm I've been a Firefox user for, I don't know, maybe 9 months, and I've been loving the dev tools. But, like like, at what point JS it just gonna start to decay and then I'm gonna have to switch back. Right?

Yeah. No. I mean, I don't think Firefox JS going away. I I don't know. The whole thing is just very hard to hard to tell what's like, what the long term effects of this are going to be considering that it is such a big hit to the web overall JS we know it, especially the web JS many of us would like to know it, you know, without being consistently tracked by, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and whoever. Right? So I don't know. The the whole the whole business is not good.

I don't I don't know what to say other than, man, we'll we'll just have to, I don't know, be tracking the repercussions of this for a long time, the amount of talent they let go.

I I don't know what you you know about Rust, Wes. Do you know a whole lot about Rust?

Not a whole lot. No.

I know that, like, Firefox was built in that, but that's about it.

I think parts of Firefox are built in it. Rust, it's like a language a systems language that is. I've been using it for a little bit now just to learn a new language, and it's it has enough stuff in line with TypeScript to feel at home. But in the same regard, it is a much more difficult language than anything I've written before in the past. Either way, Rust is largely developed out of Mozilla. So there was obviously, big concern over that considering the WASM stuff. There's, like, a a lot of very Wes, essentially, dire consequences of potentially removing some of these people.

However, it does seem like the majority of the core team of Rust is still there.

So that that at least is good, but, man, you can't feel it. Like, I don't know. There's just so many facets of the web overall that this touches, whether it is the Wes stuff or it is the documentation, the MDN docs, or the dev tools themselves, which are always getting better. Man, I I don't know what to tell you. I've been using Brave for a little bit here, so I haven't exactly been on the Firefox train super hard. But, man, I do love those dev tools. And, hopefully, they figure something out to, regain some of that talent.

Yeah. We should say that, like like, MDN is not going anywhere. MDN for a long time has been a joint partnership between Google and a couple other, of their companies as well. They've even put out a blog post saying, like, don't worry. We're not going anywhere. But, like, Mozilla did employ people just to work on the docs full time.

So, certainly, the the effort of those people probably won't be full time anymore unless Wes sort of another company can scoop them up. I did see I'm not sure if this was related or not to what we're talking about, but I did see Jen Simmons who part of CSS working group, huge advocate for all of the new layout stuff, and then she works a lot on all of the new layout stuff that we get, Flexbox, Grid. I think container queries, a lot of stuff like that. She's working at Safari now, which Mhmm. That made me feel so good. I'm like, oh, Safari cares. Like, they hired they hired her, and she's asking all kinds of stuff on Twitter about, like, what you wanna see in Safari. And

maybe Safari will now get a Scott catch up to to where the other browsers are. Yeah. I've been actually using Safari a bit more than usual because since I got the iPhone. You know, the the the good thing about the Apple phone is that, like, if you use all of Apple's software, then, like, then the phone works very, very well. And if you start trying to use the other people's software, it doesn't work as well because of Apple's gardens that they put in the in the software. Right? Whether it is the browser things where it's, like, not true Chrome that you're running on the iPhone compared to the Android. Like, I've been using Safari, and it's not terrible. There are a lot of things I like it. In fact, in the latest level of tutorials course that I'm recording right now, I'm using Safari as the browser. Oh, nice. But for no reason because the dev tools aren't as good. But I'm using I'm using Safari specifically just because the tab bar is smaller at the top, and it takes up less screen space. But, I've been I've been sprinkling it in here and there, and it's it's good. I'm I'm glad that the Safari team is open to growing the browser in these sort of ways. In the same regard, I wish it wasn't so hard to publish an extension on the Safari web extension store. You have to pay money and get an Apple developer's account and have it all those things. So I don't know. We'll we'll see. Safari is still good, but there's a lot of, like, critical, like, I don't know, deficiencies with it. Like, the fact that it doesn't update outside of a actual operating system update. Those, like, remind me tomorrow, that's that's really frustrating because, like, what we're

and every single person presses remind me tomorrow Right. For the eternity. Because it's never never the right time. It's not the right time. I got stuff to do. And if you wanna update your browser, that's the only way you can update your browser. And and that's exactly like,

when did that ever happen before? Remember IE 6? Yeah. You know? Do you remember we had a I don't know if you were involved. I had a thing on Twitter. I was tweeting about this thing that didn't work in Safari, and they were, like, somebody from the Safari team was just like, make sure your browser JS on this Vercel. And you have to update your OS. I updated my Bos, and it worked. It's like, oh, Node never I never thought like that, you know, until now. Well, I guess I did in the past, but not recently.

Yeah. And that's not to say I hate when people say Safari is the new IE, because there there are lots of good people working on it that are genuinely concerned with this stuff. But I I say that, but I I don't I don't mean to put anybody down. And I, actually, I feel like the browser is very good. There's just, like, whenever I have a bug, it's always because of Safari, not because of Mozilla or Chrome. You know, whatever. It it again, it's it's not the new IE by any means, but I get where you're coming from. That was a long answer to Loki's banger of a first question. The next question is from Brian m. He asks, first of all, love listening to your show. Thank you, Brian. It has definitely motivated to get my career started. Right now, I am a math teacher. I'm married with 2 kids, and so finding time to code is difficult. Our kids are the same age, so, yes, it is difficult.

My current situation includes waking up at 4:30 AM just to get some time in before the kids wake up. Do you either of you have any tips about finding the balance between raising kids, getting stuff done around the house, having a full time job, and trying to teach yourself web development to transition into a different career? Yeah. So I don't know what your wife's schedule is like because my wife is home. She's currently working. We're both working full time. And even though I get to code for a living, there is a lot of stuff, maybe after hours, that I would like to do JS Wes, coding wise or even just hobbies or projects or those kind of things, time to learn something. And I found it's been very difficult to find that time. Now I do not have the dedication to wake up at 4:30 AM to do that, and that's awesome.

But, really, that is the answer. The answer is find some time.

Just find some time when you are have any inkling of energy and there is no one to distract you to build in that time. I really don't know. My wife and I have gotten really, really hardcore with our schedules lately, and it's definitely helped make sure everybody knows what's going on, when and where and how. But to be honest, unless it's before the kids wake up or after the kids go to bed, unless your partner has the ability to step in and and hang out with the kids for, you know, a couple hours here and there on some sort of agreement and you you pick up the tab at a later time, man, I don't know. That that is a tough time to to raise or to, like, find that time. One thing I might suggest is if you can listen to, you know, whether it's video tutorials or have something on the TV or or podcast like syntax, like, listen to this stuff in the time that you're doing your day to day Bos. So maybe you can double dip a little bit in terms of, like, learning if you are able to learn while you're while you're a math teacher.

I don't know if you're, like, grading papers and you can do that on a Bos mode or something like that. I really honestly don't know. I'm I'm not a teacher. But, if you can find some time to at least get a little bit of double dipping in, I guess that's the only other solution. It's a tough one, Brian.

Yeah. That's I I think that you've you've you're on the right track because you got it. Something's gotta give at some point. And we've talked about this before, but I think it's fine for there to be times in your life where, like, you probably sit down with your significant other and say, like, look. Like, I'm trying to make a a career change here. This is gonna be tough for the next year or 2 or however long, you think that it's it's gonna take you before you can make that jump to either doing freelance projects or to to getting an entry level job in that type of thing. And and, really, it's just it's just about being on the same page with your signal of anything other and being like, I need.

Like, right now, my because of COVID, all of our kids are Node. Mhmm. And my wife is still trying to to work her job, but she just has to, like, take care of them Monday or Friday. So, like like, what do we have to do in that case? Well, I'm taking them every single morning while she goes and works out, and then I give her half an hour, an hour every single day where I I jump in and and she goes does a little bit of work here, there, and then she tries to squeeze them in when Node of the kids is sleeping and you throw the Ipads in front of the kid. And then every single Saturday, I take the kids myself, and I just, like, take them out of the house somewhere. So she has quiet and is able to to do some filming. So, like, it's by it's not even close to, like, the best possible situation or compared to what we used to have Wes kids would go to school and things like that, But we're we're sort of just making it work, and it's not the most fun thing because I obviously would like to hang out a little bit more. But these are the times, and she's trying to keep her thing going while, while these kids are home. So you just gotta, like, eek away little hunks of time here and there, and have understanding if they're sick of a gather.

Yeah. That's really what's important. And and Courtney and I have been like I said, we've been really scheduling stuff lately, and I think it's it's helped quite a bit. So just so everybody's on the same page, we're utilizing the calendar more. These are your times because, now that she's fully back at work, it's like, oh, we we both have, like, 40 hours a week to put in plus. So it's trying to find those times is, especially difficult right now.

Yeah. I can't wait till these kids go back to Scott, or hopefully, schools don't close again. Yeah. Right. Good luck, Brian. You can do it. Yes. Good job. Next question we have here is from Diana Garcia. If you have used a drag and drop framework using React, which one would you choose? I've never used this nor do I know of any, actually.

Scott, have you done this?

Yeah. I have. There there's a a whole bunch, and I've I've used a whole bunch of them because, you know, they I like to try out stuff like this. What's the the biggest one? The most popular one is React D and D, not React Dungeons and Dragons. This JS, React D and D is is probably the most popular Node. And this is a very, very good, like, full full service solution here. It has, let's see, 14,000 stars on GitHub. So it's got got a big Sanity. Lots of people using it. I don't know how small this thing is. The fact that they're not advertising its size means it's probably a little bit heftier.

Then there's also React to Beautiful D and D from Atlassian.

Atlassian? Is that how you pronounce that company's name? Yeah. Okay.

I I never have to say it out loud. And this one's nice. It's definitely like they they try to say, hey, this is very like Trello like. This has got the stuff, the kind of experiences that you'd want. And, again, they are not offering the size super easily here. They're not showing exactly how big. And most of these libraries seem like they are a little hefty.

So so this is my recommendation.

If you need a lot of drag and drop stuff, like, a lot of flexibility, a lot of drag and drop stuff, go with the React Beautiful D and D or React D and D. Either one of those is gonna be just fine. That said, if you are potentially using animations throughout your site and maybe you just need a draggable list, then I would take a look at just using something like Framer Motion or React Spring because either one of those, Framer Motion or React Spring, allows you to do some really nice, beautiful drag and drop stuff fairly easily itself without having to introduce another library just to do drag and drop. So that's what we do on level up tutorials. All of our drag and drop is done through Framer Motion, and it's not too, too bad. In fact, we'll be doing that in a video tutorial that I'm working on this month. But, that's beyond the point. I I think if you have an animation solution already in place, use an animation solution. If you don't, use a a dedicated library. I wouldn't I wouldn't code your own from scratch without either of those 2 things, I think.

Next question is from Ali. End to end testing versus visual regression ESLint, at which web app, development cycle should you implement each of these, the best tools versus open source? So I'm gonna pass this one off to Scott because I know you have a lot of, opinions on this as well.

Yeah. So e to e Vercel visual regression ESLint. E to e stands for end to end testing versus visual regression testing. Typically, in end to end ESLint situations, what you're doing JS loading up the application as it is and as it's being used by the users.

Some frameworks for this would be like Cypress.

And with Cypress, it physically shows you a browser window of an actual Chrome browser or Mozilla Firefox browser using the application, and then you use, any sort of jQuery or whatever the, like, syntax is for actually manipulating the site. Okay. You find this element. Make sure it exists. Okay. Now you find this element. You click on it, and now it should take you to this page. So end to end testing is largely making sure that the application works and shows up as expected as it is, like, rendered in a real browser, where visual regression testing is, as the name may might suggest, is straight up visual testing.

Like, let's say you have thousands of pages. You take a a screenshot of those pages and say, this is how these pages should look. Then maybe you change the CSS in another page and you update that visual Wes, but that CSS change, had unexpected consequences on another page. What visual regression testing is going to do is let you know that, hey. Something that you didn't expect to change visually changed visually by a change that you made. So while end to end testing is largely focused on, like, the actual user interactions and the functionality of this site, visual regression testing is is straight up like visual testing or, like, the testing of visual elements on your site. You the thing is is that I think you can do visual regression testing in Cypress as well. I haven't Deno so. There are I I saw, I went to Wes the conference? It was developed Denver. Denver developed, couple years ago when I was speaking at it, and there was a really neat talk on, like, Cypress superpowers or something like that. And it was like a paid extension, so I didn't get to try it because you had to sign up for some sort of service. But, yeah, they were they were doing straight up visual regression testing, and it and it seemed very cool. I I was super into the general way that they were doing it, but, obviously, it was a little bit overkill for something like me. At which stage in app development cycle do you implement them? I implement ETE as JS we let go or as we complete a feature.

I'm not doing test driven development with end to end testing, but when a feature JS done, one thing that we do is we have pnpm E2E test that all it does is just hit every single view on the site, like every single page or type of page. That way Wes can see if there's just, like, any generic loading bugs on Sanity individual page. So, like, the moment I create a page or a route or something, we'll always add it to the ETE testing.

So I I e d test as you go. We do not do any visual regression testing. I can imagine if you would, you would probably do that at the very end of a production application because, man, things are gonna change visually a lot when you're working on it. That's for sure. So I I wouldn't do that until the very end of, like or only on production.

I do the Cypress as I finish a piece of functionality, and I haven't done visual regression testing in probably 5 years. And when I did use it, it was awesome because it would literally show you the diffs of the of pages that changed.

But it was at the time, it Wes, like, sometimes it wouldn't work or sometimes the font wouldn't load in time or sometimes it was a little bit different.

And it was annoying enough that you'd be like, it failed. It's probably just another thing, and you have to go force it through and be like, it's fine. But I bet it's better now because it's like we've had major leaps and bounds in in headless Chrome, which can to just take screenshots for you. There's there's this thing called Vercel IO. I've never tried it, but I've heard a lot about it. I wanna try it out at some point because, that's usually like, that's not necessarily a huge problem that I have, but it's nice to know that if you're adding a quick little bit of CSS, you're not accidentally nuking something else on the website. Or even even with with JavaScript, if you were to if you're writing a server rendered React application and you you goof up some JavaScript, then, of course, you're gonna see something different spit out on the page. So that's key as well. Yeah. Totally.

Next question is from Rob Dominguez.

He says, I teach a high school course in web development.

For a group of students who have a solid knowledge of HTML and CSS and a decent understanding of JavaScript, would Svelte be a good framework entering into component based development for the first time? Love the show. Thanks for the tips. Thank you, Rob.

So my thoughts on this are, Wes, I think SEL would be a good option for that because it's not too lot like, when you're learning React, there's so many little React gotchas. Right? There's so many little React things. Even though there is, like, the, quote, unquote, just JavaScript aspect of React, you do get better at JavaScript from React. I think there are a lot of little things that are gonna throw people off, especially if you have an HTML and CSS background.

You when I when I like to think about Svelte yes. Svelte is different than HTML and CSS, but it reminds me a lot of pnpm Angular Node, how it was really easy to say, oh, you know, here is some HTML. And guess what? We just we just sprinkle in some, like, interesting little additional attributes on this, and all of a sudden, it's a loop. That JS probably a little bit easier to to learn 1st and foremost. I remember really finding it easy to learn Angular Node specifically when it wasn't all about having to work around the Angular or the framework or directives. No. It was all about, alright. You just throw something on scope, and now you get a loop and whatever. And and you get to really a little bit easier.

To me, it seems like Svelte is even like a nice little stepping stone into working in dynamic HTML and JavaScript overall. But so, yeah, I I would think Svelte is a great option for that, especially just because, again, it is it is mirroring the HTML so nicely, and it makes the interactivity parts of it fairly simple comparatively to React.

I was gonna say all of those things, so ditto.

Because so a question from Eric is, what is a good Google Analytics alternative in 2020? I have a site on Netlify, but the $9 a month seems a bit steep for what the site is. So just a quick rundown. Netlify tracks analytics based on server side data, so there's no JavaScript library that gets that gets put in. And that's really cool because the analytics are better than client side because almost all developers are blocking most of these analytic tools anyway, and it's just very basic, analytics probably enough that you need. But you have to pay the $9, and for some websites, that's a lot to pay, Vercel $100 a year just to to add analytics to something.

So, is flipping through the flipping the domain through Cloudflare just for the analytics seems crazy, but is it worth it? I'm gonna go ahead and say Wes. It's or sorry. No.

It's not crazy. Oh. Yes. It is worth it. Yes. It totally is worth it. By putting Cloudflare, you put your DNS on Cloudflare. All your traffic goes through Cloudflare, and they actually give you really good analytics for free.

So that is not crazy. That is totally worth it. Alternatives would be awesome.

I'd love to get off the Google Overload. So we we're starting to see this a lot more JS that, like, all of these cool tools from Google are cool, but a lot of people don't like the fact that they're injecting Google's little tentacles into every single website that we build, and we're starting to see that.

What was the other one? HCaptcha? Yeah. Remember we talked about that one? That Wes, like, an alternative to to recapture.

Quite honestly, I still use Google Analytics. I just don't trust it that much because of the fact that everyone blocks those Google scripts on all of it. So I usually will go for, my Cloudflare Analytics because regardless of the type of site that I have, that is, giving me the the best stats that I have there.

You have some other ones here?

Yeah. I have 2, there's 2 side options. 1 for a little bit more basic security focused analytics and the one for a little bit more hefty analytics. Now the heftier one in terms of, like, being able to track way more things is Heap. Heap dot I o allows you to track a whole ton of stuff without having Google's, grubby fingers on it. You get, all sorts of cool stuff from this. You get a lot of great UI out of this application.

You can track user flows. To me, this JS, like, a little bit more it's a little bit more interesting than Google Analytics overall anyways.

So I think Heap's a great choice. That said, if you were concerned about the pricing, let's say, Heap is free for limited session volume, 3 months of data history, and 1 user license on 1 product.

And then let's see. The very next platform is contact us. So I don't think it's cheap. So if you wanna try, get started for free. I have used Keap before. Contact us is always the most expensive option. It is. You know what? We I used to design or not design. I used to develop a site for the 1st agency I worked at, and it was for these trainers. And the trainers, they weren't really that expensive.

Like, they were expensive, but in compared to other exercise equipment, they weren't that expensive.

And in no part in the store did they allow us to put the price of the thing anywhere. They just had, like, a a contact us for all of the prices. It's like we built this whole e commerce store, and it had no buy buttons. Just contact us. And we were just like, come on. Put the price on. And then they did a survey about, like, you know, what do you like about the site? What do you own? Like, well, you know, that kind of thing. They had a a third party company, not even JS, do a survey for them. And there was, like, 90% of the responses were like, why can't I just get the price? And their whole reasoning Wes because they wanted to keep their whole sales team that'd been used to, like, cold calling people, but they, like, be confused. And I was just like, come on. Just show the price. It's a Oh, he's a devil.

On SpaceX, this website, they give you the price to buy a rocket ship. Mhmm. And everyone's like, well, if they can give you a price on their website to buy a rocket ship, you can tell us how much your SaaS is gonna cost for them. Please. Yeah. Please contact us. Okay. Yeah. The next option is an analytics service that I actually use called the Fathom use Fathom.

It's pretty neat. It looks nice. It is a very simple like, in terms of UI interface, it's it's not intense at all. This is a paid product, though, as well.

However, it's $14 a month for, the lowest tier, so it's not exactly cheap. We we're paying for the Yarn, so if you're you're not looking for that $9 Wes. Either way, they're they're, like, a very privacy focused analytics company, and I feel good about supporting a small business like this. So Is this,

Paul Jarvis' company? It is. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Paul Jarvis is the the guy behind company of 1. That that's a that's a pretty good book if you wanna run a company of 1.

So this is cool. I I like this. I should check this out. Yeah. I've been using it now for several months, maybe 4 or 5 months, and I like it. I like the UI. I like that it's simple. Looks nice. Overall, big fan.

And I'm also a big fan of another service that I use every single month, and that is Sentry at century. Io.

Sentry is the best place to track all of your errors and exceptions in Node easy to use interface. And let me tell you, I've been talking about some of their features. One of their features that I absolutely love that I've mentioned before in here is the performance metrics because, hey, why new, isn't it? Yeah. It's brand new, and and I've been loving it. The interface is really nice. It basically just shows you a table of all of your your routes that people hit. Since Sanity is already sort of tracking these errors and exceptions, they can also track the speed at which a took a given route to load, and it even gives you a user misery score. And the coolest thing is is you could say, okay. I wanna look at which page of mine has the highest failure rate.

And, okay, I click that. And now I see a page that has a high failure rate. In fact, this page, I I've never seen this because this just came in, but this page has a 100% failure rate, which means that I have a page somewhere that's being linked that is a page that no longer exists. It's a good opportunity for me to write a redirect to prevent somebody from hitting a 404. Either way, this thing is awesome. I absolutely love it. I'm I'm on here all the time looking at these various routes and seeing which are the slowest routes on my page for real users. So if you wanna try this out, head on over to century Scott I o. Use the coupon code Sanity treat, all lowercase, all one word, and you will get 2 months for free of Century today. So thank you very much for Sentry for sponsoring.

Alright.

Next question is from Anan.

I have noticed about a dozen to 100 unique clones of my git repos after each push.

It doesn't matter if the repo is initialized, the picture is added or updated, the repos are still cloned.

The traffic section shows the views to my repos at 1, sometimes 2. Is this how interested employers keep tabs on you? Are there some malicious Git users? What is happening? Wes, do you wanna take a stab at this one? I thought this was curious.

Yeah. Oh, so so the guy makes a Git repo, and then all of a sudden, there's a 100 clones of that Git repo immediately?

Yeah. That's that's what I'm getting out of it. How does he find that out? Is there, like, a like, if you click on a repo let's click on Node of mine here. Yeah. If you you can see how who's cloned that Deno, because if you go to a repo, it says in the top right hand corner

how many forks of it Yeah. Which I assume that's what he means. So at at my when like, you know, my site Vercel, Scott,

has had 8 forks of it. So I have not seen a 100 forks of of anything that I've done that I wouldn't have expected out of. I don't know. This seems very odd to me. Yeah. I wish that they gave an example of the repo because I'd love to dig into the type of people that are are doing it.

And I I would think that the reason people are are doing this is that, like, first of all, it's free to to clone a repo, and then you also keep the history of something. So if if you accidentally push, like like, AWS credentials so something a lot of bots will do on GitHub is they'll scan for anytime somebody accidentally publishes credentials to AWS or Google Cloud or something like that. And then they'll they'll go wild and start mining Bitcoin or sending spam or something like that. Do you think that this is, like, basically, the new version of

when you used to be able to search code on GitHub and people would just search for API keys via the search functionality? Do you think this is just, like, the more advanced version of that?

Yeah. I I'm I'm wondering if if that's what's happening or, like, even I'm just trying to think of, like, how nefarious could you be JS, like, somebody is trying to use Git repos as a way to store spam websites or something like that, and Google's maybe GitHub is flagging them if they all of a sudden create hundreds of of new Git repos. But if you, like, if you fork Git repo and then just blow out whatever they had and put your own stuff in, that's an option because I've noticed a lot lately in, in my GitHub searches. I search on GitHub a lot. Anytime I have a problem with Me too. How to use an API or anything like that, I'll just search it on GitHub and see other people have implemented it. And I've been finding a lot of, like, spam in there of people being, like, just trying to do SEOs stuff with GitHub Pages. So I bet there's something shady going on around here, or you're just extremely popular developer.

Yeah. Those are the 2 options. It's either shady or you're cool.

Alright. Next question we have here is from Mark Prime.

I really like this question.

With Apple like Mark's Node, Mark Bryan. It's like Yeah. That's that's pretty pretty sick.

With Apple switching to their own processors so if you didn't hear, Apple announced that they are no longer gonna be building on Intel, over I don't know. I think it's over the next, like, 3 or 4 or 4 Yarn, and they are going to be releasing their own Apple Silicon, which, at the end of the day, it's it's ARM processors. And ARM ARM processors are what are in phones. Is that right?

It's it's what's in

Apple phones. Is that what's in Android phones too? No. No. Apple Apple makes their own, Apple makes their own chips for the iPhones.

So when they came out, I researched it, and, they are indeed just ARM based processors, and and those are the processors that are often found in Chromebooks or or things like that. And the downside to that is that it doesn't run all of your software because the apps need to be specifically compiled and built for those types of processors.

But the upside to it is that they are cheaper, they're faster, they don't use as much heat, things like that. Like, I know a lot of the supercomputers out there now, instead of using super expensive Xeon Processors, they're just using 400 Yarn Processors Yeah. And distributing the load amongst each other. So that's kinda interesting that they're switching over to that. And I bet that means that we're gonna get a MacBook with wicked battery life, because they've they've sort of pinched and squeezed everything they can to get better battery life out of these things. But at a certain point, you need to address the thing that eats all of your battery, and that's your your processor.

So is it silly for anyone to buy a Mac that is released before that they release those to do development? Do you guys have experience with Windows or, and which you would still prefer which would you still prefer today if you need to buy 1? So I don't think that you need to wait for these things to come out because when they do initially come out, not all of the apps that we know and love are going to immediately work on the new ARM processors or, sorry, Apple Silicone.

Let's call it Apple Silicone.

I can't. I can't. I can't.

Okay. I'm gonna call Apple Silicone. So what's gonna be I bet it will be a good 5 years or or so before everybody has totally transitioned over, and there's gonna be a lot of bridge time where you'll have to check if your apps are working on. And at a certain point, you're not gonna get updates for older apps because they'll only work on the on the new Yarn. But I was thinking about that. I was like I'm like, okay. Well, let's just look at the apps that we developers use. We've got a terminal. We have our our text editor, like Vercel Code. You have some sort of design software.

You have a browser.

Like, what Yarn also the apps that we're using? Like, screen recorder is a big one for me. And everything terminal, that will work on ARM processor. No problem. An editor, that's Node JS built on on Chrome, so that's no sweat there. That's that's gonna work. No no problem because these these browsers already work on on ARM processors. So I bet that will be They mentioned that they had somebody

to port Electron

already. Really? Electron stuff. So Apple, like, did it themselves as far as I know. Oh, that's good. That means, like, a lot of a lot all the apps that I use are based on Electron, so that will that will work already if especially if the browser's over. Design software, so if you start using Figma, I bet I bet that will will work because you can use it in the browser. Right?

Yeah. I think Figma is maybe built on Rust. Either way, it's it's it's done through it's not well, is it done through Electron? I believe it is. Yeah. At least the app the desktop app is.

But yeah. No. I I think as long as as long as it runs in the browser, that stuff should work fine. I think that's the some of the joys of writing browser based applications

for us, you Node. Yeah. It's it's it's gonna be good. I don't think you should wait or stress out about something coming out or not just because most of you are just sitting at your desk with this thing plugged into a power source anyway.

So, at some point, you will probably get one of these if you decide to to go stay with the Mac.

But but don't sweat about it. I think this is a long term sort of move. I might be wrong about, but that's what I'm seeing. And in Windows, would you do you have experience with Windows? Yes.

Would you go with it? No. It's just it feels weird.

And that's partly because I've I've been on Mac for so long and partly because every single time we talk about Windows, there's an equivalent of whatever, but it's not as good.

Yeah. Node none none of it is is good. Yes. It's it's cheaper. You have more options for the hardware, whatever. The OS is still just, you know, coupled together in in, like, patch on patch on patch. It feels very weird to use. In fact, like, they're, like, beautification aspects of it, like, really worked. But it's like they seems like they only, like, worked on, like, the start screen and, like, the first couple of screens. The moment you get into any, like, menus in Windows, it all looks like Windows 95 still looks terrible. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's funny because we just got finished saying, well, all of this stuff is browser based, so it shouldn't matter.

But there is a certain aspect. And I know there's a lot of Windows people screaming at us right now being like, you're dumb. But that's just how I feel about every time every time I'm on it. And I've given it, like, a good like, a couple of weeks on Windows just trying to make it work and just just can't make it work. Yeah. I have

a a Windows partition on this desk or on this laptop. I've had a Windows machine for a long time. I've used it enough to know, exactly how I feel about it in terms of, like, should you wait? In my opinion, I think at least if you're looking to get a MacBook Pro, if you're spending, that kind of dinero on a machine, I would wait for the next MacBook Pro.

Why? Because I don't think it's that far away. And I think that given the option to be on the Apple Silicon or not, I would take it if you don't need need need it right now. But if you do need need it right now, I think everything that Wes said is gonna be fine. I I think it would be absolutely more than fine if you were to buy it right now. But let's see. The 16 inch MacBook Pro, according to macrumorsdot com, is listed as do not buy because it has passed or around their average days since release. And I'm pretty sure the next one that's released is going to have the Apple

if it's if it's matter of waiting, you know, 50 days, man, I would wait. If it's if it's not Oh, yeah. I didn't realize it was that. They said late 2020, they're coming? Man, maybe I'm wrong about this. I thought there would be a lot more a lot more time.

Oh, that's pretty cool. Time has been an odd thing lately. Yeah. It's just been, like, the this whole 2020 has just been a fever dream where we wake up with arm based Max. You bet.

You know what? It hasn't been a fever dream, Scott. No. No. That's a you you missed the perfect you missed the perfect transition there, Rusty. What you got. The perfect transition. You say, well, maybe you just wanna wait till these MacBooks are refreshed, and you will be certainly refreshed when you try out one of the freshest Vercel that we've ever advertised here on Sanity, and that's FreshBooks.

Yes. FreshBooks is your cloud accounting that you need for your independent freelance, small business, big business, whatever it is, if you need to keep track of invoices, expenses, time tracking, all of that good stuff. Maybe you bought a laptop. Maybe you bought a laptop and you need to, put that thing in, or maybe you need to, what's it called, depreciate it over 4 years because it was a large expense. You can use that with FreshBooks. So check it out at freshbooks.comforward/syntax.

It'll get you 30 day unrestricted free trial. Make sure you use syntax and how did you hear about us Bos, and thanks so much to FreshBooks for sponsoring.

Nice. Alright. Next question is from Paige Niederinghaus.

She says, hi. Hey, Wes and Scott. Big fan of the podcast. Thank you, Paige. My question is, have you ever been approached by or heard of GitHub Ads dot I o? They're trying to pay developers to put ads under popular open source libraries on GitHub.

They approached me recently. I wasn't sure what to think about them. It just seems fishy, and I thought there was a little chatter about it on Twitter. What do you think? I know the sponsorship ads help pay the bills, but I don't know if that conflicts with GitHub's terms of service or how developers would react, not react during us, since, typically, we're more suspicious of things that seem sponsored or disingenuous.

Thanks for any thoughts or advice you have. Paige, yes.

I have not heard of this company. That seems kind of iffy to me.

You know what? I I personally if we're talking about personally and somebody wants to throw in a Node liner, you know, if if you wanna help support this repo, here's like, watch this ad. Like, I honestly, for the amount of software that I use that other people have written, I can overlook that in my GitHub blogs or my Npm installs. I really do not care personally if people want to do this kind of thing.

But I don't Node.

A company approaching you independently and being like, hey. You know, can we throw some ads on your stuff? Like, that to me seems kinda rough. I don't know. It seems shady to me. Yeah.

I actually have a lot of experience, with this just because, like, back when I first did my affiliate thing, there was another, like, startup.

I forget who it was. I'm just searching my emails. It was probably 4 or 5 years ago, and they did this exact same thing where they implemented an SVG file, and then that SVG file would dynamically change on their server and serve up just text, that would be an ad. And they approached me and said, hey. Do you wanna buy a bunch of inventory? I said, no.

But we can try we can try it with, like, a affiliate.

And, he he put me in a bunch of his unused inventory, and numb really nothing came of it. Sanity didn't really work that well. And then I I also had, Sindre Sohas. Is that how you say it? He's the dev behind yeah. It dev behind, like, 1,000,000, all these awesome lists, a lot of tons of different plugins and JavaScript things and whatnot, and, just did a horizontal rule and then did a little ad that says improve your JavaScript skills with this ESX course from Wes Bos. Try his free JavaScript quarters, JavaScript 30 course for a taste of what to expect. You might also like his React in Sublime courses, and then another horizontal rule, and that did super well for him. I've paid out, I don't know, a couple $1,000 to him just from those little clean little ads that he's put in the read me of his repo. And every couple months, somebody would screenshot and be like, hey. What the hell is this? And then and then we would reply, be like, oh, the guy's given his entire life to open source. Yeah. Sorry.

You you you read all this free stuff, and somebody put one line of something that's not free and you lose. Yeah. I had a lot of experience of with that on YouTube. I you know, I did 2,000 free videos, and then I asked people to pay for 1. And they were like, what's the what's the bill here? Yeah. So and then that way and and when and when we said that, a lot of people sort of came to him and be like, wow, that's really cool that you're able to

like, I'm able to teach people. He's able to get a little extra money from the stuff that he's been been building, and that allow that, like, sort of funds him to keep working on on this stuff. So it was a pretty good arrangement.

I did hear that that first one I talked about was against GitHub's terms, and they got shut down for that. I've never had any any issues with mine. So I I think as long as it's, like like Or organic,

you're doing it yourself? Yeah.

As Yarn as it feels cool, it JS kinda weird when a company comes in and starts trying to drop ads into to read me's and things like that. But there's probably some sort of there's a problem here, and that is that open source authors need to make money somehow.

And I think people are trying to figure out how does that work right Node, and and this is just one of those things. So, you probably won't make a whole lot of money off of it unless you have like, like, Sindre has He's probably one of the most popular developers on all of GitHub,

and it's Scott, like, unreal how much money he's made. But if you just have, like, a couple popular repos, you probably won't make a whole lot of money for it. And I would say it's probably not worth it. Yeah. Right. I don't know. It's a tough call. I've not heard of this company, though. I don't know. I would I would prefer if it was me to do it on, like, a more personal basis than, like, through Node company that's gonna throw some stuff on there.

Next question from Colby h. I just listened to your TLD game, and it made me wonder, what are your opinions on personal site domains? Should you always try to be your name .dev? What about .me or other domain names? This is this is really interesting. So, like like, what are the the popular ones for for developers? We have .io, .dev, which is pretty new. It only came on, what, like, 6 months ago, .me.

There's .tech, which is a sponsor of our podcast.

Com. S h is a popular one. Scott.

So what should you always go to? No. You don't have to get a Scott dev. Everyone used to always try to go for the IO. Those are mostly taken up Node. And then also anytime you mention it, somebody comes at you and talks about how awful IOs are. Apparently, they're sinking the ocean or so. What was the problem with IO? I thought it was a foreign country.

Is that accurate? I thought it was a a foreign country, and there was, like, some weirdness around SEO or something. No. It's Scott. Because, like,

it it those country level domains, Google has a list of these are country level domains, but we don't treat them as country level domains. Like .tv is for Tuvalu, but they don't treat it as, like, oh, this website must be originating in Tuvalu.

Somebody is abusing the country, I think. I we can look into it. Maybe we'll put a link in the show notes if I find it. I don't forget what it is offhand.

Dev is cool. They seem to be very expensive, especially if you want a short one. Dot me. I've never liked Scott me. What do you think about Miis? Don't like it. No. It reminds me of Apple for some reason.

Does it? Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of, like I think there was, like, some service that was, like, your Node page. It was, like, around, you know, trying to be a fancy, this is your landing page. This is your business card for the Wes, and that's what it reminds me of for some reason.

Oh, yeah. And .sh is pretty Scott. Dotcom.

I use .com.

Yeah. Yeah. I think my favorite is if you don't have it if you can't get the Scott because your name JS, like, Joe Smith, I would try go for the .sh or try to make some, like, really cool domain name off of it.

Otherwise, nothing wrong with with the .dev or something like that. Yeah. I use .com.

I've just had Scott forever. Although, I do have stolinski.dev, which isn't as, like, you know, fun as scottolinski.com, but it it is like I don't Node. My Twitter handle all my handles are Wes Tolinski everywhere. So maybe s telinski Scott dev should be my main URL just to fall in line with everything else. I have never thought about that too much. But, yeah, I I would go Comtech dev before IO, me, or SH, but that's just me.

Last question here is from Cam. Cam says, what's the best way to introduce new technology or process to a team? I have a lot of ideas about this, but that said, I think these are gonna be it's gonna be different based on how big your team JS, big, big, big, big teams.

It's a little bit more interesting or difficult.

Small teams, these get a little bit more intimate in 1 on 1. You can do a lunch and learn where everybody brings their lunch, 1 person is presenting, everybody eats their lunch because they're in the same room, and everybody has lunch the same time. You eat your lunch, and 1 person gives a little presentation about a specific topic. That's 1. 2, in an internal mini conference, that'd be fun. You take a day, pnpm every single person on your dev team prepares a a miniature talk about something that they found interesting.

That way, it gets people really used to sharing things that they know and love. So a little mini conference or a miniature meetup is the same as a lunch and learn except for it's an all day, and everybody would take take a turn. Demo day, and I don't mean, like, a full day, but maybe you've prepared a code demo and you could pass along this demo and say, hey. Look at this thing. Maybe it's a problem that your team has typically or whatever, and look at how elegantly I solved it using this technology. Maybe we should look into using this technology for things. That way, people can really get a firsthand view of just what this what problem this thing is solving and how eloquently it's solving it.

Another one would be to get everybody in the room and watch a talk on YouTube. I think this is fun. I know I know people who have, done Wes' courses like this that where they're all set, and they'll do, like, a lunch and learn where they're all put on Wes' courses together in the conference. The the thing well, maybe you're not good at speaking and you don't care about speaking, but somebody else has already done a really awesome talk or tutorial or whatever. Well, you could say, hey, everybody. I have this really great lunch and learn idea. Let's go ahead and do this. Now I think all of these approaches require buy in from the whole team, and I think this is the type thing where you would really want to have your boss the blessings of your boss to say, like, Wes. This is what we're gonna do, and we're maybe gonna make it a regular thing. That way, people can get used to constantly sharing what they're learning and passing along information in that sort of way. In that way, you'll have a stronger development team. In my experience, teams that work more like this, they're more communicative.

They're more like, let's let's let's learn from each other. Like, that's our biggest strength is that we have all these brains, so we might as well use these brains to help the other brains. You know? So for for me, these kind of things really would be a good good solution for something like this.

Yeah. I agree. I love seeing teams or I even seen just friends. Like, a couple times now, I've seen people get together with people in their city, and they rent a conference room or go in somebody's work, has a conference room, and and they all do, like, 3 or 4 or 5 parts of one of my courses, JavaScript 30 or something like that, and they do it all together. And it's really cool because you can pause and talk through it together and and say, like, oh, this is how we might approach that on our team instead. And sometimes you have a more senior developer who already knows what they're doing, and they can talk to the junior ones. So just like Scott everyone has time to create mini talks and things like that. Those are awesome. But if you don't have time to do that, like Scott said, just grab some premade content.

Even just to grabbing a conference talk that's on YouTube and watching it together while you eat your lunch

is an awesome way to to go forward with that. Cool. Well, that's it for this potluck. Now we're gonna get into the part of the show called sick picks warp we pick something that we think is sick.

Man, I got the best sick pick of my I'm gonna say this is the best sick pick of my life besides

precut parchment paper. Oh, I don't even know. This this borders on precut parchment paper. Is this the type of sick that you're going to have where I'm gonna ask you, like, 6 months later, like, hey. Where'd you buy that? And you're like, it was a sick pick, man.

Happens all the time. It does.

But you can't I can't expect you to remember every pic that is sick. I got a bad memory. But here it is.

It is roller blade wheels for your office chair.

Boom.

K. So I I did not know about this until about 2 months ago. Somebody on Twitter was like they saw a picture of my office, and they said, hey.

Watch that laminate with your with your your Herman Miller Aeron chair. It'll cut that up. Yeah. And I was like, oh, he's like he's like, go get like, I'm like, I don't want those stupid little mats that you have to put underneath. He said, get roller blade wheels. So I was like, what? So you can get these, like, really nice wheels with, like, ABAC forties in them. These things these things are fast, and you turn your chair over, you pull your old wheels out, you slap these things in. It's, like, $30 or $20 American for a set. They they have 11 millimeters fit almost every chair, and then 10 millimeter one will fit IKEA chairs. And it makes your chair, like, so much smoother to glide around on.

And I feel like the chair is just more comfortable in general because, like, sometimes you can't get your chair over, like, just an inch if you just need to, like, just shift your weight around. And this just rolls everywhere with you. And and that sounds like a bad thing, but this is like a life changer. I tweeted it out and, like, it had, like, 1200 retweets. And I had, like, hundreds of people being, like, like, a couple of weeks later being, like, this is the best thing ever.

So major upgrade. I always talk to people like, what's the best upgrade you can get in your life for under $100? And this is up there with with one of the best upgrades. So roller blade wheels, you can get them on Amazon, and they fit pretty much any chair.

Yeah. That is very sick. I I have, like, a a rugable rug underneath my desk I'm constantly hitting the edge of. That is a very sick pick. That is one that I will be purchasing, so thank you very much for that. I have, I have a a wealth of sick picks that I've been collecting here. Let me pick a really sick one. Now this one is gonna be sick for any of you who have the 16 inch MacBook Air. So I'm sorry that JS going to be a small segment of this audience, but this pick is sick enough that I will, I will make an exception here. This isn't my greatest sick pick of all time, but this is Node for 16 inch MacBook Pro people that you will find useful. So this is called disable turbo boost. This is an application for the Mac. And so with these new Macs, don't know if you've noticed this, Wes, but the fans come on way sooner. The fans come on very soon, and that's because of turbo boost. Now turbo boost has a whole bunch of different effects. And if you're sitting there, you know, with your computer plugged in and whatever recording, the last thing you want is your microphone to to to pick up some of that that, noise coming off of your fans, or you don't want your fans to be going nuts. So either way, there is a neat little app that allows you to one click to disable turbo boost until you want to turn it back on. And I found this to be just a really, really nice application to have on my computer. I'll put a link in the show Node. But again, if you have a turbo boost Mac, this allows you to control your fans a little bit better in a way that, just as is the way it probably should have been working, but I think Apple's doing it, the fans on, very early for specific reasons.

Does this stop the your processor from working too hard, or does this just turn the fans off? Because I always the people are always like, use this app to turn your fans off. I'm like, well, they're on for a reason, aren't they? Like, it it Node to be cooled. Like, I don't wanna, like, fry this thing.

So okay. So it it did all it does is disable the turbo boost. Your fans will stay on. It doesn't just shut off your fans. It's basically Okay. Let's see. The MacBook runs noticeably cooler and gains 25% in battery life. So this person says it's running cooler and it gains more in battery life. I don't necessarily understand it. All I know is that I click button and my fans cools down a little bit. I click button, button says, okay, Fans cool down, and my recordings sound better.

Beautiful. Yeah. That's that's interesting. I I never ever and always ask me, hey, do is your fans on a lot? And I'm like, I don't know because I have my noise cancelling headphones on all day. Let me hold on. Let me see. Oh, yeah. Mine's, like, a rocket ship right now. Yeah. And that gets picked up in the recording for me, at least. So Oh. Like, when I start to talk and the gate's down I don't know if it's maybe my my microphone's too close to the computer comparatively. Yeah. I think I've I've had it before where it was, and I just when I put it on like, I I have mine off to the side beside my monitor, so that might be the difference of how far it is from the mic. Yeah. Cool. Cool. I'm gonna get that, though. Because, yeah, sometimes mine's mine's just like Yeah. Stop. This is so obnoxious.

Very obnoxious. And, I was happy to find out that I could turn it off. Wow. Maybe those new MacBooks will not be so hot. That'd be good. I'm kinda excited about them now. I know. Right? Who wants a 16 inch MacBook Pro that I just bought?

Oh, Wes didn't we do that? We did an entire episode on the new MacBooks, and I said, you probably should have this thing for 3 or 4 years Yes. To make it worth it. Yes. So now I gotta sit and wait. Sit and wait. Alright. Shameless plugs. What do you got for me?

Shameless plugs. Oh, it's so long since we recorded one of these. I have 2 courses.

I did a course on 3 d in React. We should maybe do an episode on 3 d in React because it's very cool. Yeah. You can work with real three d stuff. I don't know if you've noticed, but three d has been popping up all over the place. Even the new Stripe website has 3 d. So if you wanna learn how they did that and you wanna learn all about how to use 3 d on the Wes, specifically with React, we did this course on React 3 Fiber, which is an incredible library using 3 JS. And the course for this month is going to be advanced animating with framer motion. So, man, a lot of, like, really, really cool courses that I've been working on, that's going to be out. Is it August does August have 31 days in it? If so, August 31st. If not, then whatever the last day of August is. Nice little conditional there. August dot pop.

Yes. August dot pop. Yes.

So, like, negative one. It's it's the last item in August. And so those are the 2 courses that we're doing. Head on over to level up tutorials.com and, check it out. If you sign up for Vercel up Pro, you get all of those courses plus many, many more. Sign up for the year and save 25%. Thank you so much.

I'm going to shamelessly plug my upcoming Gatsby course. It probably won't be up by the time you listen to it. Maybe. It's gonna be at master gatsby.com.

I'm really excited about it because it's it's the first course I've done where we also write all of the CSS.

People always ask me, like, can you please include the CSS? And for a lot of my stuff, it's just been like, well, no. That that would that would add an extra 30 hours to the Yeah. To the course. But for this one, it was actually possible.

And then I made it skippable. For those who don't care about the CSS, you can skip it. It's really cool. We're using Sanity as a headless CMS. We're using, Gatsby, obviously, for the entire website. There's a lot of custom React hooks that we've thrown in there, serverless functions, all that good stuff. So, get ready for that. It's gonna be available at mastergatsby.com, and that's it.

Scott.

Alright. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you on Monday. Monday. Monday. Monday. Monday. Peace.

Peace. Head on over to syntax.fm for a full archive of all of our shows, and don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review if you like this show.