Potluck — New Macs × Podcast Statistics × E-commerce Testing × WordPress × Charging More × Learning Web Dev × More!

Welcome to Syntax. This is, oh, December 23rd. We're recording this in November, but A very merry Christmas to everybody who's listening in right now. Merry Christmas, Scott.

Hey. Sleigh bells. Yeah. All that stuff.

Sleigh bells and all that stuff. We are, having a potluck today. We are sponsored by 2 awesome companies. First 1 is FreshBooks.

Second 1 is Sentry. Talk about the both of them partway through the episode.

But we got a a a bunch of really awesome questions for you today, and we're gonna are gonna rip through them. So, rid Scott, and you wanna start off with the the first question here? Hey. 1st question is from

Rock Talinski.

He says you guys are doing a downtown rid. Job with 3 exclamation points. That is straight up from my dad. So shout out to my dad who, may or may not be listening to this, but he did watch our our 200th episode rid or a 300th episode. And, he he had never heard of Discord, so he was just like, well, I'll just spin the thing on the potluck, and maybe they'll see it. So Thanks, dad, for, being so supportive. My dad said he was gonna try calling as well, but then he got busy. We should have both of our dads on at some time or just, like, let them, And then Yes. You will walk away? You would want that. My dad is a riot. He is very funny. Really? Yes. He he is he's a character in the best all of the best possible ways. He's very funny. Yeah.

Alright. Let's get into some questions here. We got actually re Two questions about computers. Well, I thought we start that off because, I don't know, like, maybe, like, a month or two ago, we got questions about the new Apple Silicon Macs. And I was saying, like, oh, it'll be years before it's out and before we move over, and I was super wrong about that. They came out, like, A month after or 2 months after we had talked about it, it's looking like they're moving pretty quickly. So we thought we we got a question here about them, and we thought we'd sort of tackle them as to re Are they viable machines for web devs? So the question is from Pookie. Hey, guys. Wes, thanks for all your Pookie. Courses. I am a longtime listener, and your rec courses helped me land a new job last month for a sweet raise. Oh, congratulations,

Boogie.

Yesterday, Apple announced their new Macs. They seem pretty sweet, but I was curious is what does this mean for the world of web developers? Will my current apps slowly stop being supported? Well, things like Brew and Node and NPM still work on the new machines. Would it be smart to start learning new programs to prepare for the transition? Love the show. Have a great day. Alright. I thought this was really cool because Apple released them. It seems like a lot of the stuff that we do as creators, rid Video editing, audio, also just like running processes. We we haven't really seen, like, what does Node look like because it's not supported yet, but, rid I'm very, very excited about it. What about you, Scott? Are you looking at these new ones? I'm sort of in the,

same camp I was with rid Other things where it's just, like, wait and see at this point because, like, I just bought a 16 inch MacBook Pro, and it is a beast, and it all the things I needed to do, so I'm not, like, itching for and bubbly. Well, okay. I shouldn't say that. I I would love a new computer. I always love a new computer, but At this particular juncture, I am just, like, not even concerning myself with them. I have, like, the next to 0 research about them beyond the fact that, it go fast, and I'm pretty pretty pretty pumped about that for the future. I have it in my mind. I saw a report about a Mac Pro. Not a Mac Pro Mini, but a, quote, unquote, smaller sized Mac Pro. And I'm thinking that would be really sick to have, Like, just sitting behind my monitor. Right? Something little behind my monitor or even, like, a true audio setup and have it in another, like, rid Cooled the closet or something like that. Cool. Cables.

You know what? I I don't know personally. I'm not interested in any of these other ones, but I would be inter like, if they all really that fast, rid So then maybe Yeah. Getting, like, a production machine and, like, maybe having that be a thing, but who knows? We'll see.

Yeah. I think that these new ones are probably not for us as, like, video and content creators. I bet that they'll come out with, like, They'll take, like, 7 of the chips and throw them in another one. That's amazing. I think that will be the one for us. But for Right. For web developers, they seem pretty attractive. So the question is, do I need to like, what about my software? Is it going to work for web developers, or do I need to pick up new stuff? So the answer is probably not. Ready. Yeah. It looks like most of the software either will already work or will already work in sort of like a VM, or rid. They plan to to to make it work at some point. So, I thought it would be kinda interesting to to go through the list of software that we use as web developers And just give a quick yes, no, or it's coming. And, again, we're we're recording as a month in advance, so a lot of the being worked on might even be re It works already. So there's a couple good websites you can go to is applesiliconready.com, and then there is A GitHub repo called Does It Arm. So Arm is the technology that is underneath the Apple Silicon. Apparently, it's not rid Exactly the same thing, but a lot of the the tech that where it already works with Arm because there's A lot of tablets and phones that are built on Arm that already support the software. So let's the first the sort of the big thing is rid. Is electron based app. So apps that are built in in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, but our desktop apps like Versus Code, rid Notion, Missive.

Discord.

Is Slack Electron based still? Actually, don't know if Discord is, but I think it is. I know it's web based, so it's probably yeah. It's definitely web based. So all of those things, it looks like Elektron has already rolled out a blog post saying re Electron 11 will start to ship a x 64 version of it, so all of these apps should work. The the sorta only got you is when these apps have, like, native dependencies under the hood rid That need to be ported over. I think the next big one is Brew. So Brew is the command line utility that you use to install a lot of the things, And that currently does not work natively.

It does work under Rosetta too. So you can you can run a lot of rid applications under Rosetta 2, and they will run. And it looks like they, again, they they already have a path forward rid to trying to port it over to Apple Silicon, which is pretty cool. And from what I hear, the like, if you're running web dev stuff in Rosetta, rid The speeds are pretty comparable to what it was without Rosetta, as in what it would be on a standard Intel older Mac. Just a regular Intel Mac. Rid So that that's good because then, like, all of the new stuff will hopefully be faster, and then the Rosetta stuff will be just as good as you had it. Chrome And by extension, I'm assuming Brave and IE are already on Apple Silicon. Firefox will be soon. As of recording, it's not. Versus code is Cider's build will run, yes, soon.

ScreenFlow, that's a big one for for me. That's my main recording tool. There's no Rosetta 2 or native. Oh, it doesn't work with Rosetta 2.

No. No. It doesn't even. So, like, those apps that are, like, very heavy on video processing, they use a lot Yep. Under the hood. They already said that they've been working on the, the developer kit all summer.

So it's not like they It got released now. Like, oh, maybe we should update it. I did. They have been working on it. So that's the one I'm really excited for because my biggest pain points rid. With my laptop are slow video export times and bad battery life when you're running node processes.

Rid. I hope I hope that export like, even if it it gets, like, twice as fast, some people are saying, like, rid 5 or 6 times faster video exports, which I have a hard time believing, but, like, man, well, I lay down money quick Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If that happens. Well, just think about all the time lost that you have from your and that's why I think about, like, a production machine. If I had, like, a Mac Pro production machine, you could just tell that go thing to sport, you know, 30 videos and then pop over to your laptop or something. And What else do we have here? Figma. Unsure. It's it's browser based, So I would assume it would work because it's it's all web tech. Right? Yeah. I couldn't find anything online.

Sketch is already re Updated to Apple Silicon, so you get big benefits there. I couldn't find any info on MongoDB.

DaVinci Resolve is fully supported. Wow. Oh, that's good. I would be very curious to see what the exports on DaVidya Resolve look like. Yeah. Me too. How much faster they would be. ITerm2 rid is being worked on. I'm assuming Hyper is Electron, so probably. And those are all the big ones that I'm using. Oh, the other one is Node. Node is does not work. Re NPM and node does not work yet. Same with Rust. I'm assuming it will work eventually, and then they have announced that they will back port some of the I think node 15 will work on this, but they'll they'll back port, like, some of the LTS releases.

That will probably be be an issue rid. Unless oh, that's the other one. It's Docker. Docker does not currently work on it, and that that's a massive one for for web developers because If you need to run any tools in a Docker container, even, like, you wanna run an old version of Node that doesn't work on Apple Silicon, You think, oh, just run it in a VM. Uh-huh. But if the VM doesn't run, then then you're kinda out of luck. So Node and Docker, probably, I would hold off as a web developer For those ones, because those are those are huge ones, and those are, like, a large part of our tooling. Even if you don't like, oh, I don't use Docker directly, rid Probably a lot of the tooling you're using does use Docker under the hood. Yeah.

It for me, I'm I'm in a firmly wait and see mode with With any of this stuff, which is very contrasting to how I am with software when I like, big sir. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Alpha. Let's go on my, you know, livelihood machine.

Go. So for me, it's funny that I I do take a bit reserved approach with this stuff. But then again, I'm not needing a new computer, so I'm kinda checked out of that hunt anyways. But It's fascinating to see the updates, and we'll we'll see exactly what this does to the industry and, if this, shakes it up at all.

Alright. Next question is from Christos Altas.

Hey. Great show. No, really. Great show.

What ready. Is better for working at the home or office, an Imac or a MacBook Pro? Oh.

Yeah. It really depends on some things. Like, if you don't an external monitor. Having that big old Imac screen is really pretty sick. One time, when I worked at one of my first agencies, I was given in a large Imac rid as my, like, dev machine, and I really loved it. I really loved having that thing, but before, I was just used to only working on laptops.

So I don't know. I the big monitor is a big plus if it's your only screen. That said, I am the type to, always have my computer with me or or, you know, wanna, bang out some code or something. So I I prefer a MacBook Pro personally and almost would always have that as my default main machine.

Yeah. I agree. I we get I put this in here because this question I get all the time. Like, why don't you buy a Mac Pro and then also have a laptop? Or why don't you buy an Imac and rid. Also have a laptop or or have a dedicated machine for recording. And then the other one, I'm like, I don't want the overhead of maintaining 2 machines.

Rid. And I 100% need to be able to take my work with me to a coffee shop or on a to a conference or whatever. And I just need everything with And I don't wanna have to fuss with 2 different ones. So, because of that, you I bought the most powerful MacBook Pro that you can get. Yep. And souped it up. It sounds like a Raga ship all the time because I'm pushing it to its limits a lot of the time. I have hooked up to 2 4 k monitors. It running a dock, running all of my, stuff, and it works. It works great. So, I'm a big fan of rid Buy the MacBook Pro and then also invest in desktop stuff. And, it's funny. I was I my battery on me once. I'm a MacBook Pro, and the the LASIK, don't leave it plugged in all the time. I'm like, what? What? The toy?

I'm supposed to have it plugged in. I use it all day. They always have something to say for how you like if it's never the machine's fault or the tech's rid Like, I You're holding it wrong. Yeah. My my power cord literally caught on fire. The power cord rid. Caught on fire. They're like, well, you shouldn't wrap it around the hooks, but the hooks exist for you to wrap it around. Yeah. Why are the cops there? Then they took the hooks off probably because it was happening to a lot of people, but, like, come on, man. My thing just caught on fire. I have some empathy here. I agree with you. And I also ran 2 machines myself once before I had a Hackintosh for a long time.

Always ask, no, I'm wondering, well, I've been there, done that for a very long time. I know all the ins and outs of the Hackintosh ecosystem, and it was a giant pain in the ass to have 2 computers. It it definitely was. Now I I say that as somebody who will jump back in and maybe get a Mac Pro when these things, you know, get into rid The, ARM territory, but we'll we'll see about that. I think all the syncing libraries and everything might make that a little bit easier now with, like, Apple rid Apple syncing all of your everything in Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever. Alright. Next question here is from Liz. Liz says, rid Hi, Scott and Wes. Thanks for all of the content on your podcast. I was wondering 2 things. What are your thoughts on Remix, And, has your listenership gone down since COVID nineteen? I've heard that less people are listening to podcasts now because they can no longer have a commute. Thanks for all that you do. Yeah. You know, I haven't checked the listener stats recently, but definitely in March, we saw a big hit. I think things have rid. Normalized a little bit, but I don't think they're back to where they were because, yeah, most people aren't.

Maybe not most people, but there are a large amount of people who tech people who are now at home. And some people can't listen to podcasts while they code or while they do other things, and I I listen to them in the gym while I'm doing dishes. I've actually have not personally decreased my listenership of podcasts, but I know a lot of people have. Wes, do you have the the stats? Or Yeah. I have them open right now, and it's probably,

like, a 10, 15% drop. Not not as much as I was expecting Because a large portion of the listenership does listen on a commute. Mhmm. Definitely saw, like, a a big drop around April.

Not a huge drop, but it definitely, a drop. Drop. And it rebounded after that. We're still not at all time highs that we were rid Last year around September, but also the other thing is that this this podcast continues to grow listenerships as well. Rid. So that probably has something to do with the fact that we just keep getting more listeners that are are new and finding out about the show. That sort of replaces some of the people that are not rid driving 45 minutes to and from their job every single day. So Yeah. Pleasantly surprised given, that It seems like all podcasts have taken a bit of a a dive lately.

So what you're saying is is that we would have seen a dip, but we're just too popular. Rid Just way too popular. Yeah. Yes.

The other question to see are your thoughts on Remix. So if you haven't heard, re Remix is a new React framework from Michael Johnson. Brian Florence and Michael Jackson.

Jackson. Rid Michael Johnson.

And they're they're the devs behind RackRouter 1 through 49.

And, just Okay. Every time we mention React Router, we we joke around about that. It's a new React framework that is it looks like they are rid. Rivaling Next. Js, not in that they are gonna go toe to toe competing with features and doing the same thing, but they are doing rid sort of approaching it a little bit differently, including the fact that it's it's not open source. You have to pay to get access to it, and they are which is really cool because, like, These guys have spent their lives building and maintaining React Router and a couple other popular projects. Stuff that's probably used by rid Millions of people and haven't seen a dime for it. You know? Yeah. And, also, like, not even that they didn't see a dime, but they, like, get rid from people like Scott and I when they upgrade. I know. Release a new version of React Router. I am firmly on the in the camp of I love all of their updates. React Router is one of those projects that you do no wrong, and I love React Router. So I no. Don't don't get that wrong impression because I really do love all of their In fact, some of the React Router stuff is, like, features that I must have that they've introduced recently. So, like, I don't really know a whole lot about it because rid I haven't paid for it, and we asked Ryan to come on the show. Maybe we should ask him again to sort of explain it. But one of the features that I see Just from the Twittersphere is that it will work entirely just server side, and it you can run it without actually having React rid On the on the client, which is which is pretty nifty. And I think that might be a primary

drive of a lot of it is, letting the server do more. And not just, like, in a server side rendering situation, but like a, like, caching and sending

React components down the line. Yeah. Ready. I'm really excited about it. I don't think that it's it's not going to replace Next. Js in terms of popularity, and I don't think that that's what they're they're aiming for. Rid. They are probably aiming for, like, like a license for a team license is $1,000 per dev per year, which if somebody is building rid A massive application on it that's not really necessarily a big expense for them when they're probably paying 100 of 1,000 of dollars in salaries every single month.

So it's really interesting. I'm I'm kinda excited about this rid approach that they are taking too. A lot of people are saying like, oh, it's paid. It will never take off. But I think that they've thought a lot about it, and, it's gonna be a pretty nifty Nifty little framework.

Yeah. And I don't know if you, we've talked about this before, but I don't know if you ever used ExpressionEngine before. But that was a paid rid CMS framework that did pretty well, and, it was a nice experience to use. And as a a developer, I always was, re You know, happy when our our company got a license for it. So I think there is a a market for this type of thing, and I'm excited to see where it goes because They understand, like many other people understand right now, that the process of server side rendering and then hydrating and all that stuff is way harder than it needs ready. Be, especially if you've done any of it outside of the context of the Next. Js app or something that does it for you. Yeah. One more thing I have here. We need to have a show on

open source sustainability because I was talking to Jed who, works on Keystone, And he's got a lot of thoughts about that as well because, like, he has a consulting business, and then he also has this Keystone JS, which is a big open source project. And I'm just, like, telling them, like, I will pay, I don't know, $200. Like, I always go back to paying for advanced custom fields on WordPress where Yep. Rid I paid I paid the 100 or $200 for the plug in, and I get this amazing gallery plug in that is, like, a custom rid. A really good field that I add to it. I'm I'm keep telling them, like, I'll pay for that for Keystone where you have a sweet gallery. You can drag and drop, reorder at all text crop image, face detection, all of that added to it. I think there's some really neat stuff that could be done with with open source and re Premium plug ins or just going entirely paid like Remix is doing. I think it's an interesting space. Next question from New York Dame. Re What is your approach for testing ecommerce sites? I'm about to launch a client's online store, and I'm sick with worry that a simple plug in upgrade will impact the store And that I won't know about it until a disgruntled customer complains.

Oh, that's this is a good one. Like rid. And this is kind of scary because this is the moneymaker. Right? It's not like, oh, this button got, like, a weird hover color or Something like that. It's like, literally, they're not the money stopped coming in for for the business.

How do you test it? Well, rid. There's sort of, like, a lot of ways you can can go at it, and I recommend as many ways as possible.

I'll tell you I'll tell you what I do currently. Rid. And I'm I'm working on doing, like, automated test for it, but I currently don't. So whenever I even touch a piece of code re That has to do with the checkout or even the CSS of the checkout because I've done it in the past where the My button wasn't visible because I changed the font size of something.

So, usually, what I'll do is you can get test Stripe keys. Rid. You can just run that locally on your machine. You can 424-242.

The credit card is a fake number, and you can get credit cards that will, re Reject. You can get different credit cards that will reject for different reasons, and you can test them all to make sure that both your error handling is working as well as the actual checkout is working and the fulfillment rid on that. And then anytime anything changes in in your code, you can rerun it. And the question here is, like, a plug in upgrade is probably WordPress.

Rid. And the fact that WordPress lets you upgrade plug ins in production is like, it's it's good because, like, a lot of people don't even have a development environment for WordPress, rid. But you should definitely have some sort of development environment where you're just in Stripe Keys. You don't accidentally send emails to customers. You're totally isolated from it. Rid Past that. Like, there's nothing wrong with sometimes, I'll do this. I get emails from people all the time being like, hey. I can't can't buy it. And then I'm like, oh my gosh. Is there something wrong with my rid system, and at the end of the day, there's something wrong with their credit card or or whatever, and they weren't reading the error right. But, I'll just generate a coupon that gives me, like, rid. 99.9% off. It just brings it down to 50¢ or something like that, and I'll use my actual credit card to check it out. And it it does cost me 40 or 50¢, but there's something to say for that peace of mind every now and then. Just double check that it is working in production as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm on Braintree, which has a little bit different of a way. It's the same deal with the test credit cards, and there's a sandbox environment, And we do have automated testing. At the end of the day, I think what this user needs is a local environment to be able to install, rid Test it out. Make sure it's gonna work. And then if you wanna do that YOLO on production after that, then then by all means, go ahead. Rid. But, again, it depends on how how much money is this store making you. Is this your your whole livelihood and you're neglecting these things? Is store making you a ton of money, or is it just, like, rid side income.

And to me, that the the amount of money that the store is making really will change what my testing procedures around this looks like because of this is my entire livelihood and it is a lot of money coming in, then I'm going to make sure I have automated testing in place. I'm gonna make sure I have that local dev environment. I'm gonna make sure I have everything set up to prevent any loss of funds. Oh, and Wes has a, Wes is giving me a Transition into to our sponsor.

His transition is not good. Okay. So let me do a touch up here. This is something better. 1 Wes gave me is, you know what else Handles money.

Okay. Okay. Fine.

But you could have said, let's say, this the site is bringing you in lots of money, and all of a sudden you need to start tracking that money. It's It's the same premise, Wes, but what you've done is you've, like, just you've bridged the gap, but you haven't told a story.

So that's really what you have to do. You have to tell a story. And if you want to, make money on those stories, you can always sell your stories on your ecommerce site And, keep track of that payment with FreshBooks.

Yes. FreshBooks is small business accounting. You do your invoices. You can manage all your clients. You can see who owes you money. You can rid follow-up with them with the robot.

It's awesome. It's it's the best software I've ever used to manage all of your company's Expenses, invoices, all that stuff. And I just wanna tell really quick story. I think I told this on a couple episodes ago, but I'm gonna tell it again. I had, issue with one of the reports rid that I was generating in FreshBooks. And I saw this is this is not working. I clicked the button, and it it didn't work. And so I called them up. 1st ring picked up. Rid He said, oh, man. We can get it. We get that sorted for you. So the guy on the phone manually generated them for me and sent them over an email so I could get them off to my And and that'd be good. And then they went off and logged the bug and and followed it up with their product team. And and 2 days later, I got a email from them saying, hey. Re Thanks so much. This is actually affecting a couple other clients as well. We fixed it, and and here it is. And it was awesome. I didn't have to chase them around. They told me when it was ready. They fixed the issue temporarily for me. So just outstanding customer service at FreshBooks as well. So check it out, freshbooks.comforward/ syntax for a 30 day free trial. And make sure you use syntax in the how did you hear about us section because that will keep them sponsoring on and on. Thanks so much to FreshBooks for sponsoring.

Cool. Next question from Corbin.

Hey, syntax boys.

I'm getting into web development through college And noticing that the intro courses are very hard to get into.

I've been self teaching, so I'm feeling like I'm ahead. Re The intro to computing logic course, basic algorithm teacher, very slowly forces us to use an awful software called Raptor rid to create pseudo programs. I've been asking to actually use a language rather than software, but the teacher doesn't have enough programming knowledge rid to grade actual language assignments.

I feel like this course is a step back from what I already know, and I was just wondering if you have any tips rid I'm getting through the grueling required courses.

Love the podcast. Can't wait to hear more. Okay. So I took a number of classes that I did not care for or that were rid. I took a, get this. I took a web design and development course at the art school of the University of Michigan where they used, Oh, gosh. What was the software? It was Adobe, go live.

I forget what it's called. It was Adobe's version of Dreamweaver before rid. Dreamweaver existed. It was all based on dragging and dropping things onto a grid.

You could do multiple layers, and it never worked. The code, It always worked in their in their little preview browser, but it never worked in any real browser. So it was total garbage, and I Code it everything by hand throughout the whole course because why? Well, because you don't get to have control over the assignments.

I recommend finding some way, any way that you can make your assignments more exciting or interesting for you to keep you engaged because that's really what's gonna come out of this. You're you're gonna get the most out of this if you can use at least some inspiration from what they're doing to drive you forward in some sort of way. So I I think that's an important concept is you you need to keep yourself engaged if the course is not keeping you engaged.

Like, I I had classes that were, like, music history rid that I did really poorly in, but I to get through them, what I would do would be writing computer programs to help me study. You know? I was like, trying to find some way, any way, to make it engaging. So if you're if you're getting bored with the programs that they're having you write or any of that stuff, I still think you can Find some way to make it more interesting to you. Like, what if, for instance, what if instead of just doing the assignment in Raptor, what if you did it in a programming language at first re And then did it in Raptor. I was like, okay. I'm I'm you know, I guess that's double work, but at least you're getting something out of it. I don't know. I would I would, again, ready. Make sure you're getting the lessons that the teacher is actually teaching and not just, like, what you think they're teaching, and pay attention as much as you can and take to rid Take to learn the heart of the, core concepts and fundamentals.

Do the best you possibly can, and it should help you alone.

I just I just looked up what this raptor was, and it's like a flowchart diagramming tool. And I I literally wrote so many flowchart diagramming tools in school, and they were not for programming Per se, they were more business processes and, like, swim lanes and things like that for, like, how you do order fulfillment and whatnot. It it was like it It's it was related to tech, but, again, it had nothing to do with actually writing any code. It's funny because this this raptor, the screenshot is from Windows XP. Ready. So I can just feel how, like, oh, the software must be to to actually use. And I remember when I was doing these, I just remember being like, I have no idea what I'm doing. Like, why am I swim flow charting arrows to everything? I I just remember being like, I have no idea. And rid It was because these teachers think, like, yeah. You gotta focus on the fundamentals. You gotta learn this stuff first before you actually before you actually write any code. And we've talked about this before, and the rid. The reality is that maybe you don't necessarily have to spend your entire day on the fundamentals, and maybe you can jump in and and start trying to write some stuff. It might not be good. It might not be the best stuff ever, but at least you're you're getting your feet wet. So that sucks for you that you have to do that.

And Yeah. Like, the what are the tips for getting through this re grueling required work. Just do them. Like, you don't have to, like, slam dunk them. I got seventies all through university rid Because I was just putting in the work that was needed to get through it. And, like, I look back in hindsight, and when I when I did learn things, I looked back and go, oh, that's what that Swim chart was. That's what the Mhmm. These ideas were. And I did look back and go, oh, I understand now that I know these things.

Rid. I look back at it, and maybe I did learn a thing or two. So definitely put in a little bit of time and and get those done. But, like, what I really want to say here is that re If you wanna get good at programming, it's all about what you do and and how you put in the time. So take this time that you have in school.

Start taking online courses or building a side project or, you're obviously listening to podcasts. That's getting you somewhere as well. Just keep listening to the podcast. Rid. Keep listening to the podcast. Keep building things because when you get out of school, your career and and what job you get is not gonna be based on rid What grade or how many diagrams you built, it's gonna be what can you actually build and and what have you built in the rest. And what are you familiar with in terms of real world technology? So

that's my advice there. You mean to tell me, Wes, that my d in music history rid Did not impact my career overall as a web developer.

Yes. It's I don't know. It's funny. Like, we don't I don't wanna, like, re traditional schooled so much because, like, there's there's a lot of good stuff that can come with that. But we get a lot of these questions where people say, like, Hey.

Like, what you guys who are real web developers are talking about and what they're teaching me in school have almost no overlap. And it's frustrating to see because I don't know. It's it's hard. I I have also gotten emails from people who do teach in schools and are very much up on on how it works.

Word.

Next question from Randy.

So it's been announced that sapper will never hit one point o. Instead, Svelte core functionality is being expanded, And sapper is going to be deprecated. Oh, so the the functionality of sapper is gonna be rolled into what Svelte is. Rid. I know you all don't have any inside info on this, but kind of wondering how Scott feels about this and what he's doing with his sapper site in the nebulous time between the big announcement and the release of the next felt version.

I'll really quickly just say what I say rid. Thinking about this. I love this. I wish that React would do more. I wish that there was more rolled into what React does. Mhmm. There's something about the JavaScript rid. Industry where we have to pick and choose our pieces.

And often, that's why people love Next. Js is that Next. Js doesn't even do Have the stuff you wanted to do because they say go grab external packages for it. But I wish that more JavaScript

frameworks would do More like like they're doing here? Yeah. Yeah. Because when you control more, you control more of the output. Right? I've gotten the the vibe with I I don't know how much I know you've been doing a little bit of Dino. We should do another we should do, like, a Dino Dino episode now. Yeah. I don't know how much you've been Like, glinting and formatting and all that stuff and testing is, like, baked in, which is just, like it's so it's such a relief not to have to, like, Oh, what what library am I gonna use for this? And does it does Mega Lord connect to Omega Star and whatever? Does Omega Star connect The the big brain. I I mean, I honestly all those connections is is, like, where things start to become a problem.

So what am I going to do with my Sapper say, I am not going to do a gosh darn thing with it. Not at least not for right now, because really what they said is that is that rid The SvelteKit, which is what they're going to be calling it, is basically going to have the functionality of Sapper. So it's going to have at least some sort of file based routing system As far as I know, like, if it has file based routing system and maybe some things will be different, I I have no idea. My my sapper site is and markdown files and loading them up inside of a Svelte site. So my my site is really not complex at all. My sapper site, I'm not gonna be doing anything with it until Sveltekit is done and released and out of the way and whatever. I have been familiarizing myself with the technologies.

On the production builds and everything, they're gonna be using roll up. And then on the front end client side, for development, they're gonna be using Snowpack.

Rid Now we had Fred on the show talking about Skypack and Peekapack and some of the projects he was working on, and Snowpack is the sort of Current iteration of all that stuff in Snowpack is is really super cool if you haven't checked it out.

Snowpack dot dev. Rid. One of the coolest things about Snowpack is just how insanely fast it is. They're they're touting, 50 50 millisecond or yes. Rid. Fifty millisecond build times or just outrageous stuff? Because what's happening is they're just loading up a file, and if it needs compilation, and they're compiling that single file rather than your entire project. So build times are just just rid. Effortlessly tiny in in in in short.

I've been running experimentally snowpack on a Level up tutorials branch to try to see if we can have our site. We do a lot of, like, cute things with our repo that are kind of getting in the way, But when I got it working at least a little bit, oh, boy, howdy. It was really cool. So I'm gonna sit and wait a little bit. I'm really, really Excited that they're choosing to do this route with, Roll Up and Snowpack both separately for production or or development bundles. Re I'd like to do something similar for us at some point in the future. But, yeah, I I feel really, really strongly positively about this. I think it's neat.

Okay. So now we have a a bunch of WordPress questions.

We might be able to breeze through some of these because they're a lot of them are pretty similar. WordPress questions. 1st one is from Jesse Woody. I currently we're I'm currently working through a full stack Udemy course, to make the switch away from my day job to a freelance web development. Rid I want to start taking on some easier freelance jobs to make extra money for my portfolio, and I see WordPress As a recommended way to do this, my basic question is, would it be worth undertaking the learning process of picking up some PHP to learn basic WordPress development so that I can start freelancing now, would I be better served learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and waiting to broaden my understanding of these languages before taking on clients?

That's a great question. Like, I was thinking about this the other day. Like, would WordPress still be the best read. Intro to building freelance websites.

Before you you all get angry because you all hate WordPress, re There's some some things to think about. Like, why do freelancers pick WordPress a lot of the times? And it's because it's quick to get up and running. It's super cheap to host. Rid. The plug in ecosystem is massive. The client comes to you and says, hey. I need the website to do this.

Rid. There is almost always a plug in that will do something similar to that, and that's huge because rid. A lot of freelance developers either don't have the time or the skill to build that thing themselves.

Even if you're we're looking at, like Like, yeah, headless CMS.

There's there's not plug ins. Like, Gatsby has plug ins, things like that, but they don't have the whole admin back end UI Plug ins that would be able to do that. And often, the alternative to using a plug in is pay this $8 a month for this service, which is Mhmm. Often not an option. So If you're looking at building a couple $1,000 websites for clients, is it worth learning PHP and picking up some WordPress? I'm gonna say yeah. Why? Because Learning how to like like, how much PHP do you really need to know in order to do WordPress? Not a whole lot. You need to know how to build classes and extend things? No. You ready. You need to know how to, like, make a variable, loop over things, create a function that takes in data and return stuff. And all of the stuff that you learn in in JavaScript rid can also, apply to to WordPress. So if that's the route you wanna go, I think that's a pretty pretty good route. If you want, rid. You could also go the route of just doubling down on JavaScript and becoming more of a, like, a JavaScript rid dev and, like, a freelance where they just people will hire you to build UI kits and components and things like that. And you can get pretty far rid with just JavaScript, but there's still just so much. So, like, I I have a lot of freelance devs friends myself.

Rid. Well, I think I'll I've seen a lot of, like, big businesses. What do you call them? Agencies either closed down that we're doing, like, full time WordPress.

Not all of them. There's there's lots of agencies out there that do big, big WordPress stuff still, but I've seen a lot of them go away. But there still is a lot of rid Freelance WordPress devs that WordPress is their choice. So, yeah, I I would say, like, it's probably don't don't bet on I'm, like, rid. I am always hesitant with this stuff because everybody hates WordPress, and I I always feel like I have to, like, defend it to everybody.

But, like, I still think it is currently, like, I don't I've got my qualms about it, but I think it still is a really good choice for that type of thing. I think you have to,

decide, like, what type of developer you're wanting to be because, you know, if you want to be working at, like, FAANG and doing maybe, like, Engineeringy engineering or computer science stuff or maybe even more advanced user interfaces, then you're probably gonna get more bang for your buck out of Going hard on JavaScript.

But if you just want to build client sites and if you wanna build if you want to build client sites re In, like, an agency world or anything like that, learning PHP and WordPress overall will be, very helpful for you in the long run. It's not gonna be going anywhere anytime soon. So, yeah, I I would say it just all depends on what your goals are there. Next question is from Eric Butler. If I plan to use WordPress as a headless CMS, how do I make sure the WordPress site itself is not publicly accessible? As far as I know, there's no API only mode for WordPress like there is for Rails or Laravel. And if I install WordPress on a server And it's going to be discoverable online. I'd hate to have people in the WordPress API site think it was my website or For my static site to have to compete with my WordPress API for prominence in search engines.

How do I ensure this won't happen? Redirects robots

re Endpoint of the URL.

Correct. Yeah. So either way, having the rest endpoint of your API or use a GraphQL where there's only the one endpoint, Have those be publicly accessible.

And as far as your your WordPress site goes, redirects, like I said, redirects and robots rid to prevent it from being crawled. So robots file, disallow crawlers, and then redirect, especially, the the home page rid to your other actual home page. Yeah. There's

likely a plug in that will do this for you. But if I if it was me, what would I do? I would make a read. WordPress theme called WP Dash Nothing.

I would have an index dot p h p in there because rid. The way WordPress works is that everything will eventually try the index dot PHP if if it doesn't find any other files. And You just type in PHP return.

You return nothing. Blank. And then okay. That's done. There's no front end to your website. And then, just to be doubly safe, just like Scott says, robots dot TXT, disallow star, everything, and and that would be good, I think. One time we had our staging environment competing with the client's actual site because we forgot to do our robots on it anyways. Rid. Oh, you know what? I think the syntax website needs to do that right now because I was I was thinking, like, all these Netlify and Vercel Deployment previews? Oh, deployment. Those are URLs out in the wild. I'm like, does that does that automatically

I wonder if they automatically do that. Cannotically link back?

Rid. Do we need to add, like, a robot stat t x t dependent on environmental variables? Interesting. Probably need to. Yeah.

But, like, I also would assume that Google would put something into their search engine to make sure, like, clearly, it's the same website, and These things keep popping up, and all the links go back to syntax.fm,

but we should probably look into that. Yeah. Yeah. Next question is from Gage. Sorry. I'm gonna rapid fire some of these out here. If I have a Vue. Js website running on WordPress, how could I dynamically insert Vue components into the word or from the WordPress back end? Rid e g, have every post that inserts a Vue JS pull component. I don't want to recompile.

So that This is a a tough one because, what, the the component has to be living in PHP, essentially, if you're inserting rid a chunk of code, and that chunk of code could be written once, and that code is hitting the back end. So probably what would have to happen this is me Spitballing because I've never done this, but you probably have to, what, compile that code down to just straight up JavaScript, insert that JavaScript To be loaded via a WordPress widget or WordPress section or something and then just have some parameters being able to be changed. I don't know how the 2 interact. This sounds like a tough one to me, and I always remember back in the day of working in Drupal, and there was these things called Drupal blocks. And there was this experimental way that you could Turn on PHP in the Drupal blocks, and everyone who is, like, good at Drupal would be like, please just don't do this because you're essentially typing PHP into a Text area on on the site. And I I think about how many times I was like, well, this would be a lot easier if I just copy and pasted this BHB into this text area.

Almost always worked, but it never felt great. So I don't know. This this seems as pretty, pretty sketch to me, but it seems like something you could probably pull off.

Wes, any thoughts here?

Like, you could just dynamically insert it via the, react dom. Render or vuejs red. Dom. Render and then pass in the data via props into into that component. So unless I'm, like, Listening to this or understanding this incorrectly, there's probably something wrong with the way that you're architecting your component if you need to recompile it based on re Different data that needs to be passed in because that's that's the beauty of of the components. Right? One quick thing from the last question. I just looked it up, and both Vercel and Netlify

re We'll send a header called x robots tag, and they will disallow

your rid. Your preview URLs from being indexed by Google, so you don't even have to do anything there. It will automatically happen.

Oh, cool.

Next question from Glenn. My question has to do with WordPress.

I've heard you mentioned previously that you have used WordPress to host sites in the past. Rid I'm keen to learn how you have created your own themes for those sites. Do you write your own PHP, etcetera, or is there another way? I'm ready. Hoping to learn a bit more about developing for WordPress. This is a skill I'd like to have in my back pocket. Love to hear about any resources you'd recommend for this. This is a good question. So, there's there's sort of, like, I don't know, 3 different ways that you could approach this.

There's 1 type of person will go and buy a theme And then just start tweaking it to make it look like they want. So that's pretty popular thing to do. You're like, okay. I wanna make this website. I'll start with something close enough, and And we'll tweak it until it is. Another type of person will buy a theme, and they'll create a child theme, which allows you to overwrite selectively overwrite parts rid of a specific theme, and that's great because if there's a this is, like, this weird thing in WordPress where themes also come with A bunch of functionality, which should be a plug in, but the theme does come with all this functionality. And and the theme needs to be updated to support new things, and rid. And teams have become massive, and just they're they're almost a CMS in themselves.

It's kind of important if you're doing that, then you need to rid. Maintain the code base and then just apply your stuff on top of it. That's a child theme. What I do is just I had, like, a starter theme that I built, but it's all just rid. Totally from scratch. It had, like, your basic loops, your basic nav, your basic footer, all of that stuff in it. Rid. And I would just start from that and then build out the site from there. And I wouldn't update the starter because it it basically just it's rid It's just like a little bit of of of starter code, and it's not something you have to update over time. So, yeah, that that did I write all the PHP myself? Absolutely. I rid I still have a a handful of WordPress websites that I maintain. My own my own wife's website is still in WordPress, and, All of that is just custom written PHP that I've done myself, along with the handful of plug ins for functionality that is needed.

Cool. Yeah. I don't I honestly I have not read in PHP or WordPress in a while, so I'm gonna defer to you on that one.

Think the child themes or having a starter theme is, of course, the way to go. And if you are hacking a theme, you best Have some sort of error in handling and exception, tracking because, well, if you're hacking a theme too much, maybe you have, rid