We Review Resumes, Websites, and Online Presence

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski

and Wes Bos. Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats rid out there. My name is Wes Bos. With me, as always, is mister Scott Talinsky.

And today, we've got an awesome show for you. This is something that we just casually mentioned rid A couple shows ago where we will review, like, resumes or websites or online presence Because, like, we often get these questions from people being like, hey. I'm applying for all these jobs, and, like, it's not working. And sometimes the questions we get are, rid. We can't see why it's not working. And what Scott and I hypothesized was that it's probably something to do with how you come off initially via your resume, your Twitter, rid Or anything. Your your website probably is the biggest one that we'll have today. So we just mentioned that. And then somebody is like, hey. Like, can you actually do that? And we just, like, put a tweet out there, and we got probably at least a 100 submissions. Yeah. A lot of them. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna go through a whole bunch of them today and, So to just give our 2¢, like, or anybody to say anything here, but I feel like I have a pretty good I don't know. What what do you call that, Scott, like, when you're viewing someone's vibe online Vibedar. Vibedar. I got pretty good Vibedar. I think Scott has good Vibedar as well. Anyways, hi, God, how are you doing today?

I'm doing good, man. I had a very productive weekend and, like, not productive in the code sense, which is, like, usually how I spend my My every waking thought is is thinking about my sights or something. No. I, I got away from the screen like a good dad and Just did a ton of house projects with Landon. Landon and I I I recruited him to help me paper shred. I recruited him to help me fix the bed. We were hanging up stuff. We were vacuuming. We're we're cleaning up the Linden's room and organizing, and it was it felt so

Productive. It felt great. Those are the best days where you just, like, feel on it, and you just kinda blow through your Your list of things to do around the house because, like, nobody tells you about getting older that you'll have to spend part of your Saturday shredding paper. All of my Saturday shredding paper.

I just get so annoyed at companies that send me stuff in the mail, and I went on, like, a rid. A rip. A rip. I don't I went on something a couple years ago to be like, every time some piece of mail came in, I, like, called them. I'm like, how can I Stop getting you sending me this paper in the mail? It stresses me out. I don't know what to do with it. Like, email it to me. Ruining the environment. Yes. Ruining the environment. It's unnecessary. And rid. I I went through most of it, but I still get tons of it because of, like, legal requirements as to, like, they have to send you Stuff. And, I know there's services out there that will, like, scan your mail for you, but that doesn't seem safe. There's, like, a

And found in the States. I don't know what it's like in Canada. There's a couple of actual legitimate lists, and you can get yourself on with or, like, actually work with rid The main, like, credit score sites and everything, like credit score companies, and it will literally block you getting any credit card applications or anything.

I have no idea if this is available for anybody outside of the state, but I'll I'll maybe put a couple in the show notes because there were 2 services, one of which cost $5 Forever. Okay. I'll pay $5. The other one was free. So I'll I'll link those up in the show notes, and I I haven't seen the results of it yet. I just did it the other day, but rid. I'm very focused on no more junk mail. Oh, yeah. It's it's not even just junk mail for me. It's from like, the government sends us all these letters about

Accounting and whatnot. And, yeah, the junk mail is is another accounting, taxes. We have, like Oh, accounting. I thought you said they were sending you letters on counting. I was rid Oh. Accounting. Yeah. So they tell us how to count. No. We have, like, a couple business entities just because, like, I used to have a older sole proprietorship, and now we have a new business entity. And I know how it is. Rid Yeah. Lots of stuff. Anyways, we are sponsored by 3 awesome companies. Speaking of getting rid of the, some of your paper, FreshBooks, which is cloud accounting. They don't send me stuff in the mail, thankfully.

Linode, which does cloud hosting and Sentry, does your error reception tracking as well as your performance tracking. Talk about them partway through the episode, but let's get into it, shall we? Let's do it. I just gotta start this off with just some hypothesizing about, like, why is this stuff important? Like, why does impression matter? Like, shouldn't it just be, rid. Like, your skill set at the end of the day, like, what is having a good impression when someone views your online website or whatever, important? Rid. And I honestly think a lot of the stuff comes together to work in your favor when you're hunting for a job. And unfortunately, rid. I see a lot of people who only start to pay attention to the stuff when it comes to looking for a new job, and by then, it's it's usually too late. Rid I think a lot of the stuff that we're gonna talk about today is is stuff that needs to just be curated over time. So, like, what goes into an online presence? What what do you think is the most rein. Important, Scott. Well, I was also gonna add to what you were saying is that one of the biggest things for any company or role is fit, like, not just, like, rid Technical fit, but, like, organizational fit.

But can this person fit in with the culture that rid

exists in this company, and, like, some of these clues that we're gonna be talking about, these first impression stuff do quite a bit for, In general, giving you that that vibe about what somebody's about. The Vibedar. Totally. Totally. The Vibedar. Like, this is something I got a lot when I was teaching at the boot camp. Re We would spend a lot of time talking to people being like, yeah. You have to, like, spend time in your website, but it's probably also a good idea to re Be active on Twitter. Maybe write a couple blog posts every single year. And we got a lot of pushback from that from students being like, I don't rid. Want to be popular online, especially coming from someone like me. People like, oh, yeah, Wes. You're, like, mister popular on Twitter. Like, I don't want to be you. I'm not going to sell a course. I just want to work for a company. And that's frustrating for me because, like, yeah, like, this is not just about, like, being me and selling courses and things like that. Rid. It's not about being popular. It's about the relationships and positioning yourself in a place where you know what you're talking about. And I think sometimes people mix up rid. Having a rock solid network of people that they can count on, people they can help out, other people that can help them with, like, being this, like, quote, unquote, rid. Hated influencer that a lot of people start to see. So this is not about being popular on on Twitter or whatever, but this is just about, like, having a rock solid network so So that when the time comes that you need to go and get a job or reach out for someone or get or get a, like, a referral inside of a company,

Then that type of thing is gonna work huge in your favor. And, also, like, consider that, in particular, that's not something you have to do, But it's something that could make it a lot easier to land a job. Because do you ever see those threads where people are like, I'm so and so. I'm looking for my next role. And if you have, You know, people in your network, they'll share it, retweet it, retweet it, retweet it, and next thing you know, you're gonna have people coming to you. So, like, It's a benefit to you, but it's not necessarily, like, a requirement. Okay? Totally. Yeah. So I was talking,

rid About this to my buddy, Henri Avadaqa, on Instagram the other day, and he said you don't know he said this. I just like I was like, can I share this on podcast? Because this is exactly what I'm trying to say. He says, You don't know how many times I've tried to convince people, especially people of color, to try a lightning talk, to get stuff. This stuff gets you to research, rid And, you might even make discovery. So he's talking here about just doing, like, a 5 minute little talk at a conference or a pub night or something like that. I know it's a step out of the comfort zone for many, and that's cool, but don't get upset when those who got it land some work. Mhmm. I have a ready. Sorry for you. You know, I do lunch and learns at Juno, which is a a boot camp, and I started to end them with a post boot camp life. I tell them what it how important it is to be active on Twitter, Share what you read, what you're working on, listen to others, follow great devs. And then a couple of months later, someone DM me and and said this. I never forget the time you gave a talk at Juno, and one thing that you emphasized was to make your voice known on Twitter. You said this had opened many opportunities for you, And that's been happening to me more and more recently. I never set out to build an account, but the growth indeed has happened alongside with it. Opportunities for people I never Just wanted to share. Hope you're doing well. Smiley face. So I thought that was, like, a perfect example. So, yeah, I didn't set out to be like this person with tons of followers, but I rid. I did follow your advice of just, like, sharing what you're working on and and being part of the conversation, and

there you go. Yep. It, it shows up. I have a question for Anri. If his name is pronounced Anri rather than Henry Yeah. Like, is it Anri el vetica? Like, rid of you. Devetica? That's a good question. Yep. We're gonna need some answers, Henri.

Yeah. We're we'll have to have him on the show.

Rid He talks a lot about perf stuff, and that will give us the then how do you say Helvetica in French?

That's a great idea. That's a great question. Re Elphatica?

Yeah.

I like it.

Yep.

Ready. Alright. So let's let's jump into it. So these are going to be a little bit visual. So if you're by a computer, you can pop open these websites as well. Otherwise, rid. We're going to just try to drive home as to, like, why we think the our vibe to ours is going off. Yeah. So the first one that we were gonna do is from Ash rid

Connolly. His website's a shc0nn0lly.com, and he also linked us to a CV. So we're gonna be talking about both site and his resume.

And so I don't know. How do we wanna start this, Wes? I I wrote some notes here. So, like, from the jump, if you go to Ash's website, For me, the first things that you get, his job title, his name, and he's Ash Connelly. He's a software engineer, and he has A paragraph that says, using React, JavaScript, Next. Js, and Cypress daily, currently at Sky Bed. I love building React applications, front end architecture, component libraries, and design systems. I've been doing this for around 8 years, and I've had the pleasure of working with large clients like the BBC, WWF. That's the World of Wildlife Foundation, by the way, not the wrestling, Microsoft, and further details and skills can be found on my CV. So first and foremost, it's a very strong start for Ash. He tells us very quickly that he's using new in new tech, and he has high end clients.

Even includes their logos, which is a nice touch because for me personally, before I even read that paragraph, I saw the logos. So, you know, the logos to me would just just pop out really quick and easy. We got this question about the logos as to if that's allowed or not. I think I even asked you that question at some point. Yeah. It's probably not allowed, but just do it. Like

like, the WWF is not gonna come sue you for using their logo on your personal they they might, But they probably won't. And, like, you you're not gonna get permission from the WWF to put their logo on Yeah. On your personal website, But just be like, I've I don't know. I've worked with these people in the past. It's totally fine. Throw up a logo, and I highly doubt love or come and say, hey. Take that down. That's that's our panda. Yeah. Totally. So, I mean, at first glance, I think, you know, it's it's very apparent who who Ash is, what he's about, what he does. So clean, simple design, you know, sometimes, like, very simple designs could feel like it's missing something, but I don't think this feels that way. It feels like it's intentionally simple in the way that it is.

Does some really nice subtle animations. I I mean, the animations themselves aren't subtle, but they're they're used sort of subtly. Everything's not whizzing around. It's sort of like rid Sliding doors and opening for different things. So that aspect of it's nice. It it's nice and gentle with the animation. I think it's really nice that, like so they give their little intro paragraph. They give their clients, and then immediately get into their work where it shows, read. Here's a photo, a graphic photo. Here's a title of what the company is, and here's a short paragraph of what it is, and then a link to the site. And there's 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay? It's important that there's 4 here because I would imagine with a client base or or previous work history that Ash has done more than these 4 projects. But these 4 projects are the ones that he wants to show, and I think that's important that it's curated. Right? It it feels like it's curated. And to me, that can often be a thing where people, when they get started, they just wanna throw everything they've ever done because it feels like more is better. Right? But chances are anybody who's hiring anybody is going to look at this thing and say, I know this person's done more than these 4 projects,

So, like, I don't need to see everything. Totally. You just need to be able to, like, do a quick scan and say, alright. This person knows what they're talking about, rid. And especially for the type of job that this guy's probably gonna be applying for, like, it's not just like a like, the same app that Everyone built in a in a boot camp. This is real world. And one thing I really liked about this is that often and I used to do this on my website when I had rid A actual portfolio is I would talk about, like, the problems that were actually solved for the user. And the first one says rid. Experiencing upwards of 300 logins per second, delivering fast, lightweight experience was vital. Carried out multiple performance audits in order to make the site rid. Lightweight as possible. So it's not only like, yeah, we built this thing with this this tech, but, like, we actually had a specific problem, which was this thing gets a ton of traffic. So it's really important to us to make this thing fast as heck. And I think showing the problem and how you solved it is really important. Totally.

And lastly, for the pros here, he has a section of testimonials. Well, he has blog post 1, which is a pro, obviously.

But The testimonials, like, it's kind of interesting. I don't often see that in, like, non product based things. Like, I often see testimonials in product based things, but he has a couple of Yeah. You know, agile and DevOps delivery lead. I'm not gonna say this person's name because I don't know if they've been, you know, approved of that. But, like, So he has a couple of, quote, unquote, testimonials, 2 of them, just a one little paragraph, and it reminds me of on, like, LinkedIn when people say, like, something nice about you. And I think that's pretty cool. I'm I don't know if I'd leave the word testimonials. I don't that's a minor impact. I don't know if anybody really cares about the word testimonials there. Might be like referrals or something like that, but again, it doesn't matter. I don't think that matters. And I had some cons on the site, but they were kind of just nitpicky. One of which was This is going to come off as super nitpicky. The footer has some, like, emphasized text in gold that aren't links, but elsewhere, Text that's emphasized in gold without underlines are links, so just get rid of that, or you don't need it. Yeah. Just make it black. So, Ed, I went to click on it. Yeah. I went to click on it.

And lastly, the HTML is good, but it's not great. It's missing some semantic elements. Like, for instance, your blog posts weren't in articles, so article would indicate that that particular piece of content, rid. Not necessarily as a blog post, but it's like a serial type of content. Right? It's not necessarily the main content. There's no main section. What I found odd is that the only one of your sections that was in a section tag was the testimonials.

So that's the only one. It's minor stuff here, but, again, Pretty much just straight divs up and down the stack and some header tags, but I would take a look at that HTML just a little bit. Now I'm wondering if my own website uses rid Article tags and stuff like that. Let's check it out. For those of you who don't know, I mean, I've been on the other side of the table as an interviewer and an interviewee.

And rid One of the first things I do when I hit anybody's site, like, even Ash's site, before I even scrolled down, I popped open the source because I wanna have at least an understanding of what it looks like under the hood or at least what's being sent to the browser. Nice use of under the hood. I man, I'm not using an article tag. I gotta add that. Good review. Maybe we should have, at the end, Scott reviews Wes' site, and I'll review Scott's site. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

So we we won't spend more and more time on this one, but, he also linked his resume. The resume was in Notion, which I thought was really cool. I like that. Yeah. Very up to date, I guess, like, especially, like, if somebody's using Notion, they go, and it's just just text. There's a couple tables that link through it. Rid. Not too much. There's there's images on it as well, links to writing. So oh, actually, you know what? It's pretty much the website, but in just like a portable format that could obviously be rid Kicked out to PDF. So I thought that was pretty interesting because I've usually, when people send over resume, it's like docx or PDF or something like that. So I thought that was kinda nifty. Yeah. I really like most of Ash's resume, but I have listened beef with a couple of things. One thing he listed in his summary I thought this was kind of weird.

Sorry, Ash. And I'm gonna be critical here, but, you know, people can disagree. The sentence says, articles I've written have been featured on free code camp marvel blog And shared by industry leaders such as Brad Frost and Smashing Magazine.

The articles I've written part is good. The shared by industry leaders part kinda makes me feel weird. Rid Like, I don't know how you feel about that because, like, oh, these people shared my thing. Like, I don't who cares? That's kinda how I feel about that. I understand that that's, like, something to be proud of. Like, When, you know, some of my favorite devs first liked something that I had created, I was, like, super proud of that. But I don't know if that's something that anybody will care about in a Resume context might be nice to, like, screenshot that and just keep it in your own personal,

happiness bank or something. Yeah. And rid Something like that, I wonder like, make sure you ask those people if that's okay.

I in the past, I've done, like, somebody, like, tweets Something that they built at me, and I'm like, oh, really neat, like or sick. Looks awesome. It's not an endorsement. Yeah. They'll take that tweet and, like, yeah, like, Put it in the thing. It was like, recommended by West Boss. And Oh, yeah. That happens more often than you think where people just take my likeness of rid This guy, being online and, like, tried to use it as an endorsing their thing or whatever.

So definitely definitely want to,

Make sure you're not doing that. A couple more things I think that could be useful for other people, he lists CSS and CSS three, HTML and rid 5 under a language. Yeah. It's 2021. Just put CSS. Just put HTML. You know, there's no no distinctions anymore.

Lastly, the work history is a little bananas, because for each one, he lists, like the best one that he has here is the sentence that says carried out performance audit rid site speed improvements. It's 1 sentence. It's short. But, like, the rest of them are several sentences, sometimes paragraphs, And there's, like, way too many of them. So for under each No one's gonna read that. No one's gonna read it. Under each of your work histories, here's my suggestion. 3 or 4 bullet points, rid One sentence for each of your work histories. I don't think anybody needs to see anything more than that, and that's what I've I've always gone off of. So, Ash, thank you for submitting your site and resume. Hopefully, the critical things we said don't hurt too bad, and, We can, all learn from learn from them. Yeah. Overall, awesome. Go check it out. What else should you be checking out, Scott? Well, we should be checking out our books frequently because, who knows, maybe our credit card's been stolen or used for something, or maybe we wanna do some predictive Understanding of where our cash flow is gonna be at next year. So maybe we're gonna wanna check out our accounts using a tool like FreshBooks.

Yes. FreshBooks rid is the cloud accounting software, and I'm not lying to you. While Scott was talking about Ash's website, I just went and paid an invoice rid Using FreshBooks. So somebody sent me over an invoice, like, my wife had forwarded it to me. I clicked on the link, and it opened right up in FreshBooks, and it just says, put your credit card in. So they enabled online payments, and I just it auto filled my credit card rid Perfectly, which not every single form ever does. Yeah. And it paid the the thing right away. And I was like, man, like, it's not all that often that I get ready. Experience FreshBooks on the other side of things. I'm usually doing my own expenses and my own invoicing and sending them out to clients. But I was on the other side of this where someone rid. Sent me an invoice, and it was using FreshBooks, and I got to pay it. And it was a joy. They FreshBooks' big thing is they say just get paid faster.

That's very true. If that was any harder, like, I had to log in or or get an account or, have, like, a a number texted to me, then I wouldn't have done it while Scott was talking. Re But I literally just autofilled, hit submit, and the thing was paid. It's awesome. So if you got a small business, check it out, freshbooks.comforward/ syntax, And make sure you enter syntax in the how did you hear about us section. Thanks so much to FreshBooks for sponsoring. Sick. Next one we have here is maddy.dev, m ready. E t t y dot dev. So this one was interesting. So he says, I'm not into UI.

I'm more of a back end developer, rid And let me know what you think. So I thought, okay. This would be kind of a cool one because not everybody is a graphic designer or can afford to pay somebody to re Design an amazing thing out there. And sometimes when people are not designers, then they just go for the, like, They either try to do it themselves, which it can look good, but also can look bad, or you go get, like, a really common template Yeah. Which Yeah. I can tell right away, especially somebody that's looking at a A 100 resume. So maddy.dev, Matthew Bidwell sent this one, and I thought this was really, really, awesome because it's it's very, very simple, But it gets the point across. So Can I jump in for one second? Yeah.

I'm gonna say this, Matty. Outside of the line height here, I would, you know, obviously bump up the line height just, You know, maybe, like, 1.5 or whatever it needs to be. But outside of the line height, this side looks great. I would oh, you know, I mean, it's it's simple. It looks I mean, it's just a basic mono Whatever. It looks good. I mean, it's very simple, but it doesn't look bad. No. No. I think that that's a bit of a win there. So it's it's using a custom font, rid Which is really cool. It's a really good domain name, matty.dev.

And when you visit it, right away, it tells you who you are. And I always like that about people's websites Because sometimes you go to a website, and then you get this, like, 8 paragraphs of I'm passionate about x, y, and z, and it's just, like, too much. So rid. You land on it. It says, I'm a software engineer with 6 plus experience in creating well crafted SaaS solutions using AWS. So In one sentence, who are you? What do you do? What kind of stuff do you work on, and how long have you been doing it? All those questions have been answered to me in 1 sentence instead of, like, rid. Eight sentences. Right? Like, that's a really good thing about copywriting is you take what you wanna get across, and then you distill it down and down and down. I do that with my course websites all the time. I just right and right and right. And then you figure out how do I get this across in as few words as possible.

It goes on to say I'm Part of a team over at a million ads where I help build highly scalable, low latency services, b emoji. When I'm not programming, my rid. Distractions include a drone cinematography, cybersecurity, and browsing record stores. You can find me on Twitter. Scrutinize my code up on GitHub in touch via LinkedIn. And then there is a link to a couple blog posts. So this is amazing. It's not even half of my screen.

And he got across everything I wanna know. Where can I find you on Twitter? Where can I find your code? If I am the type of person who peruses LinkedIn, rid. I can find that. And then I think most important is a blog post. So, like, I don't know anything about this guy, but just by looking at the the landing page here, rid. The fact that there is 2 blog posts about Rust, I think this guy is probably pretty smart. And I don't even know. I haven't even read the blog post. You made a blog post about Rust? Rid You smart. Yeah. Probably pretty smart. It's like but to me, it it shows that somebody that cares enough to write a little blog post about rid A specific topic that they ran into shows me, like, I would probably wanna hire somebody like that because they they care enough about how to do Here we go. I'll look into how Rust handles referencing variables as they change scope. Someone who cares enough about variables changing ready. Scope to write a blog post about it probably cares enough about the code they're gonna be writing for your company. Totally. That's a good assessment. Yeah. That's all I have on that one. That's it. Cool. It's just a half a page, but I thought it looked pretty slick. Yeah. Sorry. We're gonna be doing these at maybe, like, different amounts and different levels of Scrutiny or whatever. So I think the the end result of this is for everyone to get some some takeaways here of, like, You know where these things are, but, like, also, like, little little tidbits

of things that you can take away for your own work. So next 1 is gonna be from Lea Lundqvist, And I wonder if Lea is related to Henrik Lundqvist.

That'd be pretty cool. Her website's at lea.link, which is a pretty neat URL.

It's nice. It's a a nice short URL, and her site is really, really cool. When you click on it, there's sort of like a gradient, rid Like a multi corner gradient that's changing very subtly, reminding me of LED lights behind a diffuse something. So it it's got that look to it. It's really nice, and the animation that's happening isn't too crazy. It just says leah l, and it animates in a neat sort of way. When you click on it, that's all it does, And it links to GitHub, Twitter, Discord, which does a neat little if you hover over the the Discord link, it does this really cool animation. Rid Took a fade in that shows the Discord number. It says, hello there. My name is Leah Lundquist. I make websites usually in React. Sometimes I write rid Servers for those sites often in Node. Js. Oh, and on occasion, I poke at iOS apps and Swift UI too.

And This is the whole site. Links to GitHub, Twitter, Discord.

Now if you go to her Twitter, you see she's very active on Twitter. In fact, that's how most the things that I've learned about her work have been is via Twitter. Right? Discord, it could be help for getting in touch, but I don't I mean, you know, that's rid Kind of not necessarily anything that the job person would look at. The GitHub link is probably the most useful of these 3 links because she has a really nice, Whatever that GitHub the new GitHub bio landing is, it it's a really nice one. Oh, I need to get one of those. Yeah. It's really nice. It talks a little bit about, You know what she does and how how you can reach her, and then it has 6 pinned tweets. So her GitHub page right off the bat is, like, nice, But I'm gonna say that Pinned repos, not pinned tweets. Yes. That's what I'm saying. Did I say tweets? Yeah.

That's okay.

Yeah. So pinned repos. And so rid Right off the bat, like, those aspects of this, you know, online presence are very good.

So the good lead paragraph, good aesthetics, the site looks nice, The GitHub, but I think she's making us do too much work off the bat. Like, yes, I'm going to click through to your GitHub, but I kinda wanna see rid Some bit of something other than that without me having to click through your GitHub. For instance, here's a small little bit. I know via Twitter that Lea has released this iOS app That's really nice. It's like a a minimalist 2 f a app, and I saw that on Twitter.

But I don't see that anywhere else. I think that's the only place I can find it. And if that wasn't a a recent tweet, I wouldn't even have known that existed at all. But it looks nice, and it's a project that you can use to show off. So I think there needs to be some sort of way on her personal site or in some sort of capacity to say, here are some cool projects that I've worked on. We don't have her resume in front of us, so maybe that's something she would include in the CV. But right now, she's making us hunt a lot for the work that she's actually done. Because Beyond that, I I'm not gonna hunt any further to find any more things because I don't I don't wanna take that time. So you need to make a little bit easier on people, especially if you're sending them to your site even if it's just 1 page with a bulleted list of here are some projects and here are some links. That's all I do on my site, and, like, really, that would be better than having

nothing. Right? Yeah. I just clicked through to her Twitter, and this is the 1st time I'm seeing it. And the rid Twitter comes off super well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think, like, that that's another part to think about, especially, like, at least in our industry. Twitter seems to be the, like, re De facto, that's where you link people to, like, at the the end of a conference talk or a blog post or something like that. Usually, people will link off rid to their Twitter, which is really cool. And the pinned tweet on her Twitter right now is an ARKit demo of rid what a magazine could look like in augmented reality. And it's just like a this amazing so cool. Yeah.

Mind blowing thing. And, like like, that rid. Reminds me of when I would do the webcam demos, like, 8 years ago, and people be like, woah, it's unreal. You can put glasses over top of video. Rid. And, like, that's the kind of stuff that got people interested in in hiring, hiring me, and I know that for sure That's the kind of thing that gets people hiring if they're looking at a Twitter. So it's it's it's really, really interesting to see that kind of stuff, and then you you you scroll down as well. Rid. My favorite thing when you are going through somebody's Twitter is, like, a good balance, and this is just my own something. It might a good balance of, like, personal life interests as well as, like, tech interests. And If you just do a quick little scroll through hers, you see lots of coding stuff, lots of tech stuff.

So, yeah, right there. I think, like, On the flip side, this is not necessarily the person we're talking about here. But sometimes when I I think about following someone, you scroll through their rid Their Twitter and just look at the, like, the latest 10 tweets. And if, like, 90% of them are complaining about, like, an airline or rid Sometimes tech people don't use their Twitter for mostly tech. It's, like, 1% tech, and the rest is just whatever else Twitter is used for. Yeah. And that's rid That's not bad that you do whatever you want, but I personally don't like following people like that. So I think that this one this one comes off real good. Yeah. One time, Les, I could not get ahold of the Ford Motor Company in any way whatsoever.

This is, like, 2011. I tweeted some photos of, like, the state that Ford left my car in after Oh, you told the story. Yeah. Yeah. Having to replace the engine and all that stuff. Yeah. They they actually got me a new car because of it. So rid They got a new car. They got a new car because of Twitter. And I'm not to say that, like, that's unfortunately the best way to get Yeah. Like, notice of a lot of companies Totally. Is rid To start to try to shame them online.

I'm more talking about people who just use their Twitter as, like, a constant complaint Yes. Stack or they're just, like, use it to, like, do infighting on especially, like, at least in my city that, like, the local politics scene. When I first moved here, I started following a bunch of restaurants and a bunch of locals who are really involved and everything like that. And then I it just turned into this very toxic, like, People trying to dunk on each other with these, like, quote, tweets and stuff like that. I was like, no. No. No. That's that's not the kind of thing I'm into, so unfortunately, I had to unfollow all those. Yeah. I hear you. Next one we have here is from Ismail Galu, which, by the way, I was like, I don't know how to pronounce this guy's name. And I clicked rid through to his LinkedIn. And I didn't even know this, but LinkedIn allows you to put a little pronunciation audio thing right beside someone's name so you know how to say their name. What? Isn't that cool? That is cool. That's such a helpful little feature. Rid Like, as if you want like, if you've got a call with somebody or whatever, you could just quickly jump on and and see how to pronounce someone's name so you Or you just you just also ask them how to pronounce their name, but it's helpful to have that ahead of time. I still love that when we contacted Pavel Gershbeck.

I messaged him and asked him, like, how how do we pronounce your last name? And he sent me an audio clip of him saying it, and I was like, this is the best.

Oh, that's awesome. So the website here is smakosh.

How how would you say that? Smackosh? Smosh?

Don't do this to me.

Smackish.

Smackish .com.

And I sent this one to to Scott, and I said, I think this is one of the best ones. And Scott says, I'm not sure. And then I said, alright, let's rid. Save it and save it for the podcast. So you'll you'll land on the website and clear explanation off the bat. I'm rid Ismael Gallo, also known as Smackoosh, a self taught full stack dev, a graphic and UX designer.

I help founders add value to society by crafting software rid. With JavaScript tools. I love open source and building side projects. So very clearly who he is, what he does right off the bat. There's a listing of skills,

Which is okay. I don't I don't necessarily It's a thumbs down for me on the skills list. Yeah?

Why don't you like it when people list their skills? Like, don't they have to? Yeah. Because okay. So

I think it could be done in a better way. This is a lot of space Being taken up for 3 generic icons and a link to see the tech tools I use. I think all of these skills part Could be part of this first initial paragraph. Yeah. And maybe even not part of the first initial paragraph. If you wanted to, like, have it be like a Subheading, it could just be, like, full stack development, hyphen,

UI and UX development, hyphen, graphic design. Like, that's all that's needed. It does say that in the opening line, so maybe it's not necessary. And I think I know why feels too much. Is because if you scroll down to there's there's some more things. Featured work, Shared on Behance, shared on Drivel, my open source work, and my articles and testimonials. So This guy's got a very impressive list of design work, development work, sharing stuff on all these different design social networks, sharing on GitHub.

And I'm I was quite honestly pretty surprised and impressed at at all the work that was on this page. I think this is why rid I like it because, like, proof is in the pudding at the end of the day. And when I hit these, like, skills, like, buttons, I'm not sure if if you design these or if these are just, like, the ones that you buy as part of, like, a pack, it feels like these are something that you you see these a lot. I think that's probably why you don't like it. Is this just like a standard rid. I do this. Here's an icon for the thing I do. I do this. Here's an icon for the thing I do. You know? Does that make sense? Yeah. But, also, like, why is UX in UI design and then also graphic design.

Like, I think you only need 1 of those one of the 2 of those, but, like, I think it's just a lot of rid. Unnecessary space being taken up for what could just be, illustrated in a subheading. Yeah. And, like, if this was adding something majorly visually for me, like, then I would say Keep it. But, like, it doesn't add anything visually that's impressive or anything. It's just, like, taking up space is the way I see it. Rid. Totally. It also makes it feel a little bit more like a template.

Yes. That I think that that's what it is. It it feels like a template, rid. And then you you scroll down and see the side projects that is created. The dribble, you can click through the dribble. I I usually really like that when rid. Yeah. Somebody links off to their Dribbble or their GitHub or, something else that's on, like, a a social network because it's like, alright. I can actually rid See that you are very involved in what it is that you're doing. The dribble alone is enough of a resume to say, alright, Sky knows how to do design. And you scroll down, you see links to a bunch of JavaScript.

They're primarily Gatsby repos here, which is really cool. And then articles, so, care enough to not only design the stuff and contribute to the open source, but also write blog post about it. And then there is talks, which rid. I personally think that's one of the best ways to, elevate yourself amongst other people is write rid talks and give them, especially right now as all these conferences are online.

If you're in a position where you can't necessarily take time off or travel, Right now, you can do these online conferences, and that really, really helps. And then there's some testimonials from,

like, Guillermo, from Vercel. That's Like a a 5 star gold testimonial right there. Here's a No kidding. Here's a testimonial from, Guillermo that says, rid One of the best Jamstack engineers I know. We know what? Just take that. What more do you want? Put it on the header of your site.

So I thought that this was Probably one of the best, like, deliveries because I scrolled through this website in about a minute, and I had a very good idea as to skill set rid As well as, like, proof is in the pudding in terms of, like, this person is not just, like, writing. I know how to do JavaScript, but they're showing me that they can Because of all of the examples and blog posts and talks and stuff like that that they've given. Yeah. I I like all of those aspects. The aspects I don't like are almost always,

like, exclusively visual, like, the things that make it feel like a template. You know, like the services section. You don't need the services section. It's just a repeat of the skill section, which is kind of unnecessary anyways. You're like, who who's that for, I guess? But, yeah, for the most part, I a 100% agree with you. There's some neat little, neat little animations and nice little touches here. The dark mode, I think, could use some love, but that's Just visually visually thing. The site looks better in light mode, but when you go to dark mode, there's some issues. Oh, man. But having having dark mode, rid. That just shows you're up on it. You know? Yeah. And I still stand on the ground of, if you really wanna impress people, put a little theme switcher in there, give you some themes. You don't have to have too many themes. Throw a little bit of Stripe mode, Stripe mode, nineties mode, whatever you want.

I I that that to me would, like like, a dark mode today would not make me Say, wow, it'd make me sick. Okay. They got a dark mode. But, like, having a theme mode, make me say, oh, wow. Okay. Cool. Somebody's thinking, You know what else? If you were really wanting to to get your site hosted and, on a nice host, where would you host it If you wanted to host your site on a nice host I would probably choose Linode, which is one of our sponsors today.

Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve a simple, affordable, and accessible cloud hosting solutions that allow you to take your projects to the next level. Hey. I know what I'm talking about next levels. That's what I do. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and Skill your modern applications faster and easier.

Get started on Linode today with a $100 free credit for listeners of syntax.

So you just need to head on over to type in your browser. Oh, fire up that browser. Don't go under the hood. Just head to the URL bar. Type in linode.comforward/syntax, and, you're gonna get a $100 free credit. That's a 100 buckaroos.

Rid Linode has 11 global data centers that provides 247, 365 human support with no tiers and handoffs regardless of your plan size.

In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 credit on s three compatible object storage, manage Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.comforward/

syntax and create the create a free account button to get started. Thank you for Linode for sponsoring Syntax. One thing I'll mention as we're in between here is I'm just going through the DMs. Well, a bunch of people sent me their CVs and whatnot, and they wanted us to remain anonymous.

And one sort of thing I'm noticing in this is that the people have to write me a couple sentences about who they are and and what's kind of stuff they do, and then they often, like, say, sorry. It's not good at x, y, and z. And I'm automatically thinking, like, if it's not clear about who you are and what you do. From me clicking on your website right away, you shouldn't have to, like, write that in a DM to me Because that should be available to literally everybody. And then also, like, I don't know if this is just because people are nervous to submit it, but there's, like, often, like, a little apology of, like, sorry. It's Not perfect on this little bit, or they sort of, like, say, yeah. I'm not super happy with it. You know you know how people, when they present something, rid. They sort of like oh, what's the word for that? They preface it. They preface it with, like, sorry about this, or it's not the best ever or whatever. And it's like, stop. Stop doing that. Like, be proud of your stuff. If there literally is something you're not happy with, then fix that because this is your this is your resume, and this is your online persona and whatnot. Preach. Re Bridge.

This other one we got sent to is jay.dev, jay thompkins.

Rid. Have you seen this one, Scott? I have. I'm looking at it right now. There's sound on it. I immediately went to it, and there's a little bear. And as you move your mouse, the glare on the bear's sunglasses moves.

And then when you need you hover over the bear, it tilts its head. And, immediately, I was like, that's whimsy. That's whimsy right there. And then I went to his Twitter profile and whimsy's in the Twitter profile. So obviously doing a great job there at like he says, rid. I'm about whimsy.

But before I even saw his Twitter profile, I said, oh, this is whimsy. Right? So, like, doing a good job at, like, getting across What it is that he's all about, their sound when you click on the the nav, which I need to add that to my website. That's so nice.

Rid. And then it's just, like like, very clean design writing links to different, like, hundreds of blog posts that he's written. Obviously, this guy is re Content creator stuff looks awesome, but just does, like, a really good job at, having a nice clean design and getting across All the stuff with a bunch of, like, little fun little nuggets and whatnot because, like, that's the kind of thing that somebody is gonna be visiting a 100 websites.

And when the bear re Turns rainbow when you hover over it, they're gonna remember that and be like,

oh, alright. See, I disagree about the bear rainbow, and this is one of my critiques with this site.

You know about Party Corgi? Yes. Party Corgi? Yeah. Party Corgi is a, you know, prominent community, and they do that exact Same thing. It's a Corgi. Hover over it, and it does that same rainbow effect. So for me, when I see this, and I I'm thinking, is this is this person taking on, like, an identity, Like a party corgi, I'd like, I am part of like, I don't know if this person is a part of that. But to me, it automatically says, like, this it's not a unique identity. It's like, rid This is some other identity that I'm applying to my own bear. That's the way I see it, but I know you might not see it that way. And, again, this is rid part of the conversation.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's true. It it's like it's good to hear it from, like, multiple people. And, like, it's also probably worth putting it in front of somebody who rid is actually hiring people on a regular basis to see what type of thing they think, but I just I I like it. Rid. I don't know. And then I'm that's cool. I've maybe it's because I'm not super up to speed with what party corgi is, but I think rainbows is a pretty safe thing To the to do on the Internet.

I don't have beef with the rain the No. Being the rainbow. What I have beef is it being the exact same thing. Oh, I see. Heather does Is what I'm saying. It's a corgi. It's a it's a cute animal. It's a you hover over it. The interior of it animates the exact same way. I see. It it feels unoriginal.

My beef isn't that it exists because I think it's dope. I just you know, I'm slightly concerned about if it's original or not. You know what I really like about this site? He has really good use of rid Both CSS animation as well as SVG animation. For instance, he has a little j rights, and there's a piece of paper doing a rid Kind of neat three d isomorphic type of thing, and it's all in CSS. And you know what? That's fantastic. It's fantastic that it's in CSS because you get a good vibe that based on his projects and his demos that he's into, like, whimsy CSS things. And so to include something in the site itself rid. Outside of the context of, like, here is just some goofy, you know, three d thing I did in CSS just for fun. This is, like, actually a design element in the page. To me, I do dig that. I'm on Safari, so, you know, who knows what the the world is gonna look like outside of Safari? There's some weird clipping going on in some of the demos, rid. So maybe give that a look on Safari.

Some other, maybe, aesthetic things I have with the site. The typography feels off to me. Does it feel off to you? Rid No. Feels a little cramped to me, especially the line height and maybe some of the margins on the headers.

I mean, I'm not a typography master. He He also has these little, like, drag bars. How do you feel about these drag bars? So he has, like, a testimonial and then, like, a slider. And you pull the slider. It's like an HTML Slide element or, HTML. Which page is this on? The home page. Where is the slider bar? Right. I know. You might have overlooked them Because they're not obvious what they do or why they're there. It's under testimonials.

Do you see the header? Oh, yeah. Oh, man.

Yeah. So there's there's a UI where you I just thought that was, like, a horizontal ruler with a dot on the end. Right. Exactly. But When you slide it, there's no way that, like, a hiring manager would see that thing and know to change the content.

It's neat, but it has to be either more obvious, more of a design element, more connected. Also, for the fact that it's, like, just directly above the header of them rid. Feels weird to me. I would expect it to be below it maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Rather than, top of it, maybe more emphasis, maybe some indication that you you should be clicking and dragging maybe. I know people hate auto carousels and stuff like that, but after some amount of time in, if nobody knows that there's this design element to move these things, you gotta show them that it can do something. Totally. I agree. Rid Man, that sound is super satisfying, though. Yeah. Now we can change the pages. Who was it that we had on that did the sound initially? I don't remember.

Josh Komu. Oh, yeah, Josh. His website has sound on it Yeah. Which is joshwkomu.com.

I'm I'm gonna add sound to my website. I just think that is so so satisfying.

Just, like, not, like, obviously, very obnoxious sound, but nice little rid Pops and clicks so that when you do something, you know that something happened. Yeah. And if you're using Gatsby or Next or any of these things, you can hook into rid The router events and just, like, start play them on route begin and and route finish. Yeah. Totally. One thing I will rid Say about a lot of these resumes that I've got in is a lot of people still using text align justify. That makes your text, like, even on both sides. I find that Really hard to read. That was big with, like, newspapers.

Right? Yes. I don't like it either. It doesn't ever look good on the web. Yeah. Alright. For the last couple,

I just sprung this on Scott, and we're into it. We're gonna be brutally honest about each other's websites.

Re Well, which is good because I don't care about my web. We'll say okay. Good. So I spent a lot of time on mine. So, that's fine, though. I and very much open to feedback. And also sometimes I don't care. So why don't you start off rid And let me know what you think about my website, both good and bad. We already established I'm not using article tag on my blog post, so that's wrong.

So Wes isn't using article tag. It's a big knock for me. I'm gonna go 2 thumbs down for no article tag.

What what is that what's his name? Doug Demiro.

The doors don't open here, so he gets a 1 point off for that and 5 points for this because the the car is very nice to drive, but, of course,

rid. Oh, man. This reminds me when I taught the boot camp, we had somebody who was like, I forget what their test status was, but the basically, they were, like, really good at making websites. Probably a web developer. But they they were, like like, ahead of an agency or something like that. And rid. He said, alright. I'm gonna do a website review. Does anyone have a website that I can review? And one of the students yelled out a website rid that I had built, like, 2 months earlier, but they didn't know that I had built it. So I had to sit through this, like, hour long thing of them, like tearing apart, the entire website, which was hilarious because, like, half of it was like, well, you have no clue, like, why we did it That way are what the constraints were or what we're hoping to get done here. But as an outsider, it's interesting to hear it. Alright. Give it to me. Constraints.

Okay.

Rid So first and foremost, inspecting the source. It is super minified except for a bunch of CSS, so the source is kinda useless. Rid. Yeah. You know, actually, I have a step in my build process that because Gatsby minifies your stuff or not Gatsby. It's,

JSX wrecked. React dom minimise it by default.

And I had wrote a step that

prettifies it. And I had to take it out because it's Just like adding, like, 5 minutes to my build step. But I agree. I hate it when you can't view source. Yeah. I like to see it. Yeah. Rid. But aesthetically, I think it's it's no surprise that your site looks very buttoned up. Like you said, you spend a lot of time on it, and it's apparent. One thing that I Oh, oh, the, big monitor thing is really cute. When you stretch the browser really wide, it comes up with some text saying you have a big monitor, Which is fun, and it would make me smile and laugh. It's whimsy. It's whimsy.

I like the aesthetic overall. The Hover animation is is very, like, pleasing. It's not distract it's it's the right kind of animation. With animation, you can sometimes get rid Over, you can make it too obnoxious. You can make it too over the top. This, to me, is very, like, subtlety. It's just like a grunge pattern that changes when you hover. It has some squares.

It's nice. One thing I don't like about your nav here's here's something I don't like about your nav.

And it's hard to say this because it it is the it's the link to the Syntax podcast has no indication that it's going to take you off-site. Other people have said this. Would kind of be difficult to do. But in the same regard, if it's in the main nav and it's taking you off-site, I kinda like some sort of indicator to let me know that Mhmm. It's gonna be opening up a new tab. But it yeah. Do? Like, maybe, like, like, a little arrow in one of the corners when you hover? Yeah. Yeah. That was that's a good idea. I like it. Yeah. Obviously, I think anytime you're you're adding this, like, little animation sprinkle when you hover over things, I think it's a good look. The site doesn't look like anything else I've seen before, So I really like that aspect of it. It doesn't feel like it's trendy, which is a big thing. So many of those ones you're seeing, you can tell exactly whose website they saw before they started making theirs. The text is is fairly easy to read. Some of it gets lost for me, but I'm looking at it from kind of far away.

One thing that I do have a little bit of beef with on the header is this, like, The background image you have of you is is a good image, and it feels really nice. But when your browser is wider, not, like, very wide, but, like, wider, rid The image stops, and then it's white, and then it's black. It's like you got a double border here. If it were me, I would have that image Stretch all the way.

Oh, I see. Like, I think I tried that, but It looked weird. Yeah. Because people have, like, Five k monitors, and then all you would see is

my, like, arm. But what if you did, like you pinned the top center To be the, like, the pinpoint.

So you did, like, a background size and had the background size position be, like, in the center middle top.

Your custom scroll bar custom scroll bars can be obnoxious. Sometimes, they can feel out of place, or they can feel like extra padding. But to me, it feels nice and part of the site. I really hate it when people don't have custom scroll bars on a black website

because then it looks like it's just this, like, white track.

And I don't know if this is just like a Firefox thing or not, but I see it a lot lately. I'm just like, ugh. So you're you're gonna be giving me a thumbs down on my site for that. I got a black site rid And, no, no scroll bar. But for the most part, I think the the biggest things about your site that are are most impressive, courses, free and premium, about me, read. Blog, tips, speaking, uses, contact.

Like, these are all the things that I would ever want to see out of you. You tell us exactly what you're gonna do. Hey, I'm Wes. I'm here to help you become a really good developer. Like, it tells you exactly who you are, what you've done, who is your daddy, and what does he do? All that stuff. And it's so easy to to find anything that you've done. But then when you do find the things that you've done, like the tips page, and you have that neat little cross out on the pagination, rid. Like, the site's a delight. I'm West, the site's a delight. And it's obvious that you spent a lot of time on it. I really enjoy it. But I think, more importantly, it ready. Makes you come across as very impressive, and I think it does an an effortless job at that. So, good job. Oh, good. Thanks. Yeah. I think it's funny you say, like, that's the

rid. Kind of vibe because, like, the type of person that's visiting my website is not, like, a hiring manager. It's it's other developers.

So whenever I, like, make whether it's rid course website or whatever. I'm like, I need to kind of flex for these devs because if there's, like, 1 or 2 little things on the website, like the hover animation is stepped, which I didn't even know was a thing. Then it's just like, ah, like that. That triggers something in your head. It's the same thing with the sound rid. On these other websites we were just talking about, like, that makes something stand out to me. And if you your audience is honestly, even if it's not other developers, little things like that, People browse the web every single day. And when there's something neat that pops out,

then that sticks in their head. Yeah. Rid I do wanna stress that my site is used as a playground for me. So Okay. I do wanna stress that. Okay. Not as,

Yeah. It's it's different. Rid. Totally different use cases for us. So let's take a look. Scotttalinski.com.

I see you use the www by default, And it redirects there. Is there any reason why you do that? I've there's some some drama around that lately, I think. Yeah. So at some point, I learned rid That Apex domains have some really interesting,

like, special cases that, like, make DNS to be a giant pain. Rid. So ever since then, I always default to www regardless of the situation.

It doesn't matter in my eyes because now the browser doesn't even show it. So no matter what you do, like, Safari doesn't show www, just the Scott Tolinski Oh, you're right. Even though we get that redirect.

So, like, to avoid any DNS headaches or if I need to do for instance, I think there is, like, something with redirects in Apex domains and SSL certificates rid That can get you into some really hot water. So to avoid any of that, I just went straight w w. Just,

Awesome. Alright. What else do we got here? So you visited the website. Rid. So Scott Talinsky, you have a link to your honeypot documentary, which is awesome.

That's, like, the best way to, like if you've got time, Here's exactly what I'm about, and it it just gives it across. They asked me to do 1, and I was like, yeah. Yeah. I'll do it in a bit. And now that the they're not doing them right now, I believe, because of Corona? You got some re regretsies? Yeah. Regretsies because, like, I see them. I'm like, damn, that's that's nice to have. Anyways, web developer, creator of LevelUp Tutorials. I That font's a little bit big for me. I gotta I gotta I think I gotta, like, move back a little, in order to to read it. This is hard because This whole episode is is hard for me because I don't like being critical of people or even feedback. One one of the best parts about this was is this this font was maybe

rid Twice as large. And I was just like, yeah. Maybe I could cool it a little bit now.

One thing is the the spaces and the pipes. I was like, oh, how is that gonna do on screen readers? And I just tried it out, and it works really well. It says web developer, creator of level up tutorials, re Cohost the syntax. F m. So it, like, it does, like, the appropriate pause in between each one, so I'm not sure if that was intentional. I think there should be links. Rid Do you think those should be links, syntax.fm level of tutorials? Yes. Syntax needs to be a link for sure.

Link it off to people because, like, the amount times I talk to people, and they're like, oh, you have a podcast? I'm like, oh, man. Like, I I saw you been. Sometimes I take for granted that everyone knows everything that we do. But Even on the podcast, people, oh, you have courses? Like, there's a lot of people that just know us from the podcast. They found us by searching Web development on iTunes or Spotify or whatever. They don't know that, oh, we're also on Twitter, and somebody the other day thought that you were the Canadian one. People often think that my voice is your voice, and your voice is my voice despite the fact that we always say who we are at the beginning of each episode. Yeah. It's ready. For those listening, I am Wes.

I'm Scott.

The animations between the pages is awesome. Rid Again, that's not something that you see on a lot of websites, so immediately, I'm impressed at it. It's nice and quick. Your about is re Super clear. Like, you can read it really quickly. Hi. I'm Scott Jolinski. I own and make web development tutorials for level up tutorials, releasing new premium series every month. Like, Good. Like, that some people are so wordy of trying to get across what it is they do and and whatnot, and it's just very clear here. I've never been accused

of being wordy.

I also cohost Syntax FM with Wes Bos. Syntax is popular lighthearted webinar podcast that teaches full stack topics while staying fun. It's good. I copy and pasted that from the syntax site. Oh, beautiful.

I enjoy b boying as well as ready. Break dancing and have been dancing for 15 years doing professional stuff for the NFL, NBA streams. I'm inspired by a hot cup of tea, rid. Excellent music in Sean Bros Kung Fu movie. See, Shaw Brothers. Shaw Brothers. Shaw Bros. Sorry. Not Sean Bros.

I really like when people rid. Show a little bit about their personal life in their website because I don't think I need to explain why, but I just love to see other sides of people. The web developers are it. Multifaceted.

And even on my own website, I have I like to work on road racing bikes and the amount of emails I've gotten from people rid Which are like, hey. I also have a bike. Here's a picture of it. And then they go into what they wanna say. And it's just like, oh, that's kinda interesting.

Rid Oh, I gotta do this. The embedded talks from YouTube? This page is ugly. I'm gonna say that. Yeah. It it ready. It's gonna look amazing, but it has all the stuff embedded, which I definitely need to do myself.

Work is pretty good. Again, the font, a little bit big rid. On me, maybe you gotta zoom out. I'm gonna go bigger.

Yeah.

See, I zoomed out to 67%, and it's much more bearable for me. And then your blog posts your blog posts need some work. I think you you said you were just playing with that anyways. Click on one of the blog posts and check out that neat little animation that you of it. Woah.

That's cool. That's good. It definitely has an aesthetic, which I really like. Like, you're not trying to Make it super fancy or whatever. You just say, like, look, this is black, white, and yellow, and it's it's good. And then you got your users page as well, which from the the guy who created the useless page, I think you're gonna need some work because there's no key there's no keyboard on there. Rid. There's no phone. Yeah. We need a couple things. You just got the new keyboard too, didn't you? Yes. I did. Alright. So, hopefully, that is I don't know if that was a super good review or not of your site, but That's my thoughts. Overall, pretty good. What about the HTML, Wes? Oh. What about the HTML? It was so nice. Let me see this. How's that HTML? Rid It's nice. Oh, yeah. They got a nav tag, a main tag. The site's super fast too. Also, can you talk about how past the site. Yeah. If you actually we talked about this on a previous episode. If you, if you go into dev tools and just like load the site, rid It loads in. Oh, that's not a good example because there's a YouTube video on it. If you go to a page that doesn't have a YouTube video on it, It's, like, 88 k with a font.

Yeah. And then this is for all the people who say the JavaScript sites can't be fast there performant or

whatever. This site doesn't have much going on, but it's tiny. Yeah. No kidding. That's that's awesome that you can get it to go that fast. I'm curious. So, like, I'm gonna go to my use this page. So your use this page is 88 k. I think we did this previously. I bet mine is, like, 3 something.

Yeah. How much of that? Mine is the font too. Mine says

1 meg. Oh, it's because the images. Oh, you know why? It's because I in the footer of my pages, I re Pull in Instagrams and Twitter images and a couple other banners as well. They are compressed from what Instagram gives you, but rid. They are loaded on every single page. But those are lazy loaded, though. So it doesn't matter about the, the initial page load. Word.

I thought this was a lot of fun. I think we should do this on a semi regular basis. Yes, I agree. Let us know you, the listener, what you think of this one, how we can approve it, What you did and what you didn't like because I think this would be a fun way to to give feedback on people's stuff. Absolutely. Cool. So now is the part of the show where we get to talk about Sick picks, which are things that we find to be sick. Wes, do you have a sick pick locked and loaded? I got one ready for you to go. No. You go for it. I'm just thinking of mine. Rid Okay. I think you'll you'll like this one if you have not heard of this item that I'm about to sick pick right now. So, Courtney, about these things that I'm I'm gonna refer to as, Like kitchen shammies? Do you ever use a chamois cloth to wash your car? It's like a very specific kind of texture.

Yes. Yes. I'm I I actually think I will I'm a chamois enthusiast, so I'm curious to see what you say. Oh, okay. So these these are basically these They're called Swedish

dish towels. They're biodegradable and reusable microfiber cleaning dishcloth rags. I told Courtney, I mean, these are basically shammies is really what they are. So they they're what we're gonna be using permanently instead of paper towel for literally everything because They're biodegradable.

They're reusable. You can reuse them, throw them in the washer. You can put them in the dishwasher, and they have a limited amount of x, y, and z uses rid. In terms before it starts to really break down, but when it does break down, just throw it in the compost bin, and it cooks compostable. Oh. So it's fantastic. So they're super cheap, And they have a a nice little grid texture on the bottom that does a surprisingly good job of cleaning and scrubbing. So I've been using these exclusively for about, like, a week or so now, and I am totally sold on it. Like, when Courtney first brought these in, I was like, oh, okay. So it's a shame me for the kitchen. Rich. Okay. But, like, no. They're very, very good. It absorbs more water than a chamois does. It's not just pushing it around. But you do kinda get it wet, you squeeze it out, whatever, and it is Very, very good, and I can feel much better about using it than using paper towel or something. That's just gonna be, like, a 1 single use term thing and might end up In the trash bin or something. Uh-huh. Are these the ones where they're, like, hard, and then you get them wet, and they become super soft? They're like a hard sheet. Ready. Yeah. They're fantastic. They're awesome. Yeah. Big fan of these. Oh, cool. I'll have to check that out. They're not too expensive. $15 for 10.

So if you think, like, if everyone replaces, like, 1 roll of

a paper towel, then you're You're coming out on top? Like, I find myself I mean, because they're washable, reusable, whatever. I've only used a handful of them in the week and, Like, maybe, like, 3 or 4 so far, and I've done some pretty some pretty nasty spills. Let me tell you. I have earned the nickname the king of spills, so I know a little bit of something about spills. Like, you've used 3 or 4 in the week. Do you do you wash those then, or is that it then? You still wash them. Right? We just did our 1st run of washing them, and they came out really nice. Awesome. So it's not even they're not even done. They're far from done. They got some pretty greasy, rough situations going on too, and and They've definitely they washed out well. They survived. So here's to kitchen jammies.

I am going to sick pick a knife Sharpening system. I I talked about my, like, knife sharpening block a couple times on podcast, and I I said last time that, for Christmas, I was hopefully getting rid. These paper wheels, and I got them in it. They are unreal. So what they are is if you wanna sharpen your knives, You can buy these wheels that you put on a bench grinder. So you have a bench grinder? I had to buy a bench grinder for this.

So, like, this is, this is, like, a major investment. Not, like, super expensive, but, like, you gotta, like, make room for this thing.

Rid. The way that works is that you get these 2 wheels. You put them on, and they come with, like, this jeweler's rouge that you put on them. And you fire up your bench grinder, ready. And you put the your knife on it, and it basically it's like, and rid They get, like, scary, sharp knives in, like, 2 seconds because, like, the hard thing about the knife stone rid. Is that it takes freaking forever. And, like, you gotta, like, you get the skill down pat and all that. Like, I have, I don't know. Like, the 20 knives that they need to sharpen, especially, like, the little pairing knives that we use all day long.

Those ones suck when they get super dull. So rid. This was awesome. So the wheels themselves were around $70, and then you gotta have a bench grinder, which you can pick up a used one for $20 online pretty quickly.

And I am so impressed at these things. It is so fun. It's kinda terrifying because you have to take Safety guards off the bench grinder entirely.

And you have, like, a wheel spinning, fast as hell, and then you've got a knife in your hand. Yeah. Rid. But if you can put up with the the fact that it might, like, impale you, you get some really, really sharp knives. That's awesome. Yeah. So So highly recommend. I'll put the link in show notes for it. It's called the paper wheels you can Google. That's what it's called. Are you gonna make one of those slow, like, slow motion videos where you throw

Cut through it like a samurai. So unlike knife sharpening YouTube, the thing to do is you you make what are called Piggly Wiggly's, Where you're like you slice a piece of paper to show how sharp it is. If you slice a really thin piece of paper, it starts to curl up, And, like, that's the ultimate on knife sharpening YouTube. To get a little pigtail? Yeah. Dope. Cool. Well, shameless plugs, I have the latest course on level up Or else at the time of release of this podcast because I I was gonna say that because we have a new course every month for those of you who don't know, but the latest course coming to level up tutorials .com is testing with Cypress. We recently moved all of our UI tests to Cypress, and I absolutely love it. It's my favorite Testing platform for many reasons, and we get into the nitty gritty, but we also teach you how to get up and running with the very most basics of Cypress. This is for people who are new to Cypress and are looking for a better way to test those things that are not having to write individual unit tests for all of your components because that's a giant pain in the butt. Awesome. I'm going to shamelessly plug all my courses, west boss.comforward/courses.

You got my master Gatsby, beginner JavaScript, full stack of apps React and GraphQL. There's tons of them on there. There's a bunch of free ones, a bunch of paid ones. Check them out. Rid. West boss.comforward/courses, and use the code syntax for $10 off. Sick. Cool. Well, thank you, for letting me critique your website, Wes. Rid. I thought it was a lot of fun. Yeah. Thank you, and thanks to everyone for submitting theirs as well. That takes some guts to to send it over to us, and hopefully you enjoyed it and learned rid Few things or 2. Yeah. And if you want to have your,

site resume, whatever, looked at, I don't know. Maybe, Maybe we should start some sort of a way to submit those so that we could make this a semi regular thing. I would not mind that if people had, some interesting sites To share, I would love to especially, maybe we should do a section where people are looking for jobs. And if you are looking for a job, then you submit yours, and then we critique it, review it, Help share it. Those types of things. That could be a definite segment. I'm in. Cool.

We'll catch you on 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

ready.