Potluck - WordPress × 3rd-Party Cloud Services × Backend Hosting × Drupal × Getting Clients × GPS vs BEM × More!

to Syntax. This is the podcast with the web development treats out there. Today, we've got another potluck for you, partially because we love doing them, partially because I just got my vaccine, and I am rocked right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Today, we are sponsored by 3 awesome companies. First 1 is Prismic.

They are a headless CMS focused on building websites with slices, LogRocket, JavaScript session replay, and revenue cat Adding reoccurring billing to your mobile app with no sweat.

How are you doing today, Scott? Hey. Could be a little bit more caffeinated. I I wanted to stop drinking coffee or having caffeine in the morning just to, And, like, no, I didn't. And so it's, what, like, 3 or it's 130 over here, and I am crashing.

But you know what I'm talking to? I'm talking to Wes. I'm talking to Webb. We're doing a potluck. I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna wake up here. I'm gonna wake wake me up before I go go, and I'm gonna do this podcast re Very, very with lots of energy. So, yeah, I'm doing good. How about you? Not too bad. As I said, I just got my vaccine yesterday, which I'm Stoked about. Little bit sleepy today. Feeling a little bit groggy, but I'm very happy to have it. And, I'm excited for JavaScript meetups and and conferences and all that to to start coming back soon, so excited about that. Yeah. I'm confident too. Alright. 1st question we have here is from Steve Montoya.

Most small businesses I know have of WordPress, and it seems like the industry standard for doing brochure websites. So brochure website generally means, like, this is just a website that has content on it, And it doesn't do a whole lot other than show photos and content and information that people need.

Maybe there's a contact form on there, and and that's about it. It doesn't do much else. So I'm tired of 1 to 5 page freelance WordPress websites. I love front end coding and design. Rid. Do I need to sell people on static sites, or are there freelance jobs out there to use Vue, React, whatever for static site web developers? I wanna Stick with small businesses and a few other niches, but I'm tired of drag and drop builders in WordPress.

Plus, I feel WordPress is overkill for the majority of the sites that I do. I just wanna code Sites and freelance things. So this is a a frustration that this Steve has is he wants to use maybe a little bit more advanced tech, But the types of clients that he's working with and and, like, the it sounds like he's happy with the the clients that he's getting and the sort of the little niche he's carved out, They are still using WordPress.

So, like like, what do you do there? And I'm I'm very curious to to hear what you think about this, Scott. You wanna give a stab first? Yeah. At the end of the day, I don't really think the client does care

know as much about what you're doing or or the tech is. Maybe they they might even let them. I used to have some clients who would, like, try to give me some some jargon to let them know that They knew what HTML was and okay.

But at the end of the day, they care about results, what's faster, what works better, what feels better.

And it very well may be your job to sell them on something that is bitter, bigger, faster, stronger well, not bigger. Let's say smaller, faster, stronger. It might be up to you to sell them on that. Now many of the times that involves issues where clients really think they need to enter data or update the data or be, in regards to have more control over that information.

But in my experience, we had just an endless amount of clients who asked for a WordPress site specifically And then it never ever changed it.

Then that's only because somebody told them that they needed WordPress.

There is a time and a place for you to say, like, Whether or not you're in that that client meeting or if it's through your team and you're discussing it with your team and saying, Listen. I can build the site in a way that's going to feel better for the user, but it's not gonna be on WordPress.

If this client is you know, WordPress is a deal breaker, I can do it in WordPress. But, hey, Maybe we should try something different for this one and then see how it goes. In my experience, the team that I was working with at any of the agencies I worked at rid Typically did not care about that. They would say, okay. And maybe perhaps in your proposal because I know a lot of you are bidding on proposals. That's A lot of how that work works is where you you bid for a project, and if you get the project and and if you say this thing is not gonna be on WordPress, that could be seen as a downside.

So if you're doing the type of proposal work in that regard, you might need to say, like, listen. We can build the site in WordPress if you'd like, or we can newer, you know, newer technologies that can give you a better experience. And if you add some flowery language to it, you can like Like, you could either the the guy at the who's selling something and say, you could have this this old thing, or you could have this fancy new one with a shiny roof. You know, you could sell it a little bit that way, and I think that will go to your benefit.

It's all gonna be about selling the client on, You know, letting them know what they need versus what they think they need because oftentimes the client thinks they need something then different than they actually do.

Yeah. It's Kinda tough with trying to do static or jamstack or or any of these, like, even just like a dynamic React site because rid. A lot of times, the benefits that you get in terms of speed and kinda slickness of the website don't outweigh rid The benefits of somebody using WordPress is why people use WordPress a lot still, because the client wants I just have a few notes here, something that's easy to update rid themselves. In some cases, they'll usually tell you. Like Scott says, they'll say, I wanna update it, but doesn't, always be the case. Rid. They want something that's mobile friendly both on the site, but as well as be able to make small edits. I know all of my friends who run small businesses. They are re Very heavy running on Ipads and phones over sitting at a desktop computer because unless they're actually doing a desk job, They're running around, and then they just do stuff from their phone. Like, I did a, I remember I did a website for a bricklaying company, like a huge Like, probably the biggest bricklaying company in North America.

And they were like, people who are on this website, they're not seeing at a desk. They are rid On their phone while they're slamming to Tim's, which is our coffee here.

And they're just kinda, like, scrolling through it on their phone, so you need to think about that. They want preview friendly. This is a big downside that, Jamstack is frustrating with right now is that when you make an update to your content, They wanna see it on the content on the site very soon, if not right away.

They want easy to add features, photo gallery, map, rid. Slider, snow day notice, we talked about that. That is, like, if something goes wrong, like, they have to shut down for the day, they wanna be able to put a big banner on the home page. And And then they want easy to click together pages with some sort of builder, which is why, like, a lot of people hate these site builders because they Especially some of the WordPress ones. They do everything under the sun, and they can be hard to work with. But, on the flip side, a lot of people actually love using this type of thing. So I don't know. I don't think that that the jamstack is is there yet. And I think if you take a look at the landscape of companies trying to solve this right now.

Stackbit has been a sponsor in the past. They're simply just gluing together, Like, the your CMS and your front end framework, but they are being, like, the piece in between.

Sanity has live preview. You can hook it up with your Gatsby re site and immediately see the updates.

Tina CMS is another one where you can view the website and click on the thing you wanna edit. Next. Js is rolling out this new live thing, which allows you to sort of collaborate and see what other people are doing. Gatsby Cloud, real time updates. So it's it's kinda funny. You see all of these companies spending lots and lots of money trying to figure this out right now. So if I were you, I would say I would, like, look towards what all these companies are doing in that space because I bet that's the the next step in terms of Building portfolio or what do we call it? Not portfolio. Brochure websites,

for clients. Yep. And you also gonna be a little cognizant that Just because you would like to build a site on a fancy thing doesn't mean that that's what's best for your client too. So, you know, don't don't shoehorn a, You know, or or Gatsby site into a situation that really does Kubernetes, Stack. Yeah. That does really want a WordPress site at the end of the day. You know what I mean? Because then nobody's gonna be happy.

Alright. Next question here is from Aidan g.

Says, hi, Scott and Wes. Loving the podcast all the way from the UK.

I wanted to get your opinion on the 3rd party cloud services that provide application functionality, things like Auth0, rid Algolia, OpenCart, etcetera. I work for a large enterprise where there is a real fear of trusting these companies with our data, and so everything is built from the ground up with less time. Miss out on a lot of the sweet features these services provide. Do you use many services like this in your production apps, and how would you decide about which ones to use? Rid So this is a tough call here because at the end of the day, you only know so much about these services.

I'm not gonna call out a service specifically, but there was a service That I use I never used them heavily. I explored this service just to see.

And, I got an email a couple of days ago from, from them about a data breach, and the stuff that's in the data breach is scary.

It's like, your security keys and stuff. Oh, we accidentally had all of the e n v, like, variables from all of the sites that were around the service leaked.

No. Should that mean you never use any services? I I don't necessarily agree with that. Companies like Auth0, I mean, their whole thing is authentication. So the their Their security better be down pat, or else they're not going to have a reputation for being, you know, authentication.

Yeah. But That doesn't necessarily mean that I've personally done an audit of any of their stuff. And even if I did, it doesn't mean that I would even under be able to understand, you know, the security implications of that. So, yeah, it it's a tough call. And at the end of the day, we're all kind of blindly trusting a lot of these services, some of which Maybe we should and shouldn't. I think a good benchmark for that are services that have existed for a good amount of time and then have a good track record. Something just popped up and it's, like, built overnight kinda deal, maybe sit and wait on that type of thing. But you have companies like you mentioned, Algolia, Auth0.

Those are all companies that have, you know, really proven track records and have been around for a good amount of time. So, personally, I would do the work to make sure that the company and the service that I'm using is something that other people have trusted information in and for a long time Or for a decent amount of time? It's a tough call because you could say, like I mean, like, next was it Vercel? Vercel's brand new, and I I trust hosting my stuff on Vercel, and I have no issues or no concerns about that.

So I guess I I don't know. It's a it's a really tough call. There there is a huge amount of cost associated with building it yourself in terms of just the sheer amount of labor, that it takes to not only build but maintain something. So it's a tough, tough, tough call. I always try to

lean on doing it myself or at least be able to do it myself.

Rid. That's one of the reasons why, like, my personal website doesn't use a something like Cloudinary to host my images. It's not that like, I use it on my course platform.

I'm a big fan of them. I use them in a lot of my courses, things like that.

But, like, my personal website, I'm just like, I feel like I, like, Entirely just build it myself. You know? If I wanted to host the thing myself, I totally could.

But at a certain point, that, rid Like, time versus trade off and expertise goes away. Like, I am not gonna get into the business of re Hosting my own video.

I might go down the route like Scott did, isn't it, and build your own player with something like Mux, but I, like, lean on someone like Vimeo rid to do my videos. Why? Because I don't have the expertise to do that type of things. I don't wanna have to maintain the infrastructure. They honestly do it cheaper than if I were to try to to do it raw myself.

So that's always a pro to using a service. Also, you don't You have a really nice UI. It's fast to implement a service. The cons to that is it can get expensive really quickly.

If you look at some of these, Like, when you start to scale things up to millions and millions of requests or or big pieces of data, then you go, oh, boy. This is getting really, really expensive.

So, yeah, there's just you just gotta kinda think about what are the pros and cons. Obviously, you can't do much these days without rid Services entirely. At some point, you probably have to buy a domain name unless you're appointing people to an IP address, rid Which you are hosting yourself, and then even then, you still have to pay an ISP to get to that. Right? So at Some point along the line, you have to say, alright. I'm letting these companies into part of my website, and I'm gonna trust them to do that type of thing. But in my own personal rid experience. I always like to lean to try to do it yourself and see how much time it's gonna do. And then if it's way too much overhead or way too much up re keep or it's way too expensive, and sometimes it makes sense to lean on, a service for that. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Like, continuous integration, something like Vercel or Netlify, those, like, continuous integration builds. Like, I guess you can host your own. What's the one that you can host yourself?

The host yourself GitLab? You can do continuous integration in GitLab. There's another one that was out there. We use GitHub Actions for all of that stuff, but I know what you're talking about. CircleCI.

That was it. Yeah. Yeah. Semaphore, CircleCI.

There's a bunch of those. And you could host that yourself, but, like, man, do I love I love using services for that type of thing because rid. Sometimes if something goofs up and I'm on my phone, I could just log in and hit rebuild or merge a pull request from GitHub, and, I like having companies part of my stack at that point. Totally.

So, one of our first question was, rid These site builders can in WordPress can get really, really frustrating. So one, actually, the this ad read will cover both of our last questions. 1, Should you pay a service instead of building it yourself? So one of those services you could pay to be your CMS is Prismic.

Rid. They have a very generous free plan as well, but they are a service. And then the other part is a a page builder. So Prismic is going all in on this thing called rid Slices, which is essentially you take your website, you chop it up into components. You've got your, hero component and maybe a product features component and maybe a, team member's component. And then you each of the pieces of data on that component, you can make an input for that component. Rid. Then what you do to build a website is you just grab those slices together and put the data. You're like, okay. I need 3 people components, and then I want a slider, and then I wanna here. It's like a page builder, and then you can go into your into your React or your Svelte or your Vue or whatever you're building it in, re Query all those slices along with the data that is in them, and then go ahead and render out. So that might be a good solution for that. Check it out. Prismic, rid prismic.ioforward/ syntax. Thank you, Prismic, for sponsoring.

Sick. Okay. This next question is from Aaron h.

Hi. Fellas love the show. Bless you. Oh, thank you, Aaron. I recently took Wes's advanced React course and went on to build my 1st custom React app. Thanks, Wes. You're welcome. When this had came to deploy the app, I was surprised by the asymmetry and hosting options for front versus back end. It seems like there are 1,000 slick free tier options for the front end. We're finding a host for my Keystone back end, Barf.

I messed around with Heroku, but Troubleshooting was a nightmare and eventually settled on a digital ocean droplet. My inner system admin is secretly happy to have another OS instance to manage, I hate paying the $5 a month to host a silly project that will probably never be seen by anyone.

I'm already irritated with the amount of care And feeding the back end needs. Yeah. For a side project, this one's no fun. It's kind of like our last question is Yeah. Do you wanna Maintain it and pay the money yourself, or do you wanna have a service? We got a theme here. Alright. It says, what gives there are so many choices for front end hosts and so many so few for back end. Rid Are there hosted back ends that have auth database image hosting, etcetera, to take care of my nitty gritty newbie friendly, friendly free tier? I should look into serverless. So, the free tier part is tough because, yeah, that kind of stuff is a little bit harder to get a free tier with.

And easier than Heroku, you could think of render.com as being like Netlify if Netlify had an option To do Netlify's front end thing, but for a node app. We use, render.com to host our node back end, and it works the exact same way that That Netlify does. You you point it to a repo. You give it your build your start command. It builds and your starts your thing, and you don't even think about it. It gives you environment groups. It gives you environment variables, any of that kind of stuff that you'd wanna need. So, they also have serverless functions on there too if you need them. That's what I would recommend is checking out render. The pricing is way, way, way, way, way cheaper than Heroku. And, we host our production there, so I'm a I'm a big fan. Yeah. Back end is is really tricky, and I actually just talked to Jed from Keystone about this. They're about to launch their Keystone 6, which rid is what I did my course on. And we we should actually have him on because he's he's thought a lot about

how to host these types of things that are node apps, but they could be serverless. And, like, there's a there's a lot of give and take. Like, why don't you see a lot of free back end? It's, First of all, peace people abuse bat free backends.

If you wanna run something malicious on a server that is free, you're for sure to attract People sending spam, money, Bitcoin, all those types of bad things. Whereas, you can do those types of things, some of them, at least, on the front end, but you need somebody to visit your website and for it to run JavaScript on the tab while they are sitting there and having it open. That's that's kind of the the first reason why. Front end is as much I think it's, like, easier, quote, unquote. It's definitely not easy to to build these huge services that host your front end. But rid. At the end of the day, you're just shipping HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to the client, and then the browser is actually running your app, not not the actual back end. Right? Rid. It's simply just a server Mhmm. That serves up the files, and then the browser runs the app. Whereas with server side, you're running the application rid on your actual servers. There's a lot more that goes on it. I always think that's, like, kinda funny that front end is basically, like, we give people our source code And say, like, you know what? You run it. Yeah. It's up to you. You go do it. You run it on your own browser. Which one? Any of them. Hopefully, it supports it. Yeah. Hopefully.

Back end is sometimes tricky if your application is stateful, meaning that if you have sessions or something in memory or file uploads, things like that. A lot of these, like, easy to use platform, Heroku, Vercel, they are Built on serverless functions, and those are easy because they're stateless. You don't have to worry about databases and file uploads and and Writing to disk and all those types of thing. You can't do that. And then when you get into those tricky things, like hosting images, you either have to go with a service, like Cloudinary ImageX, rid something like that. Or you gotta go through like, wade through the waters of building your own Amazon s three or look into some of the rid Flair stuff that they've done. I think that stuff's getting a bit easier as we go on, but those are stateful. Right? Because when somebody uploads An image to your application that both needs to be stored somewhere, and then, the URL to that image needs rid to be stored somewhere as well, which is a database. That's another hard part of doing back ends. Like, how big of a database do you need? Do you need it to scale up? How many connections do you need to have rid At a a single time, some of the databases don't play well with serverless functions. There's a lot to think about there.

I was talking to Jed from Keystone, and They are going all in on Prisma, which is really cool, and it's going to be much easier for things like Migrations. So if you have a new front end app, you simply just ship the new front end app. And when the person refreshes the page, they've got the new app. On the back end, if the data is different, if you need to do some updates to the data, or if, you or upgrading a different value rid of a database adapter or something like that, then you have to make sure that that all happens in sync and updates any data in the database. So that's a long way to say The server side is much more tricky, but I think there's a lot of companies that are trying to solve this, like Scott said, with render. Or you need to think about these things From the start to be able to host them on serverless along with some sort of database provider and some sort of image host, which The key folks from KeyStone are also working on that. Yeah. I I think if you're if you're looking to just host a node app somewhere,

my Experience has been that render is good. There also is private services too that if you want a private service like, we have, like, a server that runs privately Oh, that's cool. Then that that it's, like, very doable on on on render, and it's, like, mostly one click install. I know Heroku gets a little Gets a little crazy with some of their apps and stuff, but, the the render version is more or less, you install it as a private service. It gets you an address. You Connect to that address, and it it just works really well. So that that's been my experience with private services there. It's been it's been pretty good. Oh, and one more thing is you're not gonna be rid. $5 a month from Linode or DigitalOcean and running your own server.

Because you're running your own box and maintaining it, it's It's much cheaper than not always, but a lot of cases, it is. Like, I'm just looking at render. If you wanna run a node app on render, $7 a month to do it, which is which is not bad. But then if you wanna run another node app, then you have to pay another $7 a month. That's the same with DigitalOcean's app platform.

If you wanna run 2 node apps on DigitalOcean's app platform, that's 5 times 2 a month. Whereas if you run your own server, as long as you're not maxing out the Resources of that server, you can run as many apps as as you could possibly want on a single server. Mhmm. Our our next question here from Rustify. Rustify Submitted, like, 15 questions the other day, and I think we answered a couple of them in the past. I'm very curious to hear what you think of this, Scott, because I know you've worked with Drupal in the past, And you were a fan of that at the time.

So the question is, since the Drupal has evolved beyond awkward clog, what does what do you think that means? I have

no idea.

Klug? Klug? Klug? Awkward clug clug of v v seven. I mean, I use Drupal v 7, but I don't know if it's just saying, like, v 7 is weird. Oh, Klug is like if you Google image it, it's like a

rid Scary looking Scary looking guy. Guy. Anyways, of v seven, entities, CT tools, JSON services, re PHP template, etcetera. And then v nine with the excellent GraphQL, JSON, REST support, and tomb. Not sure what tomb is. For non Drupal developers, would you recommend Drupal as a blogger business internal network for doc publishing communication systems, rid IE, not Drupal as a website itself.

This is kinda interesting. So you could just use it as a re Internal CMS. And this this sort of, like, falls under the self hosted CMS rid area, which is not like a service, but you host it yourself, and you get all these things along. And you also get, like you can log in and rid. Have inputs and access control, and it does a little bit more for you.

I think that just boils down to how easy it is to customize. It probably is a really good option. Seems like Drupal has really seen where their area will be is PHP devs that need a really, really flexible rid CMS that the data can be piped into literally anything. Like, probably lots of iPhone apps are powered.

The data is powered by a Drupal back end. So I think, yeah, I think that's probably a really good option, especially if you wanna get up and running quickly.

The people that I hear Like, I never hear people bad talking about Drupal. It's either they don't talk about Drupal or they love it.

Well, maybe it's just because I spent I don't know if it's like a self loathing thing or something, but there's a lot of people in the Drupal community who at points or another were, didn't have nice things to say about it, but I've always enjoyed it myself. And the neat thing about this question and, You know this explanation here because I have not been keeping up with Drupal. I'm gonna admit that. I I primarily build sites in Drupal for a long time. The Original version of LevelUp tutorials from 2012 to 2015 was all in Drupal, so I'm very familiar with it. In my opinion, Drupal's biggest strength is the admin editing interface and the admin and data, The data flexibility that you have with Drupal is really good. And that was the most frustrating thing for me when I would move to WordPress sites is to having to deal with advanced custom fields, And also, I always felt like, you know, if I was passing this off to a client, the client was almost always happier with the word or rid. Version because the admin theming aspects of it were really baked in. You could do a lot for that admin theming section, and it did it worked really well with data and documents and all sorts of stuff. So, yeah, I would definitely recommend people check that out then. I I need to look at Drupal 9. It sounds like It's gotten pretty interesting. I honestly had no idea they were doing anything with GraphQL, and, I always liked the, the content editing experience of Drupal. So Walk with this, jet check and see where it's at now. I'm I'm interested.

Yeah. It looks like Drupal 9 just came out the other day. They have a fancy new icon.

Rid The little, like, new the new metal flame drop is gone. What's the new icon? That's unfortunate. A moment of silence for the new metal Flame drop. It's like a You know what? I should probably know the name of that thing. People, like, talk about it, the mascot guy.

Drupal what is it? Like Fred Durst or something? Drupal Droopy.

Icon name. Let's see. Droopy.

I feel like there's a missed opportunity if they didn't go with Droopy.

You know, Drupal marketing people, get at me. He always looked a little he always looked a little evil, don't you think? Yeah. He had, like, weird shades on. He when and there's, like, versions of them with spiked hair. It's up, but, yeah, he always looked kind of evil. He was a drop, the droopled drop. It was like a droplet of water, I think. I think that's what it was, but, yeah, he he had some weird shades on. The Druplicon, it's called. Yeah. Droopy. Come on. You gotta give him a name. Life him up. Give him a smile.

We

can give him a Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. I'd like

to present to you my idea, Droopy the drop. This is Droopy the drop. He's got a pet squirrel named Snickers. This this Snickers, the squirrel, well, you know, they'd like to hang out in the backyard, and sometimes they pretend to be an airplane guy on top of a doghouse. I don't know why. I'm just pulling stuff in from Snoopy. Okay.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. On a different level, this episode is sponsored by LogRocket.

Let's say, you coded up A Droopy on your website, and that Droopy was just not behaving right. Somebody you're getting emails are saying, hey, Droopy. You don't look right. So, you gotta check it out, and Droopy looks okay to you. You said, I don't see what's going on here. I really just don't see why Droopy is is not looking good.

So then you fire up LogRocket, which has captured all of the errors and exceptions in your site, and you see that the user was seeing something totally different. And that droopy was, in fact, all manipulated from some crappy JavaScript you had on your site. Well, you would never be able to do that or see that without asking the client for. Re Can you take a screenshot or a screen recording? Nobody wants to do that. Your client doesn't wanna do that. And at the end of the day, you might have to ask them again for more information. What browser are you using? None none of that anymore. You can use LogRocket. You can see the browser you're using. You could see what the user sees in a scribbable video replay posted to you along with The, the network tab and the console error console, anything like that that you would possibly want to debug an issue. So head on over to log rocket.com Forward slash syntax sign up and get 14 days for free.

Beautiful.

This next question is from Brian Murray.

Brian says, I have started my web development freelancing business, and I feel like I'm having a hard time getting a lot of responses from small businesses currently don't have a website.

Is there any advice you can give about talking people into hiring a web developer when they clearly need help? I plan on using Next. Js Insanity for all of my sites. My 1st client project is already built, and using it was a great developer experience. Thank you for all of the advice. The website looks great, Brian. Shout out. I don't know if you want me to read the URL on air, so I I just won't. But the website looks great, and, congrats on getting this thing done. This is a tough answer. Wes, do you wanna take this one first? Sure. Sure.

What I've learned over the years is that many businesses don't necessarily need a website or 1 at all, or do they don't think that they need 1 at all? And this is rid. Hard for me to say because I'm in the business of building websites and teaching people to build websites.

But lots of small businesses depend on rid Word-of-mouth, foot traffic, different things like that where often, if I need, like, an electrician or something like that rid Come to my website where I need somewhere to go that sells cocoa butter or something like that. I'll almost always ask my friends or ask A bunch of people on a chat room over searching for that type of thing initially.

So they might already be busy and be happy with their business, And they say, you know what? Things are going well. But we kinda just saw that those types of people kinda got rocked when the pandemic ready. They were forced to close down their businesses, and they were scrambling to get their online presence up and running. And we saw lots and lots of companies. We had an entire show on this of, like, people didn't have the tech in place In order to communicate to their clients and in order to talk to their clients, they didn't even have a website or things like that. So I think if you were to use that as an example like, first of all, you wanna work with people that wanna work with you, and you wanna work with businesses that want to use tech to solve their business problems, and there's gonna be lots of people out there that just think it's a, waste of money or a waste of time or they just don't wanna focus on it. Rid. Those are not the people you should should work with. But if you're having a hard time, like, someone's maybe on the fence, be like, look. I had a lot of lot of clients.

Rid. They were sort of caught with their pants down when the pandemic came, and we're not able to get that information across to their to their people because they didn't have A website set up or they didn't have a good one or they didn't have a contact form or a way to clearly communicate, and they were stuck, rid Like, spamming these JPEGs on Facebook, hoping that Facebook would show them rid To the people that are visiting their website, or they're just on the phone all day long answering questions because that could certainly so I would use that as a bit of a playing card as to Why they should have a good website. Yeah. We definitely did see that in terms of, like,

everybody's scrambling. And I think a lot of web devs Probably were busy because of all the stuff that we were having to do. Yeah. And I think it's a really good point is that, like, yeah, there there not everybody does need a website, but, You know, certain companies and businesses, if they're small businesses and you know they need us, you can always print out I know this is very old school. Print up some cards and drop off a card, say, hey. I make some websites. I see you guys don't do online ordering or anything like that. You know, if you're interested in doing online ordering, I can do it on rid On, you know, good good value for you. Here's my card. If you're not interested, no worries. You know? I think that still flies.

You just gotta be willing to put your self out there and do it. But, yeah, you're right. I think, Wes, about everybody talking to somebody they know already about it. So everybody knows somebody. Like, for instance, Our realtor, he's really good. And if, you know, we need anything in that realm, he's the 1st person we talk to. And if you're on his list, then that's probably a good thing for you because it seems like He gets a lot of trust put in him to, you know, refer out.

So it's gonna be about making those connections. And whether or not that is, you know, old school style, just connecting with other people and talking about what you do or, you know, going to businesses and and doing it that way or even just promoting yourself online more, There's a lot of aspects you can go about with it. But, again, it's a tough thing to to crack into. I personally was never very good at it. I I ended up doing, like, the the answering Craigslist ads. And believe it or not, you would I, you could you hear a lot of horror stories from Craigslist, but I had maybe more positive client experiences than negative ones, On Craigslist, which is sort of surprising considering its reputation.

But, yeah, there's always things like that, Upwork forms like that looking for work where people post Looking for it, but a lot of competition.

Next question we have here from James Abel.

What do you consider the best rid alternative to the BEM naming convention. So BEM is a convention that allows you to write CSS so that your selectors are scoped. It's a block element modifier. You you make a block like a a card, And then you have an element like a card header, and then you have a modifier like card header long. Maybe maybe when there's over 50 characters, you you bump the rid The font size down, something like that. I personally follow a method with very few classes.

I've seen this called GPS, Which takes advantage of the CSS cascade, but I do think I may suffer from readability problems. If I handed my stuff to another developer to work on. Interested to hear your thoughts. So GPS, you ever heard of that, Scott? Nope. Never heard of it. GPS. It's a tough Google too. Rid. Yeah. I googled it, and I found it. And the intro blog post to it says BEM is terrible, which immediately puts me off of it because Anytime someone has to, like, trash another piece of technology to, like, introduce their new thing, like, come on. That's not cool. Anyways But I went into it, and it seems reasonable.

GPS stands for global page and section. So the idea is that you have some global CSS rid Stuff that's used. And then you have a like, an ID for every single page, that you're on. And then inside of that, you have your your sections.

And it makes kinda sense to me, except that, like, I've said in the past couple of podcasts, it's kinda moving away from, like, page based. And even if you it says in the in the docs here, like, you could do it section based.

But I would think, like, component based is probably the way to go because then you can rid Move those suckers wherever wherever it is you want. So that's what GPS is. Anyways, I think component CSS Matched with a bunch of global helpers is probably the way to go with CSS right now. That's just my opinion. There's lots of people that will disagree with that, But I don't think that the the alternative to BEM is gonna be a new one of these things that someone comes out with. I think it's gonna be either a tool That helps you automatically scope your CSS, like style components or so kits built in, things like that. Or, ideally, CSS, the language, will have this scoping built into it pretty soon, and it will allow you to say, alright. Here's my card component, then you could select the h two inside of that. You don't have to put a class on it, and you can select the paragraph tags inside that. You don't have to put a class inside of that. And, oh, I got 2 images. Rid. Let me throw a class on one of them so I can,

apply some CSS to that. And I think that, for me at least, that's that's my way going forward with CSS. Yeah. And that's largely how I'm writing my CSS right now. I think BEM is fine. BEM is just really a a a standard for writing class names. It's basically like, Here's how you write your class names. But many of these things, they're really trying to solve the problem of, like you'd said, scoping. And scoping is Not something you need to do all the time, but there are times when scoping can really come in handy. Our base level CSS for our theme is done, you know, in a way that, like, We don't have to use that many classes. And if we're doing one off, CSS work, it's being done at the component level in a scoped manner to say, like, this is how this thing is. But if we're we're doing and thinking in components, you know, I'm I'm largely thinking in components. And BEM does come in handy, but I don't write strict BEM CSS myself anyways.

I do just say, hey. Here's the component. Here's its class name and then the children.

Since we are using Svelte, we have that scoping by default, so I don't have to worry about it too much. Rid But I don't think this GPS is any better than them for any particular reason.

You're dead on West with you're saying global CSS with rid some scoped 2 components where needed. And then I would also toss in there, use a couple of utility classes rid Because I don't wanna turn this into a utility class thing, but utility classes can be really great. And just because they're really great doesn't mean you have to write your entire CSS with utility classes. You know what I mean? And and that definitely is like a pendulum. People will, like, toss a couple of utility classes on there and be like, oh, man. This is great For this little bit, we might as well, you know, put 18 classes on this element.

I think you can get away with using utility classes to augment Your global styles and your scope to component styles for utility, you know, not to style the whole thing. So you know what? GPS, BEM, CSS, Sass, scope, c s this I don't I don't think it really matters. Just as long as your stuff is organized and able to be readable and writable by the people on your team. Everybody's on the same page, and there isn't, like, 8 different styles and systems of CSS writing on your team. Beautifully said. Next question here is from Nick. I have been teaching myself web development for a little over a year, and your show has been a big help. I'm getting to the point where I feel that I'm nearly qualified for jobs, and I will be starting the application journey soon. I currently work in the supply chain management at a big corporation with a background of industrial engineering.

My question for you is seeing that I have work experience at a big company at the STEM background, do you think that holds weight in terms of being qualified for a dev job? Am mainly wondering how much I should leverage it during my interviews on my resume.

Yeah. You should leverage this because, you know, When I'm interviewing people in the past or even now, I suppose but, you know, once you're talking to people to see if they're a good fit on your team, If you're getting to the interview part of it, sure, there's probably gonna be technical questions and and technical outlook on on your abilities of what you could do. But at most normal companies, non non Google sized companies, the hiring process is is very much more personal in a way. It's like, These people are just feeling you out to see if you can work on a team successfully, if you can be part of the team, if you can fit in and you can a team player, those types of things. You're gonna communicate well and listen and, you know, be the type of person that other people want to work with. And if you have a background in, you know, STEM, whatever, but if you have a background working in a larger corporation Or you have been doing prominent work in in whether it is noncoding or whatever, leverage that stuff. They ask you those questions about, you know, what is your experience with this in management, or have you ever had to give me a situation where something went wrong and how did you fix that type of deal? Those types of questions. Man, you should be loading up those questions with, well, when I was a part of this team, we worked on these problems. It doesn't matter if it's coding related. They're gonna love to hear that stuff. So, yeah, go for it. Yeah. I agree as well. I think you've worked in a technological setting before. You have engineering background. You have a big company behind you.

You probably have very good organization skills if you say you're working in supply chain management. That stuff can get hairy real quick. So use all of those things to your advantage because those are all very good skills. There's just 1 new skill you're adding, and that is being a developer on top of that. So you you've got more skills than not right now. So So good luck with that. Yeah. You would not believe how many people that I've worked with personally who didn't have

those types of skills. And, you know, it's clear that this person was primarily a freelancer or something because they couldn't work with others in a positive way. So, Yeah. Those things will go a long way for you, and they will make you a good employee with anybody.

Cool. Well, now is I survived, Wes. I did not Fall asleep, even though I'm not caffeinated. So I made it, and I even came up with a mascot. Droopy. Good old droopy.

Let's,

Droopy. Yeah. I'm impressed at that. Yes.

I have a I have a little, like, stress toy droopy around here somewhere. I'll have to to finally put them on my desk. So let's get into the part of the show where we talk about sick picks, things that we pick that are sick. Sick as in good, nonsick as in sick. Wes, you have a sick pick for us today.

I do. I I think probably 2 years ago, I sick picked a YouTube channel, Mathias Wandel, who is a Canadian used to work at RIM or BlackBerry, and he's got he has this channel called Wood Gears, and he builds all this stuff out of plywood. And it's just fascinating.

He's a super smart guy. And so he has another channel called Matthias Random Stuff.

And a couple of weeks ago, he posted a video about rid. Fixing a fan. Like, he just has all these, like, things in his life where he fixes them or solves them, and he's very, like, data heavy approach to things. Like, he'll rid. Sensors on, like, he was trying to make a a homemade vacuum, vacuum press, and he would just put sensors in it and and graft rid on the Raspberry Pi and, like, very data data driven. He had one where he was fixing a fan, and he showed how he had it sitting in front of the window, pushing air into the house or out of the house. I forgot which one it was. So I commented and said, I need you. This is the always the big Fight not a fight, but, with myself and my family and my friends, it's like, is it better when it's hot out To put a fan in the window and pull the air in or pull the hot air in the house out. So what he did is he I was like, I wanna see a video with the science and the data behind that, and he actually made one. And I was so happy. Nice.

Yeah. And, It's called best fan placement to move air through the house, and he has Raspberry Pi hooked up to a, I don't know. Some meter that shows how fast the airflow is moving, and it was all the right answers were not what I was doing.

Rid. So, I was really happy to see it and see some data behind it. So what what are the right answers here? The the right answer was you had you have to keep it At least 2 feet away from the window, so don't put the fan in the window Mhmm. And point the fan out the window.

So blow the air in the house out, and that what that will do is it will create, like, a negative pressure and pull cool air in.

So I have always been doing the opposite. Like, we have a a fan in our window because it it cools down here at night. So we usually don't have to have the AC on, which is nice. And then we just we're pumping the air in, but now I'm gonna flip it around.

So, yeah, that that's interesting. Okay. I gotta I gotta check this out. Okay? That sounds like something that I would be very into. I tweeted it, and,

like, every web developer was like, thank you. I've been wondering this for my entire life.

Yeah. Yeah. The, and engineering is fascinating. Right? My sick pick for today is a podcast that I really like to listen to called I Was There Too for Matt Gourley.

Rid. Mac Gourley is, like, kind of an improv community. He does a bunch of podcasts. I listen to actually, this is funny. I listen to another podcast of his that maybe I can do a double sick pick of his.

He he does well, he did Superego with Paul F. Tompkins. It's just like a, improv comedy podcast that's really good. He also did The Neighborhood oh, no. He didn't do The Neighborhood. Listen. Paul rid said that. But he did this podcast, they call it an easy listening horror podcast because they just talk about horror movies. And the the episodes will be, like, a couple hours long. And it's mostly it's like 2 actors that are just, like, really, really, you know, Cool dudes, not not in, like, the actually cool way, but, like, they're like, I don't know. They're they're just interesting guys. They're the type of people that you'd rid Wanna listen to Talk for a long time. They have a lot of stories about Hollywood because they were both actors, but not, like, ever actors actors. They're both, like, Super nerdy. So, like, the nerdiness is, like, very, very relatable.

And so, yeah, that was, with the it's called with Gourley and Rust Is that horror one, but the one I'm talking about specifically is I was there too with Matt Gourley, and he interviews people who were in movies that weren't A main actor or a main character or a non big actor. So they'll interview the guy who played Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars.

The guy or let's see. Here's an episode with the passengers on the bus of the movie speed. So he's just, like, interviewing the people who are also in the movie but never get interviewed. So I was there too. Silence of the Lambs with Brooke Smith. It's just like random random people, and this is a really great podcast. It's it's super fascinating.

Matt's a really great interviewer.

And you get, like, you get some really wild stories from these people who are like, oh, yeah. It was like a personal trainer, and then I got scooped up to be in this major motion picture. And next thing I knew, I was meeting Michael Jackson, rid and then, like, I never did anything else. It's like it. So it's so it's, like, whirlwind ish. It's it's very good, very, wholesome.

So check it out. I was there too. Good podcast. That sounds awesome. Give that a listen.

Shameless plugs, west boss.comforward/courses.

Rid. That has a list of all of the web development courses that I make. If you wanna learn React, Gatsby, you wanna do beginner JavaScript, Script, advanced React, and GraphQL. You name it. Westboss.comforward/courses.

Everything is currently on sale for summer. Use 10 coupon code syntax for $10 off.

I am going to shamelessly plug level up tutorials .com. I don't know if I've ever shamelessly plugged this thing before, but this is my website rid that I make tutorial videos on. And you know what? I do a new series every single month. The current series that's coming out the day that I'm recording this Podcast is on building Svelte components where we look into advanced Svelte techniques in components as in we build some neat stuff. Like, we build a whole Toast message system that does flip animations, and we we look into more in-depth on stores. So, like, if you're looking to subscribe to data And have your data available like a global store throughout. So we build some more advanced functionally stores. We we look into more into spelled actions to do, Like a use click outside of an object type of deal and just a bunch of little, like, handy things wrapped up into a course that teaches you how to build maintainable components. So check it out at level up tutorials.comforward/pro.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for tuning in. Hopefully, you rid that one, and 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 drop a review if you like this show.

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