Potluck × Twitter Following × TypeScript × Playwright

Welcome to Syntax. We got a potluck for you today. Some really good questions around how do you use Twitter? How do you keep with it all.

What's the difference between CRUD apps and, like, WebSockets and XMTP? If I don't, it. Is create app seen as amateur by companies? What's playwright? That's kind of a cool one that hit the scene recently.

We'll talk about all that plus more. In today's episode, we're sponsored by 3 awesome companies. Prismic is the headless CMS rest with the beautiful slices API. Sanity is the platform for structured content that powers your digital experiences and LogRocket, The modern front end monitoring and product analytics software. We'll talk about all them partway through the episode. How are you doing today, Scott? I am doing so good. Rid I'm doing just great. I I'm just

grinding away on all of the stuff. I'm so close to the launch of the level up site. And, honestly, by the time you're listening to this, It's well past the, the the self imposed deadline for myself. So I'm gonna have to say that the site will rid be up, and you'll all be enjoying it, and it will be totally bug free. This is gonna be kind of my, hell week in terms of getting all of the little 90% of the way their errors, all the stuff that I've been saying, well, I'll wait until, the end of the project to worry about this.

It's all coming to roost it now. So I'm Now having to take care of all the things I put aside till the last week, and I am excited. I'm excited to get this thing out to y'all because it is awesome, rid. And it it's just a lot of fun. How about you doing? I'm I'm doing good. You always ask me how I'm doing, and I never ask you how you're doing. That's true. How are you doing? Thank you. Thank you. I am doing good. I am very much

into recording my TypeScript course right now. And I've been just like rid. I've been in a groove with these TikToks. I've been like we talked about on the last episode, but, like, I've been feeling really good about them. And, like, I just have endless ideas for things that I can make now. And I rid. I think that that's a really important thing for people to know is that if you feel like, oh, I could never do that type of thing, like, with this little short form content, I don't know what to do and whatever. Rid. Just do a couple, and it's just unraveling like crazy. So

in a good way, I've been doing it too. Then we've both been kind of doing this, like, 1 a day on all of those platforms. I'm sure we did an episode about it, but Yeah. It it's definitely sparked my creativity in a lot of really interesting ways, And they're fairly simple to put together. They're not a lot of I mean, it's I we have we have the techniques set up and whatever established, so it's easy for us to now with it. I'm definitely in a groove. Yeah. Alright. The first 2 questions we have here are about Twitter. So I'm gonna read them both, and we're gonna kinda

just talk about it. First one from Mark from Rochester, Across the lake from me. Hey, hey, Mark.

May you and many of your supper club guests have said they use Twitter to keep up to date.

I tried to use Twitter on and off, but I find it challenging to dig through all the ads and cringey, so suggested content to find the good stuff. What strategies do you use to find the good stuff? How often do you check-in to keep up? Thanks so much for the great podcast. And then the second rid. Question we have here is from Blazin Baz.

Hello, friends. How do you keep up with Twitter with such a busy schedule, family, and other stuff in your life? Seems like you're always on and never take any breaks. True.

Any tips you have from you? Really? Yeah.

Rid. Let's talk let's talk about that. This is one thing that people say, like, okay. You use Twitter to key up to date. Who do you follow? Like, what do you do? Rid. And for that, it's kind of up to you. You can go to my follow list. I feel like I've curated a really good list of people. Just see who me and Scott follow.

I've been on there for 15 years, and I've curated a list of 14, 1500 people that I like to To find, generally, what I'll do is anytime I find an interesting blog post or article or something like that, I will try to find that person's Twitter, rid and follow them because that's that's how you find really, really good stuff. Right? It's not just the people that go wildly popular, because quite honestly, rid. People have figured out how to gain that type of stuff. So my tips here, curate your follow list. You gotta find people who who to follow, look at who other people are following, rid. Look at who people are replying to.

It costs nothing to hit the follow button and then unfollow them in 3 days when you realize, oh, this is this person is off the rocker or they're posting their dinner a 1000 times or they do a 17 point tweet thread about Why they hate Elon Musk or something like that? You know, like, although those some of those are a bit valid right now. Maybe I shouldn't have used Elon Musk as a example, but you rid. What I mean? Like, some of those.

My other tip, don't use topics. Twitter has topics, and all suggested stuff rid. If you go into the web dev or JavaScript topics, it's garbage. There's not a lot of really good stuff in there. Unfortunately, a lot of people have figured out how to game that. So don't use those mute, mute, mute, mute people like crazy.

Mute topics like crazy. I have found that my mute as my list gets bigger, it really takes a lot of the stuff that can wreck your day or get you distracted or whatever, because at the end of the day, I am using this for a job, and there's a lot of other stuff that can kind of sneak itself into Twitter.

It's hard to sometimes not get distracted or upset by something. So a big mute mute thing and then use TweetDeck. TweetDeck, it's the best For for looking at tweets, you can sort of curate all the columns and you can make lists of people you like and and whatnot. Yeah. I you know, I am personally concerned about the future of TweetDeck

Given, you know, the way things are right now, but even, like, I don't know if you got a chance to use the updated tweet deck at any given points. Yeah. But there sucks.

Sucks. Yeah. So if that version of TweetDeck becomes the one or they just get rid of entirely, oof. And also The worst part about it is Twitter's API is so limited that, like, any chance of people making better apps, it's almost always, Like, stifled. There were some, like, really, really good Twitter apps that were way better than the official one for Android, but then they hit their their API limit so quickly. They had to, like, up new users. They had to pull it from the App Store, and it's like, dang, you you're kinda stuck with what they're giving you. Who knows what's going to happen now? You know, Twitter is currently in a bit of turmoil, obviously.

Yeah. Maybe by the time this comes out, It'll be a whole different story, but it does not looking good right now. And I don't know, a couple of months ago, I tried the new tweet deck and I was like, this thing sucks. It sucks. And then the developer who works on it, which I felt a little bit bad. I didn't I didn't say it sucked, but I said, like, this is not nearly rid. As close to like it's not as information dense. It's missing a bunch of features. And then one of the developers who works on it, like, said, Hey, we're only a small team. And I was just like, rid. Really? Like like, I felt bad, but also, like, do you not know that power users are a major Part of this platform, and you pay zero attention. Like, you can't even view a poll inside of TweetDeck. Yeah. You can't.

There's so many things you can't do inside of TweetDeck, and it's it is so frustrating. But yeah. Like, when I worked at Ford, their advertising agency had every single person's desktop computer, if you walked by, was filled with TweetDeck screams. That's like what these people are doing. Can like, if they don't take that seriously, that's gonna harm a lot of these major brands that are using it in that sort of way. But I I you know, in terms of getting web dev information off of Twitter, I I'm I'm so there with you. If some if you find somebody annoying and they keep popping up, rid mute them if you're following them or if you don't wanna see their things. Yeah. If you are, like, hearing way too many people talk about Certain topics you don't wanna hear about. Like, I don't wanna hear about Elon Musk. I don't wanna hear about him. I'm gonna mute I'm gonna mute Elon Musk. I'm gonna mute mute Musk or anything that has anything to do with it. I just don't wanna hear about it. I I use liberal liberal use of block, mute, and,

muting of key phrases. And the Canadian block. Oh, the Canadian block. Yes. The friendly block. The Canadian block is the best. So I often have people that Try to criticize every single thing that I tweet or try to be smart about, well, you forgot about this or not this. And it's so annoying because It it bugs me. So I will do a Canadian block, which you block them block and unblock really quickly, and that drops them from following you. And often, they don't realize that ever. Or they say, oh, I I must have unfollowed him because I didn't like it. And then They stopped replying to every single tweet with some smart ass comment. I you know, that's not something most people hit.

But, you know, if you're out there, like, looking for Content. How do I find content or whatever? Find the people who are constantly posting good examples, good demos.

If somebody's posting the stupid thread emoji and then, like, listing, like, a bunch of things that probably should just been a blog post, block, Mute. Whatever. But, like, for the most part, I I look for who's posting real demos, who's posting interesting things. The The thing I I end up following a lot of brands, but only because I wanna stay up on and then when I say brands, I mean, like Like, Lay's? Start ups and web apps. No. Not like that. No. No. Not like Wednesday Wendy's Wednesdays or Lay's or any of these, not Kogar or any of these. I'm I'm following, like, you know, anytime there's a web app or small dev team, I'm, like, following that web app to just check-in on it, see what they're releasing, when they're releasing, stay up on stuff like that. I follow a lot of local devs. If you're from Denver, and I see you're tweeting, I'll probably follow you anyways. But for the most part, you know, if I wanna learn stuff, I'm following people who work on real projects and who tweet out real demos. I'm not trying to follow a lot of, like, influencer types or people who are unfortunately, you know, Sadly enough, I don't wanna be mean to, like, DevRel folks, but some sometimes DevRel stuff is just marketing arm of a company, and I I don't need that myself personally. Yeah. Ready. Yeah. That's true. Also, we I me and Scott will often ask open ended questions as content for this podcast.

And if you look at the replies or if I have a just a question about literally anything, I will just throw that out on Twitter. Just go through their applies and and see who's replying to this type of stuff. Those people are 10 times smarter than Scott and I. You should probably follow them.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Absolutely. Okay. Cool. But, you know, maybe at some given point, Wes, we should do an episode on, like, amazing people we follow on Twitter and just, like, go through and talk about, like, a hasty treat. Because there's a lot of people, You know, that I feel like I could I could talk about who do really awesome work and share things. Agree. Because because people tag me in these, like, Ten people to follow on Twitter, and it's it's the same people. And I'm in all those things and, like, follow other people. There's there's a lot better people to follow on Twitter than me. We should surface those people. Totally. I agree. Cool. Yeah. I agree. Alright. Next question here from the potluck now that we're off of Twitter is, Abdullah says, hey there. I hope you guys are doing awesome, and I pray for your sustained health so you can continue with one of the best podcasts ever. Thank you so much. That's nice. Thank you, Abdullah. Yeah. Among others, rid. Among a few others, you 2 are my all time fave role models or mentors, always indebted to you We're being a beacon that I look up to keeping myself motivated. Mom, Abdullah is just laying it on. Thank you so much.

It's been quite it's It's been quite a while since I started listening to the pod, and I couldn't afford to miss any episode. Okay. Oh my god. I should do it. I'll get to the question. I'm I'm feeling so flattered. I am. I I'm I'm blushing over here. Okay. My my question, I don't seem to draw the clear distinction between how the CRUD ops And the real time chat protocols, XMPP, WebSockets, etcetera, differ.

In as much as using the CRUD ops, We perform data transactions while communicating via real time chat apps. We seem to be doing the same thing. Is there any difference? I don't know whether my doubt is valid or mature enough to be qualified. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge and educating your other. So, basically, rid. CRUD operations versus real time chat protocols. What's the difference here? Yeah. So the difference here is that,

rid. CRUD, create, read, update, delete. This is generally when you're creating an API and you are create, reading, update, and delete. Those are just done over HTTP requests. You have a server that has an endpoint or a single endpoint graph, you all land, and it can handle those things, and it resends you back the response.

On the flip side, you have like real time protocols, which are WebSockets XMPP.

I haven't heard of that being used in a long time. That was a very popular chat protocol where you could you could have like multiple you kind of I remember when Google Chat was on XMPP, and I could have a desktop app where I had my MSN friends and I had, my Google friends all in 1 application. I haven't heard that in a while, But those things are different protocols which don't rely on the send request, open request, wafer response, get it back. Whereas WebSockets is real time where you can, in real time, you have a pipe right to your server and you can send data at any time, as well as you can be listening for data coming in at any different time. So the difference there is that Instead of having traditional single round trip requests, you have real time data that is there. And you generally don't need web sockets unless you are doing an application like chat. You wouldn't use a REST API for A real time application because what that requires is and some libraries like socket. Io do this. They fall back to polling, meaning that you just say, rid. Is there an update? Is there an update where it's it's just pull, pull, pull when sometimes you want the data to be pushed to you

Without having to do all these these empty checks over and over again. Yeah. That's a really great explanation, Les. Did you by the way, speaking of Google Chat, did you see that one Tweet about Google Meet in the history of Google Chats naming system. No. Oh my god. This is maybe the It Changes all the time. This is maybe one of the funniest tweets I've ever read. It says, it's pretty simple. Google Meet original Was previously Meet, which was then rebranded as Hangouts Meet. Meet has been merged with Google Duo, which was replaced by Google Hangouts.

Google Duo has been nay renamed to be Meet, and Meet has been temporarily renamed to be Google Meet original for clarity.

And then it continues.

To be clear, the merger of Google Meet original and Google Duo has no impact on Google Chat. The app formerly known as Google Hangouts, which was replaced which replaced Google Talk, oftenly mistakenly referred to as Gchat.

As some have noted, Google Hangouts was replaced by both Google Chat and Google Duo. To be clear, Google Chat launched as Hangouts Chat for Google Workplaces, formerly G Suite.

Oh, my gosh. Replaced Hangouts in a suite of Google apps For Android, not to be confused with G Suite.

Oh my gosh.

Beautiful.

Shout out to that guy for actually figuring that all out.

That was like I I mean, it's it's just a total mess out there.

So when I read that, I was just like, no. This is this is too good. This is so funny.

Very funny. Okay. Next one up here is we have a question from Paul. Paul says, I was hired on a large later stage startup to build a blog content marketing site from scratch and migrate an existing WordPress blog.

We will be using Next, Insanity, and Netlify, and most likely Tailwind for the styling.

The team is currently for devs, but it's likely to grow. The site will serve a larger marketing content department of about 60 to 70 people. Most of the knowledge On the dev team is in PHP, WordPress, Angular, and a little React. At the moment, the timeline is fairly generous and negotiable. Hey. That's always great.