CJ Reynolds is Joining Syntax

Yeah. So welcome. We should say his name is CJ Reynolds. Wes, you did not say his last name. So welcome, CJ.

And, yeah, this is gonna be really fun just getting to know getting to know CJ and all about what he what he's doing. But if you're like us and you just added someone to your team, there's a good chance you're gonna introduce some bugs into your code. Now I would probably put the likelihood of me introducing bugs into the code base more so than CJ here. So, if you add someone new to your code, you're gonna have some bugs. So head on over to century.ioforward/ syntax. Sign up today. Get 2 months for free, and you will be able to solve, find, and really understand any of the issues that occur on your website. And guess what? You could even create a GitHub issue for them right there and attach it to the new guy. Hey, CJ. Hey. Fix this bug that we got that I made. So, that's it.

CJ, what's up? How are you doing, my man? Doing good. I I woke up not feeling well, but I took some meds.

I'm hanging in there. So Yeah. Power through. Right? Yeah. For sure.

Yeah. So we had a a bit of an interview process. And like Wes said, it was kind of months long. It took a long time. But I I wanna, like, let everybody know, you know, CJ was really impressive to us for a lot of reasons. Beyond doing Coding Garden, which is his YouTube channel and Twitch channel where he live streamed, CJ is just a really smart dude. He he's been around the Denver scene here for a while.

And you know what? Everybody we've ever talked to has nothing but great things to say about CJ and the work he's produced. So we are just extremely stoked to have him on the team.

CJ, do you want to give us a brief introduction to who you Yarn, and then we can get into some questions to get to know CJ a little bit better.

Sure. I am CJ. Pete, a lot of people actually didn't know my last name, so it's cool if you just called me CJ as well.

But, yeah, I I I I've been into computers and tech all my life. The 1st website I built, I was, like, 12, and I built a Calvin and Hobbes fan site.

From there I started just building and fixing computers, eventually got a computer science degree.

I worked for a very large enterprise, building desktop apps, then I started teaching full stack web development, and then I worked at a consultancy where I worked from the front end to the back end, also in DevOps, kind of just architecting apps and building them. And then most recently, I've been working on and at Coding Garden full time where I do live coding live streams. So typically I'll go live, I'll build apps from scratch, I'll solve algorithmic problems, I'll answer code questions, kind of just to hang out with people and and do cool code things. So, yeah, that's

me. Nice. And, you know, one thing that you you've brought here is a much needed green palette to the video pod here. Wes and I kind of skew towards blues here, and what CJ is bringing all the all the green. It looks really great here if you're on the video pod. You can get a background too. See. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh,

he's not a green developer if, if that's what you thought. No. Oh, that's Scott. Yeah. That's definitely not the direction I was going in.

What what did you build that Calvin and Hobbes set in, by the way? I'm curious.

Yeah. So it was mainly HTML and CSS, and I used FrontPage. I used, like, drag and drop, And, it was hosted on Tripod.

Tripod. Yes. I also hosted on Tripod. Or do you ever get into Angelfire or GeoCities?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I I bounced between them. There was Lycos, Tripod, Angelfire.

Yeah. Maybe a few others. Yeah.

Free servers was was what I where I was at. Free servers. Yeah. Angel Fire was my my stomping ground. That's definitely where I hung out.

So how besides, like, the Calvin and Hobbs site, how did you get into web dev? Was it the was it like, I wanna make a Calvin and Hobbs site, and, therefore, I need to learn how to do it? Or was it this kind of thing is interesting. Let me build a Calvin and Hobbes Deno. No. It was exactly that. It was like, I want to share my passion with the world. How do I do this? And so I I kind of, like, figured it out. And that was, like, early days.

Eventually, I also started working on, like, Myspace themes.

So I was, like, mostly CSS.

And then, I was working on, like, Flash embeds for Myspace as Wes, so, like, doing action script and stuff like that. But, yeah, honestly, most of the stuff I've done has kind of just been, I wanna do the thing, so I have to figure out how to do the thing versus the reverse, I guess.

besides, like, coding and dev, like, all I've gotten into, like, making, not so much recently, but for a while, I was working on a camper van, like, trying to build it from scratch and Yeah. I play I play music. So, like, I've been building out a guitar, so I have to, like, solder it and, like, I I attached a neck to it and stuff like that. So, like yeah. And be even beyond coding, if I wanna do something, I kinda try to figure it out. Yeah. That that fits really well. What

so you you're into music. What kind of instruments you you play other than guitar?

So I'm a mediocre musician. I'm, like, mediocre at every so but guitar is probably my best instrument. I'm still not that good, but I also play Bos, so I can play drums.

And then I can't I know what the keys are on the keyboard, and I know enough to figure them out that I can sequence them to sound good. But I can't really play, like, with 2 handed piano.

Nice. Yeah. We recently got a, an electric piano that has, like, a real piano key field in the house, And it's so nice to just have 1 around because I I'm Scott, like, a trained pianist. I took I took piano lessons many times in my life, but, like, I'm not great. But it's just so nice to have the piano to sit down, bang out some notes, you know, get get some vibes going and and just feel like you can create something like that.

How did how did you know you wanted to do this as a career?

For sure. Versus a hobby. Yeah.

I I would say so, like, the early days of, like, building websites, like, I really didn't even think of it as software development early on. It was kinda just, like, again, like, I had a problem I wanted to solve, so I did it.

But then eventually, working on computers and doing, like, troubleshooting for computers, I did that for a very long time. I was, like, building computers from scratch, like, in high school.

And so, like, I I got pretty good at that, and so I was like, alright. If I can build the thing, I know how the how the how the computer itself works, all the parts and the pieces, but how do I actually make my own apps? You know, like, how can I build something that, like, runs on the desktop? Because, like, that was elusive to me even even when I started getting a computer science degree. So, like, that was my main motivation. I was like, alright. I've already I figured out the machine. Now I want to figure out how can I actually make things happen on the screen?

I I think a lot of times it's, like, unconscious help. Like, there's things that I learned that I'm not I'm not immediately reaching for, but, like, I learned them, so, like, they're kind of, like, there when I'm solving other types of problems.

Because, like yeah. So I I later in my career, I transitioned into full stack development, and never once am I actually, like, working on algorithms from scratch or data structures and stuff like that. But if I'm let's say I'm working in a Redux store in a in a React app, and maybe I wanna make sure that, like, the immutable state updates are a bit more performant, I feel like I tend to reach for the, like, slightly more performant solution first just because I I I've Yeah. I I've thought a lot about, like well, and and I've in in the computer science degree, it's all always talking about performance and and look up time and and stuff like that. So I think that's probably where it helps me, but it JS hard to say because it's in the day to day, like, I I'm not doing algorithms and data structures. So, yeah, ultimately, I think it's kind of like an unconscious help.

Mhmm. Yeah. It's interesting that you say that because it does kind of seem like you got to skip a step that I think some developers, like I don't know. I don't wanna put Wes in this boat, but definitely myself where, like, as an immature developer, I'm gonna reach for the thing that's easiest, the thing that is, like, the least resistance, and not even, like, think about the performance implication of that. And I was like a more mature developer. It's like, oh, wait. I you know, maybe the the simplest solution isn't always the best solution in that regard. So it seems like you did get to skip maybe that that step of being the immature developer.

Yeah. If you've seen the the meme of the, there's, like, the bell curve of, like, here, you're, like, a beginner developer.

I I guess I can't think of the specifics, but, basically, I feel like midwit meme. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I'm on the far end where, like, now I will reach for the simple solutions, but I at least have the the know how and the and the the tools to be like, well, maybe it's not that performance, so I can, like, tweak it. But, yeah, I I feel like I'm on the far end of that bell curve now. Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you example to listeners of of something where a comps high person might do. So I

Terabyte?

I forgot what it was. It was kinda interesting watching the activity monitor just climb and climb, and then it hit, like, a like, it hit, like, 8 gigs and fell over. Wes, I'm gonna tell you, I just did a like, I was testing a bunch of GitHub actions locally, and they have to run Oh, yeah. Through this whole Docker setup. Right? And I I I was getting resource issues. It would always just say I was running out of resources in my container. So I told Docker to just take every bit of resource on my entire computer as possible when I run these GitHub actions. And simply just telling it to run GitHub actions locally brought my computer to a crawl, took every single resource that I had.

Yeah. Let's get back to CJ. What was your what was your very first web dev dev job like?

Sure. So, I had various jobs. I guess, like, the first, software job wasn't Wes dev. Interesting.

In the 1st internship I had, I was assistant administrator.

I guess, what do you wanna hear about?

Let's hear about the 1st software job and then the 1st web dev job specifically.

Gotcha. So, I was working this was fresh out of college, and I was working with C Sharp and .net to build desktop applications.

And so that job, I guess, was interesting because I I had never worked with C Sharp in Vercel, so it was kind of, like, alright, you have a few weeks, maybe a month or so to kind of get up to speed, learn the language.

They threw me into, like, a pretty large project. And and, honestly, I I I talk about this a lot, but that project that I worked on, that very first project, kind of informed the the way I think about and build applications even today, because it was, like, a very well structured object oriented, very large application with a lot of, like, dependencies everywhere and everything. And so, yeah, basically, just getting into that code Bos and learning how everything worked and how everything hooked up and then eventually becoming an owner of that code base. So I worked that job for about 6 months and then the lead on that team moved on and I became the lead all of a sudden. So it was Node my job to maintain the code base. So it wasn't initially my code base, but after 6 months, like, basically, like, I was it was now my code Bos. Like, I knew it in an inside and out. And so, yeah, the day to day was kind of working in that code base. And so the the app itself Wes a desktop app that did data visualization.

So there were modules for different types of data visualization.

So there Wes like a bar chart and a line graph and heat map.

And then there were mechanisms for importing data and basically creating like reusable datasets that you could like drag and drop onto the various visualizations.

So yeah, I learned a ton about visualizing things and working with large datasets. I learned about, like, data decimation. That's where, like, you have, like, thousands and thousands of data points and it wouldn't actually make sense to write draw them all on the screen. So you you decimate them, you break that up, and then only draw, like, every 10th data point or, like, the average of every 10 data points, and then it ends up looking about the same on the screen, but you use a lot less processing to actually display it. Decimation JS a cool name for that. Yeah.

Yeah. So that was that was my 1st dev job.

I don't know. Yeah. I guess anything of you wanna know about it or what I should talk about?

No. I think that that's a that's a really, cool to know. You know? I had a kind of a similar experience where with my 1st job, I had eventually you know, my boss had moved on, and I took on the the senior role from him. And it puts you in such a weird position. It's interesting that you had to do that with c sharp after, not doing any c sharp before your career. Exactly. Yeah. What about your 1st web dev job? So, like, how did you go from c sharp to websites?

Sure. And so this was the same job, but I kind of, like, made web dev my job. So Cool. And this is also why I, like, lean heavily towards web dev these days JS because, like, I in working on desktop apps, specifically Windows desktop apps, they only run on Windows. Right? And so, if you want something to run on a phone or or any other type of device, you need to build a separate app for that or build a website for that. And so, one of the projects I was working on, this was actually, it it was software that needed to run-in the field and they had really, really old computers out there. So the actual UI was just printed reports. So the software would run on the back end, but the the output that they would get would literally, every morning, would run a a job that would print out the charts and their plans for the day.

And I was, like, well, that's I mean, that's really cumbersome and, you know, in manual. So I was, like, what if we had a website that just showed us the data in real time? And so I initially built it with jQuery, and then I learned about this cool thing called AngularJS.

And I I started to build it out with AngularJS.

And, it's actually super interesting because AngularJS, and we're talking about Angular one here, the old the old Angular, it introduced, well, Node didn't introduce, but it used an idea of data mining, and that actually came from the c warp world. So in c sharp, I was working on an app called or a platform called WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, and it introduced this idea of data binding, and then the creator of AngularJS, like, kind of was informed by that as well. So it's like building apps in a similar way, but now they can run-in the Wes, they can run on any device, and, so, yeah, that was my my first exposure to, like, web tech.

Wow. So that it's so interesting how many parallels you have to Wes and I. I mean, Wes and I, we both got started doing kind of, like, hobbyist sites. I think Wes did like a was it like a PlayStation fan site even though you didn't play video games? Was that it?

Yeah. And then we moved into Myspace themes. We both, you know, got our our, you know, hands dirty with Angular Node as being kind of a these big, you know, client side JavaScript apps. I know Yep. You know, Wes and I were doing I don't know. Did you ever do Backbone, Wes?

What was the what's the worst thing you've ever had to do professionally as a developer?

Okay. I I would probably say the 1st internship I had, it wasn't exactly a dev job. It was system administration.

But the reason it was so bad is because I never had anything to do. Like, I would first of all, I had an hour commute. So I would I would commute an hour there, and then they would have nothing for me to do. So I would just sit and browse Reddit, browse Hacker News.

And, I mean, that's when I learned that, like, I need to be doing something. Like, I I can't just collect a paycheck. Like, I need to be actively doing something. So that was probably the worst the worst job I had.

Funny Sanity enough, like, I actually made work for myself. So my job was to manually upgrade, websites that were running Java and Tomcat. They were upgrading from MySQL databases to Postgres database.

And when I got the job, they gave me a a a a manual, like, this thick that was, like, this is the 1st step you need to do to upgrade, and this is the next step. And I was, like, you know what? This can be automated. So I Yeah. I basically I took that manual and I turned it into a a Bos script where you like, literally, it used to take an hour to upload to upgrade a site. Now you would run my script, it would ask you a couple of questions, and it would upgrade the site in, like, 2 minutes.

So, yeah, I I flipped I flipped kinda, like, the worst job into, like, a more fun job Wes I actually got to write some code as well.

Nice. I love that.

do you have any any interesting stories of of things you've made in the past? Yeah. Like it I mean, like you said, I've done a lot of things. I would honestly, the most fun and interesting stuff has come some of the stuff I've done on Coding Garden. So Yeah. One of the one of the apps we built was called, is it new year's day Scott. You can actually go there right now, and it will show everyone's mouse on the screen that's on the site.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And if you click, it will it will it'll do, like, little fireworks.

And so but the the fun part about building this is it's actually internationalized. And so on, for those listening on the podcast, on the screen, it actually says 10 months, 11 days, 14 hours, 16 minutes, 14 seconds until the New Year's Day. But we internationalized it into, like, I think at least 20 different languages. Oh. And, that that was super fun to learn about. Like, it's not as simple as just find and replace. Right? You don't just change months to be another language. Like, in some languages, it makes sense to have the sentence where, like, New Year's Day is at the beginning versus at the end. And so this project was super fun because there was a a bunch of people that contributed translations, and we came up with, like, a custom way of of translating it. And then also, like, build building out the real timeness of, like, having your mouse on the site and seeing other people there. We used, Socket. IO and WebSockets for that. But it was fun to figure out, well, how can you have a 100 people on this site all with their mouse moving and not crash the server? So it's actually like, it's averaging out your mouse movements and then it sends it sends, like, every 500 milliseconds, it sends where your mouse was to the Vercel, and the server maintains that state. And then when it sends it to the other clients, it actually draws it out with CSS animation. So instead of, like, having every single mouse movement, it'll, like, Sanity it across, like, an average of mouse movements. So that was fun to figure out. And it looks smooth for that. You think sometimes that could get wonky.

I I Node, me, personally, if I opt for, you know, using CSS animations while I'm also trying to plot in values with JavaScript, it can it's easy for that to feel wrong, and this doesn't feel wrong at all. So sick. That's really cool. And I got I got another weird or fun one. Dung Deno Dung Hero Scott online.

So, are you all familiar with, Dev Ed? He has a pretty big YouTube channel developed by Ed. He, he put out a, like, a game challenge. She was like, an hour game challenge, like, what can you build in an hour? And so I I built this and, I built it on stream. So there's a stream of me building this live. And the idea is that so you you see a website, you see a bunch of animals jumping around, and they're leaving little poop emojis.

And in in the, the top right is the number of dungs that have been collected. And so multiple people can be on the site, and you click on the dungs to collect them, and you just try to get that number as high as possible. It's kind of like a a multiplayer cookie clicker kind of thing. Yeah.

Yeah. And what's also fun about this is this site has been running it crashed at one point, but I think at this point, it's been up for at least a year and a half, and it's just a long running node server. So that number in the top right is literally just a number stored in memory in Node. So it's not even a database.

It's just a process that's running, and it just keeps track of that that number of clicks on the site. Yeah. That's so cool.

What I wanna try to what I'm trying to game it right now. Yeah. I'll yeah. That's classic Wes here. There's protections against it. You can try. But you'll notice, like, if you try to click too fast, the emoji will reappear.

There's the server side prevents an IP from clicking too many too fast.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. I have to use that. What what is some tech that you're into right now? Like, what's some cool stuff that you you feel like inspires you, tech wise?

Definitely.

I've been looking a lot into, like, full stack type safety stuff.

Node it honestly baffles me how how long Node. Js and the the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem have been around, without having mechanisms for that, like, really, like, sharing types between front end and back end, having more structured code bases. So Hono is really cool. I've been looking into Hono.

And then also frameworks that introduce opinions. So, like, Adonis. Bos is Wes I haven't tried yet, but I wanna give it a try because it's people talk about it as kind of like the Laravel of the JavaScript world.

it has opinions about where do things go and a lot of stuff built in, and, you kind of see that trend happening in the JavaScript and TypeScript world, especially with meta frameworks, like like Svelte to Next. JS and even Next. Js on the Vue side.

For a while, they were just trying to figure things out of, like, alright, how do we get hybrid rendering and how do we get sites easily built with it with this tech. But now you can see things popping up like Blitz. Js, if you've heard of that for that's built on top of Next, and it tries to introduce more opinions and give more code structure. So those are the kinds of things I'm excited about. It's just cleaner and more opinionated and predictable code Bos, basically.

Yeah. And you do a lot of this stuff on on your Coding Garden streams. You had, like, a Try Day Friday where you're just trying new stuff. And I I was I was watching one time. You just had, like, a massive list of stuff you wanted to try. You were organizing into different different types of things.

Is that, like, something that you get joy from JS is trying a bunch of different new tech? Definitely. I I mean, I think that's that's one thing that can happen if you just only use 1 type of tech or 1 platform for a really long time is you you miss out on what the other languages and frameworks and ecosystems are doing. So more recently, I tried Laravel for the 1st time, and it was really cool to see how everything is just built in. And then, like, a few weeks later, I tried Java Spring Boot. And, again, a bunch of stuff built in, it does a lot for you. So it's like I I think the people that are creating these types of frameworks in the JavaScript and TypeScript world, they're pulling influences from other languages, other frameworks, other platforms. And so, yeah, for me, it's super fun to just see what's out there and see what's beyond JavaScript, basically.

Yeah. I think so many people miss that context of the outside of their their bubble. Right? You know? I I know for me personally, the the moment I try something that's outside of my bubble and it gives me this whole other viewpoint on what I'm doing, you Scott to realize that, like, maybe the way that you're doing things all the time isn't necessarily always the best or the right one just because it feels right. There's all these different approaches, and that recently hit me with the whole HCMX thing. Not that, like, I wanna build everything in HTMX. No. I think I'm still firmly in the the Svelte world. But when I tried HTMX, it was kind of like, oh, this is very different than what I do, and it's making me think differently about how I approach problems.

So that's that's pretty cool that you you, you get to do stuff like that. Did you see

I did. I haven't had a chance to try it, but it looks pretty cool.

I absolutely saw HTMZ. Yes. I I did. I've pawed all through that, and I thought briefly to myself, oh, I should use this. And I thought I got better things to do right now. I haven't. What is it?

And, like, Node nonstandard HTML elements. So, like, nonstandard elements.

And what what's cool about it is they say that it did the whole the whole library is enough JavaScript for just a simple script tag on your your site. Like, Wes you don't have, like, any JavaScript really to do it. So it's also very low feature.

You can't, like, replace multiple areas like you can in h t m x, but Yeah. Pretty interesting.

something like this natively. You know? Mhmm. Well, it's been, like, a desire for the longest time, like, introduction of of web components. Everyone for the longest time was like, alright. Web components are gonna kill front end frameworks, and it's all just gonna be built into the browser, but we really never saw that.

But, yeah, that's it's it is exciting to use less frameworks. If it's just built in, like, that's awesome.

Just I I spent the most time with it more recently. For the longest time, I was doing React professionally, but I was doing Vue for all my side projects, and actually ran the Vue JS meetup here in Denver. As a joke, we kind of called it the Vue support group because, like, no one actually used Vue as their full time job, they would just go there to talk about Vue.

But I've I've always been a fan of of things that, like, get rid of the boilerplate, make things simpler, and Svelte kind of ticks all those boxes. So, yeah, I build things with Svelte these days.

Yeah. That was kind of me too. I my I did React professionally, but Svelte was always my hobby.

And then when we got the chance to rebuild level up tutorials, I'm like, I'm picking SvelteKit. When we got a chance to build a new syntax site, picking SvelteKit. So now I got to surround myself with SvelteKit, and life is good.

What's what's your tech setup? Let's get into some of that stuff. What are you working with? What's your editor?

So I use Versus Code.

I have a theme. I think it's called JS or just dark is what it's called.

If you go to github.com/codinggarden/vscodedashsettings, it has all the extensions I use, the font I use and everything. But yeah, I like a nice dark and high contrast theme.

I'm running on an M1 Mac from I think 2021.

My keyboard is actually, let me look up the exact name really quick.

Yeah. So my keyboard is the RK Royal Kluge G68.

So I'm using a different keyboard here because I don't want the clicky sound when I'm, like, on video, but Yeah. Oh, yeah. This yeah. Yeah. This is the one that I use. It's got a nice cool red and gray and black color color theme, and I do like the the 65% keyboards because they take up less space.

And yeah. So I use that. Yeah. So, like,

65% of the size of of a regular one? Exactly. Node from? So the if you think of, like, a full size keyboard would include, like, a numpad, and then you also have, like, the arrow keys that are, like, offset from the rest of the keys, then you have a separate row for the function keys.

Yeah. So that's more of a a 100% keyboard, I Wes. Yeah. Yeah.

But this kind of, like, tries to make it smaller. So it will you'll see that the arrow keys have been, like, smooshed into the the main Bos, and then the number keys are dual function for also, like, function and number keys.

Oh, yeah. It's a little cumbersome sometimes because you do have to press, like, the function modifier to get your f keys. But

but I feel like I I don't do those often enough that it's not as cumbersome to just do function key and then the one that I need. Yeah. But yeah. I'm feeling like a total noob because I to go to definition, I almost always right click on my mouse, and these are, like, go to definition. Noob? Yeah. That's, like, the the, the the only, like, really bad mouse thing I do is go to definition or rename symbol. Like, I don't have I need shortcuts for all those because I use them all the time.

What about monitor and and,

what kind of monitor do you use? So for the longest time, I just use my my MacBook screen. So I I got really used to only using my MacBook because, when I live stream, I don't like to have extra screens where I'm, like, bouncing between stuff. I I technically have a separate screen that is attached to my streaming computer, but, yeah, for the most part, I just use my laptop screen. And then I have this 22 inch monitor. I have no idea what it is. I've had it for, like, 5 years that I recently plugged in, so I can have, like, Slack in another window. Yeah. Nice. Move that slide down. And you have a you have a separate computer for streaming? Exactly. Yeah. So, it's a Windows, basically, like a gaming PC. And it, Node of the main reasons I did that is just so that, like, my fan laptops the fans in my laptop wouldn't spin up when I'm streaming because I'm I'm running Docker, I have, like, a bunch of tabs in my browser open up all this stuff. And if I had OBS running as well, then, like, that that just, like, wouldn't work. And so yeah. So it's a separate gaming computer. I have, like, 2 HDMI capture cards, 1 for the camera, 1 for the PC, and then I've got a audio interface that plugs into that as well.

I agree with that. I haven't heard the fans turn turn on, but I I haven't tried streaming directly from it. I think I'm I'm also kind of, like, set in my ways. Like, I have my stream set up where I can just go live, so I haven't Yeah. Tested out anything new. But, I mean, you're completely right. Like, this thing is quiet. Like, I've never heard it spin up. Yeah. I was having, like, mouse lagging issues with OBS the other day, though, that I I couldn't figure out. So,

well, I gotta dig more into it. Yeah. In my experience, the moment you touch your streaming setup, it all breaks because that was yeah. I never had it dialed in, and then I would, like, modify just ever so slightly. And then next thing you know, I'm, you know, deep into OBS. Let's talk about your your streaming stuff, though.

Let's go deep on this stuff. Like Sounds good. How did you get how how did you choose to, like, get into to streaming specifically? Was it difficult to go live and feel comfortable being live on the Internet?

I mean, it it took a while. So, initially, I started live streaming because I was teaching at a, a coding Scott. And I actually took a 3 month break from that, but I wanted to, like, keep teaching. So I Wes, like, I I should try this this live streaming thing. But, yeah, it it took a long time before I got comfortable, and I think, like, one of the things I had to do early on was just pretend, like, I'm in front of a like, I'm in the classroom, and I kinda just doing my thing. Like, pay less attention to, like, the view count. If people come into the chat, do my best to, like, interact and talk to them. But, a lot of times, you when you're I think to even to develop a persona and, like, get comfortable, you kinda just have to stream, like, everyone's watching or, like, no one's watching. I guess whatever work works for how you're comfortable. You know? Yeah. That that was,

I don't know. Did that ever, like, bug you if you you saw, like, 0 people watching or anything like that? I have no idea how that that onboarding would have helped. No. It it did, but I think that's kind of why I had to hide it at a certain point. It was just, like, at a cert like, people were

showing up and watching, I guess, like, because of me. So as long as I was myself and I was doing my thing, I I felt like people would eventually come. And I guess the other thing JS, so I started streaming live streaming on YouTube, and the nice thing about YouTube is, like, the discoverability. So Mhmm. That 1st live stream I did, there were, like, maybe 2 people in the chat, and that's just because, like, I sent a link to my friend, and they, like, opened it up, which actually is a pro tip. If you're starting to stream,

your friends and your family should at least open it up so it bumps that view count a little bit. No. That is totally a pro tip. Yeah. My my wife likes every single one of our TikToks. She likes and bookmarks every single one of our TikToks Yeah. Just for that extra push.

But talking about discoverability. So, yeah, 2 or 3 people actually watched live, but because it's that YouTube livestream now becomes a a VOD, it has thousands of views now. And so, that was the nice thing about starting streaming on YouTube initially JS that even if I when I was live, only a few people watched, eventually, other people would go back and find the livestream, then they would subscribe, and then eventually, they would come in and and start hanging out in the live chat. Mhmm. So, yeah, it was it was a slow process, but that discoverability, I think, was key early on in on YouTube.

Yeah. For sure.

Why blue screen? I noticed that you do a blue screen for your green screen. Yep. Is it because you have so much green elsewhere in your office here? That's exactly it. So I I started with a green screen, and then I wanted to if you look at some of the earliest coding garden streams, I wanted to have a little, bamboo plant, like, sitting next to my laptop. But the green screen would it would key out the leaves of the plant. Oh, yeah. And then, eventually, I got shirts that had, like, flowers on Wes, so I was like, alright. I need to figure this Scott. And so I got a blue screen. But, fun fact, have you seen,

Squid Game? I have not seen Squid Game. It freaks my wife out, so we don't watch it. Yeah. I gotcha. But,

they wear green sports suits or, like, tracksuits.

And so all all of the keying done in that show was done with blue screens because all of the actors were wearing, and actresses are wearing green. Yeah. I I dove into that a little bit in in college. I I did a a short film, and we used a blue tarp for it. And then we didn't have enough light.

And, man, the keying was awful. It was so terrible. It took me like, I had to, like, manually key so much. I was, like, rotoscoping.

I was like, just Node bad key. Yeah.

What's your philosophy on on teaching in general? Like, I'm sure over time, it's changed and you you've evolved. Yeah. Because you you've taught in in person as well. Right? Exactly. Yeah. So I I taught at a Node school for, like, roughly 3 Yarn.

And honestly, that's that's kind of where I honed my craft. Right? So, like, being in front of a classroom of 30 students every day and kind of getting the hang of teaching things, and then, eventually, I started to do, like, off the cuff lessons. So, like, instead of, like, planned lessons, like, we're gonna teach this and this and this, like, there would be some students that were struggling a little bit. So it made a lot of sense to be, like, alright. Let's just do an impromptu lesson on what the students are having issues with. And so I got really got the hang of, kinda just, like, writing down a few objectives that we would cover and then going and, like, kind of, like, making sure that I cover each objective, which kind of gets into my philosophy, which is, like, I you maybe don't see it as much on the live stream, it happens every now and then, but I I do like to be objective focused. And so these are, like, actionable things that students should walk away from from a lesson. So, like, you use Vercel.

One of the concepts that I learned teaching was Bloom's taxonomy. And so this is a bunch of words you can use to describe the type of learning that's going to happen. So, and it also, like, it builds as a pyramid. So at the very bottom is kind of like define and describe. So define HTTP Wes. Right? And describe the HTTP request response cycle. And so that kind of, like, starts the student with, alright, I have some definitions, I can at least do the TypeScript, but then from there, you move on to application. And so then it's you might be say something like use Node. Js and Express to build a web server that handles the HTTP request and response cycle. And so that's also my kind of like my philosophy there as well Wes starting with with base knowledge and kind of, like, building building up from

Yeah. Let's talk about some noncoding stuff before we wrap up here.

What kind of hobbies do you have? What do you what do you do besides I know you mentioned, you know, doing some music stuff, but Yeah. You know, what are your what are your hobbies?

Probably my dog is my is my biggest hobby. So I have a a Saint Bernard.

Node.

So yeah. I I we we walk him, like, we go for multi hour walks, like, every weekend, and I take as many breaks as I can to go see him. So I work in my basement, and, he's too scared to come down the stairs. So it kinda force forces me to at least, like, leave the desk every hour to, like, go pet him and, like, hang out in the backyard.

That's so cool. Yeah. That's a color Colorado thing. Right? The, avalanche, their mascot is a Saint Bernard. So my typical Bernie. Yeah. Do you have one of those little kegs that you can put on them to carry some bread? I'll I'll share a pic I'll I'll share a picture. Maybe Randy can edit it in for the video podcast. But, yeah. We have a and we have some, like, amazing Christmas photos that we took. He's he's just so regal, and he's got his barrel there. He's got a barrel. Yeah. And then we we did the thing. I don't know if you saw it. Like, early pandemic, people were putting toilet paper rolls on on their dog to look like a barrel, but it's like I have that. Because Yeah. Because of the toilet paper rolls shortage. Yeah. I don't know. We did we have a pic of that too. Yeah. That's so cute.

So besides that, like I mentioned, I like making music. And then more recently, I've been working on, like, a custom guitar project. So, I got a Squire Starcaster and I replaced the neck, so I found a a neck that, is like a in an old school Stratocaster deck, and I attached that, and then I installed some Invader pickups in it.

Also, like, skateboarding. I I don't skateboard as much lately especially because there's so much snow on the ground. Mhmm. But I I've I've been skating since I was, like, 12. And I think, like, from from the age of 12 to 18, I didn't go a single day without skateboarding.

And then after but after that, it's kinda just been on and off. But I think because I did it for so long, all the muscle memory is there, so I can kinda just go, like, pick it up anytime I want to. Just kidding. Yeah. I'm I'm like

I would be out. You know? I went to a, a park with Travis Nielsen, like, a year and a half ago in Hawaii, And it Wes, like, a sick concrete park. I'm used to concrete parks because I grew up on 1. So, like, that doesn't scare me. But I hadn't dropped in on a skateboard in forever. Like, I ride I ride weekly throughout the neighborhood with the dogs and kids and stuff. But Yeah. Dropping in at, my advanced age of 37 on a concrete, quarter pipe. Even though it was like a it was like a 6 foot quarter pipe, man, that was horrifying for me. I did it, but it it was definitely, you know, a little scary there. What what's the best trick you ever hit ever in your entire life?

So I, like, I make a lot of parallels between, like, my skateboarding journey and also, like, learning to code because I was so bad. Like, it took me probably 3 years before I even landed a kick a kickflip, but I think the the mentality of just, like, keep on trying, keep on trying, and, like, that kind of is definitely parallel to, like, everything else I do. It's just, like, just try it till you make it work. So, yeah, I've never been really that good. Early days, I landed maybe, like, 2 or 3 3 60 flips.

Wow. These days, I also keep it pretty simple because I don't wanna break anything.

So I've got my, like, just basic kickflips. I like to do little shuvits, and then I like bowl skating too. So I'll do, like, little, like, slappy grinds and then just, like, rock to fakies and stuff like that. That freaks me out, but I love that you can do that.

I I made a little like, a a small little video for for Twitter of, like, just doing a few tricks.

No. Thanks.

Little did you know, you could have gotten a syntax deck for free just Yeah. Months later.

No. It's so funny. Like, I mean, I I, I I I knew yeah. But, I I kind of felt like that video I made was almost like a sponsor me tape. So, like, there there's this whole idea, like, when you're growing up skateboarding of, like I know all about this. Yeah. Yeah. You to get your best tricks, and you wanna get it on film, and you wanna get sponsors. So that that was like a syntax sponsor me tape, basically.

Yeah. I got to, I was a rollerblader, more than a skateboarder, and I got to, like, do vans skatepark openings. And I I was deep in that world, man, of trying to trying to get major sponsorships or or gear or anything from anybody.

I had a mini a tape. Yeah. That's actually how I Scott a new video, which is, kind of how I got into here. You Node, skate video, whatever. And, you know, now I'm doing video as a career.

There's a really, really good good really good documentary on it. Handle. Yeah. Oh, yeah. This Yeah.

Like the filename it's called. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I I FX 10? No. Obviously not. I just like going in my search history. I rented 1 in college, and it it Wes like, I got to live out my skate dreams. The VX 1000.

VX 1000. Yeah. Classic.

Well, I so this this weekend, I actually found something. I'll show you.

I was gonna say this would be perfect for a set. Yeah.

It is a Sony Mavica, so it's the exact opposite of high quality.

It, it runs on floppy disk. Let me see if I can get the floppy disk No. Thing that's in. Floppy disk. And, this this this specific model was from 99, but I think this thing came out, like, in 97.

But, yeah, I found this at the thrift store on Friday, and, like, yesterday, I was going around taking photos. My wife was, like, trying to hide her face because I look at this old giant camera.

But it's so sick. Like, it it there's it's, there's something to be said about, like, that mechanical sound of, like, the the floppy going in. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That sounds good. Yeah.

And then you can, like I don't know if it's coming across on the mic, but you can, like, hear it spinning when it turns on. I don't know. I have a, like, a mini DV camera I've been ripping stuff from lately because I just wanted to rip all my mini DV onto my computer. And that thing sounds like it's truly struggling every time it pulls in the tape. It's like, the worst the exact opposite of of that lovely sound. Yeah.

Do we have anything else we wanna hit, Wes? I think we should do some sick picks. Cool. Alright. Let's get into the part of the show where we're talking about sick picks and shameless plugs. We pick things that we like or enjoy.

CJ, is there anything in your life that you would want to sick pick?

I am going to sick pick the idea of ergonomics.

So especially starting this new job, like, I've made sure that I have, like, the right desk set up and everything. I I started to get, wrist issues a while back where, like, it got to the point where, like, I couldn't even use my right wrist. And so I actually switched to using a a left handed mouse left handed vertical mouse.

So, yeah, vertical mice, anything to get your setup so that you're at 90 degree angles. So, like, make sure your arms are at 90 degree when you're using your keyboard, make sure your feet are touching the ground.

My sig pick is ergonomics. Because if you if you don't do it early on, you will start to feel it later in life for sure. That's yeah. Too true.

Too true.

intricate tests for all sorts of things. And, like, I got into this because he was testing, like, you know, impact drivers and stuff. But he he since moved on to all kinds of different things. And his most recent video is what I'm sick picking explicitly.

This is ridiculous. He tested all of the different trash bags that exist, and he put them through so many different tests. And I'm just sick picking this trash bag test video.

I I I told Courtney that I was watching a a nearly 30 minute video on trash bag tests, and she this JS like, what are you doing with your life? But I gotta say, I learned a lot about trash bags. And the most interesting thing about this video is this guy manages to create the most amazing tests for this stuff, and I I just really appreciate that. The programming mind would love to, rate these kind of stress tests and endurance tests. I just think about how this would translate, into to code it at any given time. It. This trash bag Node specifically was a blast to watch.

I was happy to see that the Kirkland brand, which is the ones I already bought, were, like, 3rd place in the listing. The drum liner

I think that I don't know what what drum liner is. I don't know if we even have those. We just got regular regular old trash bags. Regular Just American sized. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have,

I guess, Coding Garden. If you visit coding.garden, it has links to all my stuff, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, all that. So yeah.

Yeah. And CJ JS Node to be producing regular content on the Syntax YouTube channel. My shameless plug will be the Syntax YouTube channel. The podcast is in a video form. If you wanna see, CJ's luscious wall of greenery behind him right now, head on over to YouTube, and, check it out. It's at syntaxfm