How To Stay Up To Date with Daily.dev’s Francesco Ciulla

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we have a very awesome guest for you. We have Francesco Chula here from Daily Dev to talk all about the platform daily dev, its history, community building, and more. This one's going to be really, really awesome.

With me JS always is Wes Bos. What's up, Wes? Hey. Stoked to talk about daily dev today. It seems like, seems like it's popping up quite a bit lately.

And, it's kinda interesting to see a platform that is not one of the major

social media companies sort of taking taking hold. And, also with us is Sanity at century.i0.

I believe they actually sponsor on daily dev, so you may see their logo while you're browsing daily dev.

Sentry is the perfect place to track all of your errors, bugs, and all that and more performance issues and stuff. So head on over to century.i0forward/ syntax. Sign up and get 2 months for free.

It's amazing. So, Francesco, welcome to syntax. Do you wanna give us a little brief introduction about who you are and what you do? Yeah. Sure. Thank you so much for inviting me. Yes. I'm Francesco, developer advocate at DeliDev.

I've been very active on Twitter and YouTube. Sorry. Now it's called X and public speaker, Docker.

I do many things. I'll say I'm also a small podcaster. And, yeah, I'm super honored to be to be here. And, yeah, let's talk about the the dev for a while. Yeah. Awesome. So I guess first and foremost, do you wanna give listeners a background into daily dev who might not be familiar with what the heck this thing is and how it came about? I like it how the what the heck is daily dev. Daily dev is a platform.

Daily dev is a platform for developers by developers. That's why it's called daily Scott dev. It's not a random platform for everyone. It's focused on developers.

The core idea is to have a feed, a personalized feed to stay up to date. Now the CEO would be upset if I give just this short explanation.

The data is much, much more. We have new features, squads, communities, search, AI powered features, but at the hits core,

the core idea is to have something to stay up to date because we know that it's, it's hard to stay up to date as a developer. It's like a hard task, and I think everyone can agree with this. Even I agree agree with this. Yeah. So that's the core idea. Nice. Yeah. I think I first became of daily dev a little bit ago. It's sort of popping up in our analytics here and there, or even people would mention it in our comments and things like that. And at that point, I checked it out, and I believe it was just an extension. Node it start out as a Chrome extension, or was it always a landing page?

Yes. So currently, we have a Chrome extension, which is the big one, but we also support other browsers, like Firefox.

We launched Android mobile app 2 months ago, and it's also available on the as a progressive web app also for Bos and for just the browser without the extension. So it's available in many different many different ways. What what we'd like is the Chrome extension or the extension will give you, like, the full,

experience, I would say. Yeah. It's kinda interesting. Like, anyone listening has never visited it before. In the last, like, I don't know, maybe 4 or 5 years, we've sort of seen, like, the death of the personal website. You know? Like, anyone making content right now is either posting it to YouTube or you're posting it to to Twitter.

The olden days of of web dev used to be like, you you had a blog, you wrote some really cool stuff, and if if that was good content, it would get passed around. And, certainly, that is is still the case. But we're seeing Node, like, even with the syntax website, it's hard to share your stuff.

When you write good stuff on your own website, it's really hard to share that with other people. There's not Google killed off the RSS feed reader.

Twitter will tank your your post if you if you put a link in them these days. Sorry, Scott. What were you saying? No. I was gonna say, Reddit will hunt you down like a a Frankenstein if you try to post anything of your own. Reddit lets you post 1 in 10 of your own personal stuff, and it's just like It's that. Yeah. I just wrote this cool thing. I wanna share it with people. Like, let me post it somewhere.

And it it feels like daily dev is the space where we've gotten back to people sharing cool links and people sharing cool stuff, and it adds in all, like, the modern stuff, which is yeah. It's hard to find good stuff. You maybe you do need a algorithm. There's a reason why everything is is an algorithm. So, like, I don't know. Is that is that a fair take on what this is?

Yes. So I'm old enough that I remember that, that days.

And but I think that having a platform with many users, like like, maybe back then, we were less on the Internet. So, like, we can we could have, like, single single pages, and they would work very well. Yeah. I think they I think they still work well for especially for someone if you do this very consistently since the beginning. To be honest, now relying on a relying on a platform will give you a bit more visibility, especially the if I was I have to start, like, blogging tomorrow from from 0, creating your own blog Sanity impossible, but it will make your life harder instead trying to use a platform. It's easier at the beginning. It doesn't, like, you know, less friction at the beginning. So this is, I think, the the reason why they are winning. Like, the new users, they will go on something that already ESLint. And then the more the more users will come, they'll just sign up. And also I think that having, a UI that you already Node, it's more familiar. Like, if you create your custom website, you can have a strong call to action. I agree. But, you know, Twitter is Twitter. LinkedIn, we know this. The developer, we are trying to make this more, like, to give the best experience. We are also, like, incredible designers. No. I don't design the developer. No worries. I will not touch that time Bos the guy.

So I think that, also, this is one of the strong points, like, giving a delightful experience.

Yeah. It definitely is a delightful experience. And I think that's one of the things that I latched onto at first because, you know, you see people mentioning or whatever. You hop on, and you see a giant wall of just really useful things. It's like you you see all these useful conference talks or useful blog posts or this or that.

Despite the fact that, you know, people can end up posting their own stuff, it's not junk. You you find up just really, really high quality things all the time on here. And I think the design lends itself to that. It does it what it reminds me of, like Wes said, it does remind me of the old web in that way Wes you're actually it's not about numbers and points and whatever. It's about finding good stuff, and I think that's, like, really super successful. When did you join Daily Dev? And and do you have any, like, history on when it started and maybe, like, some of the growth trajectory from it? Yeah. Sure. So about this the history of daily dev, I think it's fascinating. So I'll take 1 minute to to just say that. So, basically, there were 3 founders at the beginning. Developer, you, and, Scott of designer.

And, basically, the developer, had this issue of staying up to date. So it was his real issue. And then one of the other founders, they were friends back then.

He charged him to say, okay. And then build something. You're a developer. Just build. Stop complaining and do something.

And then he went on a honeymoon. So it was some years ago. And then, you know, the this developer with the the the current CEO, they said, okay. Let's let's let's surprise him. Let's do something, like, in a few days, and let's, show him, like, an MVP, and then let's show how cool it can be, like, to be a developer and then build the things with your own, hands.

And long story short, when the other cofounder came back, they showed him, the first version of the leader, which of course is not how it looks now. You can just think about that. I can provide an older design if you want to show it, and they were surprised.

And then they got some users, but what really made them the 1st ex little explosion of the is something that I think it's very strange.

1 person from the UK put the on product hunt without even asking for permission to this user. So those are Node someone could be, like, absolutely upset of, like, being launched randomly by someone.

But this is how did he ever got his first, thousands of users. So let's say, okay. Maybe this is something. It's not just a Node project, but this can become something that is useful. This is the prelude, I would say, of, and about when I joined, I joined in October 2021.

And when I joined, I was the 6th person joining. So I was the 3rd 3rd employee, and now we are about 30 after some time.

And we raised a seat around of $11,000,000.

So I don't know if you can call it still a startup, but, yeah, I still I would say a very, let's say, interesting journey, and I think also inspirational from my personal point of view. Yeah. So that's wild that

a developer landing page of essentially bookmarks that people are sharing could support so many jobs and get investment activity and all this stuff. I mean, it's they're mostly useful. And, like, I find personally a ton of value in it. So that all tracks to me. But it it is wild that you think, like, you know, this kinda just showed up out of out of I don't wanna say out of nowhere. You you guys built it and took time, but it just showed up. And all of a sudden, it's this useful tool. It's fully featured. You have all these users, and it's highly valuable. So that's, like, just really, really pretty fascinating to me overall. Did you get your 1st power user from that Product Hunt launch? Like, the 1st person who was, like, gung ho post and stuff on here left and right? Yes. I can mention a specific person. His name is Martin.

He's from Norway.

So he was an absolute power user of the.

And the the the story keeps being inspiring because now he works with us. Like, after a while, he joined the company. And he he's one of the 2 people who joined the by contributing to the open source project. So we don't have only 1 person who joined the by contributing to the project, but 2 people. So this is not a coincidence. We really care about the contributions of the Sanity. And, yes, so when someone tells me, like, now it's impossible to get a job or just contribute it to open source, I can say no. We have not 1 but 2 people who are in our company that are were actually power users and contributors to the community. So kudos to them and a huge shout out to Lee from, Philippines and Martin from Norway. By the way, we are spread around the world. We have people from Australia, Italy. Me, but we are from Italy. Probably you Node that by the accent. And, it is.

Wow. And how many users do you have total now? Is that something you can share or just generally? I hope I hope I can share this information because Wes got many, many people. I would say around 2 half a 1000000 users. So this is like it's growing very, very Wes, especially in the past few months.

Wes bid like 20%.

I can go I can Sanity exact the numbers because we are waiting to reach real big numbers to go in brag mode. We are currently in silent Node, but too soon, we will you will hear from us how much we can we can brag. But, but I hope that this JS, is not some information that I can share. But, yeah, it's fine. It's fine. But, and, something that I forgot to say very important, like, JS a free product for everyone. This makes my life as a developer advocate super easy because you can just say, just go and check daily Scott dev. But it's, it's our approach, and, for now, it's working very well. And how does daily dev make money? I know there's venture capital behind it, and then there's ads. Is that the the thing right now? Thank you. This is a great question. So we even get people Sanity in the feedback. Like, ah, you are selling our data. You're this is how you get our money. This JS, like, a.

The truth is that we have investors, and we have also some ads on the platform. This is how we make this this project sustainable. So this is the the approach, and we wanted to go in that direction. And for now, this is it it worked so far, we can say. So this is our business model, I would say. Wes. It's certainly interesting,

the platform. Like, I'll tell you 2 things I'm surprised about JS, first, like, there's a lot more people on there than you think. Like, we started posting our syntax stuff too. Like, oh, wow. Like, this is there's quite a few people on here, and it's always exciting to see that type of thing because you think like, oh, yeah. All the developers are on on Twitter all day long. You know? And we used to be on Hacker News, but, like, now there's not really a whole bunch of stuff on Hacker News about programming. It's more just Scott ups and and just, like, tech adjacent stuff. But this is, like, actually coding related stuff on every single one. And the other thing I'm surprised about is there's not maybe it's maybe we're too early for this, but there's not, like, grifters.

Like, there's not any people on here who are trying to, like, game it. But there there is an algorithm. Maybe that is my question next is, like, how does it decide what's so good to surface on the front page?

Yes. So about the details of the algorithm, I can't I don't know exactly how it works. So Okay. That part. Maybe, to give a bit more context, we should say that, they did have something called the, which is how our probably one of the Wes, the biggest features. By the way, we'll have a real launch in September because we need a really Scott launch for this squad. So probably you didn't know. And this is funny because we we were advocating for schools, like, 1 year ago, 6 months ago, and now we are really doing other stuff. And now people are starting to to create these scores that are sort of communities specific communities.

I love that feature. I use that feature as a user. I think this is a great plus if you are a developer advocate because I use it, and now if you if you also have it, you will probably see the benefits.

I like that these sort of squads, they are very focused on a topic. And now maybe for syntax, the posts are similar to what you post on Twitter or LinkedIn.

But for example, from a personal point of view, maybe I don't want to share everything I share on Twitter on the platform. I have a specific squad about Rust. There, I share just the Rust stuff. And then I have also my personal one. So it's, it's great, like, having the possibility to differentiate your your content. I think this is a huge plus because usually social media, they are an absolute mess.

And for example, there are other companies that are joining. And for example, I noticed something. The companies you know, maybe on Twitter, they make a mix of launches and then memes and then, something else.

When they are and they they are more specific. Maybe less memes, less and they are more, like, on point, I would say, because the audience you speak to can be very specific people who joined that squad for a reason. So you don't have you as you say, you don't have to grief the for impressions. So you can go on the quality part, and I really like that. I hope that you you like that, that too. I've seen that your Scott is growing is growing strong, and I and I hope that you are honestly enjoying it. I currently receive a very good, good engagement and sometimes a very good, discussions.

Also big plus so you can reply in empty comments. I can actually make an empty comment, which is basically better than other many many more platforms.

And, yes, that's it. Yeah. I I think a lot of things you said. I mean, like, Twitter for 1.

I don't know if it's it's the for you algorithm or whatever. But now it it wants to show me so many unrelated things, things that I don't care about, things that I don't wanna see, things that aren't helpful, or it's just people complaining, raging,

yeah. Stuff. Are you seeing that too, Scott? Like No. I see it's kind of a the politics. Yeah. Yeah. It it's it's almost like a Facebook where you're starting to see, like, videos that are like like, that's kinda interesting, but, like, that's not really what I'm here for. And I guess Twitter doesn't really care, because they're keeping you there longer. But, like, I'll just go to my for you page right now, and it'll often Node

it's a a lot of coding right now. I don't know. For for even if it is coding for me, it surfaces a lot of rage bait. It surfaces a lot of arguments.

Yeah. People complaining about things. And, like, if I scroll down, I can't even see, you know, maybe 1 out of every 20, 30 post is something useful or helpful.

But then, like, daily dev, you open it, my feed or whatever, there's, like, 10 useful things on the 1st page when you when you load it up. So, like, to me, that's really the added benefit of, like, having a a community that's all about, like, sharing helpful things Vercel potentially that that I don't Node. The the types of drama that you get with other social platforms.

And even, like, LinkedIn, you know, there's a lot of, like, useful things being shared on LinkedIn, but it's mostly garbage. And this I found to be, like, very, like, highly curated, high quality resources. And by the way, our our daily our our dev squad, our squad of syntax, which we'll have available in the link. And, Wes, I did get the at syntax handle, not syntax f m e o b handle. Right on. We we've been growing. We got a 1000 people on there. And we don't just post every episode of syntax. We're posting all kinds of stuff from today, I shared an open source email platform, a blog on how to make SVG spinners, and Wes a a Cubase web framework. So

fun fun stuff on there. That's what that's what's gotta happen. Like, you hear people complaining about, oh, my stuff isn't getting any traction, and I posted to here. Where else can I post it? And people don't want just to have your feet to be shoving their your stuff down their throat. People want to see stuff that is actually interesting to you and that is actually exciting. I'm glad that we're we're doing that or you're doing that because otherwise, it just becomes like another funnel for, like, auto posting crap for more people to see. And maybe, Francesco, that's the question. It's like, what type of stuff do you see doing really well on it? Like, what type of stuff do people actually enjoy? Do you have anything that stands out there?

Yes. Sure. So of course, for I think that lately, in the past few weeks, they became the number Node feature. Like, many friends, like, you, they're really enjoying, enjoying these.

I think that many people, they really like customizing their feed, which which is basically the the main feature. Now we're talking about squads because we open squad. But, basically, when you join the lead dev, you can decide what you what you want to see. And this, for example, on other platforms, you don't have control. And on Twitter, I can try and block and mute something. On the, you can Node, I want to follow Rust tags. I want to follow podcast Yeah. Tag. So that's,

something Let me interrupt you there, though. Like yeah. We get, like, we get that it you can customize it, then that's cool. But I'm I'm more thinking, like, someone's listening to this right now, and they wanna start making content.

You have very large YouTube channel, very large Twitter. You know you make content. Right? What do you think is doing well right now? What type of content are people hungry to see? Because you can look on daily dams, like, oh, that's doing well.

So you mean, like, in type of content?

Yeah. Yeah. Like, what type of content are you are you are you seeing any themes or any back in the day, it used to be RoundUp. Ten jQuery plug ins to help you do the next Oh, RoundUp. Wes.

Website. Yeah. I wrote a round up myself before I was You're showing your your age, as was saying. It also and so I think that everything related to AI LLM that, it has been humbling for 2 years Node. So everything that is related to that usually performs well. There is also an AI squad created by, cool people, cool AI moderators.

I'll be a bit selfish here. Now I am I became a a huge fan of Rust, so I have also my own squad, and I found this topic to go very well. I think that, like, articles that are, for example, from big sources, like, for example, for free Goatcamp, like articles that are already important and and from important sources, they usually go well. Yeah. Something controversial sometimes, I see. Sometimes. Like, you know, when you have a strong opinion, people will jump on it, no matter what. But still better than Twitter. That's from my opinion. So I I saw some discussions about I don't know. You should stop using x. And, of course, you will get some something there.

But usually, the level of comments, maybe you'll get some longer criticizing comments, but and I like that. For example, you can search for best discussion. So you can for example, you can decide to actually check the post that have has the most upvotes. So, yes, you can upload downvote Bos. And this is great. For example, I want for example, I want sometimes, I don't know. I want to go to the platform and engage in in something. I want to get to see if I can be part of this community.

You can actually see the post that I already have some engagement, and then you can basically find the the reason why, and then you can, you can collaborate. So this JS, like, I think the things that work the most, in terms of TypeScript you want, I can talk more about also the features.

And what about medium as well? Because I just went I went to explore in the past year by upvotes, and the top ten were all blog posts, and I had to get to the 11th before you hit video, which is not what I would have expected. You Node? I thought video does the best. So it's great to see written text doing so well on a platform like this. We relatively,

recently introduced, YouTube videos on the, so this might also be the reason. But to be honest, I like it. Even if I as I said, I I I have a YouTube channel, so it's, something that I've been waiting for longer. Trust me.

We made a special agreement with YouTube, but who use their API intensively. So it's not even something easy to reproduce.

Okay. It was a great win on our Node. But, yes, still, the blogs are going very strong and very well because, the whole platform, like, was based on this. So I don't know. Maybe this is one of the reasons why, you know, there is this, calm environment. I don't know. I like it. I I feel at home. Yeah. Yeah. There. Yeah. What YouTube APIs are you using that

is it the transcripts? I see that there's, like, a a lot of them have TLDR, which I assume are like a AI generated summary. Is that what API you're using with with YouTube? I don't know exactly which which APIs,

but, for sure, that's not or maybe it can be just for YouTube because we have the TLDR also on articles.

So probably Okay. There might be some logic which is different, of course, from from videos and articles.

The TLDR is, to be honest, a very nice feature.

I think it's kinda on point sometimes, of course. So it it gets hallucinated, but it's, usually, you get a nice recap. Something that I think should be everywhere, almost everywhere. It can really help. Like, for example, it's, like, to understand if you really want to give some time to that poster or that, that video. CSS, yes, the TRD JS a feature that's very proud of. What is this built in, by the way? I think that might be something our audience is interested.

Yes. Sure. So we use React on the front end. Sometimes we change the framework, but I think currently JS is React, JS, deployed Bos.

We use Google Cloud Platform, Terraform, Pulumi, and the JS done mostly in, Node.

Js and and some Yarn in Go. As a framework for the back end in Node. Js, we use a, which is by the way, has been done by one of my Italian friends, Matteo Tolinski, yes, if you know it, it's a super cool Love Matteo.

This is mostly the I wrote it. Postgres as a database.

I hope I I nailed the all of them.

Yeah. No. That's great to hear. You know, it it's always interesting to see what type types of stacks people are picking in in the real world, unreal products that are, in this case, being used by half a 1000000 people. So, yeah, this is this is pretty great. You know, I've got Fastify is one of those technologies that I I would pick almost every time for server side frameworks for for Node. It it's just really excellent.

I I'm curious about, like, a couple things. What do you think, like, the most important aspects of building such a good community? Like, why was daily dev able to have such a positive community, I think? I think the secret JS, in

creating what you do. So, like, we absolutely care about that the sources are not, let's say, random or spammy. We have, for example, you can block sources. You can report the sources. And I think this is one of the few applications I ever saw in my life. You can check it on the bottom left. There is a feedback button.

You can click on the feedback and you can send basically a message directly on our Slack channel. So basically, you have an embedded feedback.

Sometimes it's even positive.

We really care about the feedback of the of the users.

I am in charge of checking them, and this is very, very useful very useful to to understand the direction you want to go.

And I think and, also, yeah, the design part, how it looks, like, maybe someone will not agree with this, but, in the end, like, having a, let's say, a a good experience when you are on a platform, I think it can make the more than you might think. I think we recently changed the the website daily.dev, and then we got, like, a conversion which was, like, 20% more just because it was, you know, just restyle. So it's,

it's something. So that's I think are the most important things. Yeah. Sorry. Ex explain that more. You got a 20% lift in traffic from what? Being able to access it from the web?

Yeah. So we have a landing page. They did not have it. Yeah. They restyled, I think, months ago or some years ago. And then when they immediately their their style, they could check that the conversion, like, increased dramatically.

So let's say this has also helped to put us to the design team and the stuff here. Is that because it I'm taking a guess here, but the landing page is very aggressive on in order to use this, you must install the Chrome extension, which is it's not the case. You you can just use the website, but it's very much like use the Chrome extension. And that's nice because every time you open up a new tab, you can you can your new landing page is just good information instead of, like, the Olympics or, like, some awesome stuff that's going on in the world. Do you know why that happened? Is is that why? To do you mean why for for what's for the conversion? The 20% conversion, you said it was like a new design. Do you think that's related to the aggressive pushing towards the Chrome extension, which then makes you have it every time you open a new tab? We always made, like, the Chrome extension like the

extension like the the king because as I said, the with the extension, you get the most, the most out of the in terms of in terms of features.

And, Wes, I think it was a mix of, like, you know, proper call to action, proper design.

We for example, we added some, some badges. For example, we won a a prize on product hunt, a golden warp, the the number of users that are currently using the app. But we also have pretty good rating on Chrome store, so we bragged a bit. So I think this helped, this helped a Scott, conversion and also a bit of the the design. Yes. It's an awesome landing page. Like Yeah. Developers

developers often, like, poo poo marketing.

You you can't do that. Like, if you wanna have something successful, especially as a lot of developers build stuff like this, you need to be able to know how to make this stuff work. It's not enough to have a nice website and, hope people like it and and use it. You have to be a little bit aggressive with your tactics to to make it work. And everything daily dev has done so Yarn, let this is maybe a compliment to everybody working on it. Like, it doesn't feel icky, but you can tell that they're trying their hardest to get you to use it as as much as you possibly can.

I think one of the reasons it doesn't feel icky because it's a a free product, and it doesn't feel like they're doing anything other than putting ads in front of you. And and, like, that to me is like I don't know when we decided that that wasn't a viable business model. But at some point, people were like, oh, everything either needs to be a subscription.

We can't just have our our site be supported by ads, which I think that's pretty refreshing to see because it's not like the ads are invasive, and they're not, like, looking over your screen or anything like that. They're not blocked by you, blocked by default, which I think probably has something to do with being tailwind classes on it. But, I'm not gonna block it because, yeah, they're they're very Node, and they're they're very they're also related to me. They're related like Sentry. You might find Sentry there, and you might say, hey. That looks like a really neat service. Let me click on that. I'm curious about one of these both technical, but also, like, organizational things with platforms like this. You get half a 1000000 users. People are submitting links left and right. People are outvoting. And I know you mentioned that you can report and downvote and stuff like that. But how the heck do you handle moderation at this large of a scale?

Most of the work, I think, it's still manual for some for some reasons. Of course, so they have some some tools that can that can help.

Yeah. We rely on, like, people, like, reporting and to this end. Something interesting is that, we can have we have these trusted sources. So you can create a squad and post some some links. You you can, for example, submit your own articles. There is a a feature called the community picks Wes you can submit someone else article, but for example, you can submit your random article. So in that case, it gets blocked.

And, and, yes, so I think that that's, that's it for now.

I don't know how how much in details, it's Scott of automated for some, you know, obvious, spam and obvious things that shouldn't absolutely not be there. I think we are in a phase where it's still, like, you know, half manual, probably 70% manual still.

And we try to keep it as clean as, as possible.

And probably in the future, we will need to improve this. We know that this is, it's very important. And for example, for for squads, I think we did, good job because, you know, if you open a squad, this community, of course, the the person who creates create the communities and they can also have moderators, other admins. So Wes also gonna meet the, you know, all the features.

We rely, of course, in that point. But in in that case, it's obvious because you will be the person in charge of having this community. You can decide that that you will be the only one posting, and then we solve most of the issues.

In case you want to let everyone posting, of course, you usually, the the admins will have probably some help and some stuff. But, Wes. So for now, I think that it's it's going well. We'll probably have Node problems in the futures, but there are problems that we will address for sure. How are the tags

done on daily dev? Because, like, I noticed when you create a post, it doesn't ask you what the tags are, but then they are categorized into tags. Is that done with AI?

Okay. So tags were there before AI was cool.

So probably there was there was something like handmade, and probably this it'd be still using that. I'm not sure if we are now we are using AI to to generate these, these tags. But, yes, tags, they are generated.

Automatically, you don't, you don't choose the tags. It's a it's a choice. For now, we are we are happy with this. I don't know if in the future we'll support it. You would decide which tags, but for now, it's, this is how the tags are Deno. But the tags were have been there for for a while. It's it's a tricky thing because, like, the

unless you're at, like, an event, the hashtag is is kinda dead on Instagram, Twitter because, like, people figure out you can just spam a bunch of hashtags or tags in pnpm area and then show up in all of them. So why wouldn't you want to to apply tags that absolutely every single one? Like, they even for syntax, we've thought about this a lot. It's like, how do you categorize these things both automatically so that it's all picked up? But then how do you, like like, relate them to each other? We were talking about using what is it? The cosine distance between the 2.

It's just

being able to categorize content without manually doing it is a very tricky problem. So seems like you've done a great job there. Thank you. Thank you. We are we're trying our our Wes. And, and, yes, I think that having these tags is is great because then you can for example, you can decide to I know. I don't want to have anything to do, I don't know, with Python, I don't know, for some strange reasons. And, so it's basically blocking all the the articles that are related to that. So especially, you can decide to follow some of them or to block, block attacks or even block sources or even block authors.

So we you can really decide, like, to filter things out. And I can see it works. You can change it whenever you want. It's more like the style of I think it's 100 times more customizable than Twitter than they decide for you, for you follow, and that's it. And then you need to follow the specific people hoping that, you know, Musk, doesn't decide that now you need to watch some meme. So so in that case, it's, it's more customizable. Yeah. Here's a a question that's even for you personally,

Francesco. Like, you make a lot of content like Wes mentioned earlier.

Where is your favorite place to publish today? And I don't necessarily mean to share what you publish, but to publish in general. Like, as a content creator, what do you think is popping off right now?

I'm currently focused on YouTube, so I Scott hide the data. So I'm really focused on the video creation. I published a video today, shameless plug.

And so that's, I think, a nice platform for me to share everything I wanted to share and also different formats there.

And then when I for example, like, when I publish video, I mean, it is today. Usually, the first thing I do is that I shared also on the on the school. So that's the 2nd step. And then on another social media. This is true. It's Scott, it's not just from. So YouTube, I think, is a great platform.

If you dedicate some time to that, tomorrow, it will be my 4th anniversary on YouTube. So actually 4 years ago, I had 0 videos published. And now I think I have more than 500 published, but I removed the, like, at least 300 videos. So so I've been conductive in this 4 years.

And, yes, tomorrow is the anniversary.

Yeah. I'm gonna be real with you, Francesco. Daily Dev is the 1st place I post to as well now since, we started our squad just because we we do get a lot of good traffic from there, a lot of good engagement. And, yeah, it's just a really it's a great place to post that kind of stuff because I'm not going to post it and then cower when a moderator somewhere is gonna be, like, removed for spam or something. You know? It's like we're we're making useful stuff. We wanna share it. But yeah. No. Your YouTube channel JS great. And those of you out there who haven't seen Francesco's channel, there's a ton of great stuff on here. And if you're interested in in Rust, there's a a really pretty amazing crash course playlist on there of of Rust content in general. So if you're interested in that, check out Francesco's YouTube. We'll have it linked up as well. Let's keep talking about the the Rust stuff. I I'm I'm curious.

Why do you like Rust? What why have you just sort of doubled down on that?

Yeah. Let's say triple down or quadruple down. Because now I'm also writing a Node because now I'm also writing a book, a shim super shimeless bag. It will be out in 2025.

Different different reasons.

First of all, I Node to keep my Node, Scott sharp because I believe I am a full time DevRel developer advocate. I don't Scott much because as I said, we are 30 people, but they have great engineers, but I am the only one, like, you know, creating videos or having to do with social media. So I do my let's say, I'm a food developer. I don't code much of that maybe 5% of my time. So I needed to Node something. Okay? Yeah. And also because there is not much Rust content yet. Because now if I go JavaScript, there is a huge competition. People who Wes like like demigods of JavaScript and either with Python. So I I'm confident with JavaScript and Python, of course, even Go. But from a content creator perspective, there is a bit less competition if you type if you try to type, I don't know, rust data types. Probably mine is the 1st or second video on Google or and on many, many topics. This is helping, really, really a lot. And I like the use cases because you may think the Rust is just for system programming because this is now it was born, I would say. But for example, I like that you can use it for web development to create a back end.

And so it's not that we need to, use Rust as a back end, but it's useful to learn it because learning something, I don't know, just doing CSS. I don't know. Building something which is more of a system programming. Maybe it's less mainstream.

If I'll tell you, like, let's do a web server in Rust, and then you can there are also different frameworks.

It's a bit for, more familiar. So that's, that's one of the main reasons.

And I like that there are some, unique features. If you want, I can go into details, but, like, there are something that either you use Rust or you don't have them. Like, the way it handles the memory, I think it's, it's great. And this is and I think that some languages in the future will be inspired by how Rust handles the memory. So we will see more memory management. The programming language is probably in 5 or or 10 years because I think it's, the way to go, pun intended.

It's hard to get used to when you're coming from JavaScript, but it definitely makes you think a lot more about what you're doing, which is something that you can get into a JavaScript. You're just slapping code down and, not really not really putting in the thought that you need to. What's your favorite web framework in Rust?

Yeah. There are many. For now, I use, Actix, which is similar to Express. So it's familiar from the syntax point of view. There are more, but to be honest, Scott, I don't want to do the same mistake I did with JavaScript to explore 5 frameworks at the same time. So I learned by my mistakes.

Now I focus on 1 framework. I do some tutorials that are still basic. We'll say I'm going on talking about the handling and genetics. So I'm going into a bit more advanced stuff because I I also want the ecosystem to become a more mature before because I know that once I jump into frameworks, I will never get out alive from them. So I I used some of them, but I will I want to go slow on that part. So you can try think and, Rocket is another framework. And then there JS also there are also frameworks for front end that I'm still just exploring. The one I think is called.

There are there are more and more so the frameworks are will never be a problem for any language. The problem is, like, understanding the the syntax of the language and then Wes decide which is different. It's like Django and Flask. Like, they both are good for Python, but, you can use them in different ways. So for now, I'm happy with this, with this framework. I also made a presentation showcasing this framework some some weeks ago,

and it's cool. Wow. Yeah. That is a a good lesson for, I think, any language at this point. Right? The frameworks, you know, they're subtly different, but the core concepts and the foundational learning is always going to be here. So yeah. Awesome.

Alright. Let's move into some shameless plug in sick picks.

What do you got for sick pick for us today? So I think it's easy in this case. So,

thank you so much for inviting me. I I really just ask you to just check the little dev. So this is the Sheamus plug I decided to pick here because I think it's at least worth checking, and then you would see if you want to join. Join the ESLint squad, play around, see what can be useful for you.

That's all I ask from life. This is what I ask. That's awesome. Shameless plug. Everybody check out daily dev. It's the best. A sick pick is something that you like, you wanna share that's just maybe, something that you're just having fun with or enjoying right now? Could be a podcast, YouTube channel, seasoning, socks, whatever you want. Just anything that you're liking right now.

Yes. Sure. So if you force me to do a a second CMS plug Yes. I I'm currently building full free rust crash course. So week by week. I started in January 2024, and I'm sharing 1 video per week.

Today, I published the video.

So this is building up also by not like rushing, but I'll, I'm building this, say, from the very foundations. And now I'm going into more advanced concepts.

They are edited, of course, and they are, I think they are on point on a single specific topic. So that's, I think it's something that people might found, found useful. I don't know if I have pnpm extra slot. Otherwise, I'll shut up. Oh. No. No. It's all great. Yeah.

I I think there's been a misunderstanding.

So a a sick pick is we have 2 things. We have shameless plug, which you've Node. K. But we also have a a sick pick, which is something you pick that is that you really enjoy. So Yeah. Maybe I'll just ask you, what's the best Italian food? I went to Italy last year and enjoyed Italy last month. The oh, Wes. Scott did. So you tell us, as an Italian, what's the what's the best Italian food that somebody should be trying? Wes, well, let me crack my knuckles. But since I am Yeah. Since since I am from Rome,

you are not allowed to go away from Rome if you didn't try the carbonara, which I think I'll do also tomorrow. So follow me if you want to have some carbonara picks. And, that's, I think it's the best food in terms of, like, how taste it is, but also in terms of calories. Like, it has the best ratio because it basically just passed a couple of eggs and some meat, but it tastes super well Wes, of course, pecorino. So it's, it's, I think, the best framework in terms of pasta and the first meal.

Pasta. I

love it. I like that.

I actually didn't I'm not a big pasta fan, which was very offensive to people when I went to to Italy, but I I'll have to try it. That's it seems so good.

That's weird to hear that you're not a pasta fan. If you said this at the beginning, I would have left I would have left the the podcast. Yeah. Now now it's too late. Now it's too late, so

I'm done. So we could have done it with with just Francesco and I, because I love pasta pasta fan. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Francesco. This has been in incredible. You know, it it's been a joy to see the evolution of daily dev. When I first started using it, there was obviously no squads or anything like that, and the squads became public. Now we have our own squad. So it's a really awesome platform and stoked with all the work you all are doing over there at daily dev. So keep it up, and, keep making the web what it used to be in that regard. So that's all we have for you today, and we will catch you in the next one.

Peace.

Peace.