14 Web Development Tips I Wish I Knew Sooner

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we've got some tips and advice that we wish we knew sooner. Scott and I have been around the block. We've been in this industry long enough. We've seen many things, trends come and go, and I feel like we are are wise. You know? I'm starting to feel a little bit gray in my beard. Yeah. I think we have a little bit of wisdom to see it. So we're gonna go through and give you 13 web development tips, advice that we wish we knew sooner as we go through our careers.

How you doing, Scott? Oh, man. I'm doing I'm doing good. I got some so a little bit of gray in the beard, but no no gray up top just yet.

But my my body's feeling it was I've decided to enter the Red Bull BC Node qualifier, which is, like, the breaking world championships, and there's a qualifier in Denver. And I don't anticipate not not only not making it through, but not making it through the the US finals even. But you know what? Like, it's not the the Wes US qualifiers, not often in Denver. It's, you know, often in California or wherever. So it's like, you know what? It's here.

It's this Thursday.

I'm gonna take the opportunity to do it, and I'm just gonna try my best. And who knows how far I'll get, at this advanced age of of 38. This might be one of my last chances to do something like this. But I Yeah. I was I was gonna ask that. Like, when at what point do you stop break dancing? Oh, me, never. But, like, you know, competitively in a like, there are people who who break into, like, you know Yeah. Fifties and and forties and stuff like that. Not competitively, but they just do it because you can, like, pair it down to what you're doing. You can always do, like, less intense things where you're not, like, spinning around and stuff like that. But I I feel it in my body Wes I like, on Thursday for practicing, I ripped an entire or an entire quarter sized callus off my hand entirely.

So I have a giant hole in my hand right now, which is a perfect time to do that right before a big competition. Rough. So my body is not stoked about about it. But, yeah, this is my chance. Right? This is my one chance. And you know what? You have many chances to fix your bugs, but you should get those done fast. You should fix them fast. You shouldn't take you many chances. But let's say you fix a bug and you mark it as resolved in your century. Well, century is gonna let you know if yeah. Yeah. It's gonna century JS gonna let you know if it's not actually fixed and if you get a 2nd chance to fix that bug. And, hopefully, it doesn't take you a 3rd time, but sometimes it does. Sometimes it takes you a 3rd or 4th time. You think I finally got it this time. But Century lets you know, did it did it get, is it a regression? Did did this bug that you had marked JS fixed Node is this broken again in a new build? It can keep track of all your builds and all that stuff like that. So, check it out. That's

Because sorry. I'm I'm cutting off your your ad right here. But I like that feature because I sometimes you have those, like, really weird ones where you're like, what is causing that? And you have you got the breadcrumbs up up to happening in it, and you think, like, I think I know what happened here. And you you fix it, and you you send it off into the sun, and you click on resolve, and you hope you never see it again. But sometimes you're wrong about that, and it comes back. And, they say if you love something,

you set it free. Yes. You you set you set that, bug free. It was actually, you know what? It's very funny. There was the, there's that meme going around that clearing error code does not repair car. There's a sticker on a, like, car diagnostics tool. I I posted a a photo of my century, and it says, marking resolve does not fix the bug because it doesn't often, fix the bug. So yeah. Alright. Check it out on century.ioforward/ syntax. Sign up, then get 2 months for free. Let's get into it. Here are 13 web development tips we wish that we knew sooner. Number 1 is that no one is all knowing. We often have this idea of other developers. Maybe it's people that we work with, people that we see online, people that are on YouTube, people that we think know everything.

But in reality, this industry just has too much. There's too much. There's there's too many niches within this. There's too many paths that you can go down, whether it's your front end, your CSS completionist, your, Ruby person, your Go person, your, HTML guru, accessibility, JavaScript, UI, React, Svelte, all this stuff. There JS too dang much to know in this industry to know it all. Nobody knows it all. And because of that, we often hear a lot of things. And, you know, through the course of doing this podcast, we've gotten a lot of comments in our the potluck question form about imposter syndrome. I have imposter syndrome. I feel like I don't, you know, I'm not at the same level as my coworkers, or I'm not at the correct level for this job. But at the end of the day, nobody knows it all. Nobody is that brilliant except for a small handful of 10 x developers, and we're all just figuring out as much as we need to learn at any given point to complete our work and our jobs to the best degree that we can.

Exactly. I think when you see people with the confidence in knowing what they have, what that comes from is enough experience where they think they can figure it out. I specifically remember in my career Scott of getting over that hump of like, oh, this is a very hard problem. I might not be able to do it to with enough time and being able to talk to others.

Mhmm. I think that I can eventually figure out how to sort of tackle this type of thing. Yeah. Next Node, you will often see developers with extremely strong opinions, and you might look at them and say, hey. That person is super smart. But almost always, when people are extremely opinionated and aggressive against something, they are either masking their skills, their own skills, because they've done something some way their entire life, and they can't possibly fathom why you would do something another way. They're doing it to make themselves look smarter. I saw this quite a bit when I was teaching a boot camp. People would, poo poo certain, technology stacks because they thought it looked it made them look like they know what what they were talking about, or they're just a straight up ace hole.

You see that a lot as well. People just are are just not nice people. So whenever you see somebody with extremely strong opinion, don't think, oh, I'm I must follow exactly that opinion.

Take their advice. It probably is is good advice, but just know that there's ebbs and flows. There's come and goes with web development, and they are probably being very aggressive about their opinion for one of those reasons.

Yeah. That's such a huge thing. I I do think oftentimes too many times in this world, we look at people who are the loudest, and we say, that person knows what they're talking about. They are loud. They they are very committed to their bit. They are so committed to their bit. But oftentimes, like, you know, people who are that committed to their strong opinions, like you said, they're they're 1 they could also be insecure. They could also be insecure that they don't know these things. I don't know Svelte, so, therefore, I'm gonna say Svelte sucks just because I don't know it. You know? And and I don't wanna act like I don't know it, so I'm gonna act like I'm I'm better than it or I've I'm above it. And I think that's often, like, a a big time thing that that people do. They don't need to they don't need to straight up try it. So Yeah. Yeah. People with strong opinions are crazy. You I got into a fight with somebody on Reddit,

last week where I posted a video about using display grid to overlap elements.

Yeah. It's a great technique.

Yeah. And and he went off on this, like, rant about awful for performance in x, y, and z, and I was like, it's it's not awful for performance. I'd like, I checked it. It's 60 frames a second, and it paints once when the page loads and, all these things and and, like, I was getting kinda upset because, like, this guy was being really aggressive. And then I looked him up and, like, you know, just I looked up their Reddit history just, like, 18 years of of being an asshole ESLint, you know, and there's probably some sort of personality disorder down the down the tube there somewhere, but holy smokes.

The best thing you can do in Reddit is look at somebody's post history because if Yeah. They're arguing with you about the most mundane things or, like, just trying to start an there are people who like you said, their entire post history is just exhausting, starting arguments over nothing for no reason whatsoever. There's a lot of people like that on on Twitter too. And you know what I do? I, give them the old mute.

Mute those folks. I I use the mute very generously. If I see too much of anything on on Twitter, I'm mute mute mute. I do not care about your opinions. I, too much, too strong for me. Yeah. And it's also, like,

the unfortunate thing with with, social media is that these extremely strong opinions, it does super well. You know? Does super well. And the like like, even my like, I when I posted that CSS grid thing, I I intentionally said it's almost always better to use this over absolute. And I intentionally was very opinion about that because I wanted it to do Wes. But, like, should do I use absolute positioning? Absolutely.

Yeah. I know. No. Nothing. No. No. Absolutely.

Oh, I you know what, Wes? You know, we both mentioned we're a little without sleep today. No. I did not. That did I didn't clock that at all, so I'm very sorry about that. By the way, your grid technique for people who, who didn't watch that video Wes you overlay 2 things with the grid areas Yep. That technique is the single best technique for transitioning between 2 things. Because if you position absolute and then transition between 2 things, you then have to worry about their heights. You have to worry about position relative to the container and then setting the heights. Because when you go position absolute on something to then fade in something else, so that way you don't get things popping in and out, It messes with the position and display. So Snaps up. So I wrote like, the the, like, transition the new transition API. What's that called? No. Just in in in in Just in general. You're fading something out, fading something in? Yes. And and, specifically, I wrote a wrapper that all it does is put those things in a grid column one just to do the transition. Like, that that's all it does JS put the wrapper. Need a

that's a video right there. I'm gonna need Node That's a video. Video from you on that there. Got it. Hot tip.

A Scott tip. Yes. A Scott tip. Wait. Why why don't you call them Scott tips?

Scott tips. Oh, that's good. No. That's way better. That's what we got you. Tip. Yeah. Wes the branding man for sure. I can't believe we're 7 years in, and we've never discovered a Scott tip. Yes. I know. I know. It's very good. Well, we got from what other tips do you have? Yeah. Using tools to help you is not a bad thing. A lot of times people will talk about, you know, I I did this straight up, like, raw CSS or raw HTML or raw JavaScript or whatever. I I did this completely by myself with no help. I didn't use any stinking AI to build this. I wrote it myself.

And, like, sometimes you do like, you can move faster with tools. Now, obviously, there's caveats there. If if you're building something that's long term, you want some artists in Node. You want some stuff that you know exactly. It's gonna be super performant. It's gonna be super clean and whatever. But it depends on what the job is. And sometimes you need to get the job Deno, and sometimes tools can help you. There's so many tools out there. And and, you know, we've seen this all the time throughout the history of programming in general. There's always gonna be people grumping about tools. When Sass came on the scene, there was a huge, like, I don't need ESLint. But I'm I'm sure they're using nesting now that it's in the browser.

You know? So or variables even. I don't need variables. They're in the browser now and they're incredible. You gotta use them. So, tools help you.

Now obviously, there's Node nuance there. Don't spend a lot of money on tools that where you're just spending money on tools and not being productive and things like that or, you know, death by a 1000 Vercel, etcetera, but tools can help. When you're learning a new technology, whether it's a new piece of CSS, new server side framework, something like that, you approach it with a mixed dose of

skepticism and open mindedness because, especially, like, man, they the TikTok comments sometimes when you post about something new Anything. Is just the most, like, awful people who think that we should just wrap it up and and stick with absolutely everything, or just people not understanding that there are situations where this would really, really help you.

But then on the flip side JS, like, no. Like, don't absolutely grab every single new piece of technology and think it's going to be amazing.

Give a little bit skepticism.

What what about performance with this? You know? Is this going to be an issue? Why would I possibly need this? I find that people who are sort of on both sides, trying to understand the story

Yarn the healthiest in their learning journey. I like the way you said understand the story. Things exist for a reason and people like things for a reason. Sure. Hype trains can get out of control where people are gonna act like something like Zod is going to, you know, save their life in some sort of way. But in reality, like, these things are just solving a problem. And sometimes they're solving a problem that you don't have. So you could look at that and say, why would I need this? Therefore, I think this

bad. I don't need it. Therefore, it's bad. You know? It's like, that's not how it works. Maybe I just don't need it, or maybe it is bad. You never that problem doesn't mean that other people don't have that problem. You know? Like Yeah. The I posted about subgrid on on TikTok the other day, and I had so many people half the comments were, so it's just tables.

It's not just tables. Just tables. Like, of course not. Like, if it was just tables, then it would be that. And then the other half of the comments warp, I just stick with Flexbox, and it's no. It's not. It does something totally different than Flexbox. And, of course, you can use Flexbox for some things, and they have their own use cases, but it makes me so frustrated where people are like, oh, that was a mistake. That looks like something we don't need. Probably, we took the smartest minds of web development, put them on for years developing the specification, and they totally missed that Wes had tables already.

I I just threw a GIF in the show Node. This is the Tim Robinson yelling tables.

Yeah. I know. I I feel you, man. It it it it's wild about that, how people, they they take those approaches. And I didn't realize that TikTok was gonna be, like, one of the most toxic commented places on the planet. Yeah. It's it's because it's like a drive by

it's just drive by whatever, and, like, the the snarky comments get rewarded, which honestly I don't mind because it it Yeah. The more snarky the comments, the better the the video does, but it's, it's amazing how many people are are are I think it's that they're they're scared that things are changing, and they have to keep learning. You know? The stuff is changing very fast right now, and their livelihood is at stake if they do not keep up. And that there's a bit of, like, fight or flight there, I think. Yeah. It often comes down to

either insecurity or tribalism around your tools. Right? My tools are the best tools Yes. Because they work for me, and, therefore, other tools are bad tools. Here's one that I I really like is that things and this is very personal to me, but I'm sure to other people as well. Things make more sense the more you actually use them. And that goes along with the last one. But in reality, like, sometimes I look at some tech and it, on surface, feels like it's too much or it's too verbose or maybe, again, it's solving a problem that either I don't have or I didn't know I had.

And the more I try it, the more I will understand it. And even in terms of, like, anything from JavaScript just straight up to, you know, Wes learning of these things. The more you work with them, the more you won't even think about it. It's just gonna become second nature. There was points in my career when I was learning action script, and I was just like, I expect it to work this specific way.

And it's Scott. And I'm like, why doesn't it work this way? This thing is so hard. And that Node, if I were to look back at that code, I'd be, like, why in the world would I have ever expected this variable to exist? You know, I'm defining it in the function. Why would I expect it to exist outside the function? But it it's just one of those things. When you learn things at first, it all looks foreign. Just like the 1st time you go into somebody's house, you don't know where anything is. And then the 2nd time you're there, you know a little bit more. And or if you live there, now you have every square inch of the thing memorized. You know all the baseboards. You know all the rooms. You know everything. You know all the imperfections and all that stuff. So the more you spend time in things, the more you're going to understand them. I I feel like on that same note, I have not understood

the technology or not understood the use of it. And the more I do this, I realize, like, even, like, CSS modules, I'm feeling that right right now. We had a question the other day of, like, why don't you, like, see this module? I was looking at that question. I was like, maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I just didn't understand.

And then I was I was writing some code the other day. I go, nah. I I kinda see it. I kinda see. I think I might have been wrong about this. You know? Really? And, and it was just because I had not I think I had not hit that situation where where I had wanted it, I think. You know? I'm I'm still I'm still But I'm I'm open to to being wrong about that type of thing is maybe I just don't understand the use case for this type of thing. The people are not making these things because

Yeah. Well, I think that leads really nicely into the willingness to change your mind is a strong skill. Maybe you were wrong because you didn't totally understand it at first because that is exactly that.

Be open to to being wrong. Know that you you can be wrong, and oftentimes, you are wrong. I've been wrong 10,000 times. If you go back and listen to the history of this podcast, I'm sure I'd say some stuff that I was very wrong about over and over again. So that's part of growth. You should look at things you thought in the past and be like, what was I thinking? Because that is a sign of personal growth.

Also, when I'm, like, trying new things and I'm like you said, you're frustrated, it doesn't work in a certain way, I often think, are is this so different because somebody like, do I really need to take a step back? Like, you look at the effect library.

You know? There's obviously very smart people that are building that type of thing, and I look at it, and I go, that doesn't make sense to me, or that is a totally different way of of coding my applications. I'm not sure. But I don't I don't I don't write that off. As soon as I saw it, I go, I'm not writing that off because I think that people are thinking in different ways to approach their problems, and maybe I need to to think that way as well. Yeah. Big Scott.

Doing is better than reading or watching, and this is hard from for people like me and Scott who build courses. We have a podcast, and you can get stuck in this hole of trying to consume and research Wes at the end of the day, absolutely nothing beats just going off and building something.

You really need to start writing the code. There's no better way to get better in your job than to simply just build things. Yeah. That's so true. And

I you Node, because you can look at something and think you understand it. You can look at something and or watch a tutorial and follow along with the tutorial Yep. And think you understand it. But you're on the happy path there. You're on the everything is hunky dory because I got a a definitive map of what I'm doing.

But the moment that all of a sudden you're like, well, now I gotta go slightly to the left here, slightly to the right in your oh, wait a second.

Where am I? Where am I going? What am I doing? And if you just start exploring, you know, you get a better lay of the land here. I'm going metaphor crazy today. But you're understanding specifically about, like, all the little edges, all the little the little wrinkles, the things that you don't hit in the happy path. And that is where you truly pick up, like, what you can do, what you can't do, where Yarn the boundaries, what what, you know, what does not work. And to me personally, before reading, you know, every inch of the docs, I will work on something.

I'll hit an edge, and then I'll look at the docs to find that edge. And that's a much better way for me personally to explore a topic than just read top to bottom, watch a video, whatever, because you're not gonna hit those edges unless you hit them in a a real world scenario. That's the same reason why CSS,

like pnpm authors want you to try the things in the browser as soon as they have a a shipped version because the people that write the spec for popover or a bunch of the new CSS, they have to just sit there and think about how this works because they can't actually build with it. And then they say, please build please build things with it so that before the spec is finalized, we know those edges that you're hitting.

Yeah. Seriously.

Asking questions is good. I can't tell you, both from, like, a rubber duck debugging standpoint JS well as different people's approaches to problem solving, how important asking questions is. So whether you are on Twitter, whether you're in a Discord, whether you're on, like, a Stack Overflow, being able to say, this is my problem. This is what I've tried.

How why is this broken, or how should I approach this is is invaluable because the rubber duck debugging point JS, often, you'll fix your problem as as you type out the question and explain what you've done. It forces you to think through the steps, And often, I'll find myself going, oh, I know what I did there.

But, also, just sometimes people will follow-up with questions of, like like, why are you even doing that way? Or what's what's wrong with x, y, and z? And you go, oh, that's that's a great I'm I'm so glad somebody has a different perspective than I do. Yeah. Asking questions is good at you Node,

I was never the type of student that would ask questions in class in high school or college or anything. I'm not a hand raiser.

So for me, like, it is tough in social situations to ask questions of a group and things like that. But it is a superpower. And I admire the people who are able to ask questions because those people, their brains are way more engaged.

They're they're like thinking of the edges. They're they're looking for these issues in there. They're trying to get answers themselves. It is a a monstrous skill to build up and grow. And that's why I'm thankful for a couple of things. I'm thankful for, you know, chat rooms, IRC. That is you know, some IRC rooms could be a little hostile, but asking questions as long as you were open to them is always, you know, depends on how you're asking these questions. You can't just be like, this sucks. Why is it like this? You know? That was a a surefire way to get, like, a little time out in the IRC room or something like that. But I I personally, it's something I've been using chat GPT and Claude for because you do have to be a little careful there in terms of, like, what the answer is. You do have to back it up. But you can ask LLMs to say, like, I have this bit of contextual knowledge.

I see other people are doing it this way. What am I missing? And those tie the types of things that LLMs could give you some good answers sometimes on that stuff. You Node, sometimes I'll say, is this a thing that people actually do? Yes. It's a thing that people actually do. People actually implement off of this way for these reasons. People do this for this reason and because of that. And that even if that JS, like, you shouldn't take that obviously at at its word. It's a l l m. You should go verify that. But it's good for that initial question, that initial verification. If there's one thing that I really miss about working in an office is asking my deskmate a question about my code or a question in general, something that I've spent an hour bashing my head against. Look at this. What's wrong with this? Oh, you spelled import wrong.

I had one of those the other day. Oh, man, Wes. You know, you think that you you're immune to that kind of stuff, and I was just man, it was it was like a Node letter swap. You Node, my dyslexia killed me on that one. Oh, man. A 1 letter swap. And for some reason, my ID was not giving me a red squiggly, and I'm just pulling my hair out. Why is this not working? Yep. Yep. You goofed up the word.

Yeah. That's. I often find that as well where the tools didn't catch it. And I think, like, man, I love these tools because those little head bashing moments are certainly a lot less than they were 10 years ago.

Pasting that stuff into the AI chat is it's really good at catching those types of things. So good. You know? Do you notice anything weird about this? Paste. Oh, okay. Totally. I didn't.

I was debugging the, our desktop app, and Yeah. You know, Apple logs warp these these massive dumps of who knows what. And I was just like, where in this massive dump of questionable logs is something that is going wrong here. And then it, like, found it for me. I was just like, yes. Thank you. That's that's amazing. Love love that.

Here's one that I think is oddly controversial, which I don't understand JS everyone doesn't learn the same way. It's so funny. You Node, I see people who make their whole their whole thing, like, learning styles don't exist. That's, like, their entire brand. Right? Yeah. Because learning styles don't exist. And let me tell you, I do not learn the same way as a lot of people.

I can't read a blog post. I can read source code and learn. I can't read a blog post. I can't read, like, docs straight up and learn well. Like we mentioned before, getting my hands dirty is is a good way for me to learn, but also listening. Our brains exist in a different way. You know? We all have different strengths whether that's if you ever Scott an IQ test done, you would know that there's, you know, your your short term memory, your long term memory, your auditory, your visual, your all these things. There's all these different ways that our brains have different strengths of. And knowing, at least identifying, being able to say, hey. This is a little bit easier for me to learn this way. I'm gonna actually stick in that in that method of learning things because it is way more advantageous and and time safe for me to instead of bashing my head against this giant blog post to understand the thing, to select it all and say, read it for me.

That's a that's a good way to understand. So just pay attention to making sure that you know exactly, like, what is going on when you're learning things.

Yeah. What is my learning style is probably something that is well worth digging into. Scott of people love watching tutorials. Right? And I make tutorials, but do I watch them? Absolutely not. I it's just not my learning style. You know what my learning style is that I I figured out the other day, Scott? What's that? The Balkan breakfast. Do you know what this is? I've never heard of this. So Balkan breakfast is a stylist TikTok where you sit down with, like, peppers and sausage and cheese and toast and eggs and and lettuce and cucumber. Just just whole Vercel.

And you just, like, grab take a bite. Grab something else. Take a bite. Grab something else. Take a bite. And it's it's wild because it's like, you don't, like, cut and prepare something. You're just grabbing and taking bites out of everything. And then at a certain point, you've had breakfast.

And I thought, like, that's how I learn.

It's like, I'm just view source, GitHub, sample, blog post. You know? I'm just like even when I'm when I'm cooking as well, my wife is just like, are you following a recipe? I was like, I read 6, and I'm just gonna go for it. You know? Yeah. I I don't sit there and exactly follow a recipe. I'm simply just dipping into a 1,000 different things, and I go, I think I get it. I think I understand how to to go ahead.

Yeah. Oh, man. I gotta tell you Node time. This is actually a funny story. There's a company attempting to acquire LevelUp tutorials at one ESLint, and the person I was interviewing with it about it was, like, asking me I was right about to give my talk, which was about how to learn how I learn things quickly. And part of that talk was identifying your learning styles. So they were asking me a little bit about my talk because they just wanted to get to know me. It was, it was like a it was like a CTO of some company. And and I'm not going to identify whom, but I was telling them about this talk. I was telling them Node about, you know, how you identify your learning styles and whatever. And before I even said that, he was like, oh, that's so cool. I'm writing a book about learning styles right now. I'm like, oh, really? Tell me about your book. I'm like, thinking we got a connection here. Let's, let's explore this. And he's like, yeah. My whole premise of my book is that learning styles don't ESLint, and everyone learns the same way. And I was just like, oh, boy. Oh, boy. You are not going to like my talk. You are, this is not going in the right direction I thought I would. It was a it was a early red flag about that entire conversation. Oh, that's good.

One hot take I have here is you don't need a SaaS for everything.

And often, I feel like a lot of people who are are learning or doing something from scratch these days are piecing together 8 different Sanity. And, like, the big one and you'll you'll love this one. It's auth. Right? Like, you can write your own auth. And if you need those features, yes, of course, you can move to that type of thing, but you will die a horrible death at the helm of mouse monthly active users. So, like, it's easy to grab a whole bunch of these services and piece them together to build your application, but what you don't know is that it will get extremely expensive. These services are drug dealers. And as soon as you get to any sort of scale, you are going to be very expensive. Of course, they're they're very handy and and things like that, but, try to build it without those services at first. And, you will learn a lot and save a ton of money.

Yeah. Yeah. Not everything needs to serve. I know people say, I I I would rather have my day back. That's like a crazy thing to me that people say on Twitter. It's like, I would rather not waste a day on auth.

A waste a day? Bro, I waste days on crazy things, and my my app is still, like, existing and and still growing. You could waste a day on building your own auth to save yourself x amount of dollars in long term.

My least favorite Twitter posts by far are the ones that are like, I launched in 1 week, and here's the list of 20 services that I used. I used this for this and this for I'm also like, good luck.

Because yeah. Sure. You might make enough money here and there or whatever. But, like, the moment you get real users, that could come back to bite you. Or guess what? You're gonna get a rug pull somewhere.

You sign up. You'll you you get your data spread out amongst a 100 different Vercel, some of which at some point what was it? Was it PlanetScale that did a rug pull? Yeah. That at some point, they'll say, oh, yeah. By the way, that that thing that we were giving you for free for a 100 users, now for a 100 users, you're gonna have to pay $19 a month. Alright. $19 a month. That's just 1 more slash. Right? And and that's how it goes. I there there are so many things that people spend money on that I find to be shocking.

I would much rather have that $20 a month in my pocket and spend a day of my time doing authentication.

Yeah. No kidding. It's, I saw levels. Io describe it as a, like, a VC pump and dump where the 1st couple Yarn, absolutely everything is free. And then once the the VCs want their money back, things start getting a lot more expensive. And at that point, it's it's too hard to to move off of that type of thing. You know? It's just I've I I'll tell you right now. Vimeo, twice the price on me, and, like, ah, shit. I gotta move off of Vimeo now, you know, and Yeah. Render jacked the the price on me. I think it's, like, doubled the price, something like that. I forget what it was, but the price on that went way up. And I thought, maybe I shoulda shoulda been doing my own services. And, what I do is I go, I'm just gonna keep pulling it paying it because I feel like moving off of that thing, and they realize that. Yeah. That's that's even, like, Bluehost. I have had a Bluehost for, like, 15 years, and I got that was, like, the last holdout of this is affordable. You can host as many websites on you want it. And I got an email the other day being like, you we're gonna start charging you because you have too much stuff on there, you know, by the gigabyte.

And I had, like they only give you 20 gigs now because they realize people are hosting 30,000 websites on on a $1.8 a month plan.

You know what, Wes? Is is like man. I people don't get it either. I I don't know if it's newer developers or what, but there was, like, some comments in some regard on, like, a Coolify thing we did about a VPS.

And and somebody is like, yeah. Sure. It's $5 a month now, but what happens when you get an influx of a massive amount of users? Well, let me tell you. The price does not all of a sudden go up. Your your thing will either go down or you'll adjust it yourself because that's how the cloud services work. Right? Especially, like, the the ones that, like, they don't set a limit for how much you can spend with them. They'll say, oh, wait. You got a massive influx of users. Alright. Pay up. Time to pay up. That's that doesn't happen if you own your own stuff or or whatever. And granted, yes, there are benefits to all these things. A lot of the services have real benefits, but at the end of the day, you're paying for it. Yeah. Like, on the flip side, a lot of businesses

would rather have their website stay up and pay a whole bunch of money. You know? Kanye West talks about your clothing brand. Totally.

You you kinda rather your site stay up so you can capture that traffic versus Unless nobody buys anything, and then you get charged for it. Then you're then you're pooch. So it's it's a delicate dance, for sure. And I'm, obviously, a big user of these different Sanity, but you gotta be careful with with what you're doing. Measured approach. Know what you're getting into. Yeah.

Along those lines is you don't need to worry about scale for your 3 users.

Just know that if you do need to scale up, you likely can. You will probably see it coming. If you do get a crazy influx of users, yeah, maybe you should have something in in in place. Like, for example, I'm on render. If I wanted to, I could increase the number of, you can even have them auto scale as well. So I have, like, some hard limits in there Wes, at a minimum, I have 2 servers running, but at a maximum, I have 5. So you you can scale up to if you do need that type of thing. Totally. Yeah. Or even, like, DigitalOcean. You'd worst case, you can simply just power it down drop the drop down. Drag the drag the amount of memory and CPUs, and then start it back up again. And and it'll be expensive, but at least you can get up and running so you can figure out load balancing.

Yeah. It won't be expensive if you're on Hetzner because holy cow, they give you a lot for your money. Oh, yeah. I need to

get a a Hetzner.

I I run about a 100 things on my, like, $4 a month Hetzner Yeah. Yarn server, and it is like, it's not sweating at all. It is wild how many things I just throw on this. Oh, I need a back end. Let me just install pocket base in one second Yeah. Alongside of my 800 other pocket Bos installations.

I'm I am dying. I've had the spool of fiber on the side of my house for 2 months Node, and every day, I check if I'm they haven't haven't turned it on yet. But as soon as they turn it on, like, I'm kinda tempted to just rack a little server in my basement. Like, I have a home server, but, like, maybe something that has, like, an Yarn chip in it. I wonder how much you could could do. Because once I have, like, a 3 gig upload, you could, I did quite a bit on my 50 megabit upload when I was doing my receipt printer thing. It it ran all night. No problems on a next dev server.

Yeah.

Here's a good one. Learning the fundamentals will always pay off. Sometimes the fundamentals do feel like they are too heavy or that it's too in the weeds or it's too things that you don't have to worry about. I'm using a framework. Why would I care about how events work in the dom? I'm you know, I just I just write my own click, and it works. You know? But understanding how it all works, understanding, you know, what exactly is going on in a useEffect, understanding what exactly is going on in the browser with the APIs, with the paint, and all that things, they can save you a ton of time down the line. Anytime you have an issue with anything, you might be able to reach for 1, a lighter solution. You might be able to debug it faster. You might just generally understand what the heck you're doing and why you're doing it. So that way, when you are doing it Yeah.

You know what you're actually doing. Right? That's such an important thing that I think people just they follow tutorials. They do whatever.

They don't learn exactly what's going on. And it's important to know what is going on in your application. How does hydration work? How does authentication work? How do forms work? All these things. There's just an infinite amount of things. Dive in. Node

know how these things work, but then use a framework or library to do it. Wes. JS the the approach. Right? Like, Node one I see a lot is anytime I post anything with CSS, people say, oh, can Tailwind do that? And I think, yes. Of course, Tailwind can do that. It's it's CSS. Like, I honestly think there's some people that don't understand that Tailwind is CSS. It's just Adam wrote it for you instead of Yeah. You writing it. You know? Like, it still is at the end of the day.

So it can do like, obviously, there's some spots it can't do specific stuff, whatever. But, like, Wes. Of course, it can do it. It's CSS. At the end of the day, it's not its own styling language. And there's nothing stopping you from writing CSS with it. You know? You don't have to use the utility classes for everything.

You can use actual CSS People get mad when I say that. So you can use CSS even use actual CSS. Well, look. When I say actual CSS ID, like, you're writing you're writing properties and values. You're not writing utility classes. Yes. Yeah.

I didn't mean that as a put down. I'm gonna say No. No. No. No. No. Like like, actually writing the CSS is what you mean. Working in public will make you more hireable.

This is huge. So if you are building something, whether you're throwing the the code up on GitHub, publishing an Npm library, writing a blog post about the problems that you hit, simply just sharing what you're doing in whatever medium you find most comfortable will make you so much more hirable. It will put you in the community. It will it will attract others who need to talk things through you. Like, one of my biggest assets is having a a Twitter account, and the reason I have that is because I work in public. I share what I'm doing. I ask lots of Wes, and it's so great because you get lots of really smart people coming in, chiming in, people who are experts in whatever thing you're working on will swoop in and and provide you a whole bunch of insights for that. So just being out there, working in public as much as you possibly can is is very good. I realized a lot of people can't because it's they're working on a job, and your job won't let you do that, but it's really nice if you can. Yeah. But even, like, even

even if you're not getting questions from a or answers from a bunch of a bunch of people, you know, on Twitter or whatever, I I can tell you from being on both sides of the hiring table, every interview I've been on, the interviewers have been impressed that I had a YouTube channel. Now you don't have to have a YouTube channel, but I can tell you we've looked at a lot of applicants. And the people who have a an active blog or an active YouTube channel or they're they're posting these things, they're inherently more desirable candidate because you can tell they care. Now I get it. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of effort, but it could simply be just writing down the thing that you figured out today. That's how I did level up tutorials. It was like, here's what I learned about WordPress today. Alright. Here's what I learned about Drupal today. And I can't tell you how many how like, from the inception of that channel, every job interview I had after that, people talked about the YouTube channel in the interview and were stoked about it. Yes. It it definitely helps. And it could get questions going too. Right? You you do a blog post on a specific topic in CSS, and maybe the interviewer JS inversed in that. They might even ask you about that specific thing. And that's an opportunity to flex some knowledge and show that you have some specialized knowledge that these people might want. You have to make yourself stand out. We are in a job market nowadays that is not as simple as I graduated from boot camp, give me job. Like, that's how it was in the past, and we're not there anymore. You need to make yourself stand out in some kind of way.

Another one here is this is like a career one. You can interview for a job without accepting an offer.

If you are happy at your current job, you're doing good work, you're getting paid a good salary, another job pops up, and you think, that might be an interesting job. You know what? There's no harm. You don't have to tell your current company anything.

You apply for that job. You get an interview.

Here's here's what could happen. You, 1, you could get experience interviewing, which everybody needs. Honestly, the more practice you have interviewing, the better you'll be at it. But 2, you might get a job offer that has a substantial pay raise for you. I I've had that happen Wes I've said, I guess, I'll take this job interview. I'm happy at my current job. I have nice benefits. It's a close to my house, whatever. This job is great. Company b comes along and says, hey. Would you, you know, recruiter or something? Or you see something online, you apply for it, and maybe you get that interview, you take that interview, and who knows? Maybe you'll get a pay bump. I companies are not loyal to you. You I mean, there there are companies that will be loyal to you, but as a blanket statement, I think, you know, for a long time, people have been, like, really loyal to where they work. And I I just think that you gotta look out for you sometimes in terms of, like, where where you're looking. And if you get that job offer and it's a good job offer and it's a good everything and you don't wanna make that jump, you don't have to make that jump. Decide when you have all the cards on the table. Yeah. Don't make a decision beforehand.

Beautiful.

Well, that is our tips that we had there.

I think it was 13. I added 1 halfway, but I I removed 1, so I think we're at around 13.

I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these tips and if you have anything to add as well because, again, it's great to get other tips from other people. A lot of people are way smarter than Scott and I, especially, like, we do a lot of these potlucks. And often, Scott and I will get off the potluck and be like, damn. That person is was really smart. Who's who's the guy from Tory? About supper clubs. I swapped potluck and supper club, and now we're we're both swapping it. Yeah. Sorry. I don't know what I'm talking about. No. It's my fault. Yeah. Yeah. We had Daniel on from from Tory, and this happens fairly often where we hang up and go, man, what a thinker. You know? Yeah. What a great approach to life. I did not I've never thought about any of that stuff in that way, and it's just so great to to hear other people's opinions on these things. So tweet us at syntax f m or wherever you like. Send us your thoughts. We'd like love to hear it.

Yeah.

Sick. Cool. Well, now's the part of the show where we're getting to sick picks and shameless plugs. I've got a sick pick that I've sick picked today, but you or a sick picked today. A sick picked before. Man, this is the, flub episode JS what it is.

I I picked, these glasses.

And I had a comment on one of the videos recently, and it was like, Scott, that glass is great. Where did you get it? So I figured I would sick pick this again because these glasses, they're thick. They're strong.

I I can't I break a lot of glasses. I can't I'm the clumsiest person you'll meet, and I have not broken a single one of these glasses. You can guarantee if if, you can break it, I've broken it. That's for sure. So,

these things are are really good at it. Maybe my wife broke 1, but, I have not. It it looks like a pop can. My my wife got me some for Christmas after Yousek picked it, and it has a good mouthfeel.

Good mouthfeel. And and it has the lip that goes in, and it has a nice little, like, rounded edge to it. And so, like, you can fill this bad boy right to the top, and you're gonna get any spillage, man. And guess what? They're cheap. They're $14 for 6 of them or $14 for 4. Yeah. $14 for 4 or $32 for 6 of them. And, like, $32, you got 6 of them. That's enough to have the house and whatever. Yeah. I I use these things craft brewery in your house? Yeah. I use these things for literally everything. They're my daily drinking glass and a a big, big fan.

I'm going to sick pick another OXO product. So I sick picked the salt and pepper grinders from OXO last week. I'm gonna sick pick the OXO whisk, which is I've had many a whisks in my life, and I never realized that there was a good whisk.

You know? And and I'm usually the type of person to have opinions on, like, kitchen products. I want, like, the best, and I have thoughts about everything. And a whisk is not something I ever thought I would get into, but turns out OXO makes a amazing whisk. We've had ours for, we have an OXO one at the Scott. And every time I go to the cottage, I go, we need to get one of these for for home. This is way better than the crappy one we have. It's just it's it's a good whisk. It I don't I don't know how to describe a good whisk. It just does a good job at whisking. Which whisk is it? Because I see several.

The 11 inch balloon whisk.

Oh, the balloon.

It's, we also got a a whisk from my sister for Christmas. Let me find out what it's called. I will pause it. I have this whisk. I did not Do you? Yes. Yes. It's is it whiskey business?

It's whiskey business. No. It's not. It's the opposite of whiskey business. It's, it is very solid. I have not had any although, you Node, whisking is one of those things that can lead to some mess. You know?

Yeah. Oh, no. I'm a I'm a pro whisker. I never I never, never have any mess. So my sister also gave me a Danish whisk for Christmas, and we also like that, especially for, like, things where a normal whisk gets, like, stuck.

That's weird. It's really weird. You guys gotta Google right Node. Danish whisk. Weird. It's kind of like a weird but, like, it's it's from the Danes. Right? Like, have they ever given us anything that we didn't like? That's a great question.

So that's that if you're looking for a Christmas gift for someone who's, like, likes kitchen stuff, a Danish whisk is also a good good call.

I might I see one of these in my future at some point. They're kinda cool. Yeah. If you're doing, like,

doughs or batters or things where it always gets stuck in the middle of the whisk,

you need a Danish whisk. Yeah. Alright. I get that. I could see the benefit there. Alright. Well, I'm gonna shamelessly plug the YouTube channel for syntax. We release these shows on video Node. And not only that, CJ is putting out some insanely high quality stuff. Yeah. Today's the video, the recording of this.

Create your own Next. Js starter template.

And the thing I really appreciate about CJ's videos is that nobody gets in-depth or gets to the details or gets to the real stuff like CJ.

You know what? So many YouTube videos on any given topic are just surface level. And I don't wanna say garbage, but they're just the docs regurgitated.

And that's not what CJ JS doing. He's he's using, and he's finding the edges. Yeah. He's getting He's in the Discords asking questions. Often, he'll be like, hey. I'm not done the video yet because they have to push a change to the entire library. Exactly. Yeah. He, like, hit any issue with something, and then, like, oh, yeah. Maybe that doesn't doesn't make sense, and they fix it. So, yeah, he he goes deep, man. Yeah. For sure. And so not only do you see every, you know, podcast that we do here, but you also get a ton of awesome,

videos like that from CJ. So check it out, youtube.com@syntaxfm.

I'll put a link in the show notes. Beautiful.

Alright. Thanks everybody for tuning in, and we will catch you later.