Potluck - Svelte × Bleeding-Edge Tech × Git Process × Screencasts × Government Jobs × Permissions-Based APIs × Rescript × More!

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Bos. Thank you for tuning in to Syntax, the podcast where we try to talk about the latest and greatest In web development,

the easy listening web dev podcast, we're your hosts,

Scott Talinsky, and Wes Bos.

Ready.

We're gonna have a potluck today. I don't know why I'm starting it off like that, but please bring your utensils.

We are, doing another potluck today. We got some really good questions from you about Git And create React app, working on screencasts, being on the bleeding edge, working government job.

Rid Thank you for everyone who submitted a question. If you have a question, go to syntax.fm.

In the top right hand corner, there is an ask a question button. Click it. Put your question in the box, And we will attempt to answer it on an upcoming show. We are sponsored by 3 awesome companies today, .techdomains.

They rid give you domains that end with .techlogrocket, JavaScript session, replay, and mux Video APIs and streaming. We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode.

How are you doing today, Scott? Hey.

I'm doing fantastic.

My, My brother and his wife just had their 1st baby, so I became an infant for the 3rd time today. So it just happened. Rental. Scott. Yeah. Very pumped about that. Wow. Congratulations.

Yeah.

Little Rocky, I'm very excited about that, and, Man, it's it's so cool. So I'm I'm shout out to my brother, Ross, and his wife, Jacqueline.

So, just very happy to see little baby Rocky come into this world. Rid What kind of, like, uncle are you? Because, like, I think about me being an uncle. I'm the, like, the uncle with all the cool rid computer screens Oh, yeah. And all the gear.

And we also have all of these, like, ride on cars that have, like, batteries in them, and I'm like the fun uncle that has all the gear. What do I do? I have no idea, to be honest. I have no idea. My brother is the the uncle who buys the kids rid The loud inappropriate

gifts like a a book on he bought Landon for Christmas this year, a book on dinosaur farts that has a a button That has an audio clip of various dinosaurs' theoretical farts. And, let me tell you, Courtney was I was like, see that thing come in the mail? She was just like, oh, come on.

Oh, that's good. Those gift bombs are great where you give the kids where they're they're not really

ready for it or should be having it or, like, their parents disagree with it. They'll find the the like, He'll look in the the gift list or whatever and find whatever is the most obnoxious, loudest gift there and then and order that one.

That's his Style. So I honestly have no idea because I haven't gotten to see my other 2 nephews very much. They live in Wisconsin. We've had a pandemic and stuff. So, Yeah. Ben, I'm I'm looking forward to getting out there and and actually getting to be an uncle,

really, you know, and, seeing the kids. Right on. Alright. 1st question we have here is from Zach. I'll ask it because I know what Scott wants needs to answer this one.

Hey, Wes. Hey, Scott. Big fan. Been listening since single digit episode number. I wonder what it was. Probably 7.

Rid. Scott mentioned Svelte from time to time, and, Scott has talked about Svelte a lot. Yeah. Just time to time occasionally.

I've been drinking the Svelte Kool Aid as well. I think we gotta have a Wes Loves Svelte Hey. Episode coming up because man, oh, man, am I a fan. Anyways, rid. Scott mentioned Svelte from time to time, which is my favorite piece of technology lately. I was wondering what you guys think of using the latest Svelte Svelte Next in rid Serious projects.

Does the improved developer experience make up for the small but growing community and lack of libraries? Do you think Svelte Next is here to stay, or will it get revamped that breaks backwards comp in a couple years, like, going from SALT 2 to SALT 3? So this is a this is a great question. It's like, rid. Do I go break Bleeding Edge and risk everything breaking and rid Finding bugs and having a lack of library, or do I sorta hang back on the stable version and reap all that is with the benefits of a

stable package. What do you think about this? Yeah. And and I'm gonna be answering this from a perspective of somebody who's working a lot. I think I'm working a lot in Svelte right now. And, yeah, there is certainly, like, this this world where there's not a lot of libraries for stuff, But I'm gonna answer this in a way that's like it's kind of a little bit different. We're used to and and I don't wanna speak for everybody, but I'm used to, in the React ecosystem needing a library to do everything because every React has its own way of doing things. Right? You're distancing yourself from the dom in a bit of a way where If I want a video player, I'm not looking for a video player. I'm looking for a react video player, and that could just be me. I know a lot of other people are are probably in that similar boat in terms of, like, here's a component to do my thing. Is felt there certainly is. Like, I've used Toast components and all sorts of other things. But one of the things that I'm working on right now is a tutorial rid Showing you how to build basic components that you need in every project or want in every project, and it's shockingly simple to build so many of these. So for instance, we have a Toast message package that I imported and installed from npm.

But when we build a similar type of package in my course, It's almost like, wait, why is this why are we even using a package? Now granted, it doesn't seem like rid Writing your own everything is always the right way to go. But if I'm being entirely honest, it's so much easier to write your own stuff Insult because you're not fighting the DOM as much. You're getting to use a lot of DOM features. You're getting to use a lot of, like, really Also, wait, I should say you can say that Svelte has so much stuff baked into the Also, wait. I should say you can say that Svelte has so much stuff baked into it.

You don't need an animation library. You don't need a router. You don't need this or that Or at least SvelteKit that is. You don't need a a state library. So I find myself using an endless amount of less rid Libraries and tools and just using the platform, and it's in a very simple way. So there is definitely a risk to going into something with a much smaller community than React. Because let's face it, React has has a huge, huge community and lots and lots of stuff.

You also get lots of packages that were written 4 years ago that haven't been touched or on, like, React version 15 or something or React 16. They don't have Hooks or whatever, and sure enough you do, but you end up, you know, really relying on those libraries and packages. Where in Svelte, I found it way easier to just build my own stuff rid almost all of the time. So I don't know. It's a bit of a it's a bit of an interesting question and definitely a play there in terms of, like, rid. What's your risk tolerance? What's your tolerance to having packages that do or not exist? But for the most part, I've been very, very pleasantly surprised with If I need something, I can just find a Svelte REPL of it and just even copy and paste it into my project or write it from scratch myself.

Awesome. Yeah. I I find that way with with, like, really anything is if there is no package, you just have to write, like, a little rid Thin little adapter, like, in progress as an example.

There is, like, a React package now, but when I used it in my course, there was no React package for it. So he's gotta write a little, like, useEffect, hook to link into that. And I I would say that. Like, maybe take a look at, oh, What are these packages doing at the end of the day? And, usually, it's just a thin little layer Yeah. Put on top of that thing. If I showed you my package dot JSON from

The Svelte version of the site to this version of the the React version of the site.

I think you'd be shocked at how many things that you just Flat out don't need. In fact, the packages that we are using are ones that you'd bring on, like, normal projects like date f n s, speaking URL Yeah. Marked in prism, rid j s j s cookie, but none of those things are Svelte specific.

So if I'm looking even at my dev or at my dependencies, I hardly have any Svelte rid. Library dependencies.

I'm just using stuff. If you you want a markdown field, oh, you just have the the reactive statements to watch the string and transform it with marked. Rid Oh, hey. Well, why do I even need a markdown component? You don't. So There you go. Yep. There you go. Cool. Okay. So next question here is from Tisha rid Merville.

Merville.

Merville. Tisha, Merville. Merville. There we go. From, well, I'm not gonna say where she's from because Put it there. Calgary.

Okay. For the question is good question.

My process is often that I want to be able to use my last project as a starting off point for my next project. Rid With a new project to have having absolutely no connection or relationship to the old project, what steps do I need to completely sever any ties to the old project? Here's a bonus question. In the new project, I would love to eliminate all commits from the old project and start new, having a project with just 1 commit, The initial commit with all the code from the old project. So this is a relatively easy question because I do stuff like this all the time. When I do my course content, have a a, you know, library or, repose for various stages of the course content, and I'm usually basing that off of the previous video.

So believe it or not, the way Git works is it creates a hidden folder. And if you have hidden folders turned on on your machine, You will see a dot git folder.

And in that dot git folder contains the entire history of your project and all of your commits and everything related To get all of the hashes and stuff, you know, to be entirely honest, I know the base level of how that all works, But it's a big old folder of stuff that includes everything that your your project needs to know when you run git commands.

So with that in mind, All you have to do is remove that folder, and it removes the git history and anything from this project from entirety of existence rid With the exception of if you pushed it to GitHub or something.

So if you have this project and it's locally and you do r m space hyphen r f and then dot git to remove the dot git folder. I'm I'm telling you to run that from rid The root of your project, that will remove and trash that invisible git folder.

And by removing and trashing that invisible git folder, You have deleted the history, and then you can just do git init, git commit, whatever initial commit to get going.

So that's pretty much it. You just delete that dot git folder, and bye bye.

Next question from Penny Packer. Hey. Is CRA create react rid app is still useful for building actual production level web apps these days. People seem to be reaching for Next rid or Gatsby most of the time, and I feel CRA is mainly used for learning, building small websites. Your thoughts. Also, for normal CSR client side rendering.

I feel it is better to use something like Next and fetch data inside your component, example for a dashboard, rid Rather than building 1 with great rec app. Am I wrong? Yeah. I I find the similar way as well. Most people who are doing bigger projects, They either have an established setup and build process where they may be ejected from CRA.

I haven't talked to a whole lot of people who have, like, production apps in app, and they've still stuck in rid without ejecting, or they they go for something like Next. Js or Gatsby. So I personally would go for that type of thing. But then, like, again, if you wanna use If you don't wanna use everything that is Next. Js, if you don't like the router or whatever we talked to, Tanner Lindsley, And he said he's using Next. Js without using the router, though. So he's just using it for the build process, which I thought was interesting. I'd never heard of that.

So, yeah, I think that that is probably a good way to go, at least, for right now.

There is a note here. It says vendor lock in might bite us in the butt one day. I remember Scott Talking about issues with Next and the routing system. I was just, like, thinking about that. I was like, if you do go all in on Next. Js, like, What are the things that you would be locked into? There's routing is probably the biggest one because it's it's page based.

The link tag, that could be pretty easily polyfilled with whatever other router you wanted to move to. Yeah. The link tag's a little obnoxious, though.

Yeah.

I got beef with the link tag, but it would be obnoxious to change. I mean, yeah, you could polyfill it. Because you gotta put a anchor link in front of it inside of it. You could polyfill it, but still, yeah, that that's yeah. And then,

what else? Head? Head would be pretty easy to replace with, React Helmet.

And then the serverless functions, those are not anything specific to Next. Js.

The API signatures are rid Same as

AWS Lambda signature, so no sweat there. I don't think it'd be too much of a a project to move away from Next if you ever need to. What do you think? I think it would for the file based routing. If you're moving from a React platform to another React platform, I think that is a lot of work. Rid. I think it's easier to move from React Router to Next. Js than it would be to move Next. Js to React Router. As somebody who is Yeah. Has migrated a site to Next. Js, I I think that just based on my knowledge of it. But, again, you know, I don't know. I I I think there is a fair amount of lock in with Next. Js, And that can be okay.

You might just you know, you you are kind of saying, here's this framework that I'm Going to be saying, you know, whatever is Vercel getting preferential treatment.

I mean, I don't know they have in the past. Right? And some of these new features are Vercel only. Rid. So you have to say, like, am I comfortable being locked on to Vercel for, you know, who knows how long or risk potentially losing some features? That's a a a legitimate concern, I think, and definitely one of those ones that you you have to address yourself in terms of, like, what is your tolerance there? Are you the type of person who likes to roll your own thing and run it on your own server and do all that? Then, you know, I don't know. You can still do all that with Next. And you're not gonna be at risk of having the site not work or something, but you you might lose some of the anointed features that come along with that platform. Like, what features would you lose? Isn't it the whole multi the multiuser, stuff they just announced? Isn't that all only on Veracel?

Yeah. I don't think that is that specific to Next. Js, though? Because I was looking at that and wondering.

I think the the one big one is that if you host it yourself, it's not rid Serverless? Yeah. But there has been a lot since then, there's been a lot of platforms like Netlify that have come along and say, if you don't wanna host it on Vercel, rid No shade against Vercel. I I host my my stuff. We host syntax on Vercel. It's it's the best. Oh, yeah. No. I when I say that, I'm not I'm not throwing shade on Vercel. I think it's actually

fantastic environment in general. So are there any other features that you lose? I don't know. I I mean, I think when they they introduce things like that, I I think, whether that is the serverless functions because even even for a while, Like, yeah, you could do it on Netlify now, but you couldn't for a long time. So I don't know if there is anything necessarily right now other than that. And like I said, maybe that the multiplayer stuff, which isn't Next specific? I don't know. You're risking that, but is that a is that a big risk? No. Probably probably not. If I was running a React server side app and I was going to be doing so in a way that I wanted this thing to be a long term project, I would build it with Next. Js, and I would host rid on Vercel. But that's not to say that, like, I wouldn't have feelings about, like, alright. This is the chosen path. You know, this is not necessarily a React site. This is a,

Next. Js for sale site. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. It's not as simple as spinning up your own box, I guess, is so to say. Yeah. That's a kind of interesting point that you're bringing up is that

we're sort of moving from this, like, wholesome, you can host it anywhere, and you can build this rid yourself and run the code yourself to now we're, like, sort of half services, half, Like running the code yourself, or I it works best when you you're on services, which is, like, these businesses are running for their money. But, like, Even on my own my own website with My Gatsby, I've got, I don't know, something like like, 6,000 images now, And it's really starting to chug and really starting to get slow with the images, and everybody's solution is pay a service. Yeah. And, like, I'm like, yes. I can pay a service, but, like, part of me feels like, shouldn't I be able to run this thing quickly wherever I want, and I can I can get some benefit if I do use the service? But, like, The fact that I can't run my website quickly without having to pay a service

to fix those problems for me is is a little bit weird. So I think I I get where you're coming from on that. Yeah. And not to say the experience isn't great because the experience is great. But, you know, I mean, that is there are people who will have a rid A tolerance for the amount of services they want to rely on, and, you know, at what point does that that Break that threshold. Yeah. I don't know. It's a good thing. It's a personal personal decision there. Yeah. I agree too. And it probably has something to do with us being like I think we can consider ourselves old school devs

these days where we just used to have a FTP into a box, and you can run whatever you want. Rid. And things are getting a little bit more complicated these days, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely more complicated.

And, again, you You know, those serverless functions, you say I mean, they do have the same signature, but do you want to migrate those? Like, does that sound like fun? I don't know, Says the guy who's, like, constantly rewriting all of his stuff. So, yeah. You you can only take my word for so much of that. But yeah. Okay.

I think that's all I have to say about that. We are sponsored today by .techdomainnames.

I always love introducing these guys because it's in the name what they do. They offer .tech domain names. Rid. Dot tech domain names are pretty nifty because they're they're tech focused. They have a large availability of names. So if you're having trouble finding a good domain name that is just rid snappy and rolls off the tongue. Check out .tech, the short and relevant fast recall. I personally have uses .tech Where we list everybody's users pages. Everyone loves that. I've got west.tech. Let me know what you think I should do with that.

I'm pretty excited to have snag that. Rid. Tweet me at West Boss. Let me know what you want, me to do with that one. So we've got a pretty wicked deal for you on .tech domain names.

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So go to go.tech Forward slash syntax is tech. We've got the link for that in the show notes as well. Use the coupon code syntax 5. It's gonna get you 80% off rid A 5 year registration, which is pretty wicked. Thank you, .tech, for sponsoring, and make sure you tweet us at syntaxfm what website you have built with your .tech domain names because I know a lot of you have.

Alright. Next question here is from Restify.

What are your favorite screen cast tools on Linux, Mac, and Windows? So, I don't know about Windows and Linux. I use I show you, that's the letter I, show, and then the letter u, for Mac. And it's largely been very good because rid. I don't need my my screen recorder to do more than essentially screen record and give me some options around that. Read. IShowU is is basically you can think of the the built in QuickTime screen recorder on Mac. It's basically that with The extra types of features that I would want to have in there, being able to potentially record in in retina or superimpose my face and output 2 separate video streams or change my audio streams around or or get that type of control over it, right, or or even just choose an aspect ratio. So That's why I use Ishow You. I don't need a a a video editor in it. We're currently working with a a third party video editor for our content. And before that, I was editing myself with DaVinci. So that's what I use and like it. It's fairly cheap. It does what it needs to do, and it does it well. However, my computer has been really having a hard time lately with with the CPU in general. So I have no idea if that's an I show you thing or If it's my computer just being a a baby.

I am still on ScreenFlow, have been for for many, many years.

I really like I've got a really good flow down for recording as well as editing and doing all my stuff.

I've been, like like, hoping for something better that is specific to ScreenFlow or screen recorders and not just like a video editing application, rid. And there is one that I'm pretty excited about. It's called Descript.

Yeah. It's like a audio and video.

Rid. You record your media, and then it will transcribe it for you. You train your voice, and it'll transcribe it. And then if you wanna change Like, let's say I accidentally said the wrong method name or I said React when I meant Svelte, then you can just You could just change the word in the transcript, and it will replicate that from your voice.

It's also, like, just like a really good Video editing piece of software kinda feels like the Figma for editing videos.

It's not quite there yet. Like, I don't feel like my I I don't feel like I was as fast, and I gave it, like, a really good shot in video editing. And then also at the time, it was only recording 10 80 ready. And I needed to record in 4 k, but, like, those are minor things. And I bet in the next year or so that I will be able to move over

to using Descript. So I'm pretty excited about that. Yeah. I like Descript when I tried it. I had some of maybe some of the same issues that you did. I think some of those issues are apparently wrecked by paying the fee for it. Although, I think it's a subs is it a subscription, which would actually be a bummer? I granted I know they're doing like a a a big service. I I kinda like that.

My I show you is just a one time purchase type of deal. I don't mind paying yeah. It's $12 a month for a creator. It's like a service. It's not necessarily like an app, So to say. I mean, it is an app, but you're paying for it as a service. But Figma's like that too. Right? Yes. But Figma's Paid features are a little less invasive. Like, it's like team stuff. So if you're just working on your own projects Oh, yeah. Then it makes sense, that you can just use it all for free. It's not, like, going to limit your feature set. I guess it does, I mean, in in the team sense, but it's not gonna limit your Your productivity.

Yeah. It's like creator tools. It's like collaboration tools that you're paying for. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I I like, I have some issues with ScreenFlow, and they're so like, I have to report them and and make these bug reports for them, and then They, like, don't fix them or, like, they and, like, every time there's a new ScreenFlow that gets announced, The, like, features are like you can tell that they're, like, pandering to not power users. Yeah. And that's frustrating to me. That always happens with software that I love is that they, like, they start putting, like like like, wedding slideshow features in there. And If you, like, jump into the, like, the, like, user groups or Facebook or whatever, like, no shade on, like, nontechnical people, but ready. You can tell, like, where their audience is going. It's becoming a video editor for people who want a very, like, a Fisher Price video editor, and it's not The slideshow. Rid Yeah. Yeah. It's not it's not becoming like a a power tool for big creators, and it looks like Descript rid It's going that way, so I'm super excited about that. And I will literally don't care how much it costs if they make something that makes my life rid

It's interesting. I think Descript could be very cool, and I think it could really take over. I have so many issues with ScreenFlow. I I had, like, A verifiable bug that's been in ScreenFlow since, like, version 6, where if you, like, double click the play head, like, 3 times, it will crash the whole app. Rid It has existed since that version. I've given them screen recordings of it. I've given them error crash reports. I've showed them exactly this is how you replicate this bug Every single time, and it has never been fixed. So, I mean, that that is that's part of my beef with ScreenFlow. It's like it's not like I'm expecting this to be fixed in 1 week. It's, like, been, rid Like, 6 years that this bug has existed, and it crashes the whole app. No. Thank you. Yeah. It's frustrating to see software like that, And, like, I have no idea what the internals are or what their Oh, yeah. Their feedback process is and that type of thing, but, like, rid Man, some company, please come around and make a really good screen recording software, and

my wallet is open for that type of thing, especially, like, Paired with the new M1 Max coming,

like, I don't want this laptop to be on fire all the time. It currently is. My laptop currently on fire all the time. Even just doing screen recordings, I get down to, like, no. This thing's got 64 gigabytes of RAM. You got you cannot telling me that this computer cannot handle it. It has a a dedicated video card.

Yikes. Please, m one maths. Okay. Next question This is from John. John says, is it a bad trait for beginners to give up easily? And by that, I mean, taking the time to think of the answer of the problem, They would instead rely on googling the solution and try to understand how it worked afterwards. John, googling the solution is not giving up. In fact, googling the solution is many advanced programmers' first line of, anything. That's all we do all day. I hit a problem. What do I do? I go to Google. I Google it, and then I get the answer. Does that mean I don't understand the answer? No. You try to understand the answer, and you read through the answer, and you read on understand why.

But you get it working first. You just drop it in there. You Google it. You figure it out. That's what this whole yeah. That's what this whole gig is. It's I can Google thing and figure out answer and solve problem Repeatedly ad nauseam until infinity or simply just knowing which JavaScript framework you want to work in. I much prefer the

Look at how it's done and then reverse it. Like, yesterday, I was working on a Circular timer. You know, like, kind of like a if you've got, like, 60 seconds and it it it goes down or, like, the the rings on an Apple Watch where you close them. I was like, oh, I wanna know how to do that. And I was just, like, sitting there, and I was like, I I don't know what to do. So I looked it up. I asked on Twitter, And people said, oh, yeah. I use SVG stroke offset. Yep. And then I looked at an example, and then I just, like, basically Peeled it back from from a working example into something that I understood and then built it right back up. So absolutely, John. That's that's how we do it. At least me and Scott. Stroke offset's one of those great things you you that's what like, anytime you see, like, an SVG being, like, drawn on, they use that too. Yeah. Yeah. That's a fun little technique. It was really cool. I was very happy that

it works so smoothly, and you can apply CSS animations to it as well. I like to hook it up to a little just a little dragger, and you just or or like a slider. You just slide that input and watch it drag and watch an anime or whatever.

Next question from Joshua Douglas.

Hey, guys. Love the show. In pursuit of better health and wanna track my weight daily using a smart digital scale. Rid. The idea is to automate the process of logging my own weight, I. E. Stepping on the scale. It'll update my Apple Health any other integrations I have. After some searching around, I've landed on the ARIA Air mostly because of the design and has the coolest name. One problem is it does not sync with Apple Health as this is a product from Fitbit.

They have an API, so I'm thinking about running a Serverless function daily around 8 AM after I wait in to hit the Fitbit API and push the data into Apple Health.

This way, I can stay in the Apple ecosystem while happy with the nice aesthetic of the scale. Any thoughts of what you would do Personally, to implement something like this, PS, my girlfriend thinks I'm crazy, but I know the tinkerer side inside of Wes will love this. Thanks again.

Absolutely. Because The the solution here is by a scale that supports Apple. Yeah. Yeah. That's the solution. I was just gonna say that's my answer is to just use the scale and use the software that comes at the scale. So that's my answer. Yeah.

Oh, but, again, like, I rid I do appreciate, especially, like or or maybe this is what I have. I need to make it work.

How would it work? So I looked it up, And there are a couple bridges out there that people have already built. And then, also, it looks like there is a documented API for Apple Health, which I was very surprised to see because I was like, oh, it's Apple. There's no way you'd be able to do that, but there is. So, yeah, like, rid What I would do is is have a serverless function run, and I might even do it instead of running it once a day because, rid You do it late one day, and then you miss it. It's just running every 10 minutes, and then check if there is anything new versus what is already in your Apple Health. Rid. And if there is something new, then go ahead and and push it. That would be a pretty fun little script to your right. There's no database involved in that type of thing, I don't think. And you just have to pull the data and and push it over. So pretty fun little old project there. Let me know how it goes. Here's what I would expect you to do, Wes. I would expect you

to take a normal scale, rig up a camera above the scale rid That takes a photo of the value of that whenever a pressure sensor has been implemented, and then you convert that photo into text and then send that text along to the AAPI.

That sounds like a, inspector gadget version of the same thing. Okay.

Next question is from Dee. Hey, guys. So I work for a government with good pay and benefits, and I love where I work, rid. But I feel like I'm missing out to working in the government. We're not always able to use the bleeding edge of technology. I do try to learn on on my own, but it's Hard sometimes if I don't put it into practice. I do peek at other job openings and get excited about the tech stack and things that they're doing. Just afraid that if I leave, I won't have the stability and benefits of working for the government. Any tips and thoughts? Tips and thoughts, Dee. I You know, the latest and greatest tech is not all of it cracked out to be. I love latest, greatest tech, and I love working on it, but that does not mean that rid. It is a reason to leave stability over. You know? Granted, I've worked in all sorts of projects, and I can understand feeling that, Desire to work in more interesting or more more challenging things, that is certainly something, you know, that you need to weigh out on your own. I have Left a job before because the the tech was, not a a fun to work in on a day to day basis, but I left it for another stable Job that paid, nearly twice as much. So, you know, that's not necessarily the same conversation.

So I I would necessarily say the bleeding edge is a great place to be for tinkerers and stuff like that. And and sure enough, it's it's a lot of fun in some ways, but Nothing beats stability in a paycheck that comes in every single month unless you just sleep sleep at night. You know what I mean? Yeah. We we hear from people on the other side of this type of thing where,

they are on sort of the bleeding edge, and things are always changing. And they don't have enough time to to keep up to date, and It's definitely stressful on the other side of thing. Government is is kinda interesting because it doesn't move as quickly, and I I know that a lot of people that work in government and sort of lose their excitement for what it is that they're doing because of processes and and slow and and whatnot. But, And the other side of thing, like, you're a public servant. You're serving the people that live in your province or state or country or whatever it is that you're working on so you can think about that as well. What I would do, honestly, is like, I would probably stick with I have some friends that work in government, and they It's stable. They've got a really good pension, that type of thing. And if you can sort of stick with it, I would never be able to do it just because of my personality of I wanna be able to jump into new stuff and try out projects, but that's why I'm I'm an entrepreneur and work for myself. But if that is not the type of thing, and it's just the tech, Side projects, try to, be the force of change inside of your organization to implement some of these stuff because rid. There's certainly lots of good examples of, like, like, gov.uk and things like that where they are doing the latest and greatest And doing some really cool stuff inside of government. So I say stick with it.

You can do it. Try to implement some new tech with what you have, and then have side projects as well for stuff that interests you to sort of keep up to date. Yeah. Totally.

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Sign up and get 14 days for free. Next question from permissions dot developer. Rid. Unpopular opinion, authentication isn't that hard, but authorization is.

What systems have you built in order to handle rid. Users with specific permissions that are allowed or disallowed to take actions within your system, what advice will you have to other developers developing permission based APIs rid Assuming that their users can have 5 to 10 different levels of permissions. So we've done a couple episodes on, like, roles and authentication in the past.

At the end of the day, it is a very hard thing to do because, I think we actually talked about this with with Chris Coira as well when we did the shop talk rid. Crossover.

It's very hard to implement and then also very hard to make sure that you got it right because there's a lot rid lies on allowing someone to do something or access something that they shouldn't be able to do.

I've looked at tons and tons. I've built rid A couple over over tutorials as well as in my own, and I've just been loving the latest one in Keystone Because what they do is that they have access control, and every single model has access control rid for every single create, read, update, and delete. So what that allows is you can return true or false based on the currently logged in user. Rid. Can the user create, read, update, or delete this model? And then you can even go even further and attach those things to Every single field that is in your database. So if somebody is allowed to they should be able to update A certain field on an order.

Maybe maybe they wanna update their shipping address on an order, but they shouldn't be able to update how much they paid rid for that order. Right? That's that's and they should be able to read it, and they shouldn't be able to delete it. You know? Like, there's all this, like, craziness. Like, oh, yeah. Rid And then someone who's an admin should should be able to update and delete all of the different things. So what KeyStone does is, first of all, they give you rid Access at a model level and a field level, and then what you can do is you can build your own permissions. Rid This is what we did in my advanced React course is we created what is called a role, and a role is a group of permissions.

So you you create rid. Individual permissions can update, can delete, or can manage, and then you group all of those things into a role like rid Like a user or an editor or admin or a super admin. Usually, super admin is they can literally do anything. And then you group those in together. And then when In your your checks for the CRUD of the model or the field, then you check if they have that permission.

Not the easiest thing in the world because it it it requires a lot of, like, thinking, should this person be allowed to do this thing? Mhmm. But that has my favorite way I've stumbled across doing it. Yeah. We do role based permissions as well,

and then we simply This typically should not go without being said, even though I know you you know this, Wes, and everybody listening should probably know this by now, is that you cannot trust anything on the client. Right? And we see this all the time. So whatever checks that are needing to be made are both twofold in your permission system. They're both the server side access for whatever data mutation is happening, but also client side for just Showing the user interface.

So there's the 2 aspects of that is that you have the role system for both the UI essentially as well as rid What operations the person's able to do. But we basically just have a role role checker very similar to what you say, and our our role Checkers just is role as a function is role and then accepts an array. And then you say, alright. Is the current user From what we get from the GraphQL context, which is all server side pulled from.

If the current user has access to rid. Is an editor or whatever is a pro, then they can get access to this or that. And that's typically how we do it. Again, role based World based permissions.

But, again, we only have 4 or 5 roles on the site rather than like, some systems are gonna have a lot more intricate rid. Role systems.

In in Meteor, there was, like, a roles package for a long time that was, like, really prominently used, and they had, like, role groups. And you could say, You know, here's a role group. If you're access to this role group, then you get access to these following things in addition to micro roles. So you could have a lot of smaller roles as well as role groups to give you, like, a a finer grain control over it. You know what? I always really liked in, Drupal. There was just this Giant massive table of radio buttons to say, like, what access level can you have for every single thing on the entire site? Can do this. Okay. Edit, delete, edit, update, delete, whatever. Yeah. And you it it's just this giant matrix of radio buttons you could select who has access to what, What type of users and what types of roles? And it was, you know, very good system to have in that sort of way, but, again, not something that you would necessarily wanna build yourself. There is definitely, like, a permissions based or roles based. We we tend to go with roles ourselves, but it's a complex world. Yeah. And I I think we're maybe using the words rid differently there. Like, the way I think about it was, like, a permit and this is what I use in my courses. It's not correct. They're like, a standard thing has, like, a permission would be rid Something like can manage product. Yeah. And then

another permission might be can update user or can update rid self. And then you would group all those together into what I call the role. Mhmm. Like, I think about, like, Google Docs or something like that. Can you imagine writing the authentication type of thing and the implications that has. Right? Like, the yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rid. Security implications. So that's that's a tough one to crack. Tough one.

Okay. Next question is from Josh.

Josh says, What are your thoughts on Rescript as an alternative to TypeScript? Rescript is basically reason. ML rebranded as Rescript As far as I'm aware, and Rescript is a type a typed language that is JavaScript like. So it's not necessarily in type TypeScript the same way that you can just write a valid JavaScript in TypeScript. Rescript is a little bit more intense.

Okay. What does it say? It was previously known as Buckle script and reason.

I have used reason as it was reason before it was, And there are things that I certainly can dig about it, but in the same regard, it all feels like overkill for me when TypeScript is a little bit more Simple. So when I'm looking at Rescript versus TypeScript, what I'm not getting is is why would I use Rescript when I could use TypeScript.

That's just me personally.

There are things that are nice about it, but when I was looking at it, it felt like Here, I have to learn this whole other kind of different syntax where TypeScript just feels a little bit more like, here's an addition on the JavaScript. Re It's very slightly different. The stuff you need to to understand about TypeScript, you can pick up in a, you know, a couple of weeks where I felt like this was just too much different. I'm just looking at the examples. It's an entire different language

that compiles rid. JavaScript. So you would have to learn an entirely new language.

And, like, maybe if you have a massive rid a project, and you're really smart, and you have a amazing team, but, like, I think that would be difficult to hire for, that'd be difficult to train for, that'd be difficult to Get packages for I'm not gonna do it because it's it's I make courses on this stuff, and I make I learn what's popular.

And I make courses on that type of thing. So rid Probably is a good thing, but not for me just because of the me admin's got to do stuff that's like

rid It may seem that we're on the bleeding edge, but we do stuff that is, or at least I do, somewhat popular and somewhat well Well known. We're in the bleeding edge of the mainstream. Exactly. It's like Svelte. Right? It's like, I'm only picking Svelte here because I just know everybody else is gonna be reinstalled in 5 years from now.

No. But, you know, but that is largely my my outlook. You joke about that, but that's literally why I'm looking at it right now because, re a rid sit on stuff until I know that, okay, this is really picking up steam.

And not just because Scott won't stop gushing about it, but that's part of it. But rid I just keep hearing about it. I keep seeing it. And, like, I and now that the Svelte kit is coming out, there's a whole, like, thing for building End to end apps. So

that's when I know, okay, now is the time to take a look at this thing and jump on it. Yeah. And I think that's rid Serious conversation. But we're I mean, with Rescript, you would really have to see some major groundswell to say, oh, man. Rescript is read. The thing to use, and not just from a not just from, like, a hype standpoint, but from a a standpoint of there's enough people using it that This thing makes sense for me to adapt. A heck. I didn't even wanna adopt TypeScript for it alone for that same reason. Exactly. There was all these competing ones whether it's Flow, TypeScript, or whatever rid Until it was obvious that TypeScript was the winner winner chicken dinner, then that's when I I said, okay. You know, now is the time for me to seriously invest My time in TypeScript and by by all means, it was worth it, but, man, it would take a whole lot for me to say, oh, yeah. Rescript? Now now it's time for me to learn rid a whole another whole another language that does essentially the same thing as TypeScript does and has less support. You you know what I mean? Yeah. And we might be wrong about that. Like, in 5 years from now, syntax

episode 1033, Scott converts Level up tutorials to Rescript.

To to Rescript.

Yes. And the reason he will have moved to Rescript is because

The landscape will have changed. Yes. You are very right, and, and, who knows? We we know we could be looking at a a crystal ball here right now.

Question from Brandon. How come you guys moved to 2 sponsors on Hay season, 3 on Hay season? Not a big deal. I was just curious. It was to keep up with the cost Or just because you could, and then you'd make more.

Either way, awesome show, and really appreciate your opinions on everything. Yeah. Ready. Absolutely. This is a good question. We moved from having 1 sponsor on our hasty to 2 and 2 sponsors on our Tasties to 3.

And the reason we that was because we have a massive list of people who want to sponsor. We think that these companies are cool, And, obviously, Scott and I like to make money doing this type of thing, so I don't think we're ashamed of that at all. We I think we've built rid Something really, really cool and really great with this podcast.

We're helping lots of devs learn new stuff. We're helping companies grow by putting them on the podcast, and we're not ashamed to take the bag while doing that. What do you think about that?

You know what what you know what's important to say about this too is that, like, we're doing this instead of rid Having a Patreon with content behind a paywall. You know? Yeah. I would assume that most people, if you don't want to hear the ad, you can click Skip ahead 30 seconds or whatever on your podcast player to skip ahead of that ad.

And so many podcasts that I know and love rid Hide so much content behind a paywall that, like, it won't be possible for me to support all of the podcast that I would want to support is because of how it is. And now with Apple's and let me just say crappy solution to a Patreon, thing because they they take 30% of the cut. Rid. Anybody who's who's, supporting a podcast, who's using the Apple version of that, you are giving 30% of that to Apple, Which is outrageous.

So, you know, instead of giving Apple 30% of a cut of anything or whatever, you know, I'd rather just have an additional ad or 2 on the podcast and let y'all work it out there on your your own end. Anyways, we are sponsored today by MANSCAPED.

Joking.

We are sponsored by Best Fi no. Yeah. What are what are some other classic MeUndies.

Yeah. What are the other ones? Raid Shadow Legends.

No. I think that's really cool that our the sponsors we do have on the podcast are, Hopefully, somewhat interesting to you as a developer, and we hope that the ad reads that we do for them are kinda interesting talking about them. We're not flinging some budget knockoff

AirPods that are brought to you by Ray j. Raycon? Yeah. We're not gonna we're not gonna do that to you. So you could trust that we use and like these services. But, Raycon, if you got a $1,000,000 sponsor, you'd have me. Yeah. That's true. We joke about it, but, honestly, like, enough money, I would do anything.

Yeah. There's a, there's a, it's funny. There's a, old Old as in when we were in high school, there's a Sage Francis was a rapper who I really liked at that time, and he had a song that was called rid. A mill, and he was just like, you can't front on $1,000,000, y'all. A million would be ill. He's just like talking about how You know, he's like, I would sell out for a $1,000,000 contract. Okay? Like, I I talk all this stuff, but for $1,000,000, hey. Hook me up.

Oh, that is great. It's great. One more question is going to be from rid. Todd's bosslinski, have you tried Angular 12? I think you'd be pleasantly surprised if you gave it a chance. Have not tried it. Have too many other things to try or do. Angular 12. Holy cow. I cannot believe they were up to version 12. They're catching up to React. Yeah. I do understand the the versioning number. Rid Maybe I will try Angular at version 20. Who knows? But, yeah, I don't know. There there there seems to be in Angular, like, a lot of, like, class based things with Directives and and granted any front end framework you picked up is gonna have their own way of doing things. But it feels like there's a lot of rid Stuff to learn around Angular. And that could just be my own, biases when I'm I'm looking at this.

I personally rid have no desire to learn Angular, not because it's not good, or that it's not productive or not you know, you're not capable of writing rid things with it. I just personally have no time for it. I I have moved on from Angular, and, it's gonna take a lot to get me to use Angular again. That said, rid I think that one thing that Angular does really well is just how much stuff is in the library Specifically, like, how much stuff that you don't have to look elsewhere for, which I do I enjoy more and more as I move off of React To not have to, have to hunt for every minor little thing in your your project to make a decision about what to use. Should I use this library or that library? You know, having things like the the routing and, testing and all those things included.

Batteries included is good. Yeah.

Rid I in in my old age, I'm much more, you know, into the batteries included side of things. So, you know, certainly, you know, I think Angular could be cool, and rid Shout out to anybody writing Angular. I've heard good things, but me personally, I just I just don't have the time for it, I guess. I was tweeting about

the other day, and I just got so much flack from people about Vue and Angular and things like that. Like, why not this? And I was like, just because I say something is good, It does not mean literally everything else is awful, and there's like, I'm just 1 guy. I can't learn every single framework out there, so these are the ones that I choose ready. To to work on, and you might disagree with that, but sorry.

Wes, are you saying that you hate pork chop JS? I would I would use Porkchop JS all day long. Yeah. That is something. Yeah. Dry rub dot j s. What are some other ones we can do? Rid biggreenegg.js.

Smoked.ts.

This podcast is also sponsored by Mux. Now Mux is m u x, And Mux is the video host of your dreams if you're a web developer. Why? Because this is a developer first video platform. And I should know because I'm a developer, and I use Mux. And I I mean that sincerely. We we bet our entire video platform on Mux because it's so stinking good. And, that was before they were a sponsor of Syntax, so you know that that is a genuine opinion. Now what is Mux? Well, it's the API first Platform that makes it easy for any developer to build a beautiful video platform.

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Sign up and give it a try. If you are the type person who needs video in your application for any reason, Mux is going to be the way to do it. Mux.comforward/syntax.

Thank you to Mux for sponsoring, and, also, thank you for hosting my videos because I really like it, and thank you for that as well. Beautiful.

Can I do 1 more question? I just was One here that, actually, it needs a helpful answer, so I thought I would answer it. You may. Alright. Thanks. From Billy Mitchell, I have to copy and paste thousands of products with 6 rows of details from a spreadsheet into a web interface rid because there is no API or CSV upload function for this program. Any recommendation on how to automate data entry into web inputs, rid. Navigate pages, click buttons, and toggle between applications. By the way, it's Gordon my 1st dev job and have to give you credit for steering steering me in the right direction. So This is the interesting one. If you need to fill out a form many, many, many times, there's no API. How do you do that? Re Well, the first thing is you can take that spreadsheet and convert it into JSON very easily with the Node script.

There is Lots of plugins out there that will convert it to an array, and then you can loop over it, and it will use the heading to make the object properties for you. Rid. Then on the other side, even if there is not an API for filling out a form, usually, you can just open up your rid. Dev tools, go to the network tab and fill out the form manually and submit it, and you can see the request that it makes. And, usually, what it will do is just re Post the data to a specific endpoint either via an Ajax call or just a regular form submit. And, usually, you can just replicate that entire request with a fetch request. Go back and listen to the episode on, the vaccine finder and, I think, like, gray mark gray web or something like that where we talked about, like, building bots and scrapers and things like that. Rid You probably can automate that. If you really have to click buttons and type in and all that type of stuff, Then you can use something like puppeteer, and puppeteer will go into the node script they use to parse the spreadsheet.

And that will open up an actual browser, and you can You can literally type into inputs, click buttons, wait for seconds, and things like that. So those are fun projects. I really like doing those. Yeah.

Lewis said, agree.

Let's move on to some sick picks. Do you have a sick pick for me today?

That's a great question.

I am running out of sick pics because we are recording so often

Right now. Yeah. We're recording so often is really the problem. And it's not that I have a I have a lot of things that I I would like to share with y'all, but I need to take better notes on what those things are. So you know what? Here's what I'm gonna sick pick. I'm gonna sick pick SvelteKit because I can't talk enough about how much I like working in it right now. It's very nice. It's fantastic. There's a lot of good stuff. You get server side rendering and all this stuff and more. It's a platform for building a full stack apps in, But I think the most important thing about it is the simplicity of Svelte. Like, people ask me, like, what's the killer feature of SvelteKit? And sure, you could say it's like Next JS. Right? It's next year for yourself. But to me, the killer feature is felt itself just the simplicity that you get in working with that system. And, you know, I I don't know. I sound like a broken record, so I almost don't even wanna say it. But, hey, I like it a lot. So, that's my sick pick. Good stuff. I'm going to sick pick the Wyze rid Sprinkler controller. I know that you sick picked this,

what, like, 6 months ago or something like that, and I am in the process of setting up a Sprinkler setup.

And the sprinkler controller is not outdoor rated, so I bought this, like, enclosure for it so it can live outside, rid And I don't have to run tons and tons of wire to it. And the app is amazing for turning them on and off. It has a rid Master pump, relay on it, which is great because then I can turn the pump on for my sprinklers so that the water gets pumped into the sprinklers.

It just looks nice. It's just funny going into sprinkler world. All of the stuff looks like an Ipod from 2006, And the Wyze just comes swinging with a beautifully designed sprinkler controller. So check it out. It's at y w y zed e.com.

Rid They still don't have a Canadian store, so I had to ship this to my sister.

And, like, I bought it and shipped it to my sister, and then I had to pay my sister to ship it to me. So it's a little bit expensive, but I'm excited for them to get a Canadian store.

Yeah. You know what? I maybe I'll double up your sick for a wye sprinkler even though I already had 1 because you know what my favorite thing about the wye sprinkler system is? Besides the fact that it's like a cheap Sprinkler system, controller was that when I was debugging, I had some, some breakage in the line issues. When I was debugging that, rid. It was so easy to sit on my front lawn and be like, alright. Test zone 1, zone 1, test zone 2, test zone 2, test zone okay. There's the problem. Right? Rid. We're like in the past, you you're running downstairs or wherever your controller is. You're tweaking the knob. You're running back up. You're checking it. You're tweaking it. Yeah, man. Hepdes Smart sprinkler system as a homeowner is very, very, very nice, and I I can't believe rid that it's taken so long for a very cheap one to come out that is this good. So the Wyze one is very nice in my experience as well. It is awesome. 1 or one other feature that it has is

And not everyone will need this, but it comes with a massive power brick. And sprinklers run on 24 volts AC, And those, like, big black power bricks you get are almost always DC.

And I was, like, looking at it. I was like, this is probably half the cost of the sprinkler controller because these Those power bricks aren't cheap, especially if it's AC to AC, but they also have just like a line in. Instead of using the power brick, rid. You can pull power off of I'm using a pump relay, and it supplies you with 24 volts. So I use that, and I didn't even use the big chunky rid. Power brick that came with it, and I was like, oh, this is nice. Like, they thought about people who were in that very specific situation, which is not a lot of people. So I was really happy that it it's not just like a cheap one that doesn't have features. Like, it's it's a cheap one that has all the features. I'm gonna shamelessly plug my

course on Svelte components. It's gonna be advanced intermediate components that we're building stuff like, Hey. You wanna build a Toast message system? Well, you can build that really quickly and easily using Svelte stores, and we get into some custom stuff. So each of these videos is really finely tuned to teach you some intermediate to advanced techniques like actions and custom stores and animations and All sorts of really amazing stuff. So head on over to level up tutorials.comforward/prosign up today, and you will get 25% off.

I'm going to shamelessly plug all of my courses currently on summer sale. Go to wes boss.comforward/ courses.

That will have a list of every single course that I currently have available, advanced React and GraphQL, beginner JavaScript, master Gatsby, Rack for beginners, learn node, you name it. So it's on sale right now, but also use a coupon code syntax for an extra $10 on top of that. Sick. That's it. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll catch you on Monday.

Peace. Peace.

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