A Podcast on Running a Podcast

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is John Talinski and Wes Bos. Welcome

to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats ready. There. Today, we've got a podcast on running a podcast.

We got lots of questions about, like, how do you run the podcast? What do you use? How do you keep coming up with ideas? Things like that. I wanna start a podcast. Do you have any tips? Things like that. We are going to Delve into all of that, our recording setups. What do we talk about? Editing, hosting the website, transcripts, promoting it, Sponsors, you name it. We are speaking of sponsors, we are sponsored by FreshBooks Cloud Accounting, LogRocket JavaScript session replay, and Cloudinary Image hosting transformation for your Apple. Talk about all of them partway through the episode.

With me, as always, is mister Scott Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Ready. Hey. I'm doing good, man. Getting into it Monday morning, you know, feeling the vibes, ready to go, ready to talk about podcasting.

Rid Yeah. No. I'm doing good. Yeah. Good. Good. Good. Good. My name is Wes. I always forget to say my name on this podcast. I'm Wes Boss.

Yeah. We we don't do a lot of introducing and introductions for people who this may or may not be their 1st time listening to the show. Yeah. Wes Bos, Scott Talinski, Here, talk about web dev stuff most of the time. This time, we're gonna be talking about podcasting about web dev stuff, so a little one step back. But yeah. Yeah. We ready. Should do another

origin stories podcast because we did last 1, like, 4 years ago, and Lot's changed. Yeah. So maybe we'll do another another little intro to ourselves podcast. That'd be kinda cool. Yeah. Alright. Well, let's get in into it. Let's start with, the recording set rid Like, how do we do this? We record ourselves locally as well as we use Zoom to chat, and then we record on Zoom as a backup.

Rid. So that gives us the best output because local recording always will trump rid Any sort of online recording because there is zero compression of the vocals going through one to another. Rid. There has been probably 3 or 4 times where the recording has goofed up or something has crashed and we've lost it. And the nice thing about that is that we have a backup on Zoom,

And I don't think we've ever had to have have we ever had to redo an entire show? No. No. I don't think so, And it's actually amazing. That's amazing considering how often I have to redo screen recordings because the input was wrong or something like that. Like, I have all these steps put in place to make sure I do not have to redo a recording, and it still happens to me for sometimes that are just reasons that are completely out of my control whatsoever. So It is incredible to me that we've never had to redo a show and that we honestly just about never have to use the Zoom audio either. So Yeah. Rid. Yeah. It's pretty good. I I hate using the Zoom audio because people listen to podcasts have really good ears, and

they let us know, which is we appreciate when you let us know, hey.

Rid Your mic is sounding a little off or something like that because we strive to have good audio on this. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of audio, we'll go through our sort of rid. Our setups, I use a Heil PR 40 mic with a little pop screen in front of it. It's on a boom arm, and then that is connected to a DBX re 286 s. What would you call that? It's like a It's a preamp. It's a preamp and processor. It's got a whole bunch of little goodies in it. It takes the Asses out, and it takes the

breaths out. And what else? Pops? So it's a it's a it's a compressor and a gate, and it's a high pass filter and a low pass filter if you want it. But it's a compressor and a gate mostly. In a compressor, what that does is it rid Compresses the audio, so the stuff that's a little bit quieter becomes louder, and the stuff that's louder becomes quieter so that it's all a little bit more level. Mhmm. And then the gate It's like a if a a sound of a specific volume enters the processor, then it will let it through. But if it's not of a specific volume, rid. Then it will block it, obviously, with a little bit more of a nuance there with a shelf involved. But That's so key because you've got rid. MacBook Pros that are running fans 247.

And in the summer, I'll have the the windows open, so you'll hear a big truck roll by. Mhmm. Or sometimes I'll just ready. Goofing around here like, did you hear that?

Yes.

Okay. You hear that? Drop. So fiddling with Stuff with your fingers and you drop something or or whatever, that stuff is all taken out, which is really, really helps. Same with the recording rid Tutorials as well. It just keeps it all out. Yeah. See, right now, my kid is yelling. Can you hear that? No. No. See? There you go. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I

I use a rid Just about a very similar setup. I use a different mic. I use this, this is the ElectroVoice e so it's an EV RE 20 is the microphone. Re Electro Voice RE 20, and this is the classic radio mic. I've got kind of a deep, deep voice, so the, classic radio mic really works well for me. This is the mic you hear on NPR because they it has that specific aesthetic. And that same thing goes for me, it goes into something called a cloud lifter, which is a preamp rid. That boosts the signal, and then a then it goes directly into the two eight six s, just like Wes's, which goes with it into a thing, which goes into my computer. So that's pretty much it. So that is our recording setup. It's pretty simple. I use QuickTime to record locally,

which I'm not

the hugest rid fan of it, but it also just works really well. What do you use, Scott? I use Logic LogicX. It's funny. I never used Logic until we started doing this. I was always like, We use Pro Tools, or if I was doing my music myself, I used Ableton, but Logic has always just kind of existed on my computer because I get it with Final Cut.

Yeah. And

So cool. Try to use Logic for this. This is pretty nice. The you know, the the best thing for me about something like Logic versus QuickTime is that I can see the audio waveform generated as I'm speaking. Rid Yeah. So I I'm I'm seeing if there's peaks, valleys. I can see exactly if it's getting the right input. To me, I'm so used to working in this type of editor anyways that, like, rid. It would feel very weird to record on QuickTime, I think, for me. If anyone knows, like, a good desktop app that does that, shows you the waveforms as you're talking, that would be nicer. There's also we've been on a lot of podcasts, and these people

often use, like, Riverside

dot f m or You could just use Logic, Wes. It's really not that rid

No. But, no, the thing is you're always it's waiting for your thing to save. With QuickTime, it just saves right away, which is which is pretty nice.

Yeah. I'm not worried about the price of it. I just don't want, like, a full You're like, I don't wanna worry about this. A big app for my job. Yeah. It's a big app. Rid. Too big. It's too big for me. Maybe I'll give it a shot. Try it out. People use these online things where it's sort of like a Zoom rid. And then when you've done the podcast, it uploads your audio. So it records your audio locally. And so those are those are pretty good because then, also, then you don't have to line up the audio Because everyone's is programmatically lined up, we haven't really looked too much into I've never been impressed using one of those with somebody. It always seems like it's gonna rid. Crash. Or last time we used it, it got super laggy. My browser went to, like, 5 frames per second. Yeah. It was yeah. It was Very heavy. But that is also nice if you have a lot of guests on because when we have a guest on, we have to ask them to record locally and for them to upload their audio Yep. Which is not really an issue for developers or technical enough to do that. But if you've got a guest on that has no clue how to do any of this stuff, but you want your best audio, then those are probably good services rid to look into. Yeah. And it also helps that we don't have that many guests. So, like, if we had a guest on every week or something Yeah. It would be really nice to have, alright. This rid the process. You show up. You do this. You click this. Let's go. But, like, since we rarely have guests, it's like, well, well, we can make sure they're accommodated

individually. It's not like a a system that needs to be in place, but you do kind of want a system to be in place for your book And you might wanna do that in a service like FreshBooks. Wes, do you wanna talk about our 1st sponsor today, which is FreshBooks.

Yeah. If you have a podcast and you need to bill out your sponsors or if you are a web developer or a small business and re You need to send invoices out to your clients. You need to track who all your clients are. You need to be able to filter clients who haven't paid. Do you wanna automatically rid. Send follow ups based on those invoices. Basically, if you wanted to spend less time bookkeeping and more time working on your business, then you need something like FreshBooks ready to run that show for you. It's awesome. I've been using it myself for over 10 years now. Check it out at freshbooks.comforward/ syntax.

Rid. And make sure you use syntax in the how did you hear about it section. That'll give you a 30 day free trial. No credit card required. Thank you, FreshBooks, for sponsoring. Rid Cool. So the biggest part of, I think, of what lends to a show's success or, you know, the preparation,

most of our prep time and any of the stuff into the the notes of the show and and getting getting the show ready to go. So what we do is we have basically a couple of kanban boards that are rid 4 ideas for long episodes and short episodes. And anytime anything pops into my head, I'm putting it in there. Whether it's a fully formed idea or not, I'm just gonna put it in there. And sometimes it can just serve as a reminder for me later to go back and look through it and see if anything catches my eye. And sometimes it comes out as a fully formed idea, and I wanna start getting in there and writing notes either way. But the notes really they start as a Notion document. Notion is the app that we use for this, and it's nice because it has a relational data stuff. We can attach things like a date and a time to an episode, or we can attach a sponsor list to an episode and have all that stuff be relational.

So that works really well. What we end up doing is we create these these very broad outlines for the most part. And outlines are really just like what you'd from an outline, indentation, headings, and dotted lists, and those types of things, but they can be detailed or not detailed based on how much we know about the topic or rid Based on how many how much notes we really need or how many things that you just wanna kinda remind yourself, here are the things to hit. And sometimes it ends up just being a bulleted list of, like, essentially single words of things that we can talk about. In other times, it it can be much more Paragraph and sentence, or maybe we have links to code examples if we wanna be talking about code examples, those types of things. But it is just a big old outline Of the general sense, which it's not too hyper specific. We're not writing a script. We're having a chat between 2 dudes here having a chat, rid. And, that's really, I think, the benefit of our notes. The way that we have them is just that they can be it can be a little bit more of like a a free form jumping off point for us rather than like a, here, rid Paint by numbers this episode. Totally. And we also kinda use it as, like, a a chat in between.

Yeah. As we are, like, sort of talking back and forth now, like, If Scott is talking about something, I'll often just pop a little do the FreshBooks sponsor, and then he'll that's how he knows how to, like, read. Go in. Or or if Scott is talking and then an idea pops into my head, I'll quickly type it in, and he can kinda see that it it's really good. The real time

rid of it is excellent. Between having, like, really fast video and this type of thing, we can have a really good back and forth. It's actually pretty amazing. We can have, like, multiple conversations going on at the same time. 1 person could be speaking. The other 1 person ready. And simultaneously reading. It's like you're having 2 async conversations or or say or the synchronize. I don't even remember anymore that Yeah. The backwards definition thing. But, yeah, you end up having these essentially, this two line of conversation all the time, but sometimes, you know, just leaving little notes here or there. Hey. Did you want to do this one, you? Do you want to start this piece, you? But, yeah, it's pretty neat. So they because because they all start out as a a like a Notion doc with that relational table, what we can physically do is Drag them into a calendar, and then we have a calendar view, and then that's how we schedule shows. They go straight from a Kanban board to a calendar, And then we can click and add the sponsors based on that. It's all relational. We can keep track of the sponsors per episode, everything like that, and and make sure all that's look good. Rid We can also link through to the sponsored notes in case we have ad read notes or promo codes or things we need to know. Those are all just a link away any given episode because it's all relational. Right? Next topic we have here is how do you find out what to talk about? You've done, what, almost 400 episodes,

read. And you haven't run out of things to talk about. How is that even possible? So that's a really good thing about our industry rid is that the industry is constantly changing. There's always new stuff, always new frameworks, always new things to learn. So that's probably the the foremost of it is that rid. Scott and I always have our ears to the ground in terms of, like, what is happening, what is being released. And when we see something a couple rid Times are when we're interested in something, we can just throw that into Notion and make a technical episode of it. I those are probably some of my favorite episodes where we do

Explainer episodes, where we'll try to take a topic and distill it down for the listeners. Yeah. In in a lot of times, I mean, there's a lot of talk about in this stuff, whether it is Do libraries, but even if you were to just go bit by bit and say, like, what are all the techniques and things you need to learn? I mean, that's a lot of episodes and a lot of content right there. And and, like, it was just the couple rid Couple weeks ago, we were like, how have we not done a show on webhooks yet? So there's an endless amount of stuff, and if you could think about it, you can make a show on it. But there's also an endless amount of stuff changing, a lot of new things. I also just think we're both good at producing ideas. I think that's something that skill that we've always both had in terms of, like, when we came to do the podcast, we came with, like, 30 plus episode ideas Before we'd even recorded 1, we had ideas, and we've always been ahead of it. You know, sometimes we're scraping the barrel in terms of, like, Things that we're able to talk about at that moment without more research, but I don't think we've ever been in a situation where we're like, I have no episodes.

Like, even right now Yeah. We're episode nearly 400. And if you were to look in our potential episode list, there's probably rid Maybe 60 potential episodes in that list still of potential episodes that we're considering doing at any given point. So

True. One really good source of figuring out what to talk about is the potluck episodes. Oh, yeah. So we do a potluck once a month, sometimes more often because, rid Honestly, the Pollock episodes do really well. I really enjoy doing them. They're probably my favorite to record. Yeah. Yeah. They're also very easy for us to record. Yeah. Because all we do is rid. We just pick a whole bunch of questions, and then we attempt to answer them. And sometimes we do a little bit of research on each of the questions, but they are very easy to record, which is Sometimes you'll hear us do 1 or 2 2 episodes of potluck a month. And, also, we get enough questions that we could probably do 2 or 3 Oh, yeah. Potlucks per month, Which is good. And not just questions. Good questions. Totally. Yeah. Really good questions. So we appreciate everyone who sends those in because those keep us going. Rid. We have the hasty and the tasty. So if you're new, we have a hasty treat on Monday. That's a short 15 to sometimes 30 minute podcast. And then we on the Wednesday, we have the Tasty Treat, which is about an hour long podcast. And I'm really glad that we did that because sometimes we have topics that are just Short. Mhmm. And instead of having to throw those, like, 3 of them into 1 episode, we can just do one quick little short explainer episode on something, and it works out nicely. And people seem to really like the 2 different types because especially, like, you're like, I'm going on a, Like a half hour drive. I don't wanna get into a full episode right now, but I could certainly do for a hasty. They're different too, I think. You know, like, a a tasty treat is literally it is that. It's like it's gonna satiate you, where a hasty treat is more like a grab and go kind of thing. And it I'm not just, like, playing with this man. I I think it legitimately, that's how we view the content in the episodes too. You know? Every now and then, we do, like, a game show. So in the past, we've done, Stumped, where Scott and I tried to do stump each other. We've done what else have we done with the game show? We did the domain game. We did the domain name game where we had to guess what the price of a domain name was And which country that TLD was from or what type of business it's associated with and whether it's available, those are really fun. We could probably come up with more games. Rid. Yeah. I I really like doing the games because it's a fun little fun little break. People will really enjoy listening to them. It's it's pretty funny when Scott and I go back and forth. Especially, like, Stumped where, like, you're gaining a knowledge. If you didn't know what thing is, you're getting an explainer of what thing is, each one of those questions. But you're also getting to see that, You know, put in in a high pressure situation. Wes and I are also normal human beings and need to look things up occasionally. You know? Totally.

Rid. We've been doing a a couple of collabs lately. We did a a show with Shop Talk, which is really fun to do because I very much enjoy the Shop Talk podcast myself, and it was rid fun to have them on, and we have I think we have a pretty big overlap between the 2 audiences. Yeah. We also did a a collab with the rid Change log, and we did their front end of huge game, which was totally rigged, and, you know, we're still counting the votes here to know who won that that one, but yeah. Yeah. That was good. Rid We could probably do some more collabs in the future. Let us know if you have, ideas. I would like to do something like we had your wife on at some point as well. I'm trying to think about different types of shows that we had. So okay, Wes.

Courtney thinks that she doesn't know if if people would want to hear her on the episode again. Now I keep telling her People really like that episode. Oh, yeah. So we gotta tell Courtney if she's if she's listening right now that she needs to come back on and we need to do another mental health episode or something with her because, who don't know, my wife is a doctor of educational psychology.

It's like she would be great to have on the show again, so I don't know if we can convince her to come back on and do that. We also have soft skills episodes. I really enjoy those as well. So sometimes we'll dive into

email or apps that we use or productivity rid Or imposter syndrome, a lot of those things is those things that come along with being a developer that's not necessarily writing code, but just how you live your life. Those are pretty fun ones to do. Yeah. There's a lot of new stuff all the time, especially things that make our lives easier, and and there's so much of it we occasionally have those sick pick episodes where it's, like, We have so many things that we like and use that are new that we could share that. It's like, wow. We could do a whole extra episode full of more of these things. Rid. Totally. Also, we do like we should have a name for these, but I just wrote it down here as we coded it. Basically, if Scott rewrote his platform and SvelteKit or I built a t shirt rid. Shipping platform basically breaking down how we built that thing in the process and the decisions and the tech that we use. People really like those ones because it's it's a real application that we built, whether it was for registering a vaccine or or something like that. And We can just break it down and explain why we did specific things in certain ways. I did it episodes.

I did it. That's what my daughter says right now. I did it. We cooked it. We cooked it. What what should that be called? No. We cooked

it. Maybe something more syntax.

Chef's choice.

Seth, tweet us at Sendak's m m if you have an idea for what to call the episodes where we explain stuff that we projects that we took on and finished.

Yeah. And, speaking of We cooked it. We just did that episode on me cooking a a new SvelteKit site. Well, in that new SvelteKit site, I made sure that I launched it with one of our favorite rid Services, and this is an ad transition into, one of our sponsors today, which is LogRocket.

Now I use LogRocket and, trust me, was very, nervous about launching a new UI for the site. Now it's not perfect, but with LogRocket by my side, I feel confident that I'll be able to solve any of the bugs before I get a 1,000 emails about them because right now let's see. I'm heading into my LogRocket, and LogRocket is an error exception handling service that gives you a video scribble re replay, and I have an error where it looks like it's this looks like a a race condition is what I'm gonna guess because the video player Seems like it's not loaded in time. And I get a scribble video replay, so I can see that, okay, what's the user doing there rid On the main page, and they can click the 1, and then that's when the error comes. So looks like they're trying to load the video player. The video player was not loaded in time, And that's causing an error for this user, and I could see all of that along with the console log and more. So if you want those kind of features for debugging, let me tell you, this thing is so neat. I get the browser. I get the the user. I get what they're doing on the site, essentially, when the error happened. And you can get all of that and more with LogRocket at logrocket.comforward/syntax.

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Okay.

So editing this podcast.

We use an editor, Podcast Royale. We'll have the link for that in the show notes, and our editor has been with us for a very long time. I used to edit the podcast myself, but to be honest, know, I'm not a podcast editor. I did go to school for this kind of thing, but it I'm not, like, in practice. I don't really know what I was doing there. So I wasn't doing the this is the fancy things like cutting out the the noise when 1 person was speaking. Like, if I was speaking, I wasn't cutting out Wes' mic. So our editor, Adam, Podcast Royal, does, like, a ton for us that I was not doing and couldn't be doing. So He reached out to us, and it was, like, early days, and we said, yeah, let's do it. And we've been so happy with the work he's done ever since that rid That we've just always used them as an editor, and it's been just incredible. Adam also does all the show notes as well, so he finds the links. When we say there will be a link to that in the show notes, we always forget to put them in the notes.

So he he basically takes our, like, Notion notes here and then makes, like, a public facing version of that, and then he uploads the m p three to Libsyn. That is our host. I'm not a big fan of Libsyn. There's certainly much better options rid now, but it's honestly just not a not a problem that I cared enough about to ever change. Yeah. At the time, there was not a lot of options.

Yeah. Yeah. Now there is lots of really good options out there, but I don't really have to deal with it. And there's many other things in my life that I'd rather be doing, so we haven't rid. Haven't needed to switch off that. And then the the website itself has, like, a markdown. All the notes are written in markdown. And then as part of the rid Build is a Next. Js website. It converts them to markdown into specific pages, and that is an entire React site that sorta rid Handles that. Most people listen to the podcast on on through an app, something like Overcast or Spotify, Itunes, things like that, But a fair amount of people still listen to them on the website as well. Wow, Wes. I gotta tell you something.

You gotta go to five.libsyn.com.

So Libsyn, we're just trashing them for having an archaic out of date UI or rid Just saying it was not great. This version 5 is very nice. Oh. Yeah. Because they first of all, the loader is super pixelated. Okay. The pixelated loader, not a good start, but the tables and the charts,

the aesthetic of it all, at least, is endlessly better. This is refreshing. It feels refreshing. It's, You know, it could use some work still, but, like, yeah, this is much better than the 19 nineties in a race we had before. Because they, like, reskinned it, rid Like, a year or 2 ago, and it's like you could tell they just, like, reskinned it. You know, like, sometimes when you hit an Amazon page, it looks like it's from, like, 6 years ago. Weird buttons or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or they have, like, an image background on a button. Oh, it's a React website.

Ready. There you go. Oh, nice. Okay. Good. I'm glad that they did this. This is pretty sweet. It's gonna make me feel better about using the interface now.

Rid. Yeah. Awesome. What else? Transcripts. Transcript is something that I've I fell behind on. I probably have done 80% of the work ready. To generate and display the transcripts.

And then, man, COVID hit, things got busy. Kids are home from school. It's not much of an excuse, but that's one thing that rid. I would really like to get up and running pretty soon because those are both good for people who wanna search as well as people who are unable to listen to it. Rid. And I built a pretty sweet little, like, automation process in terms of getting them posted. So those will probably be up pretty soon on the website. What rid. What else do we have here? Would you still start 1? This is a question we get all the time. It's like, our have podcast peak.

Would you start a Twitch Or a YouTube channel instead of a podcast right now. Everybody and their mother is doing a podcast right now. Is it still worth doing one? Absolutely. I think so. I've been listening to podcasts for probably 15 years, and I show no slowdowns of of that actually happening. I'm still a big fan of it, And I think it's just a really good medium for the type of back and forth that Scott and I do. I often look at YouTube, and people post their podcasts on YouTube, and they don't do super well. The clips do. I often wonder if that would would be a a good addition to the podcast. Put the clips on YouTube. Put the clips as Shorts or something or Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. We maybe should be doing or having somebody do that because I don't know if I have the bandwidth.

I'm super good at signing up for things and saying, yeah. I can do that, and then, like, being like, oh, crap. So yeah. One thing we do get from our editor is we get 2 clips a week

Where they'll do those little, like Audiograms.

They'll take a clip of me saying something super profound or Scott Just like blowing people's minds, and then we'll you can post those to Instagram or or to Facebook or something like that. And, I haven't been great at posting those, but When I do post, some people are often really like them, so I should probably get better at that. I noticed that as well. Yeah. I know. I I don't often as well, and then I I think every once in a while, I'm like, re Oh, yeah. Got an audio, Graham, I can post. Yeah. I think there's, like, a fine balance between, like, your social feed just being, like, pushing out the same stuff all the time and, like, actual Purpose built content. There are people who I have to unfollow. Like, I think of, like, Gary v or the creative what's that guy? There's some creative guy. And after, like, a month of following, I have to unfollow because it's the same sort of, like, rid Repurposing content, posting these motivational things. So And then retweeting every single person that ever says anything about it. Yeah. Yeah. No. Thanks. Every now and then, that's totally fine. Like, I'll do that with my courses maybe once or twice a week. Someone posts something they learn, I'll retweet it. It's good. Oh, yeah. It helps sell courses, but Not all the time. That that gets really obnoxious. Yeah. There was, like, 1 service I I started following, and it's like they released, like, 1 press release thing, and then the next thing rid Just, like, hundreds

and hundreds of just retweets from people saying the same thing. You know? It's like, oh, this thing's pretty cool. Okay. Thank

you. I get it. I follow a couple of YouTubers, and whenever they release a video, people will they'll post a screenshot of them watching the video, And then they'll repost, like, a 100 people screenshots. And, like, I don't care about this. And I think they do that because people then re We'll want to post screenshots and hoping that they get reposted, but as someone who's, like, following them, it's it's really obnoxious. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

So you mentioned that, like, this is, like, a good medium for us, you know, just the type of conversation that we we tend to have on this type working out a little bit better in the audio form, I I really agree. And me, personally, I think it is just maybe because I listen to so many podcasts. Yeah. Podcast is is the medium that I I really, really enjoy working, and I really enjoy it as a medium. And I think there's an endless amount of of growth still for this medium. You're seeing right now this, like, great buy up of all these different podcasts of, like, Apple wants them or Spotify wants them or whatever, But there's more money coming into podcasting, especially in the larger shows. Right? The large shows get whatever. How how much money Joe Rogan got, not that that's Saying that's a great show or something, but I think there's a lot of room for growth in this medium, and we're still seeing Yeah. The growth in this medium. We're still seeing the evolution in this medium. So

rid I I would absolutely still start 1, and we have allowed even we can do to continue to grow and evolve our show as it is. Totally. It's and it's starting ready. To move away from its, like, homegrown roots of techies building their own thing, and things are much more produced. Things are often exclusive to Spotify or whatever, which I absolutely hate because I just just give me a RSS feed, and I'll choose the app. Yeah. Rid I feel you too. Like, it's part of what it does is it allows people like us to

just have a conversation and have that be worthwhile and shareable and stuff rather than having to have We don't need those audio sparkles or whatever in here after everything we say or or have it be that finely tuned in those ways because that's not what we're doing compared to I'm I'm trying to think of, like, a 99% invisible or something. The types of stories they're telling are very different than the than the the type of content we're providing, and I think The medium has room for all sorts of stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. Next one is, like, how do you get people to listen to it? I think

it's, like, Spotify, iTunes are starting rid Solve this problem, but, like, discoverability of podcast still seems to be you post something on social media and ask rid. For podcasts, like, we get tagged probably every day on Twitter of people saying, like, what programming podcast you listen to or, rid. Like, part of the reason why the name of this podcast is Syntax Tasty Web Development Treats is because people search for web development or JavaScript on Spotify, rid. And that's exactly what they find out. So other ways, how do you get popular? So Scott and I were super lucky in that rid. We both had, like, fairly large followings on YouTube, email us, Twitter, things like that, and we're able to start the podcast off with a bit of a boom.

Rid. I don't know that we would have lasted as long if we were having 50 people listen every single week because it's really great to hear people's feedback and actually rid See that it's working, you know. And if you don't get that immediately, it's it can sometimes be a bit frustrating. Yeah. I mean, it it did really help that we both had our audiences, but you're you made a really good point about discoverability in podcasts. I think if you want

a re Startup IT or something like that. That seems like something that could be really done well. I started using a an an app called Goodpods or something recently That's like trying to do this type of thing. There's been several of these, like, podcast discovery engines.

Yeah. Goodpods is the latest one I've been trying, and they're They're kind of interesting. I don't think anybody's really nailed it yet. Part of the problem with most of these is, like, yes, this Goodpods looks nice, But the player isn't as nice as, like, Pocket Cast or something, and everybody has their own player. So, like, I think maybe a service that integrates better With all of the different players, right, everybody has their preferences on where they play their podcasts. Maybe a service that integrates, something like that, could be really interesting. But in anything where, like, you you are saying, alright. I love syntax, obviously. What other kind of things would I I like if I like syntax? Or

Give me all of Scott's, Sick Pick podcast or something like that. Be kind of interesting if there was a more of a social discovery aspect to podcast. Also think, like, one of the reasons it's popular is is the same thing for, like, literally anything else is that just consistency is key. We've been at this for Almost 400 episodes now. It's just, well, almost 4 years or something like that. And just showing up every week And just hitting the record button whether we like it or not. Usually, we like it is really key in that you're not like, people expect re There to be a podcast every Monday and every Wednesday, and I don't think we've missed a Monday or a Wednesday in probably two and a half years. I've only missed 1 episode myself, And it was because of the birth of my child.

So yes.

That's the only time I've missed 1 episode. Yeah. And the the shop talk show when You had to run out and go buy a house Oh, that was in the middle of it. I don't did we ever explain it? We might have explained that, but, yeah, I got a call in the middle of the episodes like, where are you the closing of your house. Like, what do you mean? Where am I with the the it's not till noon, and they goofed up. That's pretty impressive given

Holidays and, you know, having kids and cold pandemic and everything, and we try to get Yeah. Right? At least a couple weeks Ahead on recording, we were, like, a month and a half ahead before summer, which is great, and then we took the whole summer off. Now we're back at ready. Trying to record an extra 1 or 2 every week so that we can have a bit of a lead time. And that's really nice as if someone gets sick or Your kids are home from school or something like that or it just doesn't work out, we can it's it's fine. We can record next week, and we're not gonna it's not gonna hurt. We both have families, and, yeah, family emergencies, definitely a thing. Or, like They pop up. Yeah. Just sleepless nights or something. Yeah. I'm not feeling very smart today, Wes. I did not sleep at all last night. Yeah. Being zonked is really, really hard. It's also funny that we record every Monday. We record rid Not hasty, any tasty every single Monday, which is not the best day ever to record a podcast because most holidays rid are on Mondays. And between the US holidays and the Canadian holidays, there is some overlap. But since we work for ourselves, we often forget that there are holidays until the day of.

Especially me. Anyone who's ever worked in an office with me knows that I do not know When holidays are, even the major ones, people I'll I'll be like, what what are we working on next week? And they'll be like, are you serious? I'll be like, what do you mean am I serious? They're like, it's Christmas next week.

Rid What? Are you serious? Oh, okay.

Minor holiday of Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Next, we are gonna talk about Sponsors. But before we do that, let's hear from one of our sponsors.

Hey, Wes.

Look at you all grown up. Oh, yeah. He's firing off the guns.

Rid That's West Abbas over there with the guns. This episode is sponsored by Cloudinary, which is the amazing cloud image host that allows you to have images and videos in the cloud that are transformed on demand.

And this is a service that Wes and I have both been using rid Since before they sponsored the show for a long time and just both love this service. And if you wanna support them, you can always click the link in our Show notes let them know that where you heard about Cloudinary. But either way, what Cloudinary does is allows you to have an image host But, again, it gives you auto generated quality format based on the person, the request requesting this image, meaning that you can serve up the rid Smallest, most precise images to whomever.

You know those those neat features, like, where you say, auto crop to someone's face? You can have those features baked in for free. You don't have to write any of that code yourself, and it all just happens to be with the URL that you pull this image from making the API rid easy, especially when you're working in any of our modern code that we do. You just augment that URL path where you're asking the image, and it's able to rid bit out a image generated for you at the time. So check out Cloudinary at cloudinary.com or use the link in the show notes again to let them know where you heard about Cloudinary, and check it out. It's a a service that personally just one of those services I gotta have gotta have. Give me that. So sponsors sponsors are a reason why we can dedicate so much time to this show. So that's a good question is how much time a week do we spend working on syntax? Rid It's probably 5 to 6 hours, would you say? Yeah. I usually plan out even though it's not most of my Monday, most of my Monday brainpower ready. Sunday evening is dedicated

to syntax, preparing for syntax. Yeah. And then we've got because we've gotta, like, write notes for the show. Usually, we we just hammer out the notes for the show rid The day of recording, sometimes we'll have other shows where we've been planning them forever. Like, the TypeScript show was a big one. That was probably 6 or 8 months coming just because Every time that I learned something new in TypeScript, I would write some notes in the show notes for that. Yeah. I sketch down notes too as I like as I'm thinking about things. Yeah. You know, just to have a general outline is ready. It always helps. So yeah. And then we've got it to have calls with sponsors and do other stuff. But it's it's a pretty well oiled machine at this point, so it doesn't take too too much of our time. Rid. But we have sponsors for the shows. The way that it works is usually right around October, November of each year, rid. We open up the sponsorship spots for the following year, and we try to sell as many of those as we possibly can Just because that is pretty intensive in terms of, like, how to sell them. You gotta have calls with everybody. You gotta make sure you understand the product. Luckily, a lot of our sponsors are things that we have used before even having them on. I'm just looking at the list of our sponsors, FreshBooks, Cloudinary, Century, rid Mux, Auth0.

Let's take a look. There's tons of sponsors that I've used in the past. The most of our sponsors, we either used before they reached out to us, And I would say that most of them, we did, or, like, we use them now. Like, I didn't know LogRocket existed before they reached out to us, rid. And now I'm like, oh, yeah. LogRocket. Awesome.

Yeah. Sweet. So that is a really great part of running the rid podcast is that we're able to get people to pay us to do this thing, and we get to work with companies that we genuinely really enjoy rid and generally like to use, which is not like some lip service or whatever. We actually do enjoy working with these companies. So that is a really cool aspect of it. I would venture to say all of our sponsors let us just giver when we do the ad reads. We ask them for bullet points and URLs and coupon codes and things like that. Rid. But, generally, we say, like, hey. Can you just, like, give us the gist of what you wanna get across and let us go for it? And we've been very happy with that, which is which is pretty cool. I think that is a bit better than at least in my opinion, I like that better than the whole, like, doo doo play music in the background.

And, like, rid Today is brought to you by QuickMortgage or whatever because we are developers. And if we can talk about it in the aspect of being a developer, I rid I think less people will skip over them, and you certainly are welcome to skip over them if you want. But,

people often say, we're the only ones they don't skip them for. Yeah. Alright. I know. Right? Good. That's the whole thing is, like and Elsa makes it so we don't have to do ad reads that are, like, oh, here's this male grooming product Is this just a show for dudes then? Is this, like, only dude show? I mean, like, I would never wanna to be that that type of podcast where you're having a reliant on something like that, but, You know, whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I say that, but money talks. So

So so male grooming product to get at us. No. I I think we have enough Sponsors that are services that we would actually love to be like.

These are are something that could legitimately help you, and we're not just, like,

Not just funding the podcast by having them on. We are trying to bring you legitimate services that we think you could use. Yeah. Yeah. Rid. Trying to surface some some really cool stuff, and I think also we're we're very lucky to be in a industry where that is possible Totally. Totally. Where the companies are run. So Sponsors have been a really awesome part. We initially started the podcast and we had no idea if we wanted to have sponsors or not. I remember we had I think it was Delicious Brains. Rid. They're the WP Migrate DB. Mhmm. Were they the 1st sponsor? I think so.

Basically, they just emailed and said, hey. Ready. Can we sponsor it? And I remember saying, hey. What do you think about having a sponsor on the podcast? You know? And, I'm just trying to look back. It was episode 4. We had Delicious Brains.

WP Migrate DB Pro came on. We weren't doing hasties and tasties at that point. We were just doing tasties, And we recorded the 1st 3 episodes ahead of time, so we had, like, a 3 week ramp up. So it was those first 3 episodes were recorded, and then by the next rid time we recorded, so it was really like the 2nd session of recording syntax. We had a sponsor. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. I was really happy to see that. And I also we also learned that There are a lot of companies that try to

hop on new podcasts because you can get very affordable spots. Ready. And what happens is 1 in probably 10 blows up. And then the money that you get from that, like, cheap sponsorship spot, You see it on YouTube as well. Like, sometimes you see these really small YouTubers getting sponsorship spots, and you go, I wonder, like, how they got that. And it's because rid. They know, like, there's a slight chance that this video is gonna get 4,000,000 views, and it's gonna pay for itself 10 times over. So Rolling the dice. Rid. I think there's even, like, software out there that's scanning for new podcasts because as soon as it hit, we got all kinds of emails from people being like, rid. We like to manage your ads as well. So maybe that's another thing we should answer is, like, Scott and I sell and manage all of the sponsors ourselves, rid. And we have all the time, we have companies that wanna come and do it all for us. They wanna just, like, take it over. And for a 20% cut or whatever, rid. They'll do it all. And we have not gone that route because, mostly, the companies want ready. To have calls with Scott and I because they're usually, it's the developers of the company have calls with us, and then rid. The money guy is also on the phone as well, making sure that everything is legit. But they need the actual developers to talk to developers rid. So we can talk amongst ourselves to understand what needs to get across for this type of thing. So I don't think it would work as well if we had somebody handling that for us. Plus, it's honestly not that much extra work for keeping the extra 20% cut. Yeah. And I also think the ads are better because of it, because rid. If we had an ad management company, they'd probably be getting us predatory mobile game ad or whatever, you know, that you're hearing on some some podcasts. Rid. Totally. Yeah. Last one we have here is what about Patreon? We get this all the time. Like, can you give us syntax without the ads, rid. But I'll pay for it. And I've never been a big fan. I've talked about this before. I've never been a big fan of Patreon in the past. I'm not sure why.

I just don't think it would be worth the extra effort. I know that you've you've thought about it in the past. What are your thoughts on that? I don't think it's a bad idea to have an ad free version, because I do pay for a couple of podcasts that I like Yeah. To get the ad free version. It's just to pay for it and then rid Skip the ads. And then their ad reads aren't ridiculous or anything like that, but Yeah. It does feel, like, nice to support those podcasts in that way. And I I feel like maybe, like, a better direct line of support because I know I'm not gonna buy anything that they're advertising anyways. Yeah. So maybe that's something. If it was something that we didn't have rid do, Wes. I don't think that would be you just have to publish 2 versions of the show. I'm not exactly sure what the effort that would go into it. Yeah. I think it would probably be worth it to do it from our time effort standpoint, and it doesn't feel that scummy to me, but I might not be. If people feel like that's not cool, it would just be like an ad free version or something. I think the biggest concern we would have would be, like, you don't wanna put, like, a paywall in front of actual content, Especially, it's educational content. Right? This stuff is meant to teach people stuff. You don't wanna say, like, okay. You have to give us, you know, $5 a month to learn something. It feels The re Three array method explanation will come with you $5 a month. Right. I think the reason why I don't like it is be not because it's it feels scummy or anything. It's that rid. When people ask me, it's because they generally say, I wanna support US,

and I get this with my courses as well. People say, hey. Like, do you have, like, a donation link or something like that? Rid And my answer to that is usually, like, no. Like, I'm doing great. Even if you don't buy one of my paid courses, that's absolutely fine. The business model works out that rid. Enough people are gonna buy the paid course, and you don't have to worry about trying to support me or something like that if if you're not able to buy it. The same thing with the podcast is, ready. Hey, we really appreciate that you love the podcast so much that you would like to open up the wallet and give us money. But I'm like, well, we're doing okay with the sponsors right now, so maybe it's okay. But I might be wrong about that as well. Maybe it's it's something we should look into. It could just be, like like I said, a purely,

aerodynamics I just want the show without the ads. Yeah. And some people just might want that. So if that's you, if that's how you feel, let us know. I'm open to consideration, but I'm not, like, Dying to do it, so, you know, we'll see. Totally. Yeah. Maybe you get the uncut version where you hear Scott and I goof up 400 times, something like that. We could have the after hours version where we drop f bombs. There we go.

Hours version where we drop f bombs. There we go.

We probably had a couple of swears on the show before, but now as a parent Oh my gosh. Yes. If I'm listening to something and someone says the s word, s t u p I d Oh. My kids, like, are like, what's going on? Someone said the word. Like, that's rid not a good word, and I'm like, oh, man. Like, that's so annoying that you have to explain to them.

I'm gonna keep listening to this thing even though they said the s word. A word that We don't want you to say, you know what? My podcast list is at a glanceable, like, which ones are okay for me to listen to with kids in the car and which ones aren't. It's so funny. I I know which podcast of mine are not just gonna drop swears, but, like, you know, drop some language I do wanna want them repeating or something or or just mimicking at, you know, 4 years old, so it's tough. Yeah. It's it's tough, but I think that's something we've always done a of job of. They kinda want our show to be one of those shows that people can't have in the car with kids in because Yeah. I know. I'm driving. I'm picking up the kids from daycare. I wanna listen to my shows, but some of my shows, rid Just can't do it. Just can't do it. Yeah. Plus, I'm not a big swear.

I'll drop hack every now and then, but you know me. Last thing we want to talk about here is live shows. This is something we didn't really talk about. We've done a couple of live shows. We've done them at conferences, which is really fun. Hopefully, we got a couple more coming up now that the world is hopefully starting to return back to normal.

And then we've done a few, like, livestream ones, which rid are super fun. The logistics of setting that up is always a bit of a pain in the butt. But I think if we had I think we're almost ready. Running up on episode 400. So what do you think about doing a a live show for 400?

I'm in. I am in. Rid Something happened between the last one and, recently, my computer just hates live streaming video. I don't know what is up with that. So,

Yeah. Well, I I think we should be able to do it in either way. Yeah. We'll figure something out. It's always fun to, like, have the chat going, and People who, like, listen to every single episode are are in the chat, the hard course and taxers.

So it's fun to be able to interact with them, and We often have people on to be able to plug their own stuff, do sick pics of their own, things like that. Totally. Yeah. I'm down. Oh, you know what I just thought of? Halloween's coming up. We gotta do the rid Spooky stories again. Oh, yeah. We gotta we gotta ask some spooky stories.

Okay. We should ask that right now if you have Yeah.

Spooky story that you would like to submit to us for our Halloween show. If you haven't heard the Halloween show, we do a show or 2 every year

rid That is spooky stories. Spooky stories. Web dev spooky stories. People submit their things where, like, I took down the entire database, and then everybody talked about it at the meeting next day. Those types of stories that make us web developers shaking our boots a little bit, that those types of stories. Yeah. Or you accidentally left a swear word in in your console log or Very common. You deployed the wrong version,

or somebody once deployed, like, a checkout with a test token, so they lost, like, $100 worth of rid. Thanks. All those awful, awful stories that web developers have. If you have any of those, submit them to us. Either rid. Send me email, wes@westboss.com, or tweet us at syntaxfm

because those are always a hoot to read through. They're a hoot. It's the definition of a hoot. Yeah. Anything else to add here, or should we get us some sick picks? Sick picks. Yeah. Some insight. We'll do a little meta sit picks. Rid. We sick pick things. I have a running list in my little notebook. Anytime I see something, I just write it down in there, and then I cross it off after I use it. So constantly have a running list of sick picks, and sometimes rid It is us looking around for things that we checking out our Amazon purchase history or whatever. But for the most part, I like to stay ahead of it because if I don't stay ahead of it, you know, I think my rid Sick picks suffer a little bit, so my sick pick this week is going to be a documentary.

It's funny because I did a, I think, a a documentary last week on Lula Rich, And this is going to be Hold on. Can we just talk about Lula Rich for a second? Can we talk about the Lula Rich after this one? Yes. Sorry. Go ahead.

Is going to be the Netflix show Crime and Penalties, the untold sports documentary.

Now the untold sports documentaries have been Really good. I only watched the Malice at the Palace considering I used to I did a halftime show for the Detroit Pistons at one point, so I'm very familiar with the Palace of Auburn Hills. So analysis at the Palace was a really good one, but the one that I'm gonna sick pick is going to be Untold Crime and Penalties about, basically, a mob boss buying his 17 year old on a hockey team. It's a professional hockey hockey team. There are minor leagues in Connecticut, and this documentary was so good. The characters are all so good interesting, we didn't know very much about the story despite my love of hockey, and I've we went in pretty blind, and my wife and I just both love this thing. So rid. Untold crime and penalties. Very good.

We watched Lulu Rich, like, the night you recommended it because rid. I love a good MLM story. Of course. Yeah. And, I was telling Caitlin. I was like, Scott recommends documentary, and it's 4 episodes. Each one is, like, rid 45 minutes long or something like that. And I was like, Scott watched it with Courtney in a night.

And she's like, what? Rid That's insane. Like, that's way too much. That's not something we normally do, by the way. We're sitting on the couch, 11 PM, and Caitlin's like, let's watch the third one. I was like, you just gave Scott hack.

Rid.

Uh-huh. Oh, it's so good.

So I'm gonna sick pick another documentary. We're going on a bit of a documentary re binge lately, and I'm going to sick pick Road Runner, which is the Anthony Bourdain documentary.

And it was rid. So much better than I had expected, and it just goes into they have so much footage of his, like, early life, which is very surprising to me. And, obviously, they have rid. Tons of footage from his life on, no reservations and parts unknown and all those things. And it was just a really awesome look into his life and His personality and it's just really, really interesting. A little bit depressing, but excellent documentary Yeah. Called Roadrunner.

Nice. I'll have to check that out. Rid Shameless plugs.

I'll shamelessly plug all my courses. Westboss.comforward/courses.

You can check out rid My Gatsby, my beginner JavaScript, full stack advanced React and GraphQL. JavaScript 30 is a free course, rid. Rack for beginners, CSS Grid, all kinds of good stuff. If you are buying one of the paid ones, use coupon code Sintas. That'll get you an extra $10 rid off. If you want to learn all sorts of modern cool tech stuff, head on over to level up tutorials.com

rid And sign up to become a pro today, and you can check out. I have a whole ton of new courses every single month. We have awesome third party content creators. So it's like a magazine subscription where a new tutorial course comes out every single month, and it's often on the latest and greatest stuff. In fact, you may have been seeing me talk a whole ton about re Svelte, and we have all the Svelte content on the hookup right now. There is beginning Svelte. There is building Svelte components, Svelte, rid Hit animating Svelte. We got the Svelte content if you are interested in learning this new hot language and framework. So check it out, level up tutorials.com.

Alright. That's it. Thank you for tuning in to our podcast about podcasts. Hopefully, you enjoyed it, and we'll catch you on Monday. Peace.

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