Potluck - Using Emoji in Naming × Project Estimates × Goal Planning

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.

Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats rid. Out there today, we've got a potluck episode for you. That is where you ask the questions, we answer them. You could submit your own question, please do, because it keeps the potlucks rid. Going. Go to syntax. Fm. We've got a little link in the top right hand corner. Smash it, fill it out. We will answer your question on the episode. Today, we've got Really good questions today on, how to come up with a reliable timeline for a project.

What is A sustainable, like how do you be a sustainable web developer in terms of like the environment? CSS media queries, SVG, HSL, rid. How would you animate a CSS gradient? I love that question. So some really good stuff coming on up. We are sponsored by 3 awesome companies, Linode, Cloud computing developers trust LogRocket. They give you visibility into people how people are using your website. And Sanity, the platform for rid. Content that powers remarkable digital experiences. Let's talk about all of them partway through the episode.

My name is Wes Bos. I'm a developer from Canada.

With me as always is mister Scott Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott?

Oh, yeah. I I could be I'm moving kind of at a a turtle's pace today. I went to the Broncos game Yesterday and, yeah, I got I got a friend invited me, and he had, like, some VIP ticket thing that had an open bar and stuff beforehand.

And you're cranking them. I I was cranking out, but I wasn't intentionally doing that. I took the train, so I didn't have to drive. But, like, man, They just kept getting me more drinks, and by the end by the end of the game, it was a little rough. Oh, yeah. You gotta and be careful with that. I can't. I I I enjoy beer

a lot, but I can only have a couple before I'm, like, ready for you. Yeah. It's not it's not typically

my style, But, you know, you're you're with the boys at the game, and, you know, unfortunately, it just happened to be on a Sunday. Pucks and everything. Yeah. It shoots the pucks.

Rid. I know. I've I've before somebody emails me, I know that it's football. I'm not that out to lunch on sports.

Ready. What do you got? You got arena football there. Who's your team?

We got the Hamilton Tiger Cats. The Tigers. They built a Matt, they're they're gonna build a massive new stadium in Hamilton, and they ended up scrapping that. And they tore down the entire stadium and, like, Turned it 20 degrees and then rebuilt it just so that the sun wouldn't be in their eyes or something like that. But it rid. Like football in Canada, like, it's huge, but they only have 13 games a year. And, like like, it's not uncommon to Go to the gym or, like go to the grocery store and see all of the players there. And they, like, have side jobs and stuff. It's not nearly as Intense says the NFL.

I would love to go to, like, a, like, a Bills game one day because we're 45 minutes from Buffalo and, like, the tailgating

Looks super fun. There's there's no tailgate culture in Canada. It was it was like that, and it was a lot of fun. I'd never been to a Broncos game, man. It was wild. On a side note here, sorry for all of y'all tuning in for web dev stuff. Our neighbor found out that she's been schmoozing with, the smoothing schmoozing with the mother of a child in their in their school. Right? They're just like, a a kid drop off. They're just kinda saying hi. Well, she just found out that the person the mother she's been schmoozing with is, is Ciara, who's a, like, a pop star and married to Russell Wilson, The quarterback of the Denver Broncos, and the child is Russell Wilson's child.

And she's like, I just I had no idea. Like, So it's quite probably good for her that she didn't know who she was. Otherwise, you'd be, like, you know Yeah. Get all starstruck trying to talk to somebody.

Oh, that's great. All right, let's get into the first question.

This is a question that somebody submitted via Instagram and I was like, this is a perfect One, please put it in the potluck because I would love to answer this. So, they said, so I have an interesting one for you. My work decided it's good For us to use emoji naming convention for our grid template areas instead of just words.

Be interesting to get your take. Your and Scott's take on this is send a screenshot to Wes' Instagram as well. So, essentially let's let's cover 2 things here. 1st, rid. CSS Grid allows you to define an area or areas of your grid. And you they're called named areas. Rid. So so meaning that you could grid up a header, a content, a sidebar, and a footer. And instead of saying, like, this item goes in the 1st column, you say this rid item goes in the content area or the header area or the sidebar area or the footer area. So you basically name them and you say just this thing goes in the in the area. And that's nice because You can change the layout of the grid and those items will still just go where you want.

And what they have rid. Opted to do is to use emojis or Unicode characters for things like arrows, center, top, right.

Rid. Or, like, you could put, like, a foot emoji in the footer.

And then when you have to put something there, you use the actual Emoji character or the Unicode character instead of the word, that describes where it is. And I thought, oh, that's that's rid. Kind of interesting. And then he said, like, what do you even think about this thing? I can't possibly like, is this a good thing? Is this is this weird? Rid. Sometimes when people do sort of like left hand not I don't know. Out of left field, that's the state that's the, rid. Saying I'm going for it. It's just like, Oh, is that is that okay to do? Is that gonna run into bad practices? So I told him like, I don't see any reason Why not? That you like this like, I don't think it's gonna break. There's no bad practices here. It's a little bit funky in the fact that you have to do it.

But I don't see a reason why not. I'm not sure that I would necessarily do it myself.

Rid. Because if it was, like, really long name, I would still have to go copy paste the actual character.

But I was curious what you thought about that.

On on the surface, it seems like something I would like because it's kind of cute and fun. But in in the same regard, I think it's It requires a level of, like, translating in your brain when you're reading it, where I would probably be a bit more explicit with the the naming convention there.

Rid. Yeah. It seems like something I should like, but I can't find myself actually liking it. Maybe if maybe I should see the screenshot here.

Maybe you can shoot that to me on Instagram. I'll do that. Yeah. Hold on. Let me,

let me let me find it real quick. I am going to Okay. So, the grid template areas was, top left arrow, a dash, top right arrow, And then they use l for the left, a cow for the middle, a thicker pipe for the 2 right hand columns, rid. A pencil on a piece of paper for the content area, and then the 2 bottom corners, and then a thicker underscore for the bottom.

I think that that the 2 different types of underscores and then the fact that you couldn't find 1 to use left hand side, so you just use l.

Alright. And then it seems as you know, maybe you should do our it's it's to me, it it seems rid. It seems like big braining it a little bit. Like, oh, let's do this. Yeah. Let's let's get this graphical representation.

I would do something like this on my website just because I know developers are pawing through it. Oh, yeah.

Like, I have lots of little, things like this on my website. It's just because it's fun for people to see. Yeah. Little Easter eggs. But as like a team development, I probably wouldn't do this. I think it's a little bit too too much of a flex. And you're gonna down 6 months down the road, 2, 3 years down the road, there's Three new developers on that they're gonna be like, what the heck is this? Like, there's one thing to be a cow, but it's another thing just to be an underscore, you know? Especially with CSS where you might not be able to, like, click through to where that was find. I think if it's gonna be weird and cute, it's gotta be as useful.

You know, it has to be as explicit. Yeah. Yeah. Feel as explicit to me. I think that's the problem. Next question is from Dago. Dago says, What's up, Wes? How are you, Scott? I'm Dago from Havana.

I will ask you guys how we can come up with a reliable timeline for a project, How we can estimate that specifically, especially if you don't know or have much experience with all the moving parts of the solution. Thanks So much for enlightening and enjoyable experience.

Thank you, Dago.

Yeah. So, basically, Dago's asking, If if you don't have all of the the data, you don't have all of the information, how are you going to Give a good reliable project timeline. And many times, a project timeline is is hopelessly optimistic, and sometimes it's The opposite of that, it's way longer than it needs to be. I have found that there's several different types of ways to give a reliable timeline. One of which is not have you do it. You can have a project manager if you're working for an agency. If you're working for a company, chances are you're not going to be the person developing that timeline.

And then you're also not gonna be the person doing the the back and forth in case things need to change or or grow as the developer. Right? So there's a situation where that's not necessarily the developer's responsibility.

Now there's a whole another situation where you're a freelancer. You're working on a small team. You don't have PMs or that type of situation where, of course, you're going to have to come up with exactly how long everything is going to take you, which I'd say is very, very common. Right? You people are asking you how long this is going to take.

The hardest part of any of this is it comes largely down to experience.

There's probably ways you could mathematically come up with how exactly long things are going to take. But in general, what you wanna do is kind of give your