Potluck × Learning Web Dev × Video Streaming × Mono Repos

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. 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 really good potluck for you today. Some really good questions about web development and CSS and SvelteKit and, rid. Mono repos and how would you put this TV script into a database? Some really cool ones. Let's get on into it. First, we'll talk about one of our sponsors which is Sentry. Yes. Sentry at sentry.io

is the perfect place to see all of your errors and exceptions, but More importantly, understand how your application is functioning at any given time.

It's so funny because Century has been a sponsor for ours since really pretty much rid the jump. And, honestly, we both use Century since before they were sponsors of this podcast. We're huge fans of this service, but Sentry has evolved in so many ways since then. You can now get access to profiling information. You can get access to replays, so you can actually see An actual replay of the error happening in your application as it happened, you can get rid. Air is an exception hack, handling for Cron jobs now as well. So you could, check to see if your jobs are successfully running, failing, or succeeding any of those types of things, And you can get access to performance metrics and more. So head on over to century.iosentrydot I always use the coupon code tasty treat, all lowercase, all one word, and you'll get 2 months for free.

Thank you so much to Century. Hey, Wes.

Did you know it is daylight savings time right now? Are you how are you feeling right now? You feeling tired?

Not Too too bad because we are also on like March break with the kids.

So it really didn't matter That the kids stayed up a little later or,

woke up a little later. So it's actually been pretty smooth for us. That's nice to hear. You know what? It's not been the smoothest for me, and I'll tell you why.

Courtney told me last week that it was daylight savings time.

So Psychologically, I took the hit already. I spent the entirety of last week and last weekend being, I'm so tired. I lost an hour of sleep. Psychologically, I thought I did. We went to Costco, and we always go, like, first thing Sunday morning, like, right when it opens. Yeah. And I was thinking last Sunday, this is gonna be great. No one's gonna be at Costco because everyone's still gonna be asleep, and it was, like, the busiest it's ever been. And the entire time we were there, we're like, how is this possible that this is so busy on Daylight Say it wasn't Daylight Saving Time, so now I had to take the hit twice. I we we I just found out, brutal, like, 2 days ago. So, yeah, I am struggling

struggling with my reality. My wife is from Saskatchewan, and they do not have daylight savings time, which is amazing. Mhmm.

I would love to just get rid of it entirely. Rid. So it's twice a year you have the annoyingness and apparently, like, people getting more car accidents and whatnot. And it's just it's just annoying in general. And my wife's rid Family doesn't have it at all. So we have to like, for you, I know you're 2 hours behind, and they're either 1 or 2 hours behind. And we always have to do the whole, like, Google, what time is it in Saskatchewan?

Kind of annoying. You know, Eric, who is on the podcast, he, He's in Arizona, and the same thing for them. So we're he does freelance work for us. It's like, what what time? I have no idea what time. It could be anything. It could be the same, or it could be different for me. So, yeah, that's a that's a tricky world. Alright. Let's get into these potlucks. The first question is from Simon. Simon says, I'm a 36 year old mechanic from Norway, and the question is, is it too late to learn web dev to try to change the job at this age? I've done JavaScript 30 and many other tutorials and love it. But working full time, 4 kids and 2 dogs, full house There for Simon.

And a horse.

Oh my god. I thought we were done with the the 4 kids and the 2 dogs. Little did I know they were like, horse horse coming in. It's horse time.

Okay. So I only get 1 to 2 hours a day to practice. Yeah. That is that's that's a lot of responsibility right there, Simon. Any tips? Should I just drop it in and stay at my job that I've done for the past 22 years? Also worth noting that I will go down and pay a lot to go over To web dev now at least 60 k. Now that's tough. So you'd you'd have a pay decrease by a a non insignificant amount.

You don't have the time to practice it, but you really like and enjoy it.

That's a tough call. And, you know, My suggestion would be to keep hunting for a job that could be financially equivalent.

Like, to me, I think that's the best world because I think those jobs are probably out there, and it may be tough to get as your 1st dev job.

But maybe if you're Capable of being picky for the fact that you already have a job. You you would be losing money to do this career change.

Maybe just apply for things and push for that pay rate that makes it so it is equivalent.

And that way you could make a transition without taking that hit financially. Because I do probably think in your situation, you're not going to be able to take it to that Next level of being, you know, more more full fully skilled in this industry without working full time as a developer somewhere.

So to me, that seems like a a priority, but I personally can't imagine taking that much of a hit financially to make that that choice. Yeah. That that's so tricky.

I I always tell my wife is, like, there's nothing worse than a well paying job you hate. And not to say that Simon here hates his job, but, oh, that's slippery slope. Once you you get into like, I've got lots of friends from university who took a Nice, well paying consulting gig right out of university.

Mhmm. And

they have cars and mortgages and all this stuff. And they can't Can't make that jump. Right? It's it's really tricky.

So I would say, like, honestly, do it's So easy for me to say do what you love, you know, when, like, there's obviously, like, also these, like, real world type of things. But 22 years is a long time for web development. Like, where were we 22 years ago? Where were we in the 2000? There's not a single line of code other than the paragraph tag that is still around from 22 years ago.

Rid. In 5 years from now, web development as we know it will likely be flipped on its head entirely. This stuff moves so quick. So I always tell people, Like don't worry about your age or whatever, how quickly you can get into it because it's a moving stream. And if you jump rid. And you can get at it then you can get up to speed really quickly and you can also climb that ladder pretty quickly. Like it's wild to me to see rid. Even like a lot of people I taught in a boot camp 8 years ago are now much more senior than I am, you know, like they teach me now, And it's because they were just able to climb it. So you think you're 36 now. Where are you going to be when you're 42? You could You could be a senior developer by your 42, and that's not old, in in any respect, especially if you like it. The other thing I'll say is that, like, rid. Like, 1 to 2 hours a day is is lots.

It's obviously not 8 hours a day, and you obviously might not rid Feel like you're getting a lot done, but people always ask me, like, where do you find the time for this type of stuff? I'm always posting, like, rid Home rental stuff on on Instagram. They're like, where do you where do you learn all this? Where do you find the time for this type of stuff? And the answer is that, honestly, I do it an hour, an hour and a half Every single night. And if you can do that with web development, it's amazing the momentum you can gain over a year or 2 of actually keeping at it. You know? Rid.

Those those hours really add up. Compound that with listening to this podcast a couple times a week. You know, like, that's Also learning as you're going on, knowing, like, what's the lay of the land, just sort of this synchronous learning. I think that you could probably do it. I don't really know. It's it's really tricky with the the money thing of of how you can do that, where your personal finances are. Can you save rid For 3 or 4 years, that type of thing. Also, like, a mechanic job is not something that those skills will not rid Go away very quickly, you know. Like it's not like you could try it for 5 years and if it's just not working out, rid If you ideally, if you've saved up and you're able to take that risk for a couple years, you can always go back to to being a mechanic. You know, like those those skills are rid. If if if not anything, they are becoming more,

more desirable over the time. So I would say rid. Try it. Go for it. You're you're still very young, and I think there's lots of time for you to learn. Yeah. Hey. On that same same rid. Seamigard, you were saying there's nothing worse than unlike a well paying job that you dislike. There's a a podcast that I listen to. It's called, tales of taboo where it's just, somebody opens up the phone line for people who have anonymous confessions about various things. And, like, some of them are, like, I'm a drug user or whatever, but some of them are just I'm a bartender. And and, like, let's collect all of the the, the messages from people that were a bartender.

And what I noticed in a lot of those, especially the ones like a career like that, people are saying this job It's really hard on me. It's it's it's, like, ruining my life, but it pays so well that I can't get out of it. And, like, that was, like, the unifying message across all of those. Pretending. Yeah. Yeah. And And I was just thinking, like, yeah, that's a tough position to be in because at some point, if you, you know, wanna make yourself happy, you do have to make that that change.

And, ideally, like, you could make that change, Simon, with his little drop in in payment as possible. So,

rid good luck. Let us know what you end up doing. Next one from Ninja Cat, principal engineer here. I've been in web dev for 15 years. Rid I know a lot but am more aware of how little I actually know, and that's okay.

What I'm curious about is how specifically do people produce work so quickly? Rid I keep find I I can keep up with solutions and figure out a path to a solution as fast or faster than most, But the step of actually writing out and running the program bug free takes so long.

Should I be focusing on typing speed or not worrying So much about everything working perfectly.

That's a good question. Like you I like that Approach to something and be like, I could probably figure it out, and that's good. That's that's a sign of a senior developer being like, I don't know how these things work, but I can get up to speed Extremely quickly. Like, I was talking to my wife the other day about something. She wants to print, like, a mural in our in our room.

Rid. And you have to get, like, these, like, 4 foot wide stickers printed and then, like, stitch them together. And she's like, let's just go to a company. And I was like, come on. Like, I can figure this out. You know? And she's just like, you can get up to speed on anything so quickly. Like, I know nothing about that area, but I guarantee I can I can learn it really, really quickly? So that that's a fantastic use case to have.

Typing speed. Absolutely.

Super fast. I think also rid Being wicked fast in your editor is super underrated, because, like you said, if you can ready. Think about it faster than actually getting it out of your fingers into your IDE.

That is probably where the bottleneck actually is. So typing speed, editor tricks, Certainly GitHub Copilot is gonna rocket you up at least probably 20% faster in your day today, which is it's sad to seem silly, but honestly, it's true. You definitely need to to get it.

I think Probably those things are are probably worth spending time on. And the other thing I think is that when you are in a specific framework rid For a long time or you're in a specific language, you just get faster in it. Like, I'm just I can do stuff really quickly in JavaScript because it's That's all I know, and it's all I've been doing for the past 15 years, you know? Totally.

Yeah. In in in your same regard about Getting faster at your editor. Yeah. Using your editor to your advantage using things like snippets, downloading snippet libraries. Those types of things are going to come in Almost more handy than typing faster, although typing faster is is certainly not a problem.

Being able to navigate through your editor and get code into your editor as fast as possible.

Yeah. That's all great. So I I often find that my overhead is almost, like, purely, like, Thinking about the correct way to solve the problem rather than typing it out. Right? Or I guess sometimes you end up having processes where You're working on something, and you kinda have to do the same thing multiple times or whatever.

And being able to utilize things like snippet libraries or your own custom Snippet libraries to get that code into the the editor scaffolding. Those types of things can definitely speed you up quite a bit.

And in that same regard, like scaffolding Or snippets. They can also prevent bugs. Right? Because if you're doing things that you've done before, you know, you're not at risk of running into a typo or any Any sort of issue if you have that code being output into your your code base automatically for you. So that's also something to think about. Alright. Next question here from Omar. Omar says, hey, Scott and Wes. Love your stuff all the way from Somalia and walk to work with your podcast On every day, it's basically a ritual. Thanks, Omar. That's awesome. I wanted to ask you specifically about web design. I rid find that I haven't done any data intensive applications as a solo developer in my workspace. And as much as back end stuff is really cool, I somehow feel lacking When I cannot find a way to make things presentable and especially in a web app, be it a form or a landing page or any application, getting something to work on. The back end is wonderful, but having it presented visually is a different type of dopamine hit. Yet I struggle to make anything look good. Do you have any issues on how you have solved it if you have. So for me personally, you know, I come from a bit of a design background. I'm not a designer, but I was always a hobbyist designer.

So for me, my sense of, design in terms of my own projects and my own CSS is something that I I've, re You know, I take joy in. It's a part of my job that I enjoy quite a bit and a part of my job that I would look forward to spending a lot of time on.

But many people, they haven't spent the time or they haven't, like, Done that work to align their taste level with their ability and of able to produce nice looking things. And in those use cases, in those situations, this is really the situation where CSS frameworks are going to help you out a ton. Right? You got your bootstraps, but you have a lot of other ones. There there's so many different CSS frameworks nowadays that you can use a rid. CSS framework, you can drop it in. You can use their premade classes.

You can have those things just kind of work themselves out for you. And then you can apply the visual elements like color, imagery, those types of things to separate it and make it look a little bit nicer.

But, you know, the biggest reasons why things typically don't look nice when you don't know what you're necessarily doing there is almost always, Like spacing.

Vertical spacing, people, like, tend to leave out a lot of white space or Maybe way too much white space and that that vertical spacing bit or padding on things. Those type of things really, rid can can, make your application look polished or not polished.

So if you're not going to be using a straight up CSS framework, You can take a a type scale and get your typography all nailed down with a type scale, which is sort of like a mini framework just for type. And then once you develop a a system for padding, just make it consistent. Right? You can set your rem value and then use 1 rem for padding.

And then if you need extra space, you do 2 rem because it's relative to a single value.

When you get into trouble is when you're just assigning pixel values willy nilly to things Based on how you think it looks. So, work it within a system, I would probably recommend not developing that system yourself until you really are comfortable with it, but you could rid. If you want to learn that type of thing as well. I think

what an important thing is to just look at what other People are doing to display the type of data that you're doing. So whether that is specifically rid. Going in did you just strike out the Tailwind UI? Just I was like, why does that happen? Sometimes it, like, autocorrects. I so what I'm saying is go and say, okay, I'm trying to display people or numbers or sales or pricing table or graphs Or options or cards or, like what you're doing is probably not unique. You're not the 1st person in the world to try to get some information across about a specific thing. So Go look and see what other people are doing, and, you can do that by seeing other websites that are in the industry, or you can go to, Sign like Tailwind UI. You can go on Dribbble and search pricing grid. You can go and find, like, back end theme or whatever and just say like, okay, so given this information, how do these People get that across, and that is often a great way because a lot of times people are just like, all I know is headings and buttons, rid. And I just got to stick them in 1 of the 2 of those things. And it's sometimes much better if you can just go. And that's why people love A lot of these UI frameworks because they come with a little hunk of a little card or something that you can do to display All of these different types of data. And I think the most important thing, which Scott was getting at, is they are consistent.

And that is what makes good looking design is that Every single time that you put padding in or every time that you have line height, it's consistent across the board, and that's what makes things look good. Totally. Next question from Fruit.

Hi. Listening to your predictions for 2023 and SSR, mister Talinsky He said something about not losing the niceties with with not having to do a full page reload. I do think This warrants a larger discussion than something else mentioned in passing. After 5 years working primarily on the front end, I've seen a fair Share of bad spas, single page application that don't do much more than move a spinner from the browser tab to the submit button.

Rid. And still when a new project begins, the mere question is if we really totally need a separate SPA front end rid. On a 1 and a half person dev team already low on time are often met with amusement, and dismissed without more comment. What do you think about us, Scott?

Well, you know, I I the the niceties, I think, that I was referring to specifically Are things like the client side routing aspect of it. Right? You can get access to page transitions and animations in those types of ways because When you're doing a page routing, it's not physically loading an HTML file from scratch. It's able to replace various aspects of it, And then you can handle the things that are are being changed. Now loading spinners and all those types of things, yes. They're not read. Great. And they're the types of things that you want to work around. But at the end of the day, you know, it's the it being a spa itself rid is not the reason why loading spinners exist or not the way reason why, things take a long time to load in various There are plenty of spas that function very quickly. So what you don't wanna lump in is the bad spas with the good spas. Spas can be just fine. So if you really the mere question, if we really need a separate spa for a front end on a one point, It it all depends on what your needs are for the application. Right? There's