We Got Roasted for Our Websites — Fair

What's up, everybody? Before we get started, I wanna tell you about two things. First of all, coming to San Francisco, and we want you to be there. Second of all, we need your spooky web development stories for our Halloween episode. So October 27, we're going to be at the, what is it, the bare bottle brewing company in San Francisco.

You're gonna wanna come and hang out with us. We're gonna have merch. We're gonna have beer. We're gonna have Scott. We're gonna have CJ. I'm gonna be there, unfortunately. The whole team's gonna be there. It's gonna be a hoot. So go to syntax.afam/meetup.

It's free, but you do have to grab a ticket, so go grab it now. And then also, spooky stories. Do you have a story where you absolutely screwed the pooch? Do you have a story where you deleted a database, where you deployed the wrong website, where you let a domain name expire, some awful story around building for the web? We wanna hear it, and we will read them out on the upcoming spooky story episode. So go to syntax.fm/spooky and submit your questions. We'll keep you anonymous. Don't worry. Nothing nothing to worry there. Don't worry. Do not worry. Do not worry. Everything will be okay. What's up, Wes? I'm ready to go. We got some really good potluck questions around free tier pricing. Should you be concerned with the $20 a month? We we apparently, we spooked a whole bunch of people. So questions around, like, source set and image sizes, image formats. What should I be doing here? What should I do with 5,000 users? It's kind of at an inflection ESLint. Or do you get your wallpapers from Wes? How is Omar Cheet doing, Scott? And a whole bunch of questions about web development in general. Ready to get ESLint it.

First question from.

I visited the website. It's of all three of you, and I must say I was very disappointed. What? Okay. I didn't put this question in here. Scott's site has huge font sizes.

CJ's was alien themed in short. Wes's was better. Thank you. At least I could read the text.

Okay. So what were you disappointed in my website? Because I am I spent a Scott Node of time on my website. I'm very proud of it. So the question, why do professional devs have terrible website UIs but create amazing websites for clients? I'm young, 19, started programming my journey, but my parents complained that I'm spending too much time on my PC and my phone. I won't say it's a lie, and I'm working on a project because I want to complete it. I work from home. How can I convince my parents that this is the best of life for me? Okay. Two questions here. Scott, why does your website suck so much? Yeah. Let me let me pop open both of our websites. This is my website, folks.

And here's what it looks like right now, and I'll tell you why it looks like this. I was looking at it about a week ago or week and a half ago, and I was thinking to myself, man, I'm really tired of the CSS in this site.

So I went and I deleted all of the CSS except for some of it.

I deleted rid of it. I got rid of it, and I kept the base CSS. So this is what my site looks like with just base CSS.

Now can it be better? Yeah.

But, you know what? I actually like how ugly and big it is. Am I working on it? Yes. So you can even tell I'm working on it because the tags don't have spacing between them. Like, the site is functional, but it it I just ripped out all the CSS. So that's why my website looks bad, but it it didn't, like, two weeks ago. I I was just bored. And me, when I get bored, I I don't really think about it. Wes side, on the other hand, I am surprised to hear it's better. West's side to me is beautiful. I I love this. Yeah.

I'm I'm a big fan of mine. I spent a lot of time on that and on the design, on all the parts of it. So big fan of that. I think the it is it is very common. It's very common that, like, developers don't even have a website, which is is hilarious when you think about it. And and if you think about it, like, I don't post a ton of content on my own website. Most of it is on Send that. Social networks and things like that. Yeah. It's classic. The cobbler's children have no shoes. You know? We've got so many other, classic. The cobbler's children have no shoes. You know? We've got so many other things that we are working on, so many other little applications. When it comes time to doing your own website, it's just like, I'd rather build something else that's really exciting or rather add this feature to the syntax website. So that's always the case. Although, like, I think if somebody were hiring you, they you probably wanna make sure you have a decent looking website. In terms of the question about being 19 and your parents being spending too much time on your phone, I would just just show them. Send them this clip right now.

Say, listen, Saizbic's parents.

He's doing cool stuff. Have you heard of AI? Have you heard of the Internet? It's gonna be big. He's gonna he's probably gonna retire you. He's probably gonna be super rich and and change lives, because of the stuff he's doing right now. So let him goof around on the Internet.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay. I got two answers to this too. My website and other professionals' websites, I I think, like you said, with the cobbler shoes thing, you know, the peach cobbler's got no pie, whatever you said. I for me, personally, I I think that you just have no time. Right? You have no time. And and the most amount of time I could muster to say, I don't like this. Let me let me get it. I mean, because you did your website a while a little while ago. It's not like you're updating it. For me, I feel like I'm updating it all the time, time, but I'm never finishing it. The last time I had a really beautiful website was when I was really hunting for jobs, and and that's really when you need to have it. But I'm not necessarily I don't care if Wes, that's why. As far as sticking on your phone, you can choose to play this part or not for your parents, but I think you probably should go outside a little bit and do some other stuff too. Touch grass. Touch. I think you should touch a little bit of grass, and you should, pick up a hobby that's not on your or your computer as well because, phones and computers are great. But let me just tell you, man, it is tough once you get, like, so locked into just being alone JS it becomes just such a bad habit to always have it on and always have it around you. So, like, you need you need some time away from screens. Man, be at nineteen.

That's the bet that might be the best time of your life. Totally. The the stuff you can hit on chicks and all kinds of stuff, man. Like, there's a Scott. Don't tell your don't let your parents watch this part, but, like, yeah, there's yeah, enjoy your life. There's there's plenty of time to program.

There's plenty of time to program. Yeah. You you could you could definitely get lost. I mean, I'm sure if that's, like, really, really what you wanna do, but touch some grass. Yeah. For sure. Question for Scott. Do are those the new AirPod threes? They are. Yeah.

Because I noticed them. I've I've you Node, sometimes people wear AirPods funny, and they wear them, like, sticking out a lot. Yeah. These are these are the new ones that's they intentionally stick out more. Right? I don't even know if they intentionally do or don't. No. They But I got I got them because I wear them so much. The battery on my nothing,

my nothing ear a's, which I these are great. They were cheap. They're nice for a lot of reasons.

These actually do much better in some situations.

I'll tell you what. Apple somehow cannot figure out how to have noise canceling headphones and to let you lay down on a pillow with headphones.

Oh, yeah. I have that problem. These things have noise canceling, and people say, oh, it's you gotta have it for the noise canceling microphone. You don't. These things noise canceling, not as good, but noise canceling, I could lay down with these things on. How would they not figure that out? Did does anybody wear them at Apple? Anybody wearing these things and laying down? How's that yeah. Like, there's this big obnoxious Node noise.

Actually bought a pair of the Nothing Ones. I found a really good deal on them online, and it was a really good deal because the battery of one of them was, like, totally shot. And then I went searching for did you know, like, the batteries in these headphones are they're just little coin cells, and they're fairly replaceable in in many of the cases.

Yeah. AirPods are are maybe a different story. But I went to go buy a new battery just, like, soldered in, and it turned out it was cheaper to buy Just a literally a handful of can I can I make this focus on the camera here? So I bought 20 What? Nothing AirPods nothing ear AirPods instead from a Chinese website.

So they're brand new, but they have little markings on them that looks like they're from the, like, the nothing like, the manufacturer before they were ready for they have, like, a, b, c on them. So some of them are, like, c grade, and then some of them are just, like, test runs.

So I'm pretty sure somebody took these out of some e recycling and then put them for sale on the Internet.

So now I have 20 nothing warp Node, and then I just went through. It was they were, like, a dollar a pair or a dollar per earbud. So I just went through and picked up a pair that was good, and and they're great. I I I just wore them this morning since 9AM, so they they went, I don't know, maybe eight eight hours with noise canceling on. That's Yeah. I I have such a problem with earbuds that I I lose them like crazy. I have four pairs of AirPods. That's why I bought these because I just keep spending AirPods are expensive. I I lose them. Yeah. Yeah. Last time I had AirPods, I had the AirPod Pro two. When I got my concussion in February, I got whiplash. Lost them. AirPods, who knows where the hell they went? That's the second pair of AirPods I've lost snowboarding. The other one I was doing a I was trying to do a five forty, and I I they flew out of my pocket, never to be seen again. I didn't fall. I even landed. I just Yeah. Flew out of my godshorn pocket.

Terrible idea.

Alright. Next question for Matt. Since you guys are a Canadian podcast, is there any way to get stuff shipped from Canada? A Canadian based store would definitely help with the currency shipping duties and, border logistics.

So, Wes, this has been a a problem no matter what. Honestly Shipping sucks. Logistics

like, worldwide logistics before all the, like, crazy tariff stuff in The States is is a very hard problem to solve. And then that added with the fact that Americans think that everything should be free shipping, which is, like, is is nuts. You know? Like, that's the biggest complaints we hear is, like, shipping is is brutal. It's like we're we're losing money on this stuff. You know? We're just selling it for as cheap as we can. I often have fights with the team to lower the prices on everything, and it's just it's a hard thing. And, especially, you just ship it to Node. It it, unfortunately, is hard. And the solution to that is, yeah, you have another warehouse in another country, but then you have these, like, weird logistics where you've got T shirts in three different locations, and then one of them is sold out, so you have to ship it from another one. And just, like, it's a very hard problem to very hard problem to solve, and it gives me a lot more appreciation for the Amazon logistics. So you can get stuff shipped to Canada.

It will cost a couple bucks to ship it, but it's the best stuff. It's all good quality. It's awesome stuff.

That's the problem. Because the alternative to that is you do a pick, pack, and, print, pack, and ship or whatever where what they do is they grab a T shirt off the rack or, like, a mug on the rack, and they do, like, a quick print on it and, like, toss it out. It's junk. It's all junk. So we don't want we don't want anything.

That's the thing. It's, like, people are like, well, this open source project has a store with 80 items in it, and you can get 40 phone cases and whatever. And that's great because it allows anybody to start up a thing, but the quality sucks. Sucks. Like, it's not good. The Sprint on Demand stuff, it looks good, and it's not good for the world, and it doesn't feel good to wear to just be constantly going through. Like, I have T shirts that are you have for, like, 6 months, and then they're just like you donate them, but, like, donating it is not the not the move. You know? That's gonna end up in a landfill somewhere.

Yeah. Yeah. Word. Question for Scott.

How are things with Omarji?

It's on it's on this computer right here. You put it on the It is if you're watching on video, you may have astute observers may have noticed I did pick it up off the ground. But, Wes, that's just because that was the most convenient place for my charging cable to go. I still really like the operating system. I still really like the laptop. The problem is is my hardware is junk. So that, like, system 76 laptop like the laptop? Yeah. I don't like the You guys I meant I like the laptop. I like the experience on the laptop. I like using it. I'll say that. But the trackpad is terrible. Even using with the mouse, the keyboard's bad. But, like, monitor that's a problem with Omarchi is that the dual monitor support sucks on it like it exists, but, like, putting things on a specific monitor sucks. So, like, just having it as my workstation computer, it's not viable. That computer JS not powerful enough. The battery lasts a long time. It's super fast. It feels really great, and there's a lot of things I like about the OS that I get really annoyed with on macOS these days with how once you use that and come back to Mac, there's an inherent latency on every single keystroke on this Mac computer that is hard to,

like, psychologically Really? Yes. Is JS it from Bluetooth? No. It's like it it's it's like the physical keyboard on the laptop, you can tell that there's latency? Yeah. I don't I don't use a Bluetooth keyboard. I'm typing on my laptop. Really?

Right here. Yes. Right here. And it it's a latency in the entire Bos. And it's not just typing. Things are just doing stuff all the time. There's so much bloat and junk on it, and the system isn't optimized.

But that that comes at a pnpm penalty of, Omarji missing things like really good dual monitor support or just there there are some times when you're like, you can feel the fact that this is, like, not a mature operating system like macOS.

If I could have my way, I would have the perfect hybrid of, something that was as responsive as Omarji, as pnpm down, but with the niceties and the attention to detail of many things on macOS. I want something in between there as as as a full time. What I did go ahead and do is I did set this computer to be as similar to Omarji as possible in terms of I got all the CLI tools.

I saved a bunch of stuff as web apps instead of just using JS Chrome tabs. So I've really replicated my user experience ESLint Omar g a lot.

I'm using the same kind of CLI tools that I was using on that. The only thing is I have stopped using Neovim because, man, my my hand's cramping up. I'm, like, trying to memorize stuff at the same time. And, like, it it's fine. I have found myself to be much better at Neovim after spending, like, two or three weeks using only that. But at the same time, I like Versus Code, man. I like it. So it's cool. I like it. If I had a better, OS, if I had a better laptop or something, I might like it a lot more. But I'm not gonna I don't really see myself moving away from Apple hardware anytime soon after doing a bunch of research in there, especially because I'm looking at, like, for my next computer, maybe getting a Mac Studio to run local LLMs or to do some video editing and stuff. You kinda need that power. Chrome tabs. Yeah.

Chrome tabs. Although I am using a new browser, Wes, in between Oh my gosh. Recording the last episode, which was just a couple hours ago and using recording this episode, I have once again switched my primary browser.

I am using Helium as the default browser right now. Who who makes that? That's a great question. Helium makes it. Helium docked computer. It's like a pnpm down version of Chrome with, privacy defaults.

It's, you know, very much like ad blocking stuff by default. It's low kinda on the features, but it's Chrome. The UI is nice and minimal.

So yeah. Pretty nice. Yeah. Yeah. And people who say you use Zen, I ain't never using a Firefox main. I'm sorry. Man, I opened Firefox the other day, and I was like, I missed this. Just the UI of it is so good. The dev tools UI is so good. Yeah. Dev tools UI Slabs for sure. Fast.

Like, I really miss the Firefox dev tools. And, like, the the Firefox UI, they also and they're putting in a bunch of, like, AI features as well. I I saw my wife use Firefox, and I glanced at it the other day, and I saw she's she's got some features. So maybe I need to give it a another shot back. You know? Like, there's the the thing that killed me and then I switched is just, like, the the feature lag. You know? I was I'm you're making podcasts about these new features, and you can't use your main driver to to test them out.

Yeah. I was looking at Anchor positioning the other day, and I was getting frustrated at the Firefox support for it. It shipped in,

shipped in Safari, and which means, like, now we're just waiting on Firefox. It's behind a flag in Firefox. I did dip into it, and there seems like in the last couple weeks, there's been some movement on it. And it does seem like it's almost there, but I don't know. I've I've been on that. It's almost there trained for a while.

Anchor positioning really solves a billion problems. Excited for it. Yeah. Oh, come on. I'm using the polyfill right now, and I just wish I didn't have to. Okay. Next question here from Omar. Hey, Wes. Scott, love the show. Been listening since day one.

How do you handle it when a customer's account gets hacked? What steps do you take in order to secure it and clean it up, and what best practices would you recommend for developers running their own apps where users can get compromised even if it's not the app's fault? So, ultimately, what Omar is referring to here is, let's say, the user account got hacked because insecure password, and their password might have been in a a data breach and somebody was able to get into that. How do you handle that? Yeah. That's that's a tough one because, hopefully, you're, you know, you're you're doing data backups and stuff like this, but it depends on scale. Right? If this is like a boutique kind of niche app that you have, certain amount of users that you wanna keep very happy, then, like, maybe you can paw through database backups and and try to restore that information.

But if it's like a giant, like, giant app, I don't know. That feels like a a tough problem to solve other than yeah. Yeah. Like, I I would imagine you'd probably want some, like, data versioning you could roll back individual users' data Vercel, but that feels like that feels like a a problem to solve for a scale that is not like a boutique kinda app. I see this a lot. And and, specifically,

Canada is with our biggest grocery store chain. It's called Loblaws, and they have, like, a points program. Right? And that's just like anytime you have gift cards or or or points, you attract the worst people on Earth that try to to abuse it and game it and whatnot. And at one point, this is probably six or seven years ago, I had my points thing hacked, probably because I signed up, like, fifteen years ago, reused the same password. Oh, man. And they drained, like, a $150 worth of points out of the thing. And I eventually, I got it back, but I've heard so many horror stories over the Yarn. And it's just like, well, it's not really their problem that you got hacked because you have bad hygiene, but it also entirely is their problem because now that hacker went and and cashed out the points, and now they gotta give you a $150 worth of points back. So they're out that that much. So you really gotta, like, just take care of your users. Your users are babies, and you have to like like, the easiest way to do it is just sign in with Gmail or sign in with Apple or whatever. Yeah. And then you take all of the the burden off of you onto the security of their their email platform.

You can obviously throw in two factor authentication, text mess as much as people hate, they'll, like, send a text with a Node. That will add a huge layer of security to your to your app. Yeah. Prevent preventative seems like the right way to go here. You gotta go ahead. What happens if after the fact? Yeah. You gotta you gotta piece it. Hopefully, you have some sort of audit trail as to what happened, when did they sign in, and what what did they change it from into you know, like like, for me, I have people can, like, merge accounts.

Yeah. So, like, if somebody, like, logs in and say, hey. My course is gone.

I used to have it, and then I can, like, look at the audit trail and be like, hey. You actually merged it with a different email address. And, like, oh, okay. But, like, it also could be that somebody hacked their account and merged it with their own so you can look back at it. Mitch k says, I work at a FAANG company, and we have very different opinions on whether you should put LLM context files. So that's, like, Vercel rules, VSS code rules, documentation, and other assorted prompts and LLM generated docs into version control? I personally feel that we should, but many do not since it JS not code. What are your thoughts on this? Yes. Put it in version control.

Yes. You have a 100 people working on the same project.

If they're all using the same LLMs, you want people to be working off the same source material in terms of those types of things. Now there's other alternatives to this. You could have your own set of tools to go get those things, and and that's like an API that could go go go get those set of tools. I personally have no problem committing, like, any of the agent files or any of those types of instruction files. I personally am moving more away from that style, though, because the more stuff you put into that is the more kind of global context your LLM is going to use. And the more you're filling up that global context, the less room you have for other things. In fact, you can go onto Claude Node, and you can do forward slash context, and it shows you a little diagram of where the context is being taken up. And if you have too many instruction files, you'll see that there's much less room for other types of context. So other alternatives for this types of things, you could have specialized agents that have some of that knowledge prebaked into them based on what they're working on specifically.

Like, instead of having a Svelte instructions file that's used and picked up on every single query, you could have a Svelte agent that has information attached to that specific agent. And then, therefore, it's not being used if that agent isn't isn't in play.

You could also do an MCP server. When we had Kyle Seismet on from Coinbase, they talked a lot about their internal tooling, though, that they used what was it? They used LangGraph or something like Maestro to build up your own kind of internal tooling for MCP to grab the data from your own knowledge base. That's a possibility too.

Me, personally, though, if it's a simple instructions file, like, don't you ever put background color on something unless I told you to.

I will put that in instructions and be fine with that. Yeah. Yeah. Commit that all day. Yeah. I think it's fine. If it's similar to,

like, a settings file, like, we're we're putting our ESLint, our TS config, our Prettier RC. We're putting all those files in our version control. So if it has something to do with how the LMM generates the code in terms of style, in terms of if it's creating new new folders, if you're using camel case, all of that, I think that certainly belongs in your git repo. But like Scott said, like, docs and, like, larger things, it's it almost starts to get out of hand because you're like, oh, well, I've I have these cursor rules for my front end and then these other ones for the back end and the but it only should apply to this. And then before you know it, you're writing all these weird rules, and it's it's much easier just to say, hey, agent.

Go pull the docs on on on I'm writing a Python server. Go go look at the rules that we have for writing a Python server, and it will pull them down. So Cursor just rolled out this thing called team rules, which is kinda cool, so you can you can share them amongst your team.

I don't know if that's better or not than because it's generally a project by project basis.

I think putting them in, like, an MCP is probably your best bet because then you can at least,

on demand, want them, and then you can share them amongst multiple projects should you want to. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. There's levels to this. That's, for sure depends on what's working for you. Next question from Reg. Hi, guys. For the past year, a friend and I have been working on a side project in our spare time.

This has meant a lot of late nights and weekends in front of the computer programming away at the app. Recently, we started getting traction, ticking over 5,000 users in getting commercial interest. Reg. Yeah. Nice. 5,000 users. Cool.

My wife, however, doesn't see that. Instead, she's tired of a husband being hidden away in his office every night and weekend working, which I can associate, which I can appreciate because I felt that too. Given that you both have successful businesses and, at least from the outside, maintain happy families. How do you manage to find that balance, help loved ones understand, and while still building things without sacrificing other aspects of life? Tough, tough question because I found myself in a situation where I am working too many nights, too many weekends, and, getting the same feedback.

And guess what? That feedback, incredibly important and incredibly valid because computer stuff is great. Career is great. Push it. You know? Grind hard. But at the same time, you gotta know when to not because you cannot, sacrifice the things in life that are really important. Your family, your partner, any of that stuff, real life, you cannot sacrifice that stuff to build an app. 5,000 users is great. If you got 5,000 users in here, yeah, I'm not gonna say that, like, additional nights and weekends wouldn't help, but, like, you know, you Scott you got away that. I I personally think at this point, turn it back, man. You you've gotten to a successful part here. I think there is a time and a place to just completely shut your computer and come up with an agreement. Talk to your wife and and see, like, alright.

If I was to work a couple extra nights a week, like, what does that look like, and when does that become a problem? For me because I still pull out my laptop a couple nights a week here and there, cranking on some stuff, vibe coding on some stuff, doing some other stuff. Sometimes I'm, you know, working on nights and weekends a little bit here too. But you have to understand that there's a a delicate balance there. And if you are causing some waves there, shut that laptop. Not worth it. Yeah. It's certainly not. You're not gonna be remembering.

Like, it's hard because, like, you're not gonna remember this in in fifty years when you're dead, but you also might. Like, it might just like, it might make you a million dollars and then absolutely change your entire family's trajectory. Right? And so I think that having an understanding with your partner of being like, I am doing this, and this is a temporary thing. Maybe put, like, a time limit on it. I need to grind for the next six months on this thing just because I think that it can I think it can take off? I think I could build something really cool here. And, like, lucky for me, my wife understands. I don't I'm pretty cut and dry Node to five, Monday to Friday, but there's there's things that pop up. You know? Like, like, probably the one for me is, like, my wife is very okay with me going to conferences, because that is part of my job. Yeah. It's hard. We have four kids, and I hate leaving her, and it's it's it's really taxing on her. But and for me to just go drink beer with a bunch of wahoos Oh, yeah. Like like, she understands. Like, it's it's good for it's good for me. It's good for my career. It it's really fun, you know, and it's it's all around good. So just that give and take understanding.

You should be working harder during your nine to five if you have to work that many nights and weekends.

Do you know? Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Like like, there's gotta be something else I can give. You know? There's always sometimes think, like, man, I'm so busy, and then my phone is like, you Scott Sanity seven minutes on TikTok today. It's like, ah, yeah.

I I probably could've done a little less than that.

Oh, yeah. You got Australian there for a minute. Oh, yeah, mate. Oh, yeah.

Question from diabetic codes. This one is interesting because he also DM'd me with a little bit more sauce on Instagram. I thought this was really interesting. So, he says, I know somebody in the supplement space who put a JotForm together that ended up getting reported and shut down, and he asked me to make him a website. So the story here is that this guy is selling some peptides. I'm pretty sure it's Ozempic.

He didn't say, but I'm pretty sure this guy is selling something on the Internet that is in a legally gray area, and he got shut down because they're using these these platforms. You know? And if these platforms deem you as that is not allowed on our platform, they will just shut you down, and you'll be you'll be out of business. You know? So the question he had is, like like, like, what do I use? So I'm gonna, like, build something from scratch. I don't wanna use any I'm gonna use no external services that can come and get me and come and shut me down. But then at the end of the day, you still have to host it somewhere. Right? So he asked, like, what should I use? So I talked to him, like, yeah. You can go for, like, a a WordPress self hosted or if you wanna use, like, a payload or a Strapi, something like that. Just host it all yourself and and build it full stack.

But then the the more interesting question is, like, where do you go to host things on the Internet when you're doing legally dubious stuff? And I don't I don't know that I'm, like, in that space, or I I'll tell you. I'm not in that space. Yeah.

But, I think, like like, first step is throw a cloud flare in front of in front of your entire website. And what that will do is it will at least stop people from being able to understand where your website is hosted. Whether whether CloudFlare will take you down, or not is is another Wes. But from what I've seen, they let a lot of stuff slide in most cases. You know? Like, there's a lot of piracy and and stuff hosted on Cloudflare.

So if you put Cloudflare in front of it, then then they're not able to tell who you're hosting with, at least not very easily.

And then who should you host it with? I would probably be more interested in having a cutover strategy rather than trying to pick a host that won't shut you down.

So have a something mirrored to another host so that if you do get shut down, you can just point your domain to another one at one point. And then whether the domain will be seized or not is is another one. But I think that that's probably a good idea. Find something like a like a Hetzner or DigitalOcean.

There are lots of ISPs that are not as well known, that are very well known for, like, I have a whole list of bad ASNs that I completely block any request from on my on all of my websites. And these are all just bad ISPs that let spammers and scammers send requests. You know? And if I'm getting any Wes from, like, a like, an ISP in Russia that is, like, clearly a data center, they're probably not doing anything anything good, you know, and, like, they're unless someone's using a VPN or whatever. But in my experience, I've had zero issues with that over probably seven or eight years.

Cool. I I got no clue on this. So I'm I'm glad you had that. I love I'm not a bad guy, but I do love this understanding the city. I'm not a good guy. Of things. Yeah. But Like, I don't I don't do bad stuff, but I do like understanding how these things work. I'm curious, actually. I'm gonna put this out there. If anybody JS listening Node anyone that runs like a like a spam operation, you know, you have a bunch of Twitter bots or something, I wanna talk to you. I think that would be interesting episode.

I actually do think that would be an interesting Node as well. Next question, Mark l. Mark l says, hi. I've been a jack of all trades web dev for twenty five years now, mainly back end, but I've never been fully comfortable dealing with images.

I've sent designs, and at some point, the inevitable question of how do you want the images comes up. I still don't know the correct answer. For example, if you upload an image to WordPress, it generates multiple versions of that image in various sizes.

Is that the right approach? How do you decide whether an image should be a JPEG, PNG, GIF, GIF? I say GIF. Sorry, folks.

Do we even still even use GIFs? What size should I ask for? Say, a hero banner background image. Is it generally true that bigger is better? So I can it can be scaled down to required sizes.

Should I be asking for different sizes of the same image for desktop, tablet, or more? You get the idea, basically, what are the best practices in dealing with images. Let me just say, there's answers for all of these questions that could be done with paying for Cloudinary.

Bingo bango. You pay for Cloudinary.

You put a URL in front of it. You say it format auto, size auto, all that stuff.

You don't think about it ever again.

You upload it with their API.

It's there. You get the ID from it. Throw that in your database, whatever it may be, that URL path.

Use Cloudinary.

The cost can get up there in terms of how much traffic you're getting.

But so many times, I personally just decided that using Cloudinary was the easier solution for me, and therefore, I went with that. I recently dove into building an image hosting and video compression service for myself using CloudFlare.

CloudFlare has an images, transform feature now that's really good. So you could very easily even get AI to do this for you if you want. You take a bucket anywhere, r two, s three, any of that stuff. You take a bucket. You take a CloudFlare worker. You send the image to the worker. It puts it in the bucket. You get a path back.

You can use that path. You then use Cloudflare's image transformation, pipeline.

Done deal if you wanna host it yourself and own all that stuff, not play for Cloudinary.

I think my advice here is don't try and do it yourself.

Grab the highest quality originals that you can. Like, don't tell your designer, hey. Give me a 800 pixel version, a 600 pixel version. That's it's not that's never gonna work. And and when you need to update something, you gotta be like, now I need to resize it. So part of your image pipeline is simply going to be throwing the image in there, and then your image pipeline is going to generate multiple sizes of it and and output an image with, like, a source set. And what that will do is it will for larger displays, you get a higher resolution. For smaller displays, you get a smaller resolution on it. Same with, like, the the formatting as well. I generally just stick JPEGs as source material in all of my sites, and then I let like, I personally use Cloudflare images as well, and then I let them just figure out what format to serve up. So it generally, it's, like, gonna be a Wes for the images, but I, like, I hate I hate having I I hate having WebPs in my, like, folders just because, like, it it doesn't work with half the stuff out there. You know? So have that generated. And and an added benefit of having a pipeline for your images is that you can also figure out what the width and height, the dimensions of those images are. And then when you're embedding them into your your content, you can explicitly put a width, a height, or an aspect ratio on them, and then you don't get that, cumulative layout shift where, like, your your content will shift down once an image has loaded because you can it it will just, like it'll blur in or or download as it wants, but the spot that that image takes is so having a whole image pipeline is well worth your time, and I personally use Cloudflare images. Another little trick you can do, and they probably don't like this, but I wrote a Cloudflare worker that sits in front of Cloudinary.

So you can use Cloudinary to transform your images, but then you can use a CloudFlare cache API just to sit in front of it and and cache those. So you don't have to keep paying for the the bandwidth or the transformations on loud and airy. There's too many things called clouds. My brain is Yeah.

And and we should say that the reason why you do this so there's there's two major approaches to well, I guess there's three major approaches. You just put the image in your folder. You load it up, you know, public folder anywhere on the app, the the static folder, whatever. You just load that image. Then you have the pipeline one that Wes is talking about Wes you take your images, you create all the versions of those images of different sizes and, quality, and then you use things like, source set, to be able to serve the correct one. Or then there's the third option, which is Cloudinary style, where when the user requests an image, it knows what their browser can support, what format is going to be the smallest.

It's going to create that image on the fly. It's going to send them the perfect image for them and then cache that on their end. So the next user that needs that same version gets that same version. To me, that feels like the most modern solution.

I'm just looking at my bill from Cloudflare, and I was curious. Since I I moved my website over to Cloudflare, I don't know, maybe six months ago, and I was curious what the bill was for just the images alone. And it is I have 14,947 images above the 5,000, free. So I have about 20,000 images, I guess, on my website, and that was $7.50.

And the storage of those was $5 because you have to I think you have to pay for $5 a month for the images included. So $13 a month for 20,000 images. It's not 20 it's, like, it's probably closer to, like, 5,000 images and four versions of each of those. Right. But that's kinda I wouldn't say that's dirt cheap, but it's also Very reasonable. Scott. Not a $100 a month. Yeah. It's pretty reasonable.

Yeah. Word.

Man, I should do an update on what my entire website costs.

Mine Scott nothing.

Wes? Do you have it hosted? It's, Cloudflare Pages. Oh. Oh, don't have traffic, don't have problems.

Don't have images. How about how that don't have images, don't have problems. How about that? My last Cloudflare bill was $27,

and Yeah. 12 of that was images.

And I bet two of that was browser rendering, so rendering my open graph images.

Oh, page rules, $5.

So I have some a couple extra rules I've added. I could probably get rid of those and move that into a worker.

I'm trying to find where the actual compute was.

14¢.

6,000,000 to 25,927, I guess, instances or milliseconds, and it cost me 14¢.

Yeah. So Meanwhile my website is 14¢. To host a website on AWS cost me a ton of money. Man, I cannot believe how expensive AWS stuff is. AWS and especially on,

with Bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive on so also check out Bunny. This is one thing. I don't hear a lot of people talking about bunny.net.

Bunny.net is a they started JS, like, a CDN, so you can host videos and images with them. But they've now now they're in, like, the database world. They're in they have, like, kind of a Cloudflare Worker competitor.

Yeah. Last time I checked, I didn't see if I I think you couldn't host, like, SvelteKit on Bunny.

Oh, yeah. It was it was more like like edge compute, you know, like, only server Node, but they probably no. They have a CDN, and they have containers now too.

I don't know why you don't hear a lot of people talk about them. It's kind of like that weird one. Maybe that's just like they don't put any money into, like, DevRel or people in the community.

There's nothing about, like, really hosting front end stuff on here is really why. It's Yeah. You know, storage, stream, CSS, but, like, you won't find a lot of references to a lot of the stuff that we deal in. Yeah. That's true.

Question from Wallpaper McBoring. Wes, I've always loved the vibe of your desktop wallpapers in your videos. Where can I find them? Specifically, the recent Skeleton Boy one. Yeah. I whenever I do, like, a hot tip or whatever, I try to generate a a new wallpaper for each of them Really? Just to put behind the video because I think it's I don't know. It looks nice, and and I think it's it's a bit of a scroll stopper sometimes when you see an interesting one. So I for longest time, I was just using the Raycast wallpapers, actually, because they have really nice gradients.

But then I when Midjourney rolled out their tiling option, I went nuts on it because I love a tiled a wallpaper. So I wrote a tool that would take a mid journey tile.

So you can you can tell MidJourney, like, hey. Make me a wallpaper, that is x, y, and z. Mhmm. And then it'll kick out just like a little tile for you. And if you use the dash dash tile flag, it will make sure that you can infinitely tile it. And then I wrote a little app that you just drag the image into it, and then you can scale it up or down. And then you hit a button, and it'll download that wallpaper as, like, a larger JPEG. So I have a whole folder of them.

I'm pretty sure I have it open sourced. If not, send me a DM, and I'll I'll make sure I open source it because it's it's kind of a a fun little tool. And I love tools like that where you just solve your problems

with it. Last question here from Patrick McDonald.

On one of your shows, I heard you say that beware of the free tier. And often once you go off the free tier, the pricing goes off a cliff.

LOL.

I love reading things like that, like, LOL. LOL.

Yes. Does that mean that we can't trust services that have a generous free tier and only a $20 pro tier, or is the pro tier just a hook to open up for more billing? Your comments worried me as a developer whose stack is in the for sale marketplace. Yeah. I think some of this is like beware of the too good to be true, free tier. Like, we'll host your whole database for free. Don't even don't even worry about it, bro. We got you. We got you. You wanna host your whole database? Don't worry about it. Like, to me, that's where where you gotta be prepared.

Any of these things that does have a generous free tier the moment you start getting real traffic, real bandwidth, real data coming through. Yeah. Your prices are gonna go up. So that is the thing about Vercel that you do have to worry about. Do I have to worry about it? I've never built anything that I've had to worry about it with. But We get free Vercel. So if you if you ever questioned

our loyalty to any company, let you know that Vercel gives us free hosting.

But And I still make my thoughts be known about Wes. Js JS without concern.

Check out serverlesshorrors.com as a site that shows it looks like the last post for this is May, 2025. Maybe these horrors have stopped.

But I thought this was an interesting image where they talk about various free platforms, that then end up turning into big bills. I don't think this is a hard and fast rule, but, like, it is something you gotta, like, have you gotta have an understanding of, what that would actually look like if you get a ton of traffic or if you, need to then build your whole business on this thing, and is the bottom line gonna cut it? You know? Are you gonna have enough money to pay for it? I always caution people about the, like and this is not for sale only. This is this is every single

business out there that is trying to charge you per seat per month, and it's it's because they they want to they wanna get that enterprise customer where, what the hell? We'll add six more people on at at $30 a month. You know? Like, that is gravy rather than, like, your your developer with their $20 bill.

And they're not making a ton of money. And, in fact, I bet Vercel loses money on some of these, especially because, like, often you hear stories about, like, people who get or attacked, and the bill goes up, and Vercel will just, like, forgive it. Like, they're still paying that bill at the end of the day. You know? That bandwidth was still used. They can't they can't put that back in the bottle. So I'm I'm sure they've eaten quite a bit just for, like, community goodwill in in that regard. And and, also, like, pricing is so hard because I I was just my eyes were crossed trying to look at my Cloudflare bill. I was just saying, how much did I spend this month on it? And it took me, like, five minutes to do it. So and you seem to, like agreed to do AWS pricing. It is Yeah.

Insane.

Pay based on usage is great until it's very hard to understand usage. You know? There's bandwidth. There's transfer between peering partners that maybe is is or isn't charged. There's, like, milliseconds on CPU. So if your if your serverless is running for ten seconds, but you're only actually running CPU for, like, thirty seconds of that or thirty milliseconds of that, then what do you get paid on? And it is so hard to estimate how much things will cost, and that's why people just do $20 a month. And you see it with, like, cloud code and all these AI right now as well where, initially, everyone's like, $20 a month. Go nuts. You can just use whatever you want. And then, like like, this stuff Scott that cost real money at the end of the day.

And there's a delicate balance, which JS, for every company, very hard to figure out of especially when you're trying to make a lot more money on those high end enterprise customers.

Don't be afraid. You can always move your stuff if it starts to cost too much. I just Node my stuff off of Vimeo onto Mux because, like, like, Vimeo just started screwing me. You know? Like, it was initially, it was $200, and then they're like, hey. You're you're actually, enterprise.

So and you're not allowed to to do what you're doing, which is streaming course videos.

So then it costs, like, $5. And then a couple years later, they just doubled their prices, and they're adding all these, like, shitty AI features on top of the product when I all I care about is Bandwidth at the end of the day.

And I got my renewal email from them, and I was like, yeah. I'm moving to mux. And, like, they didn't email me back for two weeks after I had asked a question about what it was. Like, they're just they're like, you're dead to us. No longer.

Yeah. It's so funny. I it's it's so funny. I I I do like, it's one of the reasons why I think that $5 a month, VPS is such a enticing thing because, like, you're you're buying what you pay for, and that's what it is. There's no pay by usage that's predictable.

And there's something very great about that. So if you know? The other question is is people you always hear both sides of it JS when a website goes nuts.

And should the website be shut down, or should you pay more? It depends. You know? Like, did Taylor Swift just tweet about your cool syntax T shirt, and we wanna sell a bazillion of them? Fire up more servers. We gotta handle all the Node. Or, like, is are you getting DDoSed and, and you're in trouble? You know? Or are you on top of Hacker News and you just people are using your little app that you built, and you didn't expect it to run up a $3,000 bill? It's it's a hard problem, and there's there's safeguards inside of all of these hosts as well.

Yes. For sure. One more question I forgot to ask you, Scott, from a couple questions ago.

Yes. The question was, do we even still use GIFs? When's the last time you've used a GIF? For what? For anything.

Like, not like a GIF, like a meme, like a auto playing, because most GIFs these days are just are just looping video

that is muted.

I use GIFs for the my little stream deck, but on a website, in my talks, yeah, I use little ones. But, yeah, again, they're all just memes or whatever. I'm putting in breakdancing clips into my, tech talks and stuff like that. But on actual Wes projects, I'm not using GIFs for anything. I I I almost never did anyways.

Yeah. Back in the day, it was like a way to get transparency and stuff. But, yeah, it's been a long time since I use GIFs for anything other than just looping videos.

Yeah. Because if you want animation, you use, like, a video. Like, I I haven't used a GIF in, like, conference talk for a long time. I just use muted looping video. And that way, you can pause the video when you slide off the the the slide and, like, animated GIFs are the quality was always so terrible, and the file size got so big. Yeah. So I know we have such better formats Node, folks. Apple,

come on.

I got nothing but anger for how Apple handles formats, like, boo. Yeah.

I'm also glad that people are, like, investigating and finding new formats, but, like, figure it out. My screen full of crash the other day when I drag and dropped it, hike into it, or, like, none of the Apple apps allow you to use an SVG.

And it's just like, folks, can we figure this out? Folks, come on, folks. Alright.

Yeah. Folks. Alright. Well, let's get into sick picks. I'm gonna sick pick something. Wes, did you know that there are actually modern quick look plug ins? Quick look is, for the thing in Mac OS Wes you hit space Bos and finder, it pops open the thing. Quick look is that. And, man, there's a whole bunch of formerly, one to these, and one of my biggest beefs with this was always MKV. Man, MKV is a valid format.

Wes what are you doing? Support MKV. What are you doing? So MKV, you'd hit space bar, and it would just pop open with a photo of, you know, VLC or something.

Either way, I have for you a very valid, very working, and wonderful quick look plug in for MKV.

It is called MKV Quick Look. Imagine that.

And it's super easy to install. Took one second. Worked first try. And, Ben, if you if you've been feeling this pain, you got this. So

easy. Loved it. Wes you posted that, I immediately was like, I have that one, and, like, I have the one that just gives you thumbnails. It gives you several thumbnails, and I was like, that sucks. I wanna just hit space. And and the benefit to using MKV is that if we're using, like, OBS to record an MKV and OBS crashes, you don't lose that whole file. You know? It's like an additive process. That's why you wanna use MKV, but it sucks because you can't just hit space. And then you also can't just drag them into any app. Can we all get along?

Can we all get along? Yeah. Come on. Come on. That tweet got no love, by the way. I tweeted that. Really? Maybe it's because I don't pay for Twitter, but that got no love. Can I try TypeScript and see

if it if it pops?

Only if you mention only if it does pnpm, you can do a little by the way, Scott told me about this.

You need my credit. Alright. I got a sick pick for you. This is for all of our sauce enjoyers. We've we've sick picked quite a bit of the Bakken sauces over the years. We don't have the Momofuku ones in Canada in very often. I've seen them every now and then at, like, specialty shops, but I was in The States a couple weeks ago, and I grabbed the sweet and savory Korean barbecue sauce from Momofuku.

Grabbed it at Target.

Man, that is good.

And it's like, my kids love it. Part of the problem with, like, stuff with my kids is it's it's often spicy.

And, like, I'm trying to get their their spice tolerance up, but this one is not spicy at all, and they they absolutely love it as well. So check that one out.

Yeah. Man, Node a Bakken's my daughter, like, is officially putting it on literally everything. She's got rice. She's pouring on like, she puts it on everything. Dad, we're having, chicken nuggets. Can I get the octopus sauce? Like, absolutely. The octopus sauce. Landon won't touch it, but Brooklyn loves it. Oh, man. It's it's so good. I what's the black? I saw they have black versions now. I don't know. They got pineapple at at, at Costco. They got all kinds of stuff. I took a selfie by wearing my Bakken shirt at Costco next to the big display.

Super fun.

That's awesome. You know how Koreans have, like, a kimchi fridge because they have so much kimchi? I need, like, a condiments fridge because it's just it drives me nuts. I open our fridge, and there's no room for food. It's all sauces. Hot sauce and and and garlic sauces and and bokken sauce.

And it it's so annoying because there's no room in our fridge for anything anything else.

Shameless plug. Let me tell you about Sentry. This is also an ad, by the way. You're gonna wanna check out Sentry for your projects, which will help you like, we used to Sanity help you fix your errors, but it does literally everything. You know? There's all these AI agents that you can hook it up in your your GitHub, and it will find bugs in your code Bos. And one little feature that I use Sentry for, I was just talking about my own website moving over all of the images.

One thing I was kinda worried about was, like, if if anyone's, like, hotlinking these images or, like, you know, Google search results, I wanna keep the paths the same.

So what I ended up doing was when I deployed it, I would kept my eye very closely on any four Deno fours, both for images and for, like, URLs that warp maybe broken.

And I just temporarily switched my site over for a couple hours, and then I switched it back. And I was I got a whole Sanity dashboard full of potential issues, and it was great because it was just like, oh, well, there's my day. This is my to do list of of things to do. You know? The Yeah. These things are four zero four ing. This thing broke on an old iOS device. All of the bugs just popped up, and I was able to just bang, bang, bang, fix them up myself. So check it out. Century.i0/syntax.

Use the coupon code tasty treat for two months for free.

Sick. Great. Great chatting with you today, Wes. Beautiful. See