Potluck — Corn Shucking × Self-Hosting Images × WordPress × Getting Scammed × Portfolios

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 Boss. Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats rid Out there. Today, we've got a potluck for you, which is where you send us questions. We will attempt to answer them. Haven't done one in rid A while since before we took our summer break. So we have tons of really good questions. If you've got a question, please send it over. We'll really appreciate it. Go to syntax. F m, top right hand corner. Click a button. It says submit a pop up question. You do the rest, and we will attempt to answer it on the show. Today, we are sponsored by 3 awesome companies, Linode, cloud computing developers, Trust Sentry, which is error exception and performance rid Tracking and auth. 0 does sign in and permissions management for your application. I'll talk about all of them partway through the episode. How you doing today, mister Scott Talinsky?

Hey. Yeah. I'm doing good. No. I'm just getting woken up here on a Monday morning, getting ready to go, getting my, ready. I'm ready to start the week. It's gonna be a fun one as every single week is, but I'm gonna be working on some neat features for the admin stuff in level up. And you know what? I really love working on that kind of stuff. I don't know about you, but there's something, like, really great about working on, rid like, kind of fun and interesting UI challenges Yeah. But also ones that are just made for you and your team because rid. You can, like, experiment a little bit more. You can play around a little bit more with with some of the UIs, and you don't have to be always thinking, does this look Absolutely perfect. Does this work absolutely perfect? I can get around this. I can just try out some new fun things and experiment with it. I love the admin tooling side of things. Oh, yeah. One of my favorite jobs was when I worked for Ford, and we just did prototyping designs the whole time. Like, that was my whole thing is a designer would rid Design something, and then I would get to just to code out a really rough version of it to have people check out. And it was something so freeing about knowing that nobody was going to be using this except Or, like, some people who are just trying to feel you know, there's just like a little bit of, it's a little bit more rough and rugged. So, yeah, that kind of stuff is a lot of fun for me. We should do a show on that because

often, I meet devs who work at large companies.

And you You say, oh, like, what do you work on? And they almost always say internal tooling because, like, I bet like, if you look at a big company like Uber, rid. I bet the amount of code that is written for their internal tools for administrating all of their data and

rid Everything is probably just as big as the actual application that is consumer pointed. Yeah. Totally. There's some neat neat stuff in there too. Oftentimes, the internal tooling is is, like, where Some really interesting things go down because, you know, you can take a little bit more risks.

So cool. Let's get into it with the hardest question anyone's ever asked rid on the show. This question is from Todd. This question says, hey, guys. I love the podcast. Thank you, Todd. This is a silly question and possibly the least important potluck question you will ever get When you get a new Apple device like an iPhone, Apple Watch, MacBook Pro, do you keep the box? Yes. Why or why not? Rid No. I do not keep the box unless I'm planning on selling it at some point in the future. If it's a device that I would say like, yeah. This is something I'm going to use myself and not intend on selling ever. No. I'm gonna throw that box away. I don't care about the box. Me, not a box fan. I don't care. Yeah. I only keep them if I'm going to be selling them because I know that they do sell for more With the box, it's still weird to me, but I understand why. But yeah. Yeah. I don't care about the box. I tweeted this out a couple weeks ago, And it causes a huge uproar, and I included it with another thing. So I'm gonna ask you, you buy eggs at the grocery store. Do you open them up and check them? Yes. Rid. Oh, so you're not a box keeper, but you're an egg checker. Oh, yeah. You don't wanna get home and have a broken egg? Who does that? You gotta check eggs. You gotta you gotta pull the corn back a little bit to make sure it's good. You gotta check the eggs. You gotta do all that stuff.

Alright. Let's Let's talk about the corner in just a second. But boxes, I don't keep any boxes unless I do keep the iPhone boxes. I I said on Twitter, I don't keep any boxes. Just live your life. And it's very freeing to just throw the box out. Also, my wife hates it. I get when I get something new, I'll try to open the box, Like, the wrong way. Like, rip it from the bottom or something like that.

It drives people crazy. There's other subset of people that just keep every single box rid. For, like, an alarm clock that they're never gonna you're never gonna return it or whatever. Just who who cares? Like, if something happens, You just tell the company, I don't know. I threw the box out. Like, wait. You're not gonna take this back? And a a lot of people are are scared of that happening. So, no, I don't keep a box for anything Except for my iPhones. I throw the all the computer boxes out as well just because, like, I'm not if I'm gonna sell that, I'm gonna sell it to somebody I know or give it pass it down. Maybe it's just because, Like, our house had no storage space. Like, our previous house this new one's a little bit different. We got some closets here. We had 1 closet, and it was the under the stairs closet, which was, like, rid Tiny. And it's just like, where am I supposed to keep that stuff? I don't wanna you know, like, I don't want a closet full of boxes.

It's dead air. It's not worth having that the stress of having all of these boxes and having to maintain them and and whatnot. Yeah. I don't got it. I don't have room for that. Rid. I don't check my eggs. I decided a while ago, I'm just gonna live my life and throw it to the wind. Sometimes you get a broken egg, like, once or twice a year. That's fine. You get 11 eggs. Not a big deal. I don't I don't I don't have time to sit there and open them all up and and check them. It's very freeing. Just throwing it to the wind. And what what was the last one they were talking about? Rid. The corn husk? You pulled back the corn husk? This is a weird thing. You pull it back. So in Ontario, it's very common to shuck the entire cob and leave Everything in the big bin at the grocery store. And when COVID hit, they had to implement these massive signs, re Shuck at home for safety of everyone, and everyone was up in arms because, like Seems polite. Yeah. I shuck at store. I'm a store shucker.

I would Shuck at home. Yeah. Yeah? Peaker, I would chuck at home. It's weird with the eggs, you know. I understand leaving it to the universe and just being like, alright, I guess I love an eggs. That's fine. That's pretty Cool. I get that, and I can see how that's freeing. And what I'm not is I'm not, like, pulling out the the magnifying glass and really looking. I'm gonna pop it open. I'm gonna say, there any major damage in here? No major damage, we good. I'm not turning each egg over for, abrasions or yeah. You know what you gotta do? You gotta You don't grab one that looks like it's been moved because somebody else has checked it and put it back. You gotta go one for that's, like, sitting Go in the stack. Rid Yeah. And it's, like, 98%

chance you buy, you're good. Got some scientific math. Let's see those studies, Wes. I was just just trying to do the math. Well, just, like, Personal antidote. That's where I get my science from. Yeah. Me too.

Anyways, that was a great question. Thank you, Todd. Next one is from rid. Gonzalo Diaz. Hey, guys. Awesome podcast.

Do you go over the advantages or disadvantages of using local images versus external image services? Example, Cloudinary for displaying images on a web app. This is a a really good question because it used to be that you just had 1 image. You resize the thing or maybe you maybe had, like, a Photoshop batch where you would just resize them and and upload them. But now we're in a time where rid. Often, it's a good idea to ship multiple versions of that or you wanna automatically detect. Like, I remember doing WordPress websites, and I would have sliders.

And people would upload the image, and they'd be like, the face is cut off of the person. And I'd be like, well, just crop it appropriately.

But now you can I know Sanity has this built in where you can draw a circle around the thing that matters? Cloudinary, I'm pretty sure, has person detection based on cropping. Rid. So there's major advantages, at least, I think, into using an image service, both for resizing, for compression, for performance, for rid New image formats and using a service. I know Cloudflare just rolled out their image service as well, which means that rid. This is the type of thing that is going in. Trying to host your own version of that type of thing can totally be done, but it is very easy just to to reach for a service like that as well. What do what do you think? Yeah. It's interesting because the services are are easy, and and one of the things I really like about it is just rid. Images, they take up space. They have complexities,

and the service is just being able to say, alright. Here's the URL rid and the quality auto, format auto, and, you know, literally just you take care of it. Yeah. That to me is extremely nice, and it depends on who you are and what your project is that you're doing. But me, personally, I really like I really like the experience of using Cloudinary.

The only problem is it's just, like, now you you've added 1 more service to your stack. So If you're keeping tally, you kinda gotta keep this tally of, alright, what am I willing to put into a service and what am I not willing to put into a service? Rid And maybe it's worth it to run your own version of Cloudinary because it's really probably not that hard to have a s three bucket and a serverless function do it. There's guides rid out there on the Internet how to write your own type of thing, but then that's something you gotta manage.

So it's all about what's your budget to deal with this stuff rid 1st, what's your time to deal with this stuff? You got a lot of developers. Somebody can, you know, handle image hosting and all that stuff for yourself, then, by all means, rid You can manage it internally. We're a small small business, and it's really difficult for us to have the workforce to be able to focus on those type of things. So to have a service with that kind of features for us and just just pay for it is easy. And so I like that ease of use. But, again, rid. Side projects and stuff, I'm probably just reaching for local images and not worrying too much about it. You know, a lot of the things that modern front end stacks, like, rid I know there's Gatsby Image. Next. Js has an Image thing. Vite has an Image thing. Yeah. Those kind of tools are really great, And I think that's definitely where you'd go if you weren't doing something like this. But to me personally, the ease of use of of a service makes it a feature that I personally use. If you do decide to go and host it yourself, like my own lessboss.com,

I wanted to go full like, run it myself, except for, obviously, hosting.

So I opted to use Gatsby Image, which Gatsby Image does all of your images as a part of your build. And I have rid. Thousands and thousands of images on my website. And if I have to clear the cache on that thing, it's, like, almost an hour rid to build my website, which is brutal.

And, really, the only option is to go with a service rid. That does it on demand or build your own and then also have it done on demand. Because on demand is not a big deal because what happens is somebody visits a rid. Post that no one has ever been to, and

you ask for 800 by 600. The service is gonna say, oh, I've I've never done that of that image. Let me grab the original, quickly resize it, and then throw it out the door. And the 1st person that visits that page is gonna be a little bit slow, But then after that, that image has already been cooked up, and it's it's on the shelf ready to go for the next person that comes to that website. Yeah. And and there is something about The caching, the auto format, the smallest format, the smallest size possible, all that stuff to me is what makes it worth it because you are getting the fastest images possible rid In my experience. Yeah. Alright. Next question here is from Jill, and this is a long one, so stick with me, but this is a a good one. So Jill says, hey, Scott and Wes, a 40 year old lady rid. Built a full stack JavaScript app on my own with lots of rad Postgres database stuff and a bunch of Node and Express API endpoints, Role based ant access control, fancy OAuth, and, of course, the latest React tech. Cool. And, Jill, rid Jill's doing a ton of stuff. Yeah. Wow. Good job. Jill's on fire. That's much faster than I learned any of that stuff. Holy cow. I'm pretty proud of it. I even meant you should be, Jill, by the way. Even managed to configure Nginx and deploy to AWS. The only problem is it looks like crap. My portfolio is pretty darn slick. I used a gorgeous Gatsby template that required only a bit of tweaking, but the site I architected and worked so hard at to bring to life, it looks like an 8 bit video game for toddlers.

It's responsive a responsive yet bootstrappy game. Okay. My question, does this matter? I would hope that this project shows off my back end skills, but I'm afraid they'll judge a book by its cover, and they they may. I guess the second question is, how do you show off your back end skills? Read. I have a read me in my repo, but will they actually read it, or can you be a full stack rack developer of no design skills? I'm a very, very ready to apply rid for jobs emotionally and financially, but I'm terrified of making a fool of myself and worried that I'll never get hired. I'm completely self taught and have been plugging away at my own for the pandemic.

So I send a massive thank you to you guys for the sense of community that your show provides, and props to the wise sprinkler controllers. Okay. This is a long way. And it's really, really interesting. So Jill's issue is that she's built this big old fancy thing, but she's not a designer, which, Let's face it. Most developers are probably not designers. Right? We usually work with designers, and some people are more design focused. Yes. Absolutely. A lot of us work with designers to build things in the real world, so that's a thing. But in the same regard, there is something to be said about rid 1st impressions of when somebody looks at your thing, is it gonna be like, oh, this looks good, or it doesn't look good? So, Jill, my suggestion To you would be to find some sort of an open source UI anything that matches whatever your project is, and just If it's open source, it's it's free to use, whatever, just copy it. Just find something that's out there that is available to be used and just copy it, make it look nice. You know, the skills that oftentimes people are hiring, we mentioned this before, would be like, can you replicate a design pixel perfect? Rid Like, somebody's going to look at and say, it's not about, did Jill design this? Because that's not important. But if she was able to take a design that looked nice and replicate it, make it look nice, then that's what they're gonna be looking at is, like, can you rid Work with a design that it exists, and can you, like, reimplement that in code? So I think you you should focus on the design somewhat, you don't need to design it yourself. That's not something you need to do. Another thing is if people are going to hire you for back end work, They will look at your code more than anything else. And, just worry about the cleanliness of your code, comments,

formatting, those types things will make a bigger difference, I think, than the UI of the site would. Yeah. I I agree with everything Scott said. It's just get a good template that you can apply to it because rid. People are gonna look at it and be like, this is not what it is. And he clearly just impressed us by rattling off all the stuff that you've learned in the last year, Which is very impressive that you're able to do both the back end node, the JavaScript app on their front end, as well as all the server rid AWS and Genex, OAuth, all that stuff. So it's it's very impressive. So, like, I would even play that up in terms of, like, rid. Don't judge this book by its cover and say, like, you should see the back end and, like, just, like, really go home on that being, like, rid. Like, don't be embarrassed by it at all. Be like, I'm really good at this type of thing, and I've used a

read. Template for the front end, and look, I've implemented it perfectly as well. Totally. Beautiful. And and keep in mind too is if you're new coming to development, you know, rid I know you're doing a lot of stuff, but I think you're gonna find less opportunities for full stack work as a new developer. Rid. I think a lot of times that full stack work come for maybe people who've had a little bit more work opportunities. Not saying that you can't get it. It just might be a little bit more challenging. So maybe pour everything into either the front and back end, whatever you find most interesting, and really go hard on those aspects when trying to get that 1st role Just so you can say, like, this is what I can do really well. Next question we have here from Fabian. Scott, I just finished your Svelte course, and now I'm working on building Svelte components. I have a question regarding testing. I was listening to an interview with Rich Harris on Svelte Radio, and it's my understanding that the framework is rid not to be opinionated as far as testing.

What are you doing as far as testing the SvelteKit? Do you have any recommendations, plug ins, blah blah blah? I've only ever written unit tests with Jess in Vue. I'm loving Svelte, but I really wanna work on doing writing more tests.

And there's a couple more sentences that says I think it says the same thing. So, yes, Scott. What does the testing scene look like in Svelte land? Yeah. So, you know, it's funny. I wanted to include this one because I just saw this question on Twitter the other day too. So people are asking about it. We personally don't do any gist testing for our UI at all, not because you can't do it in Svelte, but because I just don't like it, we did it largely for React, and I found it to be it's just not the most reliable for testing, but then again, You know, I think different teams work differently in that regard. We use Cypress to do all of our tests, and in that regard, Cypress does not care about what the UI layer was. The reason why that worked out really well for us is that we were able to literally change the front end JavaScript framework that our site was built in, and all of our tests were able to be rid. Kept to the same. In fact, we did not rewrite our tests. We just rewrote the code so that the test passed, which was pretty amazing if you think about it. So you're essentially just testing that the the buttons click and the HTML is rendered. Right? Yeah. And we're mocking the API the same. So, like, I rid I mean, you're using data test IDs in the code so that you can attach onto something in the DOM and say, you know, click this button here or there. That way, Cypress can still find it. Rid So I would honestly recommend that approach, but that doesn't mean that you can't do the other approach as well. In fact, And the only thing that Cypress is doing differently is it's just firing it up in the browser rather than rendering the component via node. Rid So the testing scene is largely the exact same in the react react world. It stands like something like Enzyme or something, which, Honestly, I didn't use it anyway. So you have testing library, so Svelte testing library in Node if you wanna do it that way, or you can do it rid Same way we did it and just do Cypress for everything for the UI. But either way, I didn't find anything different or odd in the testing rid of Svelte components compared to React components.

And another thing that wouldn't be any different is authentication if you were using a Service like Auth0.

Wes, do you wanna talk more about Auth0 and why service for authentication might be a good idea? Yeah. Auth0 is re Easiest way for devs to add authentication and secure their application.

They provide features like user management, multifactor auth, and enable you To let your users log in with, like, pretty much any way any way you want. You wanna log in with Google, Twitter, Discord, whatever? You got it. You wanna rid. Customize the login page. You got it. You wanna integrate it with Node. Js and Svelte or React and Next. Js. You got it. They integrate with pretty much everything out there, and they've got a really good set of APIs for integrating with whatever you can imagine. Rid. Some really cool stuff that they have is device biometrics.

If you wanna log in with the face ID or use your fingerprint or rid. What other types of biometrics are there? A retina scan, maybe? You name it, they got it. So if you're looking to integrate auth and user management into your Check out Auth0 at this is a pretty sweet domain name, a zero dot t o rid Forward slash syntax. Thank you, Auth0, for sponsoring.

Sick. Next question is from Adam. Adam says, hi, Wes and Scott. I'm weak when it comes to DevOps. I would like to confidently set up and deploy my applications on AWS and manage dev and prod environments.

Any recommendations on how to learn this, how this all works, so I really understand.

If you don't personally, can you tweet this out so other developers can share their thoughts. Okay. Adam, let me tell you, in my opinion, the best place to find this kind of stuff is in the DigitalOcean blog in my experience. I don't know about US, but the DigitalOcean, their blog has been really, really good for me to learn this type of thing because I think, specifically, they have the best guides on how to not only set up a virtual private server, set up different services, set up different rid Servers or engine apps or whatever you need. Right? And in my experience, their posts are very direct in a good way. They don't add too much fluff, but they add just enough fluff to explain things. But they also add in and make sure that security is very high And, you know, they'll they'll say, alright. Now we're doing this. Now you need to remove access from the root user. Add this, do this, do that, whatever, And they explain all very wise. So I would check out the DigitalOcean blog and really look into some of their beginner stuff about running a virtual private server, Or I think it's their, like, knowledge their knowledge docs might be it. The DigitalOcean stuff is not specific to just DigitalOcean.

Rid. It's specific to literally any Linux server. You could host it on AWS. They'll give you a Linux server.

One of our sponsors today, Linode, will give you a rid. Linux server, and you can put all these things on there. It's funny. That type of thing seems to be going more of the way of using services, rid. But I and we we talked about this with Matt from Caddy.

Very firm believer that these are still really good skills to have rid. And being able to log in and and run Nginx or run PM 2 is a popular one that I use myself.

Rid Docker, things like that. They're very good skills to have. Next question we have here is from Kanye West.

You have both that's a good that's a good one. It's very funny. You have both praised MDX in the past, but why would you use it? So rid. MDX is markdown, but with JSX in it. I understand it lets you put JSX in your markdown, but that seems rid. Counter to the purpose of using markdown files for content.

Markdown is portable format for static content and independent any front end framework that makes it a good choice for writing posts and rendering them. Once you inject a React component, doesn't that eliminate the portability and the static nature of markdown? Rid. At that point, why don't you just use a dynamic website where you have complete control over how the content is rendered? What are your thoughts? So this is a good point. Like, rid. As soon as you start to use, like, another flavor of something, then it becomes very hard to move that somewhere else. And that's rid Already an issue with markdown. I I'm not sure if you know, but as soon as you get into it, there's GitHub flavored markdown. Yeah. There is, What's a daring fireball? Marco Yeah. Marco Arman? So he's the guy that made markdown, and then he hasn't touched the spec in, like, 10 years or so, and I don't think there's any there's a lot of things that are missing from markdown. So that's why people come out with the GitHub flavored rid Markdown, and there's a couple other versions of Markdown. So there already are. You can already take Markdown from 1 format, and it doesn't work like you would expect it in another format, Which is frustrating, and then you're adding also, and you're adding React components in the middle of your markdown. Like, why would you do that? Well, Personally, why do I use it? Because it's super easy to it's a great way to write your documentation.

Rid. And then if you need to be able to throw in a a video player, which there's no video player in markdown like, a good example is I'm writing a blog post. Re My entire blog is written in in MDX. If I wanna throw in a video player or a graph or anything that is any what dynamic.

Another example is if I wanna put in a an advertisement for my courses, and I'm having a sale, and I wanna inject whatever a course is currently on sale in the middle of a 1000 blog posts, How do I do that? You know? Like, then all of a sudden you need some sort of, like, server side includes. Well, that's pretty easy to do with JSX. So, Yeah. You do get away from it, and there are some efforts to sort of port what MDX is to other frameworks.

Rid. But I don't know how well that would work just because there are so many millions of different plug ins for MDX. But I think that's better than just read. What? Doing the other thing, which is hand coding your paragraph tags and wrapping your links and with all the correct attributes and rid. Automatically applying I or or manually putting IDs on all of your headers, like, that's a nightmare for writing blog posts if you've ever done that. I much rather write it in Markdown.

And then if I ever move off of React and that I'm going to have to do a little bit of work to make sure that my rid Components now work in whatever framework I'm in, but it's worth it to me. Yeah. I think there might be, like, a difference

understanding, like, why people use these tools because, for me, it isn't just, you know, static content that you can move anywhere, but, like, It almost is more of a like a template Yeah. Templating language. Right? What is, like, the templating language you used to use was Pug. There is, like, EJS.

I still use Pug. What was it called before that? I don't know. There's been a whole bunch of different ones. Jade oh, yeah. Jade, Pug, Camel. Pug.

Yeah. And these templating languages, they don't exist to make things more portable. Really, they make things that, like, rid As markdown than it is with HTML markup. So, you know, it is for me, personally, I look at these as being like, what can we do to simplify rid The UI code to see in MDX or any of these likewise markdown with components libraries Definitely fall into the the realm of what can we do to make these things easier. But like you said, it's a lot of times it is used for things like blog posts when you wanna insert a video.

Right. And that's really where the the ease of use comes out of there for you. Oftentimes, you know, you're writing your stuff in markdown if you are a developer.

Some people definitely aren't writing it through a CMS or something like that. I I think that's a totally different different world, but we have some fairly static pages rid On our level up tutorial site, right, like the about page, does that about page need a whole bunch of HTML markup? Like, I don't think so. Rid Be, like, really prime character for, like, a markdown file that you could just convert to HTML automatically.

Alright.

Next question here is from Zach rid. Z, Zack z says, hey, Wes and Scott. I like you both. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, that's not what he was saying. I Like, you both am a developer with young kids.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, he doesn't like it. I have rid 3 boys aged 6 and under. That's a lot of boys aged 36 under. Needless to say, my house has a lot of energy in it. My job is quite flexible, which I appreciate because it gives me the freedom to structure my day to help out my family. My question for you both is, as a web developer with a spouse and young kids working from home, How do you both maintain a healthy work life balance, avoid working too much, find time for yourselves, family, etcetera? Yeah. This one's tough because The kids, if they're home, they require kind of just a ton of effort just constantly.

So for me, I'm A little bit newer of a a dad than Wes. My kids are 2 and 4. So, Wes, you've had a little bit more time than this with me, But for me, it's been really a challenge to not open my computer on the weekend like I was used to before And, like, really save it for kids are in bed or whatever. Sometimes I have problems with it where I'm like, you know, it's, like, 5 o'clock, and I don't wanna stop working because I'm in the middle of, like, a bug or something like that, but the kids are home, and then, you know, I don't wanna just put it all on my wife unless there's an emergency or something. Right? Rid So, for me, it's it's largely been about really making my work time schedule that is my work time, and I'm not working any other time. And every once in a while here, I'll take a Friday off or I'll take a Thursday off or I'll take any day off that I can to spend the time because our our kids go to daycare during the day, so They're not home at the house during the day, but making sure that those times that they are home, whether that is right when they get home from day care

or on the weekends that I am as present as possible rather than being wrapped up in work. So, yeah, that's really just it. It's setting those hard boundaries to say, like, you know what? If I'm going to be doing for fun programming, I'm gonna be doing it in my for fun time, Which is after the kids are down to bed or something. Yeah. I'm pretty much the same. I've got 3 kids all under 6. And rid During the pandemic, this is not related to the pandemic because that was brutal. Our kids are home from school, often had just the kids sitting in in here with me, rid. Trying to just watch a TV show on one of my monitors while I was trying to get some code done, and that sucks because, like, my wife works as well. So we're just trying to trying to make it work. But, hopefully, fingers crossed, we're we're through the end of that, and we don't have online school anymore. But when they are In school, it's pretty or even just during the summer, we have whatever. It's I just have very clear boundaries. I work in the summer, I work from rid 9:30 to 4:30 every single day, and that allows my wife to have a bit of a workout in the morning as well as a couple hours ready. Before dinner, like, an hour and a half before dinner to get some stuff done around the house. It's just a nice clean-cut thing. And during the winter, I just work rid Nine to 5. I drop the kids off. Usually, about 9:30 sometimes if there's traffic after dropping the kids off. But Monday, Friday, 9 to 5. People ask me this all the time. Like, how do you manage it? Rid gym. Like, I just literally work during work hours, and then you don't work during nonwork hours. And, yeah, like Scott says, if there's something fun that you wanna do that is coding related, rid Then that's in your your downtime. And whenever you've got, like, an hour in the evening or whatever, you can absolutely go for that type of thing. So rid. That's kinda what I do. I am pretty lenient with jumping out of work early on a Friday or whatever just because, like, I know that my kids are going to remember that type of thing where we went out for breakfast and I started late, rid Or I took a half day off and went to the cottage or or something like that. And that's also just like a a perk of working for yourself and being able to to manage that type of thing. But, rid. Generally, I'm pretty firm with my hours, and that's that's about it. I don't work on weekends. I don't work on nights. Yeah. And then, honestly, it's something that rid I struggle with, you know, because I am am very used to being, like, independent.

You know, I can go code. I can do whatever. I can and once you have kids, all that's out the window. And it's rid Not not like a hard transition for me, but it hasn't always been easy. There are certainly times where I find myself picking up my computer, and Courtney has to be like, hey. You know what? Why don't we, just, you know, close the computer for the day and be like, yeah. That's actually Yeah. That's a great idea. That's a very good idea. It's hard when you love this stuff so much, but, yeah, you have this.

Yeah. It's hard. It is hard. You don't wanna pull yourself away or you know, we all get the feeling of, like, when you have, like, a really intense rid bug or problem you wanna solve and you can't solve it, you gotta, like, shut your brain off for a little bit while you're with the kids and be present. And, also, you know what? Re There's something to be said for, you know, the the benefit of workplace that allows you to bail out a little bit early on a Friday or take a day off To do whatever here and there without being really stressful about it. Like, I think, you know, at the end end of the day, I would love to be a 4 day work environment, you know, full time rid For anybody who works for LevelUp Tutorials, right, that would be, like, a a great thing where people wouldn't you know, they could take a full day with their kids that's a non weekend or whatever. So, rid Yeah. It's a tough balance, but you gotta make it work. Another tough balance that you have to make work is the amount of errors on your site, as in you shouldn't be having that many of them if, they're affecting a lot of people. And how can you tell how many errors are affecting a lot of people? Well, you can use a service like Sentry. Let me tell you. We just launched a new UI for our website, so we have errors.

You'd think that you wouldn't have any errors with all your tests, rid all that stuff, but let me tell you, we have errors, and we have been on Sentry nonstop. We've been watching these errors. We've been seeing how many people rid who they're affecting. It gives us the user object, the user ID of the user, the browser. It gives us any information that we could possibly need to solve these errors. And you know what? I've been hitting a lot of I've been hitting a lot of that resolved button because what I do is I fix the errors, and then I click the resolve button, and then That never ever, ever, ever come up again because I fixed it right the first time. And so you can have that kind of feature along with performance And you'll get 2 months for free. This is definitely an offer you're gonna wanna try, especially if you have any if you have user facing code, you're gonna want a service like this because, Otherwise, those errors are just gonna go unnoticed.

So you don't wanna sweep those under the rug. You want those to be in front of your face. Thank you so much to Century for sponsoring. Read. Next question is from Lewis Blundell.

Should I write a portfolio site just using the 3 fundamentals, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, or rid. Should I write them using something I am comfortable with, such as Angular or React? Unsure if using a framework for a portfolio is a good idea. I think read. Using your portfolio site as a playground for something that you're learning is a fantastic use case. And, also, like, I talked about this On the past episode, as I built my wife a little website, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and then I scrapped the thing and went for I built it in SvelteKit, and I used rid. Prisma, my back end, just because, like, even for the smallest website, I feel like it is so much handy to be able to update the thing yourself and to rid. Have it auto deploy and have just, like, reusable components where you're not just having to copy paste code over and over again. So, Yeah. I think being able to have a playground, try new stuff out on your personal website, as well as just the actual benefit of a framework is a good idea. I would go with the

What is the smallest, tiniest little website we can produce that loads the fastest? Now granted, you want things to load as fast as possible. You want your thing to be performant. That's something you want to be. But, you know, there is that, like, reductionist example where it's like, this is the fastest website ever. Yeah. Because they're not loading any images. It's just This is not the product that we're building. And chances are, if you're interviewing for jobs, they're not hiring you to build that kind of site. They're most likely hiring you to build something more dynamic. So what you want here is to show that you can work in the type of thing that you're trying to get a job at. So So if you're trying to get a React web React job, you make that site React, something Next. Js, Gatsby, something that's gonna be fast, small, quick, whatever. Whatever you're trying to get a job in, you make that site in that technology, and then you make it really stinking good. You make it very fast. You make the code impeccable Because chances are you're gonna throw that baby on GitHub.

And if I'm your person who's going to be potentially interviewing Lou, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pop open that code. I'm gonna look at that code rid. Let's see how clean is this code. It doesn't need to be commented it to to you know, this button opens the menu. Yeah. Okay. We get it. But What we need here is we need just code that looks good so that when somebody opens it up, they'll say, oh, yeah. This person, I would like this rid to do, and then your personal portfolio site is the perfect place to show that off, in my opinion, at least. Okay. Next question is from Brian, Barracuda mayor. Pretty cool. You got a barracuda on the program. How do you handle hosting when using WordPress as a headless CMS with something like Gatsby? Rid So, Wes, I'm gonna let you take this one because I don't do a ton of WordPress hosting anymore. And in fact, every single time I suggest that I say, oh, use Bluehost, and Wes is like, don't use Bluehost.

Re So so you you can tell me where to host the WordPress site. Yeah. I don't necessarily know if I'll tell you where to host it, but the type of hosting that you'll need for rid. The back end and the front end might be a little bit different. So hosting WordPress, you need, like, a PHP server to host that thing on, and rid. That's probably the most common type of hosting out there. I know a lot of people I'm not gonna make any recommendations just because I've been out of that space for a while. Just don't use rid Just please blow those. So you need some good PHP hosting that is on a server somewhere. You can rid. Put your Gatsby website on the exact same server, and that's probably a very affordable way to do it. It's just that rid. When you are hosting Gatsby, you need a good CI integration, meaning that whenever your data in your WordPress changes, You need to rebuild your Gatsby website. And these things like Netlify, Cloudflare Pages what is it? Render is what you're using. What are the other ones? Zite. What are some other of these good Render and Netlify.

Yeah. You you get the point. Those things are really good at building your website and deploying it. Rid. That's not to say you couldn't. Even, like, Gatsby Cloud could even do that. Gatsby Cloud will build your website, and then it will put it somewhere. And that somewhere could be back on your PHP server Because all you need at the end of the day to host a Gatsby website is just a static server with an Nginx or an Apache config that you don't I don't even think you need no. You don't even need the Apache config because Gatsby renders out the folders for you. So, yeah, that's not even necessary.

Rid. So I would probably start with that, is that try to host it both on the same server. And if you find that the CI is flaky or being a pain in the butt, then go for rid Something like, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, render, something that will build it for you every single time that your data changes or every single time you click a button and You wanna rebuild that type of thing.

Next question is from Steve Lewis from the UK. How frequently do you use div rid. Tags versus finding the better tag. Love the pod, b t w. Thanks, Steve Lewis from the UK. This one's pretty simple. Try to use the best rid. Tag that you possibly can at first. So don't default to a div. Default to saying, can I use And this will take a bit at first, but can I use main article, header, footer aside, any of these things rid that are descriptive of what the content is?

And if not, then use a div or use a span if if it's a inline element. I think that's pretty simple little rule of thumb there. Yeah. For the most part, div is you have, like, a switch statement. Div is the The default one. Right? Yeah. So you go through all the options that it could possibly be ahead of time, and if it's none of those options, it's a div or a span. Span for inline, div rid block, and that's pretty much it. I do use a fair amount of divs because, let's face it, there's no reason to shoehorn some Other component in there when it doesn't have to be. So, I mean, anytime you have an arbitrary, like, divider or section of code, Div tag is usually gonna be the place to be unless it is, of course, one of those main ones, and you'll know it just by getting used to it. That's the type of thing that you definitely feel more comfortable with. Rid In fact, guys, that was one of the things that I had in my Google interview was they gave me, like, a layout, and they were like, would you make each of these things? What HTML element would you make each of these things? And I know that was always a really fascinating exercise because it, like, showed your understanding of these. And Oftentimes, there's a right and a wrong answer, but not all the time. Sometimes, it's not black or white. So just use whatever you think is appropriate based on the type of content it is, whatever the semantic meaning of that content is, and then if you can't think of anything or or none, then don't feel bad about using a div. They're there for rid to be these blank containers.

Okay. Next question is from Kirky. Kirky says, this is less of a question and more of a heads other listeners, beware of scam job opportunities. I recently encountered a scam where they used a website that seemed like a very normal and reasonable job rid board for a major company. I went through the whole process until they asked for personal info, and I asked for verification of their person. They could not provide it, so I left. But they had profiles matching actual employees of the company. They had emails. They had an HR rid and employees, they had a legitimate operation going on.

Make sure to take a second look and verify with the company before giving personal information away or depositing any of their money in your account. Yeah. This is a good one because rid As developers, you know, once you get a little bit into your career, you've had a role or two. You probably get a lot of people reaching out to you on LinkedIn about other job opportunities because There's a lot of headhunters on LinkedIn who are just scanning for hashtags and whatever to see what you do, and I'm pretty sure that that seems like a decent attack vector for somebody to say, You know what? You know, these people are desperate for jobs or you know? Give me that Social Security number, and then we'll move forward here. So, rid No. I've never fallen for a scam like this. Wes is asking me in the comments, Scott, have you ever fallen for a scam like this or almost fell for 1? Nope. I am rid skeptical about any of this stuff, text messages, whatever.

If I get an incoming call, whether that is a rid Call coming in from anywhere, whether that is the phone or anything like that. I think the general rule is to not accept that And then reach out to them on your own via their official channels. Sometimes it's it's very obvious these are real companies. Like, if Ford is reaching out to me and it's Ford, I'm not gonna be like, aren't you sure this is forward? Like, you know, I can tell the difference between some major ones there. But if it's something that I've never heard of, that's a whole another Story. I always feel bad for people like this. Like, my neighbor got her Facebook hacked the other day, and she's like, I'm investing in new opportunities,

rid. And, like, not something she would ever post. And one of her friends is like, wow. Interesting. I would like to hear more. I was like, really? Yeah. Yeah. Really? Rid. Come on. Like, I feel so like, that's the most basic one.

I feel like I have a pretty good vibe check for that type of thing, but last summer, I almost got scammed. This is not rid Tech or business related, but I took the engine out of my Sea Doo. I gave it to some guy who rid. A friend had recommended and who could rebuild it for me. And so I gave it to him, and then I called him. He's, like, yeah, rid No problem. I'll get you in the water in a week, and then, like, a couple weeks went by. And I was like, hey. What's going on? It's, like, long waiting on parts. And it started to be that whole, like, rid. That whole, like, excuse game over and over again. And I started to do a little bit of research on just, like, his name and rid. A bunch of information he had and turned out, like, every time he called me, I got, like, a different number. And I was like, this guy's got burner phones, And then I finally found this thread on a Seadoo form of this guy who just, like, takes your boat and then just runs with it or or takes all the parts out and rid Leave the shell, and I was like, oh, man. I can't believe I got scammed. So I went deep on this guy. Like, I found his real name.

Rid I found all of his numbers, all of his burner numbers. He slashed the tires on his cars. I found his shop address, and, like, this is not the kind of guy that you wanna approach Because, like, it's crazy. So, like, I would not, like, go up to him because, like, worst case, he had, like, a $2,000 motor of mine. But then I like like, he kept picking up the phone because he wanted to, like, get more money out of me because I had paid him a deposit. Ugh. And then finally, rid. After I had all the information on him, I even, like I pulled records from Florida and where he had bought a motor home from some or he had, Like, got a $100,000 motor home and then just turned around, like, he on credit, and he and then he sold it.

And that that was, like, grand theft auto. So he has, like, $100,000 grand theft auto. Rid. And it went even as deep as he was involved with, like, the previous president of the United States' scams. I like, I won't go too much re Deeper, but there's all these news articles about them that I found. I was like, this guy is a pro. But the other thing was that he was also, like, a a known guy in the, like, eighties rid. CDU racing scene. So he also did know what he was talking about. Like, he wasn't just he did know, but he was just, like, a scammer in the industry.

I gathered all this info, and I called him up.

And I called him by his real name, which made him stumble a little bit because he had given me the wrong name. I was like, I just wanna know. Like, I know everything about you, and I work in cybersecurity, ready. And you definitely don't wanna be screwing me.

And, he said, wow. Like, I don't really work in cybersecurity, but I'm freaking really good at googling stuff.

So you could tell it rattled him. And within a week or two, he got me the the motor. It worked fine. Like, he obviously knew what he was doing, and rid He buttoned everything up and got it right back to me because he knew that, like, he didn't wanna be caught, and he knew I had all the info. So that's my crazy story of almost being scammed. And I pride myself of not being the guy who gets scammed, but that was crazy. Coming in hot is Wes' badass boss with,

A little bit of a reverse scam. Hey there. That's pretty nice. Hey. And I got another one for you. You see, do. How about see While.

You know, like a do while loop? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. C do, c while? Yeah. Okay. Those are How are you gonna pull this together, Scott? How am I gonna pull together what? Rid Are you trying to get an ad rate here? No. But here, you can see me do a website rid While you see while me hosted on Linode. How about that?

Hey. There you go. That was probably the furthest stretch I've ever heard, but rid. Let's talk about Linode. They are cloud computing that developers trust. You probably know them for their VPS, rid. And they will host a website for you. No problem. You can actually, they got a $100 in free credit that they'll give you. You can take that and rid Spin up a server. You could host your Gatsby site on that. You could run PHP on it and host your WordPress website.

But they also have dedicated CPU machines. They have DDoS protection, rid. DNS management.

They've got block storage. You're gonna throw your images on there. You wanna host a bunch of big files. They have object storage.

Rid. They'll back it all up for you. They have a GPU, bare metal, Kubernetes, you name it. Anything you need to do with hosting, it's very affordable And very good. Their customer support is top notch. So you wanna check it out. They got a $100 in free credit if you go to rid linode, l I n o d e, .comforward/syntax and sign up with the free account. You're gonna get a $100 in free credit, which is A really sweet deal. Thank you, Linode, for sponsoring. Sick. Cool. Well, 1 last question here from Tisha Mervihill.

Rid What percentage of North Americans keep their mobile devices longer than 3 years? Rid 5 years, 8 years. I'm a freelancer and want to put a clause in my contract of what age of device my Apple support. Rid I can't seem to find this information.

Just more general answers like most people expect a phone to last 2 to 3 years. Yeah. This is a tough question to answer because I think it's extremely different based on where you're living, what type of population you're dealing with. And, Honestly, the browsers and the operating systems and things like that, they update themselves to stay on top of Whatever. So this is actually a very different answer for Android and iOS because in the Android world, you end up probably having phones that are kept an endless amount of sense considering that's how that's always worked. Right? And we have our these Safari updates tied to the OS. Doesn't make any amount of sense to me whatsoever.

In my opinion, than, like, an Android user. But an Android user, they probably have a later browser version because it updates on its own automatically, so I have no idea. You know, I currently have my phone for 3 years now or so. Mhmm. I don't know. I usually upgrade my phone every 2 to 3 years myself,

But I don't think that's normal or average. That's normal for, like, tech people. Yeah. But, like, if I look at I took my wife's 3 year old rid phone and gave it to my mom, and she's had it for, like, 2 years. And she's like I was just like, this thing's great. You know? Like Oh, yeah. Totally. Hits any issue. But rid. It's more like like what I tell my clients when I used to do this type of thing is I support the last 2 major versions of every browser, rid. And usually, that will cover most Ios and and Android devices. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. If they need it to support, you rid You can also take a look at their Google Analytics and say, oh, like, 80% of your people are on 7 year old Android devices, then that's gonna cost a little bit more because that's not rid. The type of stuff that I normally do. Or, hey, we're not able to do x, y, and z.

We'll have to progressively enhance for most browsers, but some people on older browsers. And Even, like, to book a COVID vax shot in Ontario, you couldn't do it on IE.

Yeah. Which I was, like, very proud of rid Our our government for being like, yes. Like, come on. Move along.

And I think that probably would have been a bit different if they said you can't book it on a rid. 8 year old Android device because for a lot of people, that's their only Internet. But I think, like, Internet Explorer is like, well, you're sitting at a computer anyway, then just rid. Open something else. And most likely, you're on a a old corporate computer, and you need to just download another one or download the edge version of that. So rid. No. I know it's a bit of a nonanswer, but I just you just kinda have to put the last 2 major versions that usually covers 3 or 4 years' worth of browsers.

And if you have to do any more than that, then you have to figure out how much extra work that will take you. Yeah. Totally. It's so funny. You should have, like, a little thing that pops open If you're still having to support or if if you're if you're using IE 11 in 2021, it pops up in the site, and it's just a little guy being like, what are we doing here? Like, what What what's happening? Why are you using this? Yeah. I have no idea, honestly. This is a tough one to to answer.

Certainly not something that we have the data on. So okay. Now is the part of the show where we do sick picks, things that we find to be sick that we've picked to share with you, things that we enjoy. And, Wes, I got a sick pick for you that I think you're going to like. I'm into it. Yeah. This is on Amazon Amazon Prime Video, and, this is a show that we started watching, and we binged it instantly. There's 4 episodes of it. And if you are into was it the Dream, that MLM podcast? Yeah. This is Lou LaRiche, And it's a series about Lularoe.

Oh. And it's 4 episodes about why Lularoe is this the giant scam. But it also like, it's so funny because, like, rid The founders of LuLaRoe, they're so trained at playing dumb to the whole thing. They're like, well, we're just trying to help people, and then they'll be like, They'll show their legal interviews, and they'll be like, did you ever know about this? She'll be like, never heard of it.

And then they'll like, they'll They'll cut to somebody else and be like, yeah. This person told me directly this is the thing. And then they're just they're the biggest scammers. They're the worst people in the whole world. They're terrible people. You'll get a little bit of overlap with other MLM stuff, but I thought it was super fascinating. I didn't know anything about Lularoe,

and, this kind of blew my mind a bit. How do you spell it? Because I just Googled it, and it's a LulaRiche Chevrolet dealership in Plymouth, Michigan.

LulaRiche, Like this, one word, and, it is wild. It is very entertaining.

It's very well produced, and the type of thing that I love, these kinda, like, rid Gammy whatever documentaries or whatever. Yeah. So I I've really dug this high production value, you know, horrible people. This deal the whole deal. Rid I am into that. I think I'm gonna try to convince Caitlyn to watch that tonight. She likes that type of stuff too. So Yeah. And it's fashion too. So I know she's into into that world. Yeah. That's rid Awful fashion. Well, yeah, it is, Isaac. I know. I know. That's the most amazing part to me is that people would wear wear the I don't know. I should talk the stuff I wear, but man Yeah. Look at me. I'm wearing currently, I'm a hood over my headphones. I'm I'm and my hair is I look terrible, in the same regard I was wearing the same hoodie today. We were watching that show, Courtney, where I'd be like, what part of this would make you be like, oh, man. I gotta sign up for this To get these ugly clothes, I gotta sign up.

Yeah.

Makes no sense, but, cool, I'm gonna check that out. I've been doing some sick repicks rid. Lately, just because there's certain things in my life I'm just like, that thing was awesome. So about a year ago, I sick picked these flame bulbs rid. Where you you screw them into any existing light bulb. Hell, yeah. Yeah. And they they have, like, a flame effect. And it is You may think, that's stupid. That's cheesy.

So convincing that it's an actual flame. It looks so good. Every, like, house in our neighborhood Right now has, like, these, like, lanterns outside with those flame bulbs in them. And every time we walk by them, we're like, man, these look great. These look really good. Yeah. They are rid. So cool. And, like, even if you're put 1 in, like, a pumpkin or something, couple years ago, I'd watched Adam Savage,

and he took one apart and put it in, like, a lantern.

And he says these things are meant to run on, like, household power, a 120 volts.

But I took it apart and looked at it, and it it doesn't run on a 120. It runs on Three volts. Just 3, which is, conveniently enough, how many volts is 2 double a batteries? So my kids got this little Coleman rid. Lantern at a yard sale, and it didn't work. And I took it all apart, and all the wires were broken and everything like that. And I was like, okay. I'm gonna rid. Make this thing sick. So I cracked open one of these bulbs, and mine said 12 volts on it. But I tried a 9 volt, like, square battery, and it worked great. Rid. So I converted my kid's lantern to 9 volt, and it has, like, a flame effect inside of it now. Like, I would just replace the entire you take the, like, rid. Bulb part off, and you just I just soldered it right to the board of the actual thing, and it looks Amazing. And it it's been running for, like, 6 hours on a single battery and not slowing down at all. And I was just, like, looking at it. I was like, these bulbs rid are so cool, especially if you Halloween's coming up. You put them in your porch light or something like that. They also We'll tell when it's upside down. So if you put the bulb upside down, it makes the flame go the other way. Woah. Yeah.

So they have little ones And, like, the the regular socket. I don't know what sockets are called. E 26 is a regular household socket, and e 12 is the little lamp ones. We got Couple of both. What about e forty? What's e forty?

He's like a South Bay rapper. Oh,

American rapper. Oh, man. That's funny. No. They don't have e forty. So that's my sick pick. Check it out. Flame bulbs.

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Sick. That's it. I'll talk to you later. Peace. I will talk to you later too. Peace.

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