Hasty Treat - Ask Us Anything!

Welcome to Syntax. In this Monday, hasty treat. We're gonna be talking about Anything. Us, ourselves. Who knows what we have asked on Twitter to ask us anything. And we hope that this is gonna be a little bit different than our Follow-up questions kinda geared towards maybe web stuff. This is gonna be a little bit more fun or or different kinds types of questions than we're used to answering. So my name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is the West Boss. Hey, everybody.

Send it for these questions.

Yeah. Me too.

With us as always in addition to West Boss, there's 2 sponsors. Now these 2 sponsors Our Prismic and LogRocket.

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What you would then do is you make a slice that's called a person, and then you're able to Just like your components can go anywhere, you you're able to pull in these slices into anywhere that will accept slices. So maybe you have a A customer page, and then but maybe you also have a team page, and you wanna be able to use that person component in both of those pages. It's It's like a little page builder, not little. It's it's like a page builder that you can just click together all of the different pieces of content that you want, And then, it gives you all the metadata about your slices in the API. You can loop over it in your React application or whatever you're using to Render out this data. It's just map it over it and spit out the corresponding component for it. So pretty, pretty slick. Check it out. Prismic doti0forward/syntax.

Thanks so much to Prismic for sponsoring.

Sick. This episode is also sponsored by Log Rocket, which is where you can see all of your errors and exceptions happening as they happened via a scribble video replay. This is legit. Head on over to logrocket.comforward/syntax.

Give this a whirl. You get access to not only the, session Session replay, the scene of the crime as I like to say, but you also get to see access to the network requests, maybe the Redux store, and and if you're not, it works with any platform you could possibly want. You just Drop in a little script on your site. Next thing you know, you can see exactly how the user committed the crime that they committed. So next time they email you saying, hey. I tried to do this thing, a. And, it didn't work, but gives. I could say, well, maybe, maybe you shouldn't be mashing your keyboard and hitting every button on the keyboard. Maybe that's why. So now it gives you access to see exactly what they did and why. Okay. Questions. Thank you to both of our sponsors for sponsoring this episode. We sincerely appreciate you. Okay. Let's get into the questions. 1st question is from Adam.

What do you miss about not being self employed? What are unexpected perks of being self employed. Well, I am self employed, and you are too. So what do you miss about not maybe not being employed? I miss The communal aspect of sitting around and asking other developers if my idea is dumb or if my code looks okay or just being able to reach over To, like, my my homie's computer and then fix something for him if he has a problem or vice versa. Right? I miss those aspects about not being employed. Unexpected perks about being self employed is that I can look as ridiculous as I want stretching or dancing in my office, and nobody will care.

Before I did it, and they just cared, and I didn't care. Now nobody else gets to care. I can just stretch and dance and do whatever. Nobody nobody will look at me oddly. Also, no one's gonna steal my expensive tea that I purchased and then somebody stole off my desk. There you go. I

Do I've talked about this before, but I never really had a job. I had a bunch of co ops.

One thing I miss is just, like, going out for lunch with people and and chit chatting, But, like, I also love having a solid 8 hours a day of just, like, working on whatever it is that I want And not having to spend time on coffee chats and all that stuff. And what are unexpected perks of being self employed? I think just being able to get up and leave if you want to.

There's no, like I'm very aggressive anti meeting. Like, I Still have meetings with people, but, like, I'm I'm very aggressive in not just having a whole bunch of random ones. And that's beautiful because then I can just take a. Breaks whenever I want. I don't have to work around,

being like, I have meeting in 20 minutes. This next 20 minutes is blown, things like that. Yeah. Here's the passive aggressive way to have no meetings. You start at Calendly and then just have no times open. And then somebody says, hey. Can we Schedule 30 seconds. Here's my Calendly. Find some time. That's beautiful. Next question we have here is from Clint. Hypothetically,

what would a LinkedIn recruiter need to Say to pull you away from your current development work and possibly even the podcast.

So here's a good question. Like, what would Somebody like a recruiter need to do in order to do it. Oh, man. I don't I don't even know. Like, I'm just trying to think. Obviously, copious amounts of money would probably do it.

It would have to be a lot of money because I really love doing the podcast, Wes. Yeah. I really like doing the podcast. I really like working for myself.

CSF. I don't know. What what do you think, Scott? Is there anything that would anything that would really tempt you?

Maybe not to stop the podcast because the podcast is too much fun. But if somebody were to say, like, okay.

Pulled me away from LevelUp tutorials. What would it have to be? One, you'd probably have to buy level up tutorials and let me do it full time. There. Okay. But you're not just gonna be able to buy level up tutorials for nothing. Buy give me, like, You know, few milli to to chill off of or whatever. But to be honest, it's gonna have to be a substantial offer. So, honestly, I would tell them, I'm not gonna tell you. Just keep going up until, you can't go up anymore, and then then we'll talk.

But for the most part, I I can't imagine saying yes to it. I I have, Over the course of time of doing level up tutorials, I have applied for drop not recently, like a long time ago.

And After working at home and working for yourself and doing the types of things I get to do learning wise with my own content, there are so many benefits f. 2. What I get to do, I would have a really hard time. I I think, like like, money aside, it would have to be something that is really interesting

And that I care about. So I was thinking that if I was not a web developer, I would be really into have you ever seen that That little documentary where these people reverse engineer John Deere tractors Mhmm. Because, like, the whole right to repair movement, that really gets my blood blood going.

And, like, there's these people that have these quarter $1,000,000 tractors, and they they're not allowed to work on them themselves. So there's, like, this whole, like, Jeez. Underground custom firmware that you can run on your John Deere. And I was like, oh, man. If I ever did something different, it would be Something like that where you're, like, bringing good to the world by, like, allowing people to work on the stuff they've paid their own money for,

But also, like, the reverse engineering is very interesting to me. I have an answer to this question. Here's what somebody would have to offer me. They would have to offer me a television show.

A show that's not no. I'm not talking to Quibi, no web series stuff. I'm talking to n. Keeping up with the Kardashians? No. This show would have a another costar named Wes Bos. Okay? So, one, they They would it for me to stop the podcast, I would have to bring Wes along. We'd have to make it a TV show too. It would have to be a MasterChef type TV show where at some point in the season, It's a master my my dream, master chef TV show judging websites. I could pick somebody's laptop off, just be like, what is this? Walk over to the trash can, drop their computer in the trash can, and be just shaking my head like Joe on on MasterChef. No. Thank you. This is How are you expecting the user to wait 2 seconds for this thing to load? I'm not expect you know, that would be fun for me, but, no, that's it. Alright. Next question is from Evan.

Evan says, what percentage of time do you guys spend doing work on clients versus your own courses or projects? I spend 100% of my time Working on my tutorial series or working on the level up codebase or working on syntax.

Maybe even 150% of the time. Downtown job right here.

Yeah. Same with me. I haven't done client work in besides from, like I have a couple like, my wife's website, a couple of family friends. Besides that, it's it's a 100% of of my time is is spent on courses. And if we were to break it down even further, I would say probably, like, Sixty% of my time is spent just checking stuff out. So building Building little things, building demos, writing notes, mind mapping, all of that good stuff. And then the other hunk of it is syntax, Actually, recording the courses, building the websites, things like that. Yeah. Next question from Eddie. Do you still do most of your work yourself, Or do you outsource some parts of it? Work can be related to anything in your business, not just making the courses.

Yes. This is a good question. What do I outsource? Well, I have, like, employees. I don't know if that's counting as outsourced, but I have an assistant who does all of the administrative work. So There's lots and lots and lots of questions that come in over email and things with credit cards or people needing receipts or or where there's all kinds of administrative stuff, and my assistant does all of that as well as accounting and and some logging invoices and Sending out billing and and all that good stuff. So there's that. And then I also have AJ who does the chat, and he helps people out With issues that they run into if you npm install and the whole thing borcs.

He'll help you through all of those weird issues. When he's seen absolutely everything, and he's so good at just being able to figure that out.

Past that, I I think that's about it. Obviously, I have an accountant that does a lot of the accounting stuff, but I don't think that that's

all that odd. I think most people have that. Yeah. I have an accountant. And speaking of, my tax documents are due today, so that's what I'm gonna be doing all day. Yeah. Taxes.

Yeah. Love it. Even when you have an accountant and you have bookkeepers Still a lot of work. Still a lot of work.

So what else do I outsource? I don't, like, Traditionally, outsource anything.

Over the course of time, we had, Eric Sartorius coding for us for level up tutorials, And then now we have a new development manager, Tom Allen, who's doing, like, a ton of our our development process.

I'm still writing code for LevelUp tutorials Every single day and primarily wrote, just a huge chunk of the code base myself. So by no means have I outsourced any of the the coding for the platform, or even the design work or anything like that. So we're largely keeping it all in house.

We've had social media people. We've had newsletter people. These are all been, you know, in house contractors or people that we've been working with for a long time. We're gonna be working with a new video editor this month for the first time In a little while, I've been editing mostly myself, but we're we're trying to free up some of my time here. So, hopefully, a video editor in the near future. We have, Raul who does our comment replies for people who leave comments on little tutorial, so he monitors those and then pings me if it's something that he needs my assistance with. But That's pretty much it for us. It's a it's a relatively, you know, easy to run platform with this many people, but we will be Hiring on more. We will be bringing more people on, especially later this year. So, yeah, that's what we do. Our next question is from Chris Brown. He says, Could you talk about protected or private routes in Next. Js? I'm coming from create react app type of routing. Greetings from Tennessee.

So, okay, what you need to know, Chris, is that if you want this to be truly protected information, you have to think about Where it originates. And with Next. Js, it can largely originate on the server or be server generated. Doesn't mean it has to be, but if it is And you want this thing to be protected, you do need to block it or redirect or anything at the server level of things. So that would be in the Git server side props stuff.

You know, typically, I don't know what you do for protected routes west, but we only have a handful of The routes that do redirects. Mostly, if they are protected, it's just gonna give you, like, an unauthorized text or something like that. So we don't have a create react app, but if it did, I would probably, depending on the situation, check to see if the user's logged in on the server side of things. And then if they are, Redirect them or have some sort of an error message to let them know that they need to be authorized to visit that page. Yeah. So if it's a page

that you wanna protect. You either do that and get server side props, and that will stop any JSX or whatever good to go into the client. You can also do it as a high order component or even just, like, at the very top of your component, you can just check if the user is signed in And then render out a login form. If they're not, that is usually fine.

It's fine to still send along templates that are just not populated with anything. Like, I remember when Starlink first came out, somebody figured out that They still sent all the templates for the entire application to manage your Starlink Internet, but there was no data in them. So they figured out if you could, Like, replicate what the data might look like, then it will start to render them out. And that's that's probably fine unless there's something sensitive in those templates that you are not expecting people to to see. If that's the case, you have to use server side props. And then the third thing is If you're using Next. Js API route, so server side or serverless functions, usually what I'll do on every single route, you wrap it in, like, a with auth tag. F. What that will do is it will intercept every single one of your requests.

And from that, with auth, you can return a function that takes in the request and the response.

You can check if they're signed in. If they are, then you just send the original handler down the thing. And if they're not signed in, then you can send back, Sorry. Please log in or or 401 unauthorized.

Yeah. And I should should note, like, on level up tutorials, you could probably get into a handful of, like, Authorized sections of the site and see user interface stuff, but explicitly, what you will not be able to do is, 1, see any data.

2, see or interact or send any types of mutations because, obviously, anything on the client that's sent to the client f is inherently going to be somewhat insecure.

So if you are not logged in or you or not have the correct access, We check all of that stuff, and anytime data is sent or anytime data is modified or attempted to be modified. So always important to remember those aspects as well. Next question from Philippe. What would you do be doing for a living if you had not been turned into

developers? So I I kinda answered this earlier. I would probably go into something like if I'm still allowed to work in tech, I would definitely go into tech in Farm implements or something. Wow. You know? I I don't know. Like, that's just something, like, that's been been on my mind recently. It's the same thing with, like, Tesla. There's this huge, community now of people that have to reverse engineer the Tesla software. Mhmm. Because for whatever reason, if Tesla blocks you. You can't use your superchargers.

You can't update the car. You can't use some of the features of the car, and you paid money for this thing. And for if they decide for whatever reason they don't want you to have that, then, you're kinda out of luck. So it's like a weird space now where People, if you wanna, like, own the thing that you paid money for, sometimes you have to now get into having tech skills

Yeah. And, figuring out all that stuff yourself. I would probably work in some sort of technical creative field like motion graphics, Which is what I wanted to do before I was a developer anyways or three d. Right? There's so many things that require you to be a good technician to do all of that Stuff and understand the systems to get animations to work correctly.

And I don't know if I would be necessarily the best creative there, But I I think I would be very good as a strong technical any anything that works with spatial anything. I I have I have high spatial skills. So for me, anything spatially is where I'm gonna be at. My my dad was an engineer, so either that or something engineering based. You know? Alright. Next question is from Enrique.

Enrique asks, will you be my hero, baby? No. He says, what do you think about Clubhouse. Feel the rhythm divide.

Yes.

Yes. I'm sorry, Enrique. I'm very sorry.

What do you what do you think about Clubhouse? Are you guys planning to talk over there sometime? I got out of Clubhouse pretty early. I have been in a handful of Clubhouse rooms. I've done a handful of Clubhouse chats. I haven't organized one myself, but I have been a part of them. I've been, I've been a speaking part of them, and and, yeah, it's okay. There's some things I don't like about it. I don't like that people who Can't just listen at the time being are unable to participate. Right? As in there's no Speech to text, there's no transcripts. If you're the type of person who needs to read or, you can't listen to something, You're being excluded. 2, I hate that there's no Android app. I don't even use an Android phone, but it's 2021, people. It's really not that hard to cross Publish. I mean, granted, it's not easy, but it's something that, in my brain, It goes against the core nature of being a web developer. Granted they're not web developers. But, like, for web developers, we've always been taught to support The most amount of people that we can. Right? And when you release an app that negates the majority of users from being able to to use it Just based on the fact that it's an Android, oof. To me, that's a huge goof, and I I really hate it even though I'm not on Android anymore. I will still fight For you Android people because, that that's stupid. I think that's dumb. And so one, you can't have any record of things either. So, yeah, it's a conversation.

It feels like meetings all day, so there are positives of it. I've had some good conversations on there, but it does it feels like you're sitting in on a meeting all day, And a lot of people can't use it, so I think it's a net negative for me. I will occasionally pop it on here and there. If there's people who are doing cool things on, I'll I'll pop in, and I'll I'll jump in some rooms if I'm invited, but That's likely how I feel. Yeah. I've been on it for, I don't know, maybe a month now, and my

overwhelming feeling on it is that it is A waste of time.

I like it, but I feel like anytime I dip into a room, I'm just like, what are these people talking about? Like, it's That's frequently low value information. Yeah. Very, very low value. People just, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yammery, Yammery. And, like, I don't know if that's because CSF. Scott and I, like to listen to podcasts, and we produce a podcast ourself. And it's it's highly produced, and all the stuff is cut out of it. And you can listen at 2x And and whatnot. And then with these things, you just gotta dip in. I do think that, like, the voice chat thing is really, really cool where you can just dip into it. And I'm really hoping that Twitter Twitter has already implemented. I've seen a couple on my IAP already of them Twitter doing rooms.

So I think Twitter will probably roll out their own Clubhouse clone of this, which would be kind of cool. I ran 1 myself, which It was really cool because, like, a bunch of people just joined in and started chit chatting about tech and and whatnot.

It's not permanent, which is, I think, a benefit for a lot of people because they the same reason why Instagram stories are popular is CSF. People don't want something that they've said to hang around for for absolutely forever.

But I'm seeing more and more recently s. People are saying, like, hey. I I've recorded the Clubhouse and posted it to YouTube, and I'm wondering if it's gonna be, like, this thing like Vine, you know, where, like, Everybody consumed the vines,

but not on actual Vine itself. Yeah. You know? I do that with Twitch too. Like, if I'm doing a Twitch, I will also f. Cross publish it to YouTube because Twitch isn't permanent. So it's like, I mean, I have it permanent somewhere for me because what I'm looking to pride is, like, long term value to people. I want people to find this. If I'm providing value, yes, I want it to be long term value. But a lot of people see Clubhouse as a way to just, like, go out to lunch and chat with people. Yeah. And, yeah, that's great to an extent, but I think to another an extent, it's it's not great. Right? I don't know. I'm iffy on it, but, I'm also open. And I think as people who create content,

we like our stuff to be able to be Accessible to as many people as possible so that the most people can get the most benefit. Right? Yeah. Exactly. I think the Type of person that's enjoying Clubhouse right now is not necessarily that type of person. They just wanna have some of the good conversations. I I like, I've had some of those good conversations at a conference too. You know, are you just like you stumble upon a random 4 people, and they're like, oh, what an awesome convo. Like, I just went down a rabbit hole about What they're working on, I learned so much, so I I think that can be had as well. We'll we'll have to try some syntax ones at some point. Oh, yeah. I'm down. Alright. Oh, the other thing I didn't like about it is to do invites, you have to give them access to your contacts list. No way. I do not trust Any app with my contact list. I don't know. Anytime that they they ask to do that. And everybody's just like, who wants a Clubhouse invite? Whenever I see somebody doing that, I'm like, you really gave This random app access to your entire contact list. And, like, that's not also just, like, you. That's you've just given the data Of everybody in your contact list, you've just, like, I would be mad if somebody gave away my phone number to it's probably They have. Yeah. They for sure have. It is. Yeah. Every 2nd of every day.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

The world.

The world. That's all you can say. Yeah. There's something about that, like, being a developer that you tend to push back on these, Like, apps doing what we have been doing already. Like, I saw Kenzie Dodds being like, what does Clubhouse do that Discord doesn't already do? And the Answer is nothing, but Yeah. Yeah. Just regular people are jumping on this thing like crazy because it's a form factor. It works a bit easier. They understand it a bit. Single purpose.

Yeah. But, like, someone like me, I'm like, well, don't let Clubhouse have your your podcast. Let's publish it ourselves. Like, don't let Medium have your blog post. Well, publish it yourself. And I get that's not

not everybody in the world, but that's definitely me. It's also not the use case that everybody is looking at it for too. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Normies

They're they're a lot different than us. Yeah.

Alright. I think that is oh, last question. Sorry. We got 1 more here CSN. Erin Ensley. Vue or React, which do you think will be the top? And should developers learn both? I found myself leaning towards both TypeScript and Node,

and then diving into some fun things like Python. That's a lot. It's a lot of stuff. What do you think, Scott? I think that's too many things, Aaron. There's too many things there, but, no, I I would say, should developers learn both? How much free time you have? I don't know. I would only learn both if I knew one of them, and I applied for a job, and I wanted to work very badly. Let's say I knew React really well. My dream job is using Vue. I applied for that job. I'm gonna go into the interview. Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna sting my butt off. I'm gonna learn Vue. That's for sure. But should I just learn them both for fun? I don't know. Maybe Wes and I have a easier time doing that because our whole thing is learning these things and the differences Between them and and trying the the new stuff. But if you don't have to try the new stuff and you're proficient with 1, they're both great systems. And Vue and React both have Huge communities. So it's not like you're not going to be able to find like, you're not gonna be like, oh, I need this this animation library, so I guess I'm Switching to React. Like, that's not gonna happen. So I don't know. I would learn one of them and learn it very well unless you absolutely need to learn another one. Yeah. I'm gonna go totally biased and just say I think React is probably better to learn,

not easier or not not Better. I'm not saying anything, but I'm just saying, like, if you're looking at getting a job, I wouldn't willing to bet there's more React jobs out there than there are Vue jobs.

I think that's that's just a sign of how popular each of them are. Not any shade on either because I think they're both awesome. But Just as a I think real world, which one is more popular is probably React. If you're gonna ask me real world, I'd probably coin, to be honest. I like both of them. Yeah. And like I said, both big communities. I really can't pick between them. Which one do I use? I use React. I like it. So if you're asking me which one do I like and use, I'm gonna say React. Ideal world, Svelte. I don't know. I love Svelte. So who who knows? I don't know. The amount we Complain about React on the show should tell you that, like, we're not married to it, but it is the one that we still continue to choose to use.

Correct.

Alright. That was fun. Ask us anything is a little bit different than a potluck, and we had some really fun questions. So thanks to everyone who submitted those questions.

And anything else to add there, Scottolino?

No. Taxes time. Just absolutely thrilled to get to my taxes, so I I would have loved to have a few more questions so I Could delay that forever.

Alright. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we'll catch you on Wednesday. Peace. Peace.

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