Potluck - Headless WordPress, Databases, Regex

Welcome to Syntax, a podcast with the tastiest web development treats rid. Out there, I've got some really good questions for you today because it's a potluck. Potluck is where we answer your questions.

Keep those questions coming, by the way. Go to syntax.f m. Rid. In the top right hand corner, there's a button. If you click it, you'll you'll be brought through to a form where you can submit your own questions. But today, we've got some really good ones on rid. And, like, should you host your database on the same server as your code? Is that faster? Rid. How is your health and fitness going, etcetera, etcetera. Dart popularity, some really good ones. Ready.

To get into it. We are sponsored by 3 awesome companies, Sentry, error exception performance tracking, Sanity, rid. Structured content, CMS, and .tech domain names. They give you .tech domain names. Talk about all of them partway through the episode. How How you doing today, Scott? Oh, I'm doing good.

Doing good, man. We're just hanging out.

We got both sets of grandpa grandparents here this week, so We're got a full house. Everybody's doing lots of stuff. We're doing lots of projects.

We spent a lot of time doing some yard work yesterday, so I'm feeling really good Organizing that kind of stuff and, all the extra hands on deck, we we feel like we're we're making some progress on this house finally. Sweet. Yeah. That's rid. I love that kind of stuff where you're like, okay.

I love a good project, and when you can chip away at it, you feel like you accomplished something. Oh, totally right. Yeah. I know. My my dad has spent, like, the past, like, 2 days just trimming trees. So he's just been, like, in the trees just trimming them all. I think we we got, like you know, when you're, like I don't Know if you your dog sheds or anything, but when you brush out a dog, there's like an entire dog's worth of hair when you brush out the dog. It's, like, kind of what he's done so far. There's, like, an entire tree's worth of branches and stuff sitting on our yard right now. So, yeah, everything's feeling a little bit cleaner.

Rid. That's good. It's unreal how quickly those things grow. Like, we were talking about that the other day, how you have to, like, kinda keep on top of it. Otherwise, they get Just out of control. My brother-in-law has this, battery powered pole saw, which is like That sounds great. You should probably get one of those. You have so many trees on your property. Yeah. And I probably come out. Well, he brings it up to the cottage every now and then, and we just you walk around and and, take down any Any limbs, especially the limbs that get in the way when you are cutting the grass.

So much nicer, much nicer and clear. Yeah. It's funny because the the previous owners of our house, like, Very clearly just did not touch the landscaping or the trees or anything once. So when I mean, when we moved in, it They'll look good, but everything was very clearly overgrown. So I've been hammering it myself, and it's amazing how much more you can hammer it even after I have. So yeah.

We, rid. And you're not even into like summer, like full summer yet. It's probably going to get even bigger. Like our new place is we rid of it in the dead of winter or like not dead of winter, but there was no leaves on any trees.

And we went and saw it the other day and were like, oh, man, this is This is gonna take a little bit of cutting back.

I think it got a little overgrown.

Better. I it's always better to cut back, I think, than have to start fresh.

That's right. You know, you plant a tree, and you gotta wait 10 years for it to get up to the right size or something. So Totally.

Alright. Well, let's Kick into some of these questions here. 1st 1 is from Paul from the Netherlands. He says, hi, guys. Love the podcast. I've been listening since day 1. Wow. Thank you, Paul.

I currently host a Next. Js app on DigitalOcean using Firestore database. I got asked Why I also don't host the database at DigitalOcean as my app could have them directly communicate with the database? I couldn't answer Properly as I'm far from an expert on databases, and their explanation didn't answer why exactly my approach was bad. Can you guys tell me what the downsides and benefits are to both situations? So even if you host Your database at DigitalOcean, it's not gonna be on the same server.

It could be on the same, like, location in the same premise, but it's not gonna be on, like, the same box or anything.

So, Wes, is there a major benefit to this At his scale that that he seems to be doing, because it doesn't mention anything about, like, some major operation here. Rid. Yeah. Do you think this really matters?

It's a little confusing because, if you were to get a box at DigitalOcean and you were to literally host your own database, rid. You could install Node or PHP or Python to run your app as well as MySQL or or MongoDB. You rid run them on the exact same server.

Right.

And that was pretty popular in WordPress land, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago where you would have them running on rid. Same server is not so much popular anymore because they have dead generally, these hosts will have dedicated servers, rid. One for databases and one for actually hosting.

And, like, I probably especially if you're a beginner, I probably would not try to run your own rid. MySQL or whatever instance on it. So there's that. I think the the benefit to it is that your rid. App does not have to go out onto the wild Internet and back to get data from your database because they're literally in the same they're on the same rid. Actual server or they're on the maybe they're in the same rack, and that's that's really beneficial because, rid. The round trip to that actual server is very, very fast. Although, sometimes that doesn't really necessarily matter because a lot of these, like, ISPs rid have major fiber backhaul between them, and the the speed at which Something goes from 1 ISP to another ISP is generally extremely fast because they are connected both with very fat pipes. So there's that.

And then also, like, if you're using Firestore, that's a hosted service.

You can't host Firestore yourself. Rid. So you tell that guy you're a joker, because you literally can't. It's a it's a hostess. You can't host your own Firestore. You have to sign up and use there. That's that's the whole benefit of it. So,

I wait. Firestore or you what is Firestore versus Firebase?

Oh, that's a good is it Firestore?

So Firestore is a NoSQL document database from Google.

So okay. Seamless integration with Firebase.

Try Firestore for free. Now I'm not convinced that you can't host this somewhere else, But so we Wes, you might be the donkey of the day here for for giving that

where's the button?

Rid. Yeah. I thought Firebase too. It's funny that you you you also thought Firebase. So Firestore is something different, which, honestly, I had never I've never never heard of Firestore, but, this is what's the difference between Firestore and Firebase? The differences are Firebase is more comprehensive. Firestore incorporates multiple services like database notifications, analytics, blah blah blah. Firestore is a NoSQL database. So Firestore rid is the NoSQL database that is part of a Firebase app. So if Firestore gives you real time updates,

Sync data structure, expressive. It's still I don't think you can host Firestore yourself, though. I don't know. Either way, They're the you what you're

the benefits that, you're looking for are really only Going to really come into effect if you're hosting everything on the literal same box, your same virtual private server, the same A service that you're running. And if you're doing, like, the DigitalOcean app platform or anything like that, that's not going to be necessarily the same anyway. So, Just that that small caveat, it's not something that I necessarily think about too much, especially at, like, a smaller scale. If you're getting into, like, crazy enterprise stuff or You need, to shave off a tiny, tiny fraction of a second or something, tiny fraction of a millisecond, then this seems like something that could Speed you up. But nowadays, you know, with, even now that we have, like, edge data coming and stuff like that, edge data and sites at the edge and all these things, I don't know if this is necessarily gonna be something that you'll need to think about too much. That's the thing as well with these edge functions that you just said it is,

The database is always the slowest part of the edge function.

And now people are starting to I've got a couple emails and DMs from people that are rid. Working on companies that do edge databases, meaning that, the querying of the data will also live in the same spot that the edge function is running, so it will be as fast as possible. But that this is way, way past where you're at. Yeah. You should just tell this guy it's not a big deal. It's fine. Yep. Like, do you is it really that slow? Probably not. Yeah. Right. What what are you saving here? Alright. Next question is from Brad. Why do I hate regex so much? I'm pretty experienced at, but somehow, I'm still very bad at it. Will either of you ever do a regex course? Rid. No. Absolutely not. No.

I I don't think anybody likes.

Regex is very confusing because it is it's literally Describing patterns with these characters, and it's very hard to actually write it. And, also, rid. The the old joke goes is I had a problem and I solved it with regex, and now I have 2 problems because, rid. It's it's very, very tricky to write regexes. And I would say in most cases, you probably like, I don't know.

I haven't I haven't read a wrote a super complex regex in super long.

Yeah, it if it's like a super Common one where, like, oh, you have to redox a credit card number or a phone number or there's almost always somebody out there that is rid. Super smart and has written these things already for you. And then you can also just like, I use reg expert or reg exer. Rid. Yeah. Reg xer, not reg x. I think expert is 1 as well, and they have a whole bunch of preset patterns.

Anytime I have to write one of those, I would just paste in examples. Kind of like a test case where you're like, I want it to match all of these things, but I don't want it to match all of these things. Rid. And then you start writing the regex and see it highlighted in real time. And I find that it makes me a lot better at writing regex instead of just trying to Guess it in my terminal editor. I wanna I wanna say also so I'm also not going to do a regex course because I just don't like it. I I had a regex, like, one zero one book that always just made me fall like, made me fall asleep almost instantly. I I sat down so many times to read a book On regex and got through, like, the 1st chapter and would be like, oh, man. I'm getting

sleepy.

Let me give a a neat little tip about regex as well. I have had really good luck with regex writing itself with Versus Code, GitHub Copilot.

So Copilot is sort of, machine learning based helper for this type of thing. And If you write out your comments telling what you want the regex to do, like, I would like this to validate email address. I've had it write an entire regex string for me.

Now I will say the caveat to this is that if you cannot read regex, this is basically useless. Because if you get a whole big pattern that says the validate email address and you don't know what it's saying, then you don't know if it works, I mean, flat out. So That that's where tools like regex one zero one come in. It's a tool that I often use. You can validate your regex strings there. You can, rid. Also learn regex from a tool like this. Oh, man. So regex 101 is probably my favorite one of these because there's, In addition to, like, being able to just test out your regexes, which is how I I write them. I always, like, write them in this thing first. You've also there's, like, a quiz game on here. So if you do regex Quiz from the sidebar. You sign up. It gives you, like, a Regex quiz and will kind of step you through some things so that you can, Really get a better handle on what you're doing for regex. There's also a library like you mentioned on your resource. There's like a library where you can go ahead and select your library. You can filter by a JavaScript and then you can just start searching for different types of regexes that are premade there's a 149 pages of premade rid. Regex is on this site. So, I am not a fan of regex, and I'm not going to teach it because I just straight up don't like it. This I think this is the tip of the day is to use rid. The copilot for writing regexes.

I just wrote a little comment. It says regex invoices that start with Wes and end with boss, rid. And it wrote me the regex, and then I said another one. Regex, invoices that are between 8 12 characters long, and it did perfect regex for it. And, like, to me, that is so much faster than having to go find an example.

That's that's great. Even just to give you your starter regex. Rid. Nice. Tip of the day. Yeah. It's it's really great. And and it's always happened to me when I'm, like, least expecting it. I haven't, like, set out to do it that way. I'll, like, write the comments rid. Because that's typically how I write my functions. And then, like, the 1st time it happened to me, I was just like, oh, you mean I don't have to now go look up this regex? It's just here for me? Okay. That's great. That's That's one thing with Copilot I find up is, like, I do less googling.

Yeah. Right. It just brings it right in for me. It's unreal. And And it makes you better writing comments because if you write your comments first, it can, a lot of times, write the code for you. So shout out to writing comments. Sometimes it It will auto complete the comment too quickly,

and I have to, like, close my eyes to, like, not read it. So I'm like, no. I know what I'm trying to write here. Don't Guess what? Please. Yeah. You don't try to guess.

Alright. This next question is from Joe Mama, which I don't think that's his real name, but we'll say it anyways. Joe Mama.

This show is great. Thanks for providing it. I have a client with a WordPress site that would like to create a mobile app where users can sign up for a subscription service. Is it possible to use WordPress use the WordPress users database as the same database that the app uses? If possible, I would like to allow users to subscribe on the website, then the app allow them to log in on the same account. If they are A subscribing user, they have access to the service. Otherwise, they can get the subscribe page. Is it possible to have an app or separate website to access rid the WordPress data in this way, or would you be able to set up users and subscription? One of the amazing CMS sponsors of Syntax. Thanks for the help. So you should be able to do this, Joe, because WordPress has an API.

And an API is how you connect to your WordPress site and work with it. There's also a lot of different tools for working with the WordPress API. No. I've never done authentication via the API. West, do you know if that's

Easy enough or what? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Every everything in WordPress

can be done via the API. I figured too much, but I've never done it. Rid. Yeah. And the yeah. I mean, if you like if you like and have worked with GraphQL, there's really great WP GraphQL integration as well. Rid. You don't have to do GraphQL by any means because WordPress comes standard with a REST API. So, yeah, I you can you can do all that more. You just interact with your Location and hit that database.

And what you do is what is the WordPress WordPress API URL. So what you end up doing is you end up hitting the WordPress site and you hit it via the API URL of which I don't have memorized. Let me the rest endpoints. List of all the wpjsonforward/wpforward/v2forward/,

and then If you visit that URL, it will list out all the API endpoints. And then from there, you can you get all your content types that you can crud against.

Yeah. So that's really how you do it here. And and I love that aspect of you hit that API, and it gives you access to, like, what exactly that almost like the documentation

like docs. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. That graph you all does that. It's called, like, introspection

where it will, like, list out. That's So good. What's really great is when people always hit your introspection your introspection. Publicly? Yeah. They I mean, my my GraphQL API's introspection turned off. So I I see anytime that somebody tries to hit the introspection

of my GraphQL API in, like, our century. Yeah. I I rid. I generally would say you should probably turn that off. It's not gonna it's not gonna stop anybody from from doing anything. But I've I've actually been to a couple of public GraphQL APIs and I just grab the URL and pop it into GraphQL Playground. Totally. And it will automatically populate all the all the fields and everything. I think it was the what's the hosting provider that I use? What's the hosting provider we use? Got I'm blanking render renders API.

If you pop the render GraphQL API into GraphQL Playground, it will populate All of the methods, and that was very useful to me to see how people build different APIs because you see every single mutation, every single query. I couldn't do anything that I wasn't allowed to do because it's all server side authenticated, but I thought it was kinda cool that they left it open. And I just spent, like, I don't know, 20 minutes perusing through it and running queries on it, see what I could access when I'm logged in and see what I couldn't. Kinda cool. Yeah. That's awesome. So long story short, yes, you can do it. And, GraphQL has a REST API baked in that you can access. GraphQL has a REST API built in. WordPress has a REST a WordPress has a don't yeah. Sorry about that. WordPress has a a REST API baked in that you access. You could check rid. WP GraphQL as well as a plug in for WordPress that will give you rid. A full blown one, and they I think they also I'm not sure who does this, but graph WP GraphQL has docs for JWT tokens, And and that's kind of the idea that you want there is that when you once you sign in, you don't have cookies when you're on a mobile app. On a On a website, you have cookies, and the cookies will tell if you're signed in or not. But if you're not in a mobile app sorry. If you're not on a browser, You're on, like, a mobile app, then you have to authenticate some other way, and that will require you to send a token along every single time you make a request rid to the API. And it looks like WP GraphQL gives you JWT tokens. I'm not sure if that's built into WordPress directly

Or if that's part of WP GraphQL, but definitely doable. So if you're writing some of this code to have your own custom API from your WordPress site that integrates with the mobile app, You're probably gonna wanna have some error and exception tracking on that, baby. So you wanna check out Sentry at century.i0 is The perfect way to log and check all of your errors and exceptions in your application in a way that you know that they will be solvable and fixable because you'll get access to just basically an entire logging of anything that's going on on your site at any given point Where you can mark these things as complete, you can mark them as fixed. You could say, oh, I'm not gonna fix this. I'm just gonna ignore this. I'm gonna sweep this under the rug. Rid. Maybe perhaps because it's a browser extension error. Who knows what. Right? But Sentry gives you all of that and more. You also get performance metric Tracking tools as well so you can make sure that your application is at tip top speed and that your user misery has an all time low. So head on over to century.i0.

Sign up today using the coupon code tasty treat, all lowercase, all one word, and you'll get 2 months for free.

Rid Thank you so much for Century for sponsoring. Next question from Robbie r. And this is funny. Somebody else sent me a DM rid. On Twitter, it asked a very similar question is, how is your health and fitness going? Because we did a couple health and fitness shows, and they said, hey. You haven't done 1 in a while. What's rid Going on.

My health and fitness is poor, I would say.

Rich. So, like, when the pandemic hit, I'd all the gyms closed for for a long time, and, like, unfortunately, just didn't rid Keep up with it at home, and I probably have about, I don't know, £15 that I I would like to to lose. So, my wife and I right now are planning rid. Gonna put a gym in the basement.

I'm pretty stoked for that. I'm starting to go jogging now. And, yeah, I'm thinking about maybe, I'm not sure if I should just go back to the gym for a couple of months before we that going.

But, man, I I I'm really excited to get back on the on the horse, as they say, just because rid. It sucks when you you don't feel good when you are kinda out of shape and whatnot. So Yeah. That that is where I'm at right Now I am stoked to get back on it, and, hopefully, we can do a little update show in a couple months. Yeah. Maybe we should. It's funny because I yeah. I'll put, like, a fitness, show on the the calendar, and you'll be like, yeah. Maybe maybe I should, should get something going first here before Maybe I should actually be healthy. Yeah.

So, yeah, I I I can't recommend enough having a a gym in your house if you're able to. I mean and, Like, those of you out there who might not wanna spend a ton of money, you can get a squat rack at Dick's Sporting Goods on Black Friday for I don't know. My rack was, like, $150.

And it weighed for, like, $150.

And, like, also in the door, you're spending maybe, like, $900 to get a full squat rack with barbells up to £300 that you could do a ton of stuff with that could get you rid into a beast. And, honestly, we had 1 in our squat rack. We just sold it because we've been using this tonal device, which is, like, incredible. But, You know, the squat rack for us was a big pandemic thing that really made our lives a lot better. We were able to hit the gym whenever we wanted. It was like a little oasis, especially for rid. Courtney and I, with the kids being home the whole time, it was like, you know, if either of us at any given point were like, I need to go take an hour in the gym. It was so easy because you're just walking over to the gym in the house shutting literally an hour, and you're getting your that hour that you can just, You know, distract yourself from the craziness of everything at any given point and work out some of that that stress that we all have with everything right now. So, you know, rid. You know, for us, it was really important that we had that, and it made a big difference in our lives. But it's also just been like, a pro tip is having something like that that you don't have to travel to or do anything about it. You just pick it up and go. You can do a half an hour. You can do 45 minutes, and we always make sure that we give our partners like, my you know, Courtney gets Whatever time she needs to work out, and and she'll give me the same.

So we've been doing for me, we've been doing, like I said, this tonal. I talked a lot about it in one of the episodes. It's like A device from the future. Honestly, I I show up at this thing. It's all magnet based, and I press go, and it tells me what my workout for today. It has a chart of Which of my muscles are fatigued, and which of them are recovering, and which of them are well rested? And it lets me do all of my stuff at the rid. Proper weight to the point where it's always hard every single time. And honestly, I've seen nothing but good results from it. So I'm I'm I'm in pretty decent shape right now.

You know, muscle wise goes, but my my cardio is in the gutter. My cardio, it stinks.

I used to go dancing twice a week, and I have not been to practice since The pandemic hit because, let's just face it, a bunch of sweaty dudes in the small room sweating and breathing each other's air for A couple hours was not great for not getting COVID, so I just did I just didn't go. But I'm gonna start going again. I'm actually really excited about going in. And I was trying to dance in my office, and I was doing that, like, once a week to keep up with things, but it's just hard. It's hard to, have that re base and whatever. And it's hard to feel even motivated to do that kind of artistic thing when you're not around your your music and your groups and all that stuff. So for For me, I'm gonna be excited to get back in there and actually getting some some cardio here, being able to do some some cardio for a little while without rid Passing out. I also got a treadmill under my desk, which I've been working on, and it's been awesome, actually. So I I got, like, a $200 or $300 treadmill underneath my walking desk, and I'll walk for about an hour every single workday.

And I can do it while I'm answering email. I can do it while coding. I can do it while doing anything except for audio recording. And it is way less distracting than you could ever imagine.

Rid. We should do a fitness episode in a couple months here. We can I can go through all the stuff I've been doing because I've been I've been working pretty hard? But I I like you. I have I have some weight I would like to shed. So, I got some I got some goals goals in mind, so we can maybe Maybe we can do a quick little goal setter. Maybe we can do like a hasty for fitness goals and then I Yeah. Hasty for fitness results If they're gonna do

it. The so the tonal, I've been like, man, this this seems sweet because like

rid. You sold all your stuff. And, like, I'm just looking at a budget of building a home gym, and this is cheaper. It looks so cool, and it's not available in Canada, but they have A total office in Toronto. Oh. So, like, it's they gotta bring it here any day now. Bring it here. You know what? Like, as As as expensive as it is, like, that is the biggest downside. It's just how straight up expensive it is. But Courtney and I use it 4, 5 times a week. I mean, we're on it 4 or 5 times a week for about an hour, so it's getting mega use in our house. And Yeah. Also, like, It is the only device I've ever owned that honestly felt like some sort of, like, quantum leap forward in a technology, so I could talk about it for about an hour, I think.

Rid. I like, it's about for 2 people, it's about a gym membership for 2 years. So if you're if you're not paying for a gym membership for 2 years,

Then you're you're breaking even. So it's it seems it's a huge upfront cost, but There's no there's a way to justify it. It is expensive. It's very expensive, though. There's no way to get around that. No kidding.

That's the first thing people say. Wow. That thing is expensive. It's like, what? Like, $3.3.

People don't have to look it up. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Okay.

Next question here is from anonymous.

Does Wes know who Gendo Ikari is? A couple of episodes ago, I said that my Monitors be flashing in my glasses making me look like Gendo Ikari. This person I'm gonna give Wes a an opportunity to guess who Gendo rid because I'm gonna say he doesn't know who he is.

Okay. And if he does, I'm gonna say he's Googled it. I did not know who it was, And I Googled it, and it looks like a pokey master. Yeah. It does kinda look like a pokey master. Yeah.

So yeah. You always say these jokes, And I was like, well, so who's who's Gendo Ikari? Looks like, some sort of supervillain.

Yeah. He I mean, he's just a he's just a bad dude. What's with Sailor Moon? Sailor Moon? Where do you see Sailor Moon? No. I'm just joking.

This is from the anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is like super famous anime.

This is very, like, very groundbreaking when it came out in Japan and is is, like, you know, extremely popular in that in that community in terms of, like, reach, and he's just a bad dude. He's he's always got these glasses that are, like, brightly lit up by I don't even know what maybe it's some kind of computer monitor or something. But he he's just kind of he's the head of this whole thing, and he's kind of a shady figure.

He's got a son who he mistreats. It's it's the whole thing.

There's lots of robot fighting too in in classic anime fashion. Big old robots fighting. Next question from Mark Volkmann.

Mark sends lots of good questions in, so thank you, Mark. Dart Popular. In episode 4 90, you guys questioned whether anyone is still using Dart.

Maybe you forgot or didn't realize definitely didn't realize, that Flutter is a very popular framework for writing apps that run on Ios In Android, these apps are written in Dart. It's actually a really nice

language. That is awesome. Yeah. So I actually did know this, and I did forget. So you didn't realize I forgot. So he actually nailed both of us there.

Me personally, that's, like, one of the main reasons why I have no interest in learning Flutter. I ain't of time for another language here. But, like, isn't Dart just

doesn't just compile down to JavaScript or did that change?

Here. Well, let's look that up so we can say something down about Dart again. Flutter have a Flutter just have a JavaScript API, or does it have to be Dart? I think Flutter has to be Dart. I think Flutter is Dart. No. It can compile to JavaScript. There are compilers for JavaScript. Can. Okay. Yeah. But But the,

what Flutter does is native. That makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. It's it's a true write once, rid. Compile anywhere kind of deal, but I've never tried this in person. And, again, Flutter is it's like a whole whole world that I don't I don't think I have an opportunity to,

rid. Spend too much time on personally. Yeah. Like, that it's true. Like, if you do want to have to write an app for both, Then I guess you will have to learn. Either do it in JavaScript and it's not entirely native or learn a secondary language, and do it natively. If you're gonna have to, like, learn Swift or something anyways, might as well learn Dart, and then have it

Deploy to both platforms. Yeah. And and people seem to like Flutter. That's the whole thing. So Yeah. Yeah. I I would imagine if you're pretty heavy into the mobile space, the mobile app space. But me personally, just being a web guy, yeah, well, we'll stay away from it for now. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So we stand corrected there. Thanks, Mark.

Next question is from monolingual.

Is it vital that I should learn another programming language? Rid. JavaScript and type Yes. You should learn Dart.

JS and TypeScript are my main driver for the day, job, and personal rid projects. I've been hearing others talk about learning benefits from this. My problem is is there's already so much to keep up within the JS world and adding another language and its frameworks is yet another thing already on my already filled plate. It's overwhelming.

Is it really required to be successful moving up in your career or being a good developer on top of it? I feel lesser when others know multiple languages or stacks, and I only know JS or TS. Alright. Let's Get some things out of the way here. If you learn another language, it does not have to become anything that you do anything real with. Learning another language can be useful in just The practice of learning the other language. When I took some time to learn Rust, I buy I got, like, maybe 1% good at Rust. And it was really helpful for me getting better at TypeScript ripped because of how similar some of the typing is in Rust to TypeScript.

And it really helped me actually understand generics rid better for some reason. I don't know why they just clicked better with rest for me even though it's, like, basically the same. So I I I actually really like learning other languages, But simply just doing it in a low stakes way. Just say, hey. I'm gonna I'm just gonna mess around, and I'm gonna get a hello world thing or even better. One of my favorite projects I mentioned before is like a contract generator because all you're doing is you're you're you're taking a string. You're replacing some elements from the string, and then you're writing to a text file or PDF or anything like that. And that's a really easy project in most of these link in most of these languages, like like Rust, for instance. Right? That doesn't take a whole lot, But you're still gonna need to learn some of the foundations, whether that is, working with strings or writing functions or even outputting a file or working with the file system, some of that stuff. So by no means do you have to write another language professionally at any point, but it does actually do a good thing to spend some time in another language Just to give your brain some perspective on how things work, there's a lot of languages too that you might even not have any idea that you would really like writing. You might pick it up and be like, Wait. Hey. I actually really like this. So when you say that you don't have your room for the other languages or frameworks, do do not I would I would not pick up another language's frameworks unless you were really Serious about diving into that thing. But what you're gonna wanna do is that now that you know the the foundations of programming, whether that's loops, functions, arrays, those types of deals, Now you can just apply some of those techniques to another approach to it, another syntax, and really get to experience that. I heard, I forget who said this, but somebody said Learning new programming language every single year, which feels a little over to me, but I haven't really wanted to start doing this myself and I have for the most part. So I I think it's important to at least and when I say learn, it it just means, like, get the 101 out of the way. Just getting a little bit of experience with it. So If you just take a weekend and plug away on some stuff for a little bit. Hey. That's enough. Yeah. I'm I'm gonna say the opposite.

You don't need to learn to know know another language. You probably at some point will be curious and be like, like, what's what's this? Oh, can I learn a thing or 2 and and to dip into it? But if you're so overwhelmed and you're still trying to, like like, learn a lot of JavaScript, I don't know that, like, rid. Piling on another language when you don't necessarily have your good fundamentals and and one is necessarily a good idea. I think That it can be super helpful, especially like like like I've done a couple of languages. And any time I dip into anything, I'm like, rid. That's interesting how that works in there, and it definitely does broaden your horizons. But if you're overwhelmed, you feel like you got too much on your plate right now.

Rid. I think you could just double down on JavaScript. It's it's the language right now.

You're not gonna go wrong there. Yeah. Yeah. It'll only do it if if You're seeking extra perspective on life.

Let's talk about one of our sponsors, which is Sanity at Sanity dot I owe. They are the structured content platform for building a better digital experience. What does that mean? Well, Sanity is awesome because, they give you a full blown CMS that's called Sanity Studio. They give you a full blown GraphQL or REST API, which you can query and create all your data through. It is awesome.

You can create custom inputs in the Sanity Studio with React. Rid. So, that's kind of the cool thing about it. Like, generally, you either have to go one way, which is you go all in and use a hosted service, and your hands are tied In terms of what inputs you could possibly have, or you go the other way, which is, you go all self hosted and you have you have to do everything yourself.

Rid. But Sanity is kinda cool because, like, the the API of Sanity is self hosted. Sanity Studio is all done for you, but rid. It is just code at the end of the day, and you can make your own custom inputs for Sanity Studio with React. So if you have a custom rid. Store picker or literally anything. Like, we we built a, I believe it was a toppings picker in my Gatsby course via Sanity Studio. Pretty sweet. So check it out at sanity.

Ioforward/syntax.

That is going to give you double the free usage tier. Check it out for your next project. Alright. Next question we have here is from Jason Arvanas.

Rid. I'm trying to get my 1st job in web development. Do I need to be familiar with design software tools like Figma, Sketch, or InVision? I always assume that, rid. In my 1st job, I would be given a mock up of what the front end should look like by a design professional, and my job would be develop a real thing that matches that design. Some of the jobs are looking for both a designer and a coder in one? Thanks, guys. Love the podcast.

You definitely need to be rid. Competent in these tools because sometimes you need to export logos or little icons less and less, rid. The exporting, like, I remember back in the day, you would slice and dice literally every little background image and and border.

But Most of that has moved over to SVG or CSS, but you still need to be competent enough to move around, export things, measure things.

Rid. So I don't necessarily think that means to be a designer.

Why do some of these jobs want both? Because they need somebody that can do both or they want somebody that can do both, because they wanna They want to be able to cover it all. So I would say get competent with it from a point of view of being able to take a rid sketch or Figma file and put it into code.

But being able to build something beautiful and that has a good UI is a whole second skill set. And I wouldn't sweat that too much if it's not something you're interested in. Yeah. I yeah. You you don't need to become a full time designer unless that's something that you're seeking to be because there's enough rid. Dev jobs out there that are are, like, just dev only and being able to pixel perfect push a design to web kind of deal.

So if if you're finding a lot of jobs that are designer and developer jobs, only really go go for that hard if that's something that you're truly interested in because Design is a whole thing, and and most of the time, the people who are designers and developers maybe have less experience in any one of those Because they're doing both of them. I mean, you can only spend so much time in this world.

And and you're not you know, you kinda have to pick and choose what you want. You can definitely have a full rid career as the designer who can make code stuff happen, who can make sites, but that is a whole kind of different career than the developer Who also has experience, being able to adapt designs. That's like a very different kind of role even though you're kind of doing the same sort of things, but it is different re experience, and it is different skill sets.

So like Wes said, you're gonna wanna experience in these applications. Figma is Probably the one at this point that you'll want to know because Figma is the most full featured. A lot of times I'm working with designers, many different companies, as long as they're, like, kind of, like, a modern agency, they're they're pretty much picking up Figma these days. There was, like, a time when it was all sketch, but I think their sketches kind of really died down lately in terms of how often you're seeing it. So too. It's it's almost entirely Figma as From what I see, the I follow sketch on on, on Twitter, and they they keep

promoting the people that are using it. But you can't beat the Cross platform ness of,

of Figma. Let me tell you, man. People told Sketch. They told them over and over again. You can't rid Just be Only Mac. You can't just be Only Mac, and they said, we don't care. And now they're, they lost that market share. Look at how giant of The company Figma is Figma Yeah. Basically was like, oh oh, you don't wanna do that? Okay. Well, we'll we'll do it. And then,

yeah, Figma is just a great product all around. The stuff they put out there Power of the web. I I still wanna get the Figma folks on the podcast to talk about, like, how do you build they use, Wasm Yep. To do a lot of the processing. So, like, it's not done in JavaScript, But the, like, UI is built in JavaScript, but, like, some of the UI is, like, 3 d Canvas Bay. I don't even know. Yeah. I don't. Close my mind how they can build such a beautiful,

app. Yeah. Figma is incredible. It's an incredible work of engineering. It's an incredible work of just about Features and everything like that, and and they've never slowed down for one second. In fact, I don't know if you've used any of those new FigJam features in it, but it's like a digital whiteboard stuff that is awesome.

We've been using FigJam a lot for doing all of our communication for the new website redesign. And it's so cool to be able to Drop an emojis and brainstorm and cluster things together and work well, all the everybody from both teams, the design team and our team are working in collaboration. It's just so cool. Also. Yeah. Spend some time getting good at Figma. Sketch rolled out something like that, but it was like a separate

thing.

And they're like, well, this works in the browser, but not sketch, but you can view things. And then I was just like,

No. Yep. Yeah. Yep. No. No. Thank you.

Alright. Next question is from John the web dev. John says, this is not ready. Question, but the only way I know how to get in contact with the show. A few weeks ago, I was catching up on syntax and listened to the January 12, 2022 potluck where you talked about developers rid looking things up. This skill is knowing what to look for.

The show gave me confidence I needed to finally apply for a web dev job and leaving my IT rid.

I have an interview next week. I don't know if I'll get it, but I know I wouldn't have even had the interview if it were not for you guys. Keep it up. Been listening a long time until everyone who will listen to the podcast. Thanks again. That's awesome, John. We need to know what happened in that interview, of you, even good or bad, whatever. I wanna know. You know what, John? My very first web dev job that I landed, I didn't want to apply for it Straight up. I I did not think I was good enough. I did not think I was ready. I was not there, and my wife gave me some confidence, and she said, just apply for it. What are you doing? You want to do this, just apply for it.

I applied for it. I hit it off with the interviewer, and I got the job, and it changed my career forever.

So just go for it. And, John, I'm so psyched to hear that you went for it. So good job, man. True. Man, like, congrats on it. This is not a question, but I put it in there. Like, sticking your neck out there, rid. That first one, that's very scary, but, honestly, just do it. Like, if you were sitting listening to this, being like, oh, I'd love to do it maybe next year. Do it now. Just apply for it and see how it goes. That's what the interview is for, is for sussing out if you'd be a good fit for it or not. So, John, the web dev, Let us know how it went. We'd love to hear it. Send us email or send another potluck question in. Yep. Literally, the only thing bad that can happen from that is

Your ego can get damaged just a little bit if you don't get the job. And if you just say, hey. I'm cool with not getting this job. I'm just gonna go ahead and do my best. I'm gonna try.

Rid. I'm gonna gain some experience, and you could change change everything forever. Yeah. Next question from Annarella.

I am a new front end developer for a start up. Rid. The role involves that I create a setup that will work for long term, and it is a large scale application that will be built with React. I have not done a ton with React yet.

What advice would you give in terms of setting up core important things around network, State management, folder structure, and any other helpful advice is welcome.

This is a good one. I would say, like, if you are building something that will be scaling up large, rid is is that you probably will make some wrong decisions that will need to be refactored out as you grow. You really especially if it's a start up, you really don't know. But my advice would be don't necessarily get, sort of distracted by the hot new things that are out there because 100% those things will will will will change. And People have there's a saying, nobody ever got fired for picking IBM.

The idea of that is that if you pick something that is maybe not as hot, But it's a little bit more stable.

Then, you will not feel that pain so much when things rid churn in the future. So that's my advice. There is, pick something that is a little bit more stable and well used versus

Something that came out 6 months ago, and everybody's talking about it. Yeah. You know what? I I yeah. I I think, like, something like Next. Js is gonna be good for you just because, you know, there a lot of those patterns are fairly established with the Next. Js. You have specific folder ways to do things. You're not having to make those choices.

Lot of people are using it. And, again, you know it's going to work. There's, like, a lot of things that you don't have to worry about if you pick Next. Js Or or Remix, to be honest. Although Remix is a little bit different in terms of the fact that it's maybe less of a quote, unquote React side and a little bit more of just a straight web rid. App website kind of deal even though it is used React itself. So honestly, pick a framework like that. Pick something that has a structure, and don't Pick some tiny little one that no one's ever heard of. Pick 1 that people are using, and that has has some community behind it. And I honestly I think that's it.

State management is kind of a whole thing, and, you know, I mean, there's Redux is out there for, you know, big community support. A lot of people using it. You know, again, Redux is always going to serve you well, so to say, but you you might not even need something that heavy handed. You might be able to just Get away with context and who knows what. Man, React is a whole world because you're opening yourself up to essentially a 1000 choices For everything, all every step of the way. So if you can reduce some of those choices by picking a framework that has some of that stuff taking care of you Mhmm. And then, you know, then rid. Then you're not gonna have to worry about it. And I think also, like, go back to listen to the episode with Tom Preston Warner, where he says

that There's sometimes a little bit more setup, but that will give you something that's a lot more maintainable for the long run, versus Something that is like immediately like, I love Next. Js, but he says he says he didn't like Next. Js because, rid. It put all the back end and front end into 1 file, so some of that magic is a little bit, not maintainable over time. That's sort of his opinion on it. And he says, like, Redwood is a little bit more set up, but we'll give you a longer term. So think about that as well. Not necessarily thinking about Redwood, but just Whatever you do choose, think about that long term idea.

Let's talk about .tech domain names. They are the rid. Awesome domain name for your next project. Why? Because it shows people you are in tech. I personally have 2 myself, uses.tech, which is my uses website, And there's another one, west.tech. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do with that yet, but I'm going to put something really sweet on it.

You should go and see if you can snap up your own .tech domain name because, there's a great value in having a .tech domain name.

Rid. They are the extension that's taking the tech industry by storm. You wanna check out if they have your own. Go to go dot techforward/ syntax is tech, and make sure you use a coupon code syntax 5. That's gonna get you listen up.

Eighty% off a 5 year registration, which is unreal.

So thank you, .tech, for sponsoring.

Sick. Well, that's that's neat. Cool. Well, this way to last 2 questions here. 1st was from Joe Sabadeau.

Hey, Wes. Just a quick note that I thought you might find interesting.

I just had a major I had just had an interview with a major tech company, and your article rid. On using string templates was really helpful.

Unfortunately, I could not remember exactly, and I was a bit afraid to directly pull up The page during the video call, I was kind of surprised that an article from 6 years ago was so relevant today. Keep on keeping on. Joe, this is so Awesome. Because let me tell you, there are so many times that I Google something and a West post comes up or who knows? There's there's a few Blogs that will always come up really highly, and it just goes to show you the power of putting out content, especially on things like browser Fundamentals or JavaScript or language fundamentals because these things are not going anywhere. And what's relevant 5 years ago and some of these things rid. Should most likely be relevant tomorrow. So, shout out to Wes for thinking ahead 5 years ago, 6 years ago and putting that out there. I'm sure I hit that same blog post at some rid in my career.

Yeah. I didn't put this in there to toot my own horn, but I put it in there to say that rid. Things move fast in JavaScript, but they don't move that fast. Yeah. Totally. Like template strings, I still consider to be a new thing rid. In my my opinion, even though like, what, 6 years ago I wrote the tutorial on how to use those.

So it is kind of like a good way to show that, if you really double down on your fundamentals, if you just get to know JavaScript rid. Rock solid.

You're going to be in good shape when Facebook or Google or Amazon or whatever major tech company is asking about rid. Template strings, because this stuff does not change all that quickly. The frameworks change very quickly, But that is okay because as long as you have good fundamentals there, you'll be able to pick up those frameworks in a in a afternoon or a couple days.

Yeah. Totally. I think that is dead on. Alright. Last question here is from Tim Smith. He says, if 80% of the time we need to use prevent default on form submissions, Why don't we simply change the HTML spec? The reason being, the the reason why we need prevent default is because we want Be able to intercept the default functionality, which is to send a request, and what it ends up doing is refreshing the page. Right? So we need to prevent that default functionality from happening so that way we can intercept it with JavaScript. And then we can do our own things, accept the results back, make modifications to the DOM as needed as is, and the post request will still, has now become in control of JavaScript. Right? We now have control of it in JavaScript world rather than in HTML world. The reason why you can't change it at this point is because, just about every website in the world would break. Just about most of them would break. So, that's why we can't change it. And prevent default only is because we're working in JavaScript. If you're not working in JavaScript, then per the default Functionality is the expected and wanted functionality.

It's only us who are stepping in front of this thing and being like, let me put some of this dirty JavaScript in here and and take Take control over this thing. That's that's when prevent default comes into play.

We had 1 more question in here. I don't know what happened to it, but I wanted to cover it because I thought it was really interesting. So do you mind if I squeeze 1 more in here? The question was, what is the rationale for not supporting CSS custom properties, that's CSS variables, in media queries when using min and max width. I really want it. I'm guessing browser devs are way smarter than me, so there must be a reason. So The question is like, why can't I set a variable like dash dash medium 1,200 pixels rid. And then use that variable inside of a media query, say, at min width at varmedium.

Right? Like, that would be super handy to be able to Stick your pixel values in a variable.

And I thought that's what you everybody's still. Everybody exactly.

Yeah. You can do that in Sass. No problem.

Rid. And the reason behind that is because, like, where would you put the variable? There is no like, media queries are based on the rid. Viewport.

And is there a viewport selector in CSS? There's not.

So, like, you think maybe put it on the root. Like, you you know, you have You have to go on the route. Yeah. Yeah. So, apparently, I'm I'm I bet that there's also some rid. There's also some stuff around, like media media queries are calculated when on the page load and if they had to recalculate them. I don't know. But There is a proposal now, for environmental variables.

Yeah. What? And so if you look up CSS env one. I'll put a link in the show notes here.

What what did what did you uncover here? Yeah. So,

rid. There is no actual code yet, but what this will allow you to do is to set CSS custom properties via the environment, and the environment is the browser. Right? So you could set they have ones for rid. Safe area inset top, safe area inset right, viewport segment width, viewport segment height. Rid. So it says the viewport segments are environmental variables that define the position and dimensions of a logically separate rid. Region in the viewport. Viewport segments are created when the viewport is split by 1 or more hardware features such as a fold or a hinge between separate displays.

So that's kind of interesting. They're thinking about, like, multiple screen websites.

I think the teacher foldable phones, you know, I think some people don't necessarily they they see them as they are today and kind of maybe jeer at them or laugh at them in some sort of way. But I think before you know it, the tech's gonna be so mature that that's gonna be really something that we're all gonna have to deal with to some degree. And I think we're a lot of us are gonna be using foldable devices before you know it, and it's just gonna be normal. The reason why they're not everywhere right now is just that they're still progressing. Right? They're they're they're not there. They're fine. They're they're neat, but they're not anything other than a tech curiosity just yet. But just Like augmented reality and Google Glass was however long ago. These things are gonna fly up on us, and we're all going to be there. Yep.

Rid. It says right here, because environmental variables don't depend on the value of anything drawn from a particular element, They can be used in place where there is no obvious element to draw on. It's kind of interesting because everything in CSS is applied to an element. Right? Even the root is, I guess, the root of the document. Right? Such As at media rules where var function would not be valid.

Now there there is some syntax, by the way, in the Mozilla docs. I have no idea. Oh, really? Yeah. That's it's it's not super interesting or exciting, but there is some syntax in the Mozilla docs that I've linked up too. So give those both a a check. It's like Like I said, it's not super interesting just yet, but,

something to keep an eye on or at least to have your brain on that it might exist at some point here. Oh, Oh, so it's gonna be like a instead of var, it's gonna be e n v. Mhmm. And so they they will give you The the values, safe area in set top. And you can, yeah, have defaults or yeah. Cool. I wonder if This will also solve the problem of the obnoxious Safari changing, title bar. Rid. Because instead of saying, like, 100 v h, 100 viewport height, you could say, like, give me a 100 viewport height minus the title bar because it looks like they're also have values of title bars. Well, then they could calculate.

That's that issue might already be solved, with the new viewport units that that take care of that. What what viewport units? Like, just VW? No. So there's new ones. Let me find it.

Yeah. Let me see. Yeah. I know. I I thought it was kind of stupid that there's new viewport units specifically that work the way I think the original one should have worked. Let me let me double check and find this here. Oh, l v s v and d v? Yeah. Large, small and dynamic viewport units.

Okay. I think this needs an entire hasty. Yes. I think it does. I love the Simpsons. We gotta get more CSS hasties. In fact, we got 1 on the list today. So, I'm I'm psyched to talk CSS. I've been doing so many cool CSS things lately that, I'm here for this. I just made a, a card for it. We'll have a show in the next couple weeks on The new Viewport units. Beauty. Cool. Alright. Well, I think that's it. Let's get into the part of the show where we talk about shameless plugs and sick picks. 1st up is sick picks, things that we think Are pretty sick. Things that we like, things that we enjoy, things that we're having a good time with right now. West, do you have a sick pick for me today? I am going to sick pick, rid. Some pliers that I got for Christmas, and I have been using them a whole bunch recently.

So There is this German brown called knipex.

I don't know how to say Americans say knipex, Or Knipex, k n I p e x. And they make, like, some of the best tools possibly out there. And I've had tons of different pliers and whatnot, but, for Christmas, my brother-in-law gave me a set of the needle nose, I think, 8 inch ones.

Rid. And, man, they feel so nice in your hand. It's like I never knew that a tool could feel so nice. And it's like our kids got, like, a toy stuck in one of their other toys. Like, you know, kids put stuff and stuff.

And that's a kid from Caitlin was going through my tool bag and being like, I can't find anything that can get this thing out. And I just like, hold on, let me get the night packs out. And it came right out. And I was like, oh, like, rid. And these are, like, lifetime tools that that you buy. It's, like, $60 for one set of, of pliers. But now that I have it, I am super stoked about it. I also found a pair of Nipex, cable cutters at a yard sale the other day. It was I was so excited. It was a dollar, and I looked it up and it's like $90 online. Amazing. So if you are looking for a present for someone who appreciates a nice tool Or you just need a nice set of pliers that you will never ever have to replace, check out the Nipex pliers. They've got all kinds of different sizes. Sweet.

Alright. Well, I'm gonna sick pick a podcast that I really like. It's on an, like, old time film podcast. It's called You Must Remember This. And it it's It's extremely well researched, but they do different series. Like, there's a whole, like, a Hollywood blacklist series talking about the whole thing of with the, the blacklist that happened during the red scare.

There's a whole section on on Dean Martin and, a lot of, like, different, like, tales From essentially early Hollywood, but also, like, the growth of Hollywood. So it's not just, like, all early Hollywood stuff, and it's less about films and more about, like, The consequence and cultural things surrounding the film, so where you're not getting into essentially the production of these films in a way that is Who who who did what and who said what, but more or less, like, what are the the situations that happened that led this thing to happen? In fact, they even did What was really interesting, they did some mini shows, one of which was on Charles Manson and how that related that whole Charles Manson thing happened. The whole Charles Manson thing. Yeah. That's That's how people talk about it. But also one about, the ruby red slippers were stolen from a museum, and it was, like, a whole whole thing surrounding there. Either way, this podcast is super good And a ton of episodes here if you're interested in that kind of thing. I found this to be one of the better film based podcasts, especially one telling Stories that you may not have heard. Beautiful.

And, shame shameless plugs.

I'm going to shamelessly plug level up tutorials.com.

Re we have a new tutorial course out every single month. And this month, in the next couple of months, we're gonna be doing a little bit more than that. You may see more than you're used to our level up tutorials as we get ready for our big sale as well as our new redesign. But we're also gonna be introducing a ton of new content. So sign up today, And you'll get access to the latest and greatest web development tech along with a lot of, tutorials teaching browser fundamentals, CSS fundamentals, and all sorts of things related to web. Check it out. Leveluptutorials.com.

Rid. Sign up today. Save 25%.

I'll shamelessly plug all my courses, westboss.comforward/courses.

Check it out if you wanna learn a thing or two about JavaScript, HTML, CSS, web development, server side, client side, you name it. Specifically, we'll talk about beginner JavaScript. If you wanna learn everything there is to know about JavaScript and get really, really good at it, use coupon code syntax for $10

off. Rid Alright. That's it. Well, we will see you in the next one on Friday for our next supper club, y'all. Peace. Peace.

Rid Head on over to syntax.fm for a full archive of all of our shows.

And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player Or drop a review if you like this show.

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