ShopTalk x Syntax

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 Bos. Everybody,

thanks for tuning in to the show. This is me cutting in after. We did a little collab with the folks from Shop Talk, So shout out to Chris and Dave for doing that. I think it was really cool. We are sponsored today by Prismic, Century, and Cloudinary. We'll talk about them partway through but enjoy the show.

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out.

Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Bos.

This is Dave Rupert. You're listening you're listening to another episode of the Shopify Show with Dave. Rupert.

Chris, rid They'll keep the camera clear. Thanks, Dave. Wasn't prepared for that one. Say I'm ever prepared for what you're about to do at the beginning of a show, but that was a good one. We got a we got a we got a was it a wrestling reference because we're gonna invite 2 other to the ring. Oh, yeah, brother. It's connected toe to toe, head to head, 360 degrees.

East versus west. Yeah. Canada versus America. React versus view. Okay. Well, sorry about that, everyone. But this is a crossover show a very exciting one zero one that's been taking too long for us to get going, but we got it going now. We have the fellas from Syntax on another podcast with the tastiest treats For web developers, I think I have that right. But it's mister Westbost and Scott Talinski. What's up, guys? Thanks for coming on the show. Hey. Yeah. Rid Thanks for having us. This is gonna be exciting little crossover episode.

Big fans of Shoptalk over here.

So,

honored. Yeah. If you end up this, I it'll be awkward that I welcome you to our show because, really, it's not the same. We'll welcome you. Thanks for coming on the Syntax podcast.

Welcome to Syntax.

It's it's my great pleasure and honor to be on the show.

I think there's a lot of crossover listeners between our 2 shows, but if you didn't if you've never heard of these fellas, head on over to Syntax FM. They do, they're the they're the real powerhouse of rid of web development podcast. I'd say they have, like, a nice website and stuff, and they record more often than we do. So it's just kinda better, I'd say.

I think Wes gets all set up for the nice website.

I I pushed a couple updates here and there, but, Wes is the real powerhouse rid that website. Oh, you guys have a nice website as well. Haven't you guys redone it, like, a couple times? And you've been doing it. Like, how long have you been doing a podcast? We just constantly do it. Rid That's gonna be I I know because I've written a couple times. It's gonna be 10 years in January, so we're at nine and a half years. Yeah. I remember listening to shop talk at my 1st dev job.

Oh. Woah.

Right on. Wow. Sweet. That does not make me feel old. It does.

Yeah. It's 10 years flies by y'all, so it's fun.

I think every week, we get a request that we should do a shop talk or a show together. So this is I I feel like we're fulfilling a lot of user requests because, not a week goes by. I don't see a tweet, I feel like. We're we're closing we're closing about 20 GitHub issues right here putting this together. Yeah. Yep.

What I like about you 2, among many things, though, is that you Feel very modern in what you do and what you talk about. So the topics are are news, but, you know, you're not you you're not, Like, anti anything, really. You're you know, you've it seems like you do a lot of work in React. Maybe, Scott, you're doing a little more these days. But they're you know, that's, like, modern that's what the front end development kinda is these days, like, or not. So you don't you don't you don't, like, talk about it like it's this newfangled thing. You talk about it, like, rid The reality that it is, which which which I appreciate.

Oh, good. Yeah. We we were actually just talking about that the other day on the podcast, how, like, we don't wanna be the rid This thing sucks podcast because there's certainly enough of that out there. We wanna be the people that are excited about new technology and,

and, like, praise the things that are doing well in our community and and the tools that we like to use. Yeah. And you've but you've been around long enough rid In in your the variety of stuff that you talk about is maybe a little similar to us. There's not it's not like you I mean, you do you've done a bunch of shows on just, like, Vanilla CSS stuff. You know? I just listened to the Miriam show. It was great. Oh, gosh. My god. What a fountain of knowledge. But but that's just you know, that that stuff Has nothing to do with React. Even though maybe that's a topic that that hits your show a lot because I think you both Write it a bunch and have a lot of experience in it and literally sell courses. It's like your life's work. Yeah. Sell Yeah. Stuff about it. So maybe that's appropriate that you hit that topic and center around it to some degree. I think it helps that that's our foundation too. I mean, my foundation is is very much CSS and HTML more so than JavaScript. And

my JavaScripting only really started heavy with, like, Angular one, really. Rid I mean, I j queried it up a whole bunch. But, you know, if if we're talking right in full apps or doing anything like that, I I wrote some backbone here and there. But For me, it was, like, always foundational CSS HTML, and that that was my bread and butter. So, you know, man, that's that's my my favorite stuff to talk about, to be honest. That's cool. Right? Because you you could imagine a a show that's, like, so newfangled

that it's just like that the topics of, like, vanilla HTML and CSS are just

rid Not that interesting to a and not you know, for better or worse, just not talked about. It's stuff that, like, is constantly changing too. Like, it's It's kind of exciting. Like we did a show on HTML a couple of weeks ago, and it's like one of the best Show is like the most listened to.

I think we called it the surprisingly interesting world of HTML, because rid done a show on HTML, and I was like, well, what's there to talk about? You got tags and couple attributes, and and then we went into it. We're like, holy smokes. This goes deep.

Mhmm. You could never do one. I mean, it's it's really deep. The the the amount of HTML like APIs is, I'm sure it's not quite what JavaScript is, but it's it's far. So if especially if you're not just talking tags, because tags is one thing, but attributes are all, you know, a whole other universe.

Yeah. We we have notes on a show on the link tag, like like like the actual link tag. And, rid There's just so many different attributes, and it does so many different random things.

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's that's a that's a weird one. It's I even think it's weird that it's like, there's been no evolution to try to bring together scripts and CSS? Like, why are those 2 different tags? You know?

Yeah. Yeah. That's true.

Yeah. That was one of the things that when I was first starting, I would always reach for the wrong one, and then you'd, oh, I gotta Google which one it is. Right?

Gotta Google it.

But I am curious about, like, what your current, like, date you like, if you're gonna sit down and build a website of of of significance, you know, like, Scott, you're working on level up tutorials .com or whatever, like your bread and butter stuff. And maybe you could even rewrite it from scratch. Like, you're Free of the existing technical debt or whatever or and and both of you, really. Like, like, what's like a hot what's like a hot rid Stack right now. What would be and not because it's popular, but because you like it.

This is an oddly, Just just a timely conversation or question because, I am currently rewriting the entirety of the front end of level up right now Mhmm. In SvelteKit, Mostly just because I I tried it, and I'm not you know, I was always joking that, like, oh, oh, gosh. This is so good. I'm gonna have to rewrite all of my rid stuff in it. And then I started thinking about it, and I was like, well, maybe I'll just hack together something here just to see what that would look like. And the next thing I know, it was, like, 3 hours in, and I had most of the difficult problems solved in it. Like the hot stuff.

And the and I was just like, oh, oh, crap. This is so good. I'm gonna have to do it. And then, I I presented it to some of the guys we work on on the site with and is expecting them all to be like, no. That's a terrible idea. And at first, they were like, yeah. It's a terrible idea. I was like, well, let's just let's Maybe just, like, hackle a hunt on it for a week and see how it goes. I think everybody was so impressed with it that,

so it's not just Svelte. Svelte, we know as kind of JavaScript framework that's an alternative to something like React review because it it's still component based. It's still I don't know. You can make a Single file click button and stuff. Yeah. But it has some it has some great stuff. It has cool animation stuff. It has cool CSS stuff. Like, I I under few people, you know, that I can't say that I Get it as deeply as you do, but that's the category of thing that it's in. So what's SvelteKit on top of that? It looks like the marketing says it's kinda like Next, first of all.

Yeah. That's really it. It's, you know, full stack for building server side apps, but what's cool is that you, like, don't have to think about the output of it. There's, like, little adapters, so if you wanna output to it, I know side mean you gotta put do you have to put node behind it or no? You don't have to. Rid. They they have these things called adapters where you just install an adapter and say, hey. Give me the Node adapter, and then it spits out a Node app. Or give me the static adapter or the Cloudflare Workers adapter, whatever you want, and you can basically output to any of those. What? There's a Cloudflare Workers adapter that rules.

Yeah. There's a Vercel adapter, Cloudflare Workers, Netlify. I I mean, there's adapters for a lot of stuff, and it's still brand new. I mean, the thing's in beta, but How do they got that kind of dev muscle on this brand new thing? It's cool. I you know, begin.com, they wrote their own adapter for rid. I'd have to assume they're they're fairly trivial to get going, but I I haven't looked at any of the adapters myself. Why it's maybe it's easy. Yeah. The dev experience for it, though, is is just Amazing. The amount of code I'm having to write for each of my components is is probably like a good amount. Like, maybe, let's say, 40% less on every single component, and it's extremely effective. So we're we're using that with a, a Fastify Server to power our API, and the API is GraphQL using something called Mercurius.

Mercurius is basically just the Fastify GraphQL, rid like, the the Fastify GraphQL package, and it comes with a whole ton of stuff to make GraphQL servers a little easier. SQL server somewhere, and then it does more rid Stuff like does it, like, CDNIs your API or something? Yeah. And it gives us, like, built in support for things like loaders. Ready. So to avoid the n plus one thing that you get with GraphQL where you can end up accidentally doing a 100 database calls instead of the 5 that you went to. Rid. So it has all that stuff baked in, so it made it really easy to to get going. So we have the Fastify API, and then the SvelteKit site hits that API.

Rid. And, then we use something called GraphQL code generator to basically scoop up our our schema and spit out, Okay. All of the mutations, all of the functions. And in SvelteKit, they end up just being a function, so we don't have to deal with, like, a React hook.

We're like with the the React version of the same thing. It would give you a React hook, like a a use, get user, or a use user hook that you then have to call another rid function that calls a function that eventually gets to your data. But this is just a a function that could either return a promise or an observable depending on what you want. Rid. And, oh, so some it does some real time y stuff? Yeah. So it ends up basically, it just scoops up our schema, scoops up our our GraphQL queries, and then rid Bits us out of function, and I just import the function and say, hey. Give me the thing. It gets me thing, and then, I render it either server side or client side, however I want.

So if I had to choose, that's a stack I've I well, which I have gotten to choose. That's the stack I went with. Yeah. That is exotic.

Sveltekit, Mercurius, Craft Purell, Fastify.

Woo. Yeah. And it's it's it's pretty hot. I like it. I mean, my the site's been on Meteor forever and ever and ever.

So we moved off of Meteor onto the Fastify Mercurius, and then now we're ripping out the front end. So, After that, we'll actually get to iterate on some features, believe it or not.

I wanna ask Quest the same question, but I do have one curious about these generated these generated.

They're not hooks. They're generated mutations and stuff. Oh, what if you don't? Like, you've you've never needed to, like, write your own mutation or or, like, Change a mutation to be like, no. I don't. This generated one is not right. I want mine to be like

So you would still write a dot GraphQL file that is like rid The GraphQL mutation side of things, but the like, in in, the previous way you do it with, like, Apollo or something is you would write that query, Then you'd either import it or use it as like a string, inside of like a GQL function and then pass that into the useQuery hook. Rid it just saves that step where you don't have to have that live in your code somewhere. It doesn't save, like, a crazy amount of steps. It's not like, in OR. It's not it's not taking, like, doing, like, what Prisma is doing or is it Prisma or Prismic? Prisma. Prismic is the hosted, the hosted CMS. Yes. So it's it's not what confusing. It's not what Prisma is doing where it's it's it's not writing any any, anything for you. It's not saving you a ton of time, but it is saving you rid maybe bloat in some of your files where you just end up having, like, the same thing you find at the time. Say, oh, hooks. That's too much boilerplate. You know? Hooks were kind of like, woah. This is easy.

Ready. Yeah. I know.

Yeah. It's it it feels it feels like it's overengineered compared to what we're working with now, though, which is I I don't know if I would have said the same thing a couple weeks ago, but now I feel that way definitely. So, Wes, are you I mean, you did a thing where you used Apollo and are you kind of

rid React Apollo, is that your fave? Or Yes. That's that's yeah. I've I've been dipping into Svelte as well because Scott won't stop gushing about it.

And I see I see where he's coming from. It's like I'm I was just working with it this morning, and I was like, oh, yeah. Like, there's just little things like the Templating and working with forms and the API is really, really nice.

But currently, all the apps that I've built rid. And and kind of the stack that I like is, is Next. Js. It it seems to be coming pretty stable these days. Like, they just announced Next 11 a couple days ago, and there wasn't any, like, fundamental big changes. I think the the big changes that will come are coming down the pipe when we get the Rack server components.

But, like, it's it's becoming a nice stable platform.

It's nice that you can just dip in and get serverless functions When you need it, the routing is built in. There's lots of lots of libraries available for React, which is pretty cool.

Rid It's nuts. I I I hate to admit how much I like Next, but it's just so good, isn't it? It's so good. I the only thing I wish that they would do is,

and I I kinda wonder if they're gonna do this because I wish that they would make a CMS because they have They just announced this, like, real time editing thing, and I just looked at it briefly, but I was like, okay. Like, I I get this. Like, you and the client can be editing the same thing at the same time, or you can see where the the client's cursor is. I was like, is the next step that they're gonna roll out some sorta, rid both like a data layer for React as well as,

some sort of CMS of, like, a client editing. Maybe. You know? Isn't it interesting how Netlify I never got into data, really, they're like, oh, you just go somewhere else to store your data. It's either markdown files in your repo or or you're on your own.

Yeah. Yeah. They have Same with the session.

I I personally have been really enjoying, rid. CMSs that are built on Prisma or just GraphQL.

Keystone is one that I used in my last course, which I'm a big fan of.

And It's it's not I I really like, like, that it will generate all the GraphQL for you. I've certainly been in a situation before where I've Had to hand code a lot of that GraphQL stuff myself, and it gets really repetitive

after a while. Well, you both agree on GraphQL. Now you probably agree on more than that, but is that are you thinking that GraphQL is, like, the thing? Is it because it's it's it's relatively new. It would there could be something that replaces it. It You know? But what do you think? Is, you know, is it is REST dead?

I I don't think REST is dead. I, like, I still reach For just popping a quick endpoint in. If I have a Next. Js app and I want a serverless function, I'll just make a new serverless function and then rid Just dump the JSON from that. And, I think especially if we start seeing a bit more of a swing back to, like server rendering? You you might just start be seeing people doing SQL statements right before they render. The good old we we were joking on the last podcast how, like, We're sorta everything we we do in in JavaScript world is sort of like, well, PHP did that, like, 12 years ago.

Yeah. Indeed. Look. I don't know. Like, I I think GraphQL is is definitely for a big project, that's That's the way to go right now, but I don't think REST will go really anywhere. And it's just a URL. Right? It's not like URLs are gonna die.

No nobody mentioned Vue at all, but I know Dave likes Vue. Would that be in your kind of an ideal Dave Stack these days?

Yeah. Dave Stack, you know, I think my ideal is, like, maybe nonexistent right now.

Like, I'm using a lot of Nuxt. Kinda went all in on Nuxt using Prisma, which we talked about. It's it it's cool. It's got quirks, But it's cool. I picked it up like learning Redwood, I guess. And Mhmm. It was it was like, oh, like, This it's the Rails, ORM, basically. It's it's like but you do a little compilation step, but it's, like, a really nice, like, way to interface with your database, even like a REST API or a REST database. So I just was like, this is what I want.

But I think I when the more you use Knox, I I feel like the more you feel like, oh, I would like this to be on Vue 3 and Vite Rather than, like, Webpack and Vue 2, which I think that's all coming in Nuxt 3. But but you start feeling it as it goes, you know, and, You know, you get an error on runtime js

runtime dot minjs line 392, and you're just like, I don't know why that That means nothing to me. I hope these dev tools stick with that. That, like, speed is so vital. I don't even think Next uses anything exotically fancy beyond webpack. In fact Yeah. They just moved to Webpack 5. Which is great, but, like, if Webcap gets leapfrogged in speed by something, which is probably, I think, is kinda happening Mhmm. Build and stuff. They should move to it because that's what when you're using a tool that has that fast of compilation, you're like, oh, Yes, please. Yeah.

It it's too fast. Yeah. It's it's it's updating before you can finish typing or or thinking. It it's it's so very fast, And, we we were, like, doing full production builds of our server just because it was just that fast. We didn't have to even think about it. It was still faster than what we were doing, in the past. So, I mean, ES build to me is Which is what are you using, did you say? Oh, you are using ES build. We are using ES build, and we're just using that to compile our TypeScript, But, on the server side, it is it's very good.

I got the perfect stack for for Scott out of there, which was full of all kinds of exotic buzzwords, so

rid I feel like that was worth it just for that. Scott does that where he he's got loves trying new stuff, and he has no problem dropping and rewriting

rid Everything. Like, he's written rewritten his course platform probably 4 or 5 times since we've started on that path. Isn't that cool? Like, if he does that, then he has real world experience Using it and then can make learning material about that thing, it's kind of a sickle pool bonus thing. Right? Yeah. Exactly.

That's cool. So I I I was gonna ask him and you, though. Have you seen Astro? I feel like I'm a become a dev evangelist for it. It's like some next next gen stuff. I haven't, tried it out yet. I just saw yesterday that it

is open to the public now, so I am also very excited about that. Yeah. It's pretty

Like, even if you just like JSX and just wanted to stay and react, you just can. You know what I mean? Like, you don't have to learn all this new stuff. Like, The Dot Astro components are cool and our JSX also and have some, like, cool superpowers, but, like, it you can just I think porting won't be so bad. Like, if somebody really wanted to move a create react app to Astro, it's gonna be a bunch of work, but probably not As bad as it seems. I don't know what it would buy you over next because one of the advantages that it builds this, like, static HTML, right, which is a big deal to me. I'm not gonna launch NoSite without Server side rendering of some kind, you know, if it's Yeah. For the for the content y parts. So I need that, but Nuxt already has that. Rid. So Yeah. It's I I feel like we're in a a bit of

a a renaissance right now where, you know, when everybody switched over from jQuery to these frameworks.

There's a lot happening in a JavaScript land right now, and

it's all awesome stuff. Yeah. Yeah. What are you thinking about, Dave?

Oh, I was, you know, I was thinking about Next, you know, in the new React changes that Wes was talking about, Like, static builds and suspense and all this stuff. You know? I just like, I think I would still choose next For, like, a React project just because, like, all that stuff's just gonna get better. Like, they're gonna handle it better. Right? Like, you don't have to Crunch your own static

build server and client build server. You know? You might do nothing. You might update your package dot JSON, then it just you just get it all. You know? There might be breaking changes, so I can't promise that, but that that's it's a possibility that their work under the hood, you just benefit from Naturally. Yeah. It just seems like we're in, like

I don't know. There's a few established players right in the scene, and, you know, any benefits that should trickle down, hopefully, you know, unless you're stuck on some, like, I guess, Nux 2 or something like that. But, you know, Like, I think, like, eventually, it'll get better. You know? I'm curious. Like, the database stuff always gives me I I need to check out Keystone,

rid What's the data store in Keystone? What it is it some Keystone was they initially wrote their own adapters where you could either use, MongoDB, or you could use I think it was Prisma. And then they basically what they did is they ripped out Their entire adapter, the API stayed exactly the same, which is awesome. You didn't have to update any of your actual code. Rid. But behind the scenes is actually using Prisma, so you get all the benefits of, the GraphQL and and all the rid The hosting, and it it runs on, SQLite locally, which is just like a file on your computer. So, like, there's no rid Like, as, like, a tutorial creator, I'm so happy because, like, then there's that one left to go to this thing. Sign up for a rid Sudo, npm. Don't put your credit card in.

Like, there's none of that. It's just here's a file. And, also, if you wanna give people starter

Data. You just give them the file, and there's all this data in it already. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by Sentry. Let's say this is a purely hypothetical situation here. But let's say, you are closing on a house and, the person who is supposed to schedule that, Nest does something on a website, and the scheduling for the house happened 2 hours earlier.

Well, that's the type of bug that hopefully your system will catch. This is just a purely hypothetical situation, not related to this episode at all. But let's say that type of situation were to happen, well, hopefully, your error and exception handling system is handling this, and I'm talking about Sentry, which is who sponsors this episode. Sentry is the perfect place to capture all of those errors and exceptions and make sure that everybody's on the same page Potentially when they're closing on a house, that would be really great. And I really wish that some people were using Sentry for that kind of thing. So head on over to Sentry dot I o. Use the coupon code at Hasty treat, all lowercase, all one word, and you're gonna get access to Sentry's just absolutely famous for their their quality tools logging, cataloging, making sure that these things are taken care of, and really just diving into your errors and exceptions in a lovely interface. Not only that, but they give you performance tracking tools as well. All the types of things that you need to know if you're running any type of web service that literally anyone is using, rid a family who's closing on a house. So that would be really great if you could head on over to century.io and use the coupon code tasty treat. Sign up, and you'll get 2 months for free.

So but what's the deploy story with Keysight? You you have to, like it's a node server of some kind somewhere, right, like, in between the database and your client? Is that kind of what it ends up being? Yeah. It it yeah. It's a node server or,

they are getting it to run. So it's built on Next. Js as well, and they are working on getting it to be able to run it on things like Vercel so you can run it in serverless functions, Which is pretty nifty.

I think that'll be the the baby bear porridge as we move on in web development. Be like, yes. Static front ends are a good best practice. There's lots of advantages to them, and you should have access to a server.

There should be no one behind it. It's almost like you need, like, a also.

Rid we we took out the server, right, like, with serverless, but now you but I feel like anytime you want that data layer, you do need the like, You do need a server kind of in there in front of your database or next to your database or something.

Because I what I was doing in the or I am doing in this Nuxt app is, like, just using Prisma as a serverless function, and it's all working, but it's very, like like, manual, I guess. I don't know. Like, I'm not I'm just using REST APIs because that's what it has by default. To get the GraphQL server, that's what I would need something like Keystone in front of it for. So, So it's like for every little change, I have to send a statically typed deal. You know? I I can't just riff on my queries and mutations. You know? Yeah. The the Keystone gives you just like an admin dashboard.

You can upload files, make your own custom inputs. It's like a like a CMS that sits on top of Prisma. That's cool. It like, that's pretty much what it is. It's not like a it's not a front end thing. It doesn't care what your front end is, or or how you build your app, it's just like a an actual CMS. So it has, like, really the thing that rid. Really won me over to Keystone over a couple of the other, ones that are out there, which is there's tons of really good ones, is the they have a really good, rid Like auth and and permissions, way to sort of manage access to things. Like, you should be able to create something, but you shouldn't be able to update that. Like, you should be able to create an order, but you shouldn't be able to update how much you paid for that order. Right? There's all these, like, rid Little nitty gritties. And, like, permissions is such a slog. And if you screw something up with permissions, you could potentially be opening up a major security So

I was just, like, so happy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal. We talk about it all the time at at CodePen, you know, because we have to I don't know.

Like, you you can do a sloppy job with permissions that it's secure and fine, but isn't very extensible and isn't very Interesting and doesn't match with what people expect. I mean, I think Google Docs is whatever, like, kind of a canonical example of how what the where the bar is For permissions where you can just be like, oh, this is private, but I can make it public at the individual document level. And I can invite this 1 person, rid Or I can invite my whole team or what I you know, there's all these, like, options for it. That crap don't code itself. No. That's rid That's tough. You imagine being, like, a new dev be at Google, and they, like, sit you down and be like, okay.

Like, here's, like, 40,000 lines of permissions.

Like, that would be tough. Tough. Tough.

Right. And and the trick then is to because you then if even if you could pull off all those features, Did you do a good job pulling off those features such that they're they continue to be understandable and extensible and, You know? Or is it just a, you know, 10,000 if lines or whatever? Have you ever and, Wes, just to switch gears a little bit because you you had to all talk about WordPress a little bit too because, like Active sites that I work on that are literally in WordPress, and I am, like, happy about that. I think they do a good job, and I think it's the right technology for the job a lot. Although, It's funny to work, like, all day and next and then go have to do, like, a little bit of work on a WordPress website and compare The DX I have set up that's just given to me on the next site. And to to compare the DX, but I have worked a long time on trying to make better on the WordPress side and have be so poor. There's no prettier for a PHP. There's no live reloading. There's no there's all this stuff that just sucks Working on that side. And it's not, like, awful. I get used to it. I get it done. But isn't that funny that it's, like, this platform that's, like, can't do you think it will get there? Do you think anybody's even rid trying, or am I just behind the times?

Probably about a year ago, there is a prettier PHP plug in. It's not Production ready. And, like, I I tried it about a year ago, and it, like, blah. It, like, it literally broke the code. So I was just like I was that's I was like, man, I am so spoiled by this, like, JavaScript stack, and then, like, I can't leave WordPress. I still have a couple WordPress sites because, Like, it it's the best CMS. There's people that love it. There's people that have sites that have been built for 10 years on this thing.

You can't do away with it. And also, like, rid I was listening a couple of your podcasts. It it sounds like the all the new WordPress stuff that they're moving on, like, the features are becoming really, really nice. You know? Yeah. I mean, I think so. I don't think it's like, oh, it's this tried and trusty old

hammer, and I just use it because I use it, Which is you know, that would be an acceptable way to feel too, but it's not stodgy.

I think it's it's pretty it's pretty good these days. But what's not good is, like, Authoring PHP templates with no dev

DX help. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Especially, like, Moving to TypeScript and having all of those how nice it is, and then you move like, I know that there's people that have much nicer PHP setups rid For their applications, there's a lot of Laravel developers that are really good at that, and they've they sort of look at some of the WordPress templates that I sling and think that's That's child's play. But that's that's the type of PHP that most WordPress developers are are working with. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I have this, like, limit where I'm like, actually write a decent amount of PHP for my site, but then have

moments where I'm like, but I really am not actually a PHP developer. You know? Like, I don't really actually know what I'm doing in here, and this spends so long, and there's so much of it that it needs auditing and and reorganization and stuff, and I end up usually trying to hire out for that kinda work because, oh,

too much. One interesting thing this, like, WordPress news is WordPress bought, acquired day 1, the, like, Mac journaling app, Which is actually pretty smooth and pretty cool

and nice. It's been around forever. I used to use that. That's the thing that you can kind of trust to write, like, I had a sad day.

My crush told me I'm stupid or whatever, and not it does it absolutely does not go anywhere except for for you to see.

Why did WordPress buy them? Well, I wonder if there it's a native app play to make blogging more I mean, the writing angle makes sense, but it's not about publishing.

Oh, for Gen z.

Yeah. Maybe.

Like, just kinda I don't know. More more casual so you could just kinda, I don't know, bring back LiveJournal or whatever.

So I don't know. I mean, the the literal reasoning is from Mullenweg.

He says, for many years, I've talked to anyone who will listen about my vision of making automatic the re Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet, which means, like, buy a lot of stuff. Doesn't I don't I think. This is Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett's thing where you just, like, buy stuff a lot. Companies. Yeah. He's like, oh, shipping liner. We'll take it. So I think the part of the idea of purchasing wasn't necessarily its Perfect alignment with the WordPress vision. It's a perfect alignment with the automatic vision, which is buy stuff.

Yeah. You look at, rid Like Mongoose, which is a adapter that you use in Node. It's, like, the most popular adapter to use in Node for MongoDB, rid. And Automattic maintains that, and they pay people to work on it. And, like like, why? I'm not sure if they have apps that use that, but, like, that is a, Like a building block of the Internet, and it's really cool to see automatic just, like, putting money towards that type of thing. I had no idea.

Wow. A lot of companies do it too. This thing, I'm a little embarrassed to say I've never heard of it. Oh my god. The the repo is, rid Of Mongoose? That's what I use on my,

this is initially made by TJ Holochuck, which Mhmm. He's the author behind, Stylus and, Express and literally everything in early Node. Js days.

So back to, you know, the fact that we both have podcasts here. Dave wrote this, and I like this. Like like, you have a lot of people that listen to your show. Us, not so much. But combined, we're even bigger. You know? What what do you, like, want for them? Like, what what is the message? What do you, like do you know? Like, I'm sure you think it's rid Fun. Certainly, we do too to to have a podcast. But do you do you think about, like, what would be better for all these people? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's kinda interesting. You get messages all the time from people who are, like,

6 weeks into a coding boot camp, and they just listen to rid. 300 hours of of past episodes or or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, like, at the end of the day, we want to help people Understand this crazy world of web development. Things change so quickly. You don't necessarily know what everything is.

And by tuning in once or twice a week and just listening to what we have to say, you're sort of just, like, keeping up with what's going on in web development, learning a new here and there and and finding out some interesting new things in in JavaScript.

But kind of the like, the the side effect to that is that people buy Our courses, we can sell platform, we can sell sponsors on it. Like, that's nice that we can make money from it as well.

But like it genuinely comes from a place of Scott and I are really excited about this type of stuff, and we're gonna try to explain the stuff that we are learning and excited about. Yeah. Do you have to

Make time for that in a way. Like like, I wonder if you well, I mean, Scott's literal career is selling tutorials Also, so I guess it kind of goes for both of you, but that you have to learn new stuff in a way that other people don't

Because your job is to teach it. So, like, you can't just be stuck and Yeah. Do you feel the FOMO real hard, or do you Not rid Really. Like, I I'm always excited about new stuff, so I'm always getting into it. And then I do make a point of checking. Like, this morning, last day, I've been building a little re Svelte because Scott's talking about it, and it seems to be gaining some some serious traction. So there's that. And then, like, rid Also, anytime we have an episode, we'll spend sometimes we'll spend an hour or whatever researching it and diving into it, talking to people, tweeting about it.

So, Don't necessarily feel too too much FOMO. I feel like we do a pretty good job at keeping up with what's going on. But even then, like, I was tweeting about Salt yesterday, and rid. Someone quote tweeted it and was like, I've been talking about it for 2 years, and finally, Wes is is taking a look at it. And I'm like, okay, bud. You know? Like, I'm not gonna check out literally everything out there. Like, I can't. There's not enough time in the day. Rid. But and and we get, like, heck from people for not talking about Angular and things like that, but we just talk about The stuff that that we are interested in and that we have time to check out, and that includes usually React, some other frameworks, and then all of CSS and all of HTML and all of vanilla JavaScript. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Yeah. I forget to mention Amber all the time. Hi, Melanie.

That's just for Melanie.

Only for Melanie.

Discord.

We are sponsored by Prismic, and let me tell you, they get it. Stop thinking about your website in terms of pages And what goes on that page? Because your client wants something a little bit more flexible. You need to start thinking about your websites in terms of components, and Prismic rid is going out there with this thing called slices. Slices essentially are a component, meaning that you create a slice in Prismic, And that allows you to have all the fields. Maybe you have an image, a title, a description, a couple other pieces of information about that. And then from Prismic, you query all of your slices. You can loop over the slices, and you can say, alright. Well, this is a, a person Slice. So let me take that person data and render out the person component.

Oh, this is a map slice. Now let me render out my map component. Think of building your website in terms of components and the data that is related to them, which is what Prismic calls slices. They're going all in on slices, so check it out. Prismic.ioforward/ syntax. Thank you, Prismic, for sponsoring.

You know, I had a day the other day where With this Apollo thing, this is the one I'm excited about recently, and I'm, like, almost, like, looking for excuses to use it because I think it's so cool.

I had it the the day that I played with it, my day as a whole looked like I got into work at the normal time, and I, like, Did some serious dev work on our regular stack and just knocked out stuff and wrote documentation and closed tickets and answered emails and did all that stuff. And then I was like, I'm gonna do something different. And then I played with Astro for, like, an hour. You know? And then I probably went back to some more normal work and went home for the day.

And it would happen to be a day where there was some definitely some Twitter vibe of, like, you don't have to learn new things.

That's you know, we're busy, like or, you know, like, the the vibe was like, don't have FOMO because you don't have to keep up with this And I kinda like that message overall. Like, that's okay to be telling people that you shouldn't be covered in guilt all the time for not coming up with stuff. Overall, I think it's a good message. But then I looked at my day, and I was like, you know what? Like, it wasn't that much of a stretch for me. It wasn't at Odds with anything else I was doing to have a look at some technology. You know? Like, I think there's a little bit of balance there that says, like, I don't think you the the message is right to Tell people, like, never learn anything. Like, don't worry about it. Just use your existing tools.

It's like it's not a terrible stretch to check out some tech. Rid No. No. It it's good for for your career, I think, to be able to check out new stuff. We we always tell people on the podcast, when you've heard us talk about it 11 times, rid Then it's your turn to check it out. You know? Like, don't don't go. Like, we're we're checking stuff out pretty early and telling you about it, rid. But then, like, when you hear us talk about it over and over and over again like Svelte, I keep hearing about it. I'm like, okay. Now is the time. I this is something that rid is not going away, obviously.

There's certainly lots of frameworks and one that fizzle out, but this is not one of them. So I think it's pretty easy to know, Okay. This thing is gaining some momentum, and it's becoming pretty stable.

Now is the time that I can spend an hour or whatever. And I think it's fun as well. Like like, don't you feel Like, learning something like Astro is just, like, renews some of your excitement for web development?

It does.

But I would say that it it does Kinda, like, depend on my mood a little bit and other things that are going on in my life. And that if what's going on in your life is, like, I just don't have the brain space for that, Then that's the part that's like, okay. But when you're in that mood that, like, this sounds a little fun actually to try it, Yeah. It does. It gets your brain spinning in this very kinda, like, cool, positive way.

Like, you know, here I am doing me. I'm a little engineer. Look at me. You know?

Rid Building stuff. Yeah. I could. It's really like, oh, I could actually build a full blown app. You know? That I I get that as well when I like It's this happens, like, pretty much every summer. Scott and I, we rerecord for the entire summer, and then we take, like, a month or two off of the podcast, rest. And I slow down my work. And then every September, I say, ah, like, now I'm interested in some of this new stuff. And rid It's true what you say about just being in the headspace for that. Sometimes you're just completely overwhelmed. You're not interested in web development at all. But then I find, personally, as soon as I have a bit of a rest from this type of stuff, I start getting that itch to check something new out. Yeah. It's, like, deep it's too deep in our brains at this point. Like like it or not, like, we all wanna, you know, have dreams about

living in the woods and, I don't know, being a basket weaver Oh, that's like, it's fun to think about other hobbies, but, like, I hate to say it. We have hobbies, and they're those hobbies are gonna draw us back Yeah. Even when we take breaks.

That's nice.

I think as for me for me, rid. I think there can be a problem when it's like a when it when it feels like it's another thing you gotta learn. Like, oh, you know what? I didn't learn Svelte, and now there's Astro.

That's another thing. Oh god. You know? Yeah. And it's gonna be on the LinkedIns, and you need 10 years of it or whatever, astro experience and stuff like that, and you're just like, man, that's not.

I it just came out yesterday. So I feel like when it feels like it's another thing you have to learn, like, you're you're, like, Stuff you have to learn less goes big, that can become

demoralized. Yeah. But you're, like, really been around web a long time, and you're really smart, and you And you kinda, like, know what you know the basics. You know that some craps gotta make some HTML that goes to browsers, and you gotta put some data somewhere, and there's probably should be a permissions model or something. Right? There's, like, these fundamental aspects of web development that never change so that you're, like, well suited to Write something like that off for a minute knowing that if I use those tools, it's gonna spit out some HTML, and the server's gonna serve it, and there's gonna be some data somewhere or something. Like, it's not gonna be so fundamentally different. I'm not the paradigm of what a website is hasn't changed under my feet rid necessarily. So there there's that kind of Yeah. That that's a really good

point. You can you can skill up on these things very quickly once you've done 2 or 3, Once you've been doing it for a couple years, like, the first thing I built in JavaScript was extremely hard because I didn't know what events were and, rid the DOM and event delegation and, like, you learning all of those things for the first time is is tricky. But then once you understand that, yeah, you're fetching data, rid There's Cores, and you gotta put it in HTML and listen for a click.

There's HTML and Cores. That's all you have to know.

90% of all the pain.

Of course.

Yeah. But it's, yeah, but it's still Fun. Right? Like, even though the thing does kinda the same thing, what's fun is, like, the learning the new syntax to some degree and seeing how much easier it is to do the thing or how well it matches some requirement that you have. Like, to me, I'm exploring things like Nuxt because out of the box, it does static rendering. And to me, I'm like, That's what I wanted. I don't really care about the tech. I wanna make sure that the thing that I use has that.

And so then when I look at Astro, I'm like, oh, it has that too. It has that Same requirement, but look how it handles data fetching. Wow. They made that like a first class citizen. They made that a very primary thing of how they do rid Oh, that's nice.

That could, like, maybe lower the cognitive load of this this code based kinda thing.

What are you exploring next for? Rid Specifically for your blog or just

No. I'd be well, that would be a whole interesting thing to think about. But, no, no. I'm I'm sticking with PHP for that for now. Yeah. But think of the the the CodePen editor, the pen editor itself, the the simple one where you just write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and you see the thing. That is 1 page on CodePen that is still rendered by Ruby on Rails templates, and there's some jQuery still on that page. And it's an older area of the site just because it's very, very complicated, and we, on purpose, didn't, like, port that page to the new stack as the very first thing we did with the new stack.

So it's a straggler on CodePen as far as being rewritten, knowing that it's so vitally important to CodePen that when we rewrite it, we're Gonna rewrite it with a bang. You know? And it's one of those pages also that there's some pages of CodePen where I don't really care if they're not static rendered at all, like your settings page or whatever. Like, who cares? You're logged in. It's just for you. I just could care less if that's static generated or not.

But when something is public facing and that Google crawls it and has SEO implications and all that stuff, for example, like Just hundreds of millions of pens, which we have.

Yeah. That cannot be a div on a page. It needs to have all the metadata. It needs to have Code that people wrote so that it can be indexed and reindexed quickly and all that stuff.

That they are stat server side rendered today because it's Ruby on Rails.

But as soon as we switch to over to a React stack our React stack, we haven't crossed the barrier of server side rendered React On CodePen. Yeah. CodePen isn't a Next app yet. So I'm playing with it because what if it was? You know? Then we would buy

rid all this stuff. You don't wanna go down the route of rolling your own server side rendering in React. We we did an entire show on how rid I was frustrated with it, and we had to scrap it because they rolled out a whole bunch of new changes to making it easier.

But still, like, re It's it's tricky.

Somebody else do it for you. You know? And for us, we we can't static generate it either because, you know, Hundreds of millions. Like I said, that's not happening.

So it's gotta have a Node server behind it. Site with a 100,000,000 pages.

Netlify

build will take No. 3 days. Server it is. You know? And this is not done. You can't explore this. This is early days, But we're we are having some success with it, and then and then it becomes interesting. Like, because we're a big, long, old app, We can put next at a subroute, like a slash. This page is a next app, but this other page isn't still. You know? Like, that's the kinda architectural stuff that we're gonna have to face. And then maybe someday, you put Next at the root, and it it Handles everything, but, like, you don't we don't have to do that on day 1, and we probably shouldn't because then we're not kind of, like, learning as we go and finding the edges and stuff.

So there might be a day. I don't know if this is how it will play out, but that that the editor itself is just its own Part of a monorepo

next step. Like, just that 1 page is served by Next. There's no problem with that. You can do that. Totally. Yeah. And you don't even necessarily have to use rid The routing part of Next. You can just use the Right. Nice server side rendering bits and and whatever other bits you want.

But if you're not sharing the router, then you're it's you you know, it'll be limiting. You'll you you won't get the the smooth page transitions.

Yeah. We'll get later when we when we make the whole full site react, and that's okay. It's just a trade off. You know? So, like, there's some areas of the site. This is, like, deep in the weeds, and I'll rid up in a sec. But if you go to, like, the challenges section of CodePen, you click around the months weeks and stuff. That's a, like, React router sitting there doing that routing, and you can tell how fast The page transitions are

so much nicer than a Ruby on Rails transition, I think. Oh, yeah. I'm on it right now. It doesn't it keeps the scroll position.

That's nice.

Yeah. But then if you click over to a pen, you know, you get the big Slow.

Here, I'm gonna load up the editor now. Ruby on Rails app is happening.

You know? Wouldn't that be nice to switch over to that and have it be instantly fast because it's re Preloaded and, you know, all that stuff. That you know, that's a UX thing that where I wanna get there, and it's probably next that will get us there because it's just of how How you know, it's a you'd know it. It's been around forever. It's a very solid project. Right? Trustworthy project.

This episode is sponsored by Cloudinary.

Now Cloudinary is the perfect place to hold all of your images, and It holds them, and it does it so nicely because what Cloudinary does is it allows you to upload your images. And you can do so programmatically, or you can Put a little scoop up URL on that image, and it does it itself. It's so cool. And once those images are in Cloudinary, that's when the magic happens because Cloudinary can transform and and make your images into absolutely anything you want. Here's a killer use case for Cloudinary here. You upload your stuff, you don't even worry about the size of the image that you're serving. Why? Because Cloudinary can transform it into whatever format rid. On the fly and cache it that the user can receive and accept giving your users the best quality, smallest images possible at absolutely, just no effort on your part, to be honest. It it's so very cool. We've been using Cloudinary over at level up tutorials since long before we started this podcast. Always been one of my favorite services. It saves me so much time never having to worry about picture fill elements or how we're gonna be serving up 8 different sizes of images for all the different formats and Different things that exist. Not only that, but you can transform your images using, like, auto detection of faces and stuff like that. There is a rid Ton of really neat little tools involved in Cloudinary.

Also, they do video too. So if you're into video or images, check it out at rid. Cloudinary.com.

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Use the link in the show notes.

Okay. I talked about myself enough. Maybe we should do sick pics.

Hey, Wes. Segue us into sick pics. How does it work?

We say, now is the time where we do sick picks, which is things that we pick that are sick.

Perfect.

Needs a jingle. Do y'all have a jingle?

Man. We've been we've been, like, needing to get a jingle, And we I even found some guy on Fiverr that would record us, like, a Blink 182 knock off song, rid But Scott thinks we're gonna we're gonna get sued for it, so we're not gonna do it.

No. Which rid have run into legal issues with large companies before for knocking off their logos, so maybe it's best we don't do that.

Fair enough. Usually, you're gonna see some desist. You won't go right to court. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

But then you'd have to go back and cease and desist, like, rid 200 episodes or whatever. That would be it. Yeah. That would be a bad bad day. So,

yeah, we need to get some better jingles for it.

It be nice if the audio tag in HTML took, like, a comma separated list of MP threes so you could, like, stitch together? Rid Yeah. So that we could just find and replace in your website. Like, oh, the 6 pic thing, just remove that from that thing. Yeah. That's actually not a bad idea.

M three u playlist, is that what they were? Yeah. Something like that. I think Anyway. I think Spotify is doing that with podcasts right now so that they can get rid. They can inject ads that are a lot of people a lot of podcasts I listen to, they give me Canadian specific ads for, like, rid Banks and investing apps that are only in Canada.

And I think, oh, yeah. They they detect my IP address, And then they deliver me this compiled m p 3. But, yeah, wouldn't it be cool to just send a couple m p threes down the line?

Yeah. Play them in order. Go. Yeah.

This. This is 1, 2, whatever you want here, 3, 4. There you go.

I dig it.

Okay. Sick pics. What do you got, Dave? Tell me. Sick pics.

Me? I basically watch everything Dave tells me too. So

okay. Okay.

Uh-huh. So I got some sick picks. Tell me if I'm doing this right, Wes. Ready. So my 1st sick pick is a shonen anime, young young boy anime called Haikyu, which is about the Some kids who go to high school and join the, boys volleyball team, and It sounds very it's on Netflix.

If you have Netflix, it's probably on, like, Crunchyroll and stuff too, but, there's a manga as well, but if you, it's really cheese ball in the way that, like, You know, like, a whole episode will be, like, 1 single point of a volleyball game. You know? Like, he's gonna serve. He has the power serve. I must counter the power serve by using my power spike. You know? Like, it's like, all these, like, kind of, like, Mental mind games for a whole episode, and then, like, mid serve, there's, like, 10 flashbacks and stuff like that to, like, when they were boys in junior high, and they played against each other. You know? So it's very sappy and silly in in that way, but it's it's really good, and I will say it's really good because it's about, like, Teamwork, working on something as a team, and that's what I'm getting from it. Like, finding people's specialties, what they're strong at, what they're weak at, And assembling teams and

figuring out some That's cool. And Here's here's I'll read 2 boys Who are bitter volleyball rivals in middle school join forces on their high school team to take on other schools with a vengeance.

Yes.

That's it. And it's really it's really good. And, and then my other rid which is sort of like a, like, a preemptive pick. Nintendo Garage is like a video game builder For Nintendo Switch, so it's like a game where you build games, and it's kind of like, you know, it'd rid Probably be in the no code realm since you're doing it on a switch. You know? But I downloaded it. My son's ready. Making games. He's 7.

Wow. He has not really gravitated to this, so I might have to go ahead and and, like, Kinda build a game and just see where it's at, but I think it's a lot of reading, and so he peaces out. You know? Yeah. Can you write an if statement? I think you can. I think it's kinda like Scratch style Yeah. Oh, this looks cool. Blocks.

So, yeah, Nintendo Garage. So, you know and then there's, like, a whole, like, state machine for, like, making a character walk and, you know, just like Oh.

Yeah. You just, like, drag. Like, you click this button. Oh, he jumps, you know, stuff like that. So, Oh, I'm into that. Kinda cool. Like, just I don't know. Like Yeah.

Even from, like, a coding perspective, I I'd like I want this for websites. I don't know.

The thing Where you, like, drag little blocks around. I I want that. I don't know. Can we make that? Some anyway, so I'll probably have to make something, just to get him, like, Interested, but, yeah, anyway, that's my sick Nice.

Did he do it right? Was that a sick Can I do it right? Evaluate my You did you did the sick pick right. Rid Double you double picked. So that's you're you're you're up there. That's a good job. Hey. Wes is up. I am going to, sick pick rid 2 YouTube channels.

I've been getting into lawn care. Something flipped in my brain. I've had a crappy lawn for my entire life, and something flipped rid in my my brain, and I'm super into lawn care right now. And, anytime I get into anything, I I do the whole Just consume every single YouTube video out there, and then I'll have a pretty good idea of the, like, surface area of this topic. So, over the last, like, couple weeks, I've just been consuming lots of YouTube videos. And there's some high quality channels. They're like they're like, take it seriously.

Yeah. They've got, like, a, like, a drone and, like, a little, like, a cut sequence coming in of the guy cutting the lawn and $40,000 lawnmower.

Seriously? $2,000

drone. Just Yeah.

What are the important topics? Is it, like, consistency?

Is that 1? Or, like, edge g Consistency,

cutting, cut height, watering.

Rid It's a little frustrating because they're all American, and they dump all these chemicals on their lawns. And just in Canada, you can't buy any of that stuff. It's just not allowed.

Rid But, all of the the sort of that stuff they talk about is learning about different types of grass is is helpful. Rid. And I'm I'm almost at a point now where I'm gonna unsubscribe from them just because I've, like I feel like I I get it and I don't need this to be my like a hobby, But, I've learned all I can learn. So the the 2 channels are Connor Ward, he's he he's got this, like, front lawn that's like a golf course, And it's so thin air, so so short, and it just looks amazing.

And he's pretty cool because he's I think he's more like my Style with web development, he's kinda off the cuff, and, it'll work out. You don't have to follow all these rules, and you sorta just do this. So I really like his style. And then another one is rid. And, Noren, he's the he seems to be more, by the book and do everything a 100% properly. So both of those, good Good sick pics for YouTube.

Nice. Yeah. It reminded me of the this one I started listening to about backpacks in our it was a recommendation kind of in our Slack, and it's good. They are high good high quality videos. They talk about backpack topics, but then I'm like I unsubscribed because I was like, okay. Like, But they really are still all backpacks. Right? Like, there's kind of, like, a limp a limit to how much backpack talk you could listen to. And Chase Reeves is a really good

bag YouTuber.

But, like, I bought a bag, and it's gonna last me, like, 10 years. So I'm kinda Kinda over that for the next 10 years. You know? Like, I'm not gonna buy another one. Sort of yeah. Sort of set. Sort of good.

Yeah. Is this the guy? I can't I can't get into this again. No more backpack videos.

For me, they they're like all those, I've because I bought a backpack, rid. I think last year, but it was, like, thinking I would leave the house. But, they, you know, they're always like, well, it's your standard 23 liter backpack. You know, everyone knows. Like, what is that? You're putting, dude, putting ginger ale in there?

Yeah. Yeah. But, like, 23

Two liter. Wait. That's that's a 12 11 and a half 2 liters. That's a lot. That's a lot of ginger ale. What are you drinking? There's a lot of ginger ale in there, rid But then and they're like, how many clothes can I fit in a 2 liter bottle? Anyway, so just like I I never get that. I never understand volume. Like, that's not a skill I possess, so I don't know.

I'm really good at two d things, less good at three d things. What do you got for us, Chris?

Thanks for those picks. I'm gonna do a web development pick. Sorry. That's no fun, but I just happened to be what I wrote down.

But I have this like, to preface rid One of the things I hate about web development, and I'm probably alone in this, is just the command line not using the command line, but needing the command line to debug things.

Like, when you're in a Ruby and you have to print crap to the thing to print the variable or whatever. Because you refresh the page, and it'll also output 98 lines of Stuff that the rendering thing is doing. I don't know what. But, like, I just despise having to use the command line to debug things. I think it's an embarrassing failure of web development. I know some people probably read it like the matrix, and they just are so used to seeing it that they can see the stack trace in there, and they love it or whatever. But I'm just like, As somebody who likes UI tools Totally. Is it bad? Like, at least get some syntax highlighting in there. At least could you put some fences around errors or Something. Use some ASCII art. Do something. I hate it. Anyway, WordPress is even worse kind of in that you don't even with PHP, you don't even really have a command line. Yeah. Rid A print r

dump it into the menu. But you gotta put it in the template, you know, and then and then look at it, render

and probably put a pretag around it so that it, you know, like, has some formatting and stuff. That's unacceptable to me too. Like, oh my god.

So, like, there's this app, and this is not the only one. Because I think people like Xdebug for this reason, and there's other stuff. But this is called My Ray dot app, And I think it's it's has adapters for all kinds of languages, but for whatever reason, focus is kind of on PHP and WordPress. Oh. Just by virtue of you having it installed on your machine, Then you are when you're writing PHP, you can just type Ray parenthesis parenthesis you know, Ray is your new console dot log, essentially.

Whatever you throw at Ray, it outputs really super nicely in this dedicated app. You know? So So if you are in this mode, you probably won't need it every day. But if you're, like, working on WordPress and need to do a bunch of blogging of your queries and crap, This thing, like, kicks butt for it. Oh, man.

Why yeah. I need I've needed this for years. Mhmm. Myray? Rid. Super good. That's I have, like, a little function in my every WordPress install called pre underscore r, where it just dumps a pretag and then dumps the The object in there, and then you you it's, like, in some, like, weird font that you're using for, like, the h one tag. Yeah. Exact exactly.

Yeah. I really don't like that. Or, like, you put it somewhere that is only, like, a 100 pixels wide for some reason. And You got a rid Horizontal scroll. You're not you're not a real developer

unless you've outputted a whole PHP object in an h one tag. I just rid You're just not a real developer. You know? Oh my god.

Don't leave your Ray commands in your code, though. I think they'll probably fail on production, but This is also $50.

So it's like, you better be ready. You better be so pissed at your debugging scene like I was that You're ready to spend $50 on this thing, but I did, and I love it. That's it. Sick pick.

Good. Sick pick. Well, we should wrap it up.

We'll just thanks, listener. If you're listening to this on, Syntax or ShopTalk, we just, I think, go safe for everybody.

We appreciate that.

You know? Thanks, Wes, for coming on.

Scott, thanks for coming on. Sometimes you have to buy a house in the podcast. We understand it happens.

Whatever happens. So, but thanks for, coming on and doing this. We we appreciate it. And, yeah, thank you, dear listener.

Follow us, at shop talk show, and syntax is at re Syntax FM. Am I right? You got it.

Okay. There it is on the Twitter's You got your own outro that you rid are required to do, Wes? Yeah. Let's Wes Wes can take it over. We just say peace,

which makes people say it's cringey,

But we still do it. Oh, I think it's amazing. I like it. Let's just end on that. Shoptalkshow.com.

Peace.

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