How to Level Up Your Web Development Career

Welcome to episode 754 of Syntax, a podcast

for web developers. We've got a really good episode for you today on how to level up your web development career. Scott got a really good question, and we're sure I'm Node gonna dive into all of that. You wanna explain what it's all about, Scott? Yeah. Yeah. We had a question come in in our inbox, and it was, can you make a video with some tips on how a front end developer can become a front end lead or get a better position in their career. So that kind of spawned this idea of how do you level up your web developer career. Right? You wanna get better at being a dev. You wanna get a better job. You want to move into a higher level in life or in your career in general. So we have 3 different sections in this episode. It's how to get getting better at being a dev, getting a better job, and then getting better at life. There's a that's a big topic here, but it's it's honestly, we're just gonna hit some some, you know, 80 Wes kind of stuff there. But we're gonna try to fill this with personal examples from our own career, how they helped us, things that work, things that didn't work, and just in general, the types of things that you can do to get better. Now if you want your code to get better, you can do a couple of things. You can sign up for century@century.i0forward/syntax, and it's going to give you errors. It's gonna give you performance tips. It's gonna allow you to have access to metrics in your application.

Honestly, too many helpful, handy things to really discuss in one little sentence. You can also sign up for the Syntax newsletter, which is the snack pack. That's what we call it. It's a fun little name. We like to have fun around here, so we call our newsletter the snack pack. You can sign up for the snack pack at syntax.fmforward/snackpack.

We'll have a link to that in the show Node, and you can get new helpful Sanity links, hot tips, tips and tricks, and even some interesting little, we're doing, you know, one off kind of potluck questions in there too where we're answering those on video now inside of the newsletter. So sign up at syntax.fmforward/snackpack.

Alright.

Let's start.

How do you get better at being a developer? Right? And this is very generalized. How how do you go from where you're at right now to where you want to be or maybe where you see other people at? And you think, man, be really great if I was as good as my coworker who's so smart at x, y, and z.

In my mind, one of the biggest, most, like, left on the table things that developers don't do is they don't ask a lot of questions. They don't ask good questions. They don't ask questions of the people who could answer them. People like the having their ego stroked a bit. Right? And if you ask them questions, it's going to make them feel smart. People like to answer Wes. As long as you're not, like, annoying them or or finding an opportune time to do so when they're maybe perhaps busy.

You say, hey. Can I pick your brain on x, y, and z later? Maybe it's somebody at work or even on Twitter. You can ping anybody. But let me tell you. The people that I see the most on Twitter asking questions seem to be advancing more than other people, and that could just be a visibility thing or even in my my Discord or our Discord channel, I should say. People ask questions in there. They get answers. People help. If you don't ask questions, man, you might not even know if you're in the right ballpark on something.

So that JS, like, a a key thing that's hard to learn. I'm a shy Vercel. Personally, I've always had a hard time asking questions in class, but I have learned more often than not that if you don't ask the questions, you know, you will kind of struggle through getting the right answer. Yeah.

Yeah. I I find that that is the best thing about having this podcast. We have really smart people on JS well as Twitter, social media, Discord, whatever.

Being able to just ask a question, I'm always surprised at yes. You get the answer to a specific thing. And, yeah, you probably coulda Googled it. But often, like, the discussion that comes as a follow-up to it or the the enlightenment that you get from different conversations is I'm always like, wow. Like, the other day, I I have this website, Wes, and it it redirects. It says you spelled West Boss wrong. Tony Danza is the boss. My West Boss is with a single s in it, and then it redirects you. Right? And I have a little hit counter on there of how many times people have visited it, and I'm switching the database provider behind it.

And I was like, what like, what should I use? Like, this is a stupid, silly, little little website, and I would love to just try the initially, I had built it just to try out Sanity scale, and now I wanna move it to something else. Which what should I possibly use? And the amount of, like, really interesting, replies that I got from that and, like, the all the little sub threads where people are talking about Cloudflare durable objects versus Cloudflare Flare key value, and, like, how key value can only be updated per key once per second. So maybe it's not a good use case for that because I only have 1 key.

Whereas, like, a durable object might be a a better use case for something like that, and some people are talking about concurrency and being able to have multiple connections to that type of thing. You know? Some other people are like, oh, why not self host? Something like that. And someone's like, why not stick it in DNS, which blew my mind that that you could possibly do that because DNS is kind of like a database itself. And I was just like, this was silly a silly question. Not a silly question, but it's a silly project. And it's kind of just an open ended question just being like, what should I do? Right? And, like, the amount of, like, like, expert level enlightenment I got from that, unbelievable. And that's just one example. I have that, like, at least 3 times a day over 15 years, 20 years of doing this. Yeah. The more you ask questions too, the more you get used to asking questions. You know, we just had,

CJ on the show, CJ of Syntax, and I got to ask him all about Docker.

And I I had no problem looking like somebody who doesn't know anything about Docker because I don't on the podcast. And sure enough, there's comments. It's like, it's really refreshing to see somebody who you think would know all this stuff, ask questions because they don't know this stuff. And I I think that's it's an important example. You know, one thing that also too you can you can practice on here is and and by all means, you want to verify this stuff, but using AI chat gbt to ask questions or to even understand things beyond, like, asking for code examples, because code examples is a whole another story. You kinda gotta know what you want when you're dealing with AI and code. But if you can ask chat gbt, like, for instance, I'm getting the, home networking stuff. Hey. I'm thinking about using this tech with this tech with this tech. Does that make any sense whatsoever? And then it can say, here's how people use those tech together.

Yes. That that that tracks.

You gotta kinda you know, you can't always take AI's, you know, word at face value for it, but it can be a good introduction to just say, hey. Is this a dumb idea?

One more tip I have around asking questions is and this is something I personally had to be okay with JS is be okay with either being misunderstood or people assuming that you don't know something. Mhmm.

And sometimes I I found myself trying to preface, I I know this much, and I I know but, like, who cares? Like, the amount of people that talk to me I had just finished a project with Cloudflare d one, which is a SQLite database on Cloudflare.

I feel like I know a lot about Cloudflare d o d one Node, and a lot of people were were were explaining Cloudflare d d one to me. Not because they're being a jerk, because they're they're excited to share that type of thing. And, initially, I was like, oh, I know about Cloudflare d one, but Node. Who cares? It's fine. It's fine. You don't have to tell it. Like, I know you're not a peacock here trying to show your skill level of obscure database knowledge.

People you're you're just out there to learn.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Next 1 is to get your hands dirty. Make things. Make mistakes. You Node, a lot of people, they don't wanna build something because maybe they're afraid they will do it poorly or that it won't work or that it'll expose that they don't know things or maybe it'll expose to themselves that they're not as smart as they thought. You gotta kinda get over this stuff because if you wanna learn anything, the best thing you could possibly do, even beyond firing up a YouTube tutorial or a blog post or anything, is to open up your code and just try to make something.

It doesn't have to be impressive. I wanted to learn graphics programming. So, I've been working with all kinds of stuff whether it is like shaders or p five or just straight up web GPU, like, to the dome. And to me, just really getting a a circle drawn into a canvas, that's a win for me, especially in Wes GPU land. Right? Just getting that far. You don't have to have something massively impressive to show at the end of it, but just getting your hands dirty and saying, okay.

This is, I guess, what this world is will give you such a different perspective on it than just looking at docs or looking at code. Yeah. Then and, hopefully, that's something that comes across in this podcast, and that's, like, sort of a core tenet we hear have in this podcast is that Scott and I are practitioners.

Right? Like, we don't wanna be the guys that are simply reading the docs and talking about it. We wanna talk about it from a point of view of we have used this, and we understand it. Because once you actually implement it, React Server Components is a huge one in this area right now is that until you actually use it and until you actually hit the issues and and try to understand design patterns and the the pros and the cons to that type of stuff, it is very hard to sort of talk about it without doing it. So get your hands dirty. Actually build stuff. Like, how do you get better at dev? You dev. Right? Yeah. I know it's a surprising answer, but you can read Medium blog posts till you're blue in the face, but nothing beats

the real thing. And, also, you know, I think some people too, they're like, oh, I don't wanna ins I don't wanna implement another to do list application because a to do list has been done to death. Do a to do list. There there's not like you can learn so much about basic operations, crud, whatever from doing a to do list pnpm anything. So, usually, I'll I'll have some sort of a jazz dev version of a a to do list if I'm wanting to learn, like, a full CRUD system just because it can teach you a lot about the general flow of what you might expect in those process. One thing that I really admire about you, Wes, is that you had your hot tips GitHub repo Wes you just throw in any kind of Deno, half baked or fully baked, whatever, into here. And so I recently started my own, which is why there's not much in here. There will be. Don't worry. And I'm calling mine cool treats because I didn't wanna rip you off. I just wanted to be a little out here. Yeah. Can you get a sign that says cool treats? That would be really good. I would love that. Yeah. So I started my own cool treats. I'll I'll keep updating them. I I did something in p five in there. I did something with WebMIDI in there. I'm just I'm just using it as a, hey. You wanna quickly get up and running? You got a Vite server in there. You got some basic CSS. I used your package too, the one that allows you to have a V dir. V dir. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, that's

that is such a good tip. I know I made it, but having an a folder that has in it, and you can create a folder or a file.

And, like, the old PHP days, navigate to that HTML file, and it will process any TypeScript or, CSS that is needed or React or JSX or anything is so good because you hear us talk about select list on the last podcast.

You just make a folder called select list and try it out. Immediately try it out, and you don't have to, like, do the whole setup and get your live reloading. That, like, that like, getting your environment dialed in just to try something is never good. And then I also never like like like, sometimes I go to CodePen to to try stuff out, but I just wanna do it in my comfy editor with all my shortcuts and all my themes and everything. JS there anything worse than hitting command s

on a on a in browser editor? And, like, for me, Yarn Browser, like, throws over in the sign menu because that's a shortcut in in Arc Browser. I I even changed your your kind of repo a little bit, and I wrote my own little plug in to inject HTML templates. So if you wanna see what a little bit more complex one is, I have, like, the ability to insert HTML templates via template tags in the straight up HTML files. That way, you can have, like, kind of base CSS. So it's just, like, a little bit more fancy than yours in just a slightly way because, you know, I couldn't just completely rip it off entirely. So That's good. So, like, you can, like, include, like, a header and footer on each of the demos?

Yeah. Like, it's a PHP include?

Every single one of my demos has a header that has a link back to the demos page. It says back to the demos. Good. And and it's just automatic. You know? I need that.

And you just do that via middleware?

I I wrote a Vite plug in, which I called Scott injection just because that's funny.

Oh, okay. Yeah. That's that's pretty much it. It basically just looks at your HTML files, and anytime it sees the bracket percentage sign, it reads that as an HTML file and then inserts that HTML file into the actual code. Oh, maybe I should add that to to the plug in. That seems really handy. Yeah. It's Wes need a show called Little Demos.

Yeah. Little Demos. Cool or cool treats. Hot tips and cool treats.

Yes.

I gotta get my sign. You gotta show me where you got yours. I'll get my new. I'll hook it up.

Next tip we have here is share what you know.

People want to hire really good developers, and they need to know that you know what you're talking about. And sometimes for people who have spent their entire career working for somebody else, you don't really have a whole lot to show for for what you want. And how do you Node? How do you show somebody that you know what you're talking about? Obviously, that's what the interview process is for, but a lot of people get dropped before that.

So dig in. These are my tips here JS dig in to new things.

Whenever you hear us talk about something, have a cool treats repo. Try it out. All the AI stuff is is hot right now. Try that out.

Post it online somewhere. Right? Mhmm. Blog, tweet, videos, commerce, threads. Core channels, wherever you're available.

Yeah. Hey. Check this out. Send it to your mom. Gist. Yeah. Yes. Endless.

Like, we're trying to have examples for for each of these, and I've heard from so many people who just started a simple little blog or a little YouTube channel explaining what it is. And this is not like you're not trying to make a YouTube channel with a 1000000 followers and become a coding influencer or whatever.

Just trying to share what you know via some sort of medium that you're comfortable with or maybe not comfortable with to try something new is showing that you know the stuff

well enough that you can explain it to others and and sort of share what you know. Yeah. In the easy version of that, if you don't wanna do video, video is admittedly hard. Just have a blog and and try to set a goal for yourself. I'm gonna blog twice twice a month. And guess what? It doesn't have to be on anything original. It does not have to be a unique concept.

It doesn't have to be something that no one's ever blogged about before.

But nothing's worse than maybe, like, you're interviewing a ESLint. You open up their website. It says blog, and you're like, oh, cool. I can't wait to check out what they've been blogging about. And it's like 1 post from 4 years ago. So just make it a regular habit, and you'll get better at it. But the blog, I think, is the easier version of doing the YouTube channel, and it definitely can help you. It can help you even distill your own knowledge.

You're not again, you're not necessarily using this to try to gain influence or an audience or anything like that. You're just straight up doing it for Vercel. And I think that's the best way to look at it. Mhmm.

Even just, like, posting on on Twitter or threads or whatever, wherever you Yarn, if you've learned something, take 10 minutes to freaking distill it down and and and send it on out there. Because the amount of times I've I've stumbled upon a really helpful little nugget from somebody who has 40 followers, unbelievable. So I find some of the best followers on Twitter that way because people took a second to share what they know. Yeah. You start searching for specific terms and and interesting niches and stuff in warp you're building. Specific error message? Like, I've started just searching error messages on also on GitHub and also on on Twitter because sometimes you'll stumble upon a thread of people talking about that specific thing or or I'll even like, you find a GitHub issue, and I wanna, like, talk about it quickly, I'll often just find the person on Twitter and say, hey. Did you ever solve this? And, like, it happened to me on Friday. No. I didn't, but this is how I worked around it, and they shared some code with me. Unbelievable.

The world is amazing.

Yeah. I tell. Right? Yeah. Next 1 is to, target your skills to what's needed.

So and that's what's needed by what potential employers, maybe your own current job, or maybe what the world Node. Or maybe you can take a bigger viewpoint and take a step back and see where things are going. You can see, alright. I see that machine learning is clearly going to be the future here. Let me spend some serious time investing in my knowledge on machine learning. Because we talk all the time.

It's fundamentals.

Learn the fundamentals. And, yes, you do have to learn the fundamentals in your career.

But specializations and, like, deep knowledge in areas are oftentimes are what will get you to the next level, will get you that job, especially in a world where, you know, these specializations, they can be the difference between you getting the job and not getting the job. I I'm very talented at developing a lot of things. I applied for an Angular Node point three job at some point in the past 6 Yarn, and I'd mostly been working in React. So when they interviewed me, I said, well, I've been working in React a long time, now, but I had worked in Angular before. And I understand Angular, and I've built a lot of things with Angular. So when they ask me questions about details in Angular, I'd say, well, I don't have to check the docs for that. I didn't get the job, because you know what? I'm not the specialist there. So you kinda gotta know, like, what is needed and take some time to learn those things.

Yeah. And that, whether you like it or not, is React and JavaScript right now in in the job market.

Not to say that, like, you should just take something that you do not like, but if you're trying to hack the system, if you're trying to, like, widen your your chances, then there's a reason why people focus on getting jobs with the most popular thing out there.

Case in point, I just got 2 tweets here. Ryan Carniato, who is the lead dev on Solid JS, he tweeted out the other day, if you ever want a humbling experience, you just have to look that 10stack query dev tools, which is 10 stack query is a library for fetching data.

10 stack query dev tools is a library for debugging that specific tool that you generally only install locally.

It has more downloads than all of Solid JS, which is the library that he works on, which is wild. Just shows how how large the React ecosystem is. And another one, Justin Fagani, he JS. He was also on on the show as well. He's from ESLint.

He says Preact, which is an alternative React renderer, passed Angular on weekly Npm downloads, which I don't know if that's entirely because I know a lot of people from Angular loaded in via CDN. I don't know if that's still true or not, but an alternative React renderer has more downloads than all of Angular.

So sometimes it makes sense just to if you really wanna hack the system. I did it myself when I was doing freelancing. I had a huge buzzword bingo matrix on my website. It included every single buzzword that I've ever touched in in JavaScript PHP dev, and that got me so much work because people scanned it and said,

we used these 2 things. This guy's the right guy. Buzzword bingo, maybe not great for your resume, though. If I see a giant word cloud of Good point. Of skills on your resume like that, it will make me think that you don't know any of them. So Exactly. But website's different. That's SEO traffic. Right? Next one is get out of your comfort zone.

You know what? I this is something that I've seen so many times, people using the I'm bad at x, y, and z as an excuse. I'm bad at JavaScript.

Therefore, I cannot learn this or I can't pick this up. This is just a straight up, like, mindset error that you gotta get away from. Because if if you tell yourself you are bad at this or bad at that, then you won't ever get good at this. Now I say this all the time. I'm bad at writing. Wes, you've seen me say that often in the Slack channel. I I I feel bad. I did bad at writing. But when I actually wrote a blog post for century, it's actually it was fine. Sure enough, I had people edited and stuff like that, but it was totally fine. And I need to get out of that habit of saying I'm bad at writing. Because just like with code, if you say you are bad at x, you won't get anywhere. You will be holding yourself back. I used to be very bad at JavaScript. I was I mean, this is let me tell you. This JS a long time ago.

Deno. But, you know, JavaScript scared me because I had done ActionScript before in Flash. I was mostly a PHP developer at that time, and I would have said my specialties were just in CSS. Like, that's really where I was, you know, feeling the most confident with CSS.

So for me, I knew all the tips and tricks at CSS. But anytime it came to doing anything intensely at JavaScript, I would pass it off to my coworkers because it felt hard for me. So the only way to get out of that is to find basic examples and work your way up. And next thing you know, you are more than proficient at JavaScript. If I were to look at myself today from where I was back then, I would be shocked that I was the same person because I I felt like Yeah. JavaScript was too hard for me, but it really wasn't. I just didn't have the practice.

I I remember I've I've told the story a few times, but I remember exactly where I was, walking down the street when I was in university being so frustrated with JavaScript. And I said, I thought, like, may like, maybe I'm just not good enough for for JavaScript. You Node? Maybe I'm maybe it's just not for me. Maybe I need to focus on these types of things. And thank goodness I pushed through that, And and now I'm out of maybe the opposite problem, which is my wife always says I'm, like, unapologetically confident Wes I'm just like, I can probably figure that out. Like, last night, we wanna have a, like, a fence in or a gate installed in our fence.

And she's I'm I'm like, we gotta get that gate going right now. And she's like, yeah. She's like, may we should find someone to hire. I was like, I was like I was like, I'll do it. She's like, do you know do you know how to do it? I was like, yeah.

You know? Like, how hard could it possibly be? I have the same problem, but mine isn't like,

can you do it? Courtney JS always like, yeah. But will you do it? And I was like, well yeah. She's I think there was there was, like, something that she was like, well, will you do this? And I was like, yeah. I'm gonna do it. She's like, okay. Well, we've been talking about it for, like, 2 years now. Oh, yeah. Oh, I just haven't had the the right weekend for it.

I I have that problem as Wes. But it it just goes to show, like it also drives me crazy, and we try to keep this language out out of our houses. We're raising our kids as well. It's like, don't say, like, I'm not good at math.

You know? Don't say that type of thing because then you pigeonhole yourself into being the specific person.

Certainly, some people are way better at specific things. I see it in my own kids. Some of them are way better at math than some of the other ones and and everything. That totally makes sense, and that's valid. But that's not to say that you cannot push through and learn these types of things, and you should be at least willing to try and pick up and try to explore new areas because your confidence in learning these new things gets better every single time that you do master one of them. Yeah. Even even a non Node example, when I first started

learning how to dance, you would not believe how many people were like, you can't dance. Why do you wanna learn how to dance? You are not good at dancing. Why would you even think to want to learn how to dance? And this was like, it it it took a lot for me to get over other people saying that because I didn't I didn't I knew I couldn't dance, but I didn't have that, like, I I didn't have that, like, confidence to say, alright. I'm gonna be really great. It was like, well, I just really wanna learn this, and that's why I'm doing it.

But you would not believe how many how many people would were giving that voice to me that you you can't do this or you will be bad at this.

Coding examples, try a new framework to learn just for fun. You might not get anywhere. You might not even get a hello world running, but you might as well try it. It might give you some different understanding.

Sometimes unfamiliar topics, will expand your knowledge of familiar ones as well. Right? You can see, like, maybe you're used to just writing everything in an object oriented way, and then you try a functional programming language or even just functional programming. Next thing you know, you might even look at the way you write your, object oriented code differently or anything differently for that matter.

So those are a lot of good tips for getting better at code. I think the Node thing that I would like to instill is just straight up write code, ask Wes, don't be afraid to feel out of your depths. Yeah. Just to go for it. And if you fail, there's really no harm, no foul. It's not like you're building a bridge that's going to collapse or something. You're just writing code for, you know, fun on your computer. That is, like, very low stakes. And as long as you keep in mind that everything you're working on for this learning adventure here is low stakes, you won't you won't feel like held back by that. You can just go to town and try new things.

Let's talk about getting a a better job. And now some of this stuff is not just getting a better job, but getting promotions or being recognized at your job or even just being seen as a valuable asset. So that way, if somebody asks for a referral or something like that, you can get a glowing review or even a referral from coworkers.

You Node, some of my favorite coworkers, if they ask me for a referral, I will gush about how awesome they are if they were awesome to work with. So, like, those types of things can go a really long ways.

So I I think one of the things that developers oftentimes don't do in this area is they don't necessarily understand, 1, stakeholders, and 2, they don't understand, like, the goals, the overarching goals of the business. We end up just thinking really tightly about, I'm building a thing with code.

And you might not necessarily understand how that affects either the bottom line or what your boss Node.

Who's asking your boss for what, and who's asking their boss for what? You Node, right down the chain, it it comes down and ends up on your desk. You're thinking, alright. I gotta push this code out. But what's the actual goal, and who needs it? Why do they need it? How important is this? Is this something that people are really truly relying on? And if I knock this out, how can I make it so everybody knows that I knock this out? Because if you understand who needs what done and how important it is or what the bigger picture is of your role in your job, it can really, like, give you a different perspective on the quality that you put into your work, but also, like, how you present your work and how you present yourself with that work.

What else here? And, also, sorry, in addition to that, it can also get you things like more resources or tools that you need or anything. Because if you pitch anything to your boss or your boss's boss, you're trying to get money for services or education or anything like that, if you can speak to their needs, not your needs, then it it will serve you so much better in the long run of of getting those things to Scott only just improve your abilities as a developer, but it'll also show them that you're thinking bigger picture, which is important to know that you're not just like a cog in the machine. You're somebody who values the bigger picture.

Exactly. And on that, I think one tip I've heard many times is find the metric that the business or the organization cares about and figure out how to make that move. So when I was freelancing, I would not just focus on, like, Wes. I'm pressing the buttons and and making the website. It's okay.

Like, how does your business work? Right? Like like, what do you want at the end of the day, whether it's more sales, you want a faster website, you want an easier to to to update website, whether it's your your users are complaining about a specific thing, figure out what those metrics are that they are focused on and learn how to move the bar on those metrics.

Yes. Absolutely.

Make an impression as being the person that gets things done fast and reliably.

I'll tell you what. I've I've worked at many agencies where individuals were working on individual projects. Like, individual developers would get sign assigned with a designer or something, and they're they're cranking on a project.

And there are some developers who would always come in a month late, half a month late, weeks late. And then there's other developers who Yarn always finishing several weeks early, and it's not about putting in overtime. You gotta figure out how to work smarter, how to get things done faster in a way that is, not sacrificing quality, but also not, like, destroying your mental health or, like I said, putting in overtime.

You Node, it's funny. My my my 6 year old son, Oh, man. What was I talking to? I was talking to him about something the other day, and he said, dad this is a direct quote from my 6 year old. He said, dad, are you afraid of hard work? And I said, why would you why would you possibly say that? Now, obviously, I'm not afraid of hard work. I started my own business. I, one time when I was 16, I worked 3 jobs at once. Like, very not afraid of hard work. I was like, well, why would you say why would you say that? He's like, well, because you said you wanted to do this the easy way.

And this is I was like, I could not believe how insightful that was from this little 6 year old, and I said I said, listen. The easy way like, if you do things the easy way, you have way more time to do more. And and not only do you do more, you do more with less effort. So you can work Yarn. You can accomplish more. And doing things the easy way isn't like an easy way out or it's not not working hard.

It's working smarter. And if you can understand how to work smarter, I think you will bring a lot of value to anything that you do.

Next 1 we have here is improving communications.

This we've talked about communication a lot over the years, and that is generally when you're talking to somebody and you're in a meeting, being able to accurately convey what it is you are understanding, actually convey what the problems might be, other things like email, making sure that it is as clear as possible whether or you're in a Slack channel. We all get those people who just sort of have, like, a frazzled brain dump, and it's just like a bit of a chore to have to read through all of their emails or they fire off a million at once. And then you you get other people who have really good timing on their communication and are able to accurately convey it, or they can ask the question right up front and then provide a little bit more context lower down.

Those people are really great to work with.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And this is something that I've never been great at, me personally.

But the thing you need to know about communication is that, like, yes, you can over communicate and you can be annoying. But I think a lot of people fall on the side of under communicating, particularly because they're either stressed or they think if they maybe fix the problem before they reach out, then the person won't care that it's late. But But if it's something's gonna be let's say let's say something's gonna be late. Your client wants to know earlier rather than later that it's late. If you're, like, avoiding that email, it's 5 days late, and you're thinking, I just gotta get this done and then I'll send it to them. That's bad. So you would much rather say, hey. I'm running a little bit late here.

I will get this to you in 5 days and then execute on it. This is the same thing. Like, think about it. You're gonna be late to dinner.

You got an appointment with somebody. Nobody likes the person that just shows up late. Send a text. Yeah. Say, hey. I'm running late. And don't send that text already late. Send that text early to let them know you're gonna be late. Yeah. I saw a thing once where someone said,

I think it was on, like, Reddit shower thoughts.

The person who says they'll be there in 5 minutes and the person that says they'll be there in 6 minutes, the person that says 6 minutes will be there before the person that says 5. And that makes so much sense to me. It's like, you actually understand Time. Like, time and and how this thing's working. You're you're accurate. You're not just trying to push it off. The person says, 5 minutes, and you're you're 30 minutes away.

I I have friends like that all the time where it's just like yeah. We used and we used to go to the bars. We had we had each other on, like, find my friends. And you would look at the map, and you'd be like, they haven't even left yet. Left. Yeah. We said be here by 7, and they're probably still doing their hair. Yeah. Find Find My has been really great. It it's funny because if I'm, like, picking up dinner or something, we're getting takeout. Courtney says she'll just, like, watch my, like, Yarn position so that she knows when to set the table or when to get the stuff for the kids. Yeah. It's it's awesome. It's a a great feature. I don't feel people are creeped out by it, but there's nothing better than having everybody know. Like, I share it with my whole family. Yeah. Yeah. I I wanna know exactly where they are, and I we used the Google Maps version with my dad because he's on Android, unfortunately, and it it doesn't update as frequently. And sometimes it's out of date, but the the Apple one is awesome. Yeah. Definitely works well. Oh, here's a good one.

Be the person they want to have around in meetings or even just around in general. It's very funny because Sarah Drasner just, like, tweeted out today.

It is really good timing. She tweeted out the biggest mistakes I see devs make is being rude to people in other positions at the company.

And then she went on some more, which is very funny because I read that tweet seconds after I wrote this section of this show notes, which JS, seriously, we've all worked with the developer who's a bummer to clients, who's a bummer to staff members that aren't developers maybe, or even to other developers that they think they're better than. They think they're too cool because they can do some advanced stuff on the code. And because of that, like, I can see it coming a mile away in meetings. You're in a meeting with a client, and they take this, like, posture. They're just like, they got their code. Maybe they got their laptop in front of them. They got a hoodie on or something. Like, man, be the be the developer they want to have there.

Be the person that they can rely on to not talk down to non tech people, to be able to explain technical topics in a really basic way, metaphor, analogy, those types of things. You can take an example and say, here's why. I had a client one time being like, why does this website not work in IE 6? And the easiest way you can say is say you you say, dummy, nobody uses IE 6. Right? The the you couldn't you're flexing your knowledge. But you'd say, well, actually, you know, the I e six only has this percentage of market share. Most people have moved off it. It's not worth our time. It'll make the website worse than these following reasons. That's a good explanation. And you do so kindly, people will understand. If you don't, they're just gonna think you're a jerk for no reason.

So be the person that not only can talk about your code in an accessible way, but can be in a meeting reliably and people will trust to be able to represent them correctly.

I I I again, I I've worked with many developers who, like I say, many, maybe 1 at each job I ever worked at where the management would say, so and so, just stay out of this meeting or whatever. Like, we'll bring in just Scott or just so and so because they know that they're not going to represent their work or their team correctly.

A developer also might be a big brain and is successfully opting out of meetings as well. Do you ever think about that?

Yeah. They're successfully opting out of, not being promoted. Promotion. Yeah. Good raises or any of that stuff or getting good referrals for their other jobs. But either way, nobody nobody likes to be around that Vercel that's a bum. No.

Also, use systems to help your deficiencies. I'm not good at time management.

I'm not good at communication.

I'm not good at, keep I guess time management is the same thing. So what I do, I use to do lists like crazy. My to do list is the source of truth for my entire life. I will if I have something on my to do list for that day, I force myself to do it. And, again, I use that, like, kind of eat that frog method, not all the time, but where I take care of the biggest, baddest to do first.

Sometimes that's not possible.

Sometimes it's a recording a video, and I look like crap, so I don't wanna do it. But, again, use your tools to help you. Yeah. I agree as well. I have such a frazzled brain when I have lots of things to do. My favorite thing to do is to have 1 thing to do is to write Node, but that's not the reality of lots of things. Sometimes I have 20 little things that need to be done, and my brain is just like, I don't know what to do. Putting them in a to do system, ordering them, I bubble bubble them up and down, and then just do the next thing next. We've talked about that many times on the podcast, but that is so helpful for a deficiency that I specifically have is not being able to put everything in order.

So some sort of system to hack it is a key.

Yeah. Another good one is, I've wrote dress to impress. You don't have to dress to impress, but just don't look like a slob every day. People notice that stuff if you're the, like, you can look like a slob occasionally. Like, everybody's entitled to to feel like they can look like a slob. Yeah. They're they're you know, there's maybe not a number I don't know. Get some things you'd like to Wes. And if you like to wear, wear them. Another thing is care about your work. Are you an assembly line robot or a craftsperson? Do you what do you wanna be? You know? Yes.

Cut the cynicism. I really like this one JS I think a lot of developers think that them being cynical about specific tech makes them look like they are extremely Scott. Or cool.

Absolutely Yarn cool or or really know that they're dialed in.

In reality, it's it just seems that you have insecurities about what's going on. It just makes you look like an asshole to everybody around you, and nobody likes being around. I I find those type of people such energy sucks that are constantly even on on Twitter, there's, I don't know, there's lots of people on there that are constantly complaining and saying why things are bad rather than just talking about what they like. And to a point, you do need to to be able to criticize thing. But if your whole personality is just being critical of something, that must be so exhausting.

It's exhausting not just for you, probably. It's exhausting for anybody who wants to spend time with you. There there's, like, a concept of, like, the the psychic vampire, which sounds very woo woo, or the energy vampire is also called. But it's like these people who are just sucking everybody else's energy from the room because they're just, like, they're just a bummer. I think that, you know, people might have called this a a Debbie Downer at some point in the past, but those types of people that might just suck this kind of the air out of the room. But, you know, the the cynicism thing is a real problem where people are so eager to talk about their employer, to talk about their coworkers, to talk about tech in a way that's just, like, I don't know, cynical for no no reason other than to to look cool.

We had a a really bad interview.

I'm not going to reveal too much more with a really bad interview in when we're interviewing recently.

And this person was so cynical about everything. We'd ask him, how do you feel about video podcasts? And video podcasts have no future. There's no reason to do a video podcast. Alright. Well, that's what we're making here. That's the job that we asked you to interview for and you signed up to interview for. So Yeah. How do you feel about, AI tool? AI tools are the worst. The devil is gonna you know? It's like, okay. Well, what do you, like, what do you actually

like or care about? It seems like you just hate everything. You know? Yeah. That blows my mind that people can be so cynical all the time about those types of things, especially when you're in an interview.

Yeah. Wild.

Here's the one that it kinda goes along with that that should be obvious.

Don't put bad stuff out into the world publicly under your name. Man, there's a guy on Twitter. I I don't wanna say who it was, but they were just ripping their current employer, their current employer, the person they're currently employed by. It's public. It's on Twitter. They can read that. And then when they got fired, which they obviously got fired, they were complaining that their coworker should or their their boss should not have fired them just because of stuff they said on Twitter. Man, that that's the shocked Pikachu face. Like, why would you ever be surprised about that? If you need to complain about stuff like that, like, if you need to do that, like, sure. I can get a little box number. One, either get a back channel or put on, like, a a, like, a an alt social media account. Right? I don't I don't see the purpose of that because I don't wanna put that out in the world. But, like, if you need to do that, why Yeah. Why would you put that under your name trashing of a current or former employee? Your your next employer is going to see that and be like, do I wanna work with this person? No.

You know? That's not do you do you have an alt Twitter account, Scott? No. No. I you know what? I could not listen. I have the syntax Twitter account login. Yeah. I have the level or I have the level up tutorials one that I used to have, that just sits dormant, and then I have my own. I do not have time to manage that other one. Yeah. I often

see I don't have 1 myself either, but I often see like, people will when they don't agree with something or, like, I tweet something about JavaScript, and then they say, oh, I hate JavaScript.

It's Sanity. You can see people have logging into their alts and and replying from that one. And you can you can see that the whole account is dedicated to them replying from their alt so that they can trash you without you actually knowing who it is, which is

wild. Here's a small hack if you're worried about putting negativity in the world. Just make all of your account usernames your actual name, and then everyone can track anything back to your name. And so that way, you won't. You'll think twice about posting anything directly that could be just, get you in trouble later.

Last 1 I have here is just, like, get your camera and microphone dialed in.

Spend an hour watching YouTube videos on how to make your camera and your microphone sound good.

We live in a world where you are going to be likely on a Zoom call at some point during the day, And it still blows my mind that you can get on a call with somebody, and they'd be like, Zoom, Computers.

Like, figure it out. We've had this before, 5 years since COVID. We've been doing this for a long time.

Pnpm a little bit of time.

And that's not to say you have to go buy a nice camera or whatever. You certainly can, but figure out how do you get lighting, how do you get how do you do something to your room so that you sound and look good? Because that is one of those things that when you're trying to figure something out, when you're trying to get to know somebody over a video call, those things really help. We see it ourselves, and Wes have people on the podcast. The people that have good Internet, good microphone, good camera, you have a much more relaxed, conversational back and forth than somebody who's just like like, oh, yeah. I found this tin can of beans, and I put plugged it into USB, and it's working.

Yeah. And don't feel like you have to spend money on this either. I know the the laptops now have, like, pretty good mics in them. I think the important important thing might even just be framing, right, which is a wild thing. If you look at Wes and I in our video right now, notice where our eyes are. Right? They're both at the same level. And why are our eyes at that level? It's the rule of thirds, where our eyes are just about 1 third up in the frame. You know? So if you split the frame into thirds, our eyes are approximately there. I could if I'm sitting up tall, I'm actually at the 3rd. But, you know, in general, you don't wanna be down here. You don't wanna be over here. You don't wanna be up here. Like, you wanna be someplace that, like, actually looks nice. Alright. Let's get into the things where you can, level up at life real quick because these are just kind of very broad and general things and and just kinda fit into everything. They they kind of make everything else easier. 1, take care of your shit. Be nice to your things. Don't trash your stuff. Keep it clean. Like, wipe it down. Hey. How hard is it to, every once in a while, wipe down your laptop or your phone or any of that stuff? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You got fingerprints all over. That was actually one thing. When we did the boot camp,

we would have a, like, a couple of those clogs and some of the screen cleaner on hand. And whenever anybody that was a potential employer came around and for the things, we would be like, everyone, clean your screens. It's disgusting, and that makes such an improvement. Yeah. Scott's got it right there. He's got

wipers on his glasses all day long. Yeah. I I did I got one comment about how dirty my glasses were, and I said never again. So I keep this ZEISS, glasses cleaner on my desk. And before we record every episode, I spritz them down. But I also use this on my computer because there's no alcohol in this. It cleans it, gets all the anything off of it. But this is this stuff is cheap. It comes with this little microfiber. You can get it on Amazon. It's probably Oh, get the boosh cloth. I have the whoosh cloth. Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna save that for a sick pick. I've sick picked that before, but I'll pick it again. Exercise. We we just did an episode on exercising syntax 4 or seven forty eight. We've done several other of these.

Even if it's just doing a couple push ups a day or going for a walk, it's not like you gotta be, like, a marathon runner or something. Get some movement in your day. You'll feel better.

Eat Wes. Yeah. You can have fast food here and there, but, you know, I used to have this big problem where at work, I would go and get, like, Panda Express, like, every day. Doesn't make you feel good.

Like, that's not that's not a good thing to do. Sleepy. Yeah. I used to just text my, coworker gifts of pandas, and he'd be like, okay.

Again? Why? Yeah. Again.

I want I want that orange chicken. Sleep as much as you can that's hard with kids.

Wes.

Clean your spaces every single Friday. Every single Friday.

3 or 4 PM. The worst at this. The worst. Take You should see my desk right now. Well, you see the random stuff on my desk? Tuesday. Yeah.

It's just like I got all kinds of random stuff on my desk. 2 by

4 on my desk that's been sitting here for 3 months. My daughter brought me wooden ice cream yesterday. I got a wooden set.

Yep. I need to I I've I need to get better at that because it's whenever I do clean my desk, I I get the the wood polish out and

feel so good.

Here's the the hack is to do it right before you leave work. Give yourself 20 Sanity. You you got 20 minutes to spare at the end of the day on Friday. Everybody does. Right? You're not pushing anything live. Let's be real. Yeah. Take all this stuff. Take that time. Wipe all your stuff down. You'll come back on Monday being like, what is this place? This place is great. Learn new skills, all kinds of skills. Doesn't have to be web skills. It can be anything. I like to learn dancing skills. I like to learn handstands, whatever. Watch YouTube. There's tons of stuff out there. Do home repair stuff. Anything you could possibly think of, Learn skills.

Lastly, take care of yourself. Take pride in how you look. I mean Yeah. It just helps. It helps you feel better. When I'm when I'm in depressive states, I, like, don't want to take care of myself. I don't want to do my to do list. And guess what? If I force myself to do it, even if I'm in a depressive state, I feel better every single time. You should see my to do list after I get a haircut. Man, I'm feeling fresh when I get a new haircut. Yeah. You're right. Yeah. Nothing could stop me. Nothing could stop me. But and the go back to the last one JS learning new skills. Mhmm. I love sharing

everything that I'm into and and learning and whatnot, and I honestly think that that helps with I think it helps with this podcast. I think it helps with online.

Like, I've I've made some really good friendships. I think that that shows that you are a multi multidisciplinary.

It's same thing with your dancing as well. Like, you can you can look at it and say, like, okay.

This person is not only good at dev. They are good at other parts of their life, and they are probably

somebody that I would like to hire. Yeah. I think that matters. One of the questions, that Caitlin asked in every interview that we did was, like, what are your hobbies? What do you like to do? And it's funny that we didn't come up with that question, but she did. And it was like, wow. Yeah. That that is such a a good good thing to understand, like, what people are about. Like, what do they get into? What what makes them tick? What's fun? What's interesting to them? Hobbies, man. I I I'm a big big hobby guy. I I tend to go down hobby rabbit holes. But there is something to be said about, you know, really investing, like, years into specific hobbies, because you can get a lot out of that as well. Like, I've been dancing I've been dancing for 20 years now. That's wild. Yeah. It is wild. If I've done anything other than development

for 20 years. I'm trying to think.

I've maybe flipped bikes for close to 20 years.

Yeah.

It you get really good at stuff over that long. Yeah.

And, you know, you might not say you might not, like, be like, oh, I I don't have 20 years to invest in something. Well, you can just invest a year or 2 in it, and maybe that turns into 20 years eventually.

So yeah.

Cool. Well, that's it. That's all I have. That's how you level up. You just work on all this stuff. But you know what? At the end of the day, take care of yourself, and a lot of this stuff will come. Take care of yourself. Be introspective. Understand, like, where you're at and and what you wanna do and where you wanna be. For the most part, just try to have positive habits. I I did talk about I did a habit tracker app. You can use it if you want. I've now opened up the login. You don't have to have a wait ESLint anymore. So Sweet. This is not an advertisement for this app. I'd you know, I'll toss it out here. There's a 1,000,000,000 habit apps. This one's free, and I made it for myself to track my podcast. URL? The dubba dubba dubba? Habit path Scott I o.

And, Yeah. You could sign up you can sign them now. It's like I said, it's totally free. I'm tracking, like, 20 plus habits on this thing daily, and I use it all the time. Right now, I I'm really tight in this direction. Like, I can't reach my hands up anymore because I I'm just too darn muscular. So I I've been working on getting that that flexibility. So I've been tracking that habit. I've been tracking, like, you know, my protein intake, which is always really low. I'm I'm I'm actually even tracking if I made a to do list for the day because that, my friends, is something that if I don't do, my day falls apart. And you can definitely see I bet if you did, like, a correlation between my mood and if I did a to do list that day, I bet it'd be a 1 to 1 correlation every single time. Oh, that would be great. Man, just

have a path. Thank first of all, thank you for not doing confirm password.

Yeah. I know that, like, that's needed for regular people, but I don't need to confirm when I'm using a password manager. Sign up Flow. This is really slick. Thank you. Bos built it. Hey. The login I built from scratch. I built that hand rolled it. Nice.

Yeah. I've been working on this is actually Wes, this is another one of those things that you could see in itself as being a Sanity. Because, Wes, I use this app. I dogfood it. I use it every day. But, 2, I work on this app for maybe, like, 30 minutes a day if that a habit of it? I do. I have a habit of working on my habit, which I should put in here. But I I put in a small increment of time on it. And now I've started it in January. We're at March, and this app has gotten significantly better. It has themes. It has light and dark mode. It has, 44 different themes. It has the ability to reorder, to edit, to all sorts of things. So it's a fun little fun little thing. Okay. That's enough on Sanity Path. Let's get into sick picks, picking things that we think are sick. Just because we mentioned in this episode, I'm going to sick pick the glasses lenses care pack I have. You can get this.

It's a it's a lovely 8 ounce bottle of Zeiss glasses cleaner that I have. It comes in a 2 pack for $13, comes with 2 little cheap microfibers, 2 giant, like I use this every day. Look at how much I've used. I use this literally every day. And I use this for everything. I use it on my my video game system. I use it on my phone. I use it on my computer screen.

It's good. So, yeah, works really well.

Sweet. I will sick pick the WHOOSH screen cleaning cloths. I picked them a while ago, but I like to, like, repick things that, like, oh, I've been using these for 2 years, and I still absolutely love them. Yeah.

The Woosh Cloths are like, I've had a lot of lot of microfibers over my day, but there's just something about the the knit on the the Woosh Cloths that make them so good for we keep one for my wife, cleaner glasses in the car. Mhmm. And then, like, in the summer, I wear sunglasses. So I like having, like, specifically having those around as well because you can only wipe them on your shirt so long and, before you lose them. So definitely check out the whoosh Scott. They're only a couple Bos, and, certainly, it's better to get that than a million of the crappy ones Or the, the Apple Polishing Cloth. Yeah. Are those any good? I have a couple of those in the drawer. No. This is the this is the one. This is the Oh. This is the one. And it is The goggles?

The goggles? Oh, no. The the one that got came with the goggles is worse than this. This is the one that came with my expensive monitor. And, like, I I described, it's like the weighted blanket. This thing is is so heavy and thick. It's ridiculous. So this is what I use in my office. But I do love the Woosh ones.

I didn't buy that. I didn't pay $25 for Node stupid monitor. Yeah. But, you know, I paid much more than that for the stupid monitor. But, yeah, the whoosh ones are great. I keep 1 in my entertainment center for the TV all the time. Yeah. I keep 1 in the house.

Apple Apple recommends if you go to the polishing cloth website, it recommends the all the other ridiculous items that they sell, probably intentionally, the Mac Pro wheels and the $1300

stand. Oh my god.

The $1300

stand. Be on purpose.

Yeah.

Oh, touche, Apple. Good for you.

Cool. Well, that's it. I hope you, learned some stuff here or, at the very least, feel inspired to, take your career up a notch and either become a better developer, a better coworker, or a better person in the hopes of, who knows, becoming more of a craftsperson or perhaps, getting advances in your career or getting that big job that you have always wanted.

That's all I got. Anything else, Wes?

That's it. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you later. Peace.