You're listening to syntax the podcast with it's a sweat to mill my treats out there. Grab yourself in and get ready. Here's got to whiskey and West boss. Welcome to syntax.
This is the 2019 year end show. It's definitely not a clip show. So we're not going to do what everyone does. They call it in, you know, you watch a show on TV and they call it in and to show you clips from all the other episodes.
No, we are going to talk to you about what were the most popular syntax episodes, what we've got planned for next year, some personal stuff. What went on with us this year, what we got done, what we learned, a whole bunch of interesting stuff like that. So buckle up and get ready. Today's episode is sponsored by Prismic, which is a headless CMS.
And for Rushbooks, which is cloud accounting software, talk about both of them partway through the episode. My name is West boss. Thanks for tuning in with me as always as Scott Telinsky. How you doing today, Scott?
Hey, I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I'm doing good. It's getting near that time near the end of the year.
You know, it's like a thing where people get ready to do other resolutions and get ready to be hyped up for the next year of their life. I've always tried to do the resolution thing on like a monthly basis, but this year's been nuts as you probably know and as we're going to talk about. So there's a lot to talk about this year. And you know, I'm looking forward to this renew sense of energy.
You get every sort of January. I'm looking forward to just moving on with 2020. We all know 2020 is going to be a better year than 2019 because that's just how the positive mindset works. Cool.
So there you go. Uh, that's all I got really out. Nice little intro. Uh, let's start with next year.
So we plan to do a live episode of syntax in March at reactathon. We did one last year and it was absolutely hilarious. We did the live coding where we did like the tech coding. We did, um, what else did we do?
We did someone like the asking audience. We had the realer fake where we made up things and you had to guess whether or not they were at the library. Uh, the master chef coding thing was so exquisitely hilarious and it worked out so perfectly that neither of us were on the same page for that. If you haven't watched it, find the clip on YouTube.
West posted on his YouTube. We can make a link available to that and why you're out of just that subscribe button so we can get West's YouTube numbers up. But, uh, we, uh, we did this thing where we did this back and forth coding. And it just so turns out we had very different ideas of what we should code.
It's absolutely hilarious. Uh, you should check out the reactathon website as well. I think it's, it's new or it's live with some of the new speakers that are going to be there this year, like Ryan Florence and Cassidy Williams. It's going to be really cool.
They're just starting to start to talk about some of the speakers who are there next year. You'll see West's photo up there, but you won't see mine just yet. Hopefully they're going to put me up there soon. Well, they got to drop.
They, when tickets to sales start to Peter off, then they drop the big bomb. They drop the big. Yeah. Right.
Yeah. And then then they sell it out. So they're waiting to drop it. Yeah.
No, I understand. Yeah. Yeah. It was an awesome conference.
It definitely felt like a very, um, I don't know how to describe it. It felt like a very like community, um, conference, like a lot of people that were out of the conference were pretty advanced in the react that they were using. Like hooks had been out for like a couple of weeks by the last year and they had already been almost everybody there was already using them, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
People were shouting out how to properly write the code that we were trying to write during our, our, uh, magic, I think, uh, no, it was a great event. I had a great time and I'm looking forward to next year's in, uh, in seeing what we can come up for more live show antics. Cause both of our live shows have been absolutely totally super fun. And, uh, I'm just excited to do more of those.
Yeah. Uh, what else has, has been gone well this year? Uh, the Twitter syntax FM on Twitter has done really well. We've, are almost at 30,000 followers, which is pretty significant.
I think, and I think that just comes from us constantly plugging it every single show and then also using it as a medium, not for us to push out information that we make, but using it as a medium for the people who listen to this podcast, to share tips and tricks and thoughts and opinions and whatever it is. And I've really liked, I think like we've sort of hit the sweet spot on that this year, uh, with the Twitter account, basically just retweeting other things. Cause it's hard when you're just like listening to a podcast and you're probably screaming at the screaming at your iPod or car or whatever it is that you're listening to. I mean, like, no, you're wrong about that.
Or there's, there is a better package for that in giving everybody a voice, which is the syntax FM Twitter account has worked out really well. So big fan of that. I'm impressed. And that's really why we're doing everything is for everyone to learn, right?
That's why we're here. And that's why we're talking about this. So we rely on the joint knowledge of the community more than anything for people to share what they're working on, share what they know and improve the knowledge of everybody together. So if you're not on Twitter or you're not following us on Twitter, get on that right now because we really like to share a lot of tasty treats there for not just us, but the rest of the community.
Yeah. But yeah, in the syntax community overall is absolutely incredible. Can we just talk about how, you know, we have sponsors on the show and it's obviously we use the sponsors that we use on the show are products that we like products that we use, products that we know a lot about. We're not just pushing you Harry's razor or whatever, Taco Bell, obviously.
Although I would take Taco Bell in a second. If they were, we're not just having this stuff on you. Sure. Yeah.
Taco Bell get at us with a kroy. Yeah, get out of place. Um, but for the most part, the whole audience just does such an amazing job of letting our sponsors know where they heard about their things. And let me tell you, that just helps us do the show so incredibly much.
You're all amazing. If you're sitting at your desk, just start giving yourself a round of applause and have everybody look at you in the office. Just let them know that we want to, we want to support you, you know. Yeah.
Yeah. And we actually have sold out all the sponsors for next year. And there was a number of companies that wanted to sponsor, but weren't like a really good fit. Like it felt like it would have been like kind of forced for some time to have them on.
Um, and we're lucky enough to be able to say no to them and just bring on companies that we are, we're really excited about and we want to see grow and things like that. So I'm feeling like really good about that as well. Cause like when you bring money into something that is very community oriented, it sometimes gets a little icky and I feel like really good about the space where we're sitting at with, um, being able to make money off of this thing and pay our bills and make it worth our time, but also not get too silly and things like that. Yeah.
I mean, it's the thing. I know we both have grown up with like punk rock music, but to me, honestly, that sort of punk rock mindset in a way has never really left me. And I've always like been a huge fan of record labels and people who have done it all themselves and if, you know, they're, they're really going for it without necessarily quote unquote selling out. Uh, so we do have advertisers on here, but again, they're companies that we know and love and I would never feel comfortable like really pushing something I didn't believe in anyways, especially in that medium, just because of, you know, like I said, my background in that is just how I've always viewed things.
Yeah. You know what I thought was really funny is that like the skateboarding culture is very much about the brands and very much about the sponsorship. And I was like, I was like watching, um, they're all small companies with the sponsorship, they're for like Nike and whoever, but yeah, a lot of them are skate, skater owned small companies. Totally.
And a lot of the companies that we have are obviously some of them are huge companies, but they've all started from like actual developers trying to, trying to solve a problem. Like you look at Netlify or just any of them, literally any of them. Yeah. All of them are, I have developers at the, like all of the founders of the companies were developers at some point looking to solve something in the space, which is really cool.
So I don't know if we're skateboarding culture. I'm not necessarily going to start wearing around a fresh books t-shirt. Actually, I do have a fresh books t-shirt. Maybe I will start wearing around a fresh books t-shirt, but I thought those first books get at me.
I don't got one. So, uh, when we had our first baby, fresh books sent me a blanket that has fresh, but this is before they even are sponsored. They are just a customer and I don't like it. No, how they, it fresh books is like a Toronto company.
So maybe they saw on Twitter, I forget how they, how they found out that I had a baby, but they sent me a blanket. And now I have this fresh books blanket that my daughter uses. That's awesome. That is awesome.
Yeah. That's super cool. And it's good. It's intense baby blankets.
That would be really cool. Um, next, what we're going to do is we're going to count down the 10 most popular episodes in syntax. We'll go from the 10th most popular down to the most popular and we'll sort of just talk about why we think it did well and any other thoughts that we have. So do you want to take number 10?
Number 10. Yeah, this episode makes sense that it would be on this list because it was the very first episode that we released in 2019. It's funny that it's number 10, you know, this was a look forward to 2019. And I know I probably want to do another look forward episode.
I don't know how you feel about that. But yeah, talking about like our personal lives and our businesses and all that stuff. And this is sort of a look back. So maybe the next episode we should do should be a look forward just like this one.
And so give that episode a listen. If you want to see, just go back in time a little bit and see how our lives were January 1st, 2019. Next one, number nine. This is probably personally one of my favorite episodes.
I wasn't there. Is that why you're saying? Oh, you I forgot that you weren't even part of that one. Yeah.
Maybe we should do that more often. Mega dis was mega dis. No, so it was number nine. SVGs with Sarah Sweden, probably put your that again, but not as much as I put you in the actual episode.
And this was just like a total eye opening episode. Just so much in the SVG world. And if you go to my beginner JavaScript course, I'm using this SVG mask. So you can use the SVG as a mask.
The drips on the website are using SVG masks. And I had learned about that from having Sarah on the episode. It's just like it's just action packed full hour of amazing stuff. You probably want to listen to that one a couple of times over.
Just make sure you delete the MP3 and then download it again. If you listen to it a second time, so keep those numbers up. Nice. All right.
Number eight. How to build an API. Now, this is one of our new episodes. This one came in August 27th.
So this is probably the most, is it the most, the most recent episode to arrive on our list here, which shows that it was a very popular episode because it hasn't had the, the time to really grow as much as some of these. So how to build an API was a lot of fun. We talked about the different ways that APIs are from rest to GraphQL, that sort of stuff and talked a little bit about interacting and working with them. Authentication, things like that.
That was a, those episodes are always my favorite. We can't do every episode. That's a huge explainer. Like that, because there's certainly just, I don't know that many things, but that was one that we had been working on for a while, just sort of putting things in as we thought about it and really happy about that one because it's like, it's almost a tutorial with that one.
It's just understanding all of the moving parts. And that's something that, sometimes a tutorial doesn't necessarily teach you, because the tutorial is more focused on the nuts and the bolts and the coding. But because of the podcast, we can't tell you what to type. So it really just focuses on the ideas and everything like that.
And I was even listening to a podcast, the free code camp podcast. And they were saying like, one of the ways that they stay up to date is by listening to syntax. And I was like, that's exactly what I want because like there's this other part of web development that is not writing code, but it is just understanding how things work, what things are, what they do, just to get a bit of a head space as to what things are. So I think that that's why that episode did so well.
I bet that will be one of our most popular episodes ever if we were to look back at it in a year. Totally. Yeah. Next is number seven.
CSS, the cool parts. Yeah, yeah, super cool. I love this. When this episode went into some of the neat stuff that you can do with CSS and surprisingly well supported things like clip path filters, background mixed blend mode, border images using hex codes with alpha.
So our GGBBAA. Oh, no. That's is that how? Yeah, that's how it works.
Our GGBBAA. Yeah. So using eight characters instead of six when you're doing hex codes, radial gradients, viewport units, CSS variables, new text decoration, some of these stuff where like, I don't know, like nobody's googling new updates to tech decoration, tech decoration, but there's a new stuff to tech decoration. So you should learn about it.
Yeah, that was we should probably give the episode numbers here too. That was episode 146. Yeah, this is the cool part. It's really one of my favorite episodes because I'm using so many of these things right now with custom properties and all the new stuff in CSS.
I love it so very much. I've always been a CSS head and you know, this stuff just really is what I'm passionate about right now beyond just JavaScript and those kind of things. So the next episode, which is what number six in the list here, six most popular episode is episode number 130, the Vue.js show Scott teaches wise. This one's not really surprised me considering just about everybody was asking for the show for over a year and was dragged his feet so hard that they left permanent indentations in the floor of his office.
So when we finally did it, it was after I had done my view course, I had done a course on grid, so I had been spending a bunch of time in the Vue.js land and I decided to talk about my understandings of the interiors of Vue and how it's different from React in a syntax way and maybe give us a little bit of a knowledge on what the difference is, what the one why, why people like it so much because it is such a popular framework nowadays. Next one we have the fifth most popular episode this year is what's new in web development where we talked about the new promise methods, promise.race, promise.all settled, promise.any, lazy loading images, there's a new attribute on the image tag that is just lazy and that will only request the resource once you've loaded, once you've scrolled it into Vue or once it's close enough to Vue, I'm not sure what the, I have to go back to that episode and look it up. CSS Houdini, we got to do an episode next year. Once we actually build something with CSS Houdini, that's pretty cool.
Subgrid, we did an entire episode on subgrid last year, did we? We did it on January 14th, so that one of the first episodes on 2019 was subgrid and we said, in that episode, it's about a year out and we caught some heat for that because a couple of people said it's not a year out and here we are almost a year later and we don't have it just yet. So I bet it will land pretty soon. Actually, I think it did land in Firefox, the latest version of it.
Did it? I think it did. Don't, well, CSS, subgrid, I think I just read that it landed in the latest version of Firefox. You're right, Firefox 71 released December 2, so it was 11 months from time of recording that it got launched and it looks like it's in Firefox 71, which is good.
Everybody has Firefist 71, that's the most stable and it is not in any other browser, not even behind flags at the moment. But once it hits in Chrome, every other browser runs on Chrome now, so we'll start to see, I'm really excited to get that in. I've got handfuls of little, even building my beginner JS. I ran into two or three little things.
I'm like, oh, give me some subgrid right now. You know what, I want more than subgrid. What? Element queries.
I really... Yeah, what the heck? What the heck? I use JavaScript library for Element queries and it's like been giving me a lot of guff with my server-side rendering because it's like, now you got to tell it to re-look at the sizes of everything on mount and rehydrating all that stuff is just no fun.
So everyone at Element queries, please. Yeah, I don't even know what the where it's at right now. I don't know if it's anywhere. I mentioned it on Twitter, but yeah, I don't know.
It's not a lot of fun to do them as they are right now. But yeah, okay. So let's get into the next one, which is the fourth most popular episode. And that's boot camps versus school versus self-learning.
This episode aired on March 13th. And let me see what episode that was March 13th. This is episode 126. We talked about what we did.
I went to college. West went to a university for business tech. So I went to school for music. We didn't necessarily take typical career paths of getting like a CS degree or necessarily a boot camp, but we were both largely self-taught web development.
And we talked a little bit about the pros and cons of self-teaching versus going to college versus taking a boot camp from our perspective. So yeah, that was a really good episode. I knew that one knows another one people had been asking for a lot. Yeah.
I had a lot to say about that. And it's something that I've been thinking about with our kids, right? Now that our kids are alive, it's sort of like, well, when they when they're old enough to go to college, like, what is the landscape of going to school to do it? Like, would I go to college if I had to do it again?
So these are all questions that I'm largely thinking about right now for myself. Yeah, I think we were really well placed to do that episode because like, obviously we're both self-taught. We both went to higher education. And I have taught a number of different boot camps.
I've taught hundreds of people in real life. And I've now seen them go on to, like some of them are, I'll say a lot of them are smarter than I am. You see the type of stuff that they're working on is pretty incredible. So go back and listen to that episode 126.
I'm pretty proud of that one. Yeah, me too. Next one we have here is the fundamentals. So something that we set off to do, I don't know, a couple months ago is to do a bunch of fundamentals episodes and sort of break down, not to teach you the fundamentals, but to break down what are the fundamentals in.
We did one on HTML and CSS. We did one on JavaScript. We did one on server side and we did one on design. And the fundamentals for CSS is number three.
That's episode number 158. And we just broke down like, what are the different things that you need to learn? Because like, we always chant, learn the fundamentals. And like, just focus on the fundamentals.
And you're like, a lot of people are like, what are they? Like, do you have a list of things that I can focus on? And we made the list. So check it out.
That is episode number 158. Yeah, those fundamentals episodes were all very well received. People seem to really, really like them. So check out all of the episodes in that series.
This next one arrived February 20th. And this one is absolutely no surprise to me. This is the second most popular episode of the year. It's episode 120 Gatsby versus next JS.
I see people linked to this episode all the time whenever anybody's asking about what's the differences here? What are these platforms? What do they do for us? When would you use each one?
That's such a huge question. I see it asked on Reddit all the time. And I'm so thankful that, you know, one of our viewers almost always post a link to that episode says this is a great explainer for why you would use each of them. And I'll grant it.
It's changed a little bit in terms of maybe we should be doing like a 2020 version of Gatsby versus next week because both the platforms have evolved quite a bit. Gatsby got themes next JS API routes and static, static building. So both the platforms are evolving. And maybe we should do a follow up.
Gatsby versus next to electric bugaloo. 2020 that's actually going to be a wicked search term we should jump on. Gatsby versus next 2020 2020. Don't steal it anybody.
That's always the modifier. We got to roll it out. All right. And the number one episode of 2019 is actually released.
What's the seventh month of the year? I always do this too. I'm so glad that you don't know that because I don't know it's it's July. July.
Yeah. I always go to one that I know. Okay. So I know May is five.
So then I can turn up a couple and I can get there. People who are actually normal are probably like, come on. You don't know the month. Just can't do it.
Anyways, that episode is episode number 162. And it's the fundamentals of JavaScript. And that this one is way ahead almost almost 10,000 more listens on that episode than number two, which is incredible. And I'm really proud of this episode as well because we basically just broke it down.
I was lucky enough to spend the entire year working on a layout for a beginner JavaScript course. So we could lend a lot of of that to the episode and just breaking down the different parts of JavaScript. And so what you should focus on what are the fundamentals. So very proud of that episode as well.
I'm quite surprised that even though it was released five months ago, it's by far the most popular. So so that one will probably go down as one of the top episodes ever. Ever. We should look real quick.
What is our most popular episode ever? Let's look. Let me look it up. Most popular episode ever is React hooks.
Is that true? It doesn't include the Spotify listens, but yeah, most popular episode ever is React hooks, which fundamentals of JS is just like 2000 listens on. Wow. Wow.
So yeah, amazing. That fundamentals one is going to go for a man props who sponsored that one. They're lucky. The fundamentals of JavaScript log rocket and fresh books.
So I got a deal there. Oh, that's good. So I was speaking of log rocket and fresh books. One of our sponsors today is fresh books.
So they're going to help us with especially right now, year the end of the year is such a huge time for bookkeeping services and software. And this is where companies like fresh books really excel because they make a lot of the stuff that I don't know if you ever used QuickBooks, but I opened up QuickBooks for the first time when I was like 20 years old and I was like, oh, this application is hard to use. And so many of these bookkeeping applications that are modern like fresh books have come out now trying to solve that problem and just make things easier. It's the absolute best kind of software for this.
If you're doing any sort of freelance business where you need to pay people track invoices, that is something that I hate doing is keeping track of my invoices. And I love it when my software lets me know that, hey, this person paid has a paid here. Do you want to resend this? Do you want to give them a little slight little nudge?
It says, hey, do you want to pay for this? So check out FreshBooks. They're a long time sponsor here at Syntax. And you know, at the end of the year, I want to thank all of our sponsors.
I want to thank FreshBooks specifically. They've been one of our first sponsors and been with us for a long time. So head on over to a freshbooks.com forward slash syntax and put syntax in the How does you hear about a section? We know you love to do that.
So please head on to freshbook.com for a syntax, go ahead and let them know that you heard about us from syntax. Awesome. All right. So next up, we're going to talk about personal stuff.
So what did 2019 look like like both professionally, but also personally, I think that those two things sort of meld each other together just because of this podcast, we talk a lot about our lives. We also talk a lot about what we're working on. So you want to give us a rundown of 2019 there, Scott? Yeah, let me just start off and say 2019 was absolutely bananas.
It was absolutely bananas. So we have a two year old and Landon is amazing, right? But I wouldn't necessarily call myself the most experienced parent at this point because we had one child and he was just a great little baby. But there's two of us were, you know, being able to watch him.
So our daughter, Brooklyn, arrived in May and it was a huge event for me. It was huge because now all of a sudden, our family is where we want it to be. I don't think we're going to have any more kids and we're just very happy to be where we are. But at the same time, you don't sleep.
You are constantly, now with two kids, it's so much harder to get that personal time that my wife and I both like, whether that's in the gym or doing coding outside of work or for me just simply running my business. So everything had to become more flexible as it became more chaotic. And now Brooklyn is absolutely amazing. She's an incredible baby.
I love her so very much. But it has made life an absolute chaos fest. It's just been, it's just been bananas. So a lot of this year has been a complete blur to me.
I don't really even know where the time went because most of the time was spent chasing kids around or getting business going. But I somehow managed to produce and release 12 courses on leveluptutorials.com. And that was no small feat. It was really difficult.
And there were some months where I was very concerned about being able to actually get the courses out. So for those of you who don't know, level up tutorials is kind of like a magazine subscription where you get a new tutorial series each month. It's like 20 videos long. But I managed to do a couple courses on TypeScript, a couple courses on Gatsby, animating React, React Native.
We had a couple of guest authors for the first time, Travis Nielsen and Spencer Carly and soon to be James Quick, people that I really love their content. So it was just absolutely a huge year for me in terms of growth. I launched this new, new version of the level up tutorial site, a lot of changes in the code base. My gosh, I'm just like looking back and thinking about how much effort went into this.
It's just unbelievable. The huge production value changes. I got a new camera, a new lighting system. I completely redid my office and to be like a set.
And that has been huge for me. What else? The code base and level up tutorials is completely different ending this year. This version isn't released yet, but it's like 99% done.
The code base is now 100% TypeScript, whether that's the API is TypeScript. The front end is now TSX and TypeScript. The framework is now using next JS instead of Meteor. That's a huge change that's going to go up and one that I am being very careful about finishing.
It's now using Mongoose instead of Meteor. It uses a new account system. And we now are going to have server-side rendering for all logged in users and all that amazing stuff that next gives you. I just can't believe how far the site has progressed, how many things I was able to put out while being in a complete days of not sleeping and all this stuff.
So that was my year. And it was absolutely wild and incredible. And somehow we managed to release two episodes of syntax every single week on top of that. It's true.
I don't think we missed one. No, no, we don't miss Wes. Call us a sharp shooter. I don't know.
I don't know anything. Kobe. Kobe. Kobe.
Yeah. That's amazing. Actually, that's amazing that we have capped out two episodes every single week. And I don't think anything else in my life has been that consistent other than putting out this podcast.
And it's totally just because I have to do it because Scott's showing up and we sold the sponsorship spots. And Scott has to do it because I'm showing up. And we just keep each other accountable for this type of thing. So it also hasn't felt like too much of a slog either.
Some days we're like, oh, man, it's Monday already. We have to record again. But generally, it's just been like, oh, this is kind of fun to do. I always leave recording this podcast.
I was like, oh, that was a good one. I enjoyed that. Oh, totally. The caffeine has been something that's propelled me to do each episode.
I like to think my lovely wife, Courtney, my amazing co-host, Wes and caffeine. Thank you for pushing me through. All right, 2019 for me. 2019 was similar to Scott.
It was a really tough year for me just in terms of feeling like I was not getting it as much done as I had hoped to get done in the year and feeling like I wasn't as productive as possible. I think like every year before this, I've always had big leaps and bounds, whether it's huge increase in numbers in my email list or launching new courses, something like that. And 2019 was really hard for a number of reasons. One of them was we had a new baby in June as well.
And that was amazing. We're really excited about that. But that paired with one of my daughters who does not sleep is just absolutely, I was just a zombie for a good chunk of the year. When we talk about how not sleeping is just absolutely devastating to every year.
Your temper is a little shorter. Your energy levels are down. Your intellect is down. Not sleeping is absolutely a huge killer.
Yeah, I had a good sleep last night. I went to the gym this morning and I feel like on it right now, just ready to take on the world and huge to do list. I'm going to slay through it. But a lot of the days were spent at half capacity, which is really frustrating.
I feel for people who have it worse than I do because I certainly have it very comfy. I work from home. I work for myself. I don't have to commute, things like that.
I certainly have it really good. I mentioned being a single parent too. I thought about that. That would be so incredibly hard.
Shout out to the single parent to you people are amazing. I think one of the episodes I want to do next year is talk to a mother who has learned to code after having kids because I've certainly heard from a few people and like, how do you do that? That's that's really tough. So we're going to bring someone on in the near to do that sort of show.
If that sounds like you and you want to show and show and show with us, you have people in mind? Yeah, well, I've got a couple of people. But if it sounds like you as well, maybe even just having a couple of people on to share how they did it would be interesting. So get in touch.
Yeah. So what else? We had New Baby in June, which is amazing. Personally, we bought a cottage, which was a long term goal of ours.
We intentionally bought like move to a cheaper city so that we could divert some of our housing funds to buying a cottage just because we work for ourselves. I want to be able to go up there in the summer and things like that. And that was a huge, a huge goal for me and we hit it and we're so happy about it. And as we that's sort of lined up with the baby.
So I took a three month paternity leave, which was amazing. I always see a lot of these people who work for like Facebook and whatever taking paternity leave. And we don't get that as self-employed people because because of we choose not to pay into employment insurance. And because of that, we don't get maternity leave.
We don't get paternity leave. We don't get top up or anything like that. So it was kind of cool to be able to just say, you know what, taking three months off. So like I cut my, I cut a third or sorry, a fourth of my year out just by doing that.
And I don't regret that at all. I'm very glad I did that. I got to spend a whole bunch of time with my kids in the summer. We made some amazing memories.
And that's probably one of the things I'm most proud of this year is being able to just disconnect. Like go to my GitHub and look at my GitHub. You can clearly see where I time off. That's my biggest thing of FOMO is your, I guess this isn't a FOMO, I don't know, but you're a senior college.
I'm so TJ on over that cottage. That's amazing and you congratulations. That's amazing. Thank you.
This is one company. I'm going to show them out. Get DevMugs. It's DevMugs.com.
They sent me my GitHub history on a mug, which is cool. I kind of want to get another one that shows my gap. And I just like, like hold on to that and be like, that was cool. Because like, we're not going to have any more kids.
That was my one chance. I'm really glad that I did it. What else here? I made the biggest course I've ever made in my life this year, which was my beginner JavaScript course.
And this is by far the hardest course I've ever had to make because teaching beginner stuff, at least I think is much harder than intermediate or advanced stuff because you can't assume anything. You have to start from the ground up and taking something which is not linear, like learning to code as you do a little bit here, you do a little bit here, you do a course here, you're sort of going all over the place and trying to convert that into a linear course where you try to build upon what you've learned, but sometimes you need to look ahead to things you don't necessarily know. So just basically laying that thing out and investigating what it is that you should teach a beginner and making it fun and making all these exercises and styling them. That was a slog.
It was really hard. There's a lot of times where I didn't, it felt like homework to me. And that's when I say I felt like homework, I mean, there's that feeling in my life where it's Sunday night and I don't want to do this. And I very rarely get that feeling in my career.
We're talking to my wife and we're like, we both love Mondays. I love Mondays. And sometimes I was just like, man, I got like six more months of this thing and I want it to be good. So I'm spending a lot of time on it.
And luckily I could just keep chipping away, keep chipping away, keep building stuff, investigating how to best teach this stuff, talking to a lot of people who are struggling with it. And the course is massive. Like I spent like my earliest notes date back like three years on this thing, but basically the entire year, every single day I just sat down and worked on this thing. And I finally was able to launch it a couple of weeks ago.
And it's done really well. And now I look back on it and go like, Oh, that was great. I'm so glad I spent all that time on it. But during it, I was like, Oh, this is, this is hard.
Like I really committed to this really big thing. But now that it's out, I'm really happy. I think it's going to be like one of these fundamental building blocks of learning JavaScript. So that was a huge milestone for me this year.
And now I'm back, we're recording my advanced React course right now. And I'm I'm slinging to GraphQL. And that's really fun to me to be able to get back into the more advanced stuff as well. Totally.
What else? A lot of this year was spent on, I working with the developer, Lewis, I know he listens to his podcast rewriting a lot of my course platform to next JS. Unfortunately, it's not launched yet, just because I haven't been able to give it my attention. And I think that's my biggest downfall of this year is that my attention was kind of sharded, meaning that like, I'm like, sharded, sharded, like in shards.
Yes, I didn't start. It was not sharded. But basically, there's like a lot of things that need my attention. And I'm very good at not caring about a lot of other stuff, because I know I have this one task at hand.
And I don't let busy work get the best of me, which is a good quality to have. But also, sometimes I need to spend an entire day doing email or accounting or looking at the other areas that I've sort of been neglecting. So early next year, I will get this thing launched. I'm really excited.
It's amazing. There's a lot of like little bugs on the course platform that this will fix as well. So that was my 2019 lot of ups and downs. But overall, I look back at it and I say, well, I'm proud of what I had accomplished.
Yeah, I am very proud of what I've accomplished this year. Yeah, you should be you did 12 more courses or 11 more courses than I did. Oh my gosh. It was very difficult.
Yeah, it was very difficult. Cool. So do you want to get into the next sponsor, which is one of these things that I really want to dive into more this next year, which is a Prismic. Yes.
So Prismic is a headless CMS that makes it easy to build a website pages as a set of components. You break your pages into sections of components and then using React View or whatever you like, you make corresponding slices in Prismic, start building the dynamically. So take your website, slice it up into different sections, create your types on the Prismic back end, and then pull in that data with a GraphQL API into Prismic. They've got lots of examples with next and next and you get the point, all of those front end frameworks, you want to check it out at Prismic.io forward slash syntax.
And again, this is an absolutely hilarious landing page. So there's animated GIFs of Scott and I, there's team last and team Scott, you just need to check it out Prismic.io forward slash syntax and try it out maybe around the holidays in the new year. You want to build a website, try this out. Yeah, try it out.
Cool. So let's get into the last section of this is stuff that we've learned this year. And let me tell you, I have learned a ton of stuff. Turns out when you do 12 courses, you learn a lot.
And this has been great for me. What I learned that I actually don't have on this list is I learned to be a better speaker. I've done, now a few talks, I hadn't done that many talks in the past, but I've done a few talks. And this most recent talk I did at Developed Denver, I felt like I was just really comfortable for the very first time and just felt very, very good with it.
So that was the skill that I picked up this year is just felt like feeling more confident in my speaking. I learned a lot. Do you think that's because you do the podcast? Poss cast.
Well, the podcast for me has been, no, I'm used to talking in front of a microphone anyways. It's more like the thing. I never, I hate to doing like stand up book reports or whatever in school. I hated doing that stuff.
I really hated speaking in front of crowds. And to be honest, I think I got, I think I just by pushing myself into the deep end and making myself do it. I think it was just like remove the scary element of it for me. And it's more like, I have these things of value and people want to hear me speak them.
So there's no reason to be nervous about it. And to be honest, I don't know, I think it was just a practice thing. Yeah, that's good. I find that as well.
Like I've been, I've been doing speaking engagements for probably almost 10 years now. And I always like, I'm in the, in my hotel room trying to practice. Like, oh, this is not very good. And then once I get up there, just bang.
And right, like doing so well, I just get such energy from the crowd. And I'm so happy to be in a place like that. Because I remember certainly like, even at my wedding, being like a little bit afraid to do like the, like the speech and that and that and now everybody asked me to see their wedding. Oh my God.
Yeah, I did like, I did my brothers, you know, and my brothers wedding, I, you know, did best man speech. And yeah, I was very, very nervous for that. I think I would be much better at that if I were to do it again. Yeah.
So okay, I learned, tech wise, I learned a lot of type script. I did lots of type scripting. I taught two courses on TypeScript, one of three active one just straight up TypeScript. But more importantly, I got my hands really dirty.
And I rewrote my entire application in TypeScript. There's so many ding files. My whole API is in TypeScript. Now my whole friend is react in TypeScript.
And let me tell you, I absolutely love it. I think there was a episode maybe like midway through the year where I was like, I don't know, we'll see. And I'm not totally, you know, sold on any of them. But I am sold on it.
I like it a lot. And it works really well. It finds all the bugs for me and it makes me feel good. So next thing I learned was I learned to be better at debugging was taught me about the debugger in the browser.
But I also learned about using the debugger in a node. More importantly, I got better at every single tab in the dev tools to solve my issues. And I really feel like I'm at my very best in terms of being able to solve problems. What's something that you let me let's do a little bit back and forth instead of me rattling all these off.
Yeah, I got really good at the just vanilla JavaScript DOM API. Because of building this beginner JavaScript course, my idea was don't use any frameworks or anything like that, just JavaScript. And I didn't want to just like console log things all day long. I wanted to actually build interaction and learn about events and event delegation and all those things.
In order to do that, we need to actually build things. So I got really good at the vanilla JavaScript DOM API. I was already pretty good at it because of my JavaScript 30 course, but I feel like I can pretty much build anything. And I had all these tweet tips over the year of things that I learned while doing it.
And I don't know, I just feel like I'm really on it with that stuff. And it's not all that useful to me in my production applications because I mostly use like a react in my production application. But it does teach me just to be a better JavaScript developer in general. Yeah, you're not going to be relying on the the framework quote unquote as much.
Totally. Whatever framework that is. Yeah. What else?
I did React hooks and suspense. Yeah. I learned a lot about both of those things. Even though suspense is still not out, it might not ever be out.
It probably will be at some point. But I totally shifting the thinking of how to approach a React application more so with React hooks. And then the suspense stuff will be pretty interesting as well when it comes to loading data and loader screens, things like that. I'm excited for that to come out.
I'm really excited for that to come out because it's going to give me another excuse to refactor my code base. No, I really love React hooks. And I learned so much about React hooks this year. I rewrote nearly all of my application to function based components.
There's still a couple that I haven't. But in the process of it, you learn about the benefits of using hooks and how they can make your code cleaner. I wrote so many custom hooks and I absolutely love to use them. There's so many things that have gotten easier for me by abstracting it out into a hook and being able to push it somewhere else.
So that's something that I really spent a lot of time on this year with React hooks as well. Other things I learned, I finally learned about the audio visualization API or not. Basically, there's a huge audio API in the browser. And I've always wanted to make it for the syntax website.
I wanted to make one of those dancing bars based on the frequency and time waves. And I've never, there's two problems. First of all, I didn't understand the audio API. And second of all, I don't understand how audio works.
You can ask your buddy who went to school for audio engineering. Yeah, I should have. But I learned enough about both of those things. Much better at the JavaScript part than actually understanding the audio.
But I certainly understood frequency and time waves. And one of the things we built in the beginner JavaScript course is this really cool visualization. And that's something I've been wanting to do for years. I probably tried like six times over the past years.
And then finally got it where I understand every land of code. One thing that I really spent some time on was felt, especially towards the end of the year when felt three dropped. I really like it. I'm not using it for anything important or anything.
But the amount of code and typing it saves you is really great. For the most part, I found everything to just work in terms of examples and documentation. Let me tell you, it's felt is the gold standard. Like React really needs to learn from this.
So does you because they have this huge examples page where it just shows you how to do basically all of the stuff that you would want to do. But since a little bit more, I want to say opinionated than react because React is sort of like, well, there is no react way to do, let's say, drag and drop or animations or whatever. You will use these libraries. So you have to go somewhere else.
But with spells and the examples, it shows you all of that stuff and more. So, okay, here's how you work with props. Here's how you work. And they're all editable, essentially examples that run life in the browser.
And if you want to learn animations or spring-based animations, hey, there's an example. And here's this felt way to do it because it has a package. So because of that, it's a little bit more opinionated and it's so easy to learn. So easy to look at.
I'm a huge user and I'll probably be doing more swelt in 2020. Another thing I looked into a lot is some upcoming APIs around shape detection. So if you want to be able to do things like face detection, barcode detection, whether it's a QR code or just something on the side of a package, if you want to look up nutrition information and text detection, there's these new APIs that are coming to the browser surrounding that. And I think they're pretty cool.
Fortunately, they stopped working. So I couldn't include them in my course. But hopefully, once they are up and running, I'll add a video on them. Other things I've been really looking into this year are just headless CMSs.
So that's obviously a very popular thing right now. A couple of them sponsored this podcast. So I've just been trying them out. And one dream I have is I want to make a GitHub repo that shows how to use all of these different headless CMSs with like Gatsby or something like that, right?
And that would be really cool because you could have like, I have some notes written somewhere where like create three different data types, relate two of them, like one to many and then many to one relationship, and then just have the ability to just pull in this data, route from page to page, fetch the data and display it on the page. Very simple, but very good example of showing how to use all these different APIs. So I personally tried out Prismic, Sanity, WordPress with the GraphQL API, Keystone JS, Hasura, Prisma, obviously Prisma too. I've had some calls with them.
I'm just kind of looking at that. So the headless CMS space is certainly one thing that is going to be on my mind in coming up in the 2020 as well. Yeah, absolutely. There's just so many good ones out there.
And this is the space that we all want to watch for 2020. It could really change a lot of people's workflows. The last one for me is I learned just a lot about not necessarily JavaScript itself, but how to write good JavaScript, how to write good code, my programming and skills in general, better. I had a problem in the past where when I'm developing things, something comes to mind, you need to name something, I've just picked something on the spot.
Things wouldn't be necessarily organized in the right way. And this year I learned so much about organizing, naming, making things very clear, writing better comments, writing better organized and looking code, win two abstract things and win abstracting. I was going to cause you trouble. And I learned it all kind of the hard way by experiencing troubles in my code.
And I still find things. I just found a variable yesterday in my code that was like, man, what was it? It was like visibility set or something. And I'm like, no, that's a Boolean.
It's a true or false. It needs to be is whatever this is, modal open. I had this whole system. And I saw this one and it made me really upset when I saw it.
So I'm still finding these things in my code to improve. And I think overall, I'm just writing better code at the end of this year. And I guess you say that every year, as long as you're progressing, you look at your code, you wrote last year, and you absolutely hate it. And that's a sign of growth in your programming.
So I guess we're on that. Yeah, I agree to every year. It's funny, the better you get at programming, the more you realize how awful you were before, like five years ago, I thought it was pretty good at JavaScript. And now I look back at it and I'm like, Oh man, that was awful.
I really like I want to put myself in my 2011 shoes, knowing the JavaScript I know now. And I think about all the things that we hired in a freelancer to do that are just so simple in my brain now, but at the time, it seemed like they were impossible. I'd certainly learned a lot about the nitty gritty of JavaScript the past year, just doing research for this thing. Nothing teaches you to get really good at something than trying to teach it to other people.
So closures and hoisting and objects and the this keyword and the new keyword, all of the ins and outs and all of the little edge cases of how these things work. I feel like I have a really good handle on that stuff just because I've had to record a bunch of videos on it. I wanted to make sure I was dead set on understanding it before I went forward and taught it. So that is 2019, a year in review, filed definitely not a clip shows a good year hard year for both of us, but looking forward to 2020.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in and listening to this podcast. It's been a hoot. We did well over 100 episodes this year of this podcast. You may feel like one of our best friends because we talked to you for a couple hours a week every week.
I hope so. I feel like I'm a pretty good friend. So yeah, be friends with us because that's cool. Yeah.
So this is the part of the show. If this is your first episode, then you might be a little bit confused about the show. But if this is your first episode, we do sick pics at the end. Stuff that we like can be really anything.
I have another podcast. People love my podcast pics. I get a lot of comments about how people love these. They're sort of like, I don't know, shady people podcasts.
There's like swindled and dark and a diaries and all these ones. So this is a podcast I've actually had as a sick pick before. But here's why I'm sick picking it again. The season two of this podcast just launched and I had actually unsubscribed since I thought it was a one off thing.
No, this podcast is back. It's the dream. The dream was all about multi-level marketing schemes for the first and sort of like, here's how these companies get you. Here's their influence and here's how they're terrible.
Well, the dream is back with season two focusing on the wellness industry. Instead of multi-level marketing, they're focusing on just supplements that don't do anything, vitamins, probiotics. The first episode was on essential oils. Let me tell you, I love this podcast.
And I'm so glad they're taking on this industry because it's an industry that I feel like I have a little bit of knowledge on. I work out and I do supplements and stuff like that. So I'm very interested in the season and I'm excited to have them debunk a bunch of stuff that I have thought to be true. Wow.