You're listening to syntax. The fun gets with the tastiest web of military down there. Just grab yourself in and get ready. Here's got the whiskey and West Floss.
Welcome to syntax the podcast with the tastiest web development treats today. We've got a really good one for you. This is something that pretty much every other question on our podcast, this is our gooey is going to replace us. What role does a gooey?
And we say that we mean graphical user interface. So a program where you can drag and drop or use some sort of interface to build part of or all of a website. So where do they live? There's a lot of hot opinions on either side of this debate.
And we're going to kind of go through it and give our own opinion as to what that looks like. Yeah. Yeah. With me, as always, Mr.
Scott Telinsky, how you doing today, Scott? Hey, I'm doing good. It's a snowstorm right now. There's an ice storm this morning.
It's so much so that we have this incline. And you're trying to walk up it. And you're just sliding back. And it was like, yeah, it was a rock market.
But we're ready to go. And we're in for the computer. Yeah, chilling. Yeah.
Ready to rock. Ready to rock. They were sponsored by two awesome companies. First one is Hasura, which is a GraphQL API on top of a Postgres database.
And the second one is Log Rocket, which is logging in session. We play for JavaScript applications. Talk about them partway through the episode. So let's go.
What do you think about the codeless movement, or what is codeless mean? Yeah, so codeless is without code. It's codeless. It's creating and building things without necessarily having to write any lines of code to make it happen.
Whether or not that's a full website or apps or prototypes or any of that stuff. I mean, we're going to be talking about gobies in general throughout the course of this episode. But the most part is codeless movement is mostly about getting things done quickly without having the need to dive into code or the skills to dive into code. Yeah.
And there's a lot of like key to opinions on both sides of this. There's a lot of people who are building these codeless tools who think that this is the next great thing. And then there's a lot of people on the other side of things that are anti it, maybe because they think they're garbage or maybe because they think they're going to take their jobs. So from my point of view, if it's going to take my job, me bashing it is not going to help anything.
I have no way to stop this if this is what is going to happen in our industry. So I don't necessarily, I'm not anti it, but I'm also not for it. And we'll talk about opinions a little bit through here. But I'm just trying to think, there's all kinds of jobs that are currently being replaced by computers and AI and things like that.
Truckers are getting replaced by self-driving cars, cashiers are being replaced by those stupid and annoying little boop-boop-things. You know what I'm talking about? You use those? You get a license to use them.
Because the people in front of me that don't know how to use them or like, I don't know what's going on with an unrecognized item. Because I think a developer, and I know that what's happening behind the scenes, they're weighing it and whatnot, I can get those through those things really quickly because I think I'm interacting with a computer and not just a regular human, right? Yeah, I can do it because I was a trained cashier at one point. Really?
Yeah, we're going to target for when I was 16 forever and every night. I got whatever that they study, I don't know if they still do, but they still have this anxiety inducing letter grade you would get for the speed of your cashier. Really? After each transaction.
And so you would do the whole transaction and then the score would pop up and on the screen. So I would always be like, because your managers can see the scores. I was always cutting for whatever the top score was every single time. They probably had the detriment to customer service.
True, true. I used to react to importance and we would get time at the window. We'd be the big one. And if you got the time at the window under, I think it was under like 14 seconds or 22 seconds, then you would get tickets to the movie or something like that.
And we were so rude to customers. We'd be like, here, grab that, take that, take that, go. Come on with timbits, throw the coffee in the passenger seat and throw the change in them. Get out of here, you know, like, so awful.
That was a good thing. Anyways, cashiers, lawnmowers, I went super into. I love lawnmowers made the list here. Yeah, because this is like Roomba lawnmowers.
I don't like that. I think that's giving a robot blade with the intention of cutting things. I know, thank you, sir. I will not have any robots with blades around my family.
OK, there's just razor blades. I guess I'll catch you. But it's just tiny little razor blades. And they start with tiny little razor blades.
Yeah, that's true. Before you know it there, you've got industrial ones that are down trees, bush wackers that are AI. John heads. Anyways, you have doctors in here?
Yeah, doctors. I mean, just think about it. And obviously not WebMD. But like, the future of medicine, you can manage this.
The flu, obviously I'm not talking about right now. But these kind of things are coming. That basically the point I'm trying to make with this is that no job is really safe. And I think every single year we're just going to continue to see more and more jobs being replaced by computers.
And if you have a wide enough view of everything, you can imagine a computer doing just about nearly every single job that exists in the current economy. What about hairdresser? You think you're going to Roomba with a please? Of course.
Yeah. You hear OK with blades near your head? Am I OK with it? Yeah, I'm not OK with it.
I'm not OK with it. I'm just saying it's the reality. OK, you're just submitting to our blade carrying robot over large. I'm not saying nothing.
I'm not saying anything. So yeah, that's our whole idea is like, why not web developers? And I think us web developers sort of have a chip on our shoulders think that we're all high and mighty because we make the world turn and things like that. And I certainly catch myself doing it all the time.
Anytime I see like a commercial for Wayfair or pretty much anything that I know somebody at that company or I know what tech is running at that company, I go, huh, like that.com is only running because of us. We know we know this tech that's running on that thing. And I don't know. We might be replaced at some point.
So I thought this would be a fun little thing is that we're largely going to be talking about web development and GUIs that assist or help in web development to allow this is really centered around website builders or app builders or tools that can do a whole bunch of stuff for you by clicking and dragging whatever what was your very first experience with sort of building an application or a website via a GUI. Oh, yeah, for me, it was Dreamweaver. And I remember thinking, oh, it can't do the whole website. Like I thought as soon as I got Dreamweaver because I was using I think notepad plus at the time.
And then I finally got Dreamweaver. And I was so excited to not have to write code anymore. And I got into it. And I thought like, oh, like it's got some tools for covering a button and you can put buttons in spots and it will generate the HTML.
But like it's not the whole replacement. And that was probably 20 years ago. That first happened. And if you ask me, if 20 years later, would we have, would we have this better?
Yeah. I was an angel. I was an angel. I was an angel.
I had myself self. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay.
I think it was Dragon Drop. Because I went from GeoCities into Dreamweaver and I realized I better have to actually learn how to write this code thing. So that was my first foray into GUIs. Yeah.
I think my first realization that they're not that good is when you were to look at it in the browser within Dreamweaver. Like the in Dreamweaver browser, everything would be roses and then you open it up in the actual browser and the whole thing would just look like a car crash. And you're just like, huh. But the GUIs said it looks fine.
So why doesn't it look fine? And that was my understanding when I had to start having the code was more like this thing came out. And then you open up the code and see like, you know, that was a different estimate. You're freaking out about this really badly crazy code that this tool has created for you.
So of the GUIs that we have out there, there's obviously lots of little GUI tools, things like there's Git clients that will allow you to use the client instead of having to write the Git commands. There's VS code. I would consider a GUI. Even though we are writing code, it does take a lot of the, like, what would you call that kind of work that VS code does?
It doesn't write any code for you, but it doesn't make things a lot easier. A lot of the hinting that it gives you a lot of the automation that it gives you, I certainly welcome that type of GUI. Yeah. It's an assistant.
You're right. Yeah. So, again, if you're on the website or it's meant for someone who will use that as a tool to go ahead and build a website. And certainly, like I, Wix even now has serverless functions, so they definitely are talking new developers.
But there's things like Webflow, we had a sponsor last year, a coffee cup had like a grid builder, which kicked out like decent CSS code. Actually, really nice CSS code at the end of the day. So that's like a whole nother area where they're not targeting end users. They're saying web developers.
Instead of writing code, this is the tool that you will use, and I haven't used Webflow myself. I've used that. I haven't. But it looks nice.
I think I'm, I'm like, I can see sort of like what it does and where we come into action. things like animations but again with any of these tools once you hit like a snag in the way that it does it it's gonna be harder for you to gain that like full control which of course is something we'll talk about and I think even further in that same direction of like GUI tools and slightly more in the direction of four developers is the app modules dot app we keep talking about this but it's not released yet I just didn't have the round of betas I'm really excited to get this one because this does feel like it's a GUI for writing the code what it feels like is more like a figma or a sketch that gives you a reactive view or whatever code yeah so the code in this becomes much more of a main feature than something like webflow where it's doesn't as code and the code is much more forefront in this you'll be able to import code and export code and have your component system come in and out of this in a design of GUI tool yeah you got to think that at some point sketch and figma and all these companies are looking at at what point can we export to HTML and CSS in JavaScript right yeah yeah so given all of these these builders um like what do we think are they going to replace our jobs where do they fit in in terms of being a web developer we want to tackle that I think with most things it's a fit for any given situation that requires independent evaluation if you're a person who is opening up a flower shop and you need a store to sell things on or whatever are you necessarily going to think all right now I gotta learn and react first and then kind of learn this next I gotta learn how to work with data like that's not necessarily the right and the best path for you maybe you have some cash and you can fire off some money that somebody who's going to do it for you but if you don't have that money these code is too old something like wicks or squarespace that you have e-commerce things built in that to me seems like the perfect situation for you to be able to go ahead and take that and so for any sort of basic operation these things are going to work really well for you and in my opinion I think one of the things that that does for us developers who are really into the code stuff is it frees us up from having to work on those types of projects those types of projects that I personally don't necessarily love to do I like building fast sites I like building nicely designed sites in brochure sites cool I like doing all of that stuff but I really like building applications that are useful a little bit more now and that's really where I want to spend my energy rather than writing some HTML they're working within the CMS or similar system to produce some sort of brochure site I'll let somebody else and or a robot do that for me gladly yeah I think where these things are going to replace jobs is the sort of like brochure where websites the couple hundred two couple thousand dollar WordPress website it's much easier for a client to just sign up for themselves especially the type of client who wants to have control and push the buttons themselves they can just sign up for one of these services and crank out a website even basic e-commerce website someone's able to sign up and kind of get it in and that's good because I don't think we need to be re-doing these websites over and over and over again everybody's got the same large photo at the top with all the action buttons we call them underneath and email sign up format the bottom of all we've written those websites thousands of times ever I think that these tools are freeing us up so that we can work on other stuff and for some people that cause anxiety because that's where their skill level starts and they're being replaced by a robot and their skill is their skill was pushing the right buttons putting WordPress themes and plugins together and now they have to be pushed a little bit further as to when do you call someone who does custom stuff it's when you hit the limitations of these things and the limitations of these tools are keep pushing themselves out they are getting better layouts they are getting better e-commerce things like that and I'm okay with that because like Scott says it opens us up to being able to work on better and harder problems because certainly there is no end to problems in web development space that we need to solve and I think that just because it's a gooey people tend to poo poo it but like you look at something like Gatsby that comes preloaded with all of these image compression and all the stuff and it just does it for you and everyone loves that and why is it that everyone loves Gatsby doing all this stuff for us but they don't like a way extra squares base doing this stuff for us and it's because it has a gooey I guess it doesn't seem as hard I know yeah that's if you think about it it's at the end of the day those are both uh you're not writing you're writing code in the Gatsby sense but you're not writing any of that image compression code yeah you don't have to write every little tiny bit of code for everything you do no I don't want to be there and as long as you're evaluating me services having part of the issue too is like who owns what right I think about that a lot with some of these like who who's the owner of this if you write the code you've owned it right and you know you're putting on a server whatever you're renting out that server space but when you have too many codeless services how much of everything do you own and maybe that's an anxiety or a stressor for people but then you can keep going far with that it's like how many libraries do you need I can use every library or you're not a framework from scratch like how far are you willing to go to make this thing 100 custom because we all use tools every single day and whether or not it's a gooey tool or it's just a medical tool whatever but they're also running the same sort of purpose and speaking of tools that really just make your life easier but don't get in the way I want to talk about one of our sponsors which is hasera at hasera.io that's h-a-s-u-r-a-i-o and hasera is this really amazing open source engine allows you to connect your database and microservices and instantly gives you a production of ready GraphQL API it's auto scalable you can import your applications I recently did a big nice little test run of hasera from my own youtube channel and it was really really cool I was very impressed and basically you can host this anywhere you want if you're not using the enterprise version so it's free to get started free to use free for any sort of major thing because again you're hosting this yourself and they even have like a one click and get started with Heroku yeah so if you want to get this trying do this one click get started with Heroku and it really just experience it allows you to basically create your own API through their gooey which is largely just a nice way to work on the database itself and it builds out all of that stuff that you typically have to write yourself for a GraphQL API with this and you take your subscriptions all that stuff it takes care of all that for you that occasion to yeah oh yeah I installed it myself when I was like evaluating it for my course and it's it's really neat yeah I know it is it is a very neat so you want to check it out at hasera.io and again get started with that Heroku get started quickly and you'll have a GraphQL API up and seriously I did my youtube video on hasera the other day and I had an API up in like less than five minutes so it's really super cool and again because it's open source and because you hosted yourself you really get a lot of that ownership feeling of this kind of thing that we were just talking about so again check it out hasera.io all right let's talk about gooey and code less a little bit more um is it always better like there tends to be either people think it's always bad or it's always better um I tend to think different situations is better not certainly been in situations where they give you a gooey for something that is clearly just talking to APIs under the hood and it's extremely frustrating because you just end up with 400 tabs and a bunch of check boxes and you can't figure it all out when in a lot of cases some lightweight scripting or something like that is the better interface for dealing with something like that even like you think about um what is it like a Microsoft excel that's a gooey for lightweight programming I would say but as soon as you want to get a little bit complicated like we've got a spreadsheet for the sponsors of the show and we've got two columns and I want to check or I want to count the number of times a certain one shows up and either call them and then tally them up on this like pivot table and I was getting into some serious stuff in my topics that went like I was like oh this would be so much I could map fill to reduce the right three second you know so uh sometimes gooey's not the best interface for that when you do want a little bit of control yeah obviously you have to learn how to do a little bit of programming but anything somewhat complicated I think the gooey falls short on that what do you think about that I think it all falls into what you're capable of doing and how quickly and comfortable you are capable of doing it because there are things like in web development that I'm capable of doing right authentication I'm very capable of doing authentication but in my platform media just does it for me I don't have to spend that time so I think there's more than just like a wing of like if you can do this or not if you should do it whatever your deadlines are whatever your goals are but everybody's on the sort of a different spectrum in a different path of like I'm capable of clicking some buttons and creating a wicksite to I'm capable of you know writing you know white code or whatever I'm right in binary to create a full stack whatever myself so there's this huge spectrum of how quickly and capable you are with something averse you know with the simplicity isn't in every single time you approach a situation or problem I think it's worthwhile to address some of these you know I had this a lot of this came up when I was doing my subscription model there's a lot of platforms that do subscriptions like there's one called recurly I don't know if you're familiar yeah I've used that before many years ago yeah and so there's a bunch of stuff I think actually based out of color out here but yeah they are they invited me to uh do they like it send me like a customer saying I'm like hey can I just pop over the office and show you guys but this kind of service what it does is it handles a lot of the nitty gritty for subscriptions and you know the prices they take a little percentage off the top well when I was writing my subscription things I was thinking like well you know what I'll just do it myself that way they don't have to take any bit off the top a little bit I know that the brain tree API really makes you write everything yourself so my API took me a substantial amount of time to write and I honestly I do kind of regret not using one of these services when I had the chance to start getting up and running when I think about how much time I spent really writing all that custom code it could have been done much faster much easier for me on this tool that's not necessarily no code but it's a tool that helps uh helps reduce the amount of code it's a code reducer that's the whole thing is we have these this whole no code movement where people are talking about not using code for anything but like what about the some code movement or some no code yeah a little bit about yeah that's maybe the sweet spot in my mind but I'm a developer so it's going to be yeah like honestly I've got no horse in either race I just want to make cool things and if either one of these things code or no code makes that easier and better it makes for a better user experience for my user and sell some more which at the end of the day then I will I will totally embrace that only unless it's a robot lawnmower unless it's a robot lawnmower unless it's a robot lawnm I welcome robot lawnmower but I'm not going to embrace it because it's been in blades I don't want to hug it yeah it's a little hug joke I'm a dad no oh I didn't even get that wow you know that's great so we did talk about some of these tools and like what they are and maybe what they do for you but I had this little levels of hell cross out and from GUI assistance and builders and this is just sort of like maybe the different levels of what these tools can be of because it can be anything from services that you just add but really for website builders specifically you have the very I think the very I don't want to say necessarily the most technical level but the very most other level of these builders is what we've all come to use is basically CMSs right um were there people at the time when CMS started popping up talking about CMSs killing programming jobs I maybe I don't know I don't remember a world before CMS is honestly but like you have WordPress which at the end of the day does a lot of stuff for you that it used to be somebody's job to do yeah the the CMS killed the what what do you call that web master or whatever it's just into the web master maybe I certainly know when I first started I knew a lot of people and I was working as a like a WordPress consultant I would go into companies and you would you would meet these people whose entire job was to just update the content and to wrap it in paragraph tags and to put spam tags around things and to inline it and it's just like oh like hopefully they have like some other skills at that because like WordPress totally decimated that whole thing because now anybody can come along and you can literally even copy paste it for Microsoft Word and it will keep the formatting and paste it in but then I guess there's a downside to that is that like have you seen the garbage that the wordpress gooey kicks out when you try to like paste in pre-formatted text right like the downside to the quality of code that comes out there sure but again you don't think about it like that person who had that job as like the person who was just updating HTML files to change the content you know the career path for them could have been learned some PHP and then all of a sudden you're not just updating that and you're writing custom functionality for a WordPress site and so I think it's important to always have your eyes on where these things are going and how you can be sort of ahead of the game there and make sure that you're not going to be replaced by a robot because you're now having these skills that these tools can't do exactly for you speaking of tools that will give you a nice gooey scott yeah doesn't give you a nice gooey is one of our sponsors today and that is log rocket now log rocket is the super cool platform that allows you to see a session replay of when errors happen in your site now this thing is really super cool let me tell you I heard a rumor that log rocket like our see the magic slogan that we can't really really tell the little bit a little bit a little p a pretty bird uh yeah so yeah we're seeing the magic uh we go around that you need to see the magic on log rocket you want to see that magic at log rocket dot com slash syntax we'll get 14 days to try it now what does this do gives you a session replay an exception tracker that allows you to see the errors as they happen so when a user click this thing and it broke your website well now you're gonna be able to see a video of that user clicking and breaking your website but only that you're gonna be seeing the network log gonna be seeing your redox or you're gonna be seeing the error logs all that cool stuff only that you're gonna be able to see the mouse and where they clicked and how they broke your website explicitly so it is really super cool you're gonna want to try it out at log rocket dot com forward slash syntax and see what magic is all about beautiful so we can continue with the next level here which would be uh you have access to code you can drag things into place maybe it's not necessarily a cms but it is a little bit more for you than a cms because you do have the access to some code right like I think like a swear space would be here because I think you do have access to some code right but for the most part the intended use is for you to be able to just drag and drop things in place and you shouldn't have to worry too much about the theme or the php that's doing um and then to be being able to drag blocks into place with just about no access to code right they're not giving you maybe you can add a script here or whatever but for the most part this is just a lego piece set right yeah you can drag and drop your blocks this is pretty popular in like word press land and as well as a swear space like this you have a whole bunch of different kinds of blocks you have a big big photo you have a gallery block you've got a text block you've got email sign up lock and you can drag and drop these things into the spots that you need and then usually what happens is to give you some sort of like custom blocks so if you really need to go custom then you can go ahead and just paste in some code and that's where your work gets a little bit frustrating where then your workflow ends up being typing into this text area or maybe they have some sort of like code like a code pen thing in there but that's frustrating for me because I'd rather work and use version control and things like that in my entire editor yeah there's a lot of like we were ground here where as developers we're starting to lose the ways that it's efficient for us to work in these like I don't want to use my mouse to click around this interface this whole time when I could be doing it very differently I think the last sort of one here in these levels of hell for it what developers would be an easy theme that's completely just generated out of the box and the only thing that allows you to modify would be text headings and images sort of drag in that sort of and these are the varying levels of these robot editors and you can see from the very bottom of hell here to the top we lose control like as you go down you're losing control you're losing the ability to take it over as a developer and I think that makes a lot of us pretty anxious one thing I'm wondering here is that a lot of the stuff we've got over today are for making websites and some lightweight e-commerce but like what about web apps what about custom functionality that you want to build have you seen anything that allows you to do custom functionality I remember there are some like app builders that are sort of like a piece specifically for like native mobile I'm not coming up with names right up top but they make lofty promises like you can make a native app without touching any code but at the end of the day if you're working with any sort of actual API or database or you're working with data in any sort of way a lot of these sites or applications that you're able to build these can only end up being so complex and then you need something that is really off the beaten path at all you're going to be totally screwed at this point yeah there's I see a lot of people namely like marketers they use Zapier to click together multiple services so they're paying four bucks a month for 47 different services and then they're all connected to each other via Zapier and Webhooks and Zapier is this tool that says like when it's kind of like if this then that but it's a little bit more a little bit more in depth than if this and that you can do things like if someone buys something on Gumroad then send them an email and push them into your email marketing software it'll allow you to just click together all kinds of different services that might not necessarily talk to each other and I've seen lots of times like that's great because it allows people mostly just to get the stuff done that they want to do but there are things where you do run into issues and you can't get done exactly what you want and quite honestly that's where I see a lot of marketers come to me and to go to Bootcamps where they're like I need like just a little bit more skills so I can I can code this myself instead of having to rely on some sort of a GUI so that's just another example as a GUI gets by and probably ninety ninety five percent of the use cases but as soon as you want to do something custom and probably something that is beneficial for your business that gives you a bit of a competitive advantage then you don't have access to that the same thing with like the people who are asking like why are you not using like Teachable or something like that for hosting your platform because it's just a thing you sign up you upload your videos and you're off and running and it's because I want to do things like parody purchasing power and coupon codes that are specific to specific people and I do want that extra ten percent and that is hugely beneficial to my business too to be able to do that we didn't even talk about some of the business financial things about this because really all these services that you're not paid for that every single time you add it like no code service to whatever you're doing you're paying for it that's coming off the top line the bottom line top line bottom line bottom line there's no top line there's no top line it's not coming off the top line it's not coming off the top or coming off the bottom line because of the only two valid ways to sit up but at the end of the day we need to assess that and what are those cost going because really when I was mentioning every curly option it's like really does so much for you but it takes them off the top and to me I'm not interested in that necessarily in every single case now there are some times where I'm definitely willing to pay for what is going to be the you know the tool that makes my life a lot better but if this tool is going to affect that for the rest of time and it's going to be percentage based on top of every single sale that I do there are some major concerns there that you need to think about like what is the most healthy cheap thing because it seems like the code option if you are a developer and you have time might be the cheapest now if you don't have time and you're hiring a developer to do it developers are pretty expensive so that that is going to trade off you need to be aware of yeah I'm just looking at a square space and their most popular is if you pay monthly 16 bucks a month and then it goes up to a 46 bucks a month and that's cheaper than a developer yeah 46 bucks a month 12 months it's from five 600 bucks a year you certainly would spend I don't couple at least at 1500 bucks to get three years and then you also have to pay them for updates but then you look at adding on e-commerce and especially like I know Shopify makes a lot of bank from the apps the add-ons if you want to do like a upsell people or circle back with email or I'm just looking at the Shopify App Store and a lot of these things are six seven eight bucks a month which doesn't seem like much until you've got 15 of them running and all of a sudden this thing is costing you a whole bunch of money but for a lot of people certainly worth it and a lot of developers are probably certainly worth it as well yeah everybody's in a different situation and every situation is different and you have some of the people on both sides of the argument need to realize that code no code is not right for everybody and code all the time is also not right for everybody you kind of have to look at each situation and what your parameters are in terms of money skills and whatever so whose jobs are at risk for these things I have some really good ones for not at risk do you want to tackle these whose jobs are at risk whose jobs are at risk well certainly certainly not the no code coders because of whose code and the no code platform right the no coders are not at risk unless they no code themselves out of the like they code themselves a robot that codes their no code for that yeah at some point they're gonna write one line of code too many and then that's just gonna start writing itself what's on the code too many oh right right what did you do no people in the house that is excellent they're just turning out pink slips everybody's toast I think like obviously there's that that's what's comforting to me is that like my courses the folks that we actually take my courses to learn react and I was like okay like obviously Obviously, they're not using their own tool to build Wix, which obviously everybody would think that. So that's not at risk. I think who is at risk is WordPress tinkerers, things like that, where it does become a lot easier to use it.
But then again, I've also seen a lot of people just move to, like there's still web developers, but they're just moving to using like Squarespace or Wix, or something like that, because it's easier tool for them to use in their client, like update, and there's nothing wrong with that, because you're still providing the service to your customer, which is getting them online and making them visible and whatnot, and how you build the website is just part of it. Yeah, that's the goal. And the day is to service the people who are paying for your services. Yeah, and then we said that the webmaster jobs that are, where you're just updating HTML on the website, I think that that ship has probably sailed out.
I don't know a whole lot of people who straight up code HTML into what's at anymore without some sort of CMS in between. Yeah, and there's some jobs that are definitely not at risk. Typically, when I work at the University of Michigan, they had such strict guidelines about what their web properties needed to be like, that I just don't think it was possible for them to get on any sort of service like a Squarespace or Wix without some sort of major contract in place for those services to adhere to specific guidelines. Like we had to run specific versions of PHP and all the servers had to be a specific way, and because of that, we were stuck on various versions of different CMSs but the University of Michigan had to basically own everything.
And I think with government, educational institutions like that, I think there are a lot of those companies who are always going to require some level of ownership over the code that unless they build their own code tool or own CMS or own whatever, that giving them into something like a Wix or a Squarespace just probably isn't going to happen. Totally. Let's finish up with some of our favorite gooies that do help us do development. What are some of yours?
Everybody knows my favorite gooey, isn't it? All of the things that I hated about deploying a website and they made it really super nice. Like, oh, you know, you want to have continuous integration for free? Why not?
Just do it. You want to have an SSL certificate without having to do anything? Yeah, no problem. So another fight to me falls in line in one of these like, it's a gooey, but at the end of the day, it's a gooey that helps you develop things faster and easier and takes care of stuff that you don't want to do yourself.
And other platforms like that would maybe be like Heroku, Heroku did the same sort of thing with hosting these one click applications. They made it really easy to add services in ways that are just super nice and easy. Another one is a Studio 3T, which honestly is my pick for the application that's stuck in the time machine because it looks like it's from the 90s. But I don't have to fiddle with my database in code all the time and maybe I don't want to necessarily have to write all these tools all the time.
This gives me a way to visualize see the database in a way that many other databases gooey's are because they're my minders. They're a must have for doing anything and obviously VS code for development is a gooey. It's not a drag and drop like a site builder. You got to do all the coding yourself but VS code itself has so many niceties that just make my, like a little high five with the app and it takes care of a bunch of stuff for you.
Yeah, I don't want to get too heated on the like Vim versus VS code thing, but like the amount of work it takes to get like side bars and everything up and running in Vim, we're all just like, I personally do this with ZSH. If you look at half the plugins I have for ZSH or ZSH for all y'all Americans, I'm just like trying to like the command line prompt and the auto completion and being able to use your arrow keys to select files from a list. All of those things are gooey's that will make your life much easier than having to type out the code directly. So not getting anyone there.
Every now and then I use a sketch CSS export. So if I've got like a card in that card and that has a border and a couple of box shadows and a specific background color on it, I'll just right click export to CSS and it'll give me the exact box. The box shadow is a big one because I have to fuss around with box shadow a lot to make it look like my design when the values are already in your design tool. I might as well just export them from there, right?
And I don't know what sketch does because it's been a long time for me but you can create these design styles. Like I've created my whole elevation system for box shadows in Figma, right? So I've created the whole elevation thing as styles. I never have to touch values ever in Figma.
I just I select a div and then or a square and I say, okay, you're elevation level three, whatever. But then there's just a right click, copy CSS. It's like so nice to be able to do that than to write box shadow comma, you know, like all that over and over again, or you're maybe prone to maybe make a mistake here or there. But this way you have the visual representation of the copy and paste you can confirm and it's not like it's just doing anything for you there.
It's just helping out. Another big gooey that I like uses. Big gooey. That's not like Cyberduck if I want to interface.
Cyberduck is like, I haven't heard of Cyberduck since the days of webmasters. I use a transmission. Man, you know what I'm good for? So if you want to upload files that are bigger than like half a gig to Backlaze B2.
Yeah. It has like it has all of the APIs for uploading to Backlaze in it. So. So just transmit.
Yeah. Does it really? Yeah. One click service for B2 because I use that for B2 or S3.
Oh, why? Because I use transmit for everything else. Like I'm just saying like if I want to upload a big file or peruse or download a file, I don't want to have to figure out what the SAP or R sync command is. Oh, yeah.
And I use the transmit. You know, what am I using Cyberduck for then? I don't know. If I'm in the B2 one because I love transmit, it's one of those apps I've used for like 10 years and I love it.
Yeah. Oh, man. Well, today I learned. But for those listening, if you don't want to pay for transmit, you can do it for free on Cyberduck by transit.
So is it good? It's a Gigui. Gigui. It's a Gigui.
It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui.
It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui.
It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui that is a Gigui. It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui and it's a Gigui.
It's a Gigui. The GOO, it's a Gigui. It's a Gigui. It's a Gigui.
to control and set up these servers where I would have looked at something on AWS and just been a little confused when I was at EC2, I never used their service like that. Yeah, I used it all. It's awful. It's so hard to do it.
I wish that Amazon would make it easier for just regular folk to use their services. Yeah, because it's difficult. Yeah. I refer to one of their services as the deal with the platform.
Well, like, there's like now this whole crop of services. Like we talked about Begin.com episodes ago. They're just a service on top of AWS that makes it easy to do serverless functions, right? Right.
So somebody had to code that to this so that we could get a no code. Begin.com. And I don't know if it begins necessarily a no code tool, really cool. Yeah, no, you definitely still have to write all your serverless functions yourself with the setup, which is like the system in part of it.
Cool. Web developers don't want to have to deal with. So I'm pretty neat. They're pretty excited that we mentioned them.
So shout out to Begin.com. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
And I actually have my video that is going to be on the level of tutorials YouTube channel. It's going to be Scott tries Begin.com. It's a new thing where it's like very cash, super cash, where I'm just trying out a service for the first time. And usually it's funny because I do my video camera.
You probably get to see my real expressions for when I actually click on things because I had a really fun experience where someone from take shape and send me a break dancing gift via the email app. That was a really cool question. It's interesting because I was using the site that was fantastic. I'm live on the video.
All right. I think that's it anymore. Thoughts are moving into some six-picks. I think it's just being cognizant of what exists out there, what is false are, what its strengths are, how you can maybe avoid being totally replaced by robots, but at the end of the day, I don't think anybody as long as you're continuing to work in these things, you're on the care of losing your job anytime soon, but it's always again, you don't want to be the developer who's still only at its HTML in 2020.
You know, absolutely. I totally agree there. Let's move into some six-picks. I've got one here today.
That is a baby. the pig was a baby. No, that's as big as well. We should get a baby.
They're pretty sick. But they had the idea that you get sick quite quickly. They do get sick. The wrong kind of sick.
I'm not going to sick like the outlet smart sock baby monitor. So what this thing is, is when you have a newborn baby, and this would be an awesome gift if you were into spending hundreds of dollars on your friends. And what it is essentially, you know, when you go to the hospital and they put that thing on your finger that tracks your heart rate and your oxygen levels. So it's the same thing, but it puts it on the baby's foot.
It's a little sock. And then there's an app on it that will allow you to monitor their heart rate and their oxygen levels via the app. And it does not like a replacement from keeping an eye on your kid. But what it is, is that like, you know, when you have a newborn baby, like, are they still breathing or you're trying to like, not wake them up, but you're trying to put your ear next to them to make sure they're still right.
It's awful as parents. You're just like, I just want to make sure they're still okay. She's looking for like an hour longer than normal. Is there okay?
And then you go in there and you wake them up and then it's awful or it's middle of the night and you wake up and you're like, I wonder if they're okay. So this thing will tell you what their heart rate is and what their oxygen level is. There are other ones that are camera based that you put this like dots on the child, like a sleepy snuggy thing. And then the camera will track the dots and make sure that the dots are moving, able to detect the breathing of the child, which is kind of cool.
But we got this one years ago, probably four years ago. And we just passed along to my sister because we're done with it now. But it was such a peace of mind thing, knowing that you can just open your phone and check on the heart rate and make sure that they are in fact still okay. And pretty cool.
Yeah, cool. I have a podcast picked today, which is going to be a podcast from Wondery, which is, you know, one of those, I think they did that dirty John one and that they just like blew up. So this is a podcast called the Baron of Botox and it's about this famous plastic surgeon to the stars and it goes into their life and sort of their downfall as a interesting human being and sort of the things that happen in their life. It's both sad and fascinating at the same time.
I know nothing about plastic surgery or Botox or any of that stuff. And I'm learning a lot of interesting things. And it's really fascinating about the history of all this stuff and this person who created this. It's very fascinating.
And the story is equal parts, horrifying and interesting. So check it out. Beautiful shamelessly plug all of my courses west boss.com forward slash courses, grab a course or two, use coupon codes and packs to get 10 bucks off, learn a little CSS script, whatever you like. Yeah, my latest course is on how to build a GraphQL API.
It's not available for level up pros at level up tutorials.com for slash pro sign up to be coming pro say 25% for the year. So yeah, that's all I got. All right. Thanks for tuning in.
Good news. Please. Head on over to syntax.fm for your full archive of all of our shows. And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review if you like the show.