Interview with Wes Bos

Welcome to inspect. My guest this week is a designer developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and a teacher. He's the author of the Sublime Text Power User Guide, created a bunch of training courses including wrap for beginners, ES6 for everyone, JavaScript 30, and most recently, Learn Node. He's the guy on Twitter that tweets screenshots of his beautiful text-level theme and just an all-round nice guy.

It's my pleasure and my privilege to welcome to the show Mr. Wesbos. Awesome, thanks for having me. No thanks for being super excited about it, yeah, no problem.

How's your day going so far? So far so good, just doing a little bit of email marketing this morning. I also just set up some credits for digital ocean for some people that are taking one of my courses. So, been a pretty chill day.

I just recently received email about your promotion on your stickers. I suppose we could talk about that a little bit later on. Sure. I suppose a good place to start with is just a little bit about you in the beginning.

How did you start and what your first experiences of web development are? Well, maybe you want to start a little bit further from back to the way you grew up. Yeah, so I'm from Hamilton, Burlington, Toronto area. It's in Ontario, Canada.

I've been here all my life, just in a couple different cities. And I've been in web development for a long, long time. I first got started probably when I was in fifth grade, sixth grade or so. And then I dabbled with it here and there, making a couple of websites.

But I really got serious into it when I was in high school. I was making my space designs. I don't know if you remember my space. I was building my space designs.

I was designing T-shirts, designing CDR, designing posters. And all that stuff had to be cohesive. So part of it was to build my space. I really picked up CSS.

And then from there, it's kind of history. It's just been chugging away at it for 10, 12 years now. And through that time, I've been able to get pretty good at it. I'm still not great, but I'm getting pretty good.

Is this a my space page for your own musical for other people? No, that was the thing about me. I always joke with my friends that I played the computer because all my friends could play instruments. But I was garbage at all.

I tried. But the one thing I could do really well, which was design stuff, and slice up a MySpace page and make it look pretty sweet. Yeah, MySpace was actually a good place to learn, especially CSS. Because it was full of hacks and you had to really work your way around.

Yeah, it was my first time really understanding what CSS actually did. Because the way it worked is that MySpace would throw up this disgusting table markup. And there was eight classes on the entire body. And then you'd have to use nested selectors in order to get to the TDTRTH row.

And then you could style that and put a background image on it. So it was kind of nice. Because I don't know if you remember the CSS Zen Garden. You would like this HTML and then you would write the CSS and you had your hands tied in terms of the markup.

And that's what really drove home the markup can be static in what it looks like and totally changed depending on what you're doing your CSS. Absolutely. MySpace was one of my first experiences with front-end CSS as well. I used to make myself a personal page on there.

But because I grew up, I was studying art and graphic design. Making it look different and better than everyone else was always my goal. And just to try and see what pushed it to its limits really. But yeah, like you said, you really had to drill down in nested selectors.

And there was quite a good community back then as well of people who had found hacks of how to add things to your MySpace page. And where to add them. Yeah, there was one generator website which I wish I could have built something like that. Because I think they were just making bank selling different themes.

Exactly. In the same way as you could buy WordPress themes now. Back then you were buying MySpace themes as well. Yeah, exactly.

I'm glad it doesn't still exist though. Could you imagine if people were hacking away at the Twitter profiles or Facebook profiles? I remember being so pissed when you couldn't. I remember putting style tags into my Facebook bio because that was a big thing when Facebook first came around.

And I was so pissed that you couldn't style your own Facebook page. And I was like, this is dumb. How will they ever survive? And yet here they are.

Yeah. Yeah, they're doing all right. Yeah, they're okay. So did you study anything related to web development?

Yeah, kind of. I went to school for what's called business technology management. So it's a business degree. It's the same degree you get if you go out for an account and or something like that.

But the focus of my degree was on the technology side of things. So I never learned to code at all in school, but I did learn a lot about how technology works and communication and interfacing with people and interacting with teams and sort of like the, I don't know, like more like the soft skills around building a business with technology and then more of like the planning side. So diagrams and swim lanes and cost estimates and all that stuff. So it wasn't like, I don't look back at it and say like, Oh, I'm glad I learned how to build swim lanes and calculate server cost.

But I do look back at it and say like, I do have a bit of a well-rounded look at business and technology and a lot of what they also taught us was like how to be personable with people. So like how to talk and how to communicate technology to different stakeholders. So I think that was that was fairly useful. Yeah, I bet that's obviously coming to handy now that your your teaching as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, before we get on to the teaching side of things, was there a pivotal point where you you realized that this was the path that you wanted to go down when you realized that, okay, it's maybe a bit more than just the hobby and my space pages that you want to turn this into your career? Yeah, it was um, so through university, I had different co-ops.

I worked for different companies. I got worked for Exxon Mobile, which is huge oil and gas company. I worked for small agencies that did like video work and I did a lot of their web stuff. So like all through, I just did different like sort of like technology stuff.

I worked in like a stock trading floor and I would generate reports from their database. And I just didn't really love any of it and I hated quite a bit of it. So it's still through there. I was still doing my space pages and whatnot.

And I had been it was funny about my space pages is that they started to die off and all these like punk started to grow up. And they would start to build actual businesses. So they would hire me to build like a website for their pool company or a website for their tattoo company. So that started transitioning.

By the time I got done four of the five co-ops that I had to do, I was just so sick of working for other people. And I was making more money at night just freelancing and doing like WordPress projects. But then I was at my actual co-op for eight hours a day. So I convinced my co-op coordinator to let me co-op for myself, for my last co-op in school.

And they agreed and it was hilarious because I had to write my own review. I did great. And then from there it was just like another year of school. And by the time I graduated school, I was just so done with school.

I was just like full on in my business. I was running it. And at that point I was able to just like be done with school and have much more time to be able to devote to doing consulting and freelance work. And that's what you've been doing ever since?

Yeah, I've never had like a real job just co-ops. They paid money, but they were all just four months long. So I've never really worked on many of teams as a consultant, but I've never had a full-time job before. Okay.

So you also teach at how could you use this right? Yeah, yeah. It's a coding school here in Toronto. Is that similar to like general assembly?

Yeah, similar kind of idea where they've put camps in part-time classes. All right. And how did you get into that? Is that something that you approached you with?

Or did you approach them? Yeah, it's actually way before like these coding schools were even a thing. I was like trying my handout blogging and I had written a bunch of WordPress blog posts on how to do custom stuff in WordPress. And at the same time, there's a couple of people here in Toronto that were building this thing called Ladies Learning.

And it was like sort of this not-for-profit startup where they would hold Saturday workshops and teach people how to code. And I was part of one of the first workshops that they ever did, which was WordPress. And that's really where I found out that I liked teaching because I just had fun with it. And I put all this content together and people seemed to really click with people the way I explained it.

And then from Ladies Learning Code a couple years later, they branched off and built Hacker U, which was because people were like, great, like this is really good. Now, like where do I go to keep learning? I want to like really dig into this because I had a taste of it on the Saturday workshop. But now I want to really learn it.

So that's what Hacker U was sort of born out of. And I was there first, not higher. I've always just been kind of a contractor for them. But I built the first part time web development program.

I built the first bootcamp that they did. I built the first JavaScript class, first WordPress class. And now it's fairly large company and they're doing some really great stuff with it. Right.

So your courses that you teach at Hacker U, are they for beginners, intermediates or across the board? And what's your main topic that you focus on? For a couple years, it was Intro to Web Dev. So it was like totally for beginners.

Like it's not anyone can come in. Like you have to pass a bit of a tech challenge and make sure that you're technologically literate. I can't even say the words, but you have to make sure that you're like a good fit for this type of program. And then it's Intro to Web Dev.

And then generally what happens is that most people make their way through Web Dev. And then there's a whole bunch of other different part-time classes. The other two that I've spent my time on was JavaScript, which I've taught for the last couple years. And WordPress as well, which I've taught for the last couple years.

So yeah, it's the people who make it into WordPress and JavaScript are pretty smart by that. They've gone through the Intro to Web Dev, or they've been working as developer for a couple years. Yeah. And have you kept tabs with anyone who's taken one of your Hacker U courses and seen where their career is?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

It's a fairly strong community. We talk to these people all the time. Lots of them are friends of mine. So yeah, it's crazy to see because I've been at it for five years now.

And the people that have taken it like three, four, five years ago, now they're intermediate senior developers. And some of them are even teaching classes themselves just because like five years is a long time in web development. You can scale up pretty quickly if you put the time in. Yeah.

And especially if you're taking the right type of courses, which obviously brings us nicely onto what you're doing now really. You're obviously known for releasing these amazing courses in JavaScript and general web development tools and tips, free courses and paid ones as well. I've taken a couple of your free courses. I've done the mastery markdown and I've looked at the JavaScript 30.

I think there's one other one. I think it was the Sublime Text. Maybe Sublime. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. I've seen both of them on YouTube. I think it was a Sublime one. One of them shared on YouTube and the others are.

Oh, yeah. Three courses program. But yeah, brilliant courses. Just the fact that you've obviously sat down and spent the time to record these videos and all the screencasts and actually come up with the content as well.

And then give me away a lot of it for free. It's just amazing. And I'm sure you're helping a lot of people progress the careers. I know I learned loads from the JavaScript 31.

Yeah, it's crazy to hear the people email me and say, like, I got a job or I got a promotion or a quit and because I did this and it's kind of weird for me to think of that. But you're actually affecting people's lives. It's kind of funny, but great, obviously. So what actually inspires each of those courses because they're all very different.

You've got the JavaScript courses, but then obviously you got markdown and then you've got CSS ones in between. Yeah. Are you just trying to cover a broad sense or are you picking up? It's just stuff that I do.

That's like, obviously, I want to make a course that people want and that will sell well and that are asking for. But really, what it all is is I'm just trying to get out of me everything that I know and how I build websites and apps. So every course that I do is like, this is how I build a React app. This is how I build a Node app.

This is how I write my CSS. This is how I'm writing JavaScript without using jQuery or whatever it is. So it's kind of just like, how do I get out of me? Because people are asking me all the time, like, how do you build specific things?

And then the other thing is, like, I listen to a lot of people about what they're having problems with or what they're sort of looking to learn next. And that will help influence what the courses are. Yeah. And the JS31, the fact that you didn't use any libraries, any jQuery in there.

I think a lot of people, including myself, when we think of the Node JavaScript, we think quite small. And we think of basic DOM manipulations. Maybe get a little bit worried that everything's going to take too long or it's going to be quite difficult. And obviously, that's why jQuery is there.

And just by the content of your course, you can see that it's very powerful with very little code. All right. Admittedly, it is ES6. So there are a few newer techniques in there.

Yeah. But it just shows the power of just the Node JavaScript and how you don't need to rely on these libraries. Yeah. So how did you pick the 30 projects that you did for the JavaScript?

30 course? Were they hand-picked from a larger list or how did you come up with those ideas? It was a fairly big list. So essentially, the whole JavaScript 30, people don't know what that is.

It's 30 things that you build in 30 days in just JavaScript. So it's not like an anti-JQuery thing. It's a people are exhausted at all of the tooling. People are asking me, like, how do I get better at just JavaScript?

And my answer to that was always like, you just have to put in a lot of work and you have to build lots and lots of things. Because that's how I learned. But people don't necessarily know what to build. So that's sort of why I came up with the course in the first place.

And these aren't really like rough JavaScript projects. These are well-polished, well-designed submitting projects. Yeah. They're fun.

They look good. They have a lot to them. So I always hate doing tutorials where you're just console logging, food bar, or you're using bootstrap or something like that. Because it just isn't fun.

And if you're not invested in it, you're not going to actually finish it. Yeah. And it was nice that you provided the start of all as well, which had the HTML and the CSS written. So the people can just focus just on the JavaScript and they'll have a nice looking end result.

Yeah. Some people don't like that. But I would be here all day if I did it. Yeah.

Of course they can go and then change the CSS and put their own spin on it. But at least out of the box, they've got a good looking end product. Exactly. Most people do.

Anyway, so you were asking, how did I pick them? Essentially for the last two years I've been before, the two years before that, I had had this idea for JavaScript 30. And every time that I had an idea of something that I wanted to build or something that I wanted a little proof of concept that I needed to teach to myself, I would throw it in the list. And then over two years, I would have a list of 50 or so of these projects that I wanted to build.

And I would also build them as well over the years. And then at a certain point, I just had this huge folder of ideas and half done projects. I'm going to just comb through them and polish them all up. And then I picked the 30 of them that actually made sense and that were doable in 10 to 30 minutes and that were exciting.

And that also taught you stuff because the whole idea is you're going to learn a specific thing, webcam access. But along the way, you're going to learn really, I'm tricking you into learning the fundamental stuff that you don't necessarily want to spend time on event listeners and all these little things that come up, but you're not going to sit down and read the documentation on because it's so boring. But if you put it into practice and actually build something real, then you're going to learn it along the way. So what are you planning to do with the ones that didn't make the cut?

Will they be like a part two of this you reckon? Sometimes the future? I don't know, they're not very good. So that's why they didn't make the cut.

They're either too big, too complex. They're not like, they're just like, I don't know, it was an idea I had, but I just scrapped it because it wasn't a great idea. It wasn't fun. So there might be a part two at some point, just because there is a lot more ideas that I do have.

And people are asking for it because they go through it and they're hungry for more, which is great for me when somebody actually finishes a course. That's how I know that it was a good one. Yeah, I know a lot of people got through that course very quickly as well, definitely quicker than 30 days. I've been watched all of them in probably in about four days, I think.

I didn't work along in real time with all of the courses. I kind of watched them and then went back and played with the code. I just found it easier to work through them that way. But yeah, it was all those good things.

There was a lot of people condensing down a lot quicker. Yeah, there's a couple of people that did it in one day, which is incredible. It's been like 18 hours. It's not 18 hours of video, but in order to watch the videos and then also implement it yourself, it takes a while.

So it's pretty incredible that people do it so quickly. I've seen a few people have created their own GitHub repositories now where they remixed your 30 ideas and made their own versions of them and created their own version of JSA, which is cool as well, right? Yeah, I love that because the whole point of learning is that you get excited about what you're building. I always have ideas and I always have these stupid things that I'm building because I have an idea and I take it and I run with it.

But people don't necessarily always have that. So the fact that sometimes when somebody builds something and they go, oh, I wonder if I can make it do X, Y, and Z and then they sort of take it and remix it, I think that's super cool because that means that they're excited about it. They're invested in their actual learning. Yeah, amazing.

So that course came out. Was it the end of last year or will we get it up this year? Oh, yeah, end of last year. I think it was November or something like that.

I should look back. Yeah, but more recently, last week, I think it was all the week before you've released your new course, which is all about Node, school learn Node. Can you tell us a bit about that course and what it involved in? Yeah, so it was my biggest course so far.

It's almost 10 hours of actual video content. Basically, what it is, it's I've been building applications like the server side of my applications in Node for five or six years now. I was very early adopter of Node and I've learned a lot of about how to actually build apps along the way. And people have been asking for how do I do that and what is my own course platform built on and they're fairly curious in that.

So I built this Node course and what it does is it teaches you Node, Express, MongoDB, Passport, a couple other major packages that are pretty popular in the Node community. And we build this application from start to finish and it includes all of the real world stuff that you would run into, like user authentication and error handling and messages and user accounts and all that good stuff. Yeah, I haven't really got much experience with Node, so that's probably going to be the next on the mind list. Yeah, I think a lot of people who do my course are more on the front end of things.

So it's kind of nice for them to have an introduction to the server side. I feel like it's fairly approachable. It's a big course, but it's nicely chunked into major topics that are 30 minutes, 20 minutes long, and that'll allow people to not be so overwhelmed with the building of Node app is huge. It's really hard.

But if you can cut it down into these chunks of things where it works along the way, then that's that's ideal. Okay. So what would you say to someone who hasn't really got much experience in JavaScript? How would they get into the language and maybe get onto these courses?

Because they don't really begin a courses, are they? You do need to have some. No, that's that's something that I'm like major lacking right now, which is like people would be like, I'd love to take every single one of them, but you don't have like a JavaScript 101. So what I've heard from people and like, I don't necessarily know what the best thing is right now, just because it's been a long time since I've been a JavaScript beginner.

But what I've been hearing for people is free co-camp. The JavaScript stuff is really, really good. There's a book called Eloquent JavaScript, which is really good. Carl Simpson has a you don't know JS, which is a little bit more technical and a little bit more like this is what the spec says.

And people who do my stuff are more like, let's build an app or let's build a clicky thing or whatever. So it's just it's more of a different learning type there, but that seems to be a really good one as well. That was a couple others, but I'm keeping notes because eventually I'll make my own JavaScript introduction course. Yeah, I mean, I've done a couple of the JavaScript courses on lyndo.com.

There's one obstacle JavaScript essential training. And it's really good, actually, it goes, obviously, as someone who's already has some experience with JavaScript, it feels very basic because it talks about the variables and how to set a variable, how to use one. But for someone who's never done any sort of programming before, it's I think it's a brilliant course. So that would be something worth checking out to get some structure from and get some hints on how to sort of what the basics are again.

Yeah, that's good to know. Because yeah, like if people want to buy my courses and they can't, then I need to send them somewhere first and then hopefully they'll come back. So yeah, definitely. So do you have any more courses planned, anything that's in the works?

Nothing in the works yet. I've got notes on quite a bit of different ideas. I'm pretty much just like how many years open right now and like I'm like listening for what people want. And the predominant chant right now is it goes to a couple topics is some people want to learn CSS because I have a Flexbox course, but like I don't in my tutorials whenever we build these like amazing looking things, we don't go through the CSS because we would of course would be 40 hours long.

But people want to know like how do you do it and what's your approach and all that. So I'm thinking about what a CSS course would look like. I do want to do a CSS 30, which is similar to my JavaScript 30. I have the domain name already.

Yeah, you've got to find the main names on you. Yeah, I've got a whole bunch. And I don't know. So there's some React stuff that more advanced React stuff.

I'd like to teach this GraphQL starting to pick up steam. So I'd like to cover that as well. I saw a tweet by someone named Anthony Garand on Twitter where he had done some detective work because you've got Flexbox. Yeah, it's Flexbox.io is the website for your Flexbox course.

Yeah. And he treated that or read the tweet actually. I read a post on CSS grid and I thought that was boss should make a video course like Flexbox.io. Get a who is on CSS grid.io and he found out that unit.

So is that something that you're planning? Have you got a CSS grid course plan? Yeah, I do. I haven't started to work on it yet, but CSS grid is just like rapidly coming around.

It seems like in the last two months or so everybody's been talking about it. So I've been doing my research over the last six months or so. And I'm going to build some sort of like something like Flexbox where it's like the introduction, the video introduction that you send people to if you need to sort of skill up on CSS grid. So it's hard.

Flexbox and grid are like it makes CSS actually pretty difficult to do once you learn it. It's amazing and it's super flexible. But learning it is a bit of a hump. So I want to create something that will be super accessible and also get into the nitty gritty of it.

I think what makes it both of them quite difficult is because a lot of new properties have been introduced all at the same time. Whereas with the transition from CSS two to three, it wasn't that big. There was just a few sort of nice nice nice things that were added things like border radius and some of the animation stuff. Yeah, it was just like stuff we wish we could do.

And now we have to like relearn how entire layout systems work, which is a bit to wrap your head around. Yeah, I've been following some of the stuff that Rachel Andrew and Jensen Simmons have been putting out who are obviously doing loads of this and just looking at some of the posts that people have created on CodePen. And obviously there's amazing stuff that you can do with it. But just trying to remember all this in text is something that doesn't, hasn't stuck into my head yet.

Yeah, and it takes a while. So the first thing you do obviously is you end up at CSS tricks post on all this in text, but video would be great. It probably took me a year to stop going to CSS tricks or Flexbox. Like the fact that I had to remember just to find content and align items in a Flexgrow shrink and basis.

Yeah, just remembering those, which one goes on the parent, which one goes on the child. Yeah, is my something back all the time. And I always end up on Chris Goye's article on CSS. Yeah, that thing's the best.

Yeah. Yeah. No, but that would be great. You know, CSS grade course would be great.

And it has, it was bubbling away in the background for a couple of years. And then all of a sudden all the browsers started supporting it in March. And now it's just everyone's talking about it. Everyone's trying to learn it all at once.

So it's a perfect time to. Yeah, I had a bet with Sarah Jasner, who's the developer. She writes for CSS tricks as well. We had a bet last September, October at a conference.

And she was like, it's going to be years before CSS grid. And I said, I said next year at this conference, I guarantee that it will be bet that it'll be green all across can I use. And she's going to buy drinks. So I think that I'm going to win that bet.

Well, it's almost solid green. You've got a little bit of a faded green. I know. And we have like four or five months net yet.

So yeah, it's just opera mini is just kind of keeping the red tab everywhere. Yeah, well, that that was part of our agreement is like a separate opera mini. That's a totally different, totally different thing. I imagine anyone would use that.

But it's huge, actually, in like developing countries, it's like the most used browser ever. Yeah, it's like, like, say like a good part of the world actually uses it. But like, it's, I don't know, you have to get into what opera mini does and how it captures the content and all that stuff. So it more strips away a lot of the website so that it can deliver just the text and some basic layout to the user.

Okay. So this conference where you were talking with Sarah, where conference was that? It's CSS DevConf, which it was in San Antonio last year. And then this year, we're both speaking out it again.

It's in New Orleans. Actually, I'm doing a React workshop there as well, which is going to be fun. So it's one of my favorite conferences every year. I've spoke out a couple times now and it's just a really good, really good community event.

Yeah, okay. So I was, like, I mentioned before, we started recording that I was speaking with Helen Holmes. We talked a lot about speaking at conferences and how she got into it and how she sort of prepares her talks. Is that something that you can share as well?

Like how do you find the whole process of creating a talk for a conference and then actually giving that talk as well? Yeah. So my approach to conference talks is, I don't know, it's not the same as everybody. I'm pretty laid back.

I'm pretty off the cuff. So I don't spend, I spend a lot of time, but I know that there's like some people that spend like, I don't know, like for every one minute speaking, they spend like three hours of prepping and rehearsing and all that stuff. So mine is more. I'll come up with a topic of something that I'm really interested in and really excited about.

And then I will deliver a talk that's full of, I don't know, full, it's more of like a tutorial where it'll explain what it is, how it works, what are the gotchas. And then I'll fill it with a lot of, like, I don't know, like tips almost, like when you would actually use it, because that's kind of what I do on Twitter as well as I'll just tweet out tips all day long about how to actually use this stuff in real life. So my hope is like, it's not like an overarching introduction to a technology. It's more of like a sort of like, people will walk away with like seven or eight little things in their pocket where they're like, huh, I didn't know that.

Oh, that's super handy. How did I not know that? And then they just kind of go away with all these new things that they have learned, rather than like a, I don't know, there's other talks out there that are really helpful as well that explain all overarching topic or detail how they've overcome a problem. Mine is more like little nuggets where everybody goes home with a couple things.

That's good. It's an easy way of digesting the content. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. That's because if you like, if you come in later, if you drift off or you get bored of a certain slide and chances are in a couple of minutes, I'll be onto a new topic and you can be interested in it again. Have you ever given any conference talks in the UK or do you have any plans to? Yeah, I did last year.

I did Smashing Conf in Oxford and I did Industry Conf in Newcastle upon time. And I've got a whole bunch of invites for all over the UK. It's funny. Like I get way more invites to Europe in the UK than I do to the US and Canada.

Yeah, I don't have any plans right now to come to the UK just because I have two new kids. So I don't do a whole lot of traveling. But I do have some coming up. I'm going to Paris in a couple months in South Africa and I think it's September or something like that.

So hopefully I'll come back to the UK soon. Yeah. All right. Good stuff.

Obviously, I've been asking you a lot of questions and there was the purpose of this talk. But you get a lot of questions on Twitter. I noticed as well. I'm always asking you them as well.

And there seems to be one that comes up quite a lot, which is about your text editor and the font that you use. And I know you've set up this nice Twitter bot, which answers the question for you. Yeah. Where's what?

And you've got a GitHub page, which is an AMA page. Ask me anything. Yeah. And you've also set up the the usage page of the tool that you use.

Now the usage page in particular is one that is one of my favorite things that you've set up because it's always really nice to see what other people are using, you know, what sort of equipment you're using to do your recording, the tools you use, what plugins you use for your text editor. And I was inspired to do that as well. And I've created a similar page as well on my own website. And one thing that was really nice was when we we had a little chat on putter with Harry Roberts from CSS Wizardry and where he's used that editor as well.

So he's also got a forge slash uses pages or yeah, I hope it becomes standard. Yeah, I thought it was a really good idea because mine was originally for slash tools because the title of the page was the tools I use. Yeah, but I've now changed mine to use this as well because I just think it's a good it's a good pattern that if people can adopt it, then you could pretty much go to any designer developer or techie person's website and hopefully they will have a uses page there and you can just do it. Exactly.

Yeah, I love that. There was this like there was this website. I think it's still around it was called uses this. Okay, let me see if it's still a thing.

Yeah, it was just interviews with like developers and creatives in our industry. And it just yeah, it's still going. And it's just like, who are you? What do you use?

I was just so interested in like what editor and what monitor it's such silly stuff, but I just love love geeking out about that kind of stuff. So it's a fun thing to have. Yeah, I think it's just some of those things where if someone else is using it and you respect what they're doing and what they're creating, it's almost like, I want to use these tools as well. And inspire to push out the same quality of content that they're doing and maybe the tools are part of that.

Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. So you get a lot of questions, but is anything that you'd like to be asked more of that you wish people would ask you? Yeah, the last podcast I was on, I said Barbecue and now everybody's tweeting pictures of Barbecue at me, which is amazing. I'm super into on, what was it on a developer tea?

Yeah, that's where I stole this question from. Yeah, yeah, it's funny that that podcast got pretty popular, which is really cool because everybody like from around the world, they're all just like showing me pictures of what Barbecue is in their culture. So that was, I don't know, that's pretty cool. I really just, I like when people ask me questions because it, for as much as I talk, I also am listening all the time to like, what are the motivations behind their questions because that helps me really understand how, what courses to create, how to market things, how to talk to people, because there's a lot of like, why behind when somebody asks you a question and that's extremely helpful to me.

So I'm really game for anything. It's part of why like, I make myself so accessible online. It's a bit overwhelming at sometimes because I've got like 40 Twitter DMs that work through right now, but open DMs, open email, ask me anything, pretty responsive on Twitter. And that will help me really just hammer in.

I know that's not an answer to your question because I don't care what people ask me, but ask me anything and I'm usually happy to chat about it. Yeah, I get a lot of questions about stickers at the moment. Mm hmm. You want to put some context into that?

Yeah, well, I'm like web developers, like stickers. It's funny, you could like, I could give, I could give you as a developer like a hundred dollar bill and you would be like, thanks. But if I were to give you like, like a dollar 50 worth of stickers, then you would just like, lose your mind because that's the best thing ever, right? Yeah.

So I've been printing stickers and giving them way at conferences and whatnot for a long time, just because I think it's really fun. And then recently, I, it's really expensive. So I went through the whole process of sourcing them in China and going through that whole process and getting them done quality at a much smaller price than like a sticker meal would be. And just people are just interested in what that process looks like because I don't know, it was very interesting to me to source them and figure out how to pay someone in China and what the process to getting them all done was.

So I need to write up some sort of blog posts now where it'll detail how to actually do this as well, because a lot of people are asking. You're going to put stick them out of business because everybody's going to be using your method now. Yeah, well, it's, it's really hard. Like you have to like email and you have to go on Skype early in the morning while they're still awake and like, stick them you will, is you drag and drop your image and it'll be at your doorstep in a couple, like a week or something.

And then this was like months of research and work and even now that I want to reorder, it'll probably be at least a month of production and shipping and whatnot. So it's not easy, but it allowed me to like do some cool stuff. Like I got them packed into bags with like a custom design top. And the place in China where I got this done was like, is like a print city.

So like this is like one little city in China where they have like all of the everything is printed, all the boxes and all the stickers and all the labels and all the tags for clothing. So like I wanted like, I wanted gold foil stickers and the guy didn't offer it, but I'm pretty sure he just like walked down the street and got them done at another place. Yeah, pretty much. And like I'll kind of the fun stuff.

So I don't know, it's interesting to me to learn how to source that stuff as well. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I've got a friend who, who does a lot of trading with in China as well. He's basically, he sells a variety of things, maybe sort of electronics and electronic peripherals.

But he sources products from China. And I've done some design work for him in the past for his packaging and things like that. Oh yeah. But yeah, he's telling me some of the horror stories that he's had with trying to get just the communication barrier really.

Yeah. And the time difference is a big factor as well. It was hard. But it's one of those places where you know, you ask one person and they will just put you in touch with the right person as well.

Like you said, like Stix City, they have these little mini villages where everyone does the same sort of thing with a slight different twist on it. Yeah. Yeah, it's really cool. I actually got some stickers made for the podcast as well.

I don't know if you've seen it. I did tweet a picture out. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.

So stick them. You had a promotion recently through Drupal, they had one of their playoffs, drill playoffs. So I responded to that. Well, I rebound there, the dribble shot and 50 of these stickers for free.

So I thought I'd get some branded for the podcast and then yeah, I'll send them out at some point to some people. I don't know. That's amazing. Yeah.

I'll stick something to post them. I'll send some to you. Oh, that'd be cool. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, you've got some space left. Yeah, I've got a little bit of space left as well. But it's funny because I stick these stickers on my laptop, but I try and be really perfect with them, get them all lined up and then I peel them back off and I don't like the layout. Oh, no, you can't.

That's no way to live. I know. I see other people where they've just got them all layered on top of each other. The way that I've seen it best because you can't make a grid as soon as you fill up that grid, then you can't fit in.

But the best way I've seen it, I'm going to do my next one is you start from the bottom left hand corner and you just start to grow it layered up from there. So you make sure that they're all overlapping. And then eventually, like after a couple years, all the stickers will grow up to the top right hand corner. Yeah, I've kind of done that.

I have started in the bottom right corner. And when you're looking down on it, but I have done quite neat integrated, but I have started in the corner. So I just filled up on one side, mainly on one side. But yeah, you do need to work on that.

That should be our website is like, what is your sticker strategy? Yeah, and talking about it. Because I have a razor blade and when I put them on the edges, I just cut them and then it looks pretty cool to, okay, to be like overlapping the edges. That's a good idea.

Well, now that you set up this stickers website that you're where you're selling, maybe you should get people to tweet in pictures of or send your pictures off there. Yeah, you'll stick those on the machine, then you could maybe make some sort of gallery. That's the plan. I threw them in the post box this morning.

So yeah, mailbox here. I am being super British the post box, but put it in the mailbox this morning. Yeah, brilliant. Brilliant.

And so while we're in the topic of questions, that's one of my main questions. Just want to see if there's anything that you want to ask me, maybe. Yeah, I don't know what's your hopes and dreams for this podcast. How do you want to do any tricks that you're going to use to explode it?

Okay, get some good guests on like yourself. And hopefully that will attract the masses. But really, it's just the reason I actually started the podcast was just to sort of improve my ability to speak about topic at length. Because I do hope you one day try and speak at a conference of some sort as well.

I've spoken. I have tried speaking at small meetups, like local meetups, just in front of like small crowds of about 20 people. And it's been okay. But I'd like to get in front of a bigger crowd and get into the depend.

But this set up this podcast as a way of just preparing for something bigger like that. Yeah, but I'm also really enjoying it. And I'm enjoying talking to new people and talking about design development tech, which is what I love talking about it with work colleagues. So why not talk about it with non work colleagues as well and just the wider audience.

Yeah, it'd be great if I had some, you know, if people would send some more questions in. It's early days yet. I haven't really got to know who my listeners are and how many listeners I've got. I did recently just last week passed 200 downloads, which was pretty good.

I wasn't expecting it to reach that so soon. So I'm quite happy about that. Yeah, I know it's still small numbers compared to some of the other tech podcasts out there. But for me, it's a really good start.

And I'm hoping that it will just get on the ground and see where it goes really. And hopefully it will just help me raise my general profile in the industry as well. And that's the idea. Yeah.

And if I can just provide some value for people, then it's all be worth it. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's even for me. Like I wanted to start a podcast forever, but it's so much work.

But if I can just flip on my microphone and have you ask me questions and we can talk about some cool stuff and it's a lot easier for me. Right. Well, yeah, there is obviously the post production bit. There's the editing and then there's the hosting and setting up iTunes, which was not the easiest thing in the world getting your RSS feed correct.

But it's what people that mean, you do anyway, we're used to building websites and working on these sort of geeky projects. So it's just it doesn't feel like work. It's just another little hobby on the side. Yeah, exactly.

As soon as it starts feeling like work, then maybe I'll change the strategy or take a break from it. But at the moment, I'm really enjoying it. So just learning at the moment, still learning. I know there's a few tricks that involved in podcasting, good ways to sort of attract sponsorship or attract guests and how to do marketing is a little bit different from podcasts as well.

Something like that. Do you see what Noah Kagan did for his new podcast? I don't know if you know who that is. He's one of the guys behind all the sumo me stuff.

He offered people, he said, Oh, mail him a dollar if they subscribe to his podcast, which is genius because if you have 10,000 people listening to your podcast, that means you spent $10,000 to get them. You can you can earn that back in ads in a couple months. I thought that was pretty pretty neat way of doing that, Lee Jen, as long as they stay subscribed. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Okay, so that's one strategy to think about. I need to think of few strategies. But I don't want to treat it too much like a business venture, you know, I'm not used to to make money or to gain any sort of fame. I just want to, the main reason I'd like the subscriber is to increase is so that I get some sort of two-way engagement and get a slightly bigger following on Twitter so that people can give me their feedback.

And that's the main reason really. Yeah. Yeah. So yes, that's hopefully that's answered your question.

Yeah. So okay, it's been really good speaking with you and thanks for thanks for coming on as a guest. Oh, absolutely. Before we before we wrap up, is there anything that you want to plug anything that you've got coming up or just where people can find out more about you on the web?

Yeah, so I'm West Boss Everywhere, WES, BOS, West Boss on Twitter is where I spend most of my days. You can take a look at my courses, which is at westboss.com. And I have got a coupon code for you, inspect an SPCT that'll get you a 10 box box, 10 box off any of my courses. So if you're interested in checking them out, you can do that big again if you want.

No, I leave the box in, I like it. Okay, cool. Yeah, so that's really it. So yeah, thanks for doing that.

So yeah, so check out one of WES BOS courses and use the discount code inspect and you'll get $10 off, $10 right? Perfect. $10? Yeah, $10 US.

How many pounds is that? I don't know. Let's see, I'm gonna convert it right now. That is 7.73 British pounds.

Okay, that's pretty good. Yeah, thanks for that. And yeah, hopefully everyone will jump on that and you'll get some money from it and everyone will learn some amazing things. Is that available across all the courses?

Yeah, that'll work on all my courses. Okay, I signed it to all of them. Okay, excellent. All right, so just remember that to check out WES BOS.com, code slash courses and use the code inspect to get $10 off.