No one cares anymore?

Welcome to Syntax. Today we got a potluck episode. That's where you bring the questions, we bring the answers. Some awesome stuff we're talking about today. What is document.design mode even for? Did you even know that this was a browser standard? Feeling anxious about the future of your career. Feeling sad that I care so much about the code. Does that even matter anymore? Right? Uh should I update apps? We got a wiener wrote in and said, "I'm not updating anything anymore." You know, no more updating. I'm sticking with what I have. Uh refactoring. Uh someone's got motion and Gap. What do you do in that that situation, right? How do should you refactor into one? Um and finally, I just want my team members to care. I my team members genuinely do not care about integration versus end to end and all these things. How do I get them to care so that we can write better code at the end of the day? If you got a question, go to syntax.fm FM and click the potluck button. Submit it to us. If you got a question or you got anything you want us to to cover, type it in the box. We'll answer on upcoming episode. All right, so let's get into the first question here. It's from Wei. Why is it so hard to find good front-end devs? My company is hiring, but everyone I interview doesn't know the difference between PNG and JPEG, or what the purpose of a bundler is. It feels like everyone out there just knows a little bit of React and has very little in the way of web fundamentals. My gosh. Yeah. Um, front end is hard. Oftentimes I feel like front end is looked down upon in a weird way. Um whether that is because people don't like CSS or HTML or they don't feel like uh it's difficult when I arguably I think I mean front end's gotten like crazy in terms of breadth of things you have to understand but also you have UX considerations uh you have to have accessibility considerations there's just so much there speed performance all kinds of stuff and anybody who has been part of this industry kind of pre the React boom and stuff like that would know that you know you used to work on frontends and all this stuff and then all of a sudden developers became really in demand and what happened a thousand in one boot camp sprung up where all they teach you is here's how to make site with react okay we do a create react app we make things click we make things open here's maybe a little bit of CSS here's to install things that's the front end to some of these folks so there was a huge boom of boot camp graduates who really didn't ever have that full experience of working on real projects that really matter with the team over the course of time when web fundamentals weren't just something that you uh something that would be nice to have. it was like something that you had to have to make anything that worked across browsers and actually was shippable right so way I think it's really just that you need to keep looking front-end developers who are skilled are out there and they want jobs but at the same time there's a lot of folks who did just do the boot camp thing and never really uh got the breadth of experience that you would need to be considered a a good well-rounded full stack front-end dev yeah I also think he's probably not offering enough money if you're if the type of candidates you're you're finding don't know the difference between a PNG and a JPEG or know what a bundler is, right? That's there's a wide gamut of of people in that regard. So, you're either looking in the wrong place or not offering enough money because there are tons of very good devs out there, but could also be a location thing. Yeah, I remember the very first front end job I got. Uh the my boss who had interviewed me was like, "Oh, you were the best." It was my first job and it was like, "You were the best applicant because you knew about CSS tricks and you knew about this and you knew about that, but h everybody else I interviewed like didn't know any of that stuff or didn't care or wasn't looking at blogs or weren't staying on top of the industry or whatever." And that was way back in, you know, 2011. So, real quick, Amsterdam, we are going to be at Amsterdam for a syntax meetup on June 10th. This is going to be a part of the opening party for JS Nation and React Summit. These are awesome conferences that are happening on June 11 and June 12th. And you don't have to get a ticket to these conferences to come to the Syntax Meetup. Um, you can simply just go to syntax.fm/meup and grab a free ticket for that. But we highly highly recommend that you also come to the conferences. Some of the the brightest minds in the industry are going to be at this thing. So check it out. jsnation.com reactsummit. You can get a combo ticket. Use the coupon code syntax for 15% off. Again, that's syntax. Meetup for tickets to the syntax meetup. And then also you go to jsnation.com andreactsummit.com to grab tickets to the conference. We'll see you there. Peace. Next question from Humongous. Good name. Uh design mode. It's a weird property. I never see used but seems like it could be useful. Why was it added to the spec? What's the pro? What problem was it solving? Does it serve a purpose today or is it some vestigial artifact of the old web? So design mode is essentially if you type document.design mode equals true. It essentially just makes the whole DOM content editable. And every every six months somebody figures this out. It's a really good tweet if you want a tweet to go to go viral because it's it's like what the browser has this thing where you can just turn it on and then when the the whole document is content editable literally every text node you can just click on it and type and delete and and whatever. Um and then under the hood what's it's actually doing is it's it's modifying it's adding and removing the HTML and the the text and the text nodes. Um so it's no different than just doing a content editable on the entire HTML document. So like like why is it there? Um the content edible was Are you eating that? I'm sorry I have to stop you. Are you eating uh the web here? Content editable. Content editable. Uh uh it it was added I I think it was added to the browser with the hopes of like we would have this like gooey where you can just like make this really rich text interface and you can just click into it and type in in what you want. Um and and the reality is that like wizzywigs are extremely hard. We've seen many many wizzywigs over the years of like how do you make something where people can simply just click where they want and type and drag and drop and resize and all of the stuff. How do you how do you make that but like make it like manageable and like still still nice on the on the back end and we've seen many people try and fail and it's it's not something I ever wish on myself. So I I think the idea with adding it was that we would have this uh beautiful guey and I I don't think we've really seen that pop up. Anybody who's doing it has to implement a whole extra layer on top of it. But why do we have it? Um I don't know. It's it's useful in many cases where if you just want to simply modify a web page, if you're taking a screenshot, if you want to do something, just pop content editable on the same thing and and it'll rip. Another thing is like I have like invoices and receipts when people buy a course from me and what always happens is somebody says, "Can you add this VAT number to it? Can you change the name of it?" I put the old address in it. Like I'm not going to get it approved. It's all I had so much just busy work of people saying, "My invoice doesn't have the right information on it." So, you know what I did? I slapped the content editable on that thing and said, "Change it yourself." Um, add whatever you need to do to get your boss to be happy with your invoice, go ahead and add it. Uh, and that stopped all those emails from coming in. So, there's certainly good use cases for it. Yeah. Yeah. I ended up doing that, too. Especially just because like you said, that was like such a huge such a huge customer service thing like I need this on my invoice. I need this on my hands, man. They they love putting numbers on things and Yeah. has to be exactly. Yeah. content editable. This is uh this is an embarrassing thing for me to admit, but I didn't realize that was like a uh universal API. I just figured it was like a browser feature or something, not like a API that every browser has. For some reason, I just thought it was like, oh, it's a Chrome feature. Oh, no. No. I don't know why I thought that. This is a big part of of HTML or design mode, not content editable. I knew content editable. Oh, yeah. That's kind of cool because you can use like like commandB and command I to bold and itallic. So if you want like a quick and easy way to edit your some text and save that HTML out. It's great. It's it's when it starts getting a little bit more complicated and you have like new u like if you hit enter it adds like spans and and then you oh there's too much space in there and before you know it you've made notion and you can't move. Yes. You put a line in between two images. It's like Microsoft Word. The notion does feel like Microsoft Word when you're working in it. My god, it is. And like I don't I don't envy the people that have to build on have to build like the the editing experience inside of notion because like I've never seen anybody do it good. I've never ever and like the probably like Obsidian is pretty good, but that's so much more stripped down. I I don't know that there is any good interface as as soon as stuff gets complicated and as soon as you have all these different features and all these little edge cases, that must be a nightmare to work on the the wizzywig engine behind notion. Yeah, I know. It's so funny. I am currently trying to teach uh my wife Courtney how to use Obsidian and she's getting it, but it is Yeah, it's it's not as friendly as Notion even though it feels like it is to me as a developer who's used to working in those types of interfaces forever. Yeah. Yeah. Sick. All right. Next one here is I want to work with people who genuinely care. My current organization is full of developers who don't care about the platform or code quality. They make no architectural decisions and just keep pushing code that isn't well thought out, well tested, or even looks good. Hey, you your co-workers might just be an AI because this is sounding a whole hell of a lot like an AI to me. Management talks about customer complaints and the need for better code, but the senior engineers don't care either. They write poor code themselves. For context, we're a startup with about 50 developers. 50? That's yes, that's not the worst part. Another senior developer and I actually care about engineering quality and we've tried to drive a lot of improvements, but they keep getting pushed back. The team always finds faults with our suggestions or comes up with vague reasons not to support us. A lot of opinions I hear don't hold up. For example, they insist on writing end-to-end tests for every small thing we ship. I've explained why integration tests would be more effective and that end-to-end tests are slow, costly, frank flaky, and a lot of the times won't scale. I even shared articles from Kent C do Dods, but they won't listen to feedback. The hard part is that the product is gaining real traction and growing fast. I don't want to walk away from a high growth company, but the this people problem is genuinely stressing me out and holding back my growth. I want you to consider something here. I want to work with people who genuinely care. I want you to consider something. You might not be right on everything. I'm just I'm just going to throw that. I'm not saying you aren't, but you might not be right about everything as much as you think you are. Personally, I prefer end to end tests for everything. Me, I prefer end to end tests for everything. And other people might too. Uh, sure. Costly, timely, those types of things. Potentially flaky. Yes, all of those things. All of the above. But man, I got a lot more value out of end to end test than I do. Can you explain the difference for the audience, the difference between an integration test and an endto-end test? Yeah, an integration test uh tests exactly what the name suggests. It tests how things integrate with one another. So, systems and how they integrate where a unit tests one single unit like a small unit, like a function. An integration test is more or less testing the pieces and how they fit together. where endtoend tests is testing as a real user using the app. So many times especially on the web end toend tests are done via some with something like playright or cypress which I haven't heard of cypress in a while now. I know people probably use cypress still most people have landed on on playright but what those are doing is it's writing the test code is running your app in a browser and clicking around and using it like a a user would. So therefore, it's kind of the ultimate integration test because it's the whole system integrated in my mind. It's one step away from having like a guy that just checks it for you. Yeah. So that was the red flag for me. That was like, h maybe maybe they do have good reasons for things. Now, I I I genuinely know what it's like to work with co-workers who don't care as much as you or have uh pushing poor projects out or or in my case, it was often times they don't have the pixel attention to detail that I had. So, I would see co-workers push out a client's site and I would just be like, "Oh, you didn't even do this. Like, you didn't even check this." And that was like frustrating for me to be in that pro. And but those were like agency projects though. So it's like okay those those those things are gone the next week or whatever. I don't have to think about it's not a big old project that the whole everyone's going to have to work in. I think the biggest thing that your team needs to get on the page with and and is a set of standards and hard enforcement things like uh things that like robots can do to to tell you what the problems are like linting stuff or or hard guidelines, things that like block code of a certain type from making it into the repo. Um but this problem will not ever fix without the management the engineering management taking control or even believing that it is a problem. So one I want you to consider that other people might have valid opinions. Two, I want you to talk in a non-aggressive way, a non-judgmental way. Yeah. To your engineering manager, and express some of your concerns. That's tough for a lot of people, especially people with coding egos. I know best. I'm doing it this way. They're not doing it the right way. This isn't a they're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. It's a hey, I've noticed these things in our project and I have some concerns for these things. Uh, do you think it's worthwhile for us to establish some guideline practices and enforce them? In some kind of concrete way. Yeah. I think what's happening here is you're you're probably stomping in being like, "We should do things X, Y, and Z way." And they're having a hard time caring. And if you ask yourself why don't they care, it's probably because fast growing startup people, everybody's got a lot on their plate. Everybody's always busy and they don't want some little wiener coming in and telling them we should be doing things differently. We have to change how it is cuz you have to just okay well now we have to figure out this new way of doing things and I'm I'm now I can't ship as much code because trying to figure this out. know, you're breaking things and oh, it doesn't maybe it doesn't work as well. Um, that's extremely frustrating. So, what you need to do is to just simply like this is so much easier with AI is just like go spend some time figuring out how you can fix it and then just bring it to them. Bring the problems that you have. Be like, "Hey, customers are complaining about X, Y, and Z. Here are three times when we dropped the ball and it made us lose money or customers or whatever." And then here here's my here's my here's my solution. And this is why it's going to be easier, right? It's going to it's not going to be harder. You're not going to have to learn a whole bunch of new stuff. It's simply just going to be easier. It's going to be faster. It's going to be better in in every regard. And if you can can do that rather than complaining and rather than trying to be a drag on their energy, but you can sort of energize and move them along, I think that that's going to be the move. Yeah. The biggest times that I've ever been annoyed with somebody giving suggestions, valid or not, is when they're giving big wien not big wiener energy. I would say uh their their energy is wieneresque. Um yes, that that to me is a is always like, okay, I get it, whatever. You know, like a personality thing at this point. That's what it boils down to. Yeah. you're probably not approaching it in a great way. And that's that is is just as much of a skill that you have to learn as figuring out where your semicolons go or whatever other developer skills that you have. Yeah. Yeah. Laura says, "I inherited a codebase that historically has used motion for incode animations. Motion is really cool. Motion.dev. Um but recently looks like they also added GSAP. Um, is it reasonable to keep both or should I make an attempt to consolidate to just one? What should I look at to determine which one may be better? There are some recent animations that also use 3JS uh as well if that's a factor. The 3JS stuff probably is is a totally separate bag of worms because um bag of worms. Yes. You know, like that's a different bag of worms. I would probably leave that out of it. That's probably like more 3D stuff. Um although I don't know. It depends on on what kind of animations they are. Maybe they could be converted. I certainly would move them into a single library. It depends on on how many and if it's going to be worth it, but if you've got pages where you're loading both libraries on there, um it the animations probably don't feel very consistent either. I'm a big fan of of both of these. I would probably look at the motion has been like cranking lately and I'm very I love everything that they've been putting out both in terms of like their defaults uh but also the library the the UX behind all of that and I don't think there's any better time to to do a refactor with all the AI we have right now being like like if you're on two weird things you can just ask the little robot to go through your codebase and find a list of every single thing that is written in Gap and figure out a plan to move each of those over um to motion. I think that's a very easy thing to do and that will significantly simplify your code base. Yeah. Yeah. It's just uh this is another one of these tough ones because it's like yeah, ideally you wouldn't want to have multiple of these libraries in here doing the same thing and they're both very capable. So it's like yeah, which one should win whatever. Um is is I wonder like how many people are using you you've inherited a codebase. So if this is the if you are the only person working on this codebase then like yeah just pick which one you like more and they're both good libraries and if you're not the only person have a pow-wow about it. I do I'm the type of person who makes an effort to just drop what they're doing and clean this stuff up. Yeah, even if that's not the most reasonable answer personally. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe see else. Don't be a wiener. You may be uh there's maybe a good reason why people have done both of those things. Also, maybe not. Maybe somebody just vibed a bunch of stuff and it just added Gap by default. You're right. There might be a good reason, but I I don't I can't think of too many things that motion and Gap like don't have overlap in necessarily. Um but that's me. I haven't used them both extensively. Okay, next one from Bill Babuzzy. Bill Babuzzy. How would you say that was? How would you say that? Babuzzi. Babooeyzy. Yes. Please do a YouTube video where you are given a piece of CSS code but are not allowed to run it. Instead, you must use a visual editor like Figma or a drawing tool to recreate what the final design will look like purely from reading the code. Then see who has made the best version closest to the original. We did it. We did it that video. Thank you for submitting this cuz I I had forgotten where I had seen the suggestion. I thought it was in a YouTube comment but I could not find it. Uh and then we found it in the potluck submission. That was super fun to do. Super fun. super challenging, especially because the drawing tool that we used was terrible and hard to use. So, that just made it even more fun. And then we also have done a video where we are coding a design and don't get to look at the rendered output of the code while we're doing it. And that's going to be releasing on a Friday video as well. Uh probably by the time you're hearing this, it will be on the Syntax YouTube channel if you want to see that. It was it was a blast. and CJ uh set us up for some really fun moments. Charles says, "Not a question, just a thanks. In a recent potluck, you talked about interview threats um opened a coden challenge this Sunday evening and immediately saw the red flag." So, let me pause for a second. We were talking about how uh Adib Hana he went through some interview and they sent him like a thing to npm install and he he he paused for a second and ran it through colad and realized there was like a post install malicious hook that would have like totally nuked his computer and stolen all of his crypto and did all these awful things. Um and and we mentioned it a couple episodes ago and and uh this person is Charles is saying thanks because I opened up a coding challenge this Sunday evening immediately saw the red flags. Google Drive zip link API key weird API key follow-up email strange spelling and formatting. Um I hope I would have noticed before your episodes, but I never know. Thanks. So man, you got to think like the scammers can get the like weird spelling figured out by now, you know, with all the technology we have. If the fact that you're your English is broken and not very good, like that that's the dead giveaway. Like even at Sentry, we do these like fishing email things where we have to like we training to like learn how to detect a fishing email. And it's often like if it's written in poor English and like I it's almost the opposite now. Now if something is way too polished that sets off my red flags and thinking, "Oh, someone someone ran this through an LLM." So good. And and people still don't see that the M dashes are dead giveaway. Oh, the am dash is the the least of the worries. I just see it in absolutely everything now. You know, it's No, I know. I'm just saying like an AI tells. It is crazy that everyone knows that it's an AI tell. Yet, I still get things with M dashes 24/7. I don't know if everybody does. Like, I think we're we're in it. I went to a a fair other day um in like a our cottage, small town, you know, and they have all these different vendors and they're selling stuff or their signs and stuff and man oh man have they they found out about Chad GPT, man. All of them all the signs, all the logos of all these things. um all of the writeups of these it's it's unbelievable how much it has like shook like small town or not not necessarily small town but it's like it certainly has reached the the outer non-technical group and it's the greatest thing to them because remember when we first figured out about it and you go wow it's outputting like you know how exciting that was initially and then you get jaded and realize all Yeah. Yes. I know but good check if you guys are interviewing certainly before you npm install or run any code in like a test um that they give you for an interview just give it a quick scan uh run it through cloud something like that because there's it seems like this this is going around stay safe out there because things are getting really real by the way we are I I want to call attention to this before we read the next question we're doing live streaming over on the syntax YouTube. Now, typically it's going to be on Mondays, but some of them have been on Thursdays due to holidays, etc. But we are going to be doing a weekly live stream over on Syntax YouTube where we're sharing with you uh interesting things that we found over the past week. So, if you want the same kind of style that we're talking about in the podcast, but in a lightning up to date that like we're talking about stuff that just happened that morning on there, uh, check out our live streams cuz we're going to continue to do those and we'll take a look at any projects and stuff you want us to look at. And even CJ Reynolds joins us that whole time as well. All right, next one here. Just trying to provide bites for my family. Hey guys, thanks for the awesome show. You really help me stay uptodate on the latest and greatest trends in JavaScript and LLM technology. Currently, I am a mid-level software engineer at a large enterprise company, and I'd like some advice on leveling up. Most days, I'm trying to be efficient and productive with my time. Deadlines make it difficult to focus on learning while working. All too often, I feel like a code monkey. I remember that term. The code we used to I used to work at a place that had a code monkey room. that was like you could just go and and work free from form out of the code monkey room. Thankfully, I'm not using LLMs as a crutch. I try to spend at least 30 minutes learning something new every day. How can I learn the deep or core knowledge of software or web tech that will make me indispensable in my career? What would you recommend? Building courses, reading docs, all of the above. Now, this one is tough because there are different answers here. So, if if you're focusing primarily on what will make you indispensable in the future, then your best bet is to stay on top of all of the latest AI stuff. Honestly, the the techniques, the skills, the stuff that other people might not be getting deep into, you're going to be competing with people who are just straight up using, you know, chat GPT or cloud code and and whatever. So having like a good handle on all of those things is always going to be helpful in the future at the this very moment. That said, that might not be the stuff that gets you excited to learn. I think that's a huge gap in the way people try to learn things is they try to learn things because they feel like they should be learning blank instead of because they're excited to learn blank. So, you need to figure out what excites you and then use your time to dive into those exciting things. You'll pick things up faster. Maybe you can sprinkle in some more boring things into the exciting things. The the number one tip that I have for learning things is to pick projects of stuff that you would like in your life, stuff that you would get excited to be able to use or to to have. Like even if it's just like a a little robot lighting up when you click a button on a website, right? If that's exciting to you, those are the things you're going to want to spend your time on because they can really push you forward into creating into exploring new avenues and exploring new ideas. And oftent times that process is like what opens our brain up to uh picking up big concepts and things that we might not have dove into before. Yeah, I think about this a lot because I love love learning things and I I find my learning happens in two ways. First, I do what's called like surface area learning. Meaning that like you're on Twitter, you're listening to podcasts, you're reading blogs, you're you're just like kind of scanning everything out there just to kind of understand what's out there. What is the surface area of this? reading documentation, understanding what the different APIs are, what the different texts are, what the different frameworks, languages, all of that stuff, right? That that's very surface level, just understanding what's out there. Um, but that only gets you so far. Like there's there's a lot of people out there that simply just know about everything, but they don't know like the nitty-gritty of like why you might want to do something. And it's it's only once you go and build something in those several specific areas do you realize, oh this is why people are are are so fed up with that. Like you might be like looking at like the LLM landscape right now and be like why are there so many harnesses right now and like why are there so many different ways to do X Y and Z? Why are people trying to reinvent memory um in in LMS? And it's because those people have gone deep with some of the other solutions and have hit the pain points. They've they think that they can do a better job because they understand it it deeply. And I I feel like a lot of people aren't going deep anymore and and real like learning things and actually hitting edges and having to like think and solve real problems. Um, people are just very high surface level. I understand what's out there. I can use the LLMs to boop boop do whatever I want. So, I think it sounds like you're doing a pretty good job at like the first level, which is like understanding what's going on. You're listening to this podcast. I think a second level is picking a couple things that you are interested in and that may be like I think you're it's probably a very good point to become the custom harness cla code skills cursor whatever at your company if you're a midlevel at a huge enterprise company and you become the guy that has figured it out and has the sickest setup and you can like show everybody you can have a lunch and learn that'll start to spread, you know, like that's probably the thing right now to to focus on and and to go deep on. So figure it out. Go download uh Hermes or go get your get PI, get a custom thing set up, not because that's what you want to use, but because I think by implementing several of them, going deep, you're going to truly understand it and you're going to be able to bring those solutions to your company. Yeah. hit edges and try to smooth those edges on repeat. Column says, "Developers won't like hearing this." Buckle up, guys. You're not gonna like hearing this, but I generally don't update software unless I'm forced to. Column, seemingly harmless updates have ruined enough native apps for me that I'd rather avoid them entirely. I have a few reasons. Yeah, there's certainly enough people on Adobe Photoshop CS2 cuz I don't want Don't move my cheese. I know where all my buttons are. Apps are getting absolutely massive. They add invasive features that take away from the experience and can't be toggled off. Reals, YouTube shows. Yeah. Can we talk about how awful the YouTube homepage is recently? There's like three good video and then games for some reason. Who's playing games on YouTube? I don't understand that. I don't understand that. Do you get games on your You have YouTube premium, so maybe yours is different, but mine is a hellscape. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, but even if you look at like the the explore section of the sidebar on YouTube is just like a list full of things people don't care about. Explore shopping playables like what are we doing? Yeah. So he says, "Aex example, I got a new phone. The latest adridden version of a simple guitar tuner uh that I had used for years and was installed and I had to find a new app. Unfortunately, where I live, local communities communicate via Facebook groups. I I know this all too well. Everyone's always anti Facebook. That's where everything goes down is Facebook groups. There is no way to see local road conditions without seeing a shrimp Jesus or a deer on a trampoline. He's talking about like AI memes or whatever. I need OpenClaw to check Facebook for me so I can avoid seeing shrimp Jesus. For a long time, I used web versions of Facebook and Instagram because the apps were much more paired down, but they eventually added all of that invasive features. So true, man. This drives me nuts. Instagram like you can't pause a video on Instagram. Yeah, you can't scroll sometimes. It's you have to like hold the you have to like swipe sideways and like just let me pause a video. It's unbelievable. Anyways, this is not the rant the rant thing here. However, since I'm a developer, I'm also on the other side of it. I want users to update immediately when I ship something. How do you reconcile the tension? Uh am I rational to avoid updates? Is that a normal behavior from the public up the the general public? I've been making more of an effort recently. I keep my browser updated and I sometimes scan change log for important security updates or features that I might want. For the most part, I still prefer early versions. What's the problem? Is it me? Well, Colum, I think you might be a little bit of a wiener. Um, but I I certainly understand where you're coming from where sometimes you don't want to update because it's it's getting worse. Um, or like like I always complain about the warp update. They put this huge update button on top of my warp and it ruins my videos all the time. And it drives me nuts because we've been using the terminal for what 30 years, 40 years now, however long terminals have existed. I don't need to update until tomorrow. It can wait. I'm doing ls-l. I don't need to update my terminal immediately. And and I understand from their point of view because there's bug fixes and now people are complaining because something is broken. Like a lot of times these updates are simply just fixing bugs that people are hitting, right? Uh but then also there's they're changing stuff and and who moved my cheese? I think that you're probably being a bit of a wiener here. I think mo in many cases the updates are trying to make the app better. In many cases, the the the updates are fixing bugs. And if if I'm I I often try to catch myself being like, I don't want to update. I don't want to learn something new. Um like I was we were talking about before this thing. I learned Da Vinci finally the video editor. I was on ScreenFlow forever. Every single update it got a little bit more bug ridden. It got a little bit more broken. Had a couple more things that were annoying. And then I was like, I just need to bite the bullet. and like finally learn this Da Vinci and and move on over to it. So you have to like kind of catch yourself being like do I not just want to update because it's like this is now more work for me to learn. Sometimes it's worth worth that. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah. Well, I mean, you are asking the guy who is currently running beta versions of Mac OS, iOS, iPad OS, who chose to build a tool that we actually need to rely on in alpha software. You are asking the wrong person because, bro, I update things to a fault. I update constantly. It's a absolute miracle that I have not gotten pawned by any npm anything because I'm be checking updates every day. I'm just just constantly checking updates and running updates. And I will tell you, it makes my life so much harder. Uh, when I had an Android phone, I used to flash all kinds of third-party OSs on there all the time, and Courtney would be like, "Your phone is never working. Why don't you just leave it on the one that's coming from Google or whoever?" And I my gosh, I just cannot do that. So I sadly column column I cannot get behind the behavior of not updating your things. I like the new stuff. Even if the new stuff is broken or hardly working, I like the new stuff and I'm usually a UI defender of when UI changes happen. It's almost always for good reasons. That said, this latest Mac OS is just straight garbage in terms of the UI stuff. It is no good. nasty work. No good. And I'm not usually a hater on that kind of stuff. So, I don't I don't I don't know what to tell you. I think you're being probably a bit of a wiener. I think there's a good healthy boundary of just updating your stuff when the update comes in. And I think that's probably fine. But it is it is so funny. I I think there is a type of person who is not uncommon who's just like, "This is it. This is all I want. I'm here. I'm happy. Don't move my cheese, etc." Yeah. I get it. I get it. But my keys unfortunately not the the world that we live in. Things are moving. Things need to be updated. Uh new features need to be added. It's it is frustrating when your your cheese is moved. But uh like one how all right I'm this is the Wes Rants show. Um Tweet Deck or XP Pro? Do you use you do you use that to to surf? I have been like a tweet deck user for I used since it since it was an Adobe Air app like Mhm. I remember probably 15 years. Um and I'm like I would consider myself like a power user of this application and one thing they did is they moved they took DMs out of it and now you got to go to X.com and click on the chats and put the stupid little code in. Uh, and I just realized I had I think I missed like 200 DMs from people. Um, probably 90% of them were spam, but there was still quite a few good ones in there that I had totally missed. And it's cuz they they move my cheese and that wasn't my normal workflow of checking my DM requests because I used to just have a column of DM requests that I would just scroll over to and I totally missed it. So that's I I do understand when it's like, why did you make this thing worse? you know, why did you take away a feature? Um, but if you're loud enough, they they they'll take it out. Like Twitter removed the ability to have like dark mode be able to select dark mode. They just they went entirely based on your your OS. And people raged because they're like, "No, I want my phone to be light mode, but my Twitter to be dark mode." And and they reinstated it. So, I was happy about Yeah. If I don't if my cheese isn't moved frequently enough, I feel like What are they doing? They not doing anything. Nobody's doing anything. This thing is dead. It's It's cooked. It's Yeah, that's how it feels good. We just got a new uh we use Riverside. They just rolled out a new design today. There's a couple bugs in it, but it feels good. You know, I'm happy that Yeah, I'm happy. Yes, I am happy. All right, next one from Patrick. The rapid evolution of AI is killing my spirit as a developer. Crafting code and solving problems has been the best part of this job for 15 years for me now. The more I adopt different AI workflows, the more anxious I get about the future, both for the dying love for this job and the fear of becoming irrelevant. I know that this is a quite common feeling that many devs share right now, but I'm curious how you guys feel about this, as people seem to really love the craft. Uh Patrick, I really love the craft, but more than the craft, I love solving problems. And the thing about AI workflows that make me feel bad is that the noneterminism in solving problems makes me really stressed out. I really love that in coding. I I know exactly what to type or where to look to solve problems. I solve them, they're done. With AI, it often feels like, all right, I have this problem in my AI setup. Not just with my code, but with my AI setup. It's not doing the things that it's supposed to be doing or that it's been told to do, or it's trying to use uh different tools when it has a read and write tool built into it. Like those types of things make me actually angry. Like I get frustrated and like that's what I when I'm thinking about like my joy being uh massacred in this job. It's strictly because the my ability to solve problems has decreased because of things not respecting the determinism that I like. That said, I think you need to take an approach for this that there are just new problems to solve now. There are new problems to solve. There's a whole host of new problems to solve. And it's your job to solve those problems if that's what you want to do. Uh and and with that, again, there's crazy new browser APIs to explore. There's crazy new workflows to explore. And yes, AI is different. It's very different than how we used to work. But in the same regard, you're still solving problems and you're still taking on challenges and you're still using technology, advanced technology to make and do cool things on the web. So in those aspects I think you need to look at it holistically as like we are able to do a whole lot of cool things with the advent of LLMs in coding and we are able to solve problems like never before. How can I use these tools to fuel that excitement rather than to let it kill my spirit? Um I think that's where you need to be Patrick. Yeah Patrick you're not being a wiener here. You're probably the first person to today that's not being a wiener. And you're not I have a lot of empathy for you, Patrick, because I feel you. I I would be lying if I said I wasn't wasn't bummed about the like dying of of lots of the stuff I love. um you know like understanding closures or uh just like the like deep tricky parts of programming that I feel like I understand deeply are now many parts of them are just now irrelevant. It doesn't matter that I I I understand how um like the closures and things work as much anymore. Certainly they still still matters to a point, but I don't think it matters as much. Not nearly as much as it. And even just like things like spot the syntax error, that's a game that we we do on our live shows. Um, it does it matter anymore that we're good at spotting the syntax error. I don't I don't think it does that you're really good at understanding where the curly bracket goes. But does it matter if you are good at uh what's a good game? It doesn't matter if you're good at Settlers of Katan or something like that. It doesn't matter. It's still fun. It's true. Still, we will continue to do it because it still is fun. And I think like what I've seen over my career of like teaching people to code is that you kind of had two people. You had the people that were just learning to code because they had an end goal. I want to learn JavaScript because I want to build something. I want to make something. I have this idea. I simply I I want a job because coding pays well. you know, like I saw all of it of people that simply just I want to build something. I want to get that job and I'm going to learn code because that is and then you have the other people is they they're using code because they they just love writing code. They love solving problems. They love the learning new things and the intricacies of it. Um and the people who use code to simply get to that end goal are stoked right now because yes, they didn't necessarily love coding and and that's that's totally fine. you you maybe you loved a business or you loved a project and learning code was simply the means to the end there and now that has has changed. Um and then the people who who simply just loved coding are feeling a little bit bummed out right now because it's like a lot of their identity and self selfworth is kind of um diminished. Um, so I think that's that's totally fine to feel that and I think a lot of people are feeling that right now, but like Scott says, there are so many more new exciting things um to sort of tackle. If you are simply looking at AI and being like, my job before was to build this thing and now instead of building the thing, I type into the box and it it builds the thing and that's that's the way it's going to be forever. I think you're you're wrong there, right? It's it's totally what we are doing is is changing and you have to sort of buckle up and realize that what your career is is like what you're going to be doing day-to-day is is going to look dramatically different in the in the next couple years. Um yes, solving problems still going to be the same thing. Um but the areas which you dip into and the kind of the stuff you dip into is going to going to look a lot different. So that's kind of my thoughts on that. And in in some regards it sucks because it's everything is changing and you're you're worried for your job and in some regards it's really exciting because now you can start like there's so many areas of my life where I'm like oh now I can like I was always into like microcontrollers and whatnot but like I I can get way more into it now. Uh knowing that I'm a technical guy who can solve problems and I'm pretty good at thinking but now I have this new superpower. That's a really exciting way to do it. You know, video editing is another aspect of it as well. You know, I'm using Cloud Code to build Da Vinci Resolve plugins right now and I don't think that that's something that I would have been able to do before that. Yeah. Yeah. I feel that. I think that was very well stated. I you know, there's so much there. We we uh those of us who really care about this craft have spent a lot of time and energy into this craft. So, yeah. Why people are a lot of people, you know, uh plumbers, lots of plumbers are are switching from what was it? Uh switching from like copper to uh like PEX and like and crimping them. And it doesn't mean that copper's gone. And in fact, there's lots of people who are I would totally want copper, but like that like amazing skill of being able to sweat a joint and perfectly seal it up. And you get these guys coming in with their little Milwaukee tubes. Yep. You know, like this stuff changes all the time. Like the only constant in life is change. And unfortunately, you have to embrace that. Adapt or die, you know. All right. Well, uh what a positive note to end on. Wes, let's talk sick picks and uh shameless plugs. Wes, do you got any sick picks for me today? All right, I got a sick pick. I don't know if I have sick picked this in the past, but I'm going to repick it again. And this is what is referred to as a plastic welder. So if you have ever have something that's plastic that breaks. So namely the thing that always breaks for us is the bins in our fridge. You know the kids grab on them, they crack and then they start to sag or like we had like a wheelbarrow that had a crack in it and it was like starting to open up. I had one of those. Yeah. Yeah. It happens all the time where plastic stuff breaks and you can't like super glue it together because that doesn't work. So, what this does, this plastic welder is you have these like staples that I'll see if I can show the camera if you're watching the video. You have these like squiggly staples and you simply just press the button uh on the on this gun here and it will heat it up like immediately and then you just sink the staple into the plastic and then you let go and the plastic rehardens again. And it works so so well. It's unbelievable how good this is. And it's it's one of these tools that's like I don't know 30 bucks, 40 bucks to buy. And it's it's saved us like hundreds of dollars in buying like bins and wheelbarrows and just stuff around the house that you can't just simply glue. You need to like physically it needs to be mechanically put back together. Melted. Yes. I love this. Yeah. I I mean, my wheelbarrow is currently cracked and I was like, "Oh, what do I got to get a new wheelbarrow? I've had this thing forever." Yeah. Well, I I literally picked up one off the side of the road. Something I do all the time. So, you Yes. You I will drive and I see stuff on the side of the road that people are throwing out and then I stop and look at it and go, I can fix that. Because you you look at it and go, "Oh, it's it has a crack in it." Right? People you crack it, you throw it in the garbage. Right? But I I love fixing things. So, this is a very very good tool for that. Yes. Word. I'm going to stick pick a couple of things. One of which is USB LEDs. They are great for your car and your car. Like there's parts of my car that get really dark or either in the back seat that would be nice to have a little LED shine in there. And these things are just little USB with an LED on the bottom. They light up little spaces. You can put one in your server rack or something. Is it is it just like a little like a little puck or is it like a strip? It's simply just it looks like like a dongle like a really thin or really small dongle with an LED that you can change colors or have it automatically change colors or whatever on there. Um just really simple. Just pop it in there and lights up spaces. So like dark spaces that have USB but no light that works really well. I put them in my car, put one in my wife's car in her her glove box and stuff. And they're light sensitive, so they only come on when it's dark out or whatever. That's great. Yes, they're really nice little things. Um, and then another car thing, Wes, is I got a wireless CarPlay adapter. And I would have thought, I don't know why I would have thought these would have been more expensive, but it's 29 bucks and you just pop it in the USB. my USB and my Ionic has for the CarPlay USB adapter is like in the weirdest spot, a place you would never ever want to keep your phone. So, because of that, I just never use the CarPlay for it. And so, I just got a wireless CarPlay mini dongle, plugged it in, now I got wireless CarPlay anytime I get. I wondered if those are good or not, cuz works. I installed like a head unit in our van that had wired and wireless. And you're right, the I put the wired one in the glove box, but it had a wireless wireless is the best. You just simply just get in your car and it connects. Yeah. And I I even like the Hyundai UI in my head unit and everything, but the I would much rather have Google Maps support because like the maps is fine. It has traffic. It has those types of things, but I would much rather use Google Maps, especially iMessage. We have we have a Tesla Model Y and it has like SMS integration and it's garbage. It doesn't work half the time. It doesn't like somebody reacts and it's like Caitlyn sent a message and it doesn't say what it is if it's like just an emoji and like come on, it's awful. Um, and I just want iMessage integration or like ways, you know, tell me where the cops are so I can slow down. Tell me where the cops are so I can hide my drugs. No, whatever. Um, okay. I got a shameless plug for you, Wes. Yes. Um, my wife has been doing a podcast. She's a a doctor of psychology. She taught in schools. She ran a testing center for kids and she's taught M's level human development courses. And now she has a podcast about parenting. So, if you want to hear a podcast where it's uh scientific parenting tips done in a way that's fun, in fact, our our latest episode as the time of recording this was on board games and like which board games are actually educational for your kids, different board games for different age groups and how the idea of like a family game night, a regular family game night can build all kinds of awesome skills within your kids. So, check that episode out. It was a lot of fun. Don't Don't people listening, don't be a wiener and let your kids play board games. That's board games are awesome. Don't be Don't you Wes, you don't even know what the benefits are. Builds resiliency. It's building ritual amongst your family. Family time. My kids love playing sorry and board games and whatnot. I just I can't do it. They uh they play with with mom. Yeah. Do it for the kids. Scott, this your phases.fm says 2025 in the footer. Uh, blame that on transistor. Oh. Oh, I got a I got a text from um uh Justin Jackson just this morning. I'll uh I'll send him a message. Well, I'm updating it. There is a way for me to update it, but I never even changed that. So, I never said that in the first place. that podcast is Phases. Check it out at phases FM on YouTube or phases.fm. All right. Please submit us your questions. Go to syntax.fm and click on the potluck button. Submit your questions. We'll answer it on a future show. Peace. Peace.