Should I Keep Using WordPress?

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we got a potluck episode for you too. That's where you bring the Wes, we bring the answers. And if you got a question for us, please submit it. Go to syntax.fm.

Click on potluck in the menu bar and submit your question. We'll answer it on a future episode. Today, we've got some really interesting questions around, should I keep using WordPress, or should I be going headless and and doing it all in JavaScript or something fancy? Is the gravy train over for software devs? A lot of people are are having a hard time finding a job right now, and things are are just switching up. Where to store your TypeScript types? Do you put them in a separate file? Do you put them in the file where you have them? It's a big mess, and we're gonna figure it out for you. Finally, there's a bunch more Wes, but one other interesting one is, like, what is the benefit to buying a SSL certificate when you can just get a free one with Let's Encrypt? Scott, we just got back from San Francisco. We did our GitHub meetup.

Props everybody who came out for that. That was a hoot, wasn't it? Man, a big time hoot. It was a it was a hoot Sanity, maybe. Couple 100 people there. There was a couple funny things. Let's let's talk about all the funny things that happened. The funny things. Yes. First of all, there was another meetup, like, on the other side. We, like, did this, like, brewery outside, and there was, like, a brewery in the middle, like a like a little like, they pour beer there. And we were on one side. Mhmm. And then there was another meetup on the other side, which it was, like, a meetup for, like, investors or something like that.

And some of those people came to our side just unknowingly, and they were just, like, talking to me for, like, a couple of minutes. And I was like, this person doesn't know They? What we are. Our like, why are they here? And then they're just like, so are you part of Y Combinator, and what are you investing? I was like, oh, I think you're at the wrong meetup. But then they, like, continued to talk to me about investing. Like, maybe there's an opportunity here. Maybe there hey. Yeah. No kidding. Right? Oh, what else? There was this is not funny, but some kid who's 14 years old came, took a bus in.

Yes.

Amazing.

That was really cool. So shout out to I forget his name, but shout out for, to the 14 year old that came out. That was really cool. If you're out there on YouTube, leave a comment. That was really great of you to come. Thank you so much for for showing up. We also had folks from Zed editor show up. We had Robbie Vercel was there. There was, like, big name people. A lot of Jason Langsdorf.

A lot of really great people showed up. Ashley Willis. There was just, like, just really great people and a lot of great conversation, a lot of big Syntax fans. We had, the park security there Wes loving our merch. One guy, one guy on a bike

Yarn security bike got one in their head. You the police hat? Scott's scared to back the blue here, but, yeah, it was a No. He was I no. I thought he was a he's a he's a full on police officer. Okay. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, he,

no. He wore our Internet hat. There Wes other people who were just, like, coming by and being like, hey. I see these hats over here. So we gave out so much gear. It was crazy. So long. Even the VC people were coming over and being like, oh, this gear is actually ripped. So we had glow in the dark syntax stickers. It was

I you have to send me a few because I brought I brought one home, and I didn't actually grab more. And my kids were losing it. And I was like, oh, shoot. I guess I shoulda got more.

I, I didn't bring any home. So, sadly, all of the ones that I had are are gone. So I think they they went really fast. So I don't know if they're still there. The Century folks might have them. So maybe next, event Wes can go to or, we can get them to send us some or something because really cool. The stickers seriously glow. Let me tell you this. When you have 300 glow in the dark stickers in your suitcase, apparently, that really wigs out the security machine. The guy pulled my suitcase aside, which is, like, not that uncommon. Right? But when he, like, opened it up, he's like, there's something really weird right here. It was just this giant ball of light.

And I was like, I wonder if it's these stickers. He's like, I don't know about that. And I was like, well, they're glow in the dark. And he was like, oh.

But it's just probably look like this, like, giant blob.

It's like there's this giant mass in your suitcase. I wonder what it looks like glow in the dark in a what's the what is it? An X-ray X-ray machine? I don't know what they what's the tech? Yeah. Like, I guess so. Like, sometimes, don't you have to, like, drink a glow in the dark liquid before you get, like, an X-ray on your bones or something?

Yeah. And then you can have that, like, skeleton. You can just go go in the dark skeleton.

That's cool. So don't eat our stickers, but Don't eat them. Might be kinda cool. That's funny that that cup But shout out, we also did a little pizza at the end. Everything was great. Awesome time meeting up. So thank you everybody who came out. Can't wait to do another one. Wes, we should do it in Toronto this year. That would be fun. Toronto or, like, let us know in the comments below which city we need to hit up. So we we hear Seattle a lot. We wanna do Michigan at some point. Wanna do every city, but let us know in the comments below.

Especially Europe, we gotta do a European tour.

Let's do Paris. Let's do, where are the Milan. Places. Let's do Amsterdam. Let's do Mallorca.

We'll do a meetup in Mallorca. Who's who's coming?

First question from debug dev says, I got an email from Bluehost extolling the benefits of paid SSL over, presumably, Let's Encrypt. Is there any real benefit to picking a paid SSL over Let's Encrypt, especially on high end and noncommercial sites? This is an interesting question.

As far as I understand, the only benefit to using a paid SSL is, like, organization certification, but I have not seen that in a browser in years. You remember you used to have a browser where you would, like, go to eBay, and then the whole bar would, like, light up green and be like, eBay corporation.

I guess that could be a way to show that it is associated with a corporation to get that. But aside from that and I don't even know if that's that big of a deal. Right? Like, the domain name is the most important, verification thing. Aside from that, there's no benefit. I think that that's a that's an old thing. They used to make a ton of money selling SSL certificates, and it's not necessary anymore. There's no security benefits or anything like that. You know? Node s traffic that is sent encrypted over SSL is is exactly that. It's not more secure.

Yeah. Not more secure because it just has a bad it used to be, like, a big trust and verification thing. And even back in the day, I remember, like, being really stoked to have that badge that was, like, protected by Kubota or. Oh, yeah. That was, like, such a a legitimizer that you needed that, that that badge on your website, the little lock, the web two point o style lock or something like that. When I see that now on a website,

I think, like, oh, man. I don't these guys Yarn, like, warp. You know? Like, that almost makes me not want to use it because but, like, I guess for regular people, they need to see a lock or something like that. You know? Like, antivirus scanned website.

It's almost better nowadays that, like, it's now just something that is to be expected and transparent and that, like, people don't have to know what it is. Yeah. It doesn't It warns you if it doesn't exist now. You know?

Like, the benefit of a SSL certificate does not protect you from, like, a lot of the other things, which JS, like like, loose database credentials or or hackers and things like that. They're the you're you're not being protected from any of that. You're simply an SSL certificate stops your data from being intercepted between your browser and the server that you're sending the data to. Yes. And that can even happen on your work. If your work makes you install an SSL certificate, on your thing, I use an app called Proxy Man, and you can install your own SSL certificate in the middle and literally just intercept that traffic, and and you can see it.

Yep.

Beware of loose database engineers.

Alright. Next one, Wahid.

Hi, Syntax. Do you guys think the position of a pure front end developer still exists? Like, two or three years ago, I would get bombarded by recruiters about front end positions, and now I get zero. And when I search for front end jobs, all I see is full stack and back end jobs. And Wes all of the different frameworks, languages, and stacks, I'm at a wit's end, to know what to learn. Do I think this job still exists? Absolutely. Because, I know even as as far as century hires, front end specialists. Absolutely. But front end specialists these days aren't just, you know, a a CSS or an HTML person. They're somebody who understands React really well. There's somebody who who can really dive deep into all of that stuff. I think these jobs absolutely still exist.

Full stack developers are much less common in larger companies where there are more engineering talent and the back ends and the data side, the full stack side of things are much more intense. Like, the scale at which the data exists in Century, you couldn't have

a front end developer working on. No. It that's not even, like, a back end app. You know, that's infrastructure engineer. It's unbelievable the scale at at it is.

Right. And so the lines are definitely blurred because even with server side rendering or whatever, there are aspects where you're having to interact with the back end of things. Yeah. But to me, a lot of that is not, like, full stack. Like, full stack is doing it all tip to tail. Yeah.

And and I I do think, like, UI and, like, front end jobs absolutely still exist.

Yeah. I think so as well. However, if you're bigger corporations are gonna have separate people. But I think if somebody if you're being hired at a company that just has an app or builds apps or whatever Sure. In many cases, you're going to be expected to do, like, front to back because, like, the lines of, like, what's front end, what's back end is is relatively blurred. You know? You gotta just query the database, Vercel render HTML, jump into the client, and and hydrate something, add a date picker with some JavaScript. Like, we had this question a a while ago what it was. Can I just do CSS anymore and not do JavaScript? I don't think that that exists. There's certainly, you can be a specialist, and there's people out there that are know CSS performance really well. Like, Harry Roberts is is probably one of them. You Node? Just performance Sanity, knows everything about CSS and and rendering and how all of that stuff works. Those jobs certainly exist, but they are much less common than someone who's like, we just need to build an app, and you have to build the app for us. And whatever you need to do to make that happen, that that works. And then as it gets bigger into, like, bigger and Kubernetes and clusters and sharding, all of that type of stuff, then then it starts to to drift off. But I would not scare away from just, like, calling yourself a full stack dev.

Learn a thing or two about how servers work and how requests come in, how databases are queried.

I think you're getting it a lot further. Especially this next question we have here is just, like, there's a lot of people looking for jobs right now. And if you can do it all, you're gonna be higher up on that list. So this is an interesting question from Pookie, and this is just something that I have heard and been asked. Even at the meetup alone, I was asked this question similar to this, like, three different times.

So the question is, will this industry become any more stable and friendly for software devs? After about ten awesome years and most of them listening to the podcast, thank you, I'm seriously considering leaving to become an electrician between AI, outsourced jobs overseas, and a return to office, which I live in a small town, which I don't have many options, I don't think the industry is stable to provide for me and my family. The job did let me go, and I've been looking for six weeks, and it seems terrible out there. Some engineers spending nine months looking for jobs. Even if I get a role, any boss could decide to cut Bos at any moment, and it seems scary. What do you think? Will the pendulum ever swing back in our favor? This is a big question. I I wrote a a couple thoughts down here as well. Like, I first of all, I think that we had some good gravy years in this industry. Good gravy. Yeah. People making silly money, people doing a boot camp and and making $250 right out the door, Facebook, Google, just gobbling up, people who who knew what they're doing. They're smart people, but just didn't have the didn't have the experience. And and that gravy train is is over now.

So a couple thoughts here. Everybody in our industry is is freaking out right now, but I I feel like every industry is freaking out right now. Yeah. You you think about, like, teachers are scrambling to figure out what to do with assignments. How do you make assignments when people can just chat GPT something? You know? Business analysts are freaking out because you can summarize, stuff really quickly.

Photographers are freaking out because, like, styles are changing and also, like, the tools. It's it's easier than ever. Like, you should see the sick ass photo I took of Scott with portrait mode.

That's definitely possible.

But, like, beautiful sunset, Scott smiling thing, I'm an idiot. I just touched the portrait button and and pushed the button on my phone, and it it poops out like a like a unreal image like that. That's that's pretty good. Right? That's dentists are being bought up by private equity. You know? Like, I see so many of these dentists that are, like or, like, Juno vet, whatever. And it's like, oh, no. You're just, like, killing the entrepreneurial vet by squeezing everything out of these small vets. But I think on the flip side, there's lots of people are probably already commenting down below mean things. There's a lot of effed up drama going on, but also lots is changing. So I think the answer is somewhere sort of in between.

And and I think if you were to just try to move to somewhere like electrical, I don't think that you will feel like that is is more stable because I think every industry is changing right now. Everybody is is feeling shifts, not just because of AI. That's that's part of it. People are freaking out and trying to figure out how to use that, but also there's just, like, political things and there's manufacturing. There's all kinds of stuff going on right now. People's attention spans are shorter than ever. Short form video, summarized content. You know? And I don't think the answer is going to just be moving to another industry. I feel like every industry right now is feeling a bit of a shakeup. So that's that's my thoughts of what's going on here. So so what should you do? Become an invaluable person. Right? People that are invaluable are people who can think big, can architect systems, they can tackle problems, they can stand out. Just by talking to people about, like, what's going on with hiring right Node, I just put a thread out on Twitter being like, what's going on? And everybody's saying the same thing is that it's there's just so many people looking for jobs. There are lots of good people that cannot get hired because there's so much noise right now. And and AI is making that absolutely Wes because everybody can generate all the slop and just send out 10,000, resumes. So I think that how we hire is going to change and, as always, has been being able to stand out from the rest of those people who are trying to just cheat the system is going to be is going to be the move. And how do you stand out? Right? Think big. Learn how to architect systems.

Build your own thing. You've you say you've been off for six weeks. Like, six weeks is a long time. You could build Yeah. Like, a life changing app that not necessarily life, Jay, but you could build something really good in six months. If you can find the energy to do that, you could absolutely slam dunk it. So I don't know if if changing systems is the move, but I think changing your approach to standing out and becoming hired is is definitely

needed. I think this approach that you're referring to has always existed.

It's JS a hack. It's a hack to get more better jobs. Because there were times when, like, hiring was really tough before the whole YC bump and all that stuff where there's, these startups coming. Like, I I remember back in the day, it was tough to get. Like, I was fighting with a lot of people for an HTML job. The things that work then are always going to work. Like you said, becoming an invaluable person. If you have that time and you have those skills, you're making things. That those things could get noticed, but they could also become a financial backing for for you.

You you could do so many different things. But like you said, I think it's really important, to emphasize that every industry is feeling some kind of crazy, craziness right now. When I talked to doctor Sarah Bird, that's why I asked her about these changes, and she was just like, every single industry is feeling these changes. And it's just like, these people get it. It is

it's a situation right now. So, I loved all of your advice, and I don't have anything important to add. I just want to emphasize reemphasize it all. Totally. I just was looking through the replies on that tweet I put out. And Pierce Bogan, he is Yes. On the Versus Code team. I met him at GitHub Universe, and he says, from a hiring manager perspective, we recently redid our interviews for the Node product team. So anyone who works on Versus Code, they gotta hire for that. They all start with an app building exercise. They can use any AI developer tool they want, which is super interesting. You get to learn a lot about every everyone uses different AI tools differently.

So some spend thirty minutes planning, then pass the AI and finish the exercise in five minutes. Some iterate much more with an agent. Some prefer to stay in the editor. So this is kind of really interesting. It's like, instead of being, like, no AI in the interviews, it's the opposite and being like Do what you want. Yeah. How how do you approach things? How do you tackle systems? How do you tack how do you how do you solve problems? I think it says a lot about a person of, like, yeah. There are people that are just gonna make me a website that does cats for whatever, and then you get some slop out the other end. But there are very smart people using these tools that are figuring out how do you approach these problems.

Then he goes on to says, then we have two interviews focused around getting to the root of the developer problem and designing a solution to solve that problem based on real feedback we've gotten from the team. So that's again, I just did I not just say that? Problem solving, systems design, those are the bigger problems, and they always have been in software design.

And and just, like, writing the actual HTML tags is is probably not gonna cut it anymore, whereas previously, it might have. I think good interviewers

have always known this that, like, the people who understand the fundamentals of how things work, but also how to fix things when they don't work, they understand problem solving, debugging. They understand, like, people who can, like you said, architect and all that. People who who have been good hires all along have, like, understood that those things are super important, which is so funny because I I remember applying for jobs that, like, they would ask me a question about, in one particular case, it was Backbone, and Marionette was the stack. And they're like, how would you do this in Backbone? It's basically just like a give me the syntax of how you would do this in Backbone. And I was just like, well, I can tell you how I would do it without Backbone, and I could tell you where I would go to learn to do it in Backbone or whatever. It's like they don't Yeah. They don't like that as an answer even though that was a better answer than, oh, you write the dot set function or whatever. You know? Yeah. Short sighted. It's never been about memorizing

the method names, and it's always been about tackling these problems, which gives me the Wes. Like, how do you get better at these things? Reps. Yeah. Sorry? Reps. Yeah? Reps. Put in the work. Practice. Six weeks. You got six weeks to build maybe six different products. You can you learn a hell of a lot about architecture and design in six weeks, building six different things.

That is that is so right. Everything I've ever learned that was valuable was through some kind of hard exploration to something going back and forth. And and AI makes this easier Node, not because you can, have AI do the work for you, but you can use it as a bit of a sounding board. You can use it to research things for you. You can use it to explain docs or blog posts. And, obviously, you have to be a little bit cautious with that, but it's never been more accessible than it is right now to to learn everything.

Yeah. Next question here from Blemming.

Hi. Longtime listener. In a recent episode about Zed, Scott talked about automating versioning with GitHub actions.

He talked about change sets, but looking up looking that up brought me to solutions for monorepos.

In the past, I would have used a simple Npm version, major minor patch with Git tags to match, but automating this would create a merge conflict since the package dot JSON gets modified. We currently have a Docker build flow to, pushing to Docker Hub, but we have stuck to using global tags like staging latest development.

Love to get versioning up and running, get properly version the project in GitHub and Docker Hub. Could Scott talk a bit more about his process and maybe share his GitHub actions? Yeah. So I have shared the GitHub actions. It's in the notes here. I was like, change sets a a monorepo tool? Because I've only ever, used it outside of a monorepo. And I went to their I I went to their ReadMe for change sets immediately, and woof, change sets for such a simple stinging project.

This JS always drives me nuts when you go to a a project like this, and it's like, here's a Node. Here's 10,000 links. Here's all this stuff, and it's like the very first sentence, a way to manage your your versioning and change logs with a focus on monorepos.

And, like, sure. I I I think by putting monorepos so front and center there, Wes. If you have a monorepo with a lot of packages, this can be handy. You can just always also just straight up use this. So, Blenning, I I'm gonna point you to one page in specific on this, which is just the intro to using change sets. That's the only link you need. They should just put that on the dang read me as the very first thing. Oh, how do you use change sets? Oh, you run n p x change set CLI in it. It gets you going. Then you run n p x change l a change set CLI. It creates a change set for you. You modify it. You take you say what the changes were, what type of change it was, then you run, change that sales to live Vercel. And then that applies it. It creates a change log. It's like a two or three step process.

And this readme granted, like, I understand that this tool is way more powerful than that, but, like, this read does such a good job of making this seem so much scarier than it actually is. I've also included in my links the my YAML for two projects. One of which is a neither of which are mono repos, by the way, in case you're wondering. One of which uses change sets just in the repo itself, and then one of which uses change set versioning within a GitHub action, and I have the action linked. But in reality, the code for that is literally just n p x change set version. That's it. It's like a one liner. It applies that, and then it it merges that back in. So, give that a check. There's a little bit more there, but, change sets is a pretty simple tool. What it does is it generates change log for you. It bumps your package versions. It keeps things nice and organized. The thing I like the most about using change sets is now that I have a package that other people are using, I can enforce in the GitHub action, hey. You have to have your change set. So that way, if somebody wants to commit and somebody wants to help this project, all they have to do is submit a PR with a change set, and that version's gonna get bumped. It's gonna run through NPM publish on its own, and I don't have to do anything other than

looks good to me. Talk about a good use case for agents, though, in in a pull request because, like, nothing is worse than, like, when you send a PR to something, like, that clearly fixes a problem. And they're like, well, can you please, like, submit a change set and do all this other bullshitty stuff? And it's just Sample. That sucks.

But now you can simply just, like, at change set Bos, please Yep. Generate a change set saying x, y, and z. Man, like, the that that is why a lot of people don't use these tools. It's just, like, the overhead is a little bit more, and then you have to go back locally and whatever. Now it's so much easier, especially, like, you're oh, you're just on your phone. Yeah. Change that bot. Please do that. Even not even change that bot. You could be, like, on the GitHub pull request, you can assign,

Copilot.

So you could say, I need a change set for this, assign Copilot, and it's gonna make one for you. Even if it's not perfect, chances are it's gonna be better than what I would have written by hand. Oh, yeah. I'm often using the data. Making the file Yeah. Having to, like, go locally, make the file, push the changes up. That's annoying. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax.

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on over to century.io/syntax.

Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

Snowy owl says, using an IDE that is not Versus Node, what are your views on that? I hear good things about Zed and Warp having its own IDE. Curious if you have switched from Versus Code or not.

Being hesitant to swap is mostly because of the rich ecosystem of Versus Code extension. Yeah. This is we just did an entire episode on Zed. I also talked to the WebStorm people at the meetup. They gave Yeah. We're web Now I have a Zed and a WebStorm sticker on my laptop, so I'm I'm repping both.

The warp one is interesting because warp is now not just a terminal, but it's like an actual, like, UI for editing stuff. You Node? It's kind of a mix of, like, cloud code, but it has a much better UI for it, in my opinion. I don't still don't just love working directly in the terminal, but No. That's pretty neat. And then Zed, yeah, I'm man, I'm I'm pretty excited about it, especially once we did that episode with Scott, and he he kinda explained that the ecosystem has caught up on a lot of the problems.

So what do you think?

Yeah. I've been using Zed ever since we recorded that episode, and I'm almost embarrassed that episode came out Wes it because, like, a day or two afterwards, they fixed so many of the things that I had that were like like, so many of the UI things, they they were they, like, nailed. And now there is, like, a UI for updating your settings and stuff. Not that I don't care about. I like a u or a JSON settings page, but, like, sometimes the UI is nice. Now there's a UI for that. And, like, they've really nailed a lot of, like, little things here and there within, the latest updates of Zed, and it just keeps getting better. So I I've been continuing to use Zed. That said, I'm the type of freak that's changing what I'm using twenty four seven.

I probably changed my browser twice since, we recorded this episode and when it's released.

And so I'm always bouncing around on different stuff. That said, the things that I've been really liking about Zed is just how many of the things I would reach to extensions for exist inside of the editor.

I'm looking for this tweet desperately right now because,

searching on Twitter is impossible. So I asked somebody. Somebody said, I can't go to Zed LeGrock is so good for finding tweets because you could just describe what you what you're thinking of.

Like, at GitHub Universe, there was this woman who who did this, like, music code thing, and it was like a like a techno Her name is is it DJ Al? DJ Dave. And I didn't know who it was, and I didn't know what the tool was. I knew Scott knew, but before I bugged Scott, I just typed ESLint Grok being like, there's something where it's like a JavaScript to make music in the React GitHub universe. And they're like, DJ Dave did it at with this thing called I forget what it's called again. What's it called? Oh, strudel.

Strudel.

It's strudel. It's a German word. Right? Strudel. We love strudel. Yeah. Grokka JS very good at finding tweets sometimes. Yeah. I didn't find it. What do you what are you searching for? Either I had a tweet about or we had something about the Zed Node, and somebody said that they liked Zed, but the extensions that they used did not exist for it. So I said, hey. What are these extensions that you're using? And they responded with a big old list of bunch of, extensions. I will say most of them, if not all of them, like, were features that exist inside of zed without needing an extension.

And many of them actually Node within Versus Code without an extension. I think we've gotten into the point where Versus Code has existed for so long. We're using all these different extensions that you've just had installed for so long that you don't even ever think did the editor go back and add this feature. So I know a lot of people think that there's some things that they need their extensions for that they just straight up don't. Now granted, I'm not I'm not saying that all of their extensions, do exist or everyone's extensions do exist. I will say I'm not missing a whole lot in the the Zed ecosystem lately. I'm just not. I find it helpful to sometimes just, like,

reevaluate before you, like just just try it. It. You know? And maybe you find out you don't need it, and maybe you find out something that is like, that that was a killer feature from Versus Node that I cannot do without.

But Scott even with, like, the whole, like, Prettier pnpm ESLint and then switching to something like Biome or what's the new Vite the one from Vite. What is it called? Oxlint.

Oxlint.

Things like that. It's just like they're trying to get to parity because that's what everybody the whole industry is built on. But sometimes, maybe it's worth just, like, reevaluating and saying, maybe I didn't need all those 8,000 plug ins for my my linter.

Yes. Yeah. Like, some of them Yarn, like, cloud code for Versus code. Oh, so cloud code is baked into zed. Node baked into zed. Yeah. GitHub pull requests, that still doesn't exist, but the Git Git stuff is good. GitLens. Do you use GitLens? Oh, man. No. No. I don't I use AirLens. Same.

Yeah. AirLens for sure. Who needs that? Who's who wants to see, while you're coding, who authored

each chunk of code? I think GitLens does a lot more than that, but it also is heavy. It's very heavy. Yeah.

Yeah. So there there's a lot of extensions. I personally have been, like I said, riding with with Zed for a bit, and I gotta say there's some really really great, things about it. My computer no longer it feels like it's taking off twenty four seven. And I do love Versus Node still. I will say that. So, no shade on Versus Code, but there's been something really nice about using this.

That's fresh. Man, the thing I keep keeps bringing me back to cursor is Cursor. Tab completion. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, the tab completion and the, like, next tab where it, like, it knows where you want and auto imports things when you use them, that stuff is so good in cursor. And, like, I keep I keep going back to Versus Node for a day or two, and their tab completion is not as good.

Zed's isn't as good either. Yeah. Zed's auto completion or tab completion isn't good, but let me tell you what's better about Zed JS it's so much faster with code actions. I mean, there's just such an inherent latency in some of those things, like auto importing or any of that stuff. I found to be exquisitely fast in zed. Even, like, something as stupid as spell checking.

Man, spell checking in Versus Node is a pain in the ass. It is probably

the extensions or whatever. But in zed, it's just so simple just to add to global dictionary whatever, and it's just so fast. My spell checker in Versus Code or or cursor, it, like the little light bulb Wes there's a spelling mistake, it, like, puts it in the wrong spot for I have some weird zoom setting set up. But, yeah, that is a pain in the butt.

It's a pain in the butt. How is that not native in in Versus Node? It should be. Because I have I have a list of, like, 800 words or something silly like that of just coding words that don't actually exist in the English language.

Spell check, man.

Agentically.

Yes. Oh, there's so many. Tolinski.

Yes. That's a good one. It never gets. So sorry, snowy owl. Give it a try. Use it. You might like it. It's very good. Weigart from and I believe this is The Netherlands.

I'm doing a dumb American thing where I don't recognize the flag.

Weigard from The Netherlands. Hi, guys. I find myself, listening to Sanity quite a bit. Even though I'm primarily a WordPress developer, most of my customers want WordPress. I've often considered going headless and switching to a more modern stack, at least for the front end. Being a WordPress dev is not exactly something to brag about these days. Hey, my Node. As long as you Scott customers, you can brag about it. But I have never been convinced that I would win anything by doing that. Sure. Building a front end in a framework like Astro or Eleventy might provide a better DX in some areas, but it complicates things in many other ways. Yes. It does.

Querying data, handling authentication, and server management. I need two servers instead of one, one for the back end and one for the front end, all becoming more difficult. So I'm curious, would you guys recommend a switch to a headless approach, or should I just continue rolling PHP templates like it's 2010? I lean towards the latter, but I'd love to be convinced I'm wrong. Hey. Listen. I think it's more viable than ever to just ship this type of thing because we have page transitions now. We have way better usage for all kinds of front end stuff with CSS.

So you can get really great experiences.

And as long as your app flies and is fast and looks modern, it doesn't matter what you're building it in. I really don't think you need to do a headless approach here. Every single time I've done a headless front end to a site like Drupal or WordPress or Magento even, Like, I have regretted that shit almost immediately, because you do have to reimplement so many things. Now there is a time when I found it to be nice, if you have, like, a static site, and a static site works really well for this stuff. But if you have a site that's being, like, constantly content edited and stuff like that, it's all there. Like rebuild it every time time they change something. Yeah. Dude, your clients hate that shit. They hate it. They also hate that they now have two URLs to manage. They hate that they have to pay or potentially host two different things in two different places. Yeah. I'd saved it. Why isn't it on the site? You gotta wait for the site to build. Okay. What year is this? Yeah. The huge reason that people use WordPress is that it comes batteries included, and it has a massive ecosystem of plug ins. And you will be giving up

all of that if you go headless. You're giving up like, you would be reimplementing current page in the nav, current page parent in the nav. You know? You'd you'd be reimplementing like, you'd have to rebuild the website every single time that you have there, and that seems like it sucks. Especially, like, oh, I want a quick store. Boom boom boom. WooCommerce. Done. You're selling stuff in, like, ten minutes. You know? Right. Whereas, like, oh, now I have to pay $900 a month for Shopify.

Add to cart. I gotta do this or that. Yeah. To me, it like, if you want to do, like, UIs that aren't like, that are are Astro or something like that, like, I wouldn't bother with WordPress as a back end, and I'd go straight to something like Supabase or something that is like Plus, you can just right. Like, I would probably spend my time on just, like, getting a modern WordPress development workflow Yes. In place. You know? You got Git. You have a whole deployment platform. You have a whole data syncing thing. You figure out how to do your image generation

so that it's on a CDN, your proper caching, page transition.

There's so much of, like, the web that you can just apply to WordPress and then just stick with old faithful as, like, a a battle tested CMS.

Yeah. Whatever you do, do it well.

I'm not here to convince you other than that. I think if you're you're skilled in that, keep rocking it. So No. The the headless

benefit is for for companies that need, like, a CMS, and and then they need that data to be pulled ESLint multiple locations. You know? Like Yes. Sanity is a really good example. The people who are using Sanity will pull that data into their mobile app. They'll pull it into their like, I've they've pulled it into restaurant, like, signage they need, like, a a single spot for all of their content, you know, data JS well as all of their images and videos and all of that stuff, and they can pull it into multiple spaces and or they wanna pull it into their own application. You know? But if you're just building a straight up website and you're not using, like, a like, a page builder, like, a Squarespace or whatever, yeah, I probably would stay there. Word. Harry says, how do you organize TypeScript types in front end projects? Do you keep them local to each file as needed or maintain a dedicated types directory, shared on global definitions? As my project grows, I find my type definitions becoming more scattered and disorganized, so I'm curious about best practices.

So, and disorganized, so I'm curious about best practices. So what I'll do is if I'm, like, typing, like, an entire module that maybe doesn't have types, that goes in a type directory.

If I have something that is global to the entire project, maybe it lives on GlobalScope, maybe it lives on the window, that goes into, like, a types directory. So I'll almost always have a types directory in there or at the very least, like, a types file. I'll often lean towards just using, like, a TypeScript s file so that it's regular JavaScript instead of just, like, a d dot t s file. Yeah. There are cases for both, of course. And then as I'm, like, building out stuff, I'll often try to keep the types that are specific to that file in that file as well. And if I find that it is like like, for example, I'm I'm working on something right now that has, like, a constants file, and it has a has a bunch of different types for what those constants look like. I'll just keep them alongside. I'll just export the type of those right right alongside where they are defined.

I feel like that's a little bit better. Where it starts to get hairy is where you're, like, importing, like, both ways from different files. That kinda gets really annoying. And if if you're using them in many, many files, probably more than five files, I'll then do a TypeScript has very good refactoring tools. You could just use the TypeScript refactoring tools and and put them bring them out of that file, move them to your types folder or types file, and then you can update it will just automatically update the rest where those are referenced in your file. I've been leaning more and more on, like I I know this isn't practical in every use case, but, like,

you got sources of truth, so you have, like, your drizzle schema. And then you're inferring your select types. You're inferring your your insert types.

Yeah. And then you use those pretty much everywhere, and then you're combining them or whatever. To me, like, as few definitions as possible for the same data.

Like, if I have a show type, I don't want the show type to be defined in eight different places

just ever slightly differently. I'm just gonna use the show type. Ever. Yeah. Yes. Once ever for any given type. Because that can count because you Infer it all. Like Infer it all. Right. I'm working on a function right now that generates steps. It's an array of arrays, and each item in that second array is is called a step.

And I didn't define a separate type called step. I simply just I'm inferring it based on the returned value of that function. That can bite you in some cases, but in this case, it's beautiful. So I don't have to go type it and then hope that I match it up in my return value.

Yes. Yeah. So I I know sometimes you can get into it, though, where you're in a component, and you're like, oh, I'm just gonna define the types for this thing while I'm here.

And then you just hand write them. And the next thing you know, there's drift, and you have Yeah. You have things that are in the game. Yeah. So CSS variables are like that too, don't you think? Where it's like,

oh, that color's a little bit different than I have had to hear previously.

Yes. They can be a bit like that. Sadiq, I'm a developer in a mid sized company in a small town in Czechia, and I've been doing this for about eight years.

We've always built custom JavaScript apps, mostly React, Vite, and Nest JS. We also create small libraries to make our development easier, mainly common functions, components, etcetera. And with AI, it's become even smoother, almost like autopilot.

But I've always thought one day I could become not just an app developer, but also give back to the community, build some cool libraries, and maybe make more low level things. I know the recommended path is to study more, dig deeper, and contribute to open source like fixing bugs and gradually leveling up.

I wonder how much is actually under my control.

Is it just about being a really good and consistent, or is there also a big element of luck involved? For example, not every actor ends up in Hollywood Deno matter how hard they try.

So what percentage would you say is luck, and what percentage would you say is an effort? And how would I know if I have it in me to become that kind of expert? Sadik, there is nothing other than just doing it. There's nothing other than just doing it. It took me a long time to learn this, but just put stuff on GitHub.

I've been putting stuff on GitHub for a long time. My one of the, like, the very first things I ever made that, like, I put on GitHub was dumb. It was not like Still is. Life changing.

It's not Wes, it's not. Still is. Don't say that. That's not nice. I, but no. You're you're you're probably more right than not. What it was, it was a is a package that simply just faded in elements on a page sequentially, and I called it DTF, down to fade. And it was a jQuery plug in. They thank you. And you just put it on there, and it just faded elements in. I could tell you offhand, like, nobody used that thing. But I I put it out there, and I did it. And now I I just do that all the time. If I'm making something, you just put it on GitHub. Maybe you post it on, like, a Discord channel or something like I I wrote a service worker for a local caching and SvelteKit. What did I do? I put it on the SvelteKit Discord and say, hey. I just made this. I'm not looking for any notoriety from that, but, like, people see that, and that might be like something that might tickle someone's fancy. Right? Somebody might be like, oh, I need that.

Just the other day, I've been thinking about this even more myself because I have all these internal tools. I have my own CSS framework that I use for everything. It's like so I I published my CSS framework. I made a little doc site for it, and I shared it, and people were were excited to see it. So it's like, you just do it, man. There's whether it's luck or whatever, it's not about seeking notoriety. It's not about seeking any sort of fame or whatever. It's about, like, just that's what the web's for, man. You made something. Just put it on GitHub. Throw it up there, and then feel free to share it. If if you share it and nobody likes it,

no no foul. Yeah. It's amazing how the people that put themselves out there are seemingly very lucky. And the the harder they try, the more lucky they get. So it's it's not about steadying up and and becoming better. It's simply just throw your stuff out there. Something is gonna catch on as useful. People are gonna start using it, and you're gonna learn a ton by fire by figuring out, oh, man. Now we need like, what what is the thing we talked about earlier? Contributing? Change sets. Change sets. Yeah. Now we need change sets. Now I need a release process. Now I need, like, all of this stuff, and you're gonna just, like you're gonna get really good really quick once these things take on. So, yeah, put yourself out there. That's Yeah. Probably my entire career is owed to myself just putting myself out there probably before I should have, and it's worked out.

Yeah. There there and you can feel very self conscious about doing that, but I would recommend just trying to release some of that because I feel very self conscious about anything that I publish these days no matter what. And, I publish a lot of stuff. And so there's always gonna be people who find it to be not useful or not interesting, but there might be somebody who does. And that's why. Yarn not going out of their way to find stuff that is not useful.

Like, you know, people are not going out of their way to find stuff they don't like.

So about that. Modern Internet people JS, like, mostly just That's fair. Talking about what they don't like. You ever, like, look at the comments of, like, plumbing tutorial for beginners, and someone's like, I've been plumbing for thirty seven Yarn, and I like, what are you doing watching a plumbing tutorial for beginners?

Move along. Right. Yeah. What are you doing? Yeah. I always hated that. When I had, like, a a tutorial that was very clearly aimed at beginners and somebody been like, why are you doing it this way? Because I'm teaching the I'm teaching it. I'm not saying this is the best practice for I'm teaching how to understand the concepts.

That's not for you. It's not for you. Yeah.

Question from confused agency CSS says, I've been working at my current company for ten years. We started that's the second person that's Scott us a question after ten years.

We have a small team of 10, and we're focused on custom software development for SMEs, small to medium sized enterprises. So it sounds like they're like an agency, and they crank out custom software. Today, we're the digital division of a consulting firm with over a thousand employees. I hold a CTO role. Wow. That's that's pretty high. A thousand It's a big role. CTO of a thousand people, mainly because I've always driven innovation and had broad knowledge thanks to my passion for learners. However, I feel overwhelmed. Many technicians prefer sticking, to for familiar methods and don't share my enthusiasm for continuous improvement, which makes most of the projects rely heavily on me.

Also, sometimes I wish I had someone to learn from. Right now, I learned through my own effort and research, and I worry that if I ever move to a product based company, my knowledge will be might be too general, not as specialized as someone who spent fifteen years doing the same thing. This makes me consider switching from consulting to product development to gain depth and to stay competitive. I could move to a company with less workload, more pay, and fewer responsibilities.

Sounds good. I'd lose the flexibility and freedom that I've owned here. I'm facing the classic dilemma. Stay for comfort or make a change to embrace new challenges. Any recommendations? Node this is always an interesting question that we get. It's just like, what do I do? Sounds like you're kind of tapped out of this. The fact that you even went and and wrote this question and asked us sounds like you're probably considering something like that. It is very tempting to always stay where you're comfortable and stay what you're always doing.

But, man, I know a lot of people.

Even at this past GitHub Vercel conference, I bumped into somebody who I did consulting with, like, fifteen years ago, and now they're doing they're doing something totally different. It's like, man, that person does a great job at being able to adapt to these different types of products. And I also I've never met a CTO at a product company that feels like their their skills are not broad enough. You know? There's so many problems that you hit and so many things that you can, you can get in on. So I would say go for it. I think this is it's probably be a good especially if you're feeling a little burnt out, you're feeling a little overworked, and you want a new, role. People are always looking for someone that's hungry, always learning, always wanting to try new stuff. And ten years at an agency that doesn't like to try new stuff, that seems like you have put in more time than most would have. Agency work is tough.

Yeah. I did agency work for a long time, and I really loved it. And let me tell you that the differentiators between the agencies that I love to work in and the one that I did not like to work in because there were two I really liked. One agency, West, like, 2,000 people. Big agency.

One agency, 12 people. Very small. It was the one in the middle that was, like, 48 people that I really didn't like to work in. And the reason why I really didn't like working for that agency was because no one gave a shit. This was, like, well past the era of icon fonts ESLint in in vector icons, and I was still getting raster icons. And they were just like the designers were just like, This is what it is. I'm like, you need to have a vector version of this icon for me. The icon is pixelated in your PSD, and, like, some of the pixels are cut off. Like, you do not care. You're so checked out. And all the other developers were, like, doing who knows what, playing on their phones at work and stuff. Like, I'm here to build good stuff, and it feels like I'm one of the only people that is here to build good stuff. So Totally. I I totally get you. Go where that passion goes, man. So yeah. Go with pnpm. Especially right now. Like, right now, every we just had a question. Everything is changing right now. And if you're excited about this stuff,

there's there's certainly a lot of people who are just like, I don't feel like having to learn all of this new stuff right now. I don't feel like changing up everything we've done. And a lot of these businesses are just, like, gutting core parts of their product and switching them over to a lot of this AI stuff. So if you're excited about it, man, there's probably lots of company that are looking for someone like you. If it doesn't work out, don't blame us because it might might be a totally wrong decision as well. I don't know. This is just a short question. No responsibility

for this.