916: I got fired, what should I focus on?

In this potluck episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott answer your questions about maintaining popular open-source projects, where to start after a layoff, impostor syndrome, Scott’s recording setup, whether a computer science degree is still worth it in the age of AI, and more! Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:44 Brought to you bySentry.io 04:16 How to maintain a successful NPM package 08:03 What to do in Denver while attending Laracon 11:18 How to branch out and learn new frameworks while balancing work life and family 15:55 Built-in state management vs external state managementFull Stack App Build | Travel Log w/ Nuxt, Vue, Better Auth, Drizzle, Tailwind, DaisyUI, MapLibre 19:43 Suggestion for CSS battles: Removing white space and new lines after the time limit? 23:06 What is Scott’s recording setup? Aputure Light Dome Aputure Amaran 150c Sony FX3 Electro-Voice RE20 27:46 Snake case vs camel caseEye Tracking Study on camelCase and under_score Identifier Styles 31:16 Have you ever had impostor syndrome? 34:56 Is a degree worth it for computer science or machine learning? 38:41 Should I use a reverse proxy server? Ep 798: Self Hosting: Reverse Proxy Servers 42:03 Where to start when updating your webdev skillset 50:11 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott:Cardboard Cutter Wes:Kitchen Scissors Shameless Plugs Syntax YouTube Channel Hit us up on Socials! Syntax:XInstagramTiktokLinkedInThreads Wes:XInstagramTiktokLinkedInThreads Scott:XInstagramTiktokLinkedInThreads Randy:XInstagramYouTubeThreads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we've got a potluck episode for you, which is you bring the questions, we bring the answers. Please keep the questions coming. Go to syntax.fm in the top corner. You click on Potluck. You submit your question about anything you want us to answer, and we'll answer on an upcoming episode. Today, we've got really good questions on what to do with the NPM package that has suddenly got very popular around how do you maintain it and make sure that it's not going to go away. A lot of questions around what skills to focus on right now. A couple of people said they just lost their job, and they're not sure what to focus on, how to skill up, how to catch up to what's going on, dealing with imposter syndrome, and a bunch of questions around Scott's beautiful lighting setup. So let's get on into it.

• 0:44Scott Tolinski?

  Speaking of imposter syndrome, I get imposter syndrome every single time I look at my website when it's not functioning. And you know what?

• 0:52Wes Bos?

  It's always even running with all these errors.

• 0:54Scott Tolinski?

  And you know what can help you get past that? Not only get past that in terms of like feeling like you've got a handle on things, but also really getting those finely tuned skills of fixing your shit. I'm talking about Sentry at sentry.io/synthesis. Sentry's got everything you need to make your application actually work, whether that is performing quickly, loading fast, tidying up those DB queries, or fixing your endpoints so that they're lightning fast, implementing caching where you need it. But it also gives you like things like a session replay, so you can see what went wrong, like in a scrubbable

• 1:33Scott Tolinski?

  video, when it went wrong. You can get just all of your errors monitored in this really excellent interface, which just underwent a really nice redesign. So everything is really reorganized in a main new navigation now that's super good. And you even get logging now, code coverage, those types of things. So check it out at sentry.io/synthesis. Sign up using the coupon code TASTYTREAT, all lowercase, all one word, and get two months for free.

• 2:06Wes Bos?

  What's up Scott? How you doing today?

• 2:08Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I'm doing good, man. Just hanging out. We got a cold one here in Colorado. It is like 50 and rainy. It's our kids' last day of school. So of course, like, last day of school vibes is just raining and cold.

• 2:23Wes Bos?

  That sucks.

• 2:23Scott Tolinski?

  But it's all good, man. It's all good. Yeah, chilling. I'm going to Amsterdam next week for JS Nation and React Summit, which will have already happened by the time you hear this.

• 2:33Wes Bos?

  Yes, and we just got back from, I just got back from Denver where we had the Syntax meetup. What a hoot, man. We had like, probably what, 120 people show up for a meetup?

• 2:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know, it was a good turnout. I would love to see what the final numbers are on that thing. But, no, I thought it was, it was great.

• 2:52Wes Bos?

  There's like this thing where I would, you just think AI can do anything. So there, I took a photo of us sitting up on stage and I took a pan of the crowd. I was like, how many people? I was like, will you just throw it into ChatGPT and they'll tell you how many? So I uploaded it to ChatGPT and they said there was three people in the crowd.

• 3:10Wes Bos?

  And then it like even showed me the Python code and everything that it ran and, no, we're close. I suppose we could just count the faces in that photo.

• 3:18Scott Tolinski?

  Hmm. What would you, that would be, we could put somebody on that.

• 3:23Wes Bos?

  Can we get an intern? Who wants to be Syntax intern to count the people in a photo?

• 3:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, also Randy just told me we were gonna have to upload like 150 videos manually to something. So I was thinking, huh, that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But also, thank you to everybody who came out. It was a great time. We did coding ga, we did some CSS battles on stage where we had to switch. We were all working on one computer. We were switching every 60 seconds. It was riot. And then we had a great after-party at Wincup Brewery and a ton of people showed up and it was just a lot of fun. Whole thing was great. So shout out to anybody who decided to make the trip out. Some people came from far away, like California.

• 4:06Wes Bos?

  Flu and drove.

• 4:07Scott Tolinski?

  Flu from Utah, yeah.

• 4:08Wes Bos?

  Amazing, yeah.

• 4:09Scott Tolinski?

  It's amazing.

• 4:10Wes Bos?

  Let us know where you want us to do the next one, because we're already thinking about that.

• 4:14Scott Tolinski?

  It's gonna happen. Let's get into the first question here from Nicolò Fideli. "Hey, I created an NPM package last year that's surprisingly taken off. It's now getting around 60,000 weekly downloads." That's a lot of downloads. "I'm looking for advice on what to do next, especially because I'd like to share ownership to ensure its continued maintenance. As I'm concerned, I might not always have the time for it myself. What do you recommend?" Yeah, so there's

• 4:44Wes Bos?

  Spyware for sure.

• 4:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, spyware.

• 4:46Wes Bos?

  Good.

• 4:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, throw some ads in the command line on install, all that stuff.

• 4:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I don't, you know, this one to me is one thing that I haven't done personally, but I do think there is some good practices in general, especially for maintenance long-term. The thing you need to think about with maintenance long-term is that hopefully your package doesn't require a bunch of versions of several different mini libraries because things are always going to be evolving, especially like front-end frameworks and stuff like that. Because in that case, yeah, you're gonna have to keep it maintained. One thing I think that some packages have done really well lately is that they've stopped

• 5:34Scott Tolinski?

  relying on a bunch of external packages for things that may change their versions, that may update, that may go out of, just out of sync in general. So like, really relying on less external dependencies to me feels like a good move for maintainability in the long run. Also, make it be known that you're looking for maintainers. Yeah, pop it in the readme. Yeah, pop it in the readme and put it somewhere, put it just at the dang top of the readme, so that like, people might see it. You never know who's out there looking to get experience doing that kind of stuff. But reach out to people that way, where they

• 6:15Scott Tolinski?

  are, whether it's on NPM, where they're going to be seeing it, or on GitHub, whatever. Just make sure that that's visible, that you're looking for help maintaining this thing.

• 6:26Wes Bos?

  Anytime I've had a, either a package, or I have several like GitHub repos that are not packages, but they're GitHub repos of, I have one for burner email addresses, I have another one for the uses.tech website, I got, I don't know, maybe four or five of those. And generally what happens is, somebody that either is interested in the project, or somebody that relies on that package for their job, is going to sort of like latch on and start submitting issues, maybe submitting pull requests. And those are generally good people. They have a little bit of skin in the game. They need to make sure that this package that they're relying on is well-used. So, reach out to those people, throw it in

• 7:09Wes Bos?

  the "read me" that you're looking for maintainers, because it's generally, yeah, a good idea to have more than one set of eyes on something that starts to get a little bit big.

• 7:17Scott Tolinski?

  And also like, maybe set up some things to accept donations, because, yeah, you might not want to be maintaining this full-time, or whatever, but if you get enough donations, then, hey, that kind of makes the pain a little bit less crazy on that one.

• 7:33Wes Bos?

  I think more people need to do that. It's just throw a little donation on there. And even if you're getting, I don't know, 50, 100 bucks a month of donations, maybe that's even high, but you get a couple hundred bucks a year, that's still significant. And like, that stuff can pay for like a laptop or whatever, and you don't necessarily feel like you're getting burned when you're like, "Oh, I just work on this thing that I love to do," and it actually starts, you get a couple little benefits from it here and there.

• 8:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, word.

• 8:03Wes Bos?

  Ryan says, "Hey Weston Scott, the most irrelevant question for Scott. I'm traveling to Denver at the end of July for LARACon." Yeah, we heard a lot of people are heading out to Denver for LARACon. "Any recommendations of what to see or do when I'm in town?"

• 8:18Scott Tolinski?

  Denver has a lot of low-key good restaurants. And what I mean by low-key is that like, you don't necessarily think of Denver and food, especially, we were talking about this at the meetup, sushi. Man, there's a lot of great sushi in Denver, whether that's...

• 8:35Scott Tolinski?

  Sushi Den or Uchi, there's some like kind of higher end places. If you're looking for a few dollar signs, man, just look up any of the top restaurants in Denver, because the fancy stuff is fantastic. If you're looking for like a good middle ground place to eat, Linger is a really cool restaurant. It's not like the cheapest place, but it's also not someplace you have to go get dressed up to go to. And it's a really, really interesting kind of like blend of various regional world foods and stuff like that. It's fantastic. They do a great job there. And while you're at Linger, right next door to it is the best ice cream place in Denver. You can get yourself some ice cream at Little Man Ice Cream. There is always a line there.

• 9:20Scott Tolinski?

  The first time we came to Denver was in October and we got Little Man one day because it was recommended to us. And then it was like, we were headed to the airport, like in the car, going to the airport. And my wife was like, can we stop at Little Man on the way there? Which was not on the way, mind you. It was out of the way and we had to go wait in a line for it. And so that's a great place to go. It's fantastic. If you do have means of transportation, I would highly recommend going out to Red Rocks. Not for a concert or anything, but it's just, people might not know this, but it's just open during the day. And Red Rocks, the park and amphitheater is like the coolest dang thing. And you can just show up there anytime, go through the-

• 10:02Wes Bos?

  It's like a mountain amphitheater, right? Like you can, you can see concerts there and it's just like out in the mountains.

• 10:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. It's so cool because it is a, like the literal sides of the amphitheater are just giant red rocks. They're massive and that like really like it's used acoustically in, with the natural landscape. But you'll see people working out there like 24/7. People are running up the stairs. People are, you know, doing yoga or it's just a beautiful landscape. So if you can get out to Red Rocks, do that. Yeah. A lot of cool stuff around Denver.

• 10:40Wes Bos?

  Rocky Mountain Oysters. Where's your favorite spot to get those?

• 10:44Scott Tolinski?

  I have never had Rocky Mountain Oysters.

• 10:46Wes Bos?

  No?

• 10:48Scott Tolinski?

  No, I think there are good spots to get them though. Yeah, I know. I've never had them. For me, it's like, hmm, not for me. Not my, not my style.

• 10:58Wes Bos?

  Do you know what a Rocky Mountain oyster is?

• 11:00Scott Tolinski?

  Of course I do.

• 11:01Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 11:02Scott Tolinski?

  I live in Colorado. I know what Rocky Mountain oysters are. They are bull testicles, for anyone who hasn't heard of that. Yeah, hmm, I don't need that in my life. I'm gonna just say that.

• 11:13Wes Bos?

  Can't say I've, I've partaked before, but maybe at one point. Next question we have here from Dan, long time lurker. Thanks for all your work. Thank you, Dan. I'm a designer and self-taught developer from New Zealand. I've been lucky enough to have been working in a marketing digital agency space for the last nine years. I have predominantly been working WordPress designing and building bespoke websites for clients using PHP, JS, CSS, et cetera. Though I have been trying to upscale myself in frameworks like React View, et cetera. The reason for this is both job security as well as a way to broaden opportunities. I am a family man, so anytime that I do have outside a family and work, it's generally late at night.

• 11:57Wes Bos?

  So my progression in learning is frustratingly slow and I often find myself having to go back and restart what I have already covered. And I feel like I'm never getting anywhere and I'm guilty of getting stuck in tutorial heel. Probably meant tutorial hell there. Sorry for the long-winded question is, but my question is, if you were in my position, how would you tackle this? Have you, guys had to do this yourself? Yeah, this is a very common problem in our industry or a problem that people have is that the industry moves so fast and if you cannot skill up during your day job, you kind of are in the spot where you, you work on the same tech stack all day long

• 12:42Wes Bos?

  and you never increase your, your skills. And then if you get canned, I think we even have a question like this later on today. Then you're, oh man, my skillset is kind of, kind of out of luck. So, your, your approach here is, first of all, try and eke these things into your day job. If your day job is constantly standing still, then the company you work for is probably going to be in trouble as well at, at some point. And they certainly need to be trying new stuff. Not to say you should try absolutely everything new, but you should constantly be looking at, what is the, the latest and greatest? What are these things that can help us build better, faster things, right?

• 13:25Wes Bos?

  If you, for whatever reason, you simply cannot do that because the tech stack of whatever app you're working on is pretty set in stone, then you're gonna need some sort of either side project or little things that you can do. And being able to start and finish and just dust your hands off of a project, I think is, is the way forward. A lot of people say like, have like a little passion project where you're working on it for like eight years or whatever. A lot of people like that, but for me, it's like, I gotta like, I'm gonna start something, I'm gonna build something that I want, and I'm gonna learn a whole bunch along the way, and then I'm going to be done that thing. You, you might want to come back to it at another point and update it, but being able

• 14:06Wes Bos?

  to simply go through the entire motion from start to finish is going to be great for your skillset.

• 14:12Scott Tolinski?

  It is tough, and I, I think some of these things, for me, is like always, especially when I was at my full-time job, working in an agency, was just, how can I shove this new upskill stuff into either the work that I'm doing at work? Or how can I finish early on my projects? And then work on tools for my job? So that way, if my boss is like... Hey, what are you working on? Why isn't it relevant? You can always be like, well, I built a tool for myself. Like, I built our team a production checklist because I wanted to learn Angular and local storage, saving stuff locally.

• 14:57Scott Tolinski?

  Just find things like that, if you can, in your day job. So that way, you aren't having to do it outside of your 9 to 5. Because I know, as somebody, you know, I worked outside of my 9 to 5 for many years just by being like a business owner, working on LevelUp tutorials. Man, that takes a toll on you. Takes a toll on your family, takes a toll on everybody. So if you can find a way to shove this stuff into your 9 to 5, do that as much as possible.

• 15:27Wes Bos?

  And I also think, like, great job listening to this podcast, right? Because half of it is simply just knowing what's out there and what the tools are. You're probably a pretty good developer as well already. And when it does come time to having to pick up this new stuff, you will probably be able to skill up pretty quickly, given that you know how to program and you hopefully know about what that tech is because you've been listening to us.

• 15:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, that's right.

• 15:55Wes Bos?

  Next question we have here from Max. Hi, Syntax Crew and Coding Garden. I have been trying out Nux, inspired by CJ's Mammoth tutorial and loving it. So CJ dropped a massive tutorial on Nux on our YouTube channel. One thing I still haven't totally grasped is when I would reach for Pinea? How do you say it, Scott?

• 16:15Scott Tolinski?

  Pinea.

• 16:16Wes Bos?

  Pinea, over creating various compositables to manage my application state. Can you help me when I would need it, Max? That's a good question. Like, when do you reach for the built-in state? And then when do you reach for an external state management library? And I honestly, I just, I wish CJ was here to help us, help us out. Oh!

• 16:41Scott Tolinski?

  Look who's here.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  What's up, guys?

• 16:44Wes Bos?

  It's up to you.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:46Wes Bos?

  Glad you popped in for that, yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'm just lying in dormant wait for NUX questions, but I'm here. I have an answer for this, yeah. So, like Wes mentioned, Pena is global state management. So I'll try to relate this answer like a little bit back to React, so I don't bore any of the non-Vue and NUX people that are here, but you can think of Pena as global state for Vue. It's kind of like Redux or Zustand. Essentially, you can have state that you use throughout your application. And then compositables are reusable hooks in React. They can have their own internal state and encapsulate functionality. Some examples of some compositables are things like a custom hashing fetch function, or a compositable

• 17:30Speaker 02

  called use debounce, where you have all the code that can debounce a value, or something like use geolocation, where you have a bunch of logic that gets the user's location, but then it makes it really easy in any component, because you can say like use geolocation. Some good examples of these are at viewuse.org. They have a bunch of reusable compositables, but if you're trying to wrap your mind around like, what is a compositable or why I might write one, they have a ton of examples there. But I would say that the TLDR is if you have an application that's moderately complex, you should reach for Pena. Because simple apps technically could create custom compositables that share state, but the moment you need a larger bit of state or something used across a lot of components, Pena is just going to be a whole lot easier. So, simple answer is just use Pena. And the way to think about

• 18:15Speaker 02

  the differences here are, compositables are created for each time you call them. So it's a new instance each time it's called. So if two different components called the same compositable, like use geolocation, that's two instantiations. And technically, you could do some things where they share state, but think of them as one-off uses. Whereas Pena is a singleton. You have one Pena instance, and then it's that same instance throughout your application. Yeah.

• 18:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you have that in React land as well, where like, yeah, each time you create a component, that component has its own state, and it's fairly encapsulated to that component unless you pass it down. But then you also have your global state management, which is, like you said, a singleton once, and that is global for your entire app.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I think one thing I'll add to that is Nuxt does have this composable called useState. And essentially, it allows you to create a state value that can be shared across your application. And so this might be where some of the confusion's coming into play because you could create a composable that uses the useState function, and now you have a state variable that technically is the same throughout your application. But it gets a little bit cumbersome if you're... the moment your store starts to get a little bit bigger. So I would say, if you've installed Pena, just start using it because it's the way to go.

• 19:33Scott Tolinski?

  Nice.

• 19:33Wes Bos?

  Beautiful.

• 19:34Scott Tolinski?

  Well, thank you so much, CJ.

• 19:35Wes Bos?

  I'm glad you popped in, CJ. I appreciate it.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, no worries. I'll see you guys later.

• 19:39Wes Bos?

  Thank you.

• 19:43Scott Tolinski?

  Next question from Bobby Tables. "Hey, guys, love the CSS battles, and I love the hacks you all have to be as concise as possible, but one suggestion: could you remove the white space and new lines after the time limit? You could all use the same tool to make it fair. This way, it would be simpler for us to follow. Cheers." Bobby, I don't mind this idea personally because oftentimes, I finish the darn thing and I run out of time to minimize it all. But also, some of the removal... I guess the removal of white space and new lines, that is the one... like, if it was just that, I would be in favor of this proposal.

• 20:25Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Scott Tolinski?

  Because it is the white space... like, that's not adding anything to the technique. And also, when you write the code, it's harder to read if it... you know, by default, like CJ just writes his in a giant block, which, that's amazing. I lose super track of... I lose track of what I'm doing with that. No, I can't do it either. So then I have to do all the removal of white space at the end. I would be in favor of this, but I don't know. I think the chaos of trying to remove the white space at the end is part of what makes it fun, too.

• 20:57Wes Bos?

  I think what would be a fun project is if we could build our own minifier with... What, what does like all the CSS next stuff use? Basically, we would like write like a tree walker that would then apply all of the minifying properties because like the stuff we use, which is like leave off pixels if for some, and then leave off the last semicolon of the property, you know, there's all those little tricks and like someone's got to build that a little minifier that takes all those hacks into account, right?

• 21:32Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, maybe that someone should be me and I'm just going to keep it for myself.

• 21:37Wes Bos?

  Maybe that's the thing is like, who can build that we all are given a, a block of CSS and then we all have to try it, build the smallest minifier while it still renders a hundred percent.

• 21:50Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, that's a great fun.

• 21:53Wes Bos?

  Although like, I don't know why I'm suggesting this because writing the like tree syntax AST walkers, basically the way that these syntax things work is that you, you parse out your code into what's called an AST, an abstract syntax tree. And then you, you write these walkers that walk through the code base and then you can go, it'll, it'd be like a variable declaration or on JavaScript, it'll be like default export and you can modify those values as you walk through the code and it sucks.

• 22:29Scott Tolinski?

  It's no fun.

• 22:29Wes Bos?

  People that write that stuff are, are really good at it. I've had to do that a couple of times and then I also wrote a, um, a code mod recently, which would walk through my code base and modify it. And that was a little bit easier, but still it's, that's confusing, man.

• 22:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know.

• 22:50Scott Tolinski?

  I, I mean, honestly, that sounds like a fun video in itself. So like, who can write the minifier that returns the best score? Hmm. With the same CSS.

• 23:02Wes Bos?

  That would be, that would be pretty fun. All right. Thank you, Bobby Tables. We liked that one. Alan asks, what is the streaming gear Scott is using for camera, mic, lights? The audio visual quality is amazing and I'd love to know how to reproduce it. Yeah, Scott has, I was in his office last week. Quite the setup.

• 23:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so my setup, one first and foremost, nice camera is going to do a lot. I've always liked Sony cameras because of their low light performance. So before we joined Sentry, I was using an A7 III and that was a really great camera, even though it's a picture camera. But if you're looking for like a dual purpose camera, the A7 series cameras are just really great for this type of thing. I am currently using a Sony FX3, which is a cinema camera because we primarily do video. We're doing a lot of video on here and I use it for more than just my webcam here. But this is like, it's a Netflix approved cinema camera and.

• 24:04Wes Bos?

  It's like four grand.

• 24:05Scott Tolinski?

  It's crazy to have that.

• 24:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, as your webcam. Wes is using the same camera as well. I have my, my whole kind of space dialed mostly with a couple of lights. I was using all LED panels. There's one right here and there's one right here as a backlight. So I have a backlight LED panel. I have a, I guess you would call this a key light LED panel because it's kind of harsh, but I'm not, since I have white walls, I'm mostly just bouncing it off the wall to get like a full fill. It's a fairly harsh, bright LED light. But the star of the show, which is my new light, which I've only had for, if you've noticed a change in my setup at all lately.

• 24:48Wes Bos?

  Like we've had this comment like probably 10 times since you've put this light on. So everybody's noticing.

• 24:55Scott Tolinski?

  So it, which is, it's wild because it is, you know, I've been using the same camera and the same stuff for a little bit. This is, I use a light dome from Aperture Light Dome and it is the.

• 25:09Scott Tolinski?

  This like big ol' soft box with a grid on it and a light thing to diffuse the light. And then for the light itself, I'm using an Aperture Amaran 150C. This light rules. It is not cheap. It's 350 bucks, but again, we do this professionally. So gotta have a professional lighting setup. This is on the cheaper end of fancy lights like this, even though it is extremely high quality. So this light does full-on RGB. I could change it to be any color in the world. So I actually have mine a little bit yellow to give me some color. I'm a fairly pale person, so it gives me a little bit, just a more color.

• 25:53Scott Tolinski?

  And yeah, I think this light right here is the star of the show. I do have some LED, like some cheapo LED things to give some color behind me. You may or may not see it, but this big ol' soft box makes such a tremendous difference. And I can even show you, I used to have a harsh LED light right here and that was, yeah, it was a little too harsh all the time. So this is the backlight.

• 26:18Wes Bos?

  And it's, I don't even like having it on because it's, it's like you can see me right now when I move my hands in front of it. It's just a bit too much. I need it to be a bit more diffused.

• 26:27Scott Tolinski?

  Dude, you get this soft box and you're gonna be looking like me. So you turn this, you can see I get a little bit of fill on my backlight side of the head. So that's the, uh, this is the backlight here. I have the, this is the fancy light. So you can see what it looks like without the soft box and then you give this on and it just gives it a full-on like production studio feel. And then this is the other harsh LED light. You can see that one is filling this side of my face. The thing that I have that is difficult for, uh, more difficult than what you will have is that I wear glasses and therefore I cannot have a light.

• 27:09Scott Tolinski?

  You could see like when I look at the light or when I look at this light, they end up in my glasses. So I have to have this one way over here and I have to have this one way over here and... That causes so many issues with trying to, you know, not cast shadows or whatever. So this softbox, again, makes all the difference in the world. Microphone, it's a ElectroVoice RE... Oh, man, I always forget the number on this. RE20, it's a classic radio mic, and that's why it sounds good. I have a deeper voice, so this microphone is good for people with a deeper voice. That's it.

• 27:46Wes Bos?

  Sounds awesome. All right, let's get into the next one. Mark C. says, "I keep seeing the use of lowercase snakecase in TypeScript JavaScript files in notable projects like Svelte.js and even in your own codebases. Example, export get first paragraph with underscores in it. I wonder if you can talk about why this is. I've been led to believe that camelcase was the more typically used standards for function naming, however, I do find that the snakecase is easier to read personally." Yes, this like, should we use X, Y, or Z? It's just constant circles in web development. And for probably, I don't know, probably 10 years, that snakecase was the move in

• 28:31Wes Bos?

  most of JavaScript. I think maybe led by Rich Harris of Svelte.js.

• 28:37Scott Tolinski?

  That's how I first heard about it.

• 28:38Wes Bos?

  That snakecase makes a lot more sense. It's a little harder to, I guess, maybe not harder to type an underscore versus a shift, but it certainly is easier to read. What do you think?

• 28:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think it is, like, clinically, I don't know if that's a word, easier to read. There is a study done with eye tracking that determined it was easier to read. Me personally, I think the biggest problem that you have is that everything in JavaScript ends up being camelcase. All the AIs want to write camelcase all the time. But for me, I prefer snakecase. I have dyslexia, so for me, camelcase, everything just kind of jumbles together. But when you have snakecase, there is a clear delineation between each word that, for me personally, with my challenges, just make it easier. Easier to read. So I don't know if that's that like is easier to read for everybody.

• 29:34Scott Tolinski?

  But me personally, I find it tremendously easier to read. So that's why I use it. But I didn't even consider using Snake Case until Rich started talking about it. And then I started checking it out and was like, huh? This is way easier to read for me. So you learn something new all the time.

• 29:53Wes Bos?

  That's awesome. By the way, I just purchased the the light and fill box that

• 29:59Scott Tolinski?

  Nice.

• 30:00Wes Bos?

  While you were talking. I get this like, like Amazon credit every now and then from my like uses page, westboss.com/uses. Go, please go click the links. And every now and then I'm like, hmm, I I use it for like the splurge stuff, you know, like, ah, I don't want to spend real money on this, but I'll put my Bezos bucks towards this.

• 30:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, right. I will tell you, the soft box is a

• 30:25Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 30:25Scott Tolinski?

  Pain in the ass to set up. It is huge, but like you have these like tension rods that you all have to do. Man, tension rods. I don't like them. My trampoline doesn't have springs. It has tension rods that are like

• 30:38Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:39Scott Tolinski?

  For fiberglass tension rods. And that sucked. I will tell you that. I had a bruise on my palm from setting that thing up. And this thing, I'm just like, oh, but when it's done, it's amazing.

• 30:51Wes Bos?

  Right?

• 30:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Once it's done, it's amazing. I will say that. But get ready for some tension rods. I had to actually

• 30:59Wes Bos?

  They have like one that blows up. You know, they have tents now that you can pump them up? And instead of having to put rods in them, it's just like air.

• 31:08Scott Tolinski?

  Hmm.

• 31:09Wes Bos?

  Where's that? Isn't that a good idea? You just blow it right up?

• 31:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Wes Bos?

  Million dollar idea right there. I mean,

• 31:16Scott Tolinski?

  There you go.

• 31:17Wes Bos?

  Joner asks, have you ever had imposter syndrome? It's funny, we get this question probably once a week. And we haven't answered it in many years because I feel like we've answered it quite a bit, but. Let's hit it again. Have you ever hit imposter syndrome? Imposter syndrome is, if you don't know, where you don't feel like you have the skill to do something. So you have a job and you think, man, how did I get this job? I'm an imposter. I can't possibly be doing, be getting paid for this. They're gonna find me out. And I think a lot of people in our industry have this. In fact, I think we talk about imposter syndrome so much that we maybe even have a little bit of the flip side,

• 32:01Wes Bos?

  where, especially in the last five or so years, where people take a three-week bootcamp and get a job at Facebook and get paid a hundred thousand dollars a year. But have you had it? Yes. I don't think I have it as much as other people, especially once I got the confidence of being able to be able to say, I don't know, but I can figure it out. Like, there's a certain point in your career where you realize there's no chance that you're gonna know everything, but you get to a point where you realize, I probably can figure that out, given enough time and resources. So my biggest advice to somebody that does have imposter syndrome is to know that everybody has it

• 32:44Wes Bos?

  and that you can, you can push through that. People that have been in their careers for many, many years certainly don't put yourself into situations where you literally don't know what you're doing.

• 32:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Wes Bos?

  But there should be a little bit of something inside you that says, I can figure this out.

• 33:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I think the best jobs, the most growth I've ever had have been the ones where I've started feeling like an imposter. Like, why would they have picked me for this job?

• 33:12Wes Bos?

  It's a good spot to be.

• 33:14Scott Tolinski?

  It's a good spot to be if you can step up to the plate. Because if they, if they call your name and you come up there and you hit a touchdown with your baseball bat, then you can get just a tremendous amount of personal growth from that. And I've found personally, again, that like, that is where the massive jumps in my education have always come from. Because you feeling uncomfortable or like you have imposter syndrome is a sign that you are on a path of, you know, an uncharted path for you. Because it's always a little bit scary to go someplace you haven't, haven't gone. So.

• 33:57Scott Tolinski?

  As long as you are the type of person who's willing to take on a challenge, man, that's a good feeling. And as far as have I ever had imposter syndrome? Yeah, oh, yeah, totally. Again, like I said, in any job that I got, that was like a big step up from where I currently was. And within three months, whatever, you're then at that level. Next thing you know, you're you're ready for the next big jump in your scary trajectory of constant progression and growth.

• 34:24Wes Bos?

  Mm hmm. We've said in the past, like, you should be like a 31% uncomfortable or a 21% uncomfortable with where you're at. And if you don't feel uncomfortable with any aspect of where you're at in life, not just like your code, like your your professional career, but like other things in your life. If you're not uncomfortable with those things, maybe stop and ask, am I, am I just sitting? Am I just maintaining right now? Because maybe it's time to take on something that is a little bit harder.

• 34:56Scott Tolinski?

  All right, next one from Boot Camp Grad. Hey, guys, thank you for your hard work in keeping your audience up to date on the latest and greatest when it comes to web development. I love your show, especially when you get excited about the topic you are discussing. Here is my career question. I'm considering earning a master's degree in computer science or machine learning or something related to artificial intelligence. I changed careers and only went through a three-month full-time bootcamp for education. Currently, I have several years' experience as a full-stack developer working on enterprise-level applications that are built in Drupal, WordPress, or a microservice architecture with Next.js and React. I feel confident and competent at my job. Yet I'm finding it difficult to get promoted or get another job,

• 35:41Scott Tolinski?

  and I'm also afraid of being replaced by AI. What are your thoughts on degrees these days? Are they worthwhile? Or would it be wiser to continue building projects on my own to learn? Thank you for any help you can provide. Okay, you know, I don't necessarily think a degree is a bad idea for machine learning because there's so much there and it's such a deep well of like deep technical, you know, things that you could Be learning as opposed to just YOLOing, uh, learning AI tools on your own. Because I think you probably could get some good distance on learning, machine learning. As an outsider of the educational system, just like picking it up on your own.

• 36:27Scott Tolinski?

  But I do think there is a lot of big scientific topics there. That if you were to really dive deep into them. To me, that screams a little bit more career longevity these days. Than just doing a, a degree on anything related to just engineering in general beyond that. Or like, just in general, AI. So I, I think if you can get into the more deeply technical aspects of machine learning. To me, that feels a little bit more like a place that people would want to be hiring. Because yes, the type of quick things that we're all going to be doing.

• 37:08Scott Tolinski?

  Will certainly probably be replaced more and more by AI every single week here. But man, somebody's got to build the AI.

• 37:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Wes Bos?

  I, I think like, those are the skills that are, are going to be needed, right? Like deep math, algorithms, data science, uh, analysis. Those things are, are what we use to, to build AI, you know? It's one thing to ping the open AI, open AI API and. Put a clever little prompt in there and parse the JSON that comes back. But it's, it's another one to be able to like, figure out like a middle out algorithm of how to like most appropriately do something like that. So if you're asking me, I would not go get a, like personally, I would not go get a computer science degree. Because you can also be in this. Like the proof is in the pudding with this career, right?

• 38:01Wes Bos?

  You can also just like build a whole bunch of shit and learn a whole bunch of stuff and build and get really good at it. And you can have a really good career, but you can, if you're the type of person that likes school and feels like that would be beneficial to your career, which I think it will be, you know, it's for a lot of time we had, you just have to learn react and you can get a really well paying job. But I think that those days are probably limited and being able to be able to go deep on something, to actually get really smart and understand how these things work rather than just being able to pooh, pooh, pooh, type it into chat GPT. That's probably a good idea.

• 38:40Scott Tolinski?

  Word.

• 38:41Wes Bos?

  Rand mom says, hi Scott and Wes. I was listening to episode 798, which was self hosting reverse proxy servers. Just so what we did is we discussed what a reverse proxy is when you're self, when you have your own server. And it's an area where I'm usually on someone on thin ice. For example, hosting multiple applications and servers on the same domain name. What can and should a reverse proxy do for me? I was thinking about getting, setting up a small tutorial repo for others to use at the small project to teach yourself some of these practical applications. All right, so a reverse proxy is this idea that you have a server and on your server,

• 39:26Wes Bos?

  you can have multiple processes running. And generally those processes run on each on their own port. Um, so you have a server, maybe you're running a node application. Uh, maybe you're running a web server that serves up a front end, front end. Uh, maybe you have like, like a database, maybe you have an API server that's running, or maybe you just have literally 20 WordPress installs running all in the, on the same server. When it comes time to visiting those applications, generally what happens is you, you visit like the IP address, colon, the port that that application is running on, and that's how you run each of them. What you want to do likely is you want to have a single domain name like syntax.fm.

• 40:11Wes Bos?

  And then you want to put each of those applications at like a forward slash, you know, forward slash API, forward slash admin, forward slash, uh, watch when you're logging in. So. What a reverse proxy will do is it will, like Caddy Server is one that I use all the time. Nginx is another really good one as well. What's the other one that they have in Coolify? They have Caddy Server and?

• 40:37Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 40:40Wes Bos?

  Uh, Traffic.

• 40:41Scott Tolinski?

  Traffic, yes. That's the default one.

• 40:44Wes Bos?

  Yes. So basically, you write these config files for your reverse proxy and that will take in every incoming request, whether it's HTTP, whether it's WebSocket request, you know, whether it's like TCP traffic. And then your reverse proxy will then route that traffic, depending on your rules, to the different applications. And that is how you can set up something like forward slash admin and it will know, ah, I'm going to capture admin forward slash whatever and I'm going to just pipe that straight into the admin application, which I know is running on port 1234. And then if something else

• 41:27Wes Bos?

  comes in that doesn't match those, then I'm going to route it to this one. Or if it's like an asset, you could like match it by like JPEG or whatever and you could route it to another, simply just static file hosting that is on your server. So it is a great way to run multiple apps on the same server. It's a great way to save money because a lot of these platform as a services, they're going to bill you based on how many apps you have running. So if you want to run like 50 different things on one server for five bucks a month, that a reverse proxy is certainly something you're going to need to figure out.

• 42:03Scott Tolinski?

  Word. Yeah, great answer. Next question from Redles. Found your podcast back in 2019. You've been inspiring me to be a better dev ever since. Many thanks. Well, thank you, Redles. I've spent the last three years working for a company that used Umbraco CMS. I originally started my dev journey as a front-end React developer, but they hired me and I learned Umbraco on the job. You heard of Umbra-

• 42:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we probably, like, probably around 2019, we have an episode where I'm like, what the hell is Umbraco? It's like a .net CMS, very popular in the like corporate world.

• 42:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it looks good. They have a nice looking website. I have no idea how the CMS looks, but it looks nice.

• 42:54Wes Bos?

  I think it's better than like, what's the other one that .NET devs? SharePoint. That's the one that that everyone. SharePoint is not really like a like a proper CMS, but it kind of is. It's it's its own beast.

• 43:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, okay. I was never given the opportunity to learn and implement new tech, upgrade any of our code bases to the latest version of Umbraco, or even update something as small as Bootstrap. Now that I've been laid off, I feel like I'm way behind on all the new tech that's available. I've been working on learning React Native since it's basically React, but I was curious what the direction you'd recommend I had while refreshing my skill set. Yeah, this one, the direction is honestly going to be right now, make make stuff. Because if you have been laid off here, you probably are just applying, you're looking

• 43:49Scott Tolinski?

  for stuff. And a lot of these jobs are going to be giving you technical interviews or expecting you to know all this stuff. And since you're behind, sure, you're going to want to study specifically the things you are interviewing for. I feel like React, React Native is never going to be a bad thing to study and get really good at. Because, I mean, here in the world of 2025 with AI, AI just is going to assume that you're writing React every single time. So like, having a good understanding of React deeply, I do think will will help you. But just be building as much stuff as possible, like a small app

• 44:30Scott Tolinski?

  every single day. Because you getting your hands dirty in some real code is going to really take you a lot further than opening up your books and starting to study. Now

• 44:43Scott Tolinski?

  I think in this new world as well, like really being good at AI tools is going to be a job differentiator. If you go into an interview and you're up against somebody who is very skilled with all of the latest AI tools, or perhaps is like on the bleeding edge of that stuff. And you're like, I don't know, I just write it all by hand. They're gonna get the job.

• 45:06Wes Bos?

  You're saying like, like a cursor or copilot, being able to use those effectively?

• 45:12Scott Tolinski?

  Being able to use them effectively, but not even just like being able to use them effectively, even as far as like having an opinion on what like is an effective use of those verse.

• 45:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Scott Tolinski?

  Like, oh, I just paste my code into chat GPT and then whatever, or I don't use anything at all. I do think being like, I use this tool for these reasons and it helps me because of this way. And I'm a faster developer for it is like a much better thing to bring to the table than shrug. You know?

• 45:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Scott Tolinski?

  So I think, yes, obviously I do think learning react, you know, react native. Those are great things to to hang your hat on. But in addition to that, I do think you see all these mandates from CEOs saying, I'm not going to hire anyone who is not skilled in AI. I think that's serious and I think that is like the new norm already. So if you want to bring something to an interview, I think you gotta bring those those cutting edge AI skills.

• 46:16Wes Bos?

  That's a really good point because like people don't want to hire someone who just bop, bop, bop. Types in the box and the AI code comes out the other end. They want to hire somebody who knows how to effectively use these tools like Scott said, and and be able to move faster and crank out more code, right? Like as much as like people listening are probably being like, no, it's gonna, it's gonna bad code is gonna come out and it's gonna be unmaintainable in a couple of years. And those are valid concerns, but the person hiring you doesn't necessarily care about that. What they they care about is that A, you understand how the code works and B,

• 46:59Wes Bos?

  you're able to use these tools to effectively create stuff and like build the stuff that it is that they want. So. That's a really good point. I think also you need to be scaling up on stuff that is very hirable right now. So Scott says, of course, React, React Native, those are very hirable as well. Build many projects that every single time you choose something a little bit different, you know? Use Tailwind in one project, use some other CSS thing in another project, use Veed in one project, you know, maybe try the new roll down so that when it comes time to talking about it, you can say, yes, I've, I've used all these things, I've, I've played with

• 47:41Wes Bos?

  this, I dipped into it. So it shows that you have, like, not only are you like keyword optimizing your resume, but you're also just showing that you know what you're talking about. And then the final thing I'll say here is that not only using AI to code, but building stuff with AI. So interfacing with the different models, interfacing with the different OpenAI APIs, building a little chat for yourself. Because a lot of people right now, as these businesses get sort of scooped by AI, they're gonna, they're gonna be kind of reactive and say, oh, we need to put AI in our own product as well. And they're gonna want to hire somebody

• 48:22Wes Bos?

  that actually knows what they're talking about with these things. So I think that React and AI, as much as you may hate both of those things, those are probably very top of the hirability skills right now.

• 48:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I, you know, I think you had a good point about trying things slightly different each time, because there's nothing worse than somebody who has a really from opinion on something they either don't understand, or have not taken the time to actually use and learn. Like, I have an opinion on Tailwind, right? I've made that clear on this show enough times, but it's not an uninformed opinion. And, and people may not agree with it, and that's fine. But like, I don't think-

• 49:05Wes Bos?

  It's not a like, it breaks my HTML2 long opinion, which is like, those people are-

• 49:12Scott Tolinski?

  I don't like the way it looks. Yeah.

• 49:13Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 49:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, totally. Or anything like I people come at me about my react opinions now because I don't use react. But I used react for like 10 years. Like it's not like I I have no experience there. I've built several highly used big apps with react. So, you know, you can have these.

• 49:32Wes Bos?

  I thought you didn't like react because of like Mark Zuckerberg and like the problematic stuff around him.

• 49:38Scott Tolinski?

  That's not why. I never said anything to that degree. I don't like react because of a lot of because of JSX. I don't really like how the entire function runs every single time something changes. Like I like when values update and those values update rather than a function running. I also don't like how there's a virtual DOM. I I get that there's a virtual DOM. I got a real DOM.

• 50:04Wes Bos?

  Straight up DOM is what you are.

• 50:05Scott Tolinski?

  Give me, give me the DOM. Yes.

• 50:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Scott Tolinski?

  Alright, yeah. Give me that DOM. That's all I want. Alright. Next section of the show is sick picks, shameless plugs. I had a sick pick and this is something you see. I don't know if you see this on TikTok shops or whatever.

• 50:24Wes Bos?

  No, we don't have that in Canada. We are free from the capitalism that is TikTok shop.

• 50:30Scott Tolinski?

  I honestly don't know if this is a TikTok shop item, but it seems like it could be. I got a a wireless, a cordless cardboard cutter, which is essentially just like a blade and a handle. You squeeze it, the blade spins and you go and it just shears.

• 50:49Wes Bos?

  Oh, Kalen has one of these for fabric.

• 50:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it shears through heavy cardboard and it's not just cardboard. They say it can do like carpet and all kinds of stuff. I I don't know. I'm only using it for cardboard. And it seems ridiculous to have a a power tool for cutting cardboard. But we have our cardboard day is once every two weeks, which is crazy. And you got cardboard in these modern times. And so I we were just struggling to do anything other than fill the bin and then jump on it. Jump on it until it all fits in.

• 51:26Wes Bos?

  Breaking down the, the delivery cardboard is like a full-time job.

• 51:29Scott Tolinski?

  It's, it is in, in your, yeah, your hands get all dry and stuff from it. So this thing costs 35 bucks. You charge it with USB and you just

• 51:41Scott Tolinski?

  and you cut your cardboard into little strips and it takes no time at all. And I've already used this thing 35 dollars worth of time. Like this thing has already saved me so much time. So for a little 35 dollar tool, I found this to be a delight to use. Even if it is probably just drop shipped, rebranded, whatever. It works just great enough for me for 35 bucks.

• 52:06Wes Bos?

  That's awesome. I, I, I've actually thought about that as well. My approach to the cardboard is simply just get more blue boxes. Because we're allowed unlimited recycling here.

• 52:16Scott Tolinski?

  Oh.

• 52:17Wes Bos?

  Cause I just like, I hate breaking down the cardboard. That's, it's such a huge thing. But maybe I, I have, I carry a knife on me all the time too.

• 52:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 52:25Wes Bos?

  But I like cut myself so many times. It's so much easier. Yeah.

• 52:29Scott Tolinski?

  And I will say like, we have two cardboard bins. They, and we still fill them up like crazy. Cause whether that's like paper bags and you know, Amazon boxes or whatever, we're getting our, our, our this or that. Man, it is crazy. The, the people, the people that, uh, own this house before us on our, like while we were moving in. The guy was here and he was like, hey, just so you know, I stole you a second cardboard bin. And nobody knows about it. And so they're not going to take it away. But this one, this other one, this one's yours too. And I was like, oh my man, setting me up. Yes. Everybody else has got one and I got two.

• 53:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah. You never, never want anyone to find out about those things. First, like at our cottage as well, we're the only people that have a mailbox. Everybody else has to walk to the end of the street and use the community mailbox, which is like this like grid of them and you have a key. I don't know what happened, but we have a mailbox and I, I don't want it to get messed up.

• 53:30Scott Tolinski?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 53:31Wes Bos?

  I'm gonna sick pick. Another thing for cutting, which is just scissors. We do a lot of like prep, meal prep for our kids, obviously. And we are big kitchen scissors family. Instead of having to get a cutting board out and cut it up with the knife, we simply just have probably six or seven pairs of kitchen scissors. They're just regular scissors, but we keep them in the kitchen. You throw them in the dishwasher every single time they use them and use it just to cut up the kids' food or if they're having pancakes or whatever. And I think that using scissors in the kitchen is severely underrated. So I'm here to sick pick to you, using scissors in the kitchen.

• 54:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Wes Bos?

  Are you a scissors kitchen kind of guy?

• 54:12Scott Tolinski?

  We got kitchen, we got kitchen scissors specifically, yeah.

• 54:15Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. Well, I have some that can cut through chicken bowls or chicken bones or whatever. But like, those are decent, but they're so big. And like, we just ordered like a 12 pack of just the regular paper cutting scissors and they've been great for the kitchen.

• 54:31Scott Tolinski?

  Costco's good for that. They sell like, um, normal pairs of scissors in a three pack that are nice scissors.

• 54:38Wes Bos?

  All right, that's good.

• 54:39Scott Tolinski?

  You know, you always need scissors, like in every room.

• 54:41Wes Bos?

  Always do. It drives me nuts that like, and the kids take them away and, oh, man.

• 54:48Scott Tolinski?

  Check this out. Uh, my wife even wrote

• 54:52Scott Tolinski?

  Tolinsky on them. So no one's gonna take these scissors. They're mine. Oh, yeah. We've both got some.

• 54:59Wes Bos?

  These are, these are technically chicken scissors or chicken, kitchen scissors, but

• 55:03Scott Tolinski?

  They look like it.

• 55:03Wes Bos?

  I don't know why they're in my office.

• 55:05Scott Tolinski?

  You best believe mine are inside a Gridfinity bin inside this drawer that has been sectioned into Gridfinity bins.

• 55:12Wes Bos?

  Amazing.

• 55:13Scott Tolinski?

  I printed out last night a Gridfinity tea bag holder. So shout out to Gridfinity. Everything in my, my house is Gridfinity now.

• 55:21Wes Bos?

  I did the whole utensil, utensil drawer. So if anyone doesn't know, Gridfinity is basically you print this track for like a drawer. And then you print out literally any bins or holders or whatever and you can make your own and then it will slot into the grid that is in your drawer and then things won't slide around or whatever. So I redid our whole utensil drawer and I made a couple custom models for the like Asian spoon and one knife holder and then I printed out just a bunch of like proper sized boxes for things like our scissors and it's like game changer. So good. Makes me so happy. My wife is just like, I, I'm happy that you're happy, but like it wasn't a problem before. I'm like, are you kidding? This was a major problem in our house.

• 56:07Scott Tolinski?

  I, I did, I did the whole like angled spice drawer because Courtney's always wanted like a nice looking spice drawer and I like, I had the spice drawer looks immaculate. It looks so good. And her comment was, I wish it was acrylic. Can this thing do acrylic? No, it can't do acrylic. Hmm. I'm not impressed then. I gotta have everything acrylic. But what, I think the acrylic looks kinda cheap if I'm being totally honest.

• 56:33Wes Bos?

  The acrylic is nice, but having it custom fit for your home is the ultimate flex. You know, there's nothing more nice than having something that is perfectly sized for what it is that you need it. Oh, I forgot. Shameless plug. Go to youtube.com, search syntax coding challenge or syntax CSS dev battles and watch one of our videos because they're absolutely hilarious.

• 56:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. The dev battles, let me tell you, a lot of people have been tuning in. I've been getting comments saying, I can't, I don't even program and these things are a riot. And I gotta say, I, I agree as somebody who has been really enjoying watching them myself. Randy does just such an incredible job editing these, but it's CJ, Wes and myself competing in various either CSS or JavaScript competitions that have some rules. It is just an absolute blast. So check those out.

• 57:29Wes Bos?

  And CJ has like a bot or something where he, everybody comments CJ did the best job. No chance. CJ did by far the worst job on the last one and like all of these like anonymous accounts come out of the woodwork and are like CJ did the best job.

• 57:46Scott Tolinski?

  It is, you know what, I will say, CJ, we're not ripping on CJ because we don't like him. We love CJ. He just wins everything, folks. So we have to, we have to fight back with our words because we are, we are upset and offended that he wins everything. So the only way I can get back at CJ is by being aggressive to him. Yes, ripping on him. We love CJ though.

• 58:11Wes Bos?

  All right, that's it for today. Peace.

• 58:13Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.