858: How to Go Deeper With Your Learning

Want to level up your web dev game? Scott and Wes share their top tips for going deeper with your learning—covering everything from reading the docs and source code to finding mentorship and engaging with the community. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 02:48 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 03:54 How do you go deeper? 04:23 Pick a project and build it. 06:36 Read the docs. Svelte Docs. 09:07 Read the source. 11:19 Consume content: blogs, conference talks, etc. Dot Conferences on YouTube. GitNation JavaScript Conferences. 16:24 Discord and Reddit. 19:31 Get mentorship and ask questions. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

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

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax on this Monday hasty treat. We're going to be talking about how to go deeper with your knowledge. You know, we all pick up surface level skills. We even pick up like medium level skills, but how do you really get that fine tuned, deep knowledge on a subject? Well, we're going to be talking about all that and more today. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is Wes Bos.

• 0:24Wes Bos?

  Hey, what's up? Excited to go deep today on, on learning.

• 0:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, me too. You know what? For somebody like me, it's a little tough at times to go really deep on a subject. I like a lot of things, right? I like a lot of different things. I like to pick up something, explore it and then move on to the next thing. Build something, build, move on to the next thing. But there are, I guess, some topics that I have like devoted a lot of time to, right? And I don't know if it's just like part of my personality that makes it tough for me to do that, but are you able to really? I know you're, you're such a guy who, who really kind of goes deep on a subject from, from the jump, right?

• 1:04Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it is almost a, like, like a bad thing because I'll often find myself being like, for example, I was trying out a new window management app called Aerospace.

• 1:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 1:19Wes Bos?

  And, and I put like five, six hours into it. And the next thing you know, I'm, I'm submitting a pull request in Swift to the thing. And I'm like, man, like, I wish I could just use the thing and be okay with it. But like I go down these rabbit holes and almost always it ends up with me correcting the docs or sending a pull request. And I think, oh, man, I shouldn't be spending this much time on this thing.

• 1:44Scott Tolinski?

  You know what? I, I tried to go deep on that and I was like so frustrated with it after about 30 minutes. I was like, yeah, whoa, I'm gonna have to eat it. Like you, you warned me I would have to spend the whole day on it. And I was like, I'm either spending the whole day on this or I'm going to go nuts with it because it was definitely useful for people out there. It does a lot of things automatically and I'm used to like hitting a keyboard command and having my, my windows snapped. To a certain spot. And this is not that. This is like you're setting up

• 2:12Wes Bos?

  It's a tiling window manager. Yeah, it's like you're you have a whole grid and then you can like, put things in different workspaces and resize the items of your grid, but everything is always 100% of the screen and you have to tile them differently. And I tried it for for a week and a half and I turned it off yesterday because I was like, I especially with recording, it's just a little bit too frustrating. And I went back to just my regular old snapping.

• 2:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know. It, I think there's potential there. There was just so much configuration, which, yeah, again, but hey, let's talk about not having that much configuration to get a lot of value and Sentry, sentry.io. Man, I don't know if you know this, Wes, but when we added Sentry to the syntax site, there's just a wizard and then added it for me. I didn't have to really do very much and

• 3:04Wes Bos?

  So a long bearded man sends a pull request to your repo and adds Sentry in.

• 3:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And Sentry, the platform that helps you fix and solve bugs, but it also helps you trace your performance issues, let you know where things are happening, how they're happening, find out which pages specifically are causing people trouble. We shipped a Svelte 5 rewrite of the site. I want to say rewrite, but it was just a migration. And well, there's a couple of little things, outstanding issues here and there. I should probably take some time to fix and Sentry's let us know that. So head on over to sentry.io forward slash syntax setup and get two months for free using the coupon code TASTYTREAT. Man, it is the application monitoring software considered not bad by four million developers. Man, a lot of people use this and that's pretty incredible. Every time I use it, I'm like, yeah, I can see why. I can see why a lot of people use this.

• 3:53Wes Bos?

  It's pretty good.

• 3:54Scott Tolinski?

  All right. So let's get into it. How do you go deeper on stuff, right? You've read the docs, you've done the tutorials, maybe you watched a couple of YouTube videos, some of these YouTube videos, they just show you how to build a to do list app, right? And then

• 4:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Scott Tolinski?

  It's like, all right, let's go. Go. I mean, granted, to do shows you the crud operations. It shows you this stuff, but like, you're never going to hit the edges with a to do app. So how do you take it to the next level in terms of finding those edges? And for me, The best way to do that is to pick a project and build it. I'm, I'm learning a local first platform zero right now. It is still in alpha. I have early access to it. I'm working on a big project with it. So how did I find these edges? How am I gaining this knowledge? Well, I'm, I'm building something real with it. You know what I'm building right now, Wes? I'm building a survey taking app. Why? Because we use a bunch of survey taking apps.

• 4:52Scott Tolinski?

  They're expensive and it's a great use case for local data. Right? You're filling in a survey responses. Something happens, the page refreshes. You want that data to just persist 100%. Every time I type, I want it to be persisting and saving. Right? So

• 5:07Wes Bos?

  It's a great use case.

• 5:08Scott Tolinski?

  It's a great use case. And you know what? Survey app has been low key. One of those apps that have always been like, I can do this. Like, what's going on here? I mean, there's

• 5:17Wes Bos?

  I can't believe how awful all the options are. Every single time that we use, like, what do we use? Type form?

• 5:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yep.

• 5:23Wes Bos?

  It gives me a lot more respect for Sasha Grief, who runs all the like state of JS surveys. Cause he's built an entire platform for this and it's so much better than all the possible

• 5:35Scott Tolinski?

  And they're so expensive. They're so

• 5:37Wes Bos?

  They're so expensive. Man, yeah, they really understand. It's, it's amazing that you can think like, wow, this is a very big company that makes a ton of money on this. Like, what was it? Survey Monkey and Woofoo are probably two of the big ones.

• 5:51Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah. So just pick a project, something that's not a to do app, but it can, you know, crud operations, whatever. And maybe even something you want to use and just try to build it. You might not end up actually building it. You might end up hitting an edge that's too sharp or something that you cannot get past. But for the most part, you will find those edges that you will not find in a super basic crud application.

• 6:16Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we get this question a lot. It's like, how do I go past X, Y, and Z? How do I get, get better at it? And like, honestly, you are not going to hit those weird things that really increase your learning until you actually go and build something real. And when you hit those real uses, use cases, you're going to hit the actual, the issues that you have. But like, you also said, like, yeah, you've read the docs. And I, quite honestly, I think a lot of people don't read the docs. And there's such a huge benefit to sitting down and simply just taking, I don't know, half an hour, an hour, and reading through every single piece of, of something in the docs, because that will give you a good idea.

• 6:59Wes Bos?

  I always talk about like, surface area of an application, right? It will give you a good idea of what the different API endpoints are, what they're for, different use cases of, of when they might be used. And then when you do hit an actual issue, it's, oh, I think I can use this API in this use case versus you may hit an issue, you might do it the wrong way. You're trying to like shoehorn what you do know into it. It's such a good thing. Just read the docs. RTFM.

• 7:29Scott Tolinski?

  RTFM. Wait, what does RTFM mean?

• 7:32Wes Bos?

  You don't.

• 7:33Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, read the freaking manual.

• 7:34Wes Bos?

  Okay, yes.

• 7:35Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, yeah, that tracks. You know, for me, it is hard for me to read the docs and get a lot of, out of it. Sometimes I'll have it like, read it for me. You know, one thing I really appreciate with docs is when they have like, really good code examples. Here's something that I don't appreciate. When docs have code examples on, um, don't do this pattern, that, you know, they have like a little code block that says, don't do this pattern, but they don't make it that obvious that you shouldn't do that pattern, unless you've read the little paragraph. I, I don't know if you've ever hit this. I, I've like, I'm doing the thing in the docs and it's not working. And then if you read the paragraph, it's like, this is a method you shouldn't use. Well, make it red or something. Make it obvious.

• 8:14Wes Bos?

  I get this with Svelte all the time, where I'll like, search how to do something in Svelte, and it will pop open, I'll find like a playground, and it's like, part of their like, learning, where like, you have to actually do it. And I'll just like, copy the like, wrong example, like the broken, and I was like, this doesn't work. He was like, oh, you gotta hit the button to actually fix it. But it's true, I, I, unless it's like, you put a big red border around it, or a cross or something, because I'm not gonna read.

• 8:41Scott Tolinski?

  I'm looking at the code.

• 8:42Wes Bos?

  I just had to read the docs.

• 8:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, but if you're scanning or something, yeah, you just look at the code and you're like, oh, this is, this is how you do it. I think I don't appreciate about those felt examples. I'm going to just, uh, put this felt team on blast here. They did the stupid pop up when you try to copy and paste code from there and it's like, uh, uh, uh, you should probably type this out yourself if you're trying to learn it. I'm not trying to learn it. I'm trying to copy and paste it.

• 9:07Wes Bos?

  Next one we have here is read the source. At a certain point in my career, I don't know when it was, but I went from, I don't know how this thing works to, oh, you can literally just go on GitHub and, and look at the actual code behind it. I do wish that it was a bit easier inside of your, your editor to read the source because often I will use a, a method from a library and I'll think, hmm, how, like, what are they actually doing here? And you, you click through to it, but then you see the like minified compiled ES5 version of that code and it's just jumbled up, right? So you have to sort of go through, uh, back to GitHub to, to actually find it. But just, yeah, just reading the source.

• 9:51Wes Bos?

  I find that the GitHub UI for when you, when you read the source or you read an example and you click on like a method name and then in the sidebar, it will show you where that method name is defined. You can click through to that. I find that to be super helpful to understand how things are actually working.

• 10:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Modern GitHub is so nice for reading source code, which I find myself doing more than ever before. And I guess it is probably because of TypeScript or like those features where you're clicking through the methods and able to see where this is used, how this is used. And yeah, I find it to be super duper handy. It is something that is a skill that when you're first starting out, I will say, even, even years into your web development career, you might go into the source of something and say, this looks entirely foreign to me. And that's largely because people have different coding styles and you're approaching something new and fresh that you may not have seen before.

• 10:50Scott Tolinski?

  Done in a way that you might not have seen, but I do think it's worth the time to stick with it and dive through what's going on. Take it step by step. What's going on? Why are they doing it this way? You can learn some really great patterns. There's a lot of things that you just don't encounter in your own code or your team's code. That you might just pop into somebody else's code base of a large project and see something being done in a way that is really just will push the envelope for you a little bit.

• 11:20Wes Bos?

  Uh, next one I have here is consume content, uh, read blogs, conference talks, things like that. One thing I will do when I'm going deep on a topic is I will try to find all of the information on a specific topic. And often, this is kind of a shame, but often there'll be like a conference talk on YouTube from somebody who is a absolute wizard in that area and it'll have like 400 views on it. And it's always a bit of a bummer to see that conference talks are some of the most valuable information from domain experts because some of these smart people don't have all the time in the world to write blog posts and whatnot, but they often will do one or two conference talks a year.

• 12:04Wes Bos?

  And if you can Hoover that up, I put it on 2X, I skip the intro, I skip the outro, and you can often take like a 30 minute conference talk and just Hoover it up in about 12 and a half minutes.

• 12:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I, I, you know, I do think not enough people give conference talks on YouTube enough time. We're like, we want the uh, quick hit YouTube content that makes it feel like we're learning or something.

• 12:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Scott Tolinski?

  But we're, we're not going deep on the, the conference talks. Now there is a type of conference talk that will not give you this. It's the conference talk where somebody's selling their product, right? But you have a library author talking about, you know, lessons they've learned from building their library or a new thing that they're releasing and why it's different and the internals of it. What are some good conference YouTube channels? I posted the JavaScript conferences from Git Nation on here and I only posted this because I'm featured twice on their homepage here. No, but a shout out to Git Nation conferences. We actually just got back from one and it was pretty amazing. We got back from React Summit and JS Nation, uh, really, really good, deep conferences there, but what are some other ones that you follow?

• 13:12Wes Bos?

  I don't necessarily just follow any conferences. I just go on YouTube or go on Vimeo and search or Google video search for topics that I'm interested in, right? So one talk we at JS Nation was Zach Jackson. He's the creator of RS pack. And he works at ByteDance, which is like TikTok, right? And his, he like detailed why he rebuilt Webpack in Rust. But like the most fascinating to me was just understanding like the scale of the builds that they have at these large companies and why none of the other solutions worked for

• 13:56Wes Bos?

  them and how they sort of went about it. And it's just a fascinating talk. And I was like, this is so valuable to have somebody so smart just like feed you this information.

• 14:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. I find, like you said, you know, especially when I'm searching for a topic, a specific topic, if I see like a conference come up and it's clearly like a large stage conference, you typically know that's going to be a pretty good talk, especially there's there are a handful of folks when you pop up and you see that so and so has done a talk on a subject, you're just like, mm, all right, time to, time to sit down and watch this. I do like watching conference talks. Yeah, for sure. I do think that they're probably underutilized and even going to conferences, you know, conferences, expensive. I get it. If your company can pay for it, go to conferences. If you have like a budget to go to educational conferences and you're not using it, you gotta

• 14:53Scott Tolinski?

  use it because I'm not just saying that as somebody who speaks at conferences now, but like, I'm saying that as somebody who gets so much value out of that stuff. And I do think besides there's like networking and you get to chat with people, you get

• 15:06Wes Bos?

  The hallway track is the best part of conferences or the dinners after, you know, it's just, we took the subway with Tanner, Tanner Linsley and Kent Dons on the way to thing. And like, that was so fun.

• 15:20Scott Tolinski?

  That was the best. Yes, that was that was some of the best stuff in the conference. But even if you're not doing that and you are just chatting with some random person in the hallway about what they're building and you can get some interesting, deep knowledge that way as well.

• 15:32Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Wes Bos?

  People always come up to me at conferences and want to talk. I'm like, you can get that on the podcast. I'm curious what you're doing, you know?

• 15:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Wes Bos?

  Often you're like, oh, well, I work for Oklahoma Feed and Supply and we're using AI to measure how much pigs eat or something crazy like that. Like, what? Like, I'm multiple occasions I met people at conferences that work on elevators like and they write JavaScript. And I met another guy who writes JavaScript. React is running on power. What was it? You know, like you drive down the street, you see those big power trashcans on the on the poles? He's like, every single one of those is running React on the device for their UI. It was like.

• 16:14Scott Tolinski?

  That's what I was going to bring up. Yeah, that those are those are kind of the coolest conferences. Because you just you don't necessarily know what's out there, what's possible.

• 16:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Scott Tolinski?

  Or, yeah, what people are actually doing. Another place that I get a lot of value at is Discord. Also Reddit, Reddit for different reasons, but Discord specifically, if I'm, and this may even be a problem of mine. If I'm learning a subject, I the first thing I do is I join their Discord. Because there, besides having like good Q and A areas where you can potentially get assistance from people in the community, there's just great conversations going on in there. And you can meet a lot of people, you can, you know, some of the ones I've gotten a lot of value out of have been obviously the Selt community, the Tori community, the Replica community,

• 17:04Scott Tolinski?

  the Coolify, Cool Labs, that there's just so many of these Discord channels that I personally get a lot of value out of just chatting with people or even just reading, seeing other code that people are posting. As for Reddit, Reddit's kind of a mixed bag, right? They oftentimes Reddits are like really against people posting links because if you're posting links, it's typically like spam or people, you know.

• 17:30Scott Tolinski?

  Hucking their stuff, but there can be some really good conversation. And again, this felt Reddit is is one that I I partake in where you show up and people say, hey, I don't understand these new runes things. Why are these existing in this way? And then you get good conversation. Yeah, occasionally there's arguing and bickering and annoying drama, unnecessary drama for no reason. But for the most part, if you are good at having like a self-filter and in making sure that you don't go down those rabbit holes of people arguing and stuff. I think you can get a lot of value out of it, too.

• 18:05Wes Bos?

  Totally. I I really like Reddit because you can get, and just in general, you can get a lot of people's like opinions on a topic. And I feel like I have a pretty good idea of if somebody's opinion is is valid or not. Simply, like, sometimes people can have opinions and I can just be like, yeah, I don't think you understand this, or you've you're just angry that that stuff is changing too quickly. Right? But then, like, you can also like often see like, hey, we had a project that did X, Y, and Z, and this API really, really worked well. Or we tried to build something in React server components,

• 18:47Wes Bos?

  and here's the issues we hit, and we can, we can overcome it. Again, like, it's just, I just hoovering up all these little things. I'd love Reddit for that, because I always read the comments, and you can just find little nuggets of stuff, just kind of get an idea of where people are at on things.

• 19:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And there are some times, too, where like, I learn about crazy new libraries that I, you know, I got my ear to the ground. And then you go to some posts, and people are talking about how they do something some way, and somebody's using, I use this library, and this library, and this library. I'm like, I never heard of any of those. What is go, what is that stuff? And yeah, just some people have different levels of connectedness to different communities. So it's it's nice to get some of that.

• 19:31Wes Bos?

  Next one is mentorship and ask questions. This is kind of tricky one, because like, people all the time ask me, hey, can you be my mentor? And I always think like, it's unfortunately, I can't, because like, time, time is limited with this type of thing. And I think my time is better spent creating content that can help multiple people at once. But often, you can find people where it can just be. As simple as you have a chat room and you can DM them when you when you hit something like when I was first starting coding, my buddy Darcy was that for me where I would just be like, like, I don't even know what to Google for this, or I don't even know how to approach this.

• 20:11Scott Tolinski?

  Is this a dumb idea?

• 20:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just, somebody needs this feature. Where do I even start to tackle? Like, having somebody like that where you can just like, reach out, or this thing is totally broken. Like, I love that when people send me their questions of like, uh, somebody on threads this morning, or not threads, Blue Sky this morning, "Hey, uh, we have a sticky header, but when you scroll inside of, when you have a scrolling div inside of the sticky header, we have issues. How do I approach this?" Right? I'm just like, hmm, nerd sniped. I don't know, but I now I want to figure it out.

• 20:46Scott Tolinski?

  Can you explain the word nerd sniped to me? I just interviewed Rich Harris for JS Nation, and he used the word nerd sniped several times, and I laughed along, uh, because I know Rich is smart, and I was just like, I don't know what nerd snipe means, and now is not the time to ask him.

• 21:03Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. Nerds snipe is when somebody asks a question, and you don't necessarily know, you don't know the answer, but you think, hmm, I need to figure that out now. Uh, where you just kind of, you just put something out there, like, "Hey, can you rotate a box in 3D when you hover over top of it? Oh, my gosh, now I'm gonna have to build this thing," you know? Like, I'm, I'm curious, too. That's a great question. You nerd sniped to me, yeah. And, uh, you can often do it on Twitter, where you just ask a question, and everybody goes, "Hmm, I need to know as well."

• 21:42Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Uh, I don't know what I thought it was in my head, but it wasn't that. So, uh, mentorship has been a big one for me, you know, in my, I was the type of person who like, really did not believe that they could get a good job in this industry when I first started. So when I got my first web development job, and it was, uh, me and another developer, I got so much out of that. And that was, you know, not an online Relationship. I got so much out of that professional relationship where my boss was able to teach me so many things that are beyond reading the docs and these go as far as you know, what to say in client meetings, like not just, you know, what not to say, what to say,

• 22:25Scott Tolinski?

  what, what might give the client anxiety if you're saying this or that, or

• 22:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Scott Tolinski?

  Just like those little things that, yeah, you can figure out a lot of that stuff over time. But if you're about to go into your first client meeting at your first job and your boss or mentor is like, all right, just so you know, do this or this and this, but don't do this. That can give you a like a light forward jump that you don't get otherwise. But as far as even coding goes, they can help you navigate the dragons. They've, they've hit the dragons. They've run into the dragons and you can save some time simply by having a good mentor that can even foresee the issues that you're going to hit when you're working on a specific project or even a code base or a framework in general.

• 23:10Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Those, the soft skills is, is really interesting as well. Like, hey, I got this email. How would you, how would you reply to this? Or hey, this person's being a jerk to me. What would you do here? Would you, would you drop it? Would you leave it alone? Or would you, would you say something, you know?

• 23:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah. I know. Normally, normally answers, you drop it. You just drop it. You suck it up and you do it.

• 23:34Wes Bos?

  Cool. That's all we have for today. Anything else to add there, Scott?

• 23:39Scott Tolinski?

  No, I got nothing. You know, I think this stuff is again, just letting your curiosity guide you a little bit, but don't be afraid to go deep on stuff. It, it can take you to a different level of professional achievement that you couldn't get otherwise. And it's going to take you into a place that AI right now can't necessarily go, right?

• 23:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah, exactly. It's, it's, I had a tweet about that the other day. It's like the, in the age of AI, we, the people that can go deep, the people that can, can read the docs, can, can figure all this out. They're the ones that are going to be able to, to stand out. And yeah, go deep. All right. Thanks, everyone. Peace.