892: The History of Syntax

Wes and Scott talk about the origins of Syntax, sharing how a friendly course name conflict led to a mastermind group, then a podcast, and eventually a full-blown media brand. They also reflect on key milestones, from early episodes and sponsorships to joining Sentry, expanding the team, and what’s next. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:51 How Wes and Scott met Scott Tolinski & The Origins of LevelUpTuts LevelUpTutorials WesBos.com 09:31 How Syntax got its name Episode 001: React Tools 15:30 Getting sponsors Delicious Brains FreshBooks 18:53 Hasty Treats and expanding the show 22:36 Adding interviews to Syntax SVGs with Sara Soueidan 23:38 Syntax’s first live show Live at JAMstack_conf 27:58 Brought to you by Sentry.io 28:34 Acquisition by Sentry 600th Episode! Major Announcement and Swag Giveaway! 33:56 Hiring a producer Randy Rektor 36:39 Transitioning to video and growing the team Rating and ROASTING Coding Desk Setups CJ Reynolds Kaitlin Bloom 41:47 Launching the merch store Sentry.shop 46:01 The future of Syntax 47:23 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: Crucial X10 Pro 4TB Portable SSD Wes: MONVICT Cordless Glue Gun Shameless Plugs Syntax YouTube Channel 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.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we've got the history of syntax. We realize we've been doing this podcast for a long, long time. And very early on in the podcast, we did kind of our origin stories where we told people about ourselves. But we've never really either followed that up or kind of explained the process of syntax. You know, I was, I was on someone's livestream last week and they're like, like, how did that even start? You know, it's been around for a while. So we thought like, let's, let's give you a little history of syntax, of where we started, how we met, and like, what did we do over the years to get to where syntax is today?

• 0:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, because a lot of you may have found this channel recently now that we've been publishing a lot more, or maybe you found the podcast over the years. And well, you might not know all of the whole, whole bits and stories. So Wes, do you want to kick it off with a little bit of, you know, pre-s syntax?

• 0:56Wes Bos?

  A little bit of lore?

• 0:58Scott Tolinski?

  A little bit of lore on the Wes Boss story.

• 1:02Wes Bos?

  All right. So back around 2015, Scott and I were both making like web development tutorials in general. And Scott was publishing quite a bit to YouTube at the time. I was doing my own courses. I did blogging on YouTube as well, but not as heavily as Scott was. How we initially met was Scott had published a course called React for Beginners. And I had a course called React for Beginners. And I said, hey, could you not? And thankfully, he was really cool about it. And he's like, oh, yeah, no problem. And you renamed it, I think, React for Everyone, which I was really happy about. And I was like, oh, by the way, I love your stuff. Like, I had taken Scott's Sketch Course at the time. So like, I knew who he was, but I had never like crossed paths before that.

• 1:47Wes Bos?

  So that was our like, sort of first introduction. And then maybe a couple of months after that, I had this idea of creating what's called a mastermind. And a mastermind group is where you get together with people who are in similar businesses as you and sort of just talk shop about. What's working, what's not working, what are your goals, you know, keep each other accountable? I was like, hey, Scott, do you want to do that? We also had Joel from Egghead. We had Josh Owens, who is running some meteor. It's called like the Meteor Dojo or something like that. By the way, I ran into him on TikTok the other day. Now he's doing 3D printing stuff.

• 2:26Scott Tolinski?

  Cool.

• 2:27Wes Bos?

  So he's, he's in a different industry now. But basically, we talked for once every two weeks for a year. And just gave you some other tips and it was very helpful. And then after about a year, we're like, I kind of got what we wanted from it. But like Scott and I had gotten along really well. We're like, dude, we should start a podcast, you know, like there's probably something else here. I really enjoyed hanging out with Scott every week and talking and we're like, man, there's, we have like a really good back and forth, good rapport, similar sense of humor, kind of in the same stages of life as well. So I, I was like, hey, you want to start a podcast?

• 3:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and it's funny. So pre all of that, I was doing like you had mentioned, a lot of YouTube and I had started YouTube in 2012. And there's actually a little, Honey Pot did a little mini documentary about my, my career that goes into a lot more details on some of that stuff. But you know, the YouTube channel for me was just a, a slow growth over time where I was publishing like nine videos a week for a couple of years and just like really, really working hard on the YouTube channel itself. And Wes had really like, really done a great job of making like really high-end premium tutorial content. And like what I was making was not that.

• 3:50Scott Tolinski?

  I mean, it was nine videos a week. You can't really do high-end content at nine videos a week. I was more or less coming home from work and recording, just like talking about what I was doing all day at work. So when we had that mastermind, you know, Wes was bringing a different angle to the same thing. And I was bringing a lot of YouTube expertise in 2015 at the time. You know, the channel was in the middle of its rise, you know, it took a long time. I'll post a link of the, um, the chart itself for the growth of the YouTube channel over time. But you know, it was just a, a long, steady growth of YouTube and you know, Man, so there was just a lot of domain-specific knowledge I had about what makes for effective YouTube,

• 4:35Scott Tolinski?

  especially like SEO stuff, because I was living and dying by the SEO game on YouTube at that point.

• 4:40Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you're just cranking it out. I remember the one of the first things I asked you in the mastermind was, how do you, how do you record so much content? You know, like you just crank, you're cranking it out. And it was good. Like I was taking them myself before I even knew you.

• 4:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And on top of that, I was doing videos for, like I did sketch videos for their website. I was doing videos for Meteor at some point. I was doing videos for Figma when they were still a tiny little company. So, you know, I was doing even more than what I was publishing onto YouTube. But for me, it was all just like, sit down and a little bit less polished, just talk about what I'm doing, explain through it, you know, record a nine to 10 minute video here and there. But either way, the mastermind group for me was so helpful because I was trying to turn what was a YouTube channel that I was not supporting myself with. Believe it or not, at the time, you get 200,000 followers or whatever on YouTube, that still doesn't pay your rent, right?

• 5:39Scott Tolinski?

  So I was trying to pivot from working full-time as a developer and doing this stuff in my free time to teaching full-time. And so Wes was like instrumental in like helping me turn my platform into something that could actually support me, which, you know, for a little while, it definitely was very tough. And I had to pick up a job here and there extra because I just could not break into it. But Wes's expertise really helped out. You know, we had been doing that mastermind group for a while and we had talked kind of casually about doing a podcast. But I did find that we created this initial planning document, April 16th, 2016.

• 6:23Scott Tolinski?

  And inside of the initial planning document was a lot of things from the name syntax at that point. Because we had a bunch of other, like, some of them were bad, some of them were decent names. We had a big old list of potential names. We just kind of decided what the vibe was going to be at this point. And we even hashed out a whole bunch of outlines for some potential episodes that we wanted to do. We decided that we maybe want to kick off like three episodes. We'd even come up with the term sick pic at that point.

• 6:56Scott Tolinski?

  Sick tips. We had a bunch of other ones that we didn't end up using, like Pound It. That was a good one. Yeah, we didn't keep Pound It. I don't know why we didn't keep.

• 7:05Wes Bos?

  I can't believe, yeah, we were just like thinking of like, like, how do we make this not boring? And we were just kind of coming into the idea of like audio Drama Mama moments, Tasty Treats, Easy Breezy, we never actually ended up using, Hot Take Time Machine, Hot Takes From Years Past, which is hilarious because this was almost 10 years ago at the moment. Is there a list of other possible names on here as well?

• 7:30Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know. I couldn't find that.

• 7:32Wes Bos?

  Man, I think I got it. Let me, let me search one sec.

• 7:35Scott Tolinski?

  Either way, we knew from pre-recording the podcast that what we wanted to do out of this was have it be a departure from dry tech podcasts. We wanted it to be fun. We wanted it to be very like, just a little bit more exciting because I think that's both of, how both of us operate. We're kind of both high-energy people. So we really just wanted to like, have something that represented that high-energy nature that both of us tend to do. So that was like really the core of it. We also both had a lot of experience listening to podcasts. I had been an avid podcast listener. I had a huge list of things that like really bugged me about people's podcasts. We both had all the tech and audio stuff, so we knew that wasn't going to be a problem.

• 8:19Scott Tolinski?

  So we had made all this stuff in April of 2016 and just did nothing with it. We pretty much just sat on it. I was working at a job and it was kind of consuming a lot of my life at that point. And it was just really tough. Wes was doing his courses. We had this idea and again, 2016, April 2016, we just sat on it. It wasn't until, well, this isn't even it. I found a tweet from November 30th, 2016, where I said, 2017 syntax, let's make it happen. We did not end up making it happen in November of 2016. It took us until like May, July, June of 2017 before we actually kicked it off.

• 9:01Wes Bos?

  It just goes to show that. Like actually doing something like ideas are a dime a dozen, right?

• 9:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 9:08Wes Bos?

  But like actually getting up and doing it is the part that makes it happen. Obviously it is, but like, man, it took us a long time to actually just go ahead and, and start recording it. And I think that was just because there's a lot going on in life, you know, focusing on courses and whatnot. But once we started getting rolling on it, I'm like, man, we should have, we should have did this two years ago.

• 9:30Scott Tolinski?

  Totally.

• 9:31Wes Bos?

  By the way, I did find the list of possible names for syntax. And it says, originally I had wanted to call my own podcast Boss Sauce. I don't even remember that. It should be fun slash funny and enough to grab people's interests. Most of these are garbage, but I'm just spitballing. So my ideas for the podcast were code, code, code, exclamation mark. Also, the second one was just code, code, exclamation mark. So two. The Fun Dev Show.

• 10:03Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:04Wes Bos?

  So stupid. Dev Sauce, that's still pretty good. Sauce.Tips, that would have not been a good podcast name. Web Sauce, Blockscope. I think Blockscope is probably my favorite second one. Dev Life, The Code Life. Well, those are all of the ideas that we had there. And then finally, I forget, syntax is not even on there. I'm not sure how we ended up landing on syntax.

• 10:30Scott Tolinski?

  We had more names than this because I clearly remember one of them was, was Code Time with Wes and Scott. And I'm trying to find that list.

• 10:40Wes Bos?

  It's on the, it was on the next page. Here we go. I had to go back in like history and find these in Google Docs history. So async, Code Time with Wes and Scott, time code, code flow.

• 10:53Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. Yeah. Syntax is the best one. I think we all, we kind of agreed on it. It's a, it's a short word. It's a cool looking word. It represents what we do really well.

• 11:03Wes Bos?

  I still very much, I love the syntax brand, you know? And, and everything around it. And like we've, we've morphed it over the years, but it's still is, it's the same logo and it's the same name. And I don't know that I've ever liked something that long where I'm like, hmm, that's a good name, you know? Nice, short. Crisp name and like every other coding podcast that's come out since then is is a take on it. It's just one word about coding.fm.

• 11:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, it was, it was, you know, it was so fun. And then one thing that happened, I was working this job at a startup and they were really abusive. And like as a developer there, it was a really tough work environment. And I've told the story before in the past, but it was the the week of the birth of my first child. And it was like a Sunday at 8 o'clock on the week my child was born. And they were harassing me, and I mean this in the like, the most aggressive, rude possible type of way about a broken feature in pre-alpha software. And it was just like, so brutal to me. And I pretty much quit the next day.

• 12:19Scott Tolinski?

  And at that point, I didn't have an income beyond like level up tutorials, which, you know, was tight at that point. And yeah, I think both of us, it was the right time. We had all this stuff down and it was the absolute right time for me. So we just decided to make it happen and start recording. The initial plan was that we recorded a teaser episode. And then we recorded three additional episodes. So that way we would have three kind of ready to go as a buffer. And the initial plan was to just do one a week. That was the whole thing. We're going to do one episode a week. It's going to be on Wednesdays, I believe. And I think so. And it was going to come out every Wednesday.

• 13:01Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Wes Bos?

  July 5th, 2017, we published the first episode on React Tools. And this was talking about like where to host React, all of the different like libraries around it, right? I'm just looking at the show notes here, CloudFlare, NextJS, GraphQL, Graphcool.

• 13:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yep, Graphcool, which is now Prisma.

• 13:24Wes Bos?

  Yes, that's seen several, Meteor, Blaze, React Storybook. Oh, man, we were early on the React Storybook, man.

• 13:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, but it's still React Storybook. That's crazy that it's been around that long. My son was born in the end of May and this first episode came out early June. So you can tell like just how fast that turnaround was for me personally to go from I'm working this job full time to now we're doing this podcast. So for me, it really needed to hit. And It hit. I think the initial reaction was great. It helped that Wes had a massive Twitter audience and at that point, I think my YouTube, it was like 200,000 or something like that.

• 14:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it was pretty fairly large.

• 14:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So it was, I think, a great initial reaction. I think we did exactly what we wanted it to do. And at that point, not a lot of people knew my name, which was funny because like I'd been on YouTube for so long, but people, I didn't put myself on camera that much. I was the Level Up Tuts guy and like, I didn't really even say my name. I was like, this is Scott from Level Up Tuts. It's like, I didn't want to burden people with having to spell my last name. So it was like, at that point, it was Wes and the Level Up Tuts guy. That was the, that was the show.

• 14:37Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that, that was really nice that we had existing audiences that we were able to push people towards. I think it's a little easier now to get sort of like an algorithm hit.

• 14:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, totally.

• 14:49Wes Bos?

  And be noticed. But at the time, it was like, discoverability for podcasts was, was extremely low. And we were able to just simply say, hey, we got this thing and push people out to it. And then just luckily from day one, we had a fairly sizable audience that were, were tuned in. I don't know that we would have kept it going for so long if we hadn't like got all the feedback. Cause it's, you hear from people and they, they email you and they, they tweet at you saying, hey, I love this episode, or you got this wrong. And I love that part about doing it. You feel part of the community.

• 15:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, people let us know right away that they liked it and enjoyed it. And because of that, we ended up getting, you know, sponsorship pretty early on in the game. I don't remember what our first sponsored episode was.

• 15:40Wes Bos?

  I think it was, I think it was Delicious Brains has a plugin, WP Myrate DB Pro, which I was a heavy user of at the time. Cause I was, I was doing a lot of, maybe not then, but when I, in my WordPress days, I used that in every single website. And we got an email from Brad and he's like, hey, Can we sponsor this thing? And I had, I had not even thought about that, you know? Like, the podcast was just a medium for us to promote our own stuff, but we had not thought about taking on external money. But, but, uh, sure. Yeah. And I forget how much it was. I think it was like 700 bucks or something like that for the first episode.

• 16:23Scott Tolinski?

  Good money, yeah.

• 16:23Wes Bos?

  So, yeah, it was good money.

• 16:25Scott Tolinski?

  That was our fourth episode. So, we had batched those first three episodes. And by the time we recorded a fourth episode, we had Delicious Brains as a sponsor. So, shout out Delicious Brains for being the first and really doing that. And for me personally, like, this was pre anybody getting signed to do a podcast deal. Podcasts existed. Podcasts were popular, but they weren't like a career. You didn't hear a lot of people saying, "I'm a podcaster," you know?

• 16:53Wes Bos?

  No, they weren't on Spotify at the time. No, it was, it was much more of like a, still like a tech thing, you know? And even 2017 was not early. I'd been listening to Leo Laporte for 10 years before that. You know, like, I literally had podcasts on my iPod.

• 17:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, 2011 plus, yeah, totally.

• 17:12Wes Bos?

  But, yeah, it was, it was amazing. And then, once that came out, we started getting emails from all kinds of companies, which I now realize that these tech companies that are trying to get in front of developers, it's kind of a hard thing to do because you can't just use regular mediums. Like, you can't, you can't sponsor like Joe Rogan with like a developer tooling company or something like that.

• 17:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, totally.

• 17:40Wes Bos?

  So, these companies were hungry to try new avenues. And also, like, at the time, the display ads were starting to tank. And, and these developer companies were looking for new areas to advertise on and to get in front of, in front of devs.

• 18:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. You know who one of our first bigger sponsors was, was Freshbooks, who then continued to sponsor us forever and ever and ever. So shout out to Freshbooks for also really believing in Syntax really early on. I mean, they sponsored episode number seven. Let's see. They sponsored episode number six. Yeah. So they started really early with us and that really made it a lot more viable, besides the fact that we were getting a lot of listens and everything like that.

• 18:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah. I think, I think companies like Freshbooks have like scanners and they look for new podcasts because I think what, what happens is if a new podcast comes up, they get on it early and if it pops, then they get really good money or value for their money.

• 18:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they did get good value because we were trending on the technology charts at that point already. So it worked out pretty well for us. And yeah, we just kind of kept that going until we decided that we wanted to add another episode because we were doing so much, but we didn't want to have another long episode. So that's where we came up with the idea of doing the hasty and the tasty treat where the hasty treat would be a short episode on a quick topic because sometimes we were finding there was all these things we wanted to talk about, but it would have been like totally wrong for us to talk about them for an hour, right? It would have felt like we were just artificially dragging it out, which you don't want to do, right?

• 19:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Or if you group them together, like three topics that have nothing to do with each other, group them together into a single show. Didn't really make sense.

• 19:35Scott Tolinski?

  Didn't make any sense. So that's why we came up with the whole hasty and tasty treat. Next thing you know, we're publishing two episodes a week. And yeah, the whole time I'm trying to turn Level Up Tutorials into business and you are still pushing out your courses, still working on that stuff and like, you know, recording a lot of content in addition to the podcast. The podcast was still like a one day of the week thing for us and probably remained a one day of the week for us until somewhat recently.

• 20:03Wes Bos?

  When we hit that like second episode that we added, it was, it was partially because like we had stuff to talk about and partially because we had more people wanting to sponsor than we had room for. So we're like, yeah, we'll, we'll add the second show. That'll be kind of neat. That worked out really well and it started to become like a... I would say not as, I would say a significant source or a good source of income.

• 20:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Wes Bos?

  Alongside my courses as well. That was kind of fun. I, I hated chasing all the sponsors and having calls with them and whatnot. And it was, it was a tricky thing. A lot of people always say like, why don't you just firm it out to like, uh, some sort of company, but.

• 20:43Scott Tolinski?

  An agency. Yeah. There's a lot of people trying to, to do that for us. There was a, a lot of people being like, we will manage all your ads. We'll do this. We'll do that. And it's like, but all right. But then you're taking a massive chunk of it.

• 20:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah. They, they wanted to take like a quarter, like a 25%. And then also the reason, I think we were making more money per listener than most podcasts were because we had the developer audience and the people who were sponsoring, like a sanity is an example. They were partially sponsoring because they had a good audience, but they were also sponsoring because Scott and I would get to know their product and, and, and talk about it. You know, like I still talk about sanity to this day.

• 21:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, totally.

• 21:25Wes Bos?

  And because I know it so well, because of all those ad reads and it's, it's an awesome product. So it was like a thing where like you had to really do it yourself. Cause you had to get on the calls. You had to try, you had to build something with it. Cause they wanted you to talk about their product from a firsthand and not just like run a me undies robotic ad read. And, and everybody loved them. And people still talk about the transitions Scott would do from the show into the actual ad reads.

• 21:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. You know what? It's funny. The transitions to the ad reads were something that I did right away. I don't know like how I got to be decent at it, but I did pick that up like from another podcast. I don't know if you know this. There's a, there was a hockey podcast, uh, Merrick verse Waschinsky and, uh, Greg Waschinsky always did really good ad transitions. And I always thought that was very funny. So I, I decided to do it, but I don't remember the first time I did that, if I did it right away or whatever. But it was always a, a thing that I wanted to do and aspired to do and kind of had never, never a problem with it. I don't know why. It just kind of came naturally to me. So that was always a kind of just initially part of that. But it did come from Greg Waschinsky. So shout out to Greg.

• 22:37Wes Bos?

  And then, right around middle of 2019, I'm just looking it up, we decided to start doing interviews, which is our Friday, which was our Friday episode. I had never wanted to do interviews because I feel like I wasn't good at them. I feel like I'm still not great at talking, but people were like, oh, can I come on? Can you get this person on? And I was like, that's not really an interview podcast, but we decided to kind of go for it. We had Sacha Grief and Cortland Allen on previously, just to kind of talk to them. But it looks like our very first actual interview was Sarah Swaden, talking about SVGs and front-end UI in CSS, which was a very good episode.

• 23:18Scott Tolinski?

  Do you know why that was? I was out. I don't remember why I was out. I was sick, I was unavailable. For some reason, I was out. And that was the first episode I missed. And you were like, well, I'll find somebody else. So you found Sarah to fill in for me, which is how that came about. But I remember that was really great and it worked out really well. I mean, obviously Sarah's great, so. But also, we did a live show in there before we decided to do interviews full-time because...

• 23:46Wes Bos?

  Oh, you're right.

• 23:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Episode 90 was our first live show. And that, coincidentally, was the first time that Wes and I had ever met in person. Given that, at the time, you know, I was living in Colorado, and I still am, Wes living in Toronto, we had never met in person. We'd probably been in very similar circles and rooms, just never, never met before until then. And yeah, it was, it was pretty great. We did the live show and I think it was really hilarious. I think that was like the one thing that we wanted to get out of the first live show, was to have it be as fun as the show, or more fun than the show, in a different format. So we came up with a bunch of games. In the very first live show, we did spicy tips, where we, where we did like spicy takes.

• 24:32Scott Tolinski?

  We did this, that, or both, which was still to this day, my favorite game that we do live, where we, I can't believe we came up with this for the first live show.

• 24:40Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Scott Tolinski?

  Which was, which was where we give you a word and you have to say if it's an NPM library, or whatever. Ever this was so for instance.

• 24:48Wes Bos?

  It was like, is this a carbon fiber road bike? Or a package for modeling 3D shapes in the browser or both? And those, that was so much fun doing that. That was at JamstackConf in San Francisco.

• 25:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah. And then we also did Stumped where we were asking questions for people in the audience. Oh no, we were trying to stump each other.

• 25:09Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 25:09Scott Tolinski?

  That was the one we were trying to stump each other. We did overrated or underrated where it was kind of rapid fire. And then we did a Q and A. It was a ton of fun. And shout out to the Netlify folks for throwing JamstackConf. That was like a great time and it was just like a pretty, I think it was a pretty sweet event for us because again, we got to experiment with the format a little bit. But we also got to hang out, which was I think important for us.

• 25:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Yeah. People were surprised that we had never met. We did what 90 episodes together?

• 25:36Scott Tolinski?

  90 episodes.

• 25:36Wes Bos?

  And never met in person.

• 25:38Scott Tolinski?

  Been over a year of doing podcasts.

• 25:40Wes Bos?

  Yeah. People had thought we had known each other our entire life, which is why I was like, yeah, that's, we clicked and, and that's why the podcast did so well. So we had a really good rapport, a really good back and forth, especially at the time that there was a lot of podcasts out there and they were all snooze fests. They were highly technical, but had no personality. And I, I think that that has changed a lot with the, with YouTube and like vlogging and like personalities becoming much more of a thing now. At the time it was just like, I am an expert, therefore I will blog and conference talk and do a podcast on it. And, and now the entertainment value is, is so much,

• 26:25Wes Bos?

  is so important alongside the actual learning things.

• 26:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that was pretty much it for a while. You know, we did a live shows here and there. We were getting invited to do that stuff. We were doing conference talks. We maintained the podcast. We were now doing three episodes a week and.

• 26:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it was just got into a really natural flow of things. It just kind of worked and didn't stop working. You know, one thing that I really appreciate about you, Wes, and like the show that we've been able to do is that I don't think there's ever been a single time where I've been like, "Ugh, I gotta do the podcast." Or, "Ugh, I gotta talk to Wes." Like, no, I'm always stoked to talk to Wes. Like, I'm stoked to talk to him all the time. So, you know, it's just a good vibe all around.

• 27:12Wes Bos?

  Totally. People always ask that, like, "Hey, do you ever run out of stuff to talk about or whatnot?" And like, some days, it's hard to figure out what to talk about. And like, you gotta put all the content together, you know? Like, it's hard putting it all together, but the actual making it is very enjoyable. And it's always been like a fun highlight of my week as well, being able to record it. And also just like share what it is that I'm working on and share what I know. It's a fun thing to be able to say, "Today, we're talking about CSS variables." You know, and you can just dive in, do all the research, figure out every little aspect of it,

• 27:52Wes Bos?

  and then just deliver it in this tidy, little neat package of an hour for somebody to passively consume.

• 27:58Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/synthesis. 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 sentry.io/synthesis. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 28:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do love diving deeply into a topic for a week and then getting to just fire hose that out in an episode. That was always just really, really super great. So I guess the next big thing, because we had been, you know, really getting into that flow for a while, was getting acquired by Sentry. So, you know, we often say on this podcast, "This show is brought to you or presented by Sentry." You know, those types of things. But Sentry was one of our longtime sponsors and they would sponsor, you know, what? 52 episodes a year, kind of repeatedly. And we had a really great relationship with them. Wes had known Ben Vinegar over at Sentry for a long time. Did you know Kramer before, David Kramer?

• 29:09Wes Bos?

  Ben had gotten in touch with me before we even did the podcast and he's like, hey, if you ever want to work together, let me know. And I had a Redux free course that was coming out. And I said, yeah, you want to like sponsor the Redux course? And they said totally. So they paid me a bunch of money. I put one of the videos of the course was me integrating Sentry into the React app and showing how it works and whatnot. And that really worked well. And then when the podcast came along, they're like, hey, we want to sponsor this as well. And like immediately, they're just like, how many episodes can we get? You know, and they just, they took as many as they possibly could, which I think they were a sponsor, yeah, 52 once a week for, for many, many years. And it was a great relationship

• 29:54Wes Bos?

  because Sentry never sent us anything to say.

• 30:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Wes Bos?

  Maybe a couple of times a year, they would drop us notes on new features that Sentry had and say, hey, like, maybe this is some good talking points. But it was always just like, well, use it, just, just let her rip, you know, and we can kind of talk about it. And everybody always thought that that was like, felt really good coming from us. And it was always a really good relationship, which is why when they approached us, they're like, hey, we want to build this into something bigger. What do you think? Bring syntax under the Sentry brand that you don't have to, you don't got to sell a whole bunch of ad spots, but also you can devote a lot more time to it. We can get you some people. Seemed like

• 30:43Wes Bos?

  a pretty good, pretty sweet proposition and able to just like, because that was, that was a frustrating part about running syntax is that we spent probably a full day recording every week. And then we had like, I don't know, another half day run around doing sponsorship stuffs and talking with the editor or things like that. And it's, it was, it was quite a bit of work. And there was a lot of stuff that we wanted to do past that, but simply just did not have the time or resources.

• 31:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, considering I was at that time, we were recording Syntax one day a week and then I was doing, what, 24 videos a month with Level Up tutorials? So it was, you know, not even just four days a week, it was Saturdays and Sundays for me at that time, just grinding on creating tutorials. So for me, I was feeling very, uh, very tired of doing that. It was very exhausting and I still love making that content, but I had, I'd really burnt myself out on how many videos I had agreed to do. And once I'd made that agreement with my customers, I can't go back on that. I can't say, no, I'm going to give you 10 videos a month or whatever. I'm going to keep, keep working on them. Now granted, we did bring in some third-party content creators at various points and that was definitely the direction, but people really liked my content.

• 31:58Scott Tolinski?

  So I didn't want to like skimp out on that. So it was a lot of work for me. So when this, this came about, it was like, all right, now we can invest all of my time into Syntax. I can put that energy that I'm putting into my own tutorials into like a group effort instead of like, I, cause I had a, I had a business. I had a couple of people working for me and stuff at Level Up tutorials. But, you know, it felt really great to be able to have all that be in Syntax. So in addition to like having a nice working relationship with Sentry, I've also, I had been using their product since before Syntax, like long before, for just as a user. So I was very familiar with the prod, product itself.

• 32:40Scott Tolinski?

  And I'd always had great experiences with the team. So when we started chatting and they, they told us what they saw in it. And one of the big things that sold me on it was, we're not going to touch it. Unless you like need our help, we're not going to tell you how to do it. You know, we just want you to think bigger and we'll give you the resources to do so. So that was, that was a big selling point because it's your, your baby, you, you know, you have this whole brand. The last thing you want is to Sentry to come in and say, make it purple. And I was like,

• 33:11Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 33:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Wes Bos?

  We've seen a lot, a lot of, like, that happens a lot, right? And when we announced it, a lot of people were like happy but cautious. And they're like, ah, hopefully they don't ruin it, you know?

• 33:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 33:24Wes Bos?

  And it was really nice after. It is, is, is when something you love gets acquired, you always think, oh, that's it. There it goes. You know, they're gonna start just like cranking it like it's gonna be low quality. It happens with everything.

• 33:40Scott Tolinski?

  Everything.

• 33:40Wes Bos?

  Except for us. So after, like, after a year of doing it and when we, we launched, we'll talk about whatever, but people started saying, ha, that I'm so glad that they didn't ruin it.

• 33:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And, and so that was really great.

• 33:57Wes Bos?

  In fact, we made it better. I should, I should say that.

• 33:59Scott Tolinski?

  We made it a lot better.

• 34:00Wes Bos?

  Significantly better, significantly better because we were able to, uh, hire a producer, Randy, who made it look better and sound better. And it freed us up from doing a whole lot of stuff, right? And now we have a whole team. We'll talk about that in a sec, though.

• 34:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah. So a part of that was Level Up Tutorials was made free. You can utilize it now, levelup.video. It's available for a totally free resource for all of the courses that I made. So that was a whole part of it, too. It's like, we're gonna take on Level Up Tutorials and just make it free for the community, which was really admirable that they did that. They were like, we don't care about the money that Level Up Tutorials is bringing in. The goodwill is better for us to make it free. So, uh, the thing I got to work so hard on and, you know, I always felt bad about putting it behind a paywall, given that, like, what, I released a thousand videos on YouTube for free before I ever charged for anything? So it was like, I really wanted to give this stuff for free, but I could not live off of it that way. So, uh, it was really great that that ended up happening.

• 34:56Scott Tolinski?

  And, uh, Kaitlin Bloom, who was the Level Up Tutorials Marketing Manager, she had been working for me for, I don't know, like a year and a half at that point, maybe a little bit longer. I was really grateful to her. She took a chance on me because, um, you know, working for a single person at a business that is like, you know, just taking, that's a risky move. So, you know, shout out to Caitlin for having the faith that Level Up Tutorials was a, a good bet. And it paid off for her. She got to join Sentry. She got to join the Syntax team and she's now the Syntax Marketing Manager and she's, she's just great. And so it was the three of us for a little bit and Ben Vinegar kind of whipped us into shape at Sentry. He, he definitely got us working more like a team. You know, Wes and I were a bit of like, mm, we just do stuff, you know?

• 35:41Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. I'm a, I'm a stallion, man. You can't pen me in, you know? I've never really had a like, a job, you know, I've always worked for myself. And I should say like, I'm still part-time, um, what, however many hours a week, but the arrangement now is, is much more formal, you know? Like we have team, we have to communicate and things like that. And I always tell my wife, I'm a stallion, you know? I just kind of let her rip and, and do what I want. And for the most part, that's still true, but, uh, Ben came in and sort of helped us figure out goals and, uh, what do you want to do? And how do you hire somebody? And, and all of that hard stuff, which I have zero experience in.

• 36:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I had been, you know, as, as doing that stuff for LevelUp tutorials, I had no experience in it either, besides like what I was doing myself. So it was really, really helpful for me to be able to have that kind of training and that kind of understanding. So yeah, the, the next step was to grow the team. What do we need? Well, uh, we need somebody who can take on the producer role of just defining the video look, moving to video at all. Before this, we were just audio. And we hired Randy Rector for that and he's just been a superhuman. He is just, uh, you know, completely everything you see graphics-wise and all that stuff. Uh, audio, he's like defined the entire visual aesthetic for the video of the podcast.

• 37:05Scott Tolinski?

  And he's done it all without much, like, I don't know. I don't think I've ever told Randy, do this, do that, whatever. He just does. He's got great taste and does a great job. In fact, you can get that just from his YouTube channel because his, his stuff all looked great beforehand. And, and we knew bringing him in would be an easy transition for us. And it was, I mean, we were able to transition to video within like weeks of him joining the program, like actually probably a week of him joining the team. So.

• 37:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah, he, he has fantastic taste. And that was one thing when we were like trying to hire.

• 37:38Wes Bos?

  Is we wanted someone to tell us what to do and not the other way around.

• 37:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Wes Bos?

  You know, like, we don't just want someone to click the buttons and edit the thing. He obviously has those skills, but he more has like a, he understands YouTube. He understands how to edit, timing. Man, go watch the latest, what is it? The reacting to the desks video on YouTube?

• 38:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:05Wes Bos?

  He took like, like 35 minutes of us yapping and cut it down to like 18 minutes of just, and it feels so smooth. And I was telling Caitlin, I was like, unreal that he can take us yapping for so long and just make it so quickly cut and it just flows really well. So just things like that. He's, he's got excellent taste.

• 38:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so we moved the podcast to video, which is a big transition. The My Baby, which was the Level Up Tutorials YouTube channel, converted into the Syntax channel. So the channel that you are watching this on, if you're watching it right now on YouTube, is formerly my YouTube channel, rebranded to be Syntax. You can go find probably all of my old videos there on there as well, which is great because we, you know, had a big subscribership here already. And it's like trying to revive a YouTube channel was quite a bit of work and we needed to, you know, bring people in. We had probably a good amount of like what are dead subscribers, people who subscribed in the past that don't exist anymore. So it was definitely like an opportunity for us to really grow in this space.

• 39:10Scott Tolinski?

  And part of that was that we wanted somebody who's focused purely on making video content. That was like one of our big things. We could have somebody who could, you know, we could, we can yap about projects on this show, we can talk about stuff, but we wanted somebody to go deeper and show you things. And it, neither of us had the time to do that is really what it came down to. So that's why we went to hire a creator and that was a. I would say that was a difficult job hunt. We had a ton of massively talented video creators, interview and create stuff for us. And it was like emotionally difficult for me because I would

• 39:50Scott Tolinski?

  have loved to hire so many people from that job hunt. But CJ stood out for being like very,

• 39:58Scott Tolinski?

  very technically deep in a way that like you could throw anything at CJ and you felt like he'd be able to make a very well-made, technical, like reliable, honest video about whatever it was. And that's really what stood out for me. He just genuinely a smart and good dude.

• 40:19Wes Bos?

  That was, that was really important to us as well. In the same way that like Randy can like edit video, Photoshop, turn the knobs on audio and, and think about hooks for a TikTok. CJ does that for like understanding every single aspect of code, which is like not everyone, like Scott and I are web developers, you know, and we know a lot about server side JavaScript and databases and caching techniques. And all the way on the other side, we know quite a bit about like front end and CSS and animations and stuff like that. And our, we have a pretty wide breadth of what we cover. And CJ, I feel like he has even a deeper breadth on some of

• 41:03Wes Bos?

  that stuff, you know, he, he actually has a computer science degree.

• 41:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Wes Bos?

  And then he's just like excellent at explaining how all of that stuff works as well.

• 41:13Scott Tolinski?

  And he's just a genuinely likable dude on top of all of that, you know?

• 41:17Wes Bos?

  Cool mustache?

• 41:18Scott Tolinski?

  Cool mustache. Yeah. You don't feel like he is trying to be like an influencer or like, you know, it's not, it's like, you don't feel like he's phony in any sort of way. The dude is who he is. And it's like such a positive thing to me. That's always a character trait I really enjoy. So adding CJ to the show was a huge value add for us. CJ had been doing his own stuff on CodingGarden. He had experiences live streaming. I had seen him doing live events in Denver around town. Perfect value add for us.

• 41:47Wes Bos?

  Another thing we touched on was the merch store. So one thing we've wanted to do forever is, is to have some sort of merch. I've done T-shirts once or twice myself. I've done stickers, but I've never had the ability to just like have stuff for sale all the time. And that was one of the things when we joined Sentry is like, hey, can we, can we do a merch store? Like, I want to be able to, to do some really cool stuff. And right off the bat, when we joined, we gave away what like a thousand T-shirts or 600 T-shirts or something like that.

• 42:21Scott Tolinski?

  And skate decks and all kinds of stuff.

• 42:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we got skate decks, we have basketballs, got some really cool hats. By the way, really cool hats coming, hoodies coming. Probably by the time you listen to this, the hoodie should actually be live at sentry.shop. So that was really cool because just having the resources of somebody to figure out how this all works. And like, we have a whole fulfillment place, you know? It's, it's a lot of work doing that. And it's really nice having it all in place now.

• 42:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's the best part about having a team here for this is because it's like, yes, we could, we could probably have done a bad job of getting a merch store by just accepting like one of the numerous requests we had over the years for like, we'll put, we'll print your stuff and ship it for you. But so many of those things are just like bad, bad quality, bad everything. And we just didn't have the ability and time to do it the right way. So that's why it was so helpful for like, for Ben Vinegar to be like, hey, I'll take over the, the store. Now Kaitlin Bloom is the point person on the store. It's like, people have been able to really assist us in the ways that have made this whole thing so much better. We don't want to push out [BLEEP].

• 43:34Scott Tolinski?

  We don't, I mean, we don't, we don't want to give you bad quality mugs and printed T-shirts or whatever. Make, take five minutes to make a photoshopped image and throw it onto a, a product? Like, yeah, I'm not into that.

• 43:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah, the, the print on demand stuff is not, it's, it's actually getting pretty good, but it's, it's not very fulfilling to do fun stuff. So we've been able to source some really Neat stuff like a basketball and a skateboard. Those are with a fingerboard in the custom box. We've got some stickers coming pretty soon. I grew up doing merch for hardcore bands. That's like how I cut my teeth in this whole web development stuff. So being able to have that for coding is such a cool thing.

• 44:21Scott Tolinski?

  It's so cool. And from there, you know, we've been doing some events. We've been doing syntax meetups. We've been showing up. In fact, it's very funny. The very first syntax, like official meetup that we did besides doing live shows was the week that we flew to Toronto to discuss potential acquisition with Sentry. And Wes like tweeted out like minutes, you know, whatever, like a few hours before we were gonna do it. Hey, we're doing a live.

• 44:46Wes Bos?

  A couple of days before. We're just like, hey, on a Monday night in

• 44:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Wes Bos?

  Hamilton, not even in Toronto, we're doing like a meetup and we had like probably what 20, 25 people come out?

• 44:58Scott Tolinski?

  It was enough. Yeah, enough people. It was fun.

• 45:00Wes Bos?

  Super fun. I'd love doing those meetups. We need to, we're gonna do a few more of them because just it's great, like actually hanging out with people that you've been conversing with online for years or weeks or never.

• 45:13Scott Tolinski?

  Totally. And it was, it was great. A lot of people asking us why I'm there, which was a question I could not answer.

• 45:20Wes Bos?

  What did you say?

• 45:21Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I don't remember.

• 45:23Wes Bos?

  I think you said we were just, we were just doing some planning or something like that, you know?

• 45:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we're doing something. But the most recent meetup we did in SF for GitHub Universe was incredible because Sentry helped us plan it. We got a great venue for it. We gave away a ton of stuff. A lot of people showed up and it was just a blast.

• 45:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that was really fun. We've done quite a few. We got some, we did GitHub Universe as well. We did React Miami. We did a live show there as well. Some, some pretty fun stuff to do in over the years. And we've got a couple more coming up this year. We're working on right now.

• 46:01Scott Tolinski?

  So that's the story thus far, and I think the plan from here forward is to continue to make this platform better. We want better shows. We want deeper quality. We want, you know, stuff that isn't out there. The last thing we want is like just more disposable junk on YouTube. So for us, that is the, the big plan here, especially as we move more into video. Obviously, the audio podcast is not going anywhere and we're going to continue to have that be just totally viable way to consume syntax. We don't want to alienate any of the audio listeners or anything like that. But we'll be doing more on YouTube as evidenced by our, our new Friday show. We've, we've been doing like, oh man, we did the roasting desk setups. We did trivia. We did CSS battles.

• 46:46Wes Bos?

  Junk that we don't do. You should watch the one where we've react to your desk.

• 46:51Scott Tolinski?

  That's not disposable. I guess it is a little bit. It's fun.

• 46:56Wes Bos?

  That wasn't supposed to. I had a hoot doing that. It was hilarious.

• 46:59Scott Tolinski?

  I did have a hoot, yes. Sometimes it's okay. Some, when I do it, it's okay. That's a...

• 47:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Lots, lots coming down the pipe. Lots of exciting stuff. If, we also are always just, always listening to, to what you guys want. So leave us a comment down below or, or send us a DM or an email, whatever ways possible. Love to hear what your thoughts are and what kind of stuff you want to see.

• 47:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I guess it's a good time to get into sick picks and shameless plugs, which again, we had these from the get-go. That was part of our initial plan was to have sick picks and shameless plugs, even by name.

• 47:38Wes Bos?

  Pretty much from day one.

• 47:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So this has been, this has been a fun thing that we've been doing for a really long time here on Syntax. So again, sick picks are the things that we like, we're consuming, we're utilizing, all that stuff. I have a sick pick, which is something that CJ had mentioned that he had gotten. So shout out to CJ for letting me know that these existed nowadays. I haven't bought an external hard drive in a very long time. Like I had a NAS, I, you know, I have that kind of thing for an external hard drive, but nothing that I could take with me.

• 48:11Scott Tolinski?

  I ended up getting was will be the catalyst was this I was doing a lot of video editing and my cache files were like taking up like 600 gigabytes on my laptop, which would just, you know, destroy my laptops, you know, space in about two seconds flat. So I got this four terabyte portable SSD. It's made by Crucial. It's itty bitty and it's four terabytes. It has 2000 megabyte read and write speed. So it uses Thunderbolt for fast writing and it's just tiny. I'm going to put some Velcro on this and Velcro it to the back of my computer so I can take it with me.

• 48:47Scott Tolinski?

  But it's shocking. Four terabytes in this little thing. It's essentially a USB flash drive and I just basically told DaVinci to throw all my cache files on it. Now I never have to worry about that again.

• 48:58Wes Bos?

  You could edit right off of that, like scratch disk off of that.

• 49:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I use scratch disk off of that. I think you could probably edit off of that as well, but I just haven't had the need to yet.

• 49:09Wes Bos?

  That's great. At least once a week, I tell my wife, I'm like, I hate Apple, you know, I have a frigging two terabyte MacBook. And like I bought my wife a new phone and she had a 256 gig one and she like all of the apps on her phone are like, you know, where they like do that soft uninstall.

• 49:29Scott Tolinski?

  I hate that.

• 49:29Wes Bos?

  And then every time, yeah. And she's just like, I can't have any more apps on my phone because I have no space for anything. And my kids' iPads are always out of space. And I was like, how is this in in the year of 2025? How is this a thing where we're just running out of it and they want you to do iCloud for a thousand dollars a month? It drives me nuts that it's so hard to get a lot of space on Apple devices.

• 49:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Wes Bos?

  And you have to literally tape a hard drive to the back of your laptop to make it work.

• 50:03Scott Tolinski?

  I was looking at Mac Studio because we're getting we're into a Mac Studio and it is it's the the upgrade price to internally move your your internal storage from one terabyte on that thing to four terabytes is a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars.

• 50:20Scott Tolinski?

  Crazy.

• 50:21Wes Bos?

  That's so silly. Yeah, I um, I can't wait for the day that you can, I don't know if this will ever come. They are, they want to charge you for like a cloud space or whatever, but like even already I saw people are like um, hacking the Mac Studios or what are those square, little square ones? Is that the?

• 50:40Scott Tolinski?

  Mac mini?

• 50:41Wes Bos?

  Mac mini where like they are like making aftermarket drives for it.

• 50:47Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:47Wes Bos?

  Which, give me that. I don't want a desktop computer, but give me that for my laptop, you know, a thousand terabytes. I want something like that.

• 50:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I've been rethinking the I don't want a desktop computer thing. I don't know.

• 50:59Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 51:00Scott Tolinski?

  If I've talked to you about this.

• 51:01Wes Bos?

  No, tell me about it.

• 51:02Scott Tolinski?

  I think virtual desktops have gotten pretty decent and like, a Mac Studio is so much more powerful than a MacBook Pro. I, I was just thinking like, when do I get my next MacBook Pro? Is it the next version? Uh, I think it probably is the next version, but what if I just kept this computer and did remote desktop into a Mac Pro that is beefy, you know?

• 51:26Wes Bos?

  You're gonna remote in? Real, you think latency would not?

• 51:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 51:32Wes Bos?

  Not be a thing?

• 51:33Scott Tolinski?

  If I'm local, that wouldn't be too bad.

• 51:36Wes Bos?

  The thing with your laptop is that you want to be able to like, bring it to a conference or bring it on an airplane or whatever and just have your stuff. And then not have to think about it.

• 51:46Scott Tolinski?

  Heavier work, whether that is, you know, work with L L Ms locally or work with, uh, you know, video editing, processing, those types of things.

• 51:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Scott Tolinski?

  It feels like you could, you could just offload that to a.

• 51:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah, especially if you did, um, you move all your coding projects to the cloud instead of doing them local. That might be.

• 52:06Scott Tolinski?

  Local cloud.

• 52:08Wes Bos?

  Like, yeah, like, you know, you can use VS Code as like a thin client and then it just does everything remotely.

• 52:13Scott Tolinski?

  And if I'm wired connection at home, it's not going to make a difference. The latency is not going to be a killer there.

• 52:19Wes Bos?

  No, no, no. At home, it wouldn't be an issue. Like if you're like sitting on the couch and you're trying to remote in, it's when you're like somewhere else. That's my thing is I always just want to slap, close the laptop and then put it in my bag and continue working. I do it all the time. I bring my daughter to dance. I sit in the parking lot for an hour.

• 52:38Scott Tolinski?

  I do that exact same thing.

• 52:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Scott Tolinski?

  And now, now I use the Vision Pro to have a giant monitor in the car and all the other parents get to look at me funny.

• 52:47Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, I'm going to sick pick. I might have been sick pick this years ago, but this is a, this is the best thing ever. Cordless glue gun. It doesn't matter which one. You can buy them third party now that fit your yellow or red batteries or whatever. This is just the Ryobi one. And man, having a glue gun that can't get kicked across the house or like trying to glue gun something and you're like, ah, you have to get an extension cord out. I hate that. So just having a glue gun that is on a battery is so key. Um, we have two, actually two of them. This is the big one. And then we also have one of the smaller craft ones. And it's so good for kids because they like, kids love glue guns.

• 53:31Wes Bos?

  And you can just like put it on the, the table where they're working and you don't have to worry about them like running by and kicking it in this magma hot glue gun.

• 53:41Scott Tolinski?

  I remember burning myself so many times on a glue gun when I was a kid.

• 53:47Wes Bos?

  I do that all the time still as well.

• 53:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 53:50Wes Bos?

  Quite a bit of glue gunning, but the only downside is it takes a little while to heat up, maybe, maybe four minutes or so. But once it's cooking, you're, you're good.

• 53:59Scott Tolinski?

  I got a cordless soldering iron recently and that was

• 54:02Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 54:03Scott Tolinski?

  A value add for me because again, it took, take a while to heat up, does not get as hot definitely, but oh man, for me not having to deal with a cable that I'm like, you know.

• 54:12Wes Bos?

  Oh man, yeah. I have, I've got two of them. So I have the. Like the TS80, I think. It's a USB powered one and then you just hook it up to a battery. And then I also just got the Ryobi one, which is, I like the Ryobi one better, to be honest, because it has like a nice stand for it and it's much bigger. But if you're doing really fussy, tiny little stuff, I'll reach for the little USB powered one.

• 54:38Scott Tolinski?

  Sick.

• 54:39Wes Bos?

  All right. That's it for today. Make sure you check us out on YouTube, syntax.fm/ nope, youtube.com/ at syntaxfm. That's it. I always do them the backwards way. Anything else to plug?

• 54:51Scott Tolinski?

  Nothing. Check us out.

• 54:54Wes Bos?

  Peace.

• 54:55Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.