964: Markdown as a CMS is a bad idea

In this potluck episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott answer your questions about keyboard shortcuts, choosing frameworks in the age of AI, markdown vs CMSs, backup strategies, moving countries for work, staying relevant as a developer, and more! Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 02:28 Do keyboard shortcuts actually improve productivity? Hyperkey 08:41 What is Error Lens, and why use it? Ep 956: Should I Keep Using WordPress? 11:44 How Scott is using a Svelte 5 service worker 14:52 Does tech stack choice still matter with AI coding? Ep 951: A first look at Remix 3 20:15 What stack should you choose for a greenfield SaaS? 22:38 What’s the right stack for a band website? 28:24 Is moving countries for work worth the tradeoff? 34:59 Brought to you by Sentry.io 36:16 How should you manage commits with AI tools? 40:50 Is programming still a good career in the AI era? 47:03 How should you back up large files and media? Ep 949: Web Dev HORROR Stories + Spooky Trivia! (Spooky Stories Pt. 1) Ep 962: The Home Server / Synology Show 53:29 What backup setup works for small teams and clients? 55:14 How should you store sensitive files safely? 58:07 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: Philips LED Ultra Definition Wes: LEGO Builder App 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. We've got a potluck episode for you today, which is you bring the questions, we bring the answers. We've got some really good questions today on, "Should I use Markdown instead of a CMS?" No, never, please. Scott and I have several thousand Markdown files as a CMS, and it sucks. "Leaving the country for a job." "Should I pack up my whole family and leave the country for less money?" "How should I master keyboard shortcuts?" Scott and I have some really good tips on mastering your keyboard shortcuts. "Should a young person get into web dev because of AI?" This is the question we get from every person of every age, or can I attempt to answer that? And then finally, "Backup strategies." Well, how do I, after the Halloween episodes, everyone's freaking

• 0:44Wes Bos?

  out about how poor their backup strategy is. So me and Scott talk about that. Let's get into it. You ready for some potluck questions there, Scott?

• 0:52Scott Tolinski?

  Oh.

• 0:52Wes Bos?

  Hold on. I like your Figma hat. That's cool. Where'd you get that?

• 0:56Scott Tolinski?

  GitHub Universe was one of those swag ones. I've done this two years in a row now, where I pulled the "Do you know who I am?" card to them, where I walk up and I say, they say, "Oh, would you like to learn about Figma?" And I was like, "I'm gonna be honest, I'm just here for the hat, but I did do your very first tutorial videos for Figma's website back in 2015." And they'll be like, "Oh, okay, here's a hat."

• 1:22Wes Bos?

  I've been around way longer than you have.

• 1:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. I was offered, like, employee number eight at Figma or something.

• 1:33Wes Bos?

  Oh, man.

• 1:34Scott Tolinski?

  And I turned it down. And that's why I'm still working here.

• 1:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Well, I don't think those, I don't think those folks got their payout either, because the Adobe, the Adobe thing got nixed as well, which I'm sure there was some pissed employees when that didn't fall through.

• 1:48Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, dude, can you imagine?

• 1:50Wes Bos?

  The Ferrari on order.

• 1:51Scott Tolinski?

  Can you imagine? There was a scene in the WeWork, not documentary, the WeWork show that they did.

• 1:58Wes Bos?

  That was super good.

• 2:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that was super good. And they had, like, employees, like, adding stuff and clicking "Buy" before it went public. And just like, man, to know that there's that much money on the line, and like, there's a future where you could have that type of money, and yet, it gets pulled away from you. Oh, crush me, honestly. Yes.

• 2:22Wes Bos?

  Oh, brutal, brutal, brutal. Alright, let's get into the first question here. You wanna grab that one, Scott?

• 2:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, from Josh Doveham. "I've been obsessed with learning keyboard shortcuts recently. Everything from macOS shortcuts to Chrome VS Code. My goal is to start weaning off the mouse over time and see what I can lock with the extra productivity and a deeper sense of flow. What are your guys' thoughts on keyboard shortcuts? Do they really make you more productive? Or are they just micro time savers that don't really help developers all that much? Love from Vancouver." Yeah, so me personally, yes, I love keyboard shortcuts and I do use them quite a bit. The ones I use most, honestly, are like window management stuff.

• 3:07Scott Tolinski?

  And I have everything to like Hyper, like Hyper F to do fullscreen, but not like the actual fullscreen, just to have it take up like maximize. Just like stuff like that. And I have like Hyper L wraps the current line in a console log. But I've tuned my personal ones in a way that like especially in my text editor that I feel very comfortable getting around on the keyboard. And then in my system as well. But I think so much value can come out of learning the shortcuts that exist in anything. Like when I teach my kid how to use the computer, I don't tell him to go click on the X.

• 3:47Scott Tolinski?

  I tell him to do Command W or whatever. I tell him to do Command Q or Command V, you know, those things. Because if that's just how you know how to do it, it becomes so much faster overall. But like one place that I've always felt has been like really good for me in video or in shortcuts is like video editing stuff. Where I have my own custom set of shortcuts for everything. And I basically am playing my keyboard like a piano when I'm video editing. Because it's just like, once you get that dialed, like people buy macro pads, they'll buy giant knobs, all kinds of stuff. And like, you can do so much with just the keyboard. The keyboard's got, it's got buttons on it.

• 4:30Scott Tolinski?

  I forgot how many buttons, but it's got a lot of buttons. So you get a Hyper key on there, you got a whole nother set of buttons. It's pretty cool.

• 4:38Wes Bos?

  Hyper key is so key. That is, you are mapping your Ctrl, Shift, Option, and Command to the Caps Lock key, and that essentially opens up a whole new world of combinations. I think a lot of people get frustrated with keyboard shortcuts because A, they can never remember them. Like, what was it? And what's the little hat symbol, you know? But if you just know that it's Caps Lock plus something else, you can go nuts. And like, I have the like extended Mac keyboard.

• 5:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Wes Bos?

  And what that allows, it gives you the whole, the whole set of, the whole numpad. And then it also gives you F, what is that, F16 to F19, and it gives you all of these, like, oh, my keyboard is disgusting.

• 5:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I'm like gonna throw up.

• 5:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I need to clean that. It gives you like Home, Page, End, Page Down, Page Up. So like, all of those keys are like almost unused in most applications. And hooking those up to Hyper plus any of those has been such a game changer for me. The only downside is like, you can't use it when you're on your laptop, but I don't use laptops straight away all that much.

• 5:49Scott Tolinski?

  I pretty much only, like, my main keyboard is the laptop keyboard. I never have an external. I love just laptop keyboard.

• 5:56Wes Bos?

  And then I also use, I use Better Touch Tool as well. One interesting thing, I did a video, and we actually have to edit this yet and get it up on the channel. I did a video with John Lindquist.

• 6:06Scott Tolinski?

  Where is that video?

• 6:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah, John Lindquist is like the most like dialed in productivity guy ever. He has this whole like app called Script Kit and whatnot, but he was showing me how he uses his mouse quite a bit. Because I've always been like, yeah, get away from the mouse. Don't touch the mouse. But he also uses like, like holding a combination and clicking. So now, if you hold any key, and then click, or right click, or middle click, or click and drag down, then you can do any number of things, you know? And we'll get the video edited and throw it up on the YouTube channel, because it was like kind of eye

• 6:48Wes Bos?

  opening that adding mouse gestures along with a keyboard, holding down a key, is just like a, like a whole nother world of adding things in there. And I've done that a little bit with my like spaces on the What is this? The MX Master Mouse?

• 7:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Wes Bos?

  When I, when I press it down, I can press a button and, and go down or press a button and go up and it will, uh, what, what will it do?

• 7:13Scott Tolinski?

  There's just so much cool stuff.

• 7:14Wes Bos?

  Changed it.

• 7:15Scott Tolinski?

  This mouse has gestures and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Expose, same. Yeah.

• 7:19Wes Bos?

  You click it.

• 7:20Scott Tolinski?

  I have expose with this one.

• 7:21Wes Bos?

  Push it down and, and mouse right and it will move it to the next space. There's a lot you can do with it and it's, it's a rabbit hole. Like you could spend your entire day trying to become productive, but I also certainly think it's well worth your time in learning keyboard shortcuts, especially the built in ones. Like my one tip is if an app doesn't have like a command palette, like, like, like a VS Code has, the help in OSX, if you click on help, there's a little search bar in there. And instead of hunting around the menus for everything, you can just type in there. There's also a Raycast extension, but this one will show you the, where they are in the menus and it will show you the shortcut for them. And that's a, a quick way to find what you want and then memorize the shortcut.

• 8:06Scott Tolinski?

  You know what I have on my MX Master? I have like, uh, undo and redo tied to this middle scroll bar, this horizontal scroll bar or scroll bar.

• 8:15Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:16Scott Tolinski?

  So I can just swipe back to undo, swipe forward to redo.

• 8:19Wes Bos?

  I can't. I fidget with it so much that I can't do that. I use, I use it for horizontal scrolling because I use TweetDeck on horizontal scrolling quite a bit.

• 8:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Wes Bos?

  But I just fidget with it all day long. So I can't, I had it in Photoshop up to undo or redo, and I kept accidentally undoing stuff.

• 8:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Scott Tolinski?

  I love that.

• 8:41Wes Bos?

  All right. Next question from Anon says, "In episode 956, and you, an alternative to Git Lens was called AirLens and was mentioned, but I can't find anything about it. Can you share more on this?" So that was not AirLens, that was ErrorLens. And this is a VS Code extension that I absolutely love. So I've, on the video, I've got it up right now. This is what it does is when you have like a, any error, so most likely a TypeScript error, a linting error, markdown error, you know, anything that is happening in your code, it will usually add like a little squiggle underneath your thing. So what I do is I use ErrorLens to inline those right.

• 9:24Wes Bos?

  Beside the actual code. So you can see here I've got some cannot re-declare block scope variables, cannot find name cool. And I've installed that, but then I went into my settings and I added a couple changes. First of all, I made the font size much smaller so that it's not so obnoxious. So it's like, it's, it's pretty small when you're, you're looking at it right now. I guess I'm, I'm zoomed in a bit right now, but I, I found that to be a good size. And then I also have it set up for error, warning and hint, as well as I have customized the colors for each of those. So the background and the foreground. So it's,

• 10:09Wes Bos?

  it's not as obnoxious as well. I found it was by default, it was way too jarring, like the whole line would turn red, or the whole line would turn yellow. And it was just like way too obnoxious. So I really toned it down there. And then I finally also, I said error lens dot exclude. And then just common things that I don't care about because I know that they will be fixed either by me, because there's already a squiggle, or they'll be fixed when I hit save. My yes lint or my prettier, whatever will kick in and fix those. So like, I ignore anything. It's like, this variable is never used or never read, because I already have a squiggle and that happens all the time. I create a variable. And then

• 10:52Wes Bos?

  it's like, hey, you never use that variable. It's like, I'm getting to it. It's the next line, you know, or unknown word. This is just like spell check. I ignore all spell check inline. And then the, the new line, yes, lint error that pops up all the time when you have like white space. I don't care about that. It's gonna, as soon as I hit save, it's gonna fix itself. So, and you can see, actually, this, the setting here is deprecated in favor of error lens dot exclude by message. So the error lens itself is showing me an error I have with my error lens config. And that's, that's really helpful for the really long ones that gets cut. Kind of obnoxious, but you just hover over top of it and go ahead and read it.

• 11:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I do like that. Yeah, thank you for sharing. I do use aero lens myself. It's dope. Cool. Next question from Josh. Scott teased us with a really cool Svelte 5 service worker when discussing his syntax site rewrite. Could, could he please do a tutorial on this specifically? We'd love to see the superpowers on our sites. It looked pretty cool. The community could benefit from such information. So the service worker thing that I did was basically storing, like intercepting queries, essentially the remote functions. It would intercept them and do a stale wall revalidate using indexed DB.

• 12:21Scott Tolinski?

  And it was, it's actually really nice. What it does is then like initially will just load from your indexed DB, basically giving you that lightning fast initial data load from, from your local data. The only problem is what I haven't done with this service worker yet is I haven't put in any code to do like invalidation on mutation, which when you're updating data and then you browse to the data and it's the stale data. So it is, it is raw. I'll post a link in this video to the gist. If anybody would like to work on this or elaborate on this

• 13:02Scott Tolinski?

  or modify this, go right ahead. I think it's a pretty cool, neat little thing, but nothing that I've had time to like really solidify yet. Just, uh, man, I got a lot of work to do.

• 13:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Um, I'm questioning about this though, like, so this is basically every time you have a request to like an API to grab like the latest podcasts or something like that, it will intercept it, check if you've already done that query. And if the data is stored locally and if so, it will just return that from the cache instead of actually hitting the server. That's what it does, right?

• 13:34Scott Tolinski?

  That's correct.

• 13:35Wes Bos?

  How is this different than just putting like a cache header on the request that's returned from the server? So that the client itself will just, oh, I already made that request. I could just reuse the, the response there.

• 13:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, because I don't believe you can do cache headers on the remote functions yet.

• 13:57Wes Bos?

  Oh, from SvelteKit?

• 14:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 14:00Wes Bos?

  Oh, okay.

• 14:01Scott Tolinski?

  I don't believe so. I think you can have cache headers on page routes and stuff to cache the pages. But yeah, individual function and that might be different by now. So Svelte folks, comment below if that is incorrect. But yeah, that's why this is doing that.

• 14:18Wes Bos?

  Plus, like you just said, if you want to have custom logic about invalidating queries, a header is not really going to help you there. Because if you sat like an hour on something and you can't clear your cache, you don't have DevTools open, then it's going to be cached for an hour in the browser. Whereas with this, you can at least put some logic inside of there to explicitly invalidate it. Or like when something is mutated, you can just go into the cache and blow it out manually.

• 14:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yep.

• 14:52Wes Bos?

  Blay says, "Just listened to the Remix episode and got me thinking. With the rapid rise of AI-assisted coding, does the choice of frameworks still really matter? If generative AI can already produce 80% to 90% of reliable code and developers can use their experience to fix the remaining 10% to 20%, how should we think about selecting a tech stack for a new web or mobile app? Should we stick with what we know now, like the tried and true React ecosystem? Explore frameworks that align more closely with web standards and performance optimization like Remix or Svelte? Or should we focus shift entirely to using well-supported, well-documented tools

• 15:33Wes Bos?

  that generative AI can most effectively interact and produce production quality? Yeah, this is actually something that I was talking to some folks at Google that work at Chrome just a couple of days ago, because I was like... Man, we got like customizable select. We've got CSS anchor. We've got scroll snap. We've got scroll driven animations. And I know it's early, but like a lot of people are not using those things. There's just NPM stall, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And, and it works right off the bat. And I was, I was kind of thinking like, like, why aren't, why aren't people, why aren't people using these things?

• 16:13Wes Bos?

  Is it because it's easier just to boop, boop, boop NPM framework that it already knows? So the question here was, does choice of framework really matter? I think it matters a lot that the, the AI understands how to, how to produce your framework. But I don't think that that's going to stop the progression of this stuff. Because we're, we're going to hit a point where like, we're already seeing it with, with a lot of the React ecosystem, where it will just, it knows to install Tailwind 3 and a whole bunch of UI frameworks. And it just adds a whole bunch of stuff. And there's better stuff out there. There's new tech out there and you're, I think you're going to start to see, especially like, let's talk about performance

• 16:56Wes Bos?

  and accessibility and all those things where your website is going to start to get slow and laggy. And it's, you're going to have perf problems if you're just installing all of this crap, when there are significantly better options out there. Choice of framework, it does matter, but I don't think that that's going to stop the fact that everything is just on the React ecosystem right now. I think that we will continue to see web standards frameworks that use browser primitives a lot more and use like web fetch, web request, web response a lot more so that you can pick up these new things.

• 17:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I think it really matters. Ultimately, at the end of the day, some people would just say, as long as the code works, whatever. But man. Some of the code is so non-performant, it's so dogged. It's duplicating stuff left and right.

• 17:51Wes Bos?

  It's hard to maintain up the wazoo.

• 17:53Scott Tolinski?

  It's hard to maintain. You edit one thing and your CSS doesn't cascade because everything is set with individual micro-styles on every single individual elements. And now you're editing a ton of billion things everywhere. It is tough. What I'm hopeful for is that as AI matures, the systems in which the code is generated will start to be able to utilize more modern techniques, more performant techniques, rather than just what was the most code on GitHub that day, uh, which was questionable, right? It is so funny because every time I do wonder about why the CSS that AI writes, even the tailwind that AI writes is bad.

• 18:38Scott Tolinski?

  But the CSS that it writes is bad. And I always wonder, like, is it really just that there's so many people that are bad at CSS? And then I go onto any open source project that is like for my server, like you, not like, not like Plex, but I have like the My Audio Bookshelf or Audio Bookshelf. I have CopyParty. I have all these apps that I run personally. And then you go into the CSS of those big open source projects and they're setting background color on everything. They have font size on every single thing and you're just like, oh, there's no system here. And no wonder the AI can't write it just because so much of that CSS is bad. It makes me upset.

• 19:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's, you see that a lot with especially projects where like a backend Python dev has built it. And you need a UI, you know, and you reach for some, and they've also been around for 10 years, you know?

• 19:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. HTML is bad. CSS is bad.

• 19:37Wes Bos?

  Yeah. So I think. Yeah, it's, I hope and pray that everything will get better, especially as like even these UI frameworks start to pick up a lot of the new built-in primitives, you know, like these UI frameworks are not going to go away, but they will start to use PopOver and Anchor, and that's going to reduce a lot of the code that is necessary. It's going to be way more declarative. We'll use the new Invoker's API. That's probably going to be a big one as well. And I think that that stuff is significantly simpler. And AI likes nice, clean, declarative, simple UIs.

• 20:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Sick. All right. Next question from Pointy. For a greenfield SaaS today, would you pick a batteries included framework like Laravel or Rails or go lean with a minimal stack? What specific criteria make that choice future-proof? Yeah, I think most people would probably want to pick something that is mature, widely supported, popular, stuff that people like and use. So many times when you're, you're building these stacks out, you're like, who do I know that's a good developer who is going to work on this and what do they know and what are they skilled at?

• 20:56Scott Tolinski?

  And let's build that stack around what we're most comfortable in. I mean, something like Rails has certainly like worked for a lot of people. React in general on any kind of node ecosystem, you're going to have a wide variety of developers who can work in those systems, you know, database, technology and stuff like that. It really depends what the SaaS today is. So just to say, for a greenfield SaaS, you can't really give a generic answer to that because if you were building Sentry, right? Sentry has very different data needs than, let's say, an email app. Or FreshBooks or a financial tracking app. All of these have very different needs in

• 21:42Scott Tolinski?

  what type of data they're storing and how they're storing it and where they're accessing it. If you're asking me personally, I'm using SvelteKit and Drizzle and better off because that's the stack that I like and it's uh but like that's not a tried and true stack of it's not like the most mature stack out there, but I like it. So that's why I would pick it. I'm effective with it. Um, so it really depends. It depends on what you're building.

• 22:12Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I'm picking something that is all in like a meta framework. Um, I'm picking nothing too crazy, too new. Um, I don't want to spend my days chasing updates and and changing things around, but it's certainly hundred percent TypeScript stack. So that all the types flow through. You're not fussing with what's server rendered, what's client render. You're not, you're not jumping through that hoop at any point. We'll keep going with the next question because it's somewhat of a similar question. Kurt Motis says, hello, Weston Scott. He included a really nice message that I'm not going to read, but thank you, Kurt. I'm a PHP Laravel based dev uh for the last seven months and I've been diving deep into NextJS rewrite of our main site,

• 22:56Wes Bos?

  which is multi-tenant, multi-language, sort of headless, coming from a jQuery background previously with no prior React experience. Now I'm so fascinated with SvelteKit and thinking about finally getting my band's website off of localhost.

• 23:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 23:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah, localhost is the new garage, you know, you just got to get it out of localhost. I've built a prototype with a headless NextJS site using WordPress roots as a CMS. It works okay. I can create pages, update content and pull into Next via the WordPress API, but I'm second guessing myself. I feel stuck in the classic dev dilemma. Is NextJS overkill for a band website? Would something like Payload or another headless CMS be smarter? Or is a repo as a CMS, which is Markdown MDX files and Git actually the simplest and best fit? And how much would you lean on platforms like Vercel for something like this? So the question is, if you're building a band website today with some media, show dates, tour, adventure updates,

• 23:59Wes Bos?

  what would you pick as your stack and how would you balance a fun playground for me as a dev versus simple and sustainable to maintain? Yes. So as somebody who has two very large Markdown based websites, uh, my own personal blog, which has something like I don't know, 1,200 markdown files in the Syntax website, which has, what? Probably close to 1,000 markdown files. Markdown as

• 24:27Scott Tolinski?

  Content.

• 24:27Wes Bos?

  A CMS sucks. Don't do it. We only do it, I only do it for myself because I want people to be able to edit and like, I want to be able to write in Markdown and I want to be able to edit it. And I want other people to send pull requests and for the same reason, we do that on Syntax. But as for somebody who's trying to create content and put it out there and have a nice UI. It sucks because it's like you gotta rebuild the website and you have all of these like weird plugins that you need to install and like, it's, it's awful. So first of all, don't do that.

• 25:00Scott Tolinski?

  You gotta manage it through Git. Yeah.

• 25:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah. No fun. Honestly, the best move is like some sort of framework that pulls from an existing CMS that is very good. And if you want to update your website, you simply log into the CMS. You type what you want, you publish what you want. And, and then, then it shows up on your website when you've hit publish. And quite honestly, picking WordPress for that is probably the move. Payload is probably a really good solution as well. Keystone is in that area as well. Strappy also in that. Ghost CMS seems to be still cranking pretty hard.

• 25:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, Ghost is pretty dope.

• 25:42Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know that I would probably move it off of WordPress because you just need a nice UI to edit your content and to be able to consume that via a JSON API. And I think you have that. I don't, I don't know that you have any problems that would be solved by moving to another, another CMS. And then in terms of like the actual framework. Is NextJS overkill for a banned site? I don't think so. No, if you, you need server rendering, you need all of that stuff. If I were to build a banned website, I would certainly go and reach for a meta framework.

• 26:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Wes Bos?

  Like 10secstart, NextJS, Remix, Spellkit, you know, Nuxed, something like that.

• 26:22Scott Tolinski?

  If I reach for a demo, I'm picking up Spellkit. You know, like

• 26:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Scott Tolinski?

  It, the meta frameworks, I'm a Next non-fan. Uh, so I'm not going to say Next, but like me personally. They feel so lightweight nowadays to just, you know, what if this felt conversion is SV? Create the thing. You got the thing. You have all your stuff there. And then if you want to add, yeah, I don't know. You get SSR out of the box. You get routing.

• 26:51Wes Bos?

  To configure a router.

• 26:53Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, it's, I hardly build anything without it. Yeah.

• 26:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I, I certainly think you should do that. You get it all. You get all the, the, the server functions ready. You know, like if you decide, oh, I do actually want to do something that's outside of WordPress. Yeah, you just pop a server function in there and you're good to go.

• 27:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Wes Bos?

  So, yeah, I think, I think you're in good, a good spot. The last advice I'll give you is err on the side of be easy to update your content.

• 27:21Scott Tolinski?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:22Wes Bos?

  Because when it is hard to put content out there, you will not actually do it. And like I have this with, with my blog post, sometimes I want to just post something very quickly. You know, and then I just posted to Twitter because it's like, ah, I don't feel like figuring, making a folder and getting an image for it.

• 27:40Scott Tolinski?

  A new file.

• 27:41Wes Bos?

  Writing it down.

• 27:42Scott Tolinski?

  Writing the front matter.

• 27:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and I have a couple of scripts that make that a lot easier. But it still is a bit of a hurdle. And I often think, maybe I should, should use this CMS. Or maybe I need like Tina, you know, Tina CMS is a, a headless CMS that gives you like a visual editor, but you can back it with Markdown or something else.

• 28:06Scott Tolinski?

  And Tina still exists. Okay.

• 28:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. They're, they're, I, where did I see them last? I saw them. I met them at a conference for a while ago. They got a bunch of, bunch of clients that absolutely love it. They got Tina Cloud now. Oh, you know, they're, they've done it when they've got the cloud product.

• 28:24Scott Tolinski?

  They got the cloud product. Yeah.

• 28:28Scott Tolinski?

  All right. Next question from Matt. Should I move to another country for less money, but potentially opportunity? I've been contracting for a company for about seven years, building custom software for their business. I built this solely at first, but over the years, the company has expanded into the last couple of years. Another developer has joined us. We essentially have a full-time job with monthly salary for this company. This has all been remote work so far, and we reside in a different country than the company operates. Now, an opportunity has become available where the company wants to improve the feedback loop in the dev process and potentially give one of us a chance to be closer and more involved with the business.

• 29:12Scott Tolinski?

  This will include some time working from the office and meeting staff who directly use the software we're building. The company has offered a pay raise to cover the cost of the initial move, which is great, but there is quite a difference in the living costs between countries where the business is located and where I'm currently living. And I have worked out that over bills, rent and tax, et cetera, I would be left with less than what I take home from contracting right now while living in a more expensive country, which makes me hesitant. I know there are positives and negatives to both places. I have a family, which would likely benefit from the move in the long run too, but personally, I'm struggling to weigh the options. Hmm.

• 29:56Scott Tolinski?

  Ooh, that's a heavy question. Um, you know, ah, this is tough for me because moving to another country is not moving to another state. You know, there's, there's, there's a lot there. And it depends, like the, there's the distance, like is this opportunity something that they could just, you know, give you the job for six months and then let you go? Like, are there any assurances that they're going to keep you on here? And if you're packing up your entire family to move to another country, what kind of assurance do you have that that job will still be there in a year? Because if they drop you, then what do you got to move back?

• 30:41Scott Tolinski?

  I mean, you could do that, but man, that's, that's a hard thing to do, especially if you're moving a family. That means you got kids, kids are in school, moving the kids to a new community, new friends. It it depends and all on that for less money. If it were me, I would probably not move. But without knowing more details, I don't think I can give another answer to this. I actually, funny enough, Figma, when they offered me the job, I had to move to San Francisco and I did not have a family at that point, but I did have two dogs. And my wife and I were looking at the salary

• 31:22Scott Tolinski?

  that was offered verse if we were to move someplace like Denver. And it was like looking at just the cost of living plus the salary they were giving. It was gonna be a pretty substantial life downgrade for us. And and we weren't rolling in cash. I mean, I was making like, uh, like $48,000 a year at an agency at this point. So like, it was going to be a tough, tough move. And that was just to another state. So I turned it down. And this to me, like, without those assurances, without that money, like, if you could get some assurances or get more money or something, I don't

• 32:07Scott Tolinski?

  know. What do you think, Wes?

• 32:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I think you let them know about your apprehensions. I've been in similar situations like this as well. You just say like, hey, this is what I'm thinking. Like, let them know. There are some upsides, you know, like, if you're doing this for less money, but you said there's a potential upside for your family, that's exciting. I know plenty of people that have made big jumps like this. And it's just been been well worth it for them. You know, I know plenty of people who did the whole, I don't know, I'm gonna go try live in San Francisco for for a year and a half. And then it pans out, you know, they get it, they get a job somewhere else, you know, they they're able to laterally move because it's a much better job market, you know, like, there's a huge upside to that as well. You maybe you meet some, some really good friends. Obviously, you're married,

• 32:51Wes Bos?

  so you're not going to meet another partner. Benefits to your family, that's huge. Like, like, what good is? I know it's less money, but if you're saying that it's going to be better for your family in the long run, like, is that going to be worth it? But I would, I would simply just straight up ask for more money and see what they say. You know, there's, I, there's not a huge downside to that. They could say no, and you still, you're back where you started. You have the decision to do it for the same amount of money or, or stay, stay where you are. But then like, there, there's the other flip side of me is just like, yeah, I can, I don't really wanna move for that. Like I, I love being able to just live where I want to live and do what I want to do.

• 33:31Scott Tolinski?

  You can't be tamed, Wes.

• 33:33Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I'm a stallion. That's, that's why I always tell everyone, I'm a stallion. I, I can't be tamed. So part of me is like, ah, it, it depends where it was, you know? Like I would probably move, we always watch that show, House Hunters, you know? And these people are like, oh, they're moving to Switzerland.

• 33:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 33:52Wes Bos?

  For the family, like, family from south of Texas is moving to Switzerland. You know, like, it's just the most crazy change. And they're like, looking at like, like a little European, like two bedroom. And they're like, oh, we're used to our like 7,000 square foot Texas mansion.

• 34:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Wes Bos?

  Yeah. But that's, that could be exciting. Like that's, that is really exciting for your kids to visit different countries and, and potentially make relationships there. So I would say, go for it. You can always come back. It's obviously a lot.

• 34:26Scott Tolinski?

  You're right.

• 34:27Wes Bos?

  It's pretty disruptive. But what the hell? You know, you don't want to be on your deathbed being like, ah, I'm glad I played it safe my whole life.

• 34:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what? That, that's not bad advice. And, and I have a buddy who, uh, moved to Japan with a kid. And then he just, same buddy moved to Amsterdam, same kid. So, uh,

• 34:47Wes Bos?

  Same kid?

• 34:48Scott Tolinski?

  Same kid.

• 34:49Wes Bos?

  Wow, he kept it.

• 34:51Scott Tolinski?

  So he's, uh, yeah. So, uh, that's two country moves with a, a child and, uh, yeah.

• 34:58Scott Tolinski?

  That's doable.

• 34:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah, let's talk about Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax. You know, you've got a website and you're probably writing some awful AI-generated garbage code. You need to know what the hell is going on with my application, right? You got errors, you got performance problems, you know, you got performance problems on the client, you know, like large contentful paint. You got database queries that don't have indexes that are are taking super slow. Don't that didn't happen to us before. You'd be able to figure out what the hell are people doing? You get session replay. This person clicked this button, then this this button, and then they drag an item over here. It's very helpful to figure out what the hell went wrong when you have a session replay.

• 35:44Wes Bos?

  You got code coverage, you got AI assist, you got Git integration. You got it all with Sentry. Oh, logs too. Don't just dump your logs into some TXT file somewhere. Integrate them with your traces so that when you have an error, you can see the logs that happen that are associated with that specific error. It's the best. I write some terrible software and Sentry helps me fix it. Go to sentry.io forward slash syntax. It's gonna get you two months for free. Use a coupon code TASTYTREAT.

• 36:16Scott Tolinski?

  Sick. Cool. Let's get into it. Next question.

• 36:21Wes Bos?

  Question from Steven Higgrave. I'm a newer developer and I was just starting to have better intuition for human readable Git breakpoints, so making Git commits at a specific point, then wham, Claude code with Sonnet 4.5 in my editor. By the way, that's the old outdated one. They released 4.7 yesterday. And what have would have been logical breakpoints are now getting hit 10 to 50 times every five minutes. So he's saying that what is is getting 10 to 50 commits every five minutes from Claude code? That's that seems like a lot.

• 36:57Scott Tolinski?

  That seems like a lot.

• 36:59Wes Bos?

  What do I do to keep my commits digestible upon reflection and useful for debugging without stopping to commit every 10 seconds? Holy hell, Steven, what that what are you building?

• 37:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Wes Bos?

  Is there a flow to let Claude initiate appropriate commits on its own as it goes? What are the pros and cons in in turning that over to Claude as well? Yeah, that's kind of interesting. Like, do you let the AI, A, write the commit message? And B, actually make the commits programmatically as you go along? I don't know that I know the answer to this because what I've been doing recently is just like, I'll have AI generate a commit message. But then if it contains like, kind of like, two things that were done, I find that kind of, kind of muddy. Because if it's like two totally separate features, they should really be separate commits, you know?

• 37:53Wes Bos?

  And I've not found a decent way yet to have it like, commit feature by feature or or take all of the files that have been changed, select the ones that are associated with that feature and then commit it. So I've kind of been doing like human in the loop right now. I certainly don't have 10 to 50 every five minutes. That seems ridiculous. I feel like I have a similar amount of commits, maybe slightly elevated if I'm doing a little bit more code generation. But I just, every time I feel like I've hit a spot, I just stop. You still have to know what the hell is going on with your code. So at the very least, you should understand what the commit message should be for it, you know?

• 38:37Scott Tolinski?

  I do not turn my commit messages to AI, even though they are very helpful to have those AI commit messages. But like, even if I am vibe coding something or having AI write a large portion of the code, I'm reading that. I'm reading it. I'm writing my own commit message. And I'm gonna go back and forth with it. You know, I think you might be hitting them slopes a little too hard on this one. I think you're, you're, I think you gotta be really, maybe a little bit more like human in the loop here. Because it feels like that is an intense, like, are you running? How many agents at once to do this, like to generate that much code?

• 39:21Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you got bigger problems, Stephen.

• 39:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Wes Bos?

  Than your commit messages.

• 39:27Scott Tolinski?

  Commit frequently, yes. Do it by hand, yes. Otherwise, who knows? What are you even putting up? Like, what is that even out there, that code? What is it like? Yeah, I still personally, I'm always testing. I'm using, you know, Chrome Dev Tools, MCP to use the thing and have it use the thing. And if I'm vibe coding something truly, I'm certainly not turning over every last thing to the AI. Because garbage out, absolutely, yeah.

• 39:55Wes Bos?

  I find that, especially when you have too many files, the commit messages get a little bit muddy. And I'm starting to notice it. You know, like when you can notice AI art? You can notice like AI-generated remeed. I'm starting to notice AI commit messages as well. It just gives me a little less confidence in some of the stuff. I also have that with like Mac apps, you know, like that whole, like, oh, this is a cool little Mac app that you should download? That whole area has been just destroyed by like vibe-coded stuff. And now I'm so hesitant to install something.

• 40:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Wes Bos?

  Because it's just like, you have no idea if this person just boop, boop, boop into the box and it spit out a Mac app at the other end, which is, I feel very hesitant. I, running that stuff on my computer versus just in a sandbox web browser.

• 40:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I feel you. All right, next question from Boris Beans. I'm 19, have been a React dev, so I must be autistic, according to Wes. Wes, what have you done for a year?

• 41:03Wes Bos?

  The episode with Courtney. People love that. The Spotify comments on that were hilarious.

• 41:09Scott Tolinski?

  Oh my. For a year and a half, I've been working at a startup for over a year. Okay, so 19, working on React for a year and a half, been working on a startup for over a year. With AI, it's hard not to think twice about the career I'm pursuing with all of the noise about programmers becoming obsolete. What do you guys think that the future for young guns like me will be in this industry? Thank you for your time. Love from New Zealand. Yes, me personally.

• 41:38Scott Tolinski?

  You can't predict the future. This stuff gets better all the time. Last year at this time, I wasn't vibe coding anything. Now, I'm still not vibe coding anything in production, but I'm vibe coding personal software tools all the time. And the code sucks, but they largely work. So that's gonna get better. It's gonna get better. But at the same time, I'm building all kinds of stuff. I'm building cool stuff and I'm able to make it work. Now, how far away is, you know, just say what you want and the thing builds and works and is perfect with no bugs and is performant and has no security issues and no flaws whatsoever? I don't know. But to me personally, I just like making stuff.

• 42:24Scott Tolinski?

  If you like making stuff, then to me, I don't think this is a bad career to pursue. I don't think it's bad to get into it. But a lot of it is caring about the stuff that you're building and liking making stuff and pushing things that way and pushing yourself. But when I first started doing web development, you did your layouts in a table and you didn't even do floats. You just did everything in a table.

• 42:51Wes Bos?

  Yeah, if there's one industry where this changes constantly.

• 42:54Scott Tolinski?

  24/7. So like, it's not just that you're not gonna wake up one night and be like, oh, I'm out of a job. You're gonna have an opportunity to evolve with this profession and whatever that may look like at some point in the future. Who knows?

• 43:10Wes Bos?

  We get this question every week in our potluck and it's one of three. I am young and I'm worried about if this is a good profession. I am middle aged and worry about long term of my career because of AI. Or I am old and I am worried that I can't keep up with it because of AI.

• 43:28Wes Bos?

  AI is going to get rid of the button clickers. AI is going to get rid of the people who don't want to put in the work. But we will forever in this world need people who are smart and can solve problems. And given that you are 19 years old, you are at the very beginning of your career. And if you can shape your career in a way where you will be the smart person, well, you will be the problem solver, you will be able to figure things out. You will be always, always in demand. What you are solving and how you do that will constantly be changing. But being smart and solving those problems will never change.

• 44:10Wes Bos?

  And I had a little rant the other day on Twitter where I was just talking about how like, everything sucks, you know, like we had

• 44:16Scott Tolinski?

  Sucks.

• 44:16Wes Bos?

  major downtimes from AWS and CloudFlare within a week. Twitter DMs weren't working. The Google launched this anti-gravity editor and it didn't work. Still, as a week later, it still doesn't work. And just like, everything seems like it's kind of, and like, there's this whole inshtification of the internet that is popping up. And we're starting to see that everybody replied to that was like, it's, oh, it's vibe coding. You know?

• 44:43Scott Tolinski?

  It's not vibe coding, yeah.

• 44:44Wes Bos?

  But I don't know that that's, it's AI or I don't know that it's vibe coding. I know that it is people just trying to move too fast because a lot is changing right now. And I know that it is that people don't give as much of it as they used to.

• 45:00Scott Tolinski?

  And, and they're, they're spread too thin because they've been laid off and the teams are smaller.

• 45:06Wes Bos?

  Yep.

• 45:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 45:07Wes Bos?

  And like a lot, a lot of stuff is, is just breaking and wearing away. And we're starting to see the cracks form. And who's going to be there to fix that? It's going to be the people that are actually smart. The people that actually know how to fix these things. The people that are, have not just like, sort of checked out and boop, boop, boop into the box. So if I have any advice for you is just like, try to live an entire career of just constant learning and constant. And that doesn't just have to be coding, but it's just like,

• 45:39Scott Tolinski?

  Evolve.

• 45:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, evolve. In my life, I'm, I'm constantly learning everything new, you know? And just getting into electronics and to, to Christmas lights and to, to baking and to like, you know, just like all of the different areas to just constantly be learning.

• 45:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. That is so right. Just constantly be learning because it is the careers, no matter what, even if it wasn't for AI, the role would look completely different 10 years from now than it does right now, regardless. So, yeah.

• 46:05Wes Bos?

  And honestly, what else are you gonna do? Every other industry right now is having the same scariness. And whether or not that's it's actually going to pan out, you know, like AI is pretty good at summarizing Reddit threads and cranking out some React components right now. But like, will it actually replace electricians? You know, are these robots that are gonna fold our clothes actually gonna get better? I don't know about that. It'd be sweet if they did, but a lot of the things that you're hearing from people, especially like on Twitter about how amazing everything is, these people are getting paid off. I have these people in my inbox every

• 46:45Wes Bos?

  single day, offering me like thousands of dollars to just post nice things about their, their AI thing. It's because there's a lot of money on the line right now. So don't believe everything you see.

• 46:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, there's gonna be winners and losers. And right now, there's a lot of fighting in the middle. And right.

• 47:04Wes Bos?

  Canada Trav says, best practices to backup. After the Halloween episode, I realized I don't have the best backup system. I have big files such as music and videos of screen recordings that take up a lot of space. Hey, us too. Since you guys deal a lot with large files, I hope you could help. I was wondering what tools, workflows and practices and other stuff you suggest for a good system. In particular, I had questions about how to handle setting up automatic backups in the following situation. So before I answer this, we'll answer them quickly, but we are going to do an entire show on local servers and NAS, probably the week after this, something like that. Just watch out for it. It's coming out. So

• 47:48Wes Bos?

  personal, for technical minded developers backing up code along with larger files for solo and hobby projects. So for me, the way that all of this works is that

• 48:01Wes Bos?

  You should assume at any point in time that your computer and/or the place where you have your backups will go away.

• 48:10Scott Tolinski?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:10Wes Bos?

  And you should be able to recover for that. So what that means is that you should have automatic backups, both locally, so it's nice and quick to restore, but also offsite. So for me, I use Time Machine to back up my entire computer just constantly. And then I also have my computer running BackBlaze where it just constantly mirrors to the cloud. So that if, worst case, if my laptop and my backup hard drives were to go away, then I would still be able to, it would be a pain in the butt, but I still would be able to recover from that.

• 48:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no, I agree. For me, I think backing up things is something that needs to happen without you thinking about it.

• 48:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Scott Tolinski?

  Because if your process really gets too bogged down or manual or anything, you know, I always really liked the Time Machine Apple backups, but then it would like break and then I would stop using it and then like, because it doesn't play nice.

• 49:11Wes Bos?

  Always, yeah.

• 49:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So some kind of automated process is really good. I used to use Carbon Copy Cloner to do an automated full clone of my drive, which is a nice little app to do that with. But yes, making the process something that is automated. I actually don't have a good process for this either. So I'm listening right now.

• 49:33Wes Bos?

  Man, yeah. So I have Time Machine and I've tried the Time Machine like on a like a local server backup and it always breaks.

• 49:41Scott Tolinski?

  Always breaks.

• 49:41Wes Bos?

  So now I simply just have a hard drive on my desk that I plug in. And even then I forget to plug it in as often as I want. So that's why I love BackBlaze, because it's just always running on my computer. It's very hard to quit it. You can only pause it for like 30 minutes or a couple hours while we're recording. And then it will just resume itself and it saved my bacon several times. So that's personal. And then the second one here was for family, for not as technical people that want to back up the photos. They have lots of photos, documents, other important things that should be backing up. How can I implement something to give them a bit of protection and redundancy? Since if they get locked out of iCloud or take a photo

• 50:21Wes Bos?

  that is not on the cloud, it could be lost forever. This is also really tricky because like, as much as you like preach this stuff to family, if they're not technical, they don't care. Like, you see it all the time on Facebook. Lost my phone. Send me your numbers. Like, oh, you just, or like, oh, my goodness, I lost my phone at the grocery store. It has all of my family memories on it. Like, oh, you didn't think like, this one little rectangle with everything you've ever held dear might get

• 50:52Scott Tolinski?

  Lost or broken.

• 50:54Wes Bos?

  misplaced it at some point?

• 50:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 50:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah. But that's why, like, as much as I hate, I hate iCloud so much because it's like a mob, you know, they, every, every five seconds, oh, you're out of space. It's critical to back up. That's the only thing that people are gonna do. But I have, for my family, I have a, something running on my Synology. It's the Synology Photos app.

• 51:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Do you like it?

• 51:19Wes Bos?

  And then it, yeah, it's, it's great. It just like, I don't use it to like, search and view. I use Google Photos for that. But I know that, like, Google Photos could rug pull, or, or I could get locked out at some point for, for reasons. So it's nice knowing that we have like, a secondary backup of all of our photos locally on, on a drive.

• 51:40Scott Tolinski?

  You know what I hate about the Synology Photos app? And I don't know if this is a me issue, is that it doesn't just back up. You have to like, run the backup. You have to say, run the backup in the background. And I don't, I've like, never gotten it. So then, like, I'll, I'll go to Synology Photos, and it's like, way out of date from what I have in my Google Photos. Because that's why I use, I use Google Photos. Just because we used to be on Android. So it's like, just locked in, into Google Photos. But still, it's like, You can just, if Google Photos can figure it out, you can figure it out Synology Photos. Don't make me enter some focused backup mode.

• 52:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I think, I think it has something to do with the fact that you don't open it often enough. And then if you don't open it for a couple of weeks, like I, my Google Photos does this every now and then. Where I open it to like search for a photo, I was like, oh shit, it hasn't backed up for like three weeks. Uh, it's just because I haven't opened it. So yeah, it, there does need to be some sort of better, better way to do that. I should check. I have it all on my kids iPads as well because they've got like a two megabyte iPad. That's the like default one from Apple. And then they take one video and then they, they're always mad that their iPad is out of space. And all the apps have that stupid little download icon behind them because it like offloads the app.

• 53:05Scott Tolinski?

  I hate that feature.

• 53:05Wes Bos?

  But you can't, man, they have nothing to manage, but they have like nine gigs of like Roblox stored somewhere and like, but you can't delete it. There's no tools to delete it. It's, it drives me nuts. I hate Apple and their storage so much.

• 53:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it sucks and it's always sucked. I remember like.

• 53:23Wes Bos?

  It has. They, they, they just want you to use the cloud.

• 53:27Scott Tolinski?

  Just pay for it. Yeah, just pay.

• 53:29Wes Bos?

  Business, not necessarily for devs, but suggestions for clients, friends, or people running smallish operations. That is not code. Uh, what are solutions? So I run a Synology NAS. And then that NAS backs up to BackBlaze B2. So what I'll do is I'll take like a video project, like yesterday we recorded like three hours worth of video, right? So that's, I don't know, probably sixty, seventy gigs. And then I'll just drag that over to my NAS and I'll, I'll hold down the, what is it? The command key? And what that does is it just, once it's done. Transferring to the NAS.

• 54:04Scott Tolinski?

  It deletes it off your local.

• 54:06Wes Bos?

  It'll delete it off your computer and then that will automatically back itself up to BackBlaze B2. So that I know, okay, all right, I got two copies of this. You know, I got the local version. I've got the remote version.

• 54:16Scott Tolinski?

  Does it automatically remove things if you remove them from your NAS? Cause I just, I would, I have so much video and I end up deleting the project file. I like maxed out my 16 terabyte NAS the other day.

• 54:27Wes Bos?

  That's a good question. I've not deleted anything off of mine yet, but the, it's like any, any blob storage where like, if you change the file, it, it keeps a copy of the old one and the new one. So I would assume if you delete it, it doesn't because that's the whole point of having a backup. So you probably have to explicitly go in there and, and delete that file from your BackBlaze. Or, or it will delete it. And if you don't use it for like a year or whatever, I should actually look into that. But I, I have not, I have a 16 terabyte NAS and I think I have, like, not all of that is backed up. Like mirrored, like not my TV shows, but all of my like video and family photos.

• 55:08Scott Tolinski?

  What do you do for your pirated media, Wes?

• 55:10Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 55:14Wes Bos?

  And then sensitive files, things like password manager, recovery codes, keys, auth, intimate images or medical info. You might not have safe, but don't want it just sitting around. Oh, one other thing I should say is that like Dropbox is still, I still pay for Dropbox. Dropbox is still good, especially their.

• 55:30Scott Tolinski?

  Google Drive. So, yeah.

• 55:32Wes Bos?

  Yeah, maybe I should switch over to that. I'm paying for Google Drive anyway. Recovery codes is, is a good one. Put them somewhere that is fire safe. Some people like to get a safety deposit box. Some people like getting a fireproof safe in their house.

• 55:48Scott Tolinski?

  I'm getting a fireproof safe for my feet pictures.

• 55:51Wes Bos?

  For your feet, feet photos? Yeah. I, I've got, I got copies of those ready though. If anyone wants them, let me know.

• 55:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yep. Gotta put it in a fireproof safe.

• 56:01Wes Bos?

  Medical, I don't know, I don't, I don't have intimate images if anyone's looking for those. And medical stuff, I, I just keep in my regular files on my computer. That drive is encrypted, so I don't, I'm not too worried about that.

• 56:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and if you have a Synology, you can actually create an encrypted folder, by the way. So any, any of the files, you can say, this is an encrypted folder. And then every time the Synology mounts, it mounts unmounted. You have to manually unmount it with your encryption key. So I do that for my, like, my, whatever, my medical documents and stuff like that. So, you know, you know what, somebody gets the drive, they got all that, that all that stuff, just your, your tax documents and any of that stuff. So just, it's really easy to make it encrypted, although it is kind of a pain in the butt. It's kind of a pain in the butt to decrypt it all the time. I like, was like, gonna write a script to automatically decrypt it and do this and that.

• 57:03Scott Tolinski?

  And I was like, well, then it's kind of like defeating the point, I guess.

• 57:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's annoying, that's, because I have mine mounted to my computer all the time. And that would be annoying to have to implement. I even, our doorbell does that, it's like local encrypted. And every time I like, open the doorbell app, it's like unencrypted. And I was like, ah, do I care that, like, the, the Amazon delivery guy is encrypted? You know, I kind of wish this was faster.

• 57:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, you know what you can also do, in macOS at least, you can create a disk image that's encrypted as well. So you can, from Disk Utility, you can create a disk image, you can set it to be a certain size and make it encrypted with a key. And then it just exists as a disk image.

• 57:44Wes Bos?

  My whole computer is encrypted, you know? If you took the hard drive out of my computer, you wouldn't be able to read the contents.

• 57:49Scott Tolinski?

  I'm just saying, if you, if you want to have like an encrypted folder to put your tax documents in, you would create a disk image, make it encrypted, drag your stuff in there. Then you can move it around as if it's a normal folder, open it anywhere that you have access to that key. I don't know if you can open it on iOS at that point, but I haven't tried.

• 58:07Wes Bos?

  All right, let's move into the next section, which is sick picks and shameless plugs. I'm going to sick pick a Lego set. So this is a little bit weird, but when I was growing up, Lego was just like... I don't know if there were sets or I didn't get sets, but Lego to me, it was just you have a bunch of bricks and you make like that like pyramid that goes to the top, right?

• 58:27Scott Tolinski?

  There were sets. Yeah, there were absolute sets.

• 58:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah. But like, like my, my son is getting super into Lego and, and he loves getting a set for like Christmas or his birthday or whatever. And so we recently got the Lego Santa, which is like, I was like, I don't know about a foot high Santa. It's 800 pieces or so. And he was reading through the book and, but I was like, let's check out what the Lego app has. Unbelievable. The Lego app. It does every step with, I guess with these new Lego steps. It's like a 3D model of every single step. It highlights the piece that you're working on. It animates the direction you need to press it down. You can pan around the, the model at any time to, to give yourself context.

• 59:14Wes Bos?

  You know, like, that's kind of frustrating when you're looking at the Lego, you have to flip it upside down. You're like, which way is it in the directions? It's so nice to have a nice, big screen and you just click next, next, next, and you can visually see where you're at. I found that so helpful. And apparently someone else on, on Instagram told me this, you can do it together. So if you get a Lego set that is like a really big one, you can have two people working on two separate parts of the Lego set at, at the same time. And then it will like, it can, they connect to each other via your account and you can like sort of track your progress and say, all right, I'm, I'm working on this part. You work on that part.

• 59:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 59:55Wes Bos?

  Check out the Lego app.

• 59:56Scott Tolinski?

  I love that little, I love a lot of that stuff in that app. And Landon has been doing the same thing where he has now like filled bins and bins of Legos, even though we had sets at some point. And so now going back to build the things that he has, it's like so much more convenient to fire up the iPad than to try to find that instruction booklet.

• 1:00:16Wes Bos?

  Find the little book. And also like, we found at, at the thrift store, we found a Toyota Supra and like a, some, some Lamborghini, like old ones. And, and like, they were all done, but it was like, it was like 10 bucks each. And I was like, we gotta get these. So we brought it home and we're like, we don't have the. The instructions, but then I realized, oh, you could just use the Lego app and just go through the instructions. Unbelievable.

• 1:00:42Scott Tolinski?

  Word. Yes.

• 1:00:43Wes Bos?

  Very cool. I know people listening to this are like, you're an idiot, Wes. This is Lego's done this forever, but I've, I am just recently getting into it.

• 1:00:51Scott Tolinski?

  Wes, just getting into Legos. Yes, I'm gonna stick pick light bulbs. Uh, LED light bulbs specifically, they can have all kinds of issues when you get into dimming, whether they're fluttering or their refresh rate or whatever is going on.

• 1:01:04Wes Bos?

  Wild world.

• 1:01:05Scott Tolinski?

  It's a wild world. These are the best bulbs that I found. They're Philips LED Ultra Definition bulbs. I just bought a new set of these and I use them with my Lutron dimmers all over the place and they're just, they're just good bulbs. So, uh, if you're looking for light bulbs that don't suck, that are LED bulbs, Philips LED Ultra Definition. Good.

• 1:01:23Wes Bos?

  When we moved into our house, we replaced all the like, um, pot lights. Cause the psycho that lived here before put cool white everywhere.

• 1:01:33Scott Tolinski?

  Cool white, yeah.

• 1:01:34Wes Bos?

  And just not, that's not, you gotta do warm white. So we replaced them all and they're expensive. It's light and the good light bulbs are very, very expensive and cheap light bulbs suck because they last about six days before you have to replace them. So I have learned that you just gotta pay the money for the Philips bulbs.

• 1:01:51Scott Tolinski?

  They last forever.

• 1:01:52Wes Bos?

  Fuss with it. Yeah.

• 1:01:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I've actually been considering moving our bathrooms to be cool white. Cause every time you go to a hotel, the bathrooms are all the cool white and they're so illuminating. You can see all the imperfections in your skin or whatever.

• 1:02:10Wes Bos?

  Our, our mirrors are cool, but like the rest of the thing is, is a warm white.

• 1:02:16Scott Tolinski?

  I like a warm light throughout the house. Courtney says it makes it feel like a cave, but I like a cave.

• 1:02:20Wes Bos?

  Oh no, you gotta, apparently like in like a hotter climates, like in the Caribbean, they like the cooler white a lot more. So, but that's, that's, that's a red flag for me. You know, you walk into someone's house and they've got like a, like a very cool white light on.

• 1:02:38Scott Tolinski?

  I like that the evening goes on, even though I don't have a lot of, uh, multi-color bulbs. I like, I like the, the light to get warmer. I like it to get darker and your eyes are just slowly adjusting and decreases over time. Yes. Big fan.

• 1:02:53Wes Bos?

  Thanks for tuning in. Catch you later. Peace.