you're listening to syntax the fine cast with the tastiest Web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Dyleski

and West Boss. Welcome to Syntax. My name is West Boss. And with me is Scott Alinsky. How you doing today, Scott?

Hey, I'm doing super good. Just hanging out here were live streaming this episode. Yeah. Two for the first time ever just to try it out. So, uh, hello to every single person that watching right now this is pretty sweet. And if you didn't catch this one, we might do this again in the future. Who knows? Well, behind the scenes look into syntax right now if you're on the YouTube, but yeah. No, I'm hanging out, man.

I'm doing good. I'm just Ah, I'm ready to kick it off. I'm really excited about this episode in particular, because as we're doing the notes, I was just like, Yeah, this is good stuff. So, you

know, I'm doing really, really well. I'm sitting in my office with the webcam on everybody's asking about the boxes of stickers that I have behind here. There's nine massive box of stickers. They're currently being processed to take out a trademark infringing sticker. That's all I'll say about that. Eso Let's let's jump into it today we're going to do the 11 habits of highly effective developers. I thought, This is kind of, Ah, fun want to do because there's obviously that book which seems super cheesy. I think it's like the 10 habits of highly successful people. It seems cheesy, but it's actually Ah, a fantastic book. I really enjoyed it.

And we thought we would sort of put together 10 habits, but we didn't have 10. We had 11. So we changed the name because we do what we want over here. So we're gonna go through them and kind of riff on on each of them. And hopefully these air some tips you can pick up us toe. How to apply them to your own career.

Yes. So we have seven. Or Hominy. Whom did we had lined, and I know you just said it, but like, 11 is it fully 11?

Officially 11? Well, yeah, because we're using an ordered list here, so numbers don't Oh, yeah. Cool.

This episode is sponsored by its sponsored by one of our long time sponsors which is fresh books, which is the easiest way to get your cloud accounting set up and seriously an awesome service. And it's also sponsored by sanity, which is a bring your own front and sort of a P I as a service, allowing you to build in structure and content and everything and allowing you to worry about the front end without having to worry about the back end is really, really cool. We're going to get into a lot more about both sanity and fresh books later on in this show. It's 38 inches, man, just 38 inches.

I opened up the soundboard. Uh, just for a little old time's sake

on this, Yeah, you got to bring it back for the big show.

Big like awesome. So let's get into it. First tip we have here and these are in no particular order that just the order in which we thought of them first, if we have here, is that you understand stakeholder in business goals, and this is something I talk about a lot when we talk about freelancing. But I also think it's important for someone who wants to be a good developer if you want to do really well in your organization, if you want to do really well for the product or the website of the application that you're building, you need to understand, like, who is this website or Web? About four at the end of the day and what are we trying to accomplish? Because all too often I see people they get caught up in their own, like Mama drama about frameworks and and all that stuff and the frameworks and everything matter. They matter for us a developer, so you can do your job quickly so you you don't get too caught up in in technical debt. That's really,

really important. But they matter because you want to make sure that your end goal and generally that's a business that's trying to make money or or an organization that's trying to get their point across. I've given the example. In the past I worked with a food bank website and the end goal is how do we get people, Ah, to to the information to use the food bank as well is how do we get people to donate goods and money towards this? So I think that's really important. Understanding, stakeholder and business goals.

Yeah, it's easy to lose track of that, too, especially when you're at the lower rungs of maybe a large company. I worked for at least one agency that had, like, 5000 employees, and it's really, you know, when you're one of those 5000 employees or even more than that, it's not always easy to to see exactly how everything that you do, like winds up to a core goal of this organization committed. This organization is huge, right? But it does every every time that you're doing anything with your your job. It is for a reason. I mean,

they hired you for a reason. So it's it's really important that you you understand what your role is in that business and that you do take ownership of that. I mean, obviously, whether or not you do have ownership over that is sort of dependent on how the company views you. Asked employees right like that could be used expendable, And maybe it's not easy to feel that way. Maybe, you know, you're purposefully not feeling that way, but yeah, at the end of the day. Everything you do is you're there because you were hired to do it. Yeah, Number two here is that you are curious and always learning. Now,

this is 01 that we talk about all the time on this show, and this is sort of student mentality and always wanting to learn and always being curious about that next thing, because that's what drives us forward. When you lose your curiosity, you lose a little bit of that spark. And when you lose that spark, you sort of lose that drive to improve. You lose Thea care that you put into your work, you sort of lose any of that stuff. That is really what makes you a good developer at the end of the day. So if you want to continue to grow, you want to continue to learn, you want to continue to be effective as a developer, you kind of always have to be curious and excited about what's new, what's in the future, what you could be doing.

Maybe. And maybe it's not something that's new, like tech wise, like maybe not something that just came out, but maybe something that's new to you, Maybe you've never done this technique or this technique. Or maybe you wanted to clean up your code or do this or a little bit of that. Ah, but at the end of the day, like you have to be curious. You have to be excited about what you're doing and grow that so that you can be good at what you do.

You think curious is the the best way to describe Ah, this approach to learning because you can certainly overdo it. And there's certainly a lot of people who are feeling overwhelmed with all of the different things that are always changing and feeling like they need to learn absolutely everything. We've talked about that in depth on this podcast already, but just always kind of just finding like I wonder if I could approach this a better way or, oh, someone has proposed a new technology or new solution to this. I'm going to take a look at that and always just kind of having an open mind toe, whatever it is and and always having, like a some sort of project that you're working on, whether it's a side project or something of your own. Ah that will keep you sharp because we will know that in your day job you could run into Ah, you run into these things where you're just working with the same tech for three or four years because that's the stack that you're on and that gap between what is relevant and what is new in what you're working on consumption is get a little bit too big.

Yeah. I mean, that's one of those things that I can't. I can't count the amount of times when I was working at agencies where my my hobby projects and like my extra time stuff was the things that were keeping me excited about what I was doing. It wasn't the WordPress site that I had made for the 100th time. It was, you know, the angular app that I was hacking together for fun.

Next one we got here is you have an open mind about new technologies, kind of a nice one toe to go into after the last one. So all too often myself included something new comes out and you say, Ah, that's dumb. Why would you do it that way? And the famous example is when react came out. Everybody said that it was done because you put your your JavaScript in line, like in the same file as your your templates and didn't even know about CSS and jazz at that time. It was like, That's dumb. You have separation of concerned and we're all really happy. Ah, about how we're building applications at the time. But react came out and just challenged all of those norms because they haven't an open mind to new technology. I think some of the best new technologies that have come out are from people who are just questioning. Maybe there is a better way. Maybe these best practices that were all spouting off is maybe not the best way to

approach it. Yeah, could you imagine if react would have launched with Js in component those part of reactors like I think there would have been actual rights. I think that's the first time you would have seen developers taking to the streets because people would have been so concerned. But, I mean, I agree. I ever a little note in here. It's like odd foods, like sometimes or maybe not even necessary, like odd foods that would you haven't tried or maybe just, like, aren't accustomed to like this is going to sound really stupid. But it wasn't until it was like like afterparty situation at like in a college party. And I was pretty Ah, I had a few and stealing and ah, somebody had laid down homis on the table and I was like,

I don't never had homis And people were like, What? So then I went to town on this home is And it was like, the greatest thing because I had never had it right and ed before it was It's not like it's an unusual food. I just never had it. And then at that point, it was game changing me. I was like, Man, I didn't really want some homis. Now from

is the best food toe have after drinking. That is totally what we after the bar. When I went to school in Toronto, we would have like Lebanese Schwarm a everywhere. And you just after the bar, you just get this massive sh warmer that just drip down your hand and the best thing ever.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You never know when the technology that you choose that looked scary to you in the past is going to be the homis of

your future. So that's deep. All right. Next. One. You want to grab the next

one? Yes, the next one is this one's could be scary for a lot of people. On that you are comfortable asking for help. That's not just like hell from your co workers, but it's helping an IRC chat room. It's helping a a slacker room helping a classroom. Maybe you're in a boot camp and you don't understand something. And maybe it seems like every single other person in the class or in the world, for that matter, understands the topic. Like I don't know, for a long time reduction. It was just It seemed like everyone had sort of understood reduction out of the box. But there was, like a large amount of people who looked at reduction were like I wait, I don't know what I don't know what any of this means,

and it was hard for people sometimes to look at that and admit that I I don't I don't get this right. Ah, when everyone else seems to understand this. So being comfortable asking questions in a any sort of setting in a group setting in a digital setting any sort of way is such a huge skill. It's like a practice civil skill you need to do. It's just immensely, Um, I don't just immensely important to growing as

a developer. Yeah, anything ableto Teoh, check your ego at the door and simply just ask for help. Hey, I don't know how any of this works, and I think that's particularly hard in our industry because of the flip side of that is often when you do ask for help, people come out of it feeling like I'm not sure. I'm glad I asked for help because you can get talked down to, and there's like, Maybe if you are, that's our next one is you help others. But there is a right way and a wrong way to approach someone that that is asking for help and maybe not necessarily even asking for help. But I don't being being able to be vulnerable and being able to let others know that you don't have all the answers. No one has all the answers, and there's there's way more people out there that are especially when you get into like a new area, maybe you are having trouble with,

like, engine axe. Your server configure is wrong. Like that's a perfect time to reach out to someone who does this stuff day in and day out. Or somebody is like we caught a an email after the domain name episode. We got a domain name from someone who I'm not sure what to say this or not, but it's someone who runs the DNS for a large fruit company. And, like so, like you

must have happened was Apple. The company

could have bean for blackberry. Oh, yes. Anyways, I was just like so, like, Wow, like, now I have this person in my email that if I ever have a problem with DNS and not understanding how these things work, like we were talking about how propagation sometimes takes long and and he explained how you can, like, never have toe wait for propagation. If you if you attack it in a specific way, I should go back to the email and mention it, cause it was super helpful information. So I think that that's really cool to be able to reach out to experts stand on the shoulders of giants. As we say,

Yeah, I mean again, it's just it is. It's making yourself vulnerable. And if you have ever asked a question and felt like it wasn't well received that you were asking a question, then it's really easy to feel down and and, like, retreat into that, that shell it maybe not ask again, but it is. It's incredibly important. And if your co workers, your boss, your teacher are good, they're going to accept any question, basically, no matter what it is and and help you through that and another mean some of the cool things here is that,

like if you use a service like fresh books, if you do need to ask for help, they're incredible and getting you that help because fresh book one of our sponsors today, he's so good at their customer service in West, You know, firsthand. We've talked about it before about brush books, customer service, you want tell us a little bit more about freshman overall,

so I think I the fresh books. The company hasn't like a really awesome approach to dealing with customer service, and I don't know if this is still the the rule, but I think it is. Is that everybody on the product everyone that works at the company has to spend. I think like two weeks. I don't know how we, however, often two weeks a year. Let's just say working in support and I call them once because I was having a problem with HST being like I I had inputted HST like lower case. But also I had a GST is the taxes in Canada and Ontario. So I had put in lower case and upper case and, like those were registering a separate taxes. So I called them and ah, they clearly knew what was a problem. And I think I talked to one of the developers on the phone like they pick up the phone. No problem.

Support was really good. They say No problem. Give me, like, 20 minutes. We're going to write a script that's gonna convert your data all over toe one. And I think within 10 15 minutes I got an email back from them and it was all taking care of, so their support is amazing. I've very rarely actually contact support, but when I dio, it's when I'm incredibly frustrated with something in having someone help you so quickly just makes me feel like finally like, I know I'm not going to be in the middle of the night. Taxes are due the next day and something's gonna go wrong. And in this problem in this case was my problem, the way I inputted the data, but they still can help me out. So check him out at fresh books dot com ford slash syntax for a 30 day unrestricted free trial. Make sure you use syntax in the How did you hear

about a section? Yeah, You know, I I hit, like also, like, a service issue to when I was, like, trying to export data out of my book keeping software, and I emailed them. It was like, How did I import? This is like, Oh, there is no way to do that, but we'll just do it. We'll fix it up for us.

So Ah, and they're pretty amazing. I have to say, in my small experience with fresh books, support staff, awesome stuff,

so really good

stuff. So along the same lines is, you know, asking for help is that you help others. And there's I want to be kind of clear about this because there's a difference between, like, being that, know it all. That's like you're doing this wrong, like that's wrong, that Beth wrong, it's wrong. And the person who's like offering help in all sorts of like, constructive ways because offering offering help to your fellow co workers are doing like trainings or lunch and learn sort of stuff. Where you're getting to share your knowledge is extremely important, especially in a ah, none intimidating way where people can ask you questions or they can just dive in a little bit more to your code,

especially if it's something they want to learn. But again, it's not gonna be a situation where you're looking over their shoulders and being like, Oh, hey, by the way, that's wrong.

You know? You think helping others I think I started teaching in person 78 years ago is a long time ago, and I noticed that as soon as I started to help others through their problems and to teach other people, my own skill level became so much higher because I don't know, there's just something about explaining topics to other people and and helping people out and in tackling issues that it makes your own skill level so much higher and get also, um, obviously really helps to me in creating all my video content as well, because, ah, it allows me to just ah, anticipate what what the needs are and all that stuff with it. So however you help people, whether that's answering questions for people, whether it's ah, doing something very publicly, like blogging or YouTube videos or just something smaller, like mentoring.

I know there's a lot of people who do just one on one mentoring, and you're not going to get a whole lot of collapse for something like that. But to that one person who you are mentoring and helping them transition into this industry, it probably means the world for them. So, however, it is that you feel most comfortable helping other people, whatever it is, it's, I highly recommend that you you find a way to

do that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you mentioned some things like like you tubing and blogging and stuff like that. And even like answering stack overflow questions that you can be sometimes stack overflow turns into like a competition is like Who can get to this one? The first, but at the end of the day, like the goal is to be helpful to people. So you want to make sure that whatever you're doing is providing help where people need it, not like just trying to appear smart. I think that the big thing I want I want

to get across. Yeah, because that's that's another thing I see all the time in volunteering for like, I used to volunteer for ladies learning code. But I used to teach out of boot camp called Hacker you and uh, you would you would find that there was some people that would help, that they were really excited about helping, but they're just a little bit overbearing. And it was like we had this, like, ask for help thing. And then people would like send, like, private, slack questions to me and be like, Hey, like,

can you help me like I don't want to put myself out there because Senate one X, Y and Z to come help me out because they're a little bit overbearing and then they just, like, get they get flustered and what not So, ah, I think the way to get around that is just to keep helping more, more people go volunteer for some weekend thing. There's tons and tons of kids learning code or Ladies Learning Code or lots of refugee boot camp. There's so many amazing things out there that need someone to give it one Saturday, every six months, the volunteer for this kind of thing. People in the chat room are all saying that they are helping out in boot camps. I think it's such a valuable skill

tohave. Yeah, absolutely. Alright, what you got

the next one next one is you have a problem solver mentality so that this is a good one, because software is you're solving problems with software. So someone comes to you with a real world problem and says, How can we make this faster, Better, stronger whatever it is, how do we automate this task? How do we help our customers who are frustrated at this problem with technology? That's what technology does, right? So there's that piece. But then there's also the piece of like writing software causes lots of bugs and causes lots of issues and you have to be able to to debug it and figure it out. So if you are someone who gets easily frustrated at at problems in in whatever or being ableto, blame things really quickly on that stupid, the way that this works is dumb. Ah, and what not it?

It's not that you can't be a good developer, but being ableto work on your problem solver mentality, I think is really important in being able. Teoh break things down into testable competitive opponents being able to pinpoint an issue. Sometimes, like I see this all the time in in the real World. I told the story a couple of pockets ago how my daughter was in the hospital and the lady with the testing computer couldn't was wiggling the monitor cord when the computer was that right. Like there's just lots of times in the real world, regardless of if it's computers or not, that people just see Oh, it's broken. I don't know where to start, like, what could it possibly be whereas, like for me, like,

I'll give, you know how stupid example. We're at a rented a cottage and the hose wasn't working and, ah forget who was trying to use the hose and go doesn't work. And then I was like, OK, it does. Okay, first, is it the Is that the actual host thing? No. Is the hose getting water? No. Is the If if you turn this on the other way, is that gonna pull water? No.

So you just kind of keep tracing it back until eventually found a little knob they had to turn on. And that pushed the water right through the hose, right? Yes. Just kind of, like, be able to follow the trail of problems until it is that you can find out where the problem is, and then fixing it is a whole another

problem. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, isolating the problem and following that trail in, like those air all such huge, huge skills in this, I mean, because especially where it working with code, knowing where to look and knowing what to remove. Like you start pulling away things that don't matter until you just narrow down. Exactly like, what is the singular item that is causing the problem. And then you can dive into that item and figure out why that item is not working a lot. People don't know this. But before it was the devil, I worked at a University of Michigan and I was doing ah a V work essentially.

But I worked at the hospital and what I was doing at the hospital was someone I was running lectures for doctors, and there's nobody more technically illiterate than doctors. For some reason, the doctors would be like I have this USB key and there's this USB port, but I don't know what to do with it. Should I put it in the port? I don't know how. I don't know how this works and not okay, you just put in the port now it works. Okay, There you go. Congratulations. But eso like that was my job most. The time was troubleshooting. And no, this is a huge one because it's under pressure,

right? You have a lecture full of doctors whose times are like their time is so important and special because you know the stuff they have to learn and doing whatever. They're constantly running back and forth. So when they're sitting there and some a V, tech isn't working at this electoral like you have to get this done with all of these stairs on you. So that was like such a masterclass for me and like being cool under pressure when everything is working or not working. And you know that you can probably solve this problem in any sort of situation or normal situation. But it's the same thing in Web Dev when the servers on fire and you have marketing and you know your PM's like screaming at you because of some, you know, bug. Yeah, it's important to keep it cool because your brain is not going to function well when you're not keeping it cool. So I think that's such a huge thing. And this is an internal review question. I get asked a ton eyes like What are some situations where you've been under a high amount of stress and had to troubleshoot a problem? Now, luckily have had a lot of experience doing that, but it's a huge thing, and you want to think about situations in life where you've had that and when it would have helped to just, like remain calm rather than actually freak out about

it. All these stories remind me of when I was in school. Uh, remember they rolled in the like VCR, DVD and the TV strapped on

that thing. Do you have one of those? Yeah. Yeah,

so stoked that we're watching a movie. But it was always like the Onley debugging that the teachers had when the movie didn't work. Was isn't on Channel Three. That was like, the only thing is what? We had to put it on channel three to get the VCR to work. Oh, and I would always have to come in there and, like, be like, OK, if it is analog and VCR, if is a DVD the you gotta work on the inputs. And it's so frustrating to see that that kind of thing, where people just don't know how toe had a debug, that kind of thing.

You could make an entire career out of being ableto get the TV a Channel three. You can do it. People will hail you as a tech wizard. I know, like I was the tech wizard in my family because I knew it to turn off the computer and turn it back on again, you

know? Yeah. Oh, that's hilarious. Alright, What do we got next? year. Um, I guess it's your turn

to grab one. Yeah, Next one is you have fun with what you do, and this is a huge one for me because I love I mean, I love Web did all that. That's the reason why I do all of this extra content. It's the reason why, you know, work so hard of what we do and grow and everything like that. For me, the fact that I'm having fun solving these problems, learning this new stuff, creating things, is maybe one of the number one drivers toe Why I'm always pushing for new stuff or pushing toe learn or or pushing myself and to do good work is really just because, hey, I enjoy it and ah, it makes us.

It makes us feel it makes me feel like accomplished when you were able to solve this problems. It makes you feel like really proud and all this stuff when you're able to come up with a really cool creative solution to something. But at the end of the day, I just have fun. Sometimes We mentioned this a couple episodes back, but like sometimes I'm like a Saturday or Sunday night. When I'm tryingto wind down, I'll play video games or I'll go break dancing or something, right? I'll do my things toe toe, wind down. But in addition to that, sometimes working on hobby projects even though you're you're struggling through some code or whatever like that sometimes coating up some hobby project is relaxing to me because it's genuinely fun. It's It's like I don't feel like I'm working. I feel like I'm I'm solving a creative problem or doing something interesting or whatever. I'm I'm getting that same experience that I would be from playing a video game or something like that. I'm, you know, genuinely

enjoying it. Absolutely. E think that's also a huge driver behind my courses because what development can be really, really frustrating with all of the bumps and things that you run into. But it's important to, even if, like what you're working on is not necessarily fun. Like I would say, like most of my Dev, I'm not like, Whoa, this is so much fun. But its nose like little those little things were like Oh, men. My database careers are 50% faster. How fun is that? You know,

our like or ah, like Oh, man, this new thing came to see us ass and I took my lunch toe to figure out how to build. Ah, a little cool thing. I was most looking the other day. There used to be this some easing CSS. There was a proposal for this CSS easing. You know, I have ease in ease out on busy and everything like that. There was, like a proposal for, like, a spring in safari, and they took it out and I had coated that up,

like two years ago when they proposed it. And it's so much fun. And I I brought it out of storage the other day and it they took it out, and I was so bummed. But I was like How it is really fun, like building these little little examples and stuff to make sure you enjoy it. And that's one of those things that I don't necessarily know. What do you think? Do you think you can learn toe, have fun with this stuff, or do you think that's more of like a personality trade?

It's a little bit about Sometimes you have to inject some fun into things that aren't fun because not everything is going to be fun. Like, for instance, I made a easing library for myself and, like easing e mean is easing fun. I don't know. It's funny. Feel like messing around. Ah, busy a curves and stuff like that. But to make it fun, I made it an easy E N w a theme using library, and that made it fun for me. So I mean, personally, I like to make things fun that aren't fun. And even if it's stupid, it will add a little bit of like extra booth into whatever you're doing.

All right, what do we got next? Um, you understand work life balance. So I really like this one because I think that a competitive advantage in their industry is being ableto have some sort of work life balance or some some sort of balance where you do not get burned out. And for every single person that's going to look a little bit different, I don't want to be the guy that keeps preaching only work, however many hours a day, there's different times in my life when I've worked very, very long days and enjoyed it very much and now and I'm at a point in my life where I really only work 9 to 5. This morning. I started at 10 because my daughter was up all night and my wife needed to sleep because she was up all night with her. So I started a little bit later, and I think like being able to understand that you should have hobbies and exercise and all of these other things outside of coding. I think that's really important because of of the amount of burnout that comes with such a fast paced industry.

Yeah, it's a big thing, and it's funny because this goes immediately back to Monday. I mean, you had tweeted out that we didn't know it was Labor Day and I personally one of my my bosses and mentors through ah development Michael entire career. It was like Halloween or something. And he was just like I was like, Oh, he said something about today being like a fun day or something. And I was just like, What are you talking about, man? He's like, Are you serious? You don't know that today is Halloween like you just not and I don't know any holidays I just flat out don't remember. I'm so awful at that. But it wasn't until we had that conversation that I was like,

huh? It is a holiday. And you know what? Everyone else is not working. And I'm sitting here working on my desk, and I was Ah, I was grinding through some stuff and I just sort of it was, like, noon or something. I just stopped. It was like, You know what? I'm taking the day off because everyone else is taking the day off, and I deserve it for all the hard work that I have been doing. So I went on, I spent some time in the yard doing adult stuff.

I like the message, Uh, Eric, who's the death on the site? And I was just like a man. I'm gonna go do some yard work, and he's like, Oh, you're living the dad life right now. I'm like, Oh, yeah, my mom, Um, with a mole on, I'm gonna clean it up.

My pick up some leaves. I'm indebted up. So I took my Labor day off to do some, uh, do some, you know, work that way. And it's important to do that stuff. It's hard to do that stuff, especially when you work so hard and you really like love what you do. It's sometimes really hard. But it's important to to understand the need to do any of that stuff, to take the time off. It's all about balance. It really bounce between a front end and a back end of a website. And one of our sponsors today is takes care of the backend of the website for you and that sponsor is sanity. They're going to remove any sort of insanity that you have in your balance of things by making the whole I don't know, the whole contents side of your application just so, so easy. So with more about sanity is Wes.

Yes. So sanity I o is they call it structured content. Done right, right. We actually talked about sanity on our design episode and we use their website as a beautifully designed website, so just check it out. If you want to look at a really well done website, I really like the fun on it. But what does it do? So they are sort of like thesis E. M s back end to your website. So the best way to explain what it did is they actually went ahead and created a back end for the syntax website. So what they did is they You log up, log into sanity dot io and you can create a project and then you start to create your data types with all of the different fields that you want. So we had episodes and we had sponsors. And we have what people that Scott and I were like we're hosts are content type. You can link the content types together and then every single content type will have its own input,

which is really, really cool. Because, ik, obviously you get your input type of text in number and whatever, but then canoe custom inputs as much as you want, because it allows you to input react components that are your own custom inputs which I thought was super super cool. So if you are looking to build ah, a website that you want to build the back end for it, it's sort of like a CMS that someone could just log in and manage all of the content side of there. You want to check out sanity a couple of things the last time we said that what they uses. G r o que grow oak. Last time we said this growth graph warranted career language. That's the language that you write to actually ping their servers and pull back a list of a list of all the data that you want So you can do all of your filtering and sorting and everything in that we said that that was built upon graphic you'll which is, he said, It's not,

actually, so that wasn't true, but they're shipping a graphic. You'll a p I built on top of that later this fall. So that's really cool. Knowing that you'll be soon be able to build all your applications in, just graphic you out and pull all that data. Um, the A P I. Israel time, which means you can sit and edit the same documents in the studio at the same time. That's really cool. Kind of like a little docks or dropbox paper. They have an awesome image pipeline. Ah, there's a link to CSS tricks.

Article all about that which is cool. It'll handle all of your image image assets. And then there's, ah, they also support micro services as well. So if you are building Justus like a real project or if you just want to try something out and you need a quick back end because I know a lot of times people want to just build something in reactor view really quickly and you can't be bothered. Toe, do the back end part of it. Check out sanity dot io ford such syntax and use the coupon code syntax, which is going to get you the awesome supercharged plan, which is that has a beefed up a p I quota. So it's more than just the free plan quota that you get. So thanks so much to sanity for sponsoring.

Thank you. Yeah, I was really impressed with sanity. Ease like a flexibility and customization. I mean, just a little demo they put together. Force was just, like, really super

slick. Yeah. Big fan of their everything. They're doing their design, the tools that they have. So pretty and ft.

Pretty nifty. Okay, next up here, I believe this is number nine. Number nine. Feeling fine. It's You are empathetic to your co workers and users and this is a big one, because empathy a lot of the times is one of those skills that I think just gets lost in the shuffle of things. Or maybe people think if I'm a good enough depth that I don't have to treat people well there. I don't have toe but myself in other people's shoes and stuff like that, but really empathy in general and understanding and being a good employee in a good coworker, two year fellow workers is just such a n'importe skill to have nourish, grow all that good stuff because a to the end of the day, you want the people you're working with to be their best. You want everyone to be on their best to do their best work, to feel comfortable and to feel inspired. And people are going to do that if you are.

You know you're not treating your co workers well. You're not understanding their problems. You're not understanding maybe how they learn and you're not treating people with respect. So being empathetic, treating your coworkers nicely. Being a good employee is just it's it's a totally undervalued skill, and I can't tell you how many deaths I've worked with that just made me want to quit a job because they were so not not good toe work with. They just flat out weren't good work with, you know, and you can always do your best. But sometimes people just they get stuck in their way. So make sure that you're growing in your your learning how to be a good person to your fellow

co workers. Yeah, I On the flip side, I've worked with some amazing people who are often will take as much time as is needed in order to explain something to you where it's it's clearly my fault because I can't understand something or not sure how, Like if you're getting kind of skilled up on existing project, you'd understand kind of how it works. That's really frustrating to feel like you're in a spot in and you're ITT's. It sucks to feel like you're bothering someone when you really need some help. So when you have empathy for your co workers, as well as as your users, you need to understand, like go back to the accessibility show we did last week and thinking about everybody that's involved in a project from the people that are working on it. The designers that you're working on you're working with as well as the people that are using the product.

Yeah, it's big. It's funny. I mean, even, like understanding, like how to treat people in a work environment like in regards to this. Like I had this boss one time. That was he was He was a fine boss, like in terms of like managing people. But he used to come around and we were in the desk cluster with a bunch of other departments and he would come around and make seriously the most inappropriate jokes, like not like, not like pushing the line inappropriate, but like it would it would be inappropriate in most situations, but especially in a quiet work environment. And you were either put in that position where, like,

okay, you, he's your boss. So do you laugh at his jokes? Or do you act like, very uncomfortable and be like, This is this is weird, but I remember even like he would leave and, like other co workers from other departments, would look over and be like, Yikes, like, What is that about? And so I mean, you don't want to put your your, ah,

your coworkers in that position, You don't want to make them feel uncomfortable. So, yeah, just being able to have that brain to see, like what is this situation like with my co workers? And how are people feeling is is

a big deal. Absolutely Next one we have is you have attention to detail. I think this one's super important. There's nothing more frustrating when working with other developers or yourself where you finish something and then the client comes back to you. Or you have to go back to the your coworker and say, like, Good. But here's a list of 40 things that are just not right in this office often happens when you're implementing a design into HTML and CSS, but but also thinking about all the possible edge case in use cases. So working with a guy on my own course platform right now, and when we're making decisions, you can tell that he thinks about every little possible thing that could happen in terms of like how to best store data. So the queers air quick, or how do not break something if we're introducing a new way of approaching something. It's it's really cool to see that because it's clear that he is very good attention to detail. And you don't have to worry about about things breaking busy. Know that they've thought

it through. Yeah, it's big, it's big, and I mean, it could be even like, if you think about it, could be We talked to him the design upset about, like, pixel perfect design and like some people Ah, finishing a design and being like, all right, it's done. You're like, No, this isn't even close. Like being able to look at things and realize what exactly needs to be through again.

All those little details is a very important thing. And, you know, sometimes those little details or even, like, ah, code style or, you know, you're how you're you're doing certain techniques or whatever like that. But it isn't. It's an important thing to ah to Ah, just I don't know, t pay attention to all the little things in our industry. What we doing? There's so many little things to keep track of its It's nuts, but it's It's one of those things you gotta practice.

You gotta do you gotta do? You gotta do. And lastly, we have here a number 11. Is there such thing as lucky number 11? Or is that a thing? No, I don't think so. I'm just I'm not good with things, but Number 11 here is that you are part of the community, and this could be any sort of like any sort of Web development community of design, community, online system or or even local community or work community. Either way, just being a part of a group of other developers is a big, big thing,

because, I mean, I can't help. Like how many times has, like the most biggest breakthroughs I've had was when I was either at a meet up our conference or hanging out chatting with some friends about some code stuff. It is such a big deal to talk to other human beings about what you're doing, because everyone's brain just functions a little bit differently. And it's extremely important to be able to tap into someone else's brain power, use their brain power the or about brainpower, and have some melding of skills and abilities,

yet totally and that being part of a community can manifest itself in any number of ways. So we got some examples here with local meet ups are really good way toe to meet him. Even if you go toe one every six months or so lunch and learns, you see often see teams of developers take one of my courses and they'll just do it together on a lunch. Or they'll do like, Ah, I've also seen people like rent our ah conference room on a Saturday in and meet up with 10 of their friends, and they all go through a job script, 30 courses, CSS good course together. And, ah, if you don't have that around you, there's Twitter. I see this hashtag 100 days of code all the time. Show up on Twitter and people are doing 100 days of code and that I think it's so cool, because by putting yourself out there and saying what you did every single day for 100 days,

it's just has this enormous community around it, and you see such encouragement. You see people starting to like find their community around them because like, that's how When I initially started Twitter, I found the Web developer community that was surrounding me. And that's how I actually got some of the first jobs that I I ever did s. So I think it's really important to find your community, whether that's online, whether that's in person, whether that's going to one conference a year, whether that's hanging out on chat rooms or in ah, in the you tube chat. Right now, we got 200 people

chatting away. Yeah, yeah, it's It's it's huge because the level I mean, we have a slack room with level up the tutorials and I bounce ideas. People bounce ideas. Everyone's talking. Everyone sort of growing together. And it's it's big. I mean, just being part of these things is it's going to help you grow as a human being and help you grow as a person. So, yeah, be part of a community. Let's do it.

Ah, some. So that's our 11 tips. If you have any more tips, why don't you send them on over toe at Syntax FM? So sick pick. I'm actually going to pick a book. I was just on vacation, and part of that vacation was my wife's mom came around, or my mother in law came with us and that she took care of our kids for a couple of the mornings and we had that time to just do whatever it is. We want it. So my wife and I both did professional development, and I read a couple books on money management and investing and just kind of idea. I've always I haven't ever talked much about my like, thought process behind, like saving money and buying cars with cash rather than financing them. And I have all these like thoughts about how toe how to best manage money,

and it's probably not important. But I did find that this book that I read very much aligned with my thoughts on how to manage money and how to approach money and its role. It plays in your life, And I had been avoiding this book for years because it sounds so stupid. It's called Rich Dad. Poor Dad.

Have you familiar? Yeah.

Have you read it? I just heard of it. Yeah, I have. So I I just Then it's like a 23 year old book or something like that are our 15 year old book. It's really old, but all of the concepts in it really stand the test of time. A big fan of it. I'm kind of bummed that I left it for so long because it was such a cheesy title, but I highly recommend it. I look, I grabbed it on audiobook. I think I flipped it on 1.5 x and I was through in about five hours of just laying in the hammock and listening to it.

Yeah, it's a good book. It's I mean again. It's one of those ones you want to listen to with some like context of of how it fits into your life. Because sometimes this, especially like there were there were some of those, like some of these finance books they like, really say like, This is the way it's this way or no other way and it's great till I get a very amount of opinions and different stuff. And then I like mixing bowl together in my mind. So I love any of those books. I love listening, that sort of stuff. I have a bunch of like podcasts in that regard. I listen to Ah, but yeah, rich and poor Dad is a classic for a reason. Uh, definitely one that you

want to check out. I really liked it because it, unlike my kids, are starting to grow up. And I'm starting to have to talk to them about money. Like my daughter found five bucks on the ground the other day and I was like, Oh, man, like we got it would have do with this, you know, like like all sudden people go, go buy toys. And I'm like, No, we need to, like, talk to her about saving.

And she has this piggy bank, and every time she finds money, she saves it and we want to give part of that away. And there's just like, ah, whole bunch And this really helped me like approach because it's not like he does talk about, like, investing in real estate and things like that. But it wasn't so much like do this like the Tony Robbins book is all about index funds, which are amazing thing. But this is just very much of ah, mindset about running a business and having your money work for you versus just getting a paycheck every single week and complaining about not making enough money. So I thought it was very, very interesting.

Yeah, as someone who Ah, who has had, like, student loans forever and ever. I mean, Kourtney has ah Ph. D So that was a lot of schooling. Just being able to budget and work on those loans is just like you really need some good financial foundation toe to figure that stuff out. So, yeah, I think any of these books that they just inspire you look at things like that is just so incredibly important. My sick pick today is going to be sort of a follow up to a sick pick that I did a while ago that a lot of people really, really seemed to like and the sick pick that Ah, it was overcooked, for that's out of the computer for whatever. So my sick pick today was overcooked to which is the sequel that came out a couple of weeks ago.

I think I don't forget. Either way, we have been playing the life out of this game. Kourtney and I, we played overcooked one until we beat it and then overcooked too. We were already pretty good at overcooked. So, you know, we're ah you know we're getting better, but like, this scheme kicks off and you're making sushi and you're making all sorts of just so fun with the added some, like really little, like interesting abilities like it's so much fun because one of abilities does, they added. To is to throw things which it doesn't seem like like in the kitchen. You're working your little cartoon guy.

You're moving stuff around your cooking and, ah, this game is so much fun because what you're doing, the whole object is toe to get the orders out as fast as they come. So your building and you're cooking things and you're working together with your your teammate to make these orders. And in the second version of the game, they allow you to throw things now. So we're in these kitchens that have, like, a chasm in the in the like that there's a giant hole that you can follow it fall into in the know the kitchen. We're just chucking Chuck and stuff at each other, and I'm like, I'm like, Here's some burgers, burgers, burgers were just tossing them and say like that were yelling at each other and we it is actually really funny of so many you principles of things about,

like, keeping cool under pressure, like when when were effective in beating the game. Corny and I are functioning like a really kitchen, and we're like were intense, but we're very like column at the same time. We're like, need burgers need burgers, but like when we when? When stuffs on fire and we're all like freaking out. The whole thing just goes into a total mess, and it's like an episode of some Gordon Ramsay TV show or something like that. But I absolutely love overcooked to two. And ah yeah, the sequel. I loved the 1st 1 and Le overcooked to definitely lives up to the hype. So that's my CPIC overcoat to play

it wicked. What about shameless plugs? James

Blood? Hey, I have a course on react testing called React testing for beginners. I've gotten a ton of great feedback on it. A lot of people have been very, very excited with this course because it makes testing really easy now. You know, I never loved learning testing. I never love testing that much myself until I figured out, like, really nice practices. I read all of can see Dodd stuff and his react testing library plus jest has, like, totally transformed how I think about testing and react. So this course is aimed at anyone who is not, like, great at testing.

Maybe doesn't love testing. Maybe doesn't know anything about testing at all. And we take you from the very beginnings all the way through Europe. Pro in real world testing situations where you can do things like testing AP eyes that come in and mocking data and understanding all the Japanese stuff. So check it out. Level of stories dot com port slash store and ah yuk UNB. I react testing for beginners. Right now it's on sale until the next series is released. I released them whenever they're finished, so get all neck. There's no is like only going to be on sale for, like, 20 more days. Or you could become a level of pro. I level up to Torres dot com four slash pro and Senate for the year save 25% and get access to everything.

Awesome. I'm gonna plug my upcoming advance react graft ul course. I just about finished the testing portion as well you talk about that? Um, I took some time and added a couple extra videos on some beginner testing stuff just so that I'm not throwing people in and being like, oh, mocks and spies and ah, test suites. And, you know, it s so we're kind of like added a couple of videos that would explain the cork ideas behind it. And then we get into testing and mocking the Apollo store and what not So that's almost done. And then the last piece I have, which is gonna be pretty quick, will be the deployment. Then I'm done. All the videos so far edited up to it.

Ah, and I'm really excited. It will be at advance react dot com, probably in a couple weeks. Or, as I tell everyone soon. Alright, he's out.

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