In this episode of What's Good, Joel Hooks sits down with Dev Agrawal, a member of the SolidJS core team, to discuss the evolving landscape of web development, AI-assisted coding, and modern framework architecture. Episode HighlightsSolidJS and Modern Framework Architecture Detailed comparison between SolidJS and React, highlighting key advantages Deep dive into Suspense implementation and reactive state management Overview of Dev's work on cross-boundary reactivity in SolidJS Discussion of his ...
Feb 03, 2025•45 min•Ep. 77
Dax Raad, known for his strong opinions on Twitter, sat down for a chat about web dev, career moves, and building cool stuff. He's not afraid to throw some heat at popular tools like Next.js , though he still helps people use it. Dax is particularly excited about local-first development, which he thinks isn't getting enough attention. He argues that sometimes the best web dev move is to step away from web dev entirely and explore other areas of programming. When it comes to career growth, Dax en...
Sep 18, 2024•49 min•Ep. 76
Dev and Joel discuss React Miami conference, praising its fun atmosphere and location. They chat about React Server Components, with Dev sharing his experience building a mini framework. They talk about Vinxi, Nitro, and the unjs ecosystem as tools for creating custom frameworks. The conversation touches on Vue's popularity outside web dev circles and non-web dev conferences. They discuss the benefits of TypeScript and strongly-typed APIs. Dev mentions his upcoming talk on durable objects at a c...
Sep 07, 2024•29 min•Ep. 75
Alex took spent the last year and a half creating his course, The Ultimate Guide to Understanding DOM Events, at egghead. Finding the time to work on a side-project like this isn't easy, and it requires one to examine their current priorities in life. Do they want to be a rockstar developer? Or do you want to have a lot of free time to spend with your family? No matter what sacrifices have to be made. But the best way to handle it is to have candid discussions with the people around you who will...
Jun 02, 2021•40 min•Ep. 74
Ryan’s background as a musician taught him many lessons that would eventually apply to his current career. As a musician, he learned about composition, sales, and even programming so he could build his band a website. Ryan also had an actual sales job where he learned that you can do something so well that you’ll be unable to do it anymore. In sales that meant being good at generating leads which lead to a lot of clients which lead to ceasing to generate leads. But, that eventually lead to you h...
Dec 19, 2020•55 min•Ep. 73
Perhaps the most important skill that a software developer can have is the ability to ask good questions. Questions will lead to the answers that you actually need. Formulating good questions is key. Often, you'll find that you answered your own question in the process of forming it. Mentorships are a great learning and growth opportunity but it's important that you respect the person that you desire mentorship from. Don't just take up their time by asking questions regularly without being upfro...
Dec 07, 2020•33 min•Ep. 72
Programming might be the quickest path for someone to start earning six figures. But, it may be a quick path, it is not an easy path. You have to either be having fun or be interested in some way. You have to have some backing motivation that's going to keep you in this. Many people try to learn to code only to stop. They either decide that they don't want to sit in a chair for eight hours a day for the rest of their life, or they don't think they're smart enough, or somebody's telling them they...
Nov 21, 2020•38 min•Ep. 71
Getting a job as a web developer right out of the gate isn't easy. People often face rejection after rejection. But, you don't have to take the "front-door" to get a developer position. You can also take the "back-door" by taking a developer-adjacent role like a support engineer and then work to become a developer in the company. There are many disciplines and technologies for you to choose to learn. There is always the question of do you become really good in one area, or do you become more of ...
Nov 10, 2020•54 min•Ep. 70
Epic React is Kent's attempt at making the biggest impact on the world. It's Kent's philosophy that he can have a much larger impact by teaching other people to write excellent software instead of just doing it himself. Epic React has been in the making for a long time. Its methods are much more thought out than your average course. You can't just throw it on your Chromecast and 2x your way through all of the videos. You have to put in the work. Kent uses the proven methods from the book "Make I...
Oct 07, 2020•48 min•Ep. 69
Tomasz highly recommends companies hire interns and train them because you can get some amazing engineers that you know are going to fit the company's needs. Another great advantage of training interns is that it levels up the senior engineers by giving them mentoring experience! But, what really is a senior engineer? Basically, a senior engineer isn't a person who programs more, faster, or better. They're a person who makes others better at what they do and a person who can solve problems. So h...
May 08, 2020•40 min•Ep. 68
Shirley Wu is a freelance data visualization expert. Data visualization, at its core, is when you take lots of data, and it's hard for you to look in Excel. You visualize that into some graph or chart, and the most simple could be a bar chart or some graph so that you can understand trends within it easier. In data visualization, there is an entire spectrum of approaches you can take with a dataset. You have to decide on the balance between art and the data. With clients, choosing where in that ...
Mar 13, 2020•51 min•Ep. 67
"Indie Hacker" - An entrepreneur that is working to gain some form of independence. Courtland Allen is the founder of indiehackers.com. He didn't take the venture capital approach. He just wanted to make enough money to support what he was trying to do. Courtland was trying to build a community of indie hackers who would share their stories, help each other, and support one another. You can't force community growth. It takes good content, time, and consistency. At first, Courtland would make goo...
Feb 28, 2020•41 min•Ep. 66
Rosie Sherry is both an unschooling parent and the founder of the Ministry Of Testing. There's a disproportionate number of bootstrappers who homeschool their kids, and maybe it's for the same reason why they built something themself instead of fitting into the mold, they think they can do it better. Ministry of Testing is a company Rosie founded, officially as an online community in 2007, but then formally as a business in 2011. It's a community of software testers who geek out on testing, host...
Feb 07, 2020•34 min•Ep. 60
Design systems are your component library, documentation, tools, et cetera. And then there are the operations of it. So like an agile team uses agile methodology, a design system is about making your teams work better. After Bootstrap, we all ended up building our own Bootstraps. We all like to think that we're special and the problems we're solving are specific to our company, but the reality is the way that your system is built is probably not that special. It's the way that your system is use...
Jan 24, 2020•26 min•Ep. 59
Segun Adebayo was turned off of web development after struggling with Wordpress' themes and plugins, and so he went straight into UI design entirely using Sketch and Figma for quite some time. It was React that brought him back into the development fold. The way React made it so easy to create components stuck with him. Segun is still a designer at heart, but his skillset goes beyond design. If he calls himself a designer, it limits what people want from him. By calling himself, a UX Engineer Se...
Jan 10, 2020•28 min•Ep. 65
T7 Chicken was where it all began with Nick's journey into development. Nick had no development experience. Still, he wasn't satisfied with the websites and apps available for Tekken framerate data, so he took it upon himself to learn Android development to create his mobile app. Nick had the support of the Tekken community and received programming help from people online. Projects like these are so crucial for rapidly growing as a developer, and you won't get the same experience at work. It's m...
Jan 03, 2020•37 min•Ep. 64
Monica Powell didn't have the most straightforward path to her first job as a developer. She took a couple of years of graphic design in college, took a computer science class, joined a student-led web development agency, and then joined a tech startup where she did email marketing and development. At that point, Monica knew that she wanted to be a developer, but she knew too much to attend a boot camp and not enough to get a job. So, she took classes, landed an internship, and then eventually g...
Dec 19, 2019•37 min•Ep. 61
At first, React looked like it might have been a fad, and JSX seemed weird. But, it didn't take long for people to see the power and beauty of it. React makes reuse easy, which makes accessibility a lot easier. Every time you needed an input, you had to remember all of the accessibility attributes and write it all by hand. With React, you can make a reusable input with all of the accessibility built-in. You must make your components accessible. There's a broader range of people who need accessib...
Dec 17, 2019•39 min•Ep. 62
D3.js is the defacto library that people use to create custom data visualizations on the web today. It's powerful and flexible. You can do whatever you want with it. However, that kind of power and flexibility comes at the cost of complexity. You have to know what you're doing, and it takes a long time to learn. There's existing content written on D3, but there's always room for another voice. With the help of Newline, Amelia wrote the book of over 600 pages, Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization ...
Dec 11, 2019•35 min•Ep. 63
Hiro started coding HTML and CSS back in middle school so she could make internet friends and talk about anime. She never thought of coding as anything more than a hobby, and she stopped when she began college. She got her master's in special education, but due to a traumatic injury, she had to make a career pivot. She got a job as a helpdesk engineer and eventually worked her to a sysadmin position at a startup. Hiro quit the comfortable sysadmin job. She asked herself if ten years from now, if...
Nov 01, 2019•36 min•Ep. 58
Khalal's first language was Java, he learned his it in school. He didn't like coding in school because all they did was learn algorithms and data structures. How many people have completely turned away from this amazing career where you get to build cool things like dad jokes in text messages simply because classes get structured around data structures, algorithms, and Java? New coders should take a step back before jumping straight to a Bootcamp. Take time to learn on your own to make sure this...
Oct 11, 2019•29 min•Ep. 57
Making technical decisions for your business when you don't have experience as a developer is difficult. It's scary to make decisions that you don't know the consequences of. Tracy got into development when at one point she had the freetime to take an HTML, CSS, JavaScript course online. Becoming a developer taught Tracy the importance of grouping her meetings so she could have uninterrupted blocks of time to get work done. Before, she didn't realize the impact that breaking people's flow had. A...
Sep 17, 2019•31 min•Ep. 56
To executives, new features mean more money, but even if you had terrific features, they wouldn't be worth a thing if they only worked half the time. Reliability isn't something you want to put off until later after the project has grown, it will save you a lot of time and money if you factor it in from day one. Everyone has adapted to a speedy internet these days. Users leave if the site is taking more than even a few seconds to load. It's easy to get overly focused on features while losing the...
Sep 06, 2019•32 min•Ep. 55
How many of us still almost exclusively use console.log() when trying to debug something? It's okay, plenty of us do it that way, but you could be saving yourself a lot of pain and suffering by using the debugger and stepping through the execution. There are several advantages to using a debugger, you get a tighter feedback loop, a lot more information, and it allows you to go into places you wouldn't have even thought about. Now debugging can take you far, but there are times when we need anoth...
Aug 30, 2019•31 min•Ep. 54
Everything is a system, and every system is a box in another larger system. It's up to managers to think in systems to make choices and understand their consequences. The manager has an obligation to their team. The decisions of managers make a tremendous impact on folk's lives. But managers are only human. "When we go into school there's kind of this sense that authorities are these all-knowing kind of perfect figures that are responsible for everything." The reality is that managers are humans...
Aug 27, 2019•44 min•Ep. 53
Marisa Morby is a professional product manager. A common question she gets is "what's the difference between a product manager and a project manager?" There's a lot of overlap, but the difference is a product manager has to understand what needs to get done and why and be able to communicate that, and the project manager makes sure that everything stays on the rails and results in a cohesive product. Many teams put significant of focus on user outcomes. A user outcome is the ultimate goal of the...
Aug 17, 2019•38 min•Ep. 52
When you are a consultant, you can't just learn a framework and then choose a place to work that uses it. Your clients will have their own needs and constraints that you're going to have to adapt to serve your client well. The constant learning can feel like a freefall. Constantly feeling dumb is panic-inducing. There's this trough of despair in software, where you swing between feeling like a genius and then going right back to despair. We can't just learn, but we have to learn well. It's criti...
Aug 14, 2019•36 min•Ep. 51
There are a few options for those trying to start a career in web development, teach yourself, join a bootcamp, or go to college. Veni chose the college route, she got a master's degree in computer science, which is awesome, but it didn't fully prepare her for web development. Computer science is primarily theory and it doesn't really prepare you for the engineering side of the job. There are only so many research positions where you'll get to applying your degree directly, the vast majority of ...
Aug 03, 2019•26 min•Ep. 50
You don't have to be passionate about code to have a successful career as a developer. Pariss Athena talks about how it isn't the code itself that motivates her to get better at understanding it. It's what being good at code provides that drives her. The financial freedom code gives Athena enables her to give more to the people and communities that are important to her. Success to her is freedom and helping others find success too. She is working on the Black Tech Pipeline, a platform to bring r...
Jul 22, 2019•21 min•Ep. 49
Vue has a reputation of being the most beginner-friendly framework, but that didn't just happen by accident. The Vue CLI is an excellent example. New developers often struggle with using the terminal and remembering all the commands. The Vue CLI provides a visual interface for the developer to generate a project. By making it easier for newcomers to make Vue projects, they've reduced the barriers to entry. Beginner-friendly doesn't mean basic. Many large-scale projects use Vue. Another example o...
Jul 20, 2019•31 min•Ep. 48
