956: Should I Keep Using WordPress?

Welcome to Syntax Today. We've got a potluck episode for you too. That's where you bring the questions, we bring the answers, and if you've got a question for us, please. Submit it. Go to syntax.fm, click on potluck in the menu bar and submit your question. We'll answer it on a future episode. Today we've got some really interesting questions around should I keep using WordPress or should I be going headless and doing it all in JavaScript?

or something fancy. Is the gravy train over for software devs? A lot of people are having a hard time finding a job right now and things are just switching up. Where to store your TypeScript types? Do you put them in a separate file?

them in the file where you have them. It's a big mess and we're going to figure it out for you. Finally, there's a bunch more questions, but one other interesting one is like, what is the benefit to buying an SSL certificate when you can just get a free one with Let's Encrypt? Scott, we just got back from San Francisco. We did our GitHub meetup. Props to everybody who came out for that. That was a hoot, wasn't it? Man, a big time hoot. It was a hoot nanny. A couple hundred people there.

there was a couple funny things let's let's talk about all the funny things talk about the funny things yes first of all there was another meetup like on the other side we like did this like brewery outside and there's like a brewery in the middle like a like a little like

they pour beer there and we were on one side and then there was another meetup on the other side, which it was like a meetup for like investors or something like that. And some of those people came to our side just unknowingly.

and they were just like talking to me for like a couple of minutes and i was like this person doesn't know what we are are like why are they here and then they're just like so are you part of y combinator and what are you investing i was like oh i think you're at the wrong meetup but then they like continued

to talk to me about investing. I'm like, maybe there's an opportunity here. Hey, yeah, no kidding, right? What else? This is not funny, but some kid who's 14 years old came, took a bus in. Yes. Amazing. That was amazing. So shout out to I forget his name, but shout out to the 14 year old that came out. That was really cool. If you're out there on YouTube, leave a comment. That was really great of you to come. Thank you so much for showing up. We also had.

folks from Zed editor show up we had Robbie Russell was there there was like big name people a lot of Jason Langsdorf a lot of really great people showed up um Ashley Willis it was just like Just really great people and a lot of great conversation, a lot of big Syntax fans. We had the park security there was loving our merch. One guy, one guy on a bike.

It was a police officer. Scott's scared to back the blue here, but yeah, it was a police officer. No, I thought he was a full-on police officer. Okay. So yeah, he... No, he wore an internet hat. There was other people who were just like coming by and being like, hey, I see these hats over here. So we gave out so much gear. It was crazy. Even the VC people were coming over and being like,

Oh, this gear is actually rips. So we had glow in the dark syntax stickers. Those were sick. You have to send me a few because I brought I brought one home and I didn't actually grab more and my kids were losing it. I was like, oh, shoot, I guess I should have got more. I uh...

I didn't bring any home. So sadly, all of the ones that I had are gone. So I think they went really fast. So I don't know if they're still there. The Century folks might have them. So maybe next event we can go to or we can get them to send us some or something because.

Really cool. The stickers seriously glow. Let me tell you this. When you have 300 glow in the dark stickers in your suitcase, apparently that really wigs out the security machine. The guy pulled my suitcase aside, which is like not that uncommon, right? But when he.

He like opened it up. He's like, there's something really weird right here. It was just this giant ball of light. And I was like, I wonder if it's these stickers. He's like, I don't know about that. And I was like, well, they're glow in the dark. And he was like. Oh, but it just might look like this like giant blob is like this is giant mass in your suit. I wonder what it looks like glow in the dark in a what's that? What is an x-ray machine?

I don't know what they use. What's the tech? Yeah. Like, I guess so. Like, sometimes don't you have to, like, drink a glow in the dark liquid before you get, like, an x-ray on your bones or something? Yeah. And then you can have that like skeleton. You can just go in the dark skeleton. That's cool. So don't eat our stickers, but.

Don't eat them. Might be kind of cool. That's funny that that got. But shout out. We also did a little pizza at the end. Everything was great. Awesome time meeting up. So thank you everybody who came out. Can't wait to do another one. Wes, we should do one in Toronto this year. Yeah. Toronto or like let us know in the comments below.

which city we need to hit up so we we hear seattle a lot we want to do michigan at some point we'll do every city but let us know in the comments below especially europe we got to do a european tour Let's do Paris. Let's do, where are the beautiful places? Let's do Milan. Let's do Mallorca. We'll do a meetup in Mallorca. Who's coming?

First question from Debug Dev says, I got an email from Bluehost extolling the benefits of paid SSL over presumably Let's Encrypt. Is there any real benefit to picking a paid SSL over... Let's encrypt, especially on high-end and non-commercial sites is an interesting question. As far as I understand, the only benefit to using a paid SSL is like...

organization certification, but I have not seen that in a browser in years. You used to have a browser where you would like go to eBay and then the whole bar would like light up green and be like eBay corporation. I guess that could be a way to show that it is associated with a corporation to get that. But aside from that... And I don't even know if that's that big of a deal, right? Like the domain name is the most important verification thing. Aside from that.

There's no benefit. I think that that's an old thing. They used to make a ton of money selling SSL certificates and it's not necessary anymore. There's no security benefits or anything like that. Traffic that is sent encrypted over SSL. is is exactly that it's not more secure yeah not more secure because it just has a bad it used to be like a big trust and verification thing and even back in the day i remember

like being really stoked to have that badge that was like protected by Koboto SSL. Oh yeah. That was like such a legitimizer that you needed that, that, that badge on your website, the little lock. the web 2.0 style lock or something like that. When I see that now on a website, I think like, oh man, these guys are like corpo, you know, like that almost makes me not want to use it because.

But like, I guess for regular people, they need to see a lock or something like that, you know, like antivirus scanned website. It's almost better nowadays that like. It's now just something that is to be expected and transparent in that like people don't have to know what it is. Yeah, it doesn't. It warns you if it doesn't exist now, you know.

The benefit of an SSL certificate does not protect you from a lot of the other things, which is like... like loose database credentials or or hackers and things like that you're not being protected from any of that you're simply an ssl certificate stops your data from being intercepted between your browser and the server that you're sending the data to. Yes. And that can even happen on your work. If your work makes you install an SSL certificate.

Um, on your thing, I use an app called proxy man and you can install your own SSL certificate in the middle and literally just intercept that traffic and, and you can see it. Yeah. Beware of loose database engineers. All right, next one. Wahid. Hi, Syntax. Do you guys think the position of...

a pure front end developer still exists. Like two or three years ago, I would get bombarded by recruiters about front end positions. And now I get zero. And when I search for front end jobs, all I see is full stack and back end jobs. And all of the different frameworks, languages and

I'm at a wit's end to know what to learn. Do I think this job still exists? Absolutely. Because I know even as far as century hires front end specialists, absolutely. But front end specialists these days aren't just.

you know, a CSS or an HTML person, there's somebody who understands react really well, there's somebody who can really dive deep into all of that stuff. I think these jobs absolutely still exist. Full stack developers are much less common in larger companies where there are more engineering talent and the back ends and the data side, the full stack side of things are much more intense, like the scale at which the data

exist in century you couldn't have a front-end developer working on no it that's not even like a back-end you know that's infrastructure engineer it's unbelievable the scale out it is Right. And so the lines are definitely blurred because even with server side rendering or whatever, there are aspects where you're having to interact with the back end of things. Yeah. But to me, a lot of that is not like full stack, like full stack is.

doing it all tip to tail. Yeah. And I do think like UI and like front end jobs absolutely still exist. I think so as well. However,

Bigger corporations are going to have separate people. But I think if you're being hired at a company that just has an app or builds apps or whatever, in many cases, you're going to be expected to do... like front to back, because... like the lines of like what's front end what's back end is is relatively blurred you know you gotta just query the database server render html jump into the client and hydrate something add a date picker with some javascript like we had this question

while ago what it was can i just do css anymore and not do javascript i don't think that that exists there's certainly you can be a specialist and there's people out there that are no css performance really well like harry roberts is is probably one of them you know just performance nut knows everything about CSS and rendering and how all of that stuff works. Those jobs certainly exists, but they are much less common than someone that's like, we just need to build an app.

And you have to build the app for us and whatever you need to do to make that happen, that that works. And then as it gets bigger into like bigger infrastructure and Kubernetes and clusters and sharding, all of that type of stuff. then then it starts to drift off. But I would not scare away from just like calling yourself a full stack dev.

learn a thing or two about how servers work and how requests come in, how databases are queried. I think you're going to get a lot further, especially this next question we have here is just like, there's a lot.

of people looking for jobs right now and if you can do it all you're going to be higher up on that list so this is an interesting question from pookie and this is just something that i have heard and being asked even at the meetup alone i was asked this question

similar to this like three different times um so the question is will this industry become any more stable and friendly for software devs after about 10 awesome years and most of them listening to the podcast thank you i'm seriously considering leaving to become an electrician between AI, outsource jobs overseas, and a return to office, which I live in a small town, which I don't have many options, I don't think the industry is stable to provide for me and my family. The job...

Did let me go and I've been looking for six weeks and it seems terrible out there. Some engineers spending nine months looking for jobs. Even if I get a role, any boss could decide to cut costs at any moment and it seems scary. What do you think will the pendulum ever... swing back in our favor. This is a big question. I wrote a couple of thoughts down here as well. Like I, first of all, I think that we had some good gravy years in this industry.

Good. There was people making silly money, people doing a boot camp and making 250 grand right out the door. Facebook, Google, just gobbling up people who. knew what they're doing they're smart people but just didn't have the didn't have the experience and and that gravy train is is over now um so a couple thoughts here everybody in our industry is is freaking out right now but i feel like

Every industry is freaking out right now. You think about like teachers are scrambling to figure out what to do with assignments. How do you make assignments when people can just chat GPT something, you know, business analysts are freaking out because. You can summarize stuff really quickly. Photographers are freaking out because like styles are changing and also like the tools. It's easier than ever. Like you should see the sick ass photo I took of Scott.

with portrait mode that's definitely possible but like beautiful sunset scott smiling thing I'm an idiot. I just touch the portrait button and push the button on my phone and it poops out like an unreal image like that. That's pretty good, right? That's... dentists are being bought up by private equity you know like i see so many of these dentists that are like

or like Juno vet, whatever. And it's like, oh no, you're just like killing the entrepreneurial vet by squeezing everything out of these small vets. But I think on the flip side, there's lots of people are probably already commenting down below mean things. There's a lot of effed up drama going on, but also lots is changing. So I think the answer is somewhere. sort of in between um and and i think if you were to just try to move to somewhere like electrical

I don't think that you will feel like that is more stable because I think every industry is changing right now. Everybody is feeling shifts, not just because of AI. That's part of it. People are freaking out and trying to figure out how to use that. But also there's just like... political things and there's manufacturing. There's all kinds of stuff going on right now. People's attention spans are shorter than ever. Short form video, summarized content, you know, and.

i don't think the answer is going to just be moving to another industry i feel like every industry right now is feeling a bit of a shake up so That's my thoughts of what's going on here. So what should you do? Become an invaluable person, right? People that are invaluable are people who can...

think big, can architect systems, they can tackle problems, they can stand out just by talking to people about like what's going on with hiring right now. I just put a thread out on Twitter being like, what's going on? And everybody's saying the same thing is that it's...

There's just so many people looking for jobs. There are lots of good people that cannot get hired because there's so much noise right now. And AI is making that absolutely worse because everybody can... generate all the slop and just send out 10 000 resumes so i think that how we hire is going to change and as always has been being able to stand out from

The rest of those people who are trying to just cheat the system is going to be it's going to be the move. And how do you stand out? Right. Think big. learn how to architect systems, build your own thing. You say you've been off for six weeks. Six weeks is a long time. You could build like a life-changing app that... Not necessarily live chain, but you could build something really good in six months. If you can find the energy to do that, you could...

absolutely slam dunk it. So I don't know if changing systems is the move, but I think changing your approach to standing out and becoming hired is definitely needed. I think this approach that you're referring to has always existed as a hack.

is a hack to get more better jobs because there were times when like hiring was really tough before the whole yc bump and all that stuff where there's these startups coming like i i remember Back in the day, it was tough to get like I was fighting with a lot of people for an HTML job.

The things that work then are always going to work. Like you said, becoming an invaluable person. If you have that time and you have those skills, you're making things. Those things could get noticed, but they could also become a financial backing for you. You could do so many different things. But like you said, I think it's really important.

to emphasize that every industry is feeling some kind of crazy craziness right now. When I talked to Dr. Sarah Bird, that's I asked her about these changes. And she was just like, Every single industry is feeling these changes. And it's just like these people get it. It is. It's a situation right now. So I loved all of your advice and I don't have anything important to add. I just want to emphasize, reemphasize it. Totally.

I just was looking through the replies on that tweet I put out and Pierce... He is on the VS Code team. I met him at GitHub Universe. And he says, from a hiring manager's perspective, we recently redid our interviews for the Code product team. So anyone who works on VS Code, they got to hire for that. They all start with an app building. They can use any AI developer tool they want, which is super interesting. You get to learn a lot about how everyone uses different AI tools differently. So...

Some spend 30 minutes planning, then pass to AI and finish the exercise in five minutes. Some iterate much more with an agent. Some prefer to stay in the editor. So this is kind of... really interesting is like instead of being like no AI in the interviews, it's the opposite.

And being like, do what you want. How do you approach things? How do you tackle systems? How do you solve problems? I think it says a lot about a person of like, yeah, there are people that are just going to make me a website that does. cats for whatever and then you get some slop out the other end but there are

Very smart people using these tools that are figuring out how do you approach these problems. Then he goes on to say, then we have two interviews focused around getting to the root of the developer problem and designing a solution to solve that problem based on. real feedback we've gotten from the team so that's again i just did i not just say that problem solving systems design those are the bigger problems and they always have been in software design and and just

writing the actual HTML tags is probably not going to cut it anymore, whereas previously it might have. I think good interviewers have always known this, that the people who understand the fundamentals of how things work, but also how to fix things when they don't work. They understand problem solving, debugging. They understand like people who can, like you said, architect and all that. People who have been good hirers.

all along have like understood that those things are super important, which is so funny because I remember applying for jobs that like, they would ask me a question about in one particular case, it was backbone and marionette was the stack. And they're like, how would you do this in Backbone? It is basically just like a give me the syntax of how you would do this in Backbone. And I was just like, well, I can tell you how I would do it.

without backbone and i could tell you where i would go to learn to do it in backbone or whatever it's like they don't they don't like that as an answer even though that was a better answer than oh you write the dot set function or whatever you know yeah Short-sighted. It's never been about memorizing the method names, and it's always been about tackling these problems, which gives me the question, it's like, how do you get better at these things? Reps. Sorry, reps, yeah.

just put in the work six weeks you got six weeks to build maybe six different products you can you learn a hell of a lot about architecture and design in six weeks building six different things

That is so right. Everything I've ever learned that was valuable was through some kind of hard exploration into something, going back and forth. And AI makes this easier now, not because you can... uh have ai do the work for you but you can use it as a bit of a sounding board you can use it to research things for you you can use it to explain docs or blog posts and obviously you have to be a little bit cautious with that but It's never been more accessible than it is right now to learn.

Everything. Next question here from Blemming. Hi, longtime listener. In a recent episode about Zed, Scott talked about automating versioning with GitHub Actions. He talked about change sets, but looking that up brought me to...

solutions for mono repos. In the past, I would have used a simple npm version major minor patch with get tags to match but automating this would create a merge conflict since the package.json gets modified. We currently have a Docker build flow to pushing to Docker hub boat.

we have stuck to using global tags like staging latest development. We love to get versioning up and running, could properly version the project in GitHub and Docker Hub. Could Scott talk a bit more about his process and maybe share his GitHub actions? Yeah, so I have shared the GitHub

It's in the notes here. I was like, huh, change sets, a mono repo tool. Cause I've only ever used it outside of a mono repo. And I went to their, uh, I went to the readme for change sets immediately and woof, change sets for such a simple stinking project. This is always drives me nuts when you go to a project like this and it's like, here's a tome, here's 10,000 links, here's all this stuff. And it's like the very first sentence.

A way to manage your versioning and change logs with a focus on mono repos. And like, sure, I think by putting mono repos so front and center there. Yes. If you have a mono repo with a lot of packages, this can be handy. You can just always also just straight up use this. So, uh, blending, I'm going to point you to one page in specific on this, which is just the.

Intro to using change sets. That's the only link you need. They should just put that on the dang readme as the very first thing. Oh, how do you use change sets? Oh, you run.

npx change set cli in it it gets you going then you run npx change a change set cli it creates a change set for you you modify it you take you say what the changes were what type of change it was then you run change that sales live version and then that applies it it creates a changelog it's like a two or three step process and this readme granted like i understand that this

tool is way more powerful than that. But like this read does such a good job of making this seem so much scarier than it actually is. I've also included in my links that my YAML for two projects, one of which is a neither of which are mono repos, by the way, in case you're wondering, one of which uses change sets just in the repo itself. And then one of which uses change set versioning within a

GitHub action, and I have the action link. But in reality, the code for that is literally just NPX change set version. That's it. It's like a one liner, it applies that and then it emerges that back in. So give that a check.

There's a little bit more there, but Change Sets is a pretty simple tool. What it does... is it generates changelog for you it bumps your package versions it keeps things nice and organized the thing i like the most about using change sets is now that i have a package that other people are using i can enforce in a github action hey you have to have your change set

So that way, if somebody wants to commit and somebody wants to help this project, all they have to do is submit a PR with a change set. And that version is going to get bumped. It's going to run through NPM publish on its own. And I don't have to do anything other than. Looks good to me. Talk about a good use case for agents, though, in a pull request, because like nothing is worse than like when you send a PR to some thing like that.

clearly fixes a problem and they're like well can you please like submit a change set and do all this other bullshitty stuff and it's just it's not bullshitty that sucks um but now you can simply just like at change set bot Please generate a chain set saying X, Y, and Z. Man, that is why a lot of people don't use these tools. It's just...

Like the overhead is a little bit more and then you have to go back locally and whatever. Now it's so much easier, especially like, oh, you're just on your phone. Yeah. Change that bot. Please do that. even not even change that by you could be like on the GitHub poll request, you can assign a copilot.

So you could say, I need a change set for this, assign copilot, and it's going to make one for you. Yeah, that's what I mean. Even if it's not perfect, chances are it's going to be better than what I would have written by hand. Oh, yeah. I'm often using AI to write my change sets. Even just the fact of making the file, having to go locally, make the file.

Push the changes up. That's annoying. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax. You don't want a production application out there that... Well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to century.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

Snowy Owl says, using an IDE that is not VS Code, what are your views on that? I hear good things about Zed and warp having its own IDE. Curious if you have switched from VS Code or not. Being hesitant to swap is mostly because of the rich ecosystem of VS Code extension. Yeah, this is...

We just did an entire episode on Zed. I also talked to the WebStorm people at the meetup. Now I have a Zed and a WebStorm sticker on my laptop, so I'm wrapping them both. The Warp one is interesting because Warp... is now not just a terminal but it's like an actual like ui for editing stuff you know it's kind of a mix of like cloud code but it has much better UI for it in my opinion I don't still don't just love working directly in the terminal but

That's pretty neat. And then Zed, yeah, man, I'm pretty excited about it, especially once we did that episode with Scott and he kind of explained that the ecosystem has caught up on a lot of the problems. So what do you think? Yeah.

I've been using Zed ever since we recorded that episode. And I'm almost embarrassed that episode came out when it did because like a day or two afterwards, they fixed so many of the things that I had that were like, like so many of the UI things that they were, they like nailed. And now there is.

like a ui for updating your settings and stuff not that i don't care about i like uh you or uh json settings page but like sometimes the ui is nice now there's a ui for that and like they've really nailed a lot of like little things here and there within uh the latest updates of zed and it just keeps getting better so i i've been continuing to

That said, I'm the type of freak that's changing what I'm using 24-7. I probably changed my browser twice since we recorded this episode and when it's released. And so I'm always bouncing around on different stuff. That said, the things that I've been really liking about Zed is just how many of the things I would reach to extensions for exist inside of the editor. I'm looking for this tweet desperately right now because...

Searching on Twitter is impossible. So I asked somebody. Somebody said I can't go to Zed. The Grok is so good for finding tweets because you could just describe what you what you're thinking of. Like at GitHub Universe, there was. this woman who who did this like music code thing and it was like a like a techno her name is is it djl DJ Dave. And I didn't know who it was, and I didn't know what the tool was. I knew Scott knew, but before I bugged Scott, I just typed into Grok being like...

There's something where it's like a JavaScript to make music and they were at GitHub Universe and they're like, DJ Dave did it with this thing called. I forget what it's called again. What's it called? Strudel. Strudel. Is it strudel? It's a German word, right? Strudel. We love strudel. Yeah, Grok is very good at finding tweets sometimes. Yeah, I didn't find it. What are you searching for? Either I had a tweet about...

We had something about the Zed episode and somebody said that they liked Zed, but the extensions that they used did not exist for it. So I said, hey, what are these extensions that you're using? And they responded with a big old list of bunch of extensions. I will say most of them, if not all of them, like were features that exist.

inside of Zed without needing an extension. And many of them actually exist now within VS Code without an extension. I think we've gotten into the point where VS Code has existed for so long, we're using all these different

extensions that you've just had installed for so long that you don't even ever think did the editor go back and add this feature. So I know a lot of people think that there's some things that they need their extensions for that they just straight up don't. Now granted, I'm not I'm not saying that all of their extensions do exist or everyone's extensions do exist. I will say I'm not missing a whole lot in the Zed ecosystem lately. I'm just not. I find it's helpful to sometimes just like.

reevaluate before you like just just try it you know and maybe you find out you don't need it and maybe you find out something that is like ah that was a killer feature from vs code that i cannot do without but sometimes even with like the whole like prettier in es lint and then switching to something like biome or what's the new v the one from beat what is it oxland oxland things like that it's just like they're trying to get to parody because that's what everybody

the whole industry is built on. But sometimes maybe it's worth just like reevaluating and saying, yeah, maybe I didn't need all those 8000 plugins for my my linter. Yes. Yeah. Like some of them are like. Claude code for VS code. Oh, so Claude code is baked into Zed. Codex, baked into Zed. Yeah, GitHub pull requests, that still doesn't exist, but the Git stuff is good. Git lens, do you use Git lens? Oh man, no, no, I use error lens. Yeah, same.

Yeah, Errolens for sure. Who needs that? Who wants to see while you're coding who authored each chunk of code? I think GitLens does a lot more than that, but it also is heavy. it's very heavy yeah yeah so there's a lot of extensions i personally have been like i said riding with with Z for a bit. And I got to say, there's some really, really great things about it. My computer no longer, it feels like it's taking off 24 seven. And I do love VS code still. I will say that. So no shade on VS code,

But there's been something really nice about using this. That's fresh. Man, the thing I keep keeps bringing me back to cursor is tab completion. Yeah. And like the tab completion. and then like next tab where like it knows where you want auto imports things when you use them That stuff is so good in Cursor. And I keep going back to VS Code for a day or two, and their tag completion is not as good.

Zed's isn't as good either. Yeah. Zed's auto completion or tab completion isn't good. But let me tell you what's better about Zed. Is it so much faster with code actions? There's just such an inherent latency in some of those things. auto importing or any of that stuff I found to be exquisitely fast in Zed.

Even like something as stupid as spell checking, man, spell checking in VS code is a pain in the ass. It is probably the extensions or whatever, but in Zed, it's just so simple just to add to global. dictionary whatever and it's just so fast my spell checker in vs code or cursor it like the little light bulb when there's a spelling mistake it like puts it in the wrong spot for i have some weird zoom setting set up

But yeah, that is a pain in the butt. It's a pain in the butt. How is that not native in, in VS code? It should be. Cause I have, I have a list of like 800 words or something silly like that of just coding words. that don't actually exist in the English language. Spell check, man. Agentically. Yes. Oh, there's so many. Talinsky. Yes, that's a good one. It never gets. So sorry, snowy owl, give it a try. Use it. You might like it.

Very good. Weigart from, and I believe this is the Netherlands. I'm doing a dumb American thing where I don't recognize the flag. Weigart from the Netherlands. Hi guys. I find myself listening to syntax quite a bit, even though I'm primarily a WordPress. developer most of my customers want.

WordPress. I've often considered going headless and switching to a more modern stack, at least for the front end. Being a WordPress dev is not exactly something to brag about these days. Hey, my God, as long as you've got customers, you can brag. about it but i have never been convinced that i would win anything by doing that sure building a front end in a framework like astro or eleventy might provide a better dx in some areas but it complicates things in many other ways yes it does

Queering data, handling authentication and server management. I need two servers instead of one, one for the backend and one for the front end, all becoming more difficult. So I'm curious, would you guys recommend a switch to a headless approach or should I just continue rolling PHP templates? blitz like it's 2010. I lean towards the latter, but I'd love to be convinced I'm wrong. Hey, listen, I think it's more valuable than ever to just ship

this type of thing, because we have page transitions. Now we have way better usage for all kinds of front end stuff with CSS. So you can get really great experiences. And as long as your app.

flies and is fast and looks modern it doesn't matter what you're building it in i really don't think you need to do a headless approach here every single time i've done a headless front end to a site like drupal or wordpress or magento even like i have regretted that almost immediately because you do have to reimplement so many things now there is a time when i found it to be

nice uh if you have like a static site and a static site works really well for this stuff but if you have a site that's being like constantly content edited and stuff like that you gotta rebuild it every time this time you change something yeah dude your clients hate that

They hate it. They also hate that they now have two URLs to manage. They hate that they have to pay or potentially host two different things in two different places. Yeah, I saved it. Why isn't it on the site? You got to wait for the site to build. Okay, what year is this? Yeah. The huge reason that people use WordPress is that it comes batteries included and it has a massive ecosystem of plugins and you will be giving up.

All of that. If you go headless, you're giving up like you would be re-implementing current page in the nav, current page parent in the nav. You know, you'd be re-implementing like you'd have to rebuild the website every single time that you have there in that. Seems like it sucks, especially like, oh, I want a quick store. Boop, boom, WooCommerce done. You're selling stuff in like 10 minutes, you know, whereas like, oh, now I have to.

Pay $900 a month for Shopify. Add to card. I got to do this or that. Yeah. To me, if you want to do UIs that aren't... like that our our astro or something like that like i wouldn't bother with wordpress as a back end and i'd go straight to something like supabase or something plus like plus you can just write like i would probably spend my time on just like

getting a modern WordPress development workflow in place. You know, you got Git, you have a whole deployment platform, you have a whole data syncing thing. You figure out how to do your image generation so that it's on a CDN, your proper caching page transition.

there's so much of like the web that you can just apply to wordpress and then just stick with old faithful as like a battle tested cms yeah whatever you do do it well uh yeah you'd love to be convinced otherwise i'm not here to convince you other though i think if you're you're skilled in that keep rocking it so no that the headless benefit is for for companies that need like a cms And then they need that data to be pulled into multiple locations, you know? Yes.

Sanity is a really good example. People who are using Sanity will pull that data into their mobile app. They'll pull it into their like they pull it into restaurant like signage in the past. They need like a single spot for all of their content, you know. as well as all of their images and videos and all of that stuff and they can pull it into multiple spaces and or they want to pull it into their own application you know but if you're just building a straight-up website

And you're not using like a, like a page builder and like a Squarespace or whatever. Yeah. I probably would stay there. Word. Harry says, how do you organize TypeScript types in front end projects? Do you keep them? local to each file as needed or maintain a dedicated types directory shared on global definitions as my project grows i find my type definitions becoming more scattered and disorganized so i'm curious about best practices so

What I'll do is if I'm like typing like an entire module that maybe doesn't have types, that goes in the type directory. If I have something that is global.

to the entire project maybe it lives on global scope maybe it lives on the window that goes into like a types directory so i'll almost always have a types directory in there or at the very least like a types file i'll often lean towards just using like a types dot ts file so that it's regular javascript instead of just like a d.ts file there are cases for both of course and then as i'm like building out stuff i'll often try to keep the types that are specific to that file

in that file as well and if i find that it is like like for example i'm i'm working on something right now that has like a constants file and it has a has a bunch of different types for what those constants look like. I'll just keep them alongside. I'll just export the type of those right

right alongside where they are defined, I feel like that's a little bit better. Where it starts to get hairy is where you're importing both ways from different files. That kind of gets really annoying. And if you're using them in many, many... files probably more than five files i'll then do a typescript has very good refactoring tools you can just use the typescript refactoring tools and and put them bring them out of that file move them to your types

folder or types file and then you can update it will just automatically update the rest to where those are referenced in your file i've been leaning more and more on like i i know this isn't practical in every use case but like You got sources of truth. So you have like your drizzle schema and then you're inferring your select types. You're inferring your, your insert types. And then you use those.

pretty much everywhere and then you're combining them or whatever to me like as few definitions as possible for the same data like if i have a show type I don't want the show type to be defined in eight different places just ever slightly differently. I'm just going to use the show type. Once ever. Yes. Once ever for any given type. Because that can happen. Or none. Infer it all. Infer it all. Right.

I'm working on a function right now that generates steps. It's an array of arrays and each item in that second array is called a step. And I didn't define a separate type called step. I simply just am inferring it based on the returned value of that function. That can bite you in some cases, but in this case, it's beautiful. So I don't have to explicitly go type it and then hope that I match it up. my return value.

Yes. Yeah. So I know sometimes you can get into it, though, where you're in a component and you're like, oh, I'm just going to define the types for this thing while I'm here. And then you just handwrite them. And the next thing you know, there's drift and you have. Yeah, you have two spots. yeah so css variables are like that too don't you think where it's like oh that color is a little bit different than i have had here previously yes they can be a bit like that sadique

I'm a developer in a midsize company in a small town in Czechia, and I've been doing this for about eight years. We've always... built custom JavaScript apps, mostly React, Vite, and Nest JS. We also create small libraries to make our development easier, mainly common functions, components, et cetera. And with AI, it's become even smoother, almost like.

autopilot. But I've always thought one day I could become not just an app developer, but also give back to the community, build some cool libraries and maybe make more low level things. I know the recommended path is to study more, dig deeper and contribute to open source like fixing bugs and gradually leveling up. I wonder how much is actually under my control. Is it just about...

being a really good and consistent, or is there also a big element of luck involved? For example, not every actor ends up in Hollywood, no matter how hard they try. So what percentage would you say is luck and what percentage would you say is an effort? effort, and how would I know if I have it in me to become that kind of expert. Sadiq, there is nothing other than just doing it. There's nothing other than just doing it. It took me a long time to learn this, but just put stuff on GitHub.

I've been putting stuff on GitHub for a long time. One of the very first things I ever made that I put on GitHub was dumb. It was not life-changing. It's not... Well... It still is. Don't say that. That's not nice. But you're probably more right than not. What it was, it was a package that simply just faded in elements on a page sequentially. And I called it.

DTF down to fade. And it was a jQuery plugin. Thank you. And you just put it on there and it just faded elements in. I can tell you offhand, like nobody used that thing. But I put it out there and I did it. And now I just do that all the time. If I'm making something.

You just put it on GitHub. Maybe you post it on like a discord channel or something like I wrote a service worker for local caching and SvelteKit. What did I do? I put it on the SvelteKit discord and say, Hey, I just made this. I'm not looking for any notoriety from that. But like people see that, that might be like something that might tickle someone's fancy, right? Somebody might be like, oh.

I need that. Just the other day, I've been thinking about this even more myself because I have all these internal tools. I have my own CSS framework that I use for everything. It's like so I published my CSS framework, I made a little doc site for it and I shared it and people were We're excited to see it. So it's like you just do it, man. There's whether it's luck or whatever. It's not about seeking notoriety. It's not about seeking any sort of fame or whatever. It's about like just.

That's what the web's for, man. You made something, just put it on GitHub, throw it up there, and then feel free to share it. If you share it and nobody likes it, no foul. Yeah.

It's amazing how the people that put themselves out there are seemingly very lucky. And the harder they try, the more lucky they get. So it's not about steadying up and becoming better. It's simply just... throw your stuff out there something is going to catch on as useful people are going to start using it and you're going to learn a ton by fire by figuring out oh man now we need like what what is the thing we talked about earlier contributing change sets

Change sets. Yeah. Now we need change sets. Now I need a release process. Now I need like all of this stuff. And you're going to just like, you're going to get really good, really quick once these things take on. So yeah, put yourself out there. That's probably my entire career is owed. to myself, just putting myself out there probably before I should have. And it's worked out. Yeah. And you can feel very self-conscious about doing that. But I would recommend just trying to release some of that.

Because I feel very self conscious about anything that I publish these days, no matter what, and I publish a lot of stuff. And so there's always going to be people who find it to be not useful or not interesting, but there might be somebody who does.

People are not going out of their way to find stuff that is not useful. Like, you know, people are not going out of their way to find stuff they don't like. I don't know about that. Modern internet people is like mostly just talking about what they don't like. That's true. You ever like look at the comments of like... plumbing tutorial for beginners and someone's like I've been plumbing for 37 years and I like what are you doing watching a plumbing tutorial for beginners move along

Right. Yeah. What are you doing? Yeah. I always hated that when I had like a tutorial that was very clearly aimed at beginners and somebody been like, why are you doing it this way? Because I'm teaching, I'm teaching it. I'm not saying this is the best practice for, I'm teaching.

how to understand the concepts that's not for you it's not for you yeah question from confused agency cto says i've been working at my current company for 10 years we started as the second person that's

sent us a question after 10 years. We have a small team of 10 and we're focused on custom software development for SMEs, small to medium-sized enterprises. So it sounds like they're like an agency and they crank out custom software. Today we're... the digital division of a consulting firm with over a thousand employees i hold a cto role wow that's

That's pretty high. A thousand CTO of a thousand people. Mainly because I've always driven innovation and had broad knowledge thanks to my passion for learners. However, I feel overwhelmed. Many technicians prefer sticking to familiar methods and don't... share my enthusiasm for continuous improvement, which makes most of the projects rely heavily on me. Also, sometimes I wish I had someone to learn from right now.

I learned through my own effort and research, and I worry that if I ever move to a product-based company, my knowledge might be too general, not as specialized as someone who spent 15 years doing the same thing. This makes me consider switching from consulting to... product development to gain depth.

and to stay competitive. I could move to a company with less workload, more pay and fewer responsibilities. Sounds good. I'd lose the flexibility and freedom that I've owned here. I'm facing the classic dilemma. Stay for comfort or make a change. to embrace new challenges, any recommendations? So this is always an interesting question that we get. It's just like, what do I do? Sounds like you're kind of tapped out.

of this the fact that you even went and and wrote this question and asked us sounds like you're probably considering something like that it is very tempting to always stay where you're comfortable and stay what you're always doing But man, I know a lot of people, even at this past GitHub Universe conference, I bumped into somebody who I did consulting with like 15 years ago, and now they're doing...

They're doing something totally different. It's like, man, that person does a great job at being able to adapt to these different types of products. And also, I've never met a CTO at a product company that...

It feels like their their skills are not broad enough. You know, there's so many problems that you hit and so many things that you can you can get in on. So. i would say go for it i think this is probably a good especially if you're feeling a little burnt out you're feeling a little overworked and you want a new uh role people are always looking for someone that's hungry always learning always wanting to try new stuff and

10 years at an agency that doesn't like to try new stuff, that seems like you have put in more time than most would have. Yeah, it's tough. Yeah, I did agency work for a long time and I really loved it. And let me tell you that the differentiators between the agency that I love to work in and the one that I did not like to work in because there were two I really liked. One agency, Wes, like 2,000 people. Big agency. One agency.

12 people very small it was the one in the middle that was like 48 people that i really didn't like to work in And the reason why I really didn't like working for that agency was because no one gave a shit. This was like well past the era of icon fonts and vector icons. And I was still getting raster icons. And they were just like.

The designers were just like, huh, this is what it is. I'm like, you don't even have a vector version of this icon for me. The icon is pixelated in your PSD and like some of the pixels are cut off. Like you do not care. You're so checked out and all the other developers.

were like doing who knows what playing on their phones at work and stuff like i'm here to build good stuff and it feels like i'm one of the only people that is here to build good stuff so totally i i totally get you go with that passion code man Go with it, man. Especially right now. We just had a question. Everything is changing right now. And if you're excited about this stuff, there's certainly a lot of people who are just like, I...

don't feel like having to learn all of this new stuff right now. I don't feel like changing up everything we've done. And a lot of these businesses are just like gutting core parts of their product and switching them over. to a lot of this ai stuff so if you're excited about it man there's probably lots of companies that are looking for someone like you

If it doesn't work out, don't blame us because it might be a totally wrong decision as well. I don't know. This is just a short question. I hope no responsibility for this.