My early blog posts were around sublime text and
How you can be sort of like a power user in sublime text, but the way that it makes sense in my mind
Also makes sense in their mind, and I realized that I I have a pretty good way of
Describing how things work because I don't know that I would have kept with it if I had
200 listeners per episode or something like that for for a year, you know, it's a bit of a grind
Yes, keep going. I'm sure you know
Yeah, it's really hard to keep up. Yeah, that's really it's a lot of work behind the behind the camera
Yes, oh, yeah women who did this like 30-day green smoothie challenge
Where you sign you go to their blog you sign up for the 30-day green smoothie challenge you get 30 recipes
And you just stick with it and they built this amazing community
And I was like I should do that with JavaScript, you know is like I look back at my entire career and like
What did I do that like really helped helped people and changed the world and it sounds silly
But it a lot of people learn to code through that this podcast platform that we're talking on right now Riverside the it was built
By a guy who took my course. He's like I'm gonna build a podcast platform
He took my node course are the type of developer who AI will take their job for me as a developer
I think you absolutely need to lean into using AI when you're coding
And I'm at a point now where I'm like, there's another VS code fork, you know, oh, there's another AI thing
There's an it's like, oh, this is that that talk I did a year ago is 100% obsolete. It's all different now
It's it's crazy. It was the images that this thing generated like two or three years ago
We're hilarious and now they can make invincible video
Like if you think oh, I'm gonna ignore it because it can goof up you're I'm sorry, but it's gonna it's gonna keep getting better
What do you think is the secret formula that make this online courses successful?
You mentioned one of them, which is how you are teaching to other people
I think part of the reason why my courses do well is because it's just me
I'm just flying by the hip at the time everybody said I was an idiot for doing that
Like why don't you just make a sign up and you can access all your courses at once?
You know the rails cast was big at the time where you
listening to those people is
Very beneficial because you can get you can get good marketing copy out of out of their their pain points
But you can also get a good read for where people are at and you can know what to create from there
Does anything change after the acquisition or it's still the same vision for the syntax fm content strategy and stuff like that
In fact, like sometimes sometimes people from century will suggest guests and I'm like no like the other day someone was like
Hey, can can we get this person on the podcast? And I was like that is not a good fit
You know like when we were selling ads
We sold out of all the ad space so we added another episode and then we sold out all that ad space
So we added a third episode because we're like well
Let's just keep making money on this thing or when we were pregnant with our first child
I had been
fussing around with this sublime book for
like almost a year and
When we realized we were we're gonna have a baby
Is there something in you just kicks you into hard drive and I put the thing out and it did super well
and I made a bunch of money on it and like
What do you think make this success of the syntax there a large part of the web development community
Talks about how things suck and and people think that you can look smart
By calling stuff bad
So welcome guys to here. Let's go podcast a podcast we interview software engineer to share the
Entrepreneurship and here we are on episode number three of season number two and here
We have the famous west boss because of the syntax fm
We already have the other co-host Scotland skin. This is the number two and here we have
The other course, which is west boss. He's also content creator
course in structure teaching JavaScript and I am one of
his students
And let's see you after this intro to share more about west boss story
You
Thank you so much west boss for
Giving us time to share your story with us for today episode
And can you give the audience who is probably already know you like an introduction about yourself?
Yeah, uh, so my name is west boss. I am a full stack JavaScript developer from Canada and I like to
build courses and
Apps and stuff like that around the latest and greatest in
server-side JavaScript front-end frameworks new css stuff all all that surrounds that area
And I also have a podcast called syntax. It's that syntax fm and we release a bunch of episodes every week on
on web development
That's great. Thank you so much for giving audience the introduction about yourself
And the first question that I usually ask the guest is how did the guest started with web development?
How was the first interaction with computer? So
How this love of web development started back there?
Yeah, oh man, uh, it goes way back to when I was just a kid. Uh, we were one of the first people to have
a fast internet or internet at all. Sorry even dial up and uh
I was just poking around building websites. I built a couple
Just websites for myself. I built one for PlayStation 2 before it came out
And and then I always just kind of love that and then once my space came around I was in
uh in high school
And my space was you could tweak it with adding hml and css to your profile. So I would add
Um, I would like do custom my space layouts for people
and
Along with like designing the whole thing
And like all through high school. I was always like designing t-shirts and albums and and whatnot and
As things sort of started to shift away from my space
Uh, I was like, oh well, maybe I'll just just build websites now, you know
So I I picked up WordPress and I did like freelance consulting
for a number of years
while I was in university and then
Once I graduated from university. I was like, I'm gonna do this thing full time
and I was just kind of
doing JavaScript, WordPress
Consulting good joining agencies that needed work or needed some some jobs done and then finally
The like I guess not the last arc, but I I started doing a lot of blogging
early on and that blogging turned into
Building courses and selling them and and and here I am today
That's really good. And what was your first blog post that you wrote back then?
Oh, that's that's a great question. Um
A lot I don't know exactly what the first one was but a lot of my early blog posts were around sublime text and
how you can be sort of like a power user in sublime text and
At the time I had been trying a whole bunch of blog posts about like
Here is how to cache stuff in php and and here are
Some apps that I use and here's some css
I don't want to call them css tricks because that's chris coyer's website, but
Yeah, uh, I they all did like kind of well, but then as soon as I did sublime text ones. They just hit
Um, and I was like, oh, I got I have something here
You know, you know that like you're constantly searching for
For what's your thing you see it with a lot of creators and eventually you hit on something
and uh
The sublime text stuff did super well and at the time it went to the top of hacker news
And I kind of scrambled I'm like I knew like I got to harness this traffic
Somehow because these people are not going to come back to my blog post
Some of them subscribe on rss feeds and whatnot, but you kind of lost them after that
So I quickly threw up like a little sign-up form to just funnel their emails into mailchimp
I'm like, I'm writing a book on sublime text and like
I think I got like 2,025 hundred sign-ups
Um in a couple days from that traffic
Uh, and then I was like, well, I better write a book now because uh, that is is what I told people I'm doing
So I I did that and it worked out
That's really everything and which time we are talking about the first blog post about sublime text
Yeah, when was that? Oh, that's that's a good question. It's probably
like
2013 2014 or so
um, yeah, that's really good and
You did like a blog posting for quite some time and after that you start doing more like online courses
And most of them were like a more JavaScript focused and what was the first course that you did?
after like
I would say done but after migrating from blogging to like other online courses
Yeah, so so what had happened was
I was doing blog posts and a local
Me meet up or a local um thing late called ladies learning code
Asked me they said they had like one day workshops
and
They were like, hey, would you lead a workshop? And I thought
Me, I don't think so like I'm not I'm not a teacher
But I was like, ah, sure. I'll do it because at the time I just went I just went to the last page of my blog post and
my first like
10 or so
blog posts were on php and
php caching techniques and
My first sublime
blog post was september 22
2011
um and previously before that I was doing a little bit of no j s
Uh stuff, which is it shows you how long I've been in in no j s world almost 15 years. Yeah, um
Yeah, so like that
I was doing those blog posts. They had noticed they said, hey, will you come learn lead a workshop?
I said, sure. So I put together a one day workshop on building like a theme with wordpress and
It was nuts. We had like a hundred women come out and they we spent all saturday
doing wordpress and and learning it and
People said to me. I really like the way that you explain things. It just makes sense to me and and I thought, hmm
I'm just I'm a bit of an idiot, but the way that it makes sense in my mind
Also makes sense in their mind and I realized that I I have a pretty good way of
Of describing how things work in a way that is approachable and not academic or or over the head because I I find that with
There's a lot of really smart people out there that
are are really smart and uh, they can't
It's hard for them to convey
It to just us regular people
So after after I had done that I was like, oh, man
Maybe I should be doing a little bit more and as part of writing the sublime text book
I was like, well, you got to have like a two levels, right?
You got to have the book but you got to have the book and something else
So I was like, I'll have the book and a couple videos, you know, I think I had like 20 videos on on how to do things
Um, and people just like the videos better. They're like that. I want more of these videos, right?
It was kind of the like early days of coding videos
So I thought okay, and then my my next course after that was one on I think it was on react
or or maybe on flexbox and
I just
I was like, I'm gonna do this whole thing videos, you know, I don't I don't really like writing
I love doing these videos. It makes a lot of sense to me. So I just kind of started doing whole video courses and
um, that's that's the end of that I've done. I don't know 10
15 since then. Okay. And you started doing video in similar time to Scott Talonski if I
Maybe it's similar time. Yeah doing like a youtube video and mostly
Technical and coding video. Yeah. Yeah him and I are are hilariously similar because like we didn't meet each other to many many years later
but
Like when we did meet each other we're like, hey, we kind of we kind of started at the same time
We kind of we we both got married around the same time. We're both around the same age, you know, like we're very similar in that way
Uh, so yeah, we we both started around same time
And it's funny because I had been watching scott's videos for years before I had ever met him in
online or even reached out
That's great. I mean, yeah, I remember this story like uh, that's like
Maybe you wrote them an email or something about something
I couldn't remember exactly. Yeah, you want me to tell the story? Yeah, so
So I had released a
A course called react for beginners. Um, and then maybe three or four months after that
scott scott was huge on youtube or he still is but uh,
he was like very early in like the coding youtube thing and
He put out a youtube series called react for beginners
And I I was like, hmm. That's gonna be bad for me because that's the exact same thing that I named my course
So I emailed him and I was like, hey, like I know I don't own
the rights to react for beginners
Um, but would you mind renaming it and he was totally cool. He's like, oh totally
so he renamed it react for everyone and then
Uh, after that I was like, oh, thanks for being so cool because you could have just like blown me off and said you don't own that
name
Which was which was valid and then I was like, hey, you want to like start like what's called a mastermind?
And it was just a group of four
Developers who kind of also create content and we met I think once every other week
And just talked about sales and strategies and recording and and all kinds of stuff like that
That's really amazing. And this is like this conversation. This is what will lead us to the syntax fm podcast
Yeah, you like have been this connection. This will lead us to this product called syntax fm and
I think after this mastermind
Other people left and you will be the only one that was there like a westmost and
You like a scott scott and you have been in the mastermind and after that you started the syntax fm correct me if I'm wrong
Yeah, yeah, so there was four of us and after about a year of the mastermind
We sort of were like, all right. This was great. But we sort of got what we needed out of it
So we we sort of dispersed
And then I was just like, hey like me and scott really jived well and I was like, do you want to start a podcast?
And uh, he's like, yeah, totally that would be really fun
And then we just like kind of molded over and talked about it for a year after that and then finally we we put something out
And uh, it popped off from there. Yeah, that's amazing. And it was like a hit from the start. It was amazing
And how do you think the syntax fm products or podcasts help you and your online courses?
And your personal brand or each other side you like the personal brand help the podcast
Um, I think they're mutually beneficial at at the time. It was very hard to start. I think it still is it's really hard to start a podcast
Um, especially back then there was no discoverability. It was all word of mouth. So
If if you just put a podcast out there, there was no spotify recommendations or youtube algorithm or whatever
It was simply just people subscribing to podcasts. They like and if you didn't know about it, then
Then you couldn't find it. So we got a really early boost
From on the podcast because I had a fairly large email list and scott had an extremely large
YouTube channel
And we were able and we both had pretty big social followings as well. So we're able to very
Uh, quickly funnel people from those into the podcast
um, which I think
Sort of helped our success because I don't know that I would have kept with it if I had
200 listeners per episode or something like that for for a year. You know, it's a bit of a grind
To keep going. I'm sure you know
Yeah, it's really hard to keep up. Yeah, that's really it's a lot of work behind the behind the camera. Yes. Oh, yeah
and
after this podcast and
A lot of things happen and like it's growing both like the the podcast and uh, you're online courses
And yeah other courses and stuff and also you push more
Like a content on youtube. I remember the three day
JavaScript challenge like a playlist. There's a lot of things that happen
Can you give us more detail about this one?
Yeah, totally and I'm sorry. I totally forgot to to tell you about the brand thing as well
They were mutually beneficial meaning that I like our brands were able to help people listen to the podcast
But by people tuning in every single week or several times a week
It really helped put us in people's minds even if they were not buying the courses
They were like, oh if I want to learn something about web development west is the place to go and I'll send people there
But sorry the second question you had. What sorry. What was the second question the youtube content that you started with like the third
Oh, yeah, yeah, I had been doing speaking gigs and
and a couple youtube videos here and there not a not a whole lot
um, but I
I remember I was I think I was at smashing conf in in britain. I was listening to a podcast about these
Women who did this like 30 day green smoothie challenge
Where you sign you go to their blog you sign up for the 30 day green smoothie challenge you get 30 recipes
Uh, and you just stick with it and they built this amazing community and I was like, I should do that with javascript
You know, so I I built this thing javascript 30.com
Um, and at the time sorry, I'm leaving all all kinds of stuff out
But at the time I was also the ladies learning code turned into a like one of these like coding boot camps
But before it was a boot camp. It was also just part-time classes and I was teaching
Part-time web development classes and I had a lot of students come to me
Saying I I need more practice. You know, I I did all the exercises, but I just want to I want to get better
I want to do more things like what can I build and I remember thinking like
You don't know what to build like my mind is just
Constantly thinking of things to build and and being exciting about new tech and and whatnot
And I thought like oh man, not everybody just has that
Openness to just go and create stuff without being prompted people need
More exercises and and also I was like sort of beating the whole drum of like there's no formation without repetition
I mean, you just got to build a lot of stuff people come to me all the time. How do I get better at coding?
You know, I took a course. I'm like, did you build a thousand things yet?
You got to build a thousand things and you'll then you'll get pretty good at it
So I was like, all right, I'll give you 30 things to build just javascript
You know html file css file javascript file. Nope bundlers. No builders. No framework
None of that a frustrating stuff that comes along with the javascript
Ecosystem, so I built javascript 30 30 days of of challenges one every single day
You sign up for
The thing and you get access to the whole course right away
And then I also drip that out on youtube as well
So I host the videos on my own course platform, but I also just published them freely to to youtube as well and that done
It's it's over half a million people have
Taken the course now. It's it's pretty wild
Um, and it just got such good reception from from everybody and like we talk about that like hitting
You know, like that was one of my really big hits a lot like that sublime text blog post really hit
I had a couple free courses that did
Did well
But that that javascript 31 like that's that might be something that like is like I look back at my entire career and like
What did I do that like really helped helped people and changed the world and it sounds silly
But it a lot of people learn to code through that
yes, and
I learned so much back then through this playlist
And also the way that you are teaching javascript back then like I want to start it was very entertaining
I didn't feel bored like yes, you're like a video style format
It wasn't feeling bored. It was always like entertaining. There's a lot a lot of sign
Silence like poses and stuff. It was really I would say intense but at the same time like entertaining
so you don't feel bored when you are
learning how to
Yeah, how to how to use javascript
Yeah at the time a lot of like a lot of the online courses where people with like slide decks
And they would they would prepare a whole power point
And then they would just sit there and hit next next next and and talk over it and for a lot of people
That's a great way to learn
But I think what I hit on is that like not everybody learns well that way a lot of people just want to see
me building real world things that is
Semi complicated, you know and and real world enough that you can think oh
I can take this I built this let me let me now expand that and build something else like this
This podcast platform that we're talking on right now riverside the it was built by
A guy who took my course. He's like i'm gonna build a podcast platform. He took my node course
He'd built he basically took the stack that we learned in the course and then built obviously it's it's much more
It's an amazing product now and it's as much further ahead than that was but it was like a like an initial building block for
people who had
Dreams and ideas of things that they want to build. Yeah, exactly. This is the was the thing that I
really like about the course that you can just for example, you think
This is really good. Can I just like add this feature or like this stuff?
So it's like you will have the initiative yourself to like I make it better and like it's more complex
And those those wins of like I made something that feels good. I did something I did something the next day
Those small wins are crucial for momentum in coding because coding coding's hard
And it's a slog and things don't work and you get frustrated, you know
And if you get too much of that you you can just throw your hands up and be like this is not for me, you know
And and like I had that myself with coding. So it's it's nice to have those small wins
You feel good about yourself, you know
Yeah, that's really I mean and you mentioned some really good number for you mentioned like over a half million of
all
Like a student that attend
And purchase your online courses can can we have like a other number that you would like to share with us?
If you don't mind, um, not a half a million. So that's that the JavaScript 30 was a free course
Um, and and that's what they call a lead magnet in the biz
um, which is like
You see a lot of people try to put crappy stuff out there to try to capture you and then force you down some funnel
Um, and I've always been like a fairly
Savvy marketer guy, but I'm also like I also have a high bar for BS
So I just was like, all right
Well, I'm just gonna make some of my courses free and some of them paid and that's the only differentiator between the two
So I don't know what other stats I can I can give you. Um
That's like your head. Yeah. Well, like so I'll give you I'll give you another one. I have um beginner javascript dot com
So that is my paid javascript from scratch
Um, or if you're intermediate you can get to know the language really really well
um
And like the javascript 30 is just practice. It's assumes, you know, some javascript, right? Um, and the beginner javascript dot com
is
absolutely
Exercise heavy approach to learning modern javascript
Um, and that that's a paid course and that has over 20 000 people have bought it
Over the years, which is is is quite a bit. Yes
So you currently only like to do online courses and speaking gigs
and one of the the conference that you went to is
That's I watched a video about it. It's GS nation
And the the last year version it was you have a talk about AI and the developer
And one of the questions that I would like to ask about
What do you think are the developer that AI will take their job?
Yeah, there is kind of developer. I wouldn't say developer will take our job
But like I frame it a bit. So what are the the type of developer who AI will take their job?
I think the thing about being a web developer is that it's it's always changing
There's always new stuff to learn. There's always new best practices. There's always new frameworks
You're always upgrading things and for a lot of people that's really frustrating because it moves so fast and
They they don't like that, right?
And to me I I I like it because it's there's always it's always
Always entertaining always new things to sort of learn. Um, but now like that we have this like fast movie in javascript
And now we also have this like looming AI
um
Come out
It's it's it's kind of scary for a lot of people because they don't necessarily know like
Is it going to take our jobs? You see a lot of hucksters out there saying it's going to totally replace
x y and z
And then you see a lot of people saying no, I I like to handwrite every line of code that I want and you don't you can't trust the
the AI
And I think both of those people are
They are either scared or have something to sell you
Um, and and I don't think you should listen to either of them
So like for me as a developer, I think you absolutely need to lean into using AI when you're coding
I think that if you don't you are going to sort of get left behind
Um, and and we've seen that that over the years with like the people who made
2000 $3,000 small business websites
Um, that that industry is is not doing well. Um, they're all on wix or squarespace or whatever because
Quite honestly, it's a better experience. You pay
30 bucks a month and you can just change the website yourself versus
Have to do this whole design and development and you don't you get your own business to run, right?
So like that whole small business space has been sort of taken over by that and like social media
And I think that the people that are in in that like 2000 $3,000 website space
Are are finding themselves having to skill up now because
Oh, I can't just do that now now. I have to learn how to like do some serious coding
So I can build custom functionality and whatnot. So I think that's going to happen with AI as well where
the stuff that was
Hard before like building a small business website. I died it for many years is kind of table stakes
um, and just the the the table stakes are sort of moving up and
It's no longer enough to to be able to write clean code and and whatnot because the AI can can do that, right?
and
Who's going to survive this is the people that
Can can use those to build even better things like
It's not just like oh, we're not just going to stop technology now that AI is here like oh, well
Let's keep building these like these websites. No, we're going to we're going to use it to build the freaking craziest stuff ever
that that are are even so much more next level, you know, so
um, I think we're all just kind of shifting forward a whole bunch
um, and
Everybody should like not embrace it. I got a lot of people saying like a doom a doomsday guy and all of my videos about AI
I still I don't I don't build entire apps with AI
But I certainly use it as co-pilot and helpers and whatnot. So
I think that as long as you are just kind of open to the idea of of using it as a tool, you know, it's it's a booster pack
for
For your skill set and I don't know if that answers your question
I don't I don't know if anybody's going to get out of it. I think the people that will
Leave web development are the people that are just like like there's a lot of just I I can't do this anymore
This is too. It's just changing so fast. It's exhausting
Even me I'm full time my job is keeping up with what's going on in web development
And I'm at a point now where I'm like, there's another vscode fork, you know, oh, there's another AI thing
There's an it's like, oh, this is that that talk I did a year ago is 100% obsolete. It's all different now
It's it's crazy
Yeah, that's that's true. It's like a fast pacing
And there's a lot of work it would be an extra work for you to keep update with all the stuff and every week every day
There is something new to to like a dude. There is like a new AI model
There is no cloud AI model that you would have to use
But the the point that you mentioned is really really good is
To use the AI as a tool in your like a toolkit instead of like a just like a to embrace not embrace
But to like help you with development instead of not using it because it's kind of like a speed up your development and
May it's my like also improve your
Speed of shipping and stuff like this. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's an awesome tool and
Of course, there's caveats like of course you should review the code that you got
I got bit on it. I did a video on it
I didn't even realize that I had a bug and I like published a video and I was like, I got bit
You know, like I didn't even that's that's what can happen
But people that think that it's not gonna get better
Like if you go back two years and people were laughing at the like the images that this thing generated like two or three years ago
We're hilarious
And now they can make convencible video
Like if if you think oh, I'm gonna ignore it because it can goof up your
I'm sorry, but it's gonna it's gonna keep getting better
Uh to a certain point. We'll probably hit like a
Diminishing returns, but these guys are firing up nuclear reactors right now
So they can have more power to run more
Computers like they're trying hard
And I have no control over it. So I'm coming along for the ride
You should keep up with it. That's the only thing that you have to do
Yeah
And this will lead me to a question that
Like how did you keep up with all of this trend and this new ai and new technology?
It's always changing and I would say it's hard to keep up with all of them
But how did you pick which one to like how to learn because there is a lot of things to learn
What is like a your matrix for technology that is
Trending to learn or to like I make a video or a course about
Yeah, I always tell people when you hear about it nine times it's time to start picking it up
So people like me like it's hard to keep up with the stuff, right?
And I'm it's my job to keep up with it and and that's why people listen to the podcast
That's why people follow and social media, you know, and I'm constantly checking stuff out, you know
And at a certain point you're gonna you're gonna hear me talk about it for the seventh time
Like man, let's talked about
CSS nesting. I should really check that out, you know, now maybe it's time for me to check that thing out
So don't don't go wild checking absolutely everything out. You're gonna burn yourself out, but
Uh at a certain point you're gonna realize. Oh, this tool has a bit of
a bit of momentum
and and how you do that is is
You sort of keep your ear to the ground for
People that are in the industry
So personally what I do is I I follow a whole bunch of people on social media
I have lists of
release notes
What is it browser?
intent to ship
specs things like that and constantly looking at it and then like
Once those sort of are finalized once those are mainstream once it's in all the browsers
Then it's sort of time to to take a look at it and with a lot of this stuff
It's not like oh, I have to learn this brand new thing
Because if a new ai model comes out
You're not like really learning anything new. You just switch the drop down to to a new model, you know, and
Every now and then there's new techniques and new interfaces, but
It's the same with javascript as long as you know fundamentals
Then you can switch from framework to framework, right? Like I can switch from react
I picked up svelte in like a day
Um, it's because I I know javascript pretty well. Yes. Yeah, that's the most important thing
Usually to recommend to someone that is just getting started in your development is take your time to pick the fundamental, right?
Like a javascript for the model and after that you can like easily pick any like a not gs
Any like a back end or front end framework. It will be easy
You just need to learn like the folder structure the syntax of the framework and that's it
But always like going to the basic that is the most important thing because it will be
Easily to transform learning to transfer learning from a framework to another one. It will be like easy for you
And I have a question that's talking about this stuff and your online courses and
You are doing really great with this online courses
What do you think is the secret formula that make this online courses successful?
You mentioned one of them, which is how you are teaching to other people and
Like to be beginner friendly perspective of thing. I think there's a there's a couple things
I think like one is is like personality
um
The people who take my courses like me. They like the way that I explain things
They like the way that I I code and not everybody does, you know
Some people will ask for a refund because they're like you're obnoxious or oh, whatever
And that's totally fine because it's not not for everybody if you if you try
To please absolutely everybody you're not going to come out with a good
product
I
My thing I always talk to the syntax team about is like let's not round the corners off of this thing
Meaning that like don't distill this down
So that you're making everybody happy
Especially when you have like
A larger group of people that have opinions on something
I think part of the reason why my courses do well is because it's just me. I'm just flying by the hip
I'm just making I'm making all the decisions myself and it's 100 percent my personality in all of that stuff
Um, and then as things start to get bigger
You start to round the corners off
You don't do things as as crazy as you want because it's and then it just doesn't become as good
So I think that's that's one of them. Um, and then I think the other one is just is just like trust
In that, you know, what you're talking about, you know, like I've spent
20 years in this industry
Sharing what I know
showing people that
I know what I'm talking about for the most part
Uh, and and people trust me, you know, people know that I usually know what I'm talking about
Um, and if I don't I'm able to to ask people who do know
So I think that's been been a big one and then also like
another big thing I have is
Is called make it a thing meaning that
Uh, when I released my first courses
A lot of people asked why are you putting them on their own domain name?
Um, why aren't you just putting them on westboss.com forward slash
Job script, you know, and like like why make a whole new website? You're you're your SEO is going to be garbage
And I thought no like
Or or the free courses. Why not just put it out on youtube?
Why are you making a whole landing page and you can sign up for and all that?
It seems like a lot of work
Um, and my answer to that is that the perceived value
I know the courses that have have high value
So I don't I don't I'm not worried about that
But the perceived value of putting something on its own domain name with its own its own design
You know, there's stickers for the course. Um, the perceived value is is so much higher when you make it a thing
And it's also it's fun for me to to be able to do that. So
At the time everybody said I was an idiot for doing that
Like why don't you just make a sign up and you can access all your courses at once?
You know, the rail's cast was big at the time where you
Sign up and get all the all the courses at once or why don't you do one a month, you know?
And I was like, that's that's not really what I want to do
I just want to be able to put out a course when it's ready. I want to put it on its own domain name
I want to make it a thing and uh, and now everybody does that
That's what every single person that releases a course now
Is doing exactly what I've done and a lot of them copy paste all the marketing content from it as well because they oh
It actually did work out for him
That's the reality
Like talking about like a other people copying your like a marketing technique and stuff
Do you think is the market still open for new content or it's saturated?
Especially for web development and JavaScript stuff because there's a lot of they have to choose or do you think it's
It's enough currently for
for what it is
I think there's always room
for someone who
Knows what they're talking about and is passionate about it when I put my first sublime text book out
There was three other books already published on sublime text, you know
Like if you if you take that metric you'd be like, no, there's how many books on sublime text do we possibly need?
But people like the way that I explain things and and and whatnot and it it worked out it worked out for me
So I think there's always room for that type of thing. You're always seeing new creators
Pop off because people go. Yeah, this guy's awesome. You know
so
You have to like I think it's it's a much more
Busy space right now
Everybody wants to put a course out. It's much easier to put a course out. There's lots of platforms
According video is really easy
Um, so it's certainly a little bit more crowded
but I think
If that's what you want to do
Try it go for it. I don't I don't think you can
You can sit around and and think about it for for too much longer because then you're
You start getting in your head and and coming up with excuses, you know
Yeah, makes sense
And for someone that would like to start online courses as a developer
What think or miss say that you would like
To avoid if you're starting out the online courses that you will not make with the current stage of
The trend and the equipment that we have access to and the technology that we have access to
What are the listen or the mistake that you would like to avoid if you're just starting out like a today
You will have a new course and you are just starting out
With no like a I would say with no like a big audience
Yeah, that's what likes to start like an online course. I I think
You really have to get the audience first
You're not gonna you're not gonna build a course and have it pop off
Maybe on some of these bigger platforms like if you were to publish it on a marketplace
Maybe they have a built-in audience
But
In reality if you're just like I want to make a course
You probably haven't you might not have an audience and you might not know what you want to talk about and if that's the case
I highly recommend in my case. I was writing blog posts until I figured out what hit
In your case, it's probably going to be pushing youtube videos tiktoks
tweets blue sky
skeets things like that until
just
Talk about what you love share what you know and eventually something's gonna pop off and
You're gonna know. Okay. This is this is the thing that I want to talk about because
You don't know what's gonna work. Well until
You try it and if you build an entire course
That's a lot of work to try something whereas you can very easily test things with a 10 minute youtube video
Yeah, it makes us because building a course. It's a huge commitment
And there's a lot of things that you would like to consider because yeah, I are putting yourself in
In the fire
yeah
And talking about listen that you learn and mistake to avoid
What the listen that you learn from from from making
The online courses from building syntax, which is a successful product and your online course which is a successful product
Also, what are the listen that you learn the hard listen mostly?
And mistake that you would like that you wish that you avoid back there. Oh man
I don't know that like I've had like a whole bunch of like. Oh, that was a major mistake
um
I I did at one point. I was started working on like a
javascript tooling course
And it was like at the time of like gulp and grunt and uh and in babble and things like that and then I realized like
This is this stuff changes absolutely so quickly and it's also not something that
people are dying to learn
um, so
I ended up scrapping that I I think
My my biggest lesson is is just listen to people. I often will just send email out to my email list and be like, hey
What are you struggling with? What are you?
What do you want to learn what what's going on and just just hit reply and tell me and you can get really good insights into
How people feel like I'm I'm always that's why I love social media. You're always talking to people
Always replying to people and you get really good insights as to what tech are people using what are people struggling with?
Are people actually using this tech or is it just like a hype circle?
and
listening to those people is
Very beneficial because you can get you can get good marketing copy out of out of their their pain points
But you can also get a good read for where people are at and you can know what to create from there
Yeah, it makes sense. That's your point. This is a really good point to mention
I really like I would like the currently the syntax fm gets acquired by sentry and currently
Sentry on the syntax fm does anything change after the acquisition or it's still the same vision for the syntax fm content strategy
And stuff like this it got better. Oh, that's that's what happened
No, sentry is a really cool company meaning that they've been a supporter
They sponsored one of my courses way way like probably eight years ago something like that
And they're just like hey
You want to do anything? That's the approach they came to me. Hey, if you ever want to do anything cool
Let us know and I was like, hey, you want to sponsor one of the videos in my free course?
And they're like sure and and like it turned out to be the best ROI they ever did
And then they sponsored the podcast for many many years. They basically were just like, hey
Here's here's the money for the podcast
Talk about sentry. They never gave us ad reads or specific points or anything to hit on
they're just like
They're just they understand that again developers have a low bar high bar. They don't like bs, you know, so
When it came time that they were like, hey, if you ever want to do anything
Cool with with syntax that's that's outside of just sponsoring the podcast
Let us know then they're like, hey, how about you just join us because like I think we can make this thing a lot bigger
You know, I think we can do video. We got a producer. We have
Marketing and social media. We have new creators
the resources
That we have are are amazing and it allows us to create much better
stuff, um, which is really cool and uh
Yeah, it's it's been great because like a lot of people were scared. They're like, please don't let sentry
Like screw this up, you know, that always happens when when when something gets bought but
they were we're very
Cognizant of that as well and and they are
Like pretty I don't want to say hands off, but they'd never tell us
What to do or anything like that. In fact, like sometimes sometimes people from sentry will suggest guests and I'll be like now
Like the other day someone was like, hey, can can we get this person on the podcast?
And I was like that is not a good fit, you know, like
It's I'm not we're not doing anybody favors here because at the end of the day, this is the community's podcast and
We want to make sure that
We maintain that whole vibe
Um, it's really important to me. So it's it's it's been awesome so far. Yeah, it's really it's it's one of the
My favorite podcast like in web development and currently the speedup
Like I subscribe to the other podcast and every week there is new podcast
yeah
Yeah, we're actually
We're actually going down. So we do
We do three week right now
And the only reason we do three a week right now is because we when we were selling ads
We sold out of all the ad space
So we added another episode and then we sold out all that ad space
So we added a third episode because we're like, well, let's just keep making money on this thing and now
What we're doing is we're going down to two a week
and
It was just going to free up a bit more time to do some more video content because like youtube is
Is a big focus of ours with syntax right now
And we want to spend a bit more time on creating videos, especially because like some of the podcast
Content is better fit for a visual medium
Um, so now it's nice to say hey, we want to talk about something
What's the best medium?
Should we talk about it for 15 minutes on audio an hour on audio?
Do we need to bring a guest on or do we do we want to make a an actual video that goes along with this?
Yeah, and recently like I saw that in the youtube channel syntax. There's like a short format like a 20 minute
video that
Is currently start up and one of the video that's got my eyes is
You mentioned like a
How about having kids help you with career and I would like to get more detail about this one and
like a more
insight about how
Having kids help you with your career. Yeah, well that so when I
Had my first or when we were pregnant with our first child
um
I had been
fussing around with this sublime book for
like almost a year and
When we realized we were we're gonna have a baby
It's just something in you just kicks you into hard drive and I put the thing out
It did super well and I made a bunch of money on it and like
having kids is
The best like productivity kick in the pants to sort of get you going
There's just something internal in you to provide for them
Um, which sounds silly, but it's it's true. I some the best entrepreneurs out there
Not all of them. There's there's of course many cases, but many of the best entrepreneurs
I know our parents and it's just there's something in it where when you have kids you learn
To manage your time better and to provide for them and like
Yeah, you just get a little bit more tenacious
Yeah, and more responsibility because you have to provide for your kids. So yes, exactly a lot of pressure on youtube
It's either this one or not
Yeah, exactly
That's really great for you to mention
And talking currently you are like almost on the last month of the year and here will be over
And do you have any production for what technology what that will be trending in the next year?
um a couple things first of all
CSS has
Undergone crazy transformation in the last year year and a half
um a lot of the features
Most people don't even know about just yet. You know, there's nesting and scoping in animations and
uh starting style and like we have many podcasts on the topic and it's just
The amount of new css that has hit is unbelievable
um
And between that and html
um
We're going to be able to build much more flexible interfaces with just hml and css
You're not going to need as much javascript, which is it's kind of nice just from a complexity
Point of view it's easier to code and of course you're you're loading less javascript on the page
um
So that that's one is that like I think like css is gonna
CSS is having a moment right now very much how javascript had a moment when es6 came out
And the other one is um, I'm really excited about tan stack start
um, this is a new
Meta framework full stack framework kind of like next jas or remix
And it allows you to do
server side client side in the same file, which is kind of cool like rpc calling server code from the client
And that's not that we've had that for a long time, but just the approach
To this I think is very refreshing
Because we've seen react server components for
I don't know they've been out for a year now
And I haven't seen a whole lot of uptake. I've seen I'm a big fan
And I like a lot of the things especially the like keeping things at a component level
You know, you can do your data fetching in the component you can suspend in the component
You can do everything you want rather than a page level
But I think tan stack start is going to be
Um, it takes away a lot
It gives you all those benefits
But it takes away a lot of the like hard parts that people are hitting in like next jas specifically right now
So I think it's going to do it's going to pop up. It's just in beta right now
He only announced it like a couple months ago
But I think given his track record and given me playing with it. I think that it's gonna
A lot of people are going to enjoy it
Awesome that we I I never play with the tan stack, but I already like
Know the founder or the developer behind this over twitter and yeah never play with this
But yeah, it will be yeah the the tan stack even if if you've used react query or it's called tan stack query now
It's one of those things where you use it and you go, ah, this is nice
This is simple. I get this, you know
And I think I always think about my courses in the same way where
There's very smart people building these things
but
Tanner just has like an approach ability
to him where he understands the like
regular developer
And they just they want extreme power without it being extremely complicated and everything he does it's just like damn
That's so simple. Yeah, it makes sense. That's your point
I have a question about the syntax fm that I forgot to mention
Yeah, is what do you think make the success of the syntax?
Maybe I have one of the things from my perspective is the chemistry between you and scott
It's really amazing and it does show off in the podcast
But I would like either to have your opinion about the formula or what do you think?
Make the syntax fm a success project from the start. Yeah
We pull our audience every year and we ask them. Why do you listen and also importantly? Why do you turn it off?
Because that's that's really interesting to me as well as like when people stop listening
Why is that right?
And
A lot of the reasons we get from people is is probably the biggest one is they just they like the personality, right? They like scott
They like me
They like the way that we explain things. They like the positivity. That's a big one as well
There a large part of the web development community
Talks about how things suck and and people think that you can look smart by calling stuff bad
and
That is not
Good, I don't think it's good to be critical of things
But when your entire personality hinges on saying what is not good
Or trying to make yourself look smart because something is not as good as you would like it
um
That really frustrates me when when people do that
And I a lot of people don't like listening to that as well because it's exhausting to listen to people talk about how much
Stuff sucks all the time
Not not good for your your mental health. So the positivity between the two of us is
Is probably the biggest one the chemistry the back and forth the banter
Um, we talk a lot about our lives that one is split of whether people like it or not a lot of people say
I wish you would do more
episodes about your lives
Like we just did an episode on electric cars or I've done one. We've done ones on health and fitness and soft skills
um
But a lot of people say I don't like those episodes and and to me that's fine because it comes back to the
Don't round the corners off. You know if if we're going to just stay strictly tech
And not talk about anything else
Then you lose some of the the flavor of of the podcast and then you you're round the corners off and it becomes just another
Two white dudes talking about tech, you know, there's plenty of those out there
Um, so that that's one and and people just like it's because it's a good way to keep up to date with what's going on
Like we said, it's it's a crazy industry
And if you simply just need to listen to us for a couple hours a week
And you can stay up with what's going on with web development. That's a pretty easy way to to keep up to date
I have a question that this would be the last question is couldn't you what do you think is
For example, we see a lot of hype
Not hype but like hyper growth during the covet situation and after that
This was also a lot of layoffs and during like the covet time
There are a lot of bootcamp
And people can get like a job in a big tech company like a three months
Which is no longer the case right now. It's much harder. It's much tougher for new grad or someone
Even like a someone's in here to get a job right now
What do you think is the take from this experience or from the current market?
And do you think is the market
Will recover soon or it will be the same situation
Harder. So what is your take about this stuff about the the job market as a developer? Um
I I don't know
um
Is my answer. So we had uh taylor
dessen he is a recruiter in tech
And he's got his he's kind of got his finger on the pulse of like like who's actually hiring and whatnot because you hear these stories
All the time if you go to syntax.fm 4 slash 8 45
You can listen to his kind of thoughts on it and he said yeah, like
It's it was a gravy train for a couple years. You know, you saw a lot of people
coming from other industries
Coming from finance and being like i'm gonna work in tech now, you know, and I that gravy train is
I think a little bit over
But it's not to say you still can't get into tech. We're still looking for good people who are
Smart and know their stuff
But I do think it's going to take a little bit more than
Taking a boot camp like I I used to teach at a boot camp
and uh
I stopped I don't know six or seven years ago
But they had they shut down about a year or so ago just because they they can't get people placed in these jobs
So those easy entry level jobs, I think are gone
Um, it might it may come back at a certain point
But I don't I don't even know. I don't know what to answer to you. It's it's people always ask me
Like what's the future of ai? What's the future of jobs and the answer is nobody really knows
You know, everybody who's who's telling you that is is probably just guessing
Yeah, it makes us so it's about the economy. So you don't yeah
Yeah, the economy has a lot to do with it
Yeah, it makes us. Yeah, got your point. Thank you for pointing the episode and there will be shared in the show
Not so for people. Thank you. It's interesting about it. So they can
Listen to the full episode
and the last section will be about resources
The stuff that you would like to share with the audience about searching and online courses specifically because
You are one of the best online
online instructor in web development what
It's the resources that you will need to follow or like at the frame of the that they need to follow
Yeah, um, so westboss.com forward slash courses has a list of of all the courses I have
You can there's a bunch of free ones you can take
Also, there's a bunch of paid ones on there. And so like take a free one. See what you see what you like. Um
Follow me on social media. So I post what are called like hot tips, which is I have a sign behind me
I've been doing that for probably 12 years now
Uh
So find me on your favorite platform, you know, I post the videos everywhere tiktok
LinkedIn instagram twitter blue sky threads
everywhere you can imagine uh youtube
And just don't watch a couple of those if you like the way that I explain things if you like my personality
Maybe consider taking one of the courses a beginner javascript javascript 30 etc. Awesome
And what are the resources you would like to recommend for someone starting the online
Course a book
It's can be anything
I don't know
The thing is like I I didn't take any
Any courses or anything to to learn how this stuff works
um, it was just simply
Like figure out who's who's doing well in the industry and follow them and see what they're doing, you know see
uh
What techniques they're doing talk to them?
Uh, watch youtube videos. I think I'm big on like
Just trying to when I'm trying to learn something. I'm big on just like hoovering up all the information, you know
And and for me, that's try it read websites read blog posts go on social media
Try to watch as many conference talks youtube videos about that topic as as you possibly can
Um, and then that way you have a good idea of like the surface area
Of it. So I don't know. I don't have like a definitive one
Resource that I would point people to okay makes sense. So you just need to get your hand dirty and start paying around
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's the thing with a lot of this stuff is as soon as somebody distills it down
Into a single resource
um
It's probably not it and and I say that as somebody who builds courses for coding distilled down into a single resource is
Yes, the course will give you lots of really good information
But at the end of the day, you really just need to build stuff and you really need to try stuff
And that's how you're gonna figure this stuff out
Yeah, it makes sense. Thank you so much for pointing this. This is the last
Part of this episode. Thank you so much
Westboss for taking the time and squeezing the time and having this conversation with me absolutely
The topic that we mentioned and it was a pleasure having you for today episode
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me appreciate it. This was fun. I was just I used to just lock myself