Markdown as a CMS is a bad idea

Welcome to Syntax. We Scott a potluck episode for you today, which is you bring the Wes, we bring the answers. We Scott some really good questions today on, should I use markdown instead of a CMS? No. Never. Please.

We Scott and I have several thousand markdown files as a CMS, and it sucks. Leaving the country for a job. Should I should I pack up my whole family and leave the country for less money? How should I master keyboard shortcuts, Scott? And I have some really good tips on mastering your keyboard shortcuts.

Should a young person get into web dev because of AI? This is the question we get from every person of every age, but, we're gonna attempt to answer that. And then finally, backup strategies. Well, how do I after the Halloween episodes, everyone's freaking out about how how poor their backup strategies JS. So me and Scott talk about that. Let's get into it. You ready for some potluck questions there, Scott? Oh. Oh, hold on. I like your Figma hat. That's cool. Where'd you get that?

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

And they'll be like, oh, okay. Here's a hat. They're like like,

I've been around way longer than you have. Yes. I, I was offered,

like, employee number eight at Figma or something. Oh, man. And I turned it down, and that's why I'm still working.

Yeah. Wes Yes. I don't think those I don't think those folks got their payout either because the Adobe the Adobe thing got nixed as well, which I'm sure there was some pissed employees when that didn't fall through. Oh, Node. Can you imagine? The Ferrari on order.

Can you imagine? There was a scene in the WeWork, the not documentary, the WeWork show that they did. And super good. Yeah. That was super good, and they had, like, employees, like, adding stuff and clicking buy before the, it went public. And, just like, man, to know that there's that much money on the line and, like, there's a a a future where you could have that type of money and yet it it gets pulled away from you, it would crush me, honestly. Yes.

Brutal. Brutal. Alright. Let's get into the first question here. You wanna grab that one, Scott?

Yes. From Josh Doveham.

I've been obsessed with learning keyboard shortcuts recently. Everything from Wes shortcuts to Chrome, Versus Node. My goal is to start weaning off the mouse over time and see what I can lock with the extra productivity in a deeper sense of flow. What are your guys' thoughts on keyboard shortcuts? Do they really make you more productive, or are they just micro time savers that don't really help developers all that much? Love from Vancouver.

Yeah. So me, personally, Wes. I love keyboard shortcuts, and I I do use them quite a bit. The ones I use most, honestly, are, like, window manage management stuff. And I I have everything to, like, hyper, like, hyper f to do full screen, but Scott, like, the actual full screen just to have it take up, like, maximize.

Just like stuff like that. And I have, like, hyper l wraps the current line in a console log. But I I've tuned my personal ones in a way that, like, especially in my text editor that I feel very comfortable getting around on the keyboard and then in my system as as well. But I think so much value can come out of learning the, the shortcuts that exist in anything. Like, when I teach my kid how to use the computer, I don't tell him to go click on the x. I tell him to do command w or whatever. I tell him to do command q or command v, command you Node, those things. Because if that's just how you know how to do it, it it becomes so much faster overall. But, like, one place that I've always felt has been, like, really good for me in video or, in shortcuts JS, like, video editing stuff, where I I have my own custom set of shortcuts for everything, and I basically am playing my keyboard like a like a piano when I'm video editing. Yeah. Because it it's just like once you get that dialed like, people buy macro pads. They'll buy giant knobs, all kinds of stuff. And, like, you can do so much with just the key. The keyboard's got the it's got buttons on it. I forgot how many buttons, but it's got a lot of buttons.

So, you get a hyperkey on there. You got a whole another set of buttons. It's pretty cool. Hyperkey is so key. That that is you are mapping your control, shift, option, and command

to the caps lock key, and that essentially opens up a whole new world of combinations.

I think a lot of people get frustrated with keyboard shortcuts because, a, they can never remember them.

Like like, what was it, and what's the little hat symbol? You know? Yeah. But if you if you just know that it's caps lock plus something else, you can go nuts. And, like, I have the, like, extended Mac keyboard. Yeah. And what that allows, it gives you the whole the whole set of npm the whole num pad, and then it also gives you f what is that? F 16 to f 19, and it gives you all these, like, like, oh, my keyboard is disgusting.

Yeah. You're totally yeah. I'm, like, gonna gonna throw up. Yeah. It's I I need to clean that. It gives you, like, home page end, page down, page up. So, like, all of those keys are, like, almost unused in most applications, and hooking those up to Hyper Plus, any of those has been such a game changer for me. The only downside is, like, you can't use it when you're on your laptop, but I don't use laptop straight away all that much.

I pretty much only like, my main keyboard is the laptop keyboard. I never have Sanity external. I love just laptop keyboard. And then I also use I use better touch tool as well. One interesting thing, I did a video, and we actually have to edit this yet and get it up on the channel. I did a video with John Wes.

And just talking about John yeah. John Lindquist is, like, the most, like, dialed in productivity guy ever.

He has this whole, like, app called ScriptKit and whatnot, but he was showing me how he he uses his mouse quite a bit. Because I've always been like, yeah. Get away from the mouse. Don't touch the mouse.

But he also uses, like like, holding a combination and clicking.

Yeah. Node if you hold any key and then click or right click or middle click or click and drag down, then you can do any number of things. You know? And Wes we'll get the video edited and show and throw it up on the YouTube channel because it was, like, kinda eye opening that adding mouse gestures along with a keyboard, another world of of adding things in there. And I've done that a little bit with my, like, spaces on the what is this? The MX Master mouse. Yeah. Wes I when I press it down, I can press a button and and go down or press a button and go up, and it will, what will it do?

There's there's so much cool stuff. Chase does gestures

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

You know what I have on my MX Master? I have, like, undo and redo tied to this middle scroll Bos, this horizontal scroll bar or scroll bar. Oh, yeah. So I can just swipe back to undo, swipe forward to redo. I can't I fidget with it so much

that I can't do that. I use I use it for horizontal scrolling because I use, TweetDeck on horizontal scrolling Yeah. Okay. Quite a bit. Yeah. But I just fidget with it all day long, so I can't I had it in Photoshop up to undo or redo, and I kept accidentally undoing stuff. Yeah.

I love that. Alright. Next question from Anans. JS in episode nine fifty six, and Scott you, an alternative to GitLens was called AirLens and was mentioned, but I can't find anything about it. Can you share more on this? So that was not AirLens. That was ErrorLens, and this is a Versus Node extension that I absolutely love. So I've, on the video, I've got it up right now.

This is what it does is when you have, like, a any error, so most likely, like, a TypeScript error, a linting error, markdown error, you know, anything that is happening in your code, it will usually add, like, a little squiggle underneath your thing. So what I do is I use error lens to ESLint those right beside the actual code. So you can see here I've got some Sanity redeclare block scope variables, cannot find name cool. And I've installed that, but then I went into my settings and I added a couple changes. First of all, I made the font size much smaller so that it's not so obnoxious.

So it's, like, it's it's pretty small when you're you're looking at it right now. I guess I'm I'm zoomed in a bit right now, but I I I found that to be a good size.

And then I also have it set up for error, warning, and ESLint, as well as I have customized the colors for each of those. So the background and the foreground, so it's it's not as obnoxious as well. I found it was by default, it was way too jarring. Like, the whole line would turn red or the whole line would turn yellow, and it it was just, like, way too obnoxious. So I really toned it down there. And then I finally also I said, aero lens dot exclude, and then just common things that I don't care about because I know that they will be fixed either by me because there's already a squiggle, or they'll be fixed when I hit save.

My ESLint my Prettier or whatever will kick in and fix those. So, like, I ignore anything that's like, this variable is never used or never read, because I already have a squiggle, and that happens all the time. I create a variable, and then it's like, hey. You never use that variable. It's like, I I'm getting to it. It's the next ESLint, you know, or unknown word.

This is just like spell check. I'd I ignore all spell check-in ESLint, and then the the new line, ESLint error that pops up all the time when you have, like, white space, I don't care about that. It's gonna as soon as I hit save, it's gonna fix itself. So Mhmm. And you could see, actually, this this setting here is deprecated in favor of error lens dot exclude by message.

So the error lens itself is showing me an error I have with my error lens config, and that's that's really helpful. For the really long ones, it gets kind of obnoxious, but you just hover over top of it and go ahead and read it. Yeah. Yeah. I do like that. Yeah. Thank you for sharing. I I do use the error lens myself. It's dope. Cool. Next question from Josh. Scott teased us with a really cool Svelte five service worker when discussing his syntax site rewrite rewrite.

Could could he please do a tutorial on this, specifically? We'd love to see the superpowers on our sites. It looked pretty cool. The community could benefit from such information. So the service worker thing that I did was, basically storing like, intercepting queries, essentially, the remote functions.

It would intercept them and do a stale wall revalidate using indexed DB.

And it was it's actually really nice. It what it does is then it like, initially, will just load from your pnpm DB, basically giving you that lightning fast initial data load from from your local data. The only problem is what I haven't done with this service worker yet is I haven't put in any code to do, like, invalidation on mutation, which Wes you're updating data and then you browse to the data her. And it's Yeah. The stale data.

So it is it is raw. I'll post a link in this video to the gist. If anybody would like to work on this or elaborate on this or modify this, go right ahead.

I think it's a pretty cool, neat little thing, but nothing that I've had time to, like, really solidify yet. Just, man, I got a lot of work to do. Yeah.

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

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

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

Oh, from from SvelteKit? Yes.

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

But, yeah, that's that's why this is doing that. Plus,

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

Yep. Blais says, in just listen to the remix episode and got me thinking. With the rapid rise of AI assisted coding, does the choice of framework still really matter? If generative AI can already produce 80 per to 90% of reliable code and developers can use their experience to fix the remaining 10 to 20%, how should we think about selecting a tech stack for a new web or mobile app? Should we stick with what we know now, like the tried and true React ecosystem, explore frameworks that align more closely with web standards and performance optimization like Remix or Svelte, or should we focus should focus shift entirely to using well supported, well documented tools that generative AI can most effectively interact and produce production quality code? Yeah. This is this is actually something that I was talking to some folks at at Google that work at Chrome just a couple days ago because I was like, man, we got, like, customizable select. We've got CSS anchor. We've got scroll snap. We've got scroll driven animations.

And I know it's early, but, like, a lot of people are not using those things. There's just npm install Bos blah blah whatever, and and it it works right off the bat. And I was I was kinda thinking, like, like, why aren't why aren't people why aren't people using these things? Is it because it's easier just to boop boop boop npm framework that it already knows? So the question here was, does choice of framework really matter? I think it matters a lot that the the AI understands how to how to produce your framework. But I don't think that that's going to stop the progression of this stuff because we're gonna we're gonna hit a point Wes, like, we're already seeing it with with a lot of the React ecosystem Wes it will just it knows to install Tailwind three and a whole bunch of UI frameworks, and it just adds a whole bunch of stuff. And there's better stuff out there. There's new tech out there, and you're I think you're gonna start to see especially, like, let's talk about performance and and accessibility and all those things Wes your website is going to start to get slow and laggy, and it's you're gonna have perf problems if you're just installing all of this crap when there are significantly better options out there. Choice of framework, it does matter, but I don't think that that's going to stop the fact that everything is just on the React ecosystem right now. I think that we will continue to see web standards frameworks that use browser primitives a lot more and use, like, web fetch, web request, web response a lot more so that you can pick up these new things.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it really matters.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, some people would just say, as long as the code works, whatever. But, man, does some of the code is so nonperforming.

It's so dog.

It's duplicating

stuff left and right. It's hard to maintain up the wazoo. Yeah. To maintain.

You edit one thing, and your CSS doesn't cascade because everything is set with individual micro styles on every single individual elements. And now you're editing a ton of billion things everywhere.

It is tough. What I'm hopeful for is that as AI matures, the systems in which the code is generated will start to be able utilize more modern techniques, more performant techniques rather than just what was the most code on GitHub that day Yeah. Which was questionable.

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

you see that a lot with especially projects where, like, a back end Python dev has Totally. Built it. And you need a UI, you know, and you you reach for some and and they've also been around for ten years. You know? Yeah. HTML JS bad. CSS is bad. Wes. So I think yeah. It's I hope and pray that everything will get better, especially as like, even these UI frameworks start to pick up a lot of the new built in primitives. You know? Like, these UI frameworks are not gonna go away, but they will start to use popover and anchor, and that's going to reduce a lot of the code that is necessary. It's gonna be way more declarative.

We'll use the new Vocers API. That's probably gonna be a big one as well. And I think that that stuff is significantly simpler, and AI likes Node, clean, declarative, simple UIs.

Yes.

Sick. Alright. Next question from Pointy.

For a Greenfield SaaS today, would you pick a batteries included framework like Laravel or Rails or go lean with a minimal stack? What specific criteria make that choice future proof? Yeah. I think most people would probably want to pick, something that is mature, widely supported, popular, stuff that people like and use. So many times Wes you're you're building these stacks out, you're like, who do I know that's a good developer? Who is gonna work on this? And what do they know? And what are they skilled at? And let's build that stack around what we're most comfortable in. I mean, something like Rails has certainly, like, worked for a lot of people.

React in general pnpm any kind of node ecosystem, you're gonna have a wide variety of developers who can work in those systems, you know, database technology and stuff like that. It really depends what the SaaS today is. So just to say, for a greenfield SaaS, you can't really give a generic answer to that because if you were building Century, right, Century has very different data needs than, let's say, an email app or FreshBooks or a financial tracking app. All of these have very different needs in what type of data they're storing and how they're storing it and where they're accessing it. If you're asking me personally, I'm using SvelteKit and Drizzle and BetterAuth because that's the stack that I like. And it's, but, like, that's not a tried and true stack of it's not, like, the most mature stack out there, but I like it. So that's why I would pick it. I'm a effective effective with it.

So it it really depends it depends on what you're building.

Yeah. I I'm picking something that is all in, like a meta framework.

I'm picking nothing too crazy, too new.

I don't wanna spend my days chasing updates and and changing things around, but it's certainly 100% TypeScript stack so that all the types flow through. You're not fussing with what server rendered, what's client render. You're not you're not jumping through that hoop at any point. We'll keep going with the next question because it's somewhat of a a similar question. Kurt Motus says, hello, Wes and Scott. He included a really nice message that I'm not gonna read, but thank you, Kurt. I'm a PHP Laravel based dev, for the last seven months, and I've been diving deep into Next. Js rewrite of our main site, which is multi tenant, multi language, sort of headless, coming from a jQuery background, previously with no prior React experience. Now I'm so fascinated with SvelteKit and thinking about finally getting my band's website off of localhost.

Yes.

Yeah. Localhost is the new, garage. You know? You just gotta get it out of localhost.

I've built a prototype with a headless Next. Js site using WordPress roots as a CMS.

It works okay. I can create pages, update content, and pull into Nextiva the WordPress API, but I'm second guessing myself. I feel stuck in the classic dev dilemma.

Is Next. Js overkill for a banned website? Would something like payload or another headless CMS be smarter? Or is a repo as a CMS, which JS markdown MDX files and Git, actually the simplest and best fit? And how much would you lean on platforms like Vercel for something like this? So the question is, if you're building a band website today with some media, show dates, tour, adventure updates, what would you pick as your stack, and how would you balance a fun playground for me as a dev versus simple and sustainable to maintain? Yes. So as somebody who has two very large markdown based websites, my own personal blog, which has something like, I don't know, 1,200 markdown files, and the Syntax website, which has, what, probably close to a thousand markdown files. Yeah. Markdown as

Content.

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

You gotta manage it through Git. Yeah. Yeah.

No fun. Honestly, the best move is, like, some sort of framework that pulls from an existing CMS that is very good. And if you wanna update your website, you simply log in to the CMS.

You type what you want. You publish what you want, and and then then then it shows up on your website when you've hit publish. And, quite honestly, picking WordPress for that is probably the move.

Payload is probably a really good solution as well. Keystone is in that area as well.

Strapi also in that. Ghost CMS seems to be still cranking pretty hard. Yeah. Ghost is pretty dope.

Yeah. I don't I don't know that I would probably move it off of WordPress because you just need a nice UI to edit your content and to be able to consume that via a JSON API, and I think you have that. I don't I don't know that you have any problems that would be solved by moving to another another CMS.

And then in terms of, like, the actual framework, is Next. Js overkill for a band site? I don't think so. No. If you you you need server rendering, you need all of that stuff. If I were to build a band website, I would certainly go and reach for a meta framework Yeah. Like ten sec start, Next. Js, Remix, SvelteKit,

you know, Nuxt, something like that. If I reach for a demo, I'm picking up SvelteKit.

You know? Like Yeah. It it the meta frameworks I'm a next non fan, so I'm not gonna say next. But, like, me personally, they they feel so lightweight nowadays to just you Node? What are the SvelteKit Vercel? It's Wes. Create the thing. You got the thing. You have all your stuff there. And then if you wanna add yeah. I don't know. So you get SSR out of the box. You get routing. To configure a router.

Like It's we're I I hardly build anything without it. Yeah. Yeah. I I

the the server functions ready. You know? Like, if you decide, oh, I do actually wanna do something that's outside of WordPress. Yeah. You just pop a server function in there, and and you're good to go. Yep. So Yep. Yeah. I think I think you're in good a good spot. The last advice I'll give you is on the side of the easy to update your content. Mhmm. Because Yes. When it is hard to put content out there, you will not actually do it.

And, like, I have this with with my blog post. Sometimes I wanna just post something very quickly, you know, and then I just post it to Twitter because it's like, I don't feel like figuring making a folder and getting an image for it and file. Writing it down. Writing the mark the front matter.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And And and I have a couple TypeScript that make that a lot easier, but it still is a bit of a Vercel, and I often think maybe I should should use this CMS. Or maybe I need, like, Tina. You know? Tina CMS is a a headless CMS. Know? Tina CMS is a a headless CMS that gives you, like, a visual editor, but you can back it with

markdown or something else. And Tina still exists. Okay.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. They're they're I where did I see them last? I saw I met them at a conference for a while ago.

They got a bunch of bunch of clients that absolutely love it. They got Tina Cloud now. Oh, you Node, they're they've done it when they've got the cloud product. They got the cloud product. Yeah.

Alright. Next question from Matt. Should I move to another country for less money but potentially opportunity? I've been contracting for a company for about seven years building custom software for their business. I built this solely at first, but over the years, the company has expanded into the last couple of Yarn. Another developer has joined us. We essentially have a full time job with monthly monthly salary for this company. This has all been remote work so far, and we reside in a different country than the company operates.

Now an opportunity has become available where the company wants to improve the feedback loop in the dev process and potentially give one of us a chance to be closer and more involved with the business. This will include some time working from the office and meeting staff who directly use the software we're building.

The company has offered a a pay raise to cover the cost of the initial move, which is great, but there is quite a difference in the living cost between countries where the business is located and where I'm currently living. And I have worked out that over bills, rent, and tax, etcetera. I would be left with less than what I take home from contracting right now while living in a more expensive country, which makes me hesitant? I know there are positives and negatives to both places. I have a family, which would likely benefit from the move in the long run too, but, personally, I'm struggling to weigh the options.

That's a heavy question.

You know, this is tough for me because moving to another country is not moving to another state. You know? There there's there's a lot there, and it depends. Like, the there's the distance.

Like, is this opportunity something that they could just, you know, give you the job for six months and then let you go? Like, are there any assurances that they're gonna keep you on here? And if you're packing up your entire family to move to another country, what kind of assurance do you have that that job will still be there in a year? Because if they drop you, then what, you gotta move back? I mean, you could do that, but, man, that's that's a hard thing to do, especially if you're moving a family. That means you got kids, kids are in school, moving the kids to a new community, new friends.

It it depends. And all on that for less money, if it were me, I would probably not move. But without knowing more details, I don't think I can give another answer to this. I actually funny enough, Figma, when they offered me the job, I had to move to San Francisco, and I did not have a family at that point, but I did have two dogs.

And my wife and I were looking at the salary that was offered versus if we were to move someplace like Denver. And it was like looking at just the cost of living plus the salary they were giving, it was gonna be a pretty substantial life downgrade for us, and and we weren't rolling in cash. I mean, I I was making, like, like, $48,000 a year at an agency at this point. So, like, it was going to be a tough tough move, and that was just to another state.

So I I turned it down, and this to me, like, without those assurances, without that money, like, if you could get some assurances or get more money or something. I don't know. What do you think, Wes? Yeah. I think you let them know about your apprehensions.

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

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

That's that's why I always tell everyone I'm a stallion. I I can't be tamed.

So part of me is like, it it depends where it was. You know? Like, I would probably move we always watch that show House Hunters.

Mhmm. You know? And these people are like, oh, they're moving to Switzerland Yes. For the family. Like, family from South Of Texas is moving to Switzerland. You know? Like, it's just the most crazy change, and they're, like, looking at, like, like, a a little European, like, two bedroom. And they're like, we're used to our, like, 7,000 square foot text management.

Yeah. Yeah.

But that's that could be exciting. Like, that's that is really exciting for your kids to visit different and potentially make relationships there. So I would say go for it.

You can always come back. It's obviously a lot. You're right. It's pretty disruptive.

Yeah. But what the hell? You know? You don't wanna be on your deathbed being like, I'm glad I played it safe my whole life.

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

Same kid. So, Same kid? Same kid. Wow. He kept it. So he's, yep. So, that's two country moves with a a child and, yeah.

That's two country moves. Firm. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about

Sentry at Sanity dot I o forward slash syntax. You know? You've got a website, and you're probably writing some awful AI generated garbage Node. And you need to know what the hell is going on with my application. Right? You got errors. You got performance problems. You Node, you got performance problems on the ESLint, you know, like, large Contentful Paint. You got database queries that don't have indexes that are are taking super slow. Don't that didn't happen could be able to figure out what the hell are people doing. You get a session replay. This person clicked this button, then this click this button, and then they drag an item, over here.

It's very helpful to figure out what the hell went wrong when you have a session replay. You got code coverage. You got, AI assist. You got Git integration.

You got it all with Sentry. Oh, logs too. Don't just dump your logs into some TXT file somewhere. Integrate them with your traces so that when you have an error, you can see the logs that ESLint pnpm that are associated with that specific error. It's the best. I write some terrible software, and Sentry helps me fix it. Go to sentry.io/syntax.

It's gonna get you two months for free. Use a coupon code Sanity treat.

Sick.

Cool. Let's get into it.

Next question.

Question from Steven Highgrave. I'm a newer developer, and I was just starting to have better intuition, for human readable GitHub breakpoint. So making Git commits at a a a specific ESLint. Then, wham, Cloud Node with Sanity 4.5 in my editor. By the way, that's the old, outdated one. They released 4.7 yesterday. And what the old outdated one. They released 4.7 yesterday.

And what have would have been logical breakpoints are now getting hit 10 to 50 times every five minutes. So he's saying that, what, he's he's getting 10 to 50 commits every five minutes from Cloud Code? That's that seems like a lot. That seems like a lot. What do I do to keep my commits digestible upon reflection and useful for debugging without stopping to commit every ten seconds. Holy hell. It's even with that. What are you building? Yeah.

Is there a flow to let Claude initiate appropriate commits on its own as it goes? What are the pros and cons in in turning that over to Claude as well? Yeah. That's kinda interesting. Like, do you let the AI, a, write the commit message, and, b, actually make the commits programmatically as you go along? I don't know that I know the answer to this because what I've been doing recently is just, like, I'll have AI generate a commit message.

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

I do not turn my commit messages to AI even though they are very helpful to have those AI commit messages.

But, like, even if I am vibe coding something or having AI write a large portion of the code, I'm reading that.

I'm reading it. I'm writing my own commit message, and I'm gonna go back and forth with Wes. You Node? I think you might be hitting them slopes a little too hard on this one. I think you're you're, I think you gotta be really, maybe a little bit more, like, human in the loop here because it it feels like that JS an intense like, are you running how many agents at once to do this, like, to generate that much code? Yeah. You got bigger problems, Steven. Yeah. Then You got bigger problems. Than your commit messages.

Commit frequently.

Yes.

Do it by hand. Yes. Otherwise, who Node? What are you even putting up? Like, what is that even out there? That code, what is it? Like, yeah.

I I still personally I'm always testing. I'm I'm, yeah, I'm using, you know, Chrome DevTools MCP to use the thing and have it use the thing. And if I'm vibe coding something truly, I'm certainly not turning over every last thing to the AI because

garbage out. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I find that, especially Wes you have too many files, the commit messages get a little bit muddy, and I'm starting to notice it. You know, like, when you can notice AI art, you can notice, like, AI generated remedial? I'm starting to notice AI commit messages as well. Mhmm. Yeah. It just gives me a little less confidence in in some of the stuff. I also have that with, like, Mac apps.

You know? Like, that whole, like, oh, this is a cool little Mac app that you should download.

That whole area has been just destroyed by, like, Vibe Node and stuff. And now I'm I'm so hesitant to install something Yeah. Because it's just, like, you have no idea if this person just gets the stuff into the box and and it spit out a a Mac app at the other end, which is I feel very hesitant. I running that stuff on my computer versus just in a Sanity Node web browser.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel you. Alright. Next question from Boris Beans.

I'm 19 and have been a React dev, so I must be autistic according to Wes. Wes, what have you done

for a year? The episodes with Courtney.

People love people love that. The Spotify comments on that were hilarious.

Oh my. For a year and a half, I've been working at a Scott up for over a year. Okay. So 19, working on React for a year and a half, been working on a start up for over a year. With AI, it's hard not to think twice about the career I'm pursuing with all of the noise about programmers becoming obsolete.

What do you guys think the future for young guns like me will be in this industry? Thank you for your time. Love from New Zealand.

Yes.

Me, personally, I you can't predict the future. This stuff gets better all the time. Last year at this time, I wasn't vibe coding anything. Now I'm still not vibe coding anything in production, but I'm vibe coding personal software tools all the time. And the code sucks, but they largely work. So that's gonna get better.

It's gonna get better.

But at the same time, I'm building all kinds of stuff. I'm building cool stuff, and I'm able to make it work. Now how far away is, you know, just say what you want and the thing builds and works and is perfect with no bugs and is, performant and has no security issues and no flaws whatsoever.

I don't know. But to me, personally, I just like making stuff. And if you like making stuff, then to me, I don't think this is a bad career to pursue. I don't think it's bad to get into it. But a lot of it is caring about the stuff that you're building and liking making stuff and and pushing things that way and pushing yourself.

But when I first started doing web development, you did your layouts in a table, and you didn't even do floats. You just did everything in a table. Yeah. If there's one industry where this changes constantly Twenty four seven. So, like, it's not just that you're not gonna wake up one night and be like, oh, I'm out of a job. You're you're gonna have an opportunity to evolve with this profession and whatever that may look like at some point in the future.

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

And, like, AI is going to get rid of the button clickers.

AI is going to get rid of the people who don't wanna put in the work, but we will forever in this world need people who are smart and can solve problems. And given that you are 19 years old, you are at the very beginning of your career. And if you can shape your career in a way where you will be the smart person, well, you will be the problem solver. You will be able to figure things out. You will be always always in demand. What you are solving and how you do that will constantly be changing, but being smart and solving those problems will never change. And and I had a little rant the other day on Twitter where I was just talking about how, like, everything sucks. You know? Like, we had Sucks. Major downtimes from AWS and CloudFlare within a week. Twitter DMs weren't working. The Google launched this anti gravity editor, and it didn't work still JS a week later. It still doesn't work. And just, like, everything seems like it's kinda and, like, there's this whole of the Internet that is is popping up. And you warp starting to see that everybody replied to that was like, it's oh, it's vibe Node. You know? It's not vibe coding. Yeah. I I don't know that that's it's it's AI, or I don't know that it's vibe coding. I know that it is people trying to move too fast because a lot is changing right now, and I know that it is that people don't give as much of a as they used to. And and they're they're spread too thin because they've been laid off, and the teams are smaller. Yep. Yeah. And, like, a lot a lot of stuff is is just breaking and wearing away, and we're starting to see the cracks form. And who's gonna be there to fix that? It's going to be the people that are actually smart, the people that actually know how to fix these things, the people that Yarn are actually Node how to fix these things, the people that are are have not just, like, sort of checked out and boop boop boop into the box. So if I have any advice for you JS just, like, try to live an entire career of just constant learning and constant. And and that doesn't just have to be Node. No. But it's just like and, yeah, evolve. In my life, I'm I'm constantly learning everything new. You know? I'm just getting into electronics and to to Christmas lights and to to baking and to, like, you know, just, like, all of the different areas to just constantly be learning.

Yeah.

That is so right. Just constantly be learning because it JS. The careers no matter what. Even if it wasn't for AI,

the role would look completely different ten years from now than it does right now Yep. Regardless. So yeah. And, honestly, where what else are you gonna do? Every every other industry right now is having the same scariness. And whether or not that's it's actually going to pan out. You Node? Like, AI is pretty good at summarizing Reddit threads and cranking out some React components right Node. But, like, will it actually replace electricians? You know? Are these robots that are gonna fold our clothes actually gonna get better? I don't know about that.

I it'd be sweet if they did, but a lot of the things that you're hearing from people, especially, like, on Twitter about how amazing everything is, these people are getting paid off. I have these people in my inbox every single day offering me, like, thousands of dollars to just post nice things about their their AI thing. It's because there's a lot of money on the line right now, so don't believe everything you see. Yeah. There's gonna be winners and losers. And right now,

there's a lot of fighting in the middle and right.

Canada Trav says Wes practices to backup. After the Halloween episode, I realized I don't have the best backup systems.

Hell, no.

I have big files such as music and videos of screen recordings that take up a lot of space. Hey. Us too.

Since you guys deal a lot with large files, I hope you could help. I was wondering what tools, workflows, and practices, and other stuff you suggest for a good system. In particular, I had questions about how to handle setting up automatic backups in the following situation.

So before I answer this, we'll we'll answer them quickly, but we are going to do an entire show on local servers and NAS probably the week after this, something like that. Just watch out for it. It's coming out. So personal.

For technical minded developers backing up code along with larger files for solo and hobby projects. So for me, the way that all of this works is that you should assume at any point in time that your computer and or the place where you have your backups will go away. Mhmm. And you should be able to recover for that. So what that means is that you should have automatic backups both locally, so it's nice and quick to restore, but also off-site. So for me, I use Time Machine to back up my entire computer just constantly, and then I also have my computer running Backblaze Wes it just constantly mirrors to the cloud so that if, worst case, if my laptop and my my backup hard drives were to go away, then I would still be able to it would be a pain in the butt, but I still would be able to recover from that.

Yeah. No. I I agree.

For me, I think backing up things is something that needs to happen without you thinking about it. Yeah. Because if your process really gets too bogged down or manual or anything, you know, I always really like the time machine, Apple backups, but then it would, like, break, and then I would stop using it. And then it, like because it's just yeah. It it so some kind of automated process is really good. I used to use, Carbon Copy Cloner to do an automated full clone of my drive, which is a a nice little app to do that with.

But, yes, making the process something that is automated. I actually don't have a good process for this either, so I'm I'm listening right now. Yeah. So I have Time Machine

on a and I've tried the Time Machine, like, on a, like, a local server backup, and it always breaks. Breaks. So now I simply just have a hard drive on my Wes that I plug in. And even then, I forget to plug it in, as often as I want.

So that's why I love Backblaze because it's just always running on my computer. It's very hard to quit it. Mhmm. You can only it for, like, thirty minutes or a couple hours while we're recording, and then it will just resume itself. And it saved my bacon several times.

So that's personal. And then the second one here was for Sanity, for Yep. Not as technical people that wanna back up the photos. They have lots of photos, documents, other important things they should be backing up. How can I implement something to give them a bit of protection and redundancy since if they get locked out of iCloud or take a photo that is not on the cloud, it could be lost forever? This is this is also really tricky because, like, as much as you, like, preach this stuff to family, if they're not techno they don't care. No. Like, you see it all the time on Facebook. Lost my phone. Send me your numbers.

Like, oh, you just or, like, oh my goodness. I lost my phone, at the grocery store. It has all of my family memories on it. Like, oh, you didn't think, like, this one little rectangle with everything you've ever held dear might get lost or broken. At some point. Yeah. Yeah.

But that's why, like, as much as I hate I hate iCloud so much because it's like a mob. You know? They they every every five seconds, oh, you're out of space. It's critical to back up. That's the only thing that people are gonna do.

But I have for my family, I have a, something running on my Synology. It's the Synology Photos app. Yeah. Do you like it? And then it yeah. It's it's great. It just like, I don't use it to, like, search and view. I use Google Photos for that. Yeah. But I know that, like, Google Photos could rug pull or or I could get locked out at some point for for reasons.

So it's nice knowing that we have, like, a secondary backup of all of our photos locally on

on a drive. You know what I hate about the Synology Photos app, and I don't know if this is a me issue, is that it doesn't just back up.

You have to, like, run the backup. You have to say, run the backup in the background.

And I don't I've, like, never gotten it. So then that like, I I'll I'll go to Synology Photos, and it's, like, a way out of date from what I have in my Google Photos because that's what I use. I use Google Photos, just because we used to be on Android. So it's, like, just locked in on into Google Photos. But still, it's like, you can just if Google Photos can figure it out, you can figure it out, Synology Photos.

Don't make me enter some focused backup mode.

Yeah. I think I think it has something to do with the fact that you don't open it often enough. And then if you don't open it for a couple weeks like, I my Google Photos does this every now and then Wes I open it to, like, search for a photo. I was like, oh, shit. It hasn't backed up for, like, three weeks.

It's just because I haven't opened it. So, yeah, Node does need to be some sort of better better way to do that. I should check. I have it all on my kids' iPads as well because they've got, like, a two megabyte iPad. That's the, like, default one from Apple.

And then they take Node video, and then they they're always mad that their iPad is out of space.

And all the apps have that stupid little download icon behind them because it, like, offloads the app. I hate that feature. Can't manage nothing to manage, but they have, like, nine gigs of, like, Roblox stored somewhere and, like but you can't delete it. There's no tools to delete it. It's it drives me I hate Apple and their storage so much. Yeah. It sucks, and it's always sucked. I remember, like Yeah. It has Applebee.

They they just want you to use the cloud. Just pay for it. Yeah. Just pay Business. Not necessarily if it does, but suggestions for clients, friends, or people running smallish operations that is not code.

What are solutions? So I run a Synology NAS, and then that NAS backs up to Backblaze b two. So what I'll do is I'll take, like, a video project. Like, yesterday, we recorded, like, three hours worth of video. Right? So that's, I don't know, probably sixty, seventy gigs. And then I'll just drag that over to my NAS, and I'll I'll hold down the what is it? The command key. And what that does is it just once it's done transferring to the NAS it'll delete it off your local? It'll delete off your computer, and then that will automatically back itself up to Backblaze b two so that I know okay. Alright. I got two copies of this. You know, I got the local Vercel. I've got the remote version. Does it automatically remove things if you remove them from your your NAS? Because I just I would I have so much video, and I end up deleting,

the project file. I, like, maxed out my 16 terabyte NAS the other day. That's a good question. Video. I've not

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

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

Dropbox is still good, especially there. Drive. So yeah. Yeah. Maybe I should switch over to that. I'm paying for Google Drive anyway.

Recovery Node is is a good one.

Put them somewhere that is fire safe.

Some people like to get a safety deposit box. Some people like getting a fireproof safe in their house.

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

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

Yep. Gotta put it in a fireproof safe.

Medical in I don't know. I don't I don't have intimate images if anyone's looking for those. And medical stuff, I I just keep in my regular files on my computer.

That drive is encrypted, so I don't I'm not too worried about that.

Yep. And if you have a Synology, you can actually create an encrypted folder, by the way.

So any any of the files, you can say this is an encrypted folder.

And every time the Synology mounts, it mounts unmounted, You have to manually in, unmounted with your encryption key. So I do that for my, like, my, whatever, my medical documents and stuff like that. So, you know you know what? Somebody gets to drive. They got all that that all that stuff, just your your tax documents and any of that stuff. So just throw it. It's really easy to make it, encrypted. Although it is kind of a pain in the butt. It's just kind of a pain in the butt to de encrypt it all the time. I, like, was, like, gonna write a script to automatically de encrypt it and do this and that. And I was like, well, then that's kind of, like, defeating the point, I guess. Yeah. That's annoying.

That's because I have mine mounted to my computer all the time. Yeah. That would be annoying to have to implement. I even our doorbell does that. It's, like, local encrypted.

Mhmm. And every time I, like, open the doorbell app, it's, like, unencrypting. And I was like, do I care that, like, the the Amazon delivery guy is encrypted?

Yeah. You Node, I kinda wish this was faster. Yes. Do you know what you can also do? In macOS, at least, you can create a disk image that's encrypted as well. So you can from disk utility, you can create a disk image. You can set it to be a certain size and make it encrypted with a key, and then it just detects a disk image. Whole computer is encrypted. You know? If you took the hard drive out of my computer, you wouldn't be able to read the card. Saying if you if you wanna have, like, an encrypted folder to create your tax documents in, you would create a disk image, make it encrypted, drag your stuff in there, then you can move it around as if it's a normal folder or open it,

anywhere that you have access to that key. I don't know if you can open it on iOS at that point, but I haven't tried. Alright. Let's move into the next section, which is sick picks and shameless plugs. I'm going to sick pick a Lego set. So this is a little bit weird, but when I was growing up, Lego was just like, I don't know if there were sets or I didn't get sets, but Lego to me, it was just you have a bunch of bricks and you make, like, that, like, pyramid that goes to the top. Right? Yeah. They were absolute sets. Yeah. Yeah. But, like like, my my son is suit getting super into Lego, and and he loves getting a a set for, like, Christmas or his birthday or whatever.

And so we recently got the Lego Santa, which JS, like, as like, I don't know, about a foot high Santa. It's 800 pieces or so. Oh. And he was reading through the book, and but I was like, let's check out what the LEGO app has.

Unbelievable, the LEGO app. It does every step with, I guess, with these new LEGO steps. It's like a three d model of every single step. It highlights the piece that you're working on. It animates the direction you need to press it down. You can pan around the the model at any time just to give yourself context. You know, like, it's kinda frustrating when you're looking at the LEGO. You flip it upside down, and you're like, which way is it in the directions? It's so nice to have a nice big screen, and you just click next, next, next, and you can visually see where you're at. I found that so helpful. And, apparently, someone else on on Instagram told me this.

You can do it together. So if you get a LEGO set that is, like, a really big one, you can have two people working on two separate parts of the LEGO set at at the same time, and then it will like, it can they connect to each other via your account, and you can, like, sort of track your progress and say, alright. I'm I'm working on this part. You work on that part.

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

at at the thrift store, we found a Toyota Supra and, like, a some Cool. Some Lamborghini, like, old ones. Mhmm. And and, like, they were all done, but it Wes, like, it was, like, $10 each. And I was like, we gotta get these. So we brought it Node, and we're like, we don't have the the instructions. But then I realized, oh, you could just use the LEGO app and just go through the instructions. Unbelievable.

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

Wes. Just getting into Legos.

Yes. I'm gonna sick pick light bulbs.

LED light bulbs, specifically, they can have all kinds of issues when you get into dimming, whether they're fluttering or their refresh rate or whatever is going on. World. It's a wild world. These are the best bulbs that I found. They're Philips LED ultra definition bulbs. I just bought a new set of these, and, I use them with my Lutron dimmers all over the place, and they're just they're just good bulbs. So, if you're looking for light bulbs that don't suck, that are LED bulbs,

Philips LED ultra definition. Good. When we moved into our house, we replaced all the, like, pot lights because the psycho that lived here before put cool white everywhere.

Cool white. Yeah. You gotta do warm That's not you gotta do warm white. So we replaced them all, and they're expensive. It's light. And the good light bulbs are very, very expensive.

And cheap light bulbs suck because they last about six days before you have to replace them. So I have learned that you just gotta pay the money for the Phillips bulbs

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

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

I like a warm light throughout the house. Courtney says it makes it feel like a cave, but I like a cave. Oh, no. You got it. Apparently, like, in, like, hotter climates, like like, in The Caribbean, they like the cooler way a lot more.

So

but, it's a that's that's a red flag for me. You know? You walk into someone's house, and they've Scott, like, a like, a very cool white light on.

I I like that the evening goes on even though I don't have a lot of, multicolor bulbs. I like I like the the light to get warmer. I like it to get darker, and your eyes are just slowly adjusting and decreases over time. Yes. Big fan. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you later.