HTML All The Things - Web Development, AI, and Developer Careers

Today we celebrate this past week's milestone of 300 released episodes. Now we know that this number is a bit wishy-washy because we have some "side episodes" like Tidbits and Web News...and it doesn't help that we changed how we number our episodes in the feed at some point down the line. But despite all that, we're considering the episode that released just this past Tuesday as of recording this, as episode 300!

In this special edition episode, we won't be talking so much about web development, but instead of reflecting on the past 300 episodes of the HTML All The Things Podcast and discuss our future goals on where we want HATT to be in the future.

Thank you all for listening and here's to another 300!

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/celebrating-300-episodes-whats-next-for-html-all-the-things

This week we had the pleasure of sitting down with the creator of MacOS Web, Puru Vijay to discuss how creating projects can help land you a job in the web development field. MacOS Web has come up in Puru's job interviews and has helped him build a connection with the development community, including those that are hiring. He is also passionate about contributing to open source projects and ensuring that navbars at the bottom of smartphones have left-handed and right-handed detection. Matt and Mike had a blast with this interview and hope that you enjoy it too!

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/make-a-project-get-a-job-w-puru

Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings

AI is a hot topic these days with LLMs dominating much of the tech talk we see online. In the web development scene, chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot are able to develop and debug code through simple conversational prompts that don't require complex developer-level knowledge. This simplicity has brought with it a lot of discussion and debate about AI's role in the development space. Will it replace all developer jobs? Is it simply another tool to increase a developer's productivity? Should aspiring junior developer use AI in their learning. In this week's episode, Matt and Mike discussed learning to code alongside ChatGPT and Copilot. The guys explored the dangers of using AI while you learn, when you should reach for a chatbot, and then touch on their thoughts surrounding the future of the industry. Will Devin take all our jobs?

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/should-junior-developers-use-chatgpt-to-help-them-write-code

Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings

Vendor lock-in in web development refers to a situation where a company becomes overly reliant on a single vendor's products or services, making it difficult and costly to switch to another provider. This can lead to several issues, such as reduced flexibility, high switching costs, and a lack of interoperability with other systems. This might mean that a business is using a specific technology stack or platform that does not easily allow for migration to other systems, potentially leading to increased costs and limited innovation. On the flip side, vendor lock-in can provide benefits to a business such as great pricing (ie sales and loyalty benefits), increased productivity as users master a limited toolset, and the avoidance of "reinventing the wheel" repeatedly with custom code. In this episode, Matt and Mike discussed vendor lock-in in both a negative and positive light. Breaking down what you should be looking out for when choosing vendors to build products with.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/beware-of-vendor-lock-in

Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings

Free tiers are no stranger to web developers as many look to them to get them started on a new tool, try out hosting, or help with some basic design work. The problem is that free tiers are sometimes downgraded, or even completely removed from existence if a service decides that they're more trouble than they're worth. For those relying on free tiers to do their work, this can spell disaster and even cause some businesses to shut down. In this episode, Matt and Mike discussed the dangers of free tiers, what they're good for, and why you should be ready to pay up at some point down the line.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/free-tiers-are-dangerous

Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings

Kevin Powell, known to many as the King of CSS, joins Matt in this packed episode to discuss the current status of CSS, how to tailor your content absorption for learning, and more. The duo discussed whether or not popular CSS toolkits (ie SASS, TailwindCSS) outweigh the need to learn vanilla CSS. They also discussed whether naming conventions like BEM are still relevant since most web developers use frameworks that have localized CSS per component. And that's just getting started, the guys also discussed tutorial hell mitigation, browser support + using features in production, focusing your educational content absorption, and much more.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/css-styling-the-web-learning-through-content-w-kevin-powell

Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings

WordPress is a very popular tool for making websites that can be easily extended to get the job done. While the original focus of WordPress was blogs, over time other websites started being created with it through the use of plugins like WooCommerce (eCommerce sites), ACF (dynamic data-driven sites), and Elementor (sites that can be built visually). This versatility fuels WordPress' continued popularity, but also brews a community that believes it's a bloated and dated tool. Having recently make a website with WordPress, Matt takes us through a deep dive of what he believes is an identity crisis stemming from Gutenberg/FSE, no built-in disaster recovery, and limitations forcing the use of multiple plugins.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/wordpress-is-a-no-code-tool-that-requires-coding

Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings

With the tech job market seemingly exploding with layoffs recently, nailing your technical interviews is possibly more important than ever. With that said, there are a lot of opinions out there on how much prep you should be doing and whether you should be applying everywhere, or just to a few select places so you can focus your studies. This week we had that pleasure of speaking with Kyle from TechSquidTV to discuss all things technical interviews. We also discussed what to do after you've been laid off and then switched gears to discuss the marrying of hardware and software together into unique projects.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/technical-interviews-exposed-w-kyle-techsquidtv

Learn with Scrimba - https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings

Progressing through your web development career is unique depending on the companies you decide to work for, but there are some common positions that companies will use to help guide their promotion process. These positions include junior developer, developer (intermediate), senior developer, tech lead, and staff engineer. Each one of these positions will have a unique flare depending on who's setting up the teams but in general as you climb the ladder through them you'll collect more cash, more responsibility, and slowly transition to less code/more management. In this episode Matt and Mike discussed the common promotions that web developers progress through and how they can vary company to company.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/junior-developer-vs-senior-developer

Learn with Scrimba - https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings

Work-life balance is an important topic to talk about in the tech field, especially in 2024 with the recent layoffs and overall industry downturn. It can be easy to sacrifice some personal time to log extra hours at the office in an attempt to give yourself some job security or impress your boss. The problem is that this can be a slippery slope that leads you to work all the time for no additional pay and if your company restructures, or has problems keeping up revenues, you may still get a layoff. Digital availability is also a major problem in the tech field and other industries that rely on technology heavily - work is always ready to be done 24/7, with messages and emails coming in at all hours of the day. It's easy to just "check one email" when you get home from a long day at the office, quickly leading to getting pulled into a situation that could have you working throughout the evening. During these trying times it's important that we keep our families, friends, and mental health in mind alongside our careers. In this episode Matt and Mike discussed the importance of work-life balance for web developers during these trying times.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/work-life-balance-for-web-developers-in-2024

Learn with Scrimba - https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings