#152 How a breakdancing injury launched a coding empire with Scott Tolinski
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The schedule for me was I prep and write code for two weeks.

I record straight through on one week, whatever, all 24 videos in one week. The last week I edit like crazy and then release. And then I go to the next one and I better have that next one idea at least planted in my brain or else I'm in trouble. And I did that for about like, what, like two, three years before I was like, like through COVID. And I'm just like, I am like burning out so hard. I'm like, I have no idea what I'm going to do next month. Yeah.

Thank you.

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp Podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreeCodeCamp.org. Each week, we're interviewing developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech. And this week, we're talking with Scott Talinsky. He's a developer who, 14 years ago, after injuring himself while breakdancing, decided to create a programming tutorial YouTube channel called Level Up Tuts.

He's also co-host of Syntax, the most popular web dev podcast on the planet.

Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developer tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at wixstudio.com. Support also comes from the 11,113 kind folks who support Free Code Camp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to donate.freecodecamp.org. Scott, it's thrilled to have you here, man.

Yeah, stoked to be here. Yeah, I think the only time you and I have hung out in the flesh was at Jamstack Conf in San Francisco before the pandemic, in the before times. Oh, yeah. And that was actually the first time I'd ever met Wes, my co-host in person, by the way. Wes Boss.

So if you heard the name West Boss, that is Scott's partner in crime on Syntax. Yeah, and we had never met in person. We'd been doing the podcast for several years. So that was a fun trip. I met a lot of people for the first time at that conference. It was a lot of fun. That was a good one. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're going to hear all about your adventures and the many conferences and stuff you're doing, the world traveling. And we're also going to hear about your exciting life there in Denver, Colorado. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Which is just like a phenomenal city, the Mile High City. I love going out there. I've been out there several times. But first, the question on everybody's mind, what's going on with WebDev? The person who makes several WebDev-related podcasts each week, you are like uniquely qualified, arguably the most qualified person other than maybe Wes Boss, to ask, what is the state of WebDev right now?

Yeah. You know what? On all accounts, it's the easiest it's ever been to do big things. And I think that's kind of how it's always been evolving. But I don't know what's happened lately with CSS and browser APIs have just exploded to the point where all of the things that, like,

Like I wished for in like 2011 and earlier, uh, we're like getting right. It's like the stuff we used to, to like discuss around the office. It'd be so cool if we had a parent selector or all this and that container queries. And like now all this stuff is here.

And you just get to use it. So for me, from like a browser perspective, it's all gotten really good. And then on top of that, the framework world has all gotten really good too. Everyone's kind of converging on several ideas, but there's enough variety still in the frameworks where...

Let's say I want to use this or that. The tooling in the framework, like meta frameworks and the whole systems around these things have gotten so much tighter that I don't have to be stuck in React if I don't want to write React. But also like React itself now has several very good options on directions to go. So you don't have to be stuck in one specific path.

And I just see it getting better and better. I think we're learning so many lessons along the way. I mean, I've been talking a lot about local first software lately because it's something that I've been doing a lot. And while that's still not super easy, it's still a really good step in a direction that feels really nice to use in my mind. So I'm personally creating more than I've ever created easier than I've ever created it. Yeah.

Okay, awesome. And I'm taking notes as we talk because I want to follow up on all these items. If anybody hears any terminology you don't understand, don't worry. I am going to prod Scott. So, Scott, when you say local-first development, what exactly is that? Yeah. So local-first development as a term is a little bit bigger than I think what most people realize. There's like several principles of local-first software or lo-fi software that's like

You should own your data. It should live locally. You should be able to work without an account. It should have like the ability to pick up on one computer and leave off on another. There's like all these different principles of local first software. Also, like one of them is that it should exist in the long now where like

If somebody so-and-so shuts down the servers, your app isn't suddenly not going to work. It's just that that syncing won't work. So there's a lot of little niche explanations for it. But the way I personally look at it, because I think for most people, it's really just the data lives locally on your device in the client, whether that is an indexed DB or something else. And you load that data from the client initially, right?

And therefore, you're not having to go off to a server to pull in data. You're not having to hit the database like a remote database to get data. And therefore, it loads like super fast. And likewise, anytime you mutate or query for data, it's primarily loading it from the local database first.

And because of that, it gets to sync in the background and the user ends up having like this extremely fast local feeling experience, like an iPhone app or something. Cause they're typically using like a, an embedded SQL light or something. Right. And, and it's, it's so nice that like, I don't have to do fancy techniques like optimistic UI, because what I'm doing is I'm saving to the local database. It's actually saving there in the background process. It's going to reconcile with my, my database. Yeah.

there's quite a bit more there, like technically, like what it's doing behind the scenes, the conflict resolution, the syncing engines, how it's storing data, how it's versioning the data and stuff like that. But for the most part, you can think about it as loads the data really quickly locally and then takes care of the rest kind of behind the scenes. Yeah. How far do you think web development is? This is an extremely broad, perhaps naive question, but like how far do you think web apps are from,

essentially being indistinguishable from mobile apps? And is there some sort of frontier that we'll never truly be able to cross? That's a good question because let me tell you, there are apps on my phone that...

feel so native and they aren't. So like there's that email client that I used to use. I use superhuman now, but I was using missive and missive is built in. I still, if it's either backbone in Cordova or, or react in Cordova, one of those, either way, it's a web view and you'd never be able to tell.

So some of it is a bit of like a skill issue. If you notice like a, a bad feeling native app, that's actually a web view. And other bits are how people are loading data, like the, the local data story. Um, because there's a, a to do app that I use called tweak and it uses fire store and some local Firebase data stuff. And again, you would never be able to tell that this app wasn't native or wasn't like a native code. It was a web view.

And so I do think that it's possible today to have an app that's indistinguishable from a native app. You just have to be good at it. And it's hard. Uh, it's a hard thing because it's, it's really easy to introduce the things that make an app not feel native. Like, uh,

slow loading jank in the, um, the animations like, um, non, non smooth 60 frames per second animations. There's even like UI elements that aren't quite native feeling. Uh, it's just really easy to go down that road of, um,

It feels like a web app now. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I definitely want to dive into some of these productivity apps. Uh, you mentioned, cause I know you're like a big, uh, productivity buff and you're, you're all about like delegating things to machines to handle for you. So you can focus on whatever the important things that you, that require your like superior human intellect. Uh, but,

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I think there's different frameworks that take different approaches, but you're seeing a lot of the same patterns kind of pop up, whether that is like a compiler, right?

For instance, you know, so Svelte has a compiler, compiles essentially a lot of the framework away. Vue, I don't know if their compiler is released, but you might be able to know that more than I am not tapped into the Vue ecosystem as much. SolidJS has a compiler. There's a React compiler now. There's actually third-party React compilers that they help with some of the more annoying tasks of keeping track of stuff.

But also you have signals. A lot of people are converging on the idea of signals for state. A lot of patterns for the file system routing has all kind of converged in a very similar way, whether you have any of these meta frameworks, Next.js, SvelteKit. A lot of these handle routing in a very similar way.

And even like a lot of patterns emerging with using form actions where data is being retrieved from the server side or in many times these things are like the server client is getting blurred within all of these meta frameworks. So it doesn't necessarily feel too different to pick up a Next.js app or a SvelteKit app or a Solid Start app.

or even, you know, Astro apps or anything like that. There's always so many ideas are all kind of feeling, feeling very similar with slightly different approaches to them. And I think that helps a lot.

Me personally, I tend to always stick with one, but in the past I've bounced around a lot between frameworks and the ability to have not that much overhead going from one to another is really nice. I feel like I could pick up a solid JS project without having written very much solid. But based on the way that Svelte handles state and the way that I know how React works, JSX works, I feel like I'd be able to pick it up in no time, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And when you say projects, like, I mean, the main project is probably like the syntax FAM, uh, the syntax website or like, are there other big projects that you maintain where you're, you know, potentially getting to try out these new frameworks and libraries? Yeah.

Yeah. I have a lot of side projects. I'm a side project kind of guy where I'm – a lot of what we do when we talk on syntax, I can't just be from a place of I'm reading docs or I'm reading a blog or –

Um, even I'm just reading the code. It has to be from a place of I've gotten my hands dirty. I've worked in this thing. I can talk about it. Um, like even with the local first stuff before I did an episode on local first stuff, I'd built side projects and like five different local first platforms just to see like how they felt. Right. And so I maintain a lot of little side projects. I have a habit tracker app that I, I regularly work on. It's, um,

It's called Habit Path. It uses Replicash for local first data. It's built in SvelteKit. I also largely do maintain the Syntax website with Wes and CJ, which is a big project. And then I just have a handful of little apps. You know, I build things for my wife. I build things for my friends and stuff like that. So I'm always kind of like picking up interesting little projects here and there.

Too many, I think. Yeah. That's really cool that you're helping out your wife with projects. And you're kind of looking around. You have this embarrassment of skills from doing web development for, I don't know, like 20 years probably at this point. How long have you been a developer? Professionally since 2011. So that was when I got my first web development job. And...

It was hard because I had done freelancing before that. I'd been building sites with Magento. I'd been doing some e-commerce, a little bit of WordPress. And I had been working in web development since probably 2004 in high school. But that was building Flash sites, a lot of table-based sites for myself, for my band, those types of things. So it wasn't professional until 2008, 2008.

when I was taking on some freelance projects here or there, just for extra cash. And it wasn't even like what I wanted to do with my career. But my wife was like, you got to pick one thing, you're doing too many different things. I wanted to be a musician, because I went to school for music, I wanted to be a motion graphics artist, I was a video editor, like I was all these things. And my wife was like, you got to just like really focus on one thing, because you have all this

creative energy, but you're not like doing one thing. Uh, and so your wife, like, let's just back up because this is a long time ago. How long have you been married? Um, since we got married in 2012, uh, but we'd been dating since 2008. So, um, she, she's, uh, just, uh, you know, she's really, really smart. Uh, she's a doctor of psychology. So she, you know, has put in the time, um, in terms of studying research and all this stuff, she knows how people's brains work.

She gave me every psychological test known to man before we got married just because she had to do these tests, right? She had to do the test for school and she's like, I need a subject. I'll test Scott. I'm sure that's the motivation, right? But she knows my brain better than anybody else. So she was just like, I know how this brain is working. I need you to focus that energy and –

I don't know how we came up with it was web development. I think that was just the thing that I was best at. I had all these things I was aspirationally really wanting to be a graphic designer. I'm not that good at design. And I was actually pretty good at video editing and motion graphics, but I would have to move to LA or New York. I'd have to...

really changed my life for those careers. So it was like, what can I do here? What can I do right now? And like, what am I good at? And again, here, here is Denver, Colorado. Like, did you grow up there?

No, I've actually – I'm somewhat new to Denver. We moved here in 2015. I'm originally from southeast Michigan, born and raised like just 30 minutes out of Detroit. Okay. And that's – so is my wife actually. So we met out there. We both went to the University of Michigan and we met right after college. Okay. So I just want to establish like a little bit of chronology.

Yeah.

that tells kind of like some of your story, but like, so rather than a traditional, like autobiographical or biographical episode, I wanted to talk a lot about web development, but I'm going to just establish the chronology here. So, yeah, so you grew up in Michigan, 30 minutes out of Detroit, right?

Yep. You're like, I don't need to know exact age, but you're like a, you were born in the 80s, like me probably. 86, 38. So you're like six years younger than me. So, you know, you were growing up in the 80s and 90s. Of course, like that was a very awesome time to be growing up in my opinion. Yeah. You got into breakdancing, which is an

an awesome discipline and like an entire, you know, culture, uh, which we can talk about a little bit as well. And then you, uh, went to school in Michigan, uh, and Michigan of course has like university of Michigan, I think has like an amazing musical program that like, if anybody's heard of like Wolfpack, uh,

and some bands like that. They all come out of that university. And guess where they came out of? They came out of the exact program I went to. This is a program, Performing Arts Technology, which is a weird little niche program at U of M where there's four sub-disciplines of performing arts technology. There's performance-focused. There's

composition focused, there's media focused, and then there's engineering focused. So my best buddy, who actually is the mastering engineer for Wolfpack, he went for engineering. I'd known him since high school. We were in a band together. So he went for engineering and I went for media focus. In my media focus program,

the guitarist for 30 seconds to Mars and a, um, a woman who got second place on the voice were the other two people in my graduating class. So there'd be three, three students in each of these, uh, focuses a year and the Wolfpack guys. Yeah, they, they were in, I believe the year after me, at least, um, Theo Katzman was in my, my year. I forget if he was composition or performance focused, but I went to, yeah, I went to school with those guys. Um,

Got to see them at my buddy's wedding. They sang Baby Shark to my son and gave him some little drumsticks and stuff. So, yeah, those are my dudes. But, yeah, cool, cool program. I'll tell you that. It was a lot of fun.

creative talent in a odd way with like university resources, right? So we had access to professional recording studios and professional camera equipment. And the classes I took were like projector performance art.

So you had to create some sort of interactive performance with a projector. And I made a synthesizer that projected beams of color onto the wall. And if you stood in a specific beam, it would play a sound. So you could run through it and it would sound like somebody dragging their hands across a keyboard. Just crazy stuff like that. I mean, people were just...

a lot of odd creative energy, um, for university. I also had to take like sewing and, uh, printmaking and a lot of just like weird art stuff. Dance. I had to take 18 credits of dance. Um, so yeah, really interesting program. So, so you go to, you know, that's university of Michigan, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then, uh,

Then you get married and then you start doing software development in 2012. You start working as a professional software developer after having done banned websites and stuff for marriage. Oh, yeah. And then ultimately you move to Colorado, I think, in 2014-ish? 2015, yeah. 2015 is when you start Level Up Tuts.

I actually started it in 2012. So I started, I got my first job in like March of 2011. I think like I could even tell, I don't know how I'm good with dates somehow, like March 11th, 2011. And then I started level up tutorials, March of 2012. Specifically, as you mentioned, I got injured. I got a concussion in February right before Valentine's day. We also were getting our, our,

wedding photos taken like that week. And I was just at practice. I was practicing three or four days a week at that point. And I just dropped myself on my head pretty much. And I, uh, Ooh, it was rough. I had a huge bruise on the side of my head. So, um,

Like Valentine's Day, I got this giant bruise on my head. We had to cancel our wedding photos. I just want to talk about like for a minute. Yeah. That is a really cool field. Like I, as a young and when I was in Tokyo, I spent like a summer in Tokyo and I just hung out with all the kids in the subway station. Yes. I've been, I've actually practiced in the Shibuya subway station. Yeah. Well, Shibuya subway station is like the big one where all the good...

Really good people. I was in like the kind of the boonies with my, my friend that was teaching out there. He let me stay with him in Japan. And, uh, yeah. So, but you know, they, they would like, maybe they get some like cardboard boxes and put them out or they just do it on, on the actual floor. Uh, but yeah, it was, um, it was really amazing. And, uh, there's just so much energy around that sport and it is an Olympic sport. Right. Um, and, uh,

Maybe you can talk about like, how did you get into break dancing? Was that part of your dance studies or did you just independently get into that outside of university? Yeah, totally independently. You know, I was...

I was a sponsored rollerblader. So back when like rollerblading was popular, I used to enter a lot of competitions. I was like an extreme sports guy, right? So I pretty much lived at the skate park. And likewise, I also got a concussion skating. I just slipped off a handrail and I got like really skittish about being like kind of high up after that because it like really sucked. It was not like a good situation.

What happened exactly? So you were just like going on a rail and you fell and hit your head? Yeah. It was a rail I had done a whole bunch. Did you have a helmet on? I had a helmet on. It was in Dexter, Michigan. And you know what? I'd been doing this rail all day and it was one of those, oh, one last run, you know? Well, it's always going to be the last run, right? Always one last run. I was getting a little lazy with it. I slipped off and I fell from like 10 feet up and I hit like right here and

like pop my helmet off. Like it broke the strap on my helmet. So I hit really hard. It sucked. And, uh, I pretty much just quit. I ended up going back to this. Like I went from being like having a little bit of some juice on some competitions and stuff to like being like, I, I don't feel like comfortable being here anymore. And, uh, you're of getting another concussion.

Yeah, just I felt really weird after that. I was just like, you know, sketchy on everything. So I really needed some kind of that type of energy in my life. I'm a kind of hyperactive dude. And I'd always really liked breaking. I'd seen it in several music videos.

There was a time, actually, there was a music video. People of my age and young folks might not, but there was a music video called Name of the Game by The Crystal Method. It was popular. They had a breakdancing guy with a giant nose on it. That dancer, his name is Easy Rock, and I didn't know this at the time that it was Easy Rock. He's one of my favorites, but I saw him again recently.

performing at Lollapalooza just by himself. He was like, they're representing rock city crew and he was just doing performances. And I was like, ah, uh, I just went up to him. I'm like, how do I, how do I learn this? And he was basically just like, Hey, find, find whoever's local and just like show up to the practice. That's pretty much it. Um,

And I did that. I found a group at the University of Michigan. So when I was in high school, I just started driving up to the dance. It was like a campus rec building. And you weren't allowed in if you weren't a student. So these guys, I don't know why they did this, but I'd emailed them and they were like, hey, we'll sneak you in if you want to come.

They don't know me. I have no idea why. I've never – you know. So they used to pop open the exit door, and we'd run in the exit door, like down the stairs, and then the security people would be like, stop. But then they couldn't leave their post. So it's like that's all they could do. Wow, that's crazy. So you just recently ran across –

That was their – like that was so much that their mode is that they have like a whole system for sneaking people in. So they would sneak several people in a night and I just started going once a week and then after I got admitted to the school, I ended up like becoming president of the club and –

you know, just had a bunch of friends. And the next thing you know, we're practicing four days a week and I'm, I'm, you know, driving all over the U S to enter competitions. And, um, yeah. So, you know, it was me and my buddies. We would, we would drive down to Tennessee. We would enter a battle and then drive right back. We would drive to New York, enter a stay a night, drive back. And that was just like, or Chicago, um, or there's a lot of stuff in, in, you know, Detroit area too, but yeah, just a lot of competing and a lot of practicing and,

Yeah, grinding on it for a long time. I mean, the sport always seemed to me like a young man's game or a young woman's game because it is really rough. It's brutal. Like freezing in different positions and stuff like that or doing some of those, like doing flares and stuff, some of the power moves. It's like that's like a lot. Your body wasn't really designed to work in that way, and you're kind of compensating for it. Even like holding turtle, I would always feel like my wrists were like

Getting like... The sinew, the cartilage was getting damaged and stuff. Mine's totally damaged, yeah. But like...

It's so amazing and beautiful to watch somebody who is good at breakdancing. It is just like the most high-energy, euphoric thing. You know they're having a great time, and it's just visually dazzling to watch. What drew you to it? What made you invest all this time, this energy, in training and driving around and going to all these different competitions and stuff, these battles? Yeah.

Yeah. You know what? At first it was like, I just thought it was cool. I wanted to, I wanted to learn, um, I wanted to learn a windmill. That was like my goal. It's like one of the, the moves, your legs are split, you're rolling around kind of. And it was just like, I want to learn that. But then you learn that it's, it's one, it's a long journey to learning just that, which is a, a tough skill. And even though it's like one of the first big moves you learn, it's still like a really tough skill. And, and,

On the road to getting that skill, it's like you discover so many other incredible aspects of this art form, right? Because it's improvised. So when you go out to do a competition, the DJ picks a song at random. You don't know what it is.

You don't even, if you're in a group setting too, you don't even know who's going first. It's kind of like a all strategic and how you're, how you're doing it. And so you don't know what song you're going to get. The song plays, you have to kind of react to that in the moment. And sure you have your, your moves, you have the, the moveset that you can do, but everything has to be done to the music on beat to a song that you, you don't know that's coming up. And, and,

what that really does is it like fuels this like really awesome improv, um, improv, like,

that you might not know you had. And I've always been a music guy. I grew up, like I said, I went to school for music. So for me, it was a way to experience music in a different way. And I was not a dancer in any regards before learning how to break. And even long years into breaking, I was not a good dancer. I was good at the gymnastic stuff. My crew would send me out there to do the spins because we had guys that were better dancers to really react to the music.

and like now at the advanced stage of 38, it's like impossible for me to do that still. So I, I've like really had to transition into being more of like a, like let, let the music drive everything type of dancer. And it's like really been awesome. Uh, it's, it's been a great way not only to extend the ability for me to do this, but like,

It feels very different. And you know what? It's funny because like when I first started, everybody was like, there's no chance you're going to be good at this. And just because I don't come from a history of dancers, like none of my friends dance. Everybody's kind of like, you're going to pick up dancing. So it felt good to like prove people wrong in that, that way in the same regard, like

It feels really awesome that so many people, even today, they hear that I do this. Like, whether it's my parents at school, for my kids' school, or friends of ours, or even family members. And it's an awesome feeling to show up at a wedding or a dance event of any kind and just do some crazy stuff. And people are like, oh, no, you've actually...

Yeah.

Well, I'm glad that you're able to... It's heartening to hear that you're still able to dance. It's just like maybe it's a little harder for you to do some of the more full-body... Yeah. I lost the flares maybe like seven years ago just because my wrist can't do it anymore. So I'm getting to that...

age where I'm like, all right, let me retire this or retire that. I've largely retired spinning on my head, not because of any injury, but just because I don't want to go any more bald than I'm already gone. So it's like, that will happen. Yeah.

Yeah, so spinning on your head was when you received the concussion. There's like this video of – was that of you or was that of somebody else? But basically you kind of tweaked your head and like slammed it. And it was – your head was kind of already on the floor, near the floor, so it didn't seem like that hard of an impact. Yeah, so what it is is you're – the move was it's called an elbow air flare. And you're on one elbow and you launch –

Hit my microphone. You launch over like so you're in the air and you land on the other forearm. So you go over your back and land. So there's a period in time where you're completely suspended. But the thing that comes along with that is you're throwing really hard.

So to get that twist, you're rotating really hard. So you could imagine I wasn't that high off the ground, but I'm on one forearm and I pull really hard and I basically just slam my head into what was tile on top of like concrete, like really unforgiving floor. And my head like bounced off the floor. It was like...

Like, it looks pretty benign in a way, but in the same regard, man, it was a hard hit. There's like a guy in the background of that video you can see being like, ugh, because it was that gnarly, I think, in person. Definitely, yeah, definitely the worst hit I've had doing anything. Yeah. Let's talk about the recovery process from that. I mean, in the documentary, the Honeypot documentary, again, linked in the show notes,

You talk about there being like this eight-month period or something like that where you couldn't exercise or do anything physical. And for you, that's got to be like just like a huge bummer because that's like a huge part of your life is being active. I mean, you said you're like this hyperactive kid who loves to go out and –

do things, right? Physically, not just like sit at a keyboard, even though that's, you know, how you've made a name for yourself and everything is like, like, you know, coding and stuff, but, but you love the corporeal reality that we inhabit and you want to go out and do stuff. And so what was that, uh, convalescence process like for you? And what did you learn about yourself during that period? Yeah. So, you know, I, it was kind of a good, perfect storm for me. My wife was getting her doctorate and I think she was in her, uh,

program at the time. I don't actually don't remember if it was the doctor program or master's program either way. She is swamped with work, schoolwork 24 seven, right? So she's just studying. And in that time, I used to go to dance practice three days a week. So I all of a sudden have like three days of my evening where my wife is completely occupied with studying. And now I'm like,

all right, what am I going to do? I, you know, I could play video games. I do like playing video games. I could, uh, do all these things. Uh, but my boss and I at the time had, had been talking about YouTube because at the time there wasn't really, there wasn't really any YouTube tutorial channels. There was, there was one really, and it was the new Boston and the new Boston had been doing just rapid fire video tutorials on all kinds of stuff like YouTube,

Python or PHP or just whatever. And we were looking at the amount of subscriptions he was getting and we're like, this is wild because he's really just talking through the things that he knows. And

We both kind of had this like, we could do that. The only other people doing this at the time were selling content. So we had bought a bunch of video tutorials, whether from like Jeffrey Way on Envato or there's a – we subscribed to a lot of Drupalize Me. I think Drupalize Me was one of the big ones. Yeah, and Drupal is one of the web dev kind of –

frameworks. Uh, it's like, I think it's like a PHP framework or something that you were working on at the time. It was very popular for running like content type websites. Totally. And what was it? There's another like rails cast was big rails cast is when I used to, I love that. I love the ASCII cast since I didn't even have to watch it. I could just read through. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there were all these people doing this, but not many people doing it on YouTube. So we were just like, let's just do it. And, uh,

we, we made the brand level up tutorials, level up tuts. Um, and we just kind of, we, we kind of sat on it, but we were like, you know, it's hard to get started with anything like that, especially if you've never done it. And he didn't, my boss like had to get a microphone. He had to get like used to talking into a microphone. I had to get used to talking into a microphone encoding, um, and just started doing it. And where it was like,

All right, I'm just going to make a video on the thing I did at work today. I've done 100,000 Drupal sites, and a lot of the ways that I was learning things at the time was through IRC channels or forums. And I felt very frustrated that I had to go to a forum to get this process. Or a lot of it was handed down knowledge. My boss would be like, here's how we...

Drupal without screwing things up because, you know, it's kind of a tenuous process. It wasn't like WordPress where you could just click install. And so I just took it step by step and I said,

Here's how to install Drupal. Here's how to get around Drupal. Here's what the admin looks like. Here's what the front end looks like. Here's how you create a content type. And I just made like six, seven minute videos in each of these chunks. And I don't, I couldn't even tell you how fast it happened because by the end of the year, I was putting out like nine videos a week.

I was replacing those three days a week I was doing dancing with recording three tutorials because, again, they're like six-minute tutorials. They're on one specific thing that I know really well. I just talk. I show it. I screen record. And I had this background in video editing, so it was incredibly easy for me to edit this stuff.

Just chop it up, whatever. And I could get through three video recordings in about like two hours. And I would just do that three days a week. And I did it for several years where I was putting out like 300 some videos a year just on the same thing. And since...

I had experience in that time. I was working at an agency. It was my first dev job was at an agency and we were cranking out sites, whether it was Drupal, WordPress, Magento, we were just cranking these sites out. So I got a lot of experience in all these different platforms and I could get like 80 videos out of Magento. Magento was so convoluted and annoying to work. I could get 80 videos teaching people things. Um, and that's really just how, how it got started. I, I,

I just needed somewhere to put my energy into is really, really it. Yeah. So I, yeah, I mean, I'm just imagining you're, you're like, you get the news and you can't do any physical activity. The doctor's like, not even yoga. I think you mentioned not even yoga. Yeah, it was, it was like, man, I'll tell you what, the sensation of it all was so distressing because I,

I would get this really intense tunnel vision. It would feel like everything's kind of closing in. I was getting like, yeah, sure. You get migraines and headaches. But for me, the biggest thing is that I knew that I was experiencing like a post-concussive symptoms when like my whole worldview just felt like it was being compressed in front of me and your brain doesn't work and it, it, it's frightening and it sucks. And it would be really frustrating like six months after my injury to be like,

I'm feeling great today. I'm going to do some yoga, try to do that. And you do like some basic stuff. And then 10 minutes later, you feel this, like this closing in. And I'm just like, really? Like it's still that bad. Um, so it was honestly like, when did it eventually subside? I, I, it got better. Um, it got like more tolerable by the time I, I, I did get, I got married. So, um,

The end of the year of 2012, like, yeah, like eight, nine months later, I was able to dance at my wedding and not feel, like, concerned that it was going to be a problem. But I wasn't back to regular practice for, like, another, like, four or five months, if that. And even then, you're like, now again, I'm, like, a little skittish about it. But I was still able to come back and win several competitions with my crew, and it wasn't like I was unable to do it. And now I'm just...

It's not like I'm not careful or it's not like I'm, I'm, I'm that careful. I'm still doing, you know, stuff on my head. I'm still spinning and all this stuff, but I think I'm just, I'm not taking any unnecessary risks. We're practicing a nicer floor. And now I practice in like a studio that's like built for breaking. Um, it's like a, there's several, it's crazy in Colorado out here. There's like five studios that are,

specifically breaking studios. It makes no sense because we didn't have anything like that in Michigan. Well, I mean, that's still, this is like a fraction of yoga. I think there are like, how many yoga studios? Oh yeah. I heard there was like, like so many, like it's, it's one of the most popular small businesses. Oh yeah. I believe it. Yeah.

Speaking of small business, so you were working at an agency, like a small agency. I think in one podcast I listened to, you said it was like

Something like 12 people. Yeah, 12 people. Really small, tons of clients. And that constant flow of work in and out the door just gave you so much exposure to so many different, I guess, business problems that clients would face. And you got to work with so many tools. So you've got this endless smorgasbord of ideas for videos. How did you track those ideas? Did you have just some list that, oh, got to do a video on that, got to do a video? Were you kind of logging these things as you encountered them as a developer? Yeah.

Yeah. And a lot of it was even like kind of like sequential. Because if you think about it, like let's say...

you know, you're building a WordPress site, there's probably like 20 steps that could become individual videos that you have to do on like every site. And if somebody didn't know their way around WordPress, like what were the things that they would need to know? Obviously, like updating, installing plugins, how to even just work in an editorial flow. Like those types of videos did really well, even though they weren't necessarily for developers. So I was really just thinking like,

Here is the things that I have to do, and I have to... And any time... Yeah, I don't remember if I used Trello or anything at that point, but it was so much so that I didn't have to really think about it too much. It was just that I kind of knew what I was doing all day at work and just...

Yeah. Just running through it. Uh, it's really, it wasn't until you'd hit, like for me, it wasn't until I hit like 50 videos in a series that I had to like scrape for ideas. It's like I did 50 Drupal videos before I was ever like, Oh, let me do a 20 part Drupal series on this theme specifically, you know? So there is a lot of content to be made for that, especially cause there was just no resources. And also it was really easy to do it at the time because there wasn't a lot of competition on YouTube and,

And if you had a good microphone and you understood things like increasing the font size so people can read it, just like the basics, a lot of the times people were still releasing coding tutorials and a good bulk of them with just those tiny little computer mics or even worse, they have a text box where they're typing on screen. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Back in the day. Totally. Those, I think...

Unless it's for some very esoteric thing, I generally won't even get those. Because I watch tons of tutorials. Because I'm constantly looking up how to do different things. And yeah, I will occasionally catch where they type on the screen. They text edit over here. They go to code. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, cool. I appreciate that they made a tutorial on this. Obviously, the best tutorial that exists probably on this extremely specific topic because YouTube is recommending it. At least the algorithm thinks it's the best one.

Yeah. Yeah. But, but, uh, yeah, like, like if you're creating tutorials, we, we have a style guide, Bo Carnes, who runs the freeco camp YouTube channel has a very simple style guide. And those are like the first rule, make the text big so people can hear it. Use a decent microphone, you know? Um, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, at the time, those low hanging fruit got you a long way. So it helped me get off the ground, even when I wasn't like, extremely practiced. And it wasn't until like, you know, like a year or so in, like, I wasn't, I'm the type of person who will release 300 video tutorials without expecting any views on them. And likewise, like when I was trying to make it as a musician, I was recording like,

My whole thought process was if I record 20 songs, maybe one of them will be a little good. That was like – I'm definitely like an iterate, iterate, try new things type of person. So I just – I made a lot of videos without expecting them to blow up. And even if they were to blow up, the goal was only for it to like – I wanted the YouTube ad revenue to pay my rent. That was the only goal. Yeah.

It took a little while to get there, but we eventually had a couple of videos hit harder in some different communities and people started to subscribe. And it's like, if you look at the growth, it's just suddenly just bigger and bigger. It was never a huge burst of growth, but just steady kind of exponential growth for...

many years until, uh, until I stopped really publishing on YouTube that much. Yeah. And we're going to, we're going to talk about your transition. Uh, but I want to go back to that time where you were working in the, this 12 person agency and kind of like just building, building, building like your entire ethos. It seems to be just when in doubt, just,

Yeah. Like iterate, throw things at the wall, right? Like you took that approach with music. Uh, you've taken that approach, like just getting exposed to all kinds of projects and then with creating video tutorials. Um, I know that there was a time where you were working at this small agency and I, I love talking about agency life because that is a huge portion of the developer ecosystem is just people working in agencies. Um, and, uh,

You were able to go be at that 12-person agency dealing with smaller clients, and then you transitioned into working...

Still at an agency, I believe, but for Ford Motor Company. Oh, yeah. One of the biggest corporations in the world. Yeah, I was at an agency first for this 12-small-person agency, and it was really great. I had a lot of good mentorship there. I got a lot of experience working with clients. And then I actually got another job for about six months at the University of Michigan, which

where they had an internal creative agency where you actually had to bid for projects. It was owned by U of M, but you still had to bid for projects. So when I was at that 12-person agency, we were often bidding against

this, this, uh, internal agency was called Michigan creative. And they were like a little bit bigger, like 40 persons. So I, I stepped up from like a 12 person agency, like where we had two developers to an agency where we had like six developers. And again, I, I was crushing projects, but that job, um, I was so used to working a lot faster that I would finish a project like two months ahead of schedule. And I'd be like, all right, what's next? And they'd be like, there, what do you mean? What's next? Um,

And so I got a lot of time again to like practice things. And that's where I picked up a lot of like JavaScript framework stuff that wasn't applicable to my job. But like, I wanted to just explore it because I had, I had a lot of free time and I was, I was a little bored at that job when I got the email, believe it or not from a recruiter. And it was like, we're looking for this, you know, Ford motor company. And my, my grandpa worked at Ford his whole career. My dad had worked at Ford. So I was like, Oh,

Okay, yeah, I'll fulfill my destiny. Yeah. And it was a cool project. It was a project where they were getting 30 people together to explore on experimental interfaces. And there was three developers, several designers and researchers. The guy who did the Domino's app was a part of it because the Domino's app at the time... The pizza delivery timeline. Yeah. That was just...

Reality, my understanding. It's just a bunch of time events, basically. It doesn't actually track your pizza and its proximity to your door. I believe it. But either way, that interface was so well-received. They brought that guy along. And it was like, we're going to do some groundbreaking interfaces for Ford.com and really push the boundaries there.

And man, that project, like I would say our team did some incredible stuff and they used like none of it or, or like, yeah, it would be like presenting, I guess it's like the same, like as the concept car. Yeah. You give them this really cool concept car and they're like, great. Uh, we're not going to use it. And,

And so I remember being in these like really frustrating meetings with like Ford executives. Like I was like, you know, you show up, you're, you're typically like a developer and like in client meetings as a developer, maybe they might expect you to look like a developer, but I'm in a meeting with like people with like suits and Rolexes and stuff. Like, you're just like, Oh, I'm kind of out of place in this meeting a little bit. And, uh, they were, uh,

Yeah, they were just like not willing to take any kind of risks, whatever. Even in my mind, they weren't really even risks just because I was so used to like, oh, yeah, let's do some cool interface stuff. But I did that project for two years.

And that was a cool, cool gig, you know, um, just got to explore the whole time, work on fun stuff. Uh, and I'll tell you what the, having a YouTube channel that was somewhat popular at that point really helped me get that job because it was a competitive interview process, even though they, they had a recruiter like seek me out specifically, but yeah. Yeah. So the background of this is like, you've been working on this YouTube channel. It's been slowly growing and you were working at agencies, uh,

Were you able to eventually leave and just focus on doing Level Up Tuts? Again, that's the, I guess, deprecated name of the channel. Oh, yeah. By the way, if you're looking for it, Level Up Tuts is now the syntax. Yeah. And even at this point, I think Level Up Tuts might have had to change because, I don't know, you know, Envato? Yeah. They do like Tuts Plus. The Theme Forest.

Yeah. They had a lawyer come after me about the word tuts on my YouTube channel. How can that be something trademarkable or whatever? That seems super sketch. I can't understand the argument for that. That's like the WWF having to change their name because of the World Wildlife Foundation. I'm sorry, but they're completely different things. How can you confuse the two? I had a lawyer look at it. And again, I wasn't making any money off of the channel really. So it wasn't like I could put any money to protect that.

And they were like, yeah, you could fight this, but if they actually want to do something with it, you're going to have to pay a lot of money. So if you can change it, just change it. And I was like...

So then I had to start calling it Level Up Tutorials, which is why there was the name change. But yeah, it was so lame to me. I was like, come on. Nobody's mistaking us. I think it was just like one person didn't like the growth that my channel was getting or something. So yeah, now the channel is Syntax. It is now completely transitioned over to being Syntax. Yeah, which is the name of your very popular podcast that we mentioned earlier, but I'm going to re-mention it. Syntax is the podcast. That is the ongoing project.

Yes. So maybe you can talk about that period of life. Were you able to focus full-time on the channel? Was there a time when you were just doing YouTube and that was all you were doing? Never doing YouTube specifically. So I had been going hard on YouTube up until like...

mid 2016. And that's so I was able to the Ford project for me ended in 2016 ish. And then I was like, I'm going to make it go at doing YouTube or level up tutorials full time, but not like YouTube. I was like, I'm going to do the rails cast model, where I'll have some things premium, or I'll have a subscription that people can subscribe to,

And, uh, I'll give them some little things like ad free. You don't have to watch ads anymore. And I was just doing this all in a Drupal platform that I had built for this, for like, it was importing the videos from YouTube and doing it all. Um,

And nobody bought it. Nobody paid any money for it. So it was like, oh, shoot. And I'm just seeing... At some point, they cut my ad revenue in half. So now was it not only not paying my rent, but I wasn't making any money from the premium things I was trying to do with it. And...

I was trying to do a few things. I tried to release like a – because Wes and I had kind of connected at this point. And we were just – he was helping me grow my business and I was helping him grow on YouTube. That was like the kind of like tradeoff that we had going on, just kind of like meeting every once in a while to talk about it. And –

I tried his model where I released this really great big course. I put a lot of time into it, and nobody wanted to buy it because it was like, you've been giving us 300 videos a year. Why the hell should we give you $100 for this 40-video course? I had so many angry comments, the fact that I did not release that for free.

And it was so distressing. My wife, always my champion, it was like on YouTube, like trying to be like, he does so much on this channel for free. And I'm just like, don't bother with it. Yeah, this is how it's going to be. So I needed to like really adjust my thinking. And what happened was I ultimately had to quit. I had to quit the dream. And I took a job at a startup out here that did not end up going very well. So yeah, great.

Yeah, and out here being Colorado, man, your timeline is so... I know, yeah, yeah. I moved to Colorado. Maybe we'll create a little timeline and put it in the video description. Maybe you and I can create that after we finish talking. Like a legend. We just moved to Colorado just for a change of pace. Nothing real, yeah. My job at Forward was wrapping up. My wife, her job was wrapping up. We just moved out here to change of pace. And then it was like...

All right. Now we're out here. So we got to make something work. Yeah. So let's talk about like Colorado as a place. Like, you know, I'm a huge fan. I've been out there a lot of times. I've got a friend who lives out there and we go out and visit. And yeah, last time I was out there, I borrowed his car because I didn't want to rent a car. I was like, I ain't going to borrow your car. He's like, yeah. He has this brand new like nice Honda Civic or something. And I was driving my family around Colorado and...

rear-ended me, and then it pushed me into the car in front of me. It's a beautiful car. Drivers are a problem out here, yeah. Yeah, and I just felt so terrible because my friend, here he was being so kind and letting me borrow his car so I could save a little money on a rental car, and that was the one time that we got in a wreck. Anyway, sorry. That's like a total non sequitur. No.

My wife's been rear-ended twice out here. It's a thing, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, getting rear-ended twice, that seems, like, improbable. That doesn't happen that often, right? Oh, yeah. And they were both scary. One time she was pregnant with our son, our first son. And then next time our, like, one-year-old daughter was in the back. And we're just like, come on. Like... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, both my kids were in the back. Thankfully, they were fine. But it's still... Scary. Very scary. Like, I remember... You just...

I don't know if you've experienced it yourself, but basically you get hit and you're like, whoa. And it's like all of a sudden things get really real. And then you're drifting and you're like, oh, no. Like you're stepping the brake. I can't step any harder on the brake. And you're just...

Yeah.

Sorry for the little. No, no, no. But if anybody's ever been in a rear accident, any sort of car accident, stay in the car. Don't get out of the car. Just safety advice. Wait for the police to get there. Don't try to talk to the other people. Just wait for the police. Start taking photographs in case people start driving off and stuff. I filmed a lot like immediately afterward. And yeah, anyway, unsolicited car accident advice. Yeah.

So Colorado, Denver, the mile high city, it literally is like a mile above sea level. Oh yeah. Yeah. So, so whenever you go up there, you get a headache for the first day or so. Yeah. Drink tons of water and take like ibuprofen and stuff when I go, go there.

Yeah, we – so it's so funny. We have these giant – I wish I had one because I always have one on me – these giant Yeti mugs that we got with the Syntax logo. And they're huge. They're the biggest one Yeti makes. And the Canadians on the team – because our team at the time had three people in Denver and three people in Toronto area. And –

All the Canadians on the team were like, why is this mug so big? Like, why do you, and I'm like, this is what we have to drink out here. This is how much water I drink every like 10 minutes. I drink one of these. So yeah, you drink a ton of water out here. But yeah, same, same deal. It took a little bit of adjusting, you know, like we would take our dogs for walks and they would just like lay down. Cause they're like, I'm not doing any more of this. Like,

until your body adjusts to it. Even like the babies are born sometimes occasionally like blue out here because of the blood, the way the blood reacts. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. It's a cool place. Yeah. But I mean, the advantage is wherever you go, it's not how you feel like you're like some sort of oxygen high problem.

Also, for the breaking scene, let me tell you, crews come out here from everywhere, from Chicago or L.A., and you have a home field advantage like I've never experienced. If you can get into the later rounds of a competition, you just see the out-of-state crews just crashing hard. Their endurance starts getting shot, and you're like, okay.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's illegal to train for like a marathon or something in like one of those hyperbaric chambers. Oh, really? Yeah. But it's totally illegal to go to Denver and just go run a bunch up in the mountains, right? Yeah, they do that. There's a thing in Manitou Springs called the Incline. It was like a former cog railway line. And Olympic athletes will just –

jog up it or it's like an intense intense physical endurance thing but you see like all the time on Instagram the Colorado Avalanche are there training on it and stuff it's just like this massive natural giant hill to train on it's super cool yeah so you moved out there originally was this because of like the startup opportunity

And that was just for vibes. The startup opportunity just came. We met somebody at a haircutting appointment, just kind of ran them off the thing. They needed a developer. I took the job. And yeah, it was a bad idea. They were just a bad manager in terms of like...

like the way they communicated, it was like aggressive and like name calling and like yelling and no, just like really toxic, like exceedingly toxic. And in the same regard, um, the other founder of it was just like not delivering on their part in terms of, we have one founder who is got all the connections, one founder who's got like the financial backing and they were both supposed to be playing a role in, um, in, in taking this thing, um,

To investors, whatever. And my job was to build a prototype of the app.

I built a really great prototype and like they just weren't able to get any traction. And I think the stress and the amount of money they had put into the project was then taken out on me for some reason. So they, I always, I tell a story because it's like, it's about the creation of syntax because Wes and I had known each other at this point for a little bit. We had talked about doing a podcast. We had even kind of come up with a name and a general idea for it. And we weren't doing anything with it.

I was super busy at work. He was busy doing his stuff. My son was born that week. My boss is calling me at eight o'clock on a Sunday night about a feature that's broken in like pre alpha software. And I'm just like,

Come on. Uh, so I quit. Um, I quit, quit the very next day. It was a Monday. I quit the next day and I have no job. I just have a, a brand new son who's only been here for like less than a week. And, uh, it was a hard time to quit a job, but, uh,

Yeah, I had not even a tiny net from the YouTube ad rev because the YouTube ad rev had crashed so hard at that point. Just to give me some perspective, so obviously FreeCodeCamp, we do run ads. We do some of our support in terms of keeping the lights on. At FreeCodeCampaign, we spent more than $100,000 last year on servers, for example. Yeah, wow. Some of the proceeds come from...

YouTube ads and, uh, and most of the proceeds come from donations and people in the community donating. And then we get some grants, uh, as well. And I'm always kind of like hustling, trying to, trying to find people that are willing to give a grant to free code camp. Uh, that's a huge part of what I do, but, uh, we've, we never, I guess, experienced like the glory days of YouTube before the cut. So we've only experienced like post cut, but what revenue used to be like,

Oh, it wasn't, you know what? It was never, it was never incredible. I'll tell you that. But I'm looking at like very clearly and it's like, I can almost pinpoint it from like 2015 and like, like month over month. It's like, it's going to go in like this. So it's getting a little bit better. And then it's like, um, and nothing had changed in my process in that time. It was just, uh, it went from at that point, like, let's see, like, like I said, never, never great.

It went from like $60 a day for me down to $30 a day overnight. Wow. Which again, what is $60 a day? And that's like on the same approximate level of viewership and everything like that? It's just... Same everything. And even then, that's not that much. $60 a day is just $21,000 a year. So yeah, it was tough to make it just on YouTube. And let me tell you, early on, when I first started chatting with Wes, we also had a group with Joel from Egghead. Joel Brooks.

Joel hooks. And he kept saying, get off YouTube. Not like, like in terms of your financial, uh, future, your income is not going to have its future on YouTube. And I was just like, but it's right. It's getting better every week. I'm like making progress. It seems to be growing. And then I, sure enough, it's like slashed even, even from what it was. And I was just like, Oh, he's super right. Um,

I need to figure something out. And you saw kind of like the dark side of just giving everything away. And then suddenly you asked for them to pay for like a course and suddenly. Totally. It's almost as if you'd been better off just going to one of those course websites and not having any reputation preceding you and just created the same comprehensive course and put it up. It would have been way better.

You think – so you think you were actively harmed by being so generous. Actively harmed. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, actively harmed by it. But it wasn't until – so I quit that job.

That happened in May. And then I think the first Syntax episode was out in June. So we moved pretty fast after that because I was like, my business isn't working. I just quit my startup. Let's do something. And we just decided to run with it. And we recorded...

three episodes just to get like practice with it. And so we recorded three episodes in bulk and we were like, okay, if we record three, then we have a buffer that we can then record one a week after that and have some time. And we did that. And the first three hit really hard. They, they got downloaded immediately because I had a big audience from YouTube. Wes had a big audience from Twitter and his courses. So we were able to hit, hit the,

from two different angles, right? There wasn't a ton of overlap in our audience. And the podcast just took off. And I think it was by like the fourth or fifth episode, we had sponsors already. And it seemed like a really good bet because I went from...

Oh, shoot. How am I going to have a paycheck? I'm going to have to look for a job. I'd even applied for several jobs. I interviewed at Starz, the TV company, which let me tell you, man, I don't know if it's changed, but they at that point still weren't even using ES5, which was long past the time where that was acceptable. Wait, Starz, they were actually streaming video without ES5? Yeah. And this was like, they were asking me all kinds of questions and I

Like, even, like, getting into technical questions about, like, how would you do this? And I was like, I haven't done it without these things in many years. So let me think about this. So, like, it was like – it felt like I was going back in time. And I'm glad I didn't get the job just because it probably would have paid decently. But I would have been, like, working –

back in time or something. You probably would have been too distracted to really focus on growing Syntax. Yes. So the podcast ended up working really well from the start. Wes and I had a lot of fun doing it. It's so cool because it's just showing up to work and chatting with your buddy about the stuff that you like. And I think that was the appeal of Syntax. And that's largely how it feels to me. We're going to record after this. And I'm just stoked to talk to him about anything. We both were messing around with Cloudflare Tunnels. So now I'm going to get to go chat with him.

about Cloudflare tunnels and what we were able to do with that. And it's just fun. You learn a lot. And yeah, we had a, it is funny. He and I have very similar approaches to things, even if he's like way better at business than I am.

I'm not. Entrepreneurship is tough for me. But when I started my YouTube channel, I had a big old list of things I didn't like about other YouTube videos and also things I did not like about paid video content.

And that was my thing. I was like, I'm not going to do these things. And that was largely informed, like how I did my, my content. And then the same thing with syntax. We both came with a big list of things that we don't like about podcasts. Here are the things that we're not going to do. And I think that like really changed. I'm curious if I'm doing some of those, like, so anti-patterns and what I'm doing, but like, don't, don't worry about hurting my opinion or hurting my feelings or anything. What were some of these things that you, what are some things you don't like about podcasts or YouTube videos specifically?

Just like shout, shout out some of your pet peeves. I mouth, mouth noises is a thing for me. Um, like people eating into the microphone or really like getting like mouth noises into the audio and not getting rid of that. It's like a big one for me. For some reason I have like a misophonia or something like that where I like really like gives me the creeps. Um, but again, it's like the little things like good audio, clear, good video. But for podcasts specifically, um,

We wanted to have enough banter, but not too much banter. We didn't want there to be 30 minutes before they got to anything useful. A big part of what informed Syntax was that we wanted to be

and useful. Like that was like it. It's like we wanted to be first and foremost something that people walked away from every episode with. So we didn't want to spend too much time on fluff. We wanted to get down to it. I'm trying to find my list of things that we wouldn't want. It's funny. We had a lot of episode topic ideas before we ever moved through with them. We had a lot of interesting ideas in general. I'll have to find this document sometime. But

Yeah, it was a lot of just pet peeve stuff about not getting to the content right away, not explaining the content well, but also if it is too dry. We didn't want to be dry. We didn't want to be like, look, what are we not like about tech podcasts? Why do we shut them off? Well, they're not very much fun to listen to. It's just like...

let me talk to you about this JavaScript feature, you know, which we didn't want to be, yeah. Yeah, well, I, like, really admire just how technical your podcast is. I mean, because, like, we definitely tried having it be more technical and, like, okay, let's talk about JavaScript for, like, half an hour. So without the visual element of being able to, like, put code up on the screen and, like...

That was something that I found incredibly difficult to surmount, but you all have managed to do that, dare I say, because I feel very engaged when I listen.

And obviously, like some of the episodes I've listened to most recently, like we just went through Halloween here, your spooky stories of like just nightmares, many of which don't involve including a wereclaws in the sequel statement. Yeah, like the werewolves. Yeah. So you have figured out a way to like keep...

The podcast, and I think a lot of this is just probably iteration because you have more than 700 episodes, but to keep the podcast both very technical and also keep it light and keep lots of that kind of syntactical sugar in there to make it more palatable, if you will. The spoonful of sugar is kind of what I'm trying to say.

I think a lot of it comes from the fact that he and I had both done so many video tutorials. We're so used to talking about approaches and stuff. And one of the things that my tutorials always did really well, or at least the feedback I got, was that I was good at making kind of like, even like programery complex things that a lot of other people, either they just pass over or assume you know, able to like say those in a kind of an explain like I'm five kind of way, right? Like really...

taking something a little bit more jargony and breaking it down like, Oh, by the way, if you don't know how this works, this is how it works. And whether that's through like heavy use of metaphor, which is something we, we do a lot. Um, you'll hear Wes like constantly making food metaphors for things like when I'm eating one half of a sandwich and somebody's building the other half of the sandwich, that's like streaming, you know? And it's just like stuff like that where we're constantly kind of trying to make each other laugh with these ridiculous metaphors that make sense or, um,

Just breaking down topics in that way. So to me, it's like oftentimes you want to you don't want to shy away from being technical, but you do want to hit people in a way that's not a pure technical explanation of it, you know, relate things to what they know. And I think that some of it just comes naturally the way that he and I both seem to teach or see things. We're both kind of like, yeah, that way.

How has the podcast evolved over the years? Like, what have been the major... Like, for example, I got the opportunity to listen to you do a live recording of a podcast at Jamstown South, which was phenomenal, by the way. You even got the audience involved, I think. How has your approach evolved

over the years and like have there been any kind of like general best practices that have emerged across technical podcasting as a whole that you've like embraced or are there are there any things that are like more that you're more rogue and still doing that that a lot of people have moved away from uh like a lot of people do like heavy really quick jump edits and stuff like that and like try to make it like tiktokization of podcasts and then you have like this podcast which is

Yeah.

Yeah.

from what you all are trying to do and from what a lot of like blip for, I say blip for like, if you ever watched max headroom, uh, the, the, the, the 30 minute ad condensed into like three seconds or a 30, 30 second ad can this into three seconds. Like they were all trying to like, just how much marketing can we jam into? Like a short of a period. I feel like like the tick tockization. So, uh,

Sorry, that was like 10 questions all at once. No, no. But what are some practices that you've tried and abandoned or practices that you've avoided over the years? We're good at running experiments and we're good at listening to the audience. One of the things I really admire about Wes is that, for instance, we just put out a survey and...

When we're putting out a survey, like an audience survey, which we've only done two of these now, Wes is always like, give me the most brutal, mean feedback you possibly can. And I'm just like, please, just say only nice things. I'm too sensitive for that. But he's so good about being like,

I truly want to know what you hate about this so that we can like adjust it or whatever. And he has good intuition in those regards. So he's great to work with, uh, like a lot of these types of things. But I think some of it is like, we came up initially with so many different format ideas and we're not afraid to try them out and see how they work. We did a few episodes of like,

they were kind of like portfolio site reviews. And it's like, we learned after three of those that does not work well on just audio. Um, we thought it might, it, it ended up, it's, you're doing a lot of mouth coding. Now that we've transitioned to video, it might work a little bit better, but like maybe in a different format. Um, so we're not afraid to try things like that. Uh, we used to do a holiday gift guide episode every year where it was like, here's, um, basically a collection of things that just we like. And, um,

We stopped doing it for like three years and people just started messing us. Do the gift guide again. And so we'll do it. We just recorded it. And I think we're good just about one, listening to the audience to knowing what like the core fundamentals and foundation of the show really is. And then three, just experimenting with all kinds of stuff. So we have like some formats, like we have our potluck questions.

which have been named potluck questions since they started. And we do one of those a month. That's always been a thing where we're answering a whole episode full of audience questions once a month. And those episodes, I got to tell you, we have, I couldn't even, even exactly tell you how many questions we've had submitted over time. It's been so many. Um, and it, it, it works for us. Yeah. We've had,

nearly 1,500 questions asked to us over the lifetime of this podcast. So we have such a good time doing those, one a month, whatever. It works every single time, and it's fun for us to talk about all these different topics. Other than that, we have formats that, like,

He and I, it's so funny. We don't talk that much prehand about what this is going to be because we've been doing it now for so long. We have such a good idea about the other, the way the other person works is that we have explainer episodes where I'm explaining or I'm teaching something to Wes.

Yeah. Wes is the audience surrogate. I'm teaching him and he doesn't know this. So therefore he gets to ask the questions that someone in the audience might ask and vice versa. Same thing. He's explaining something to me. I get to ask the questions. We have another topic where, uh, potentially we're both well-versed in the thing. So we write an outline and the way it works is that we have a headline. He discusses it. I discuss it. And then we kind of wrap our thoughts up together. He discussed it. I discussed it, wrap it, our thoughts up together. Um,

And these formats are the way we like approach these things. It just kind of happened over time, whether it is I'm interviewing him, he's interviewing you. We're both taking on a topic. We're both teaching a topic. And sometimes it's just like chatting about stuff that we like and, hey, can we have a conversation about this? Because, again, it's just you're chatting with your buddy about – that's actually – it's like we want to feel like you're sitting at your desk talking with your coworker about this blog post that you read. Yeah, I mean –

Thinking about the sheer volume of time you spent talking with Wes over the years, I mean, it's probably more than a lot of siblings have spent talking to their siblings. It's crazy. Yeah, it's a lot. I would venture to say that maybe aside from your wife and kids, you probably have spent more time talking to them than, would you say, than anybody? Yeah.

Yeah. And it's so funny because we record three episodes a week and we record them all on one day. So it doesn't really feel like that much. But it's like I talk to him all day on that one day and then that's it. You know, I don't know. Yeah, it's different. It's different. Now I'll tell you.

you know, if we want to get into this since joining century, uh, now that it's my full-time job. Yeah. So just for context, century is a, uh, tool like it is like an observability tool. I'm not sure how to categorize it, but basically gives you insight into what's going on inside your app. Uh, like free code camp uses it. Um, and, uh, it's, it's probably saved us from many an outage. Um, but century came along and essentially said like, Hey,

We like the YouTube channel that you've built, Scott. We like the podcast that you and Wes have built. Can we make it in-house, essentially? Is that a way to describe it? Like it was an acquisition? Yeah, it was an acquisition. And for a long time, we didn't really want to use that word. Not because of any...

issue with that but the big problem was is that it was kind of near the time that digital ocean had acquired scotch.io and digital ocean and what was uh css careers yeah yeah css tricks and people were pretty sour about the css tricks thing at that very moment

And so a lot of the language was like, we're just going to be working together because specifically we did not want people to get concerned. Because frankly, from the very first moment that we started talking to Century, and by all means, they were one of our very first sponsors. And they had been sponsoring 52 episodes a year for...

for most of the existence of the podcast. So we, we had known them for a very long time. We were very tight with them. Wes had even done some sponsor work with them pre syntax. So, uh, there was a long time, uh, friendship and partnership with century. And they were like,

Hey, if you guys could work on this full time, what would that look like? And so we just spitball ideas or whatever. And they're like, okay, we can enable that. If Scott, you don't have to worry about your YouTube channel. And so we'll just make that free. And then you guys can build the syntax out full time. And what we're not going to do is we're not going to get in the way. We're going to let you do it.

We're going to let you build it out, and our only expectation is that you guys think big and do it how you would do it with this opportunity. So they've largely been very hands-off. And I mean very, very hands-off. They had one person from the Sentry team, Ben Vinegar, came to work on the Syntax team as my boss. Yeah.

The biggest thing that Ben vinegar did to me was like, get me into shape as a manager of a company, you know, where like, I'm so used to just doing things bootstrapping or recording this or that it was like, he put me through like management bootcamp. And that like changed things a lot for me. But like,

it, it, that has been the biggest shift is that like, now we're thinking about this as we have the opportunity to do whatever we want here. Nobody is getting in the way. Nobody's going to, uh, spoil this for us, but we have to think bigger. Um, so to,

To go back to the DigitalOcean thing, that was very explicitly defined when we were starting to make this announcement, is how can we announce that this is happening without people getting worried that Sentry is going to change syntax because they weren't going to change syntax. At least they weren't going to change it. They would...

you know, let us do what we want to do. Yeah. So you might change as a result of the additional resources, but it'd be intentional changes that you were making because, Hey, now we are less constrained because we don't have to worry about as many things. Thanks. Because there's company.

Yeah, Wes and I were working on Syntax one day a week prior to this, which is kind of crazy because of how successful and how good the podcast was. But we would spend half the day working on the episodes. And granted, you were constantly preparing for episodes by –

the projects we were doing, the side projects, the tutorial courses we were doing. You're constantly in the back of your mind preparing for episodes. But we would spend half a day prepping episodes, half a day recording episodes, and that was it. So now it's like you got four more days of

a week to work on this thing. Like, what can you do? And we brought along, uh, Caitlin bloom who had worked for me at level up tutorials. She was our marketing manager at level up. She was my only employee, um, at level up tutorials. So it was really cool to be able that, uh, that century allowed her to stay on as the marketing manager of syntax. Um,

We were able to then take a look at the team, and Ben was like, what do we want to accomplish this year, and who do we need to make that happen? Which is why we ended up hiring a producer, Randy, who's like the coolest guy in the whole world, and CJ Codingarden, who's just an extremely talented teacher. Yeah. Yeah. So CJ is now the third...

content creator of Syntax, and he largely works on YouTube. He occasionally pops into the podcast. And yeah, CJ rules. He's also from Denver here and just a really genuine great guy.

Yeah. Cool. So that's essentially like a pretty big change in terms of just having more resources available, but you were able to basically bring in the same people or people that you already knew. So it's not like they stuck you with like just this giant hierarchy above you. It sounds like you had a single person that you're interfacing with and that person has been very helpful. This Ben vinegar gentleman. Oh yeah. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and a big theme throughout like what you've been talking about through this entire episode is,

And what you were just talking about, learning from Ben, like kind of how to manage yourself and not just like the bootstrap ethos of like, okay, here's what this week looks like, baby. But being able to step out and maybe abstract yourself a little bit more so you can –

change systematically how things work, right? Which is something you have the liberty of doing when you're not as focused on the day-to-day grind, right? You've got to pull yourself back from the whetstone. And I was... Let me say, I...

When I quit that startup and I started the podcast, I started really getting serious about level-up tutorials as a business. I changed my model. I put everything behind a paywall, and I was not doing YouTube at all anymore. YouTube was like an advertising arm to get people to sign up for the service, like you would Egghead or Netflix or whatever. And that ended up being way more successful, and it worked really well for me. But I had...

made the promise to release 24 videos a month, every month. That's a lot. That's a huge commitment. On top of doing the podcast, right? So we were doing the podcast one day a week. The other four days, I was prepping and recording. And I functioned very much like a magazine. I had worked in a magazine once. So the schedule for me was I prep and write code for two weeks. I

I record straight through on one week, whatever, all 24 videos in one week. The last week I edit like crazy and then release. And then I go to the next one and I better have that next one idea at least planted in my brain or else I'm in trouble. And I did that for about like, what, like two, three years before I was like, like through COVID. And I'm just like, I am like burning out so hard. I'm like,

I have no idea what I'm going to do next month. This is, I should not have done that. I brought on a few third party content, content creators, Colby Fayock, James Quick, Amy Dunn, did amazing courses. Amy Kaepernick did all courses for level up tutorials and it kind of made it a little bit easier because I could have a guest course and then my course and then a guest course. And then kind of like,

halved the amount of totally you had to carry but but it still was tough yeah still tough if you don't want me asking like was there ever like did it ever occur to you like hey maybe like i should just scale back my commitment like hey everybody quick update 24 episodes is driving me to burn out maybe i could do 12 episodes or something like that i didn't feel comfortable doing that um

Just because I have a heart. If I'm going to make a promise to that, I'm going to stick to it even if it's tough on me. So when the Century deal came about, I was just feeling so burnt out that it was like, yes, this sounds like a great way to focus for me. Because like you said, in that bootstrap mentality, it's always like directly what's in front of me. And I was not able to like think of –

like business goals or management goals. I wasn't able to strategize. I wasn't able to do any of that stuff. It was like, all right, I got it. I'm in fight or flight 24 seven for several years. And, uh, yeah. So yeah, feeling a lot more, um,

smart, I guess, with the choices I'm able to make today than before. Yeah. Well, that's a great cautionary tale in maybe overcommitting. And I'm definitely going to be cognizant of that going forward. I'll just have that kind of anecdote in the back of my mind. You committed to something that was doable for a while, but there was no end in sight. Was there an end date when you were going to stop delivering 24 episodes a week? Did you stipulate that when you made your initial commitment? Yeah.

No, the end date was I had figured that I would grow the business enough to operate in a way where I could have these third-party content creators. I could pay them royalties and then I would step back more and more. But I had to be cognizant of that because the first time when I did a couple of third-party creators here and there, even though they were great content creators, the feedback I got immediately was we subscribe to this for you. Yeah.

which was hard to hear because it's like, ah, that is exactly the problem. So yeah, it was tough. And the hard part is that the business was working and it was growing and it was finally taking off. So for me, it was like,

all right, I made this commitment. It's working hunker down and do it, you know? Yeah. And when it's working, it can be very hard to mess with something that's working. Like don't touch that. It works like that. You know, the old sticky note on the don't ever restart this server. Exactly. Right. Diesel generator sitting next to it. We don't know if this stuff's working. Yeah. Oh yeah. Trust me. It was, yeah, it was getting harder and harder. So, um,

Yeah. Now I get to not only focus more on the podcast as the executive producer, I get to focus on making the team productive, figuring out how to scale out a little bit more.

And even as far as right now, I think the big thing for us is that Syntax is known primarily as a podcast, right? It's a developer podcast. And the goal for us is to think of it more as a media destination, like a media company, where you're not just coming to Syntax for the podcast, which we have our podcast, but we're building out several other shows, whether that is through YouTube or the website. And we'd like to have...

like a little bit more of like a media brand, so to say, than a podcast, which is something that we've been working on for a while. We first made the jump to YouTube last year in March. We made the jump to video. Now over 25% of our listens comes from YouTube of the podcast alone. So like largely we were able to grow a lot on YouTube by just moving to YouTube. And then CJ has been focusing on

Like developing several different show types and repeatable content types. The hard part for us is that the main focus for Syntax from day one has always been to not go into clickbait, to not go into engagement hacks. Like we don't want to do surface level garbage content that gets subscriptions and clicks and views.

So we have to really balance this deeply technical, deeply authentic content, but still somehow get it in front of people, which we all know that the clickbait videos and thumbnails, it all works. It works. Absolutely. We just don't want to do it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean –

who runs the free cocaine YouTube channel and I are always having these conversations like, but if we just put this sensational quote that they said and like, Oh yeah. Uh, but, but at the same time we don't want to misrepresent things and we don't want people to get, uh,

If you just say, it's going to take all our jobs, and you put that as the thumbnail, everybody will click on that video because they all want to be vindicated. Like, yeah, I didn't ever learn to code, and now I don't have to. And look at all those dummies who spent all that time learning to code. But that's not actually what's going on. It's not taking your jobs. It's ridiculous that nobody believes that who knows anything about writing software. Or there are just so many other dark avenues you can go down.

So many. Yeah, yeah. And you have, time after time, taken the high road. And if you go to any of those videos, you just click on a random one to spin the wheel. It's going to be you with your code editor up and you're building something. You're getting your fingers on the keyboard. And you're like, all right, what are we doing today? It's very...

practical and like hands-on. And that's something I've always admired about your channel is that, that like there've been so many opportunities for you to take the easy path and you've never veered off of your, your high road.

Yeah. So that's where we're at right now. It's like, how do we continue to do that and to continue to keep that while also trying new things and not losing that piece? Because that is like for us, that's like essential. We have to remain authentic and deeply technical first and foremost. And that's the challenge. How can you do that while still growing a YouTube audience?

beyond where we're at right now. On the note of being technical, I've got several rapid-fire questions because we're going to wrap up here in a few minutes. Let's do it. One of them is you talk a lot about you have the skills, you put in the time, you can build things, and yet it's easy for if you don't trumpet your accomplishments and your capabilities and stuff...

Some person who's more brazen and brasher is going to come out and be like, I'm the best developer and you should listen to me instead of, why are you looking at level laptops when you can watch... And you've talked about the importance of hyping yourself up, I think is the term you use. You need to hype yourself up and people need to know how great you are and they're not just going to know. Yeah, they're not just going to know. Yeah, that's a tough skill. Yeah, how do you do it tastefully? Yeah, well...

It's hard because it never feels tasteful to hype yourself up in any way. But you can be proud of the things that you've done. It does feel very uncomfortable for me to be like, I did 2,000 video tutorials. That's how I got... But that's honestly what I did. And I worked hard to do that. And I think it's important to know that... Or for other people to know that when you do...

put in the time and effort into something. It's not being overly confident or braggadocious or whatever, just to let people know what you are doing or what you have done. It is a tough balance to cross, but it is like in any job interview or any situation, you do need to sell yourself in a way because, yeah, people don't know your accomplishments. People don't know like,

breadth of your skills or abilities or whatever. So there is, it's tough to do it in a way that feels authentic without seeming braggy. My advice is just to be honest with it all. I think that's the biggest thing. Yeah, I mean, as long as you're matter of fact, right? Like, I've created 2,000 tutorials.

I haven't created 2,000. I've written maybe like 400 text-based programming tutorials over the years. But that's still something that I'm proud of. It's massive. And it does give me some degree of credibility for somebody who's like, who is this Quincy Larson guy? Why should I care what he has to say? I can kind of like, over here, look. And yeah, you'll always have that library. No matter what happens, you'll always have that library.

you know, the annals of history will always be able to point to, Hey, there was this guy named Scott in the 21st century who created all these tutorials on this old technology. Crazy. Maybe, maybe people will study it. Who knows? But another thing that,

you've done over the years is just get insane reps. Yes. And you're somebody who's learned music, learned video production, learned breakdancing. You've learned all these different domains, right? And skill intensive, many of which are hierarchical skills. You don't just sit down and play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the piano. And independent of understanding how music theory and having good fundamental...

all those different considerations that go into being able to do something like that and going in similarly building a web app. You don't just, one does not simply sit down and create a sophisticated contemporary web app that runs like a mobile app, right? That has accessibility considerations, performance considerations, all those different considerations. Like there's so much. What is the role of reps in getting you there? For me, it's like 100% of...

uh, uh, my strategy in general. And it, I don't know if it's just how I, how I am. Cause I don't know if it's like necessarily a cognizant strategy that I've developed or something, but that is largely how I've, I've approached most things as if I, I, I don't worry about where I'm at, uh, especially like the dancing stuff, right? I would show up to practice. I'd practice for two hours, three days a week. And, uh,

Over that time, you do it for 12 years or whatever. Suddenly, you look back and you're like, oh, wait, I'm at a high level here. And that's only because I was able to do that. And same thing with the YouTube tutorials. For me, I've always viewed reps as a necessary part of getting good at anything. And when I encourage people to either...

Yeah.

And you only grew by 100 subscribers or whatever in that time. That's sweet. That's good. You now have 100 subscribers, but you've also got so much practice at doing this thing that the next 52 are going to be that much easier and the next 52 are going to be that much easier. And

Yeah, sure. If you're doing, you know, 120 episodes of a podcast and nobody's listening, still, you look at what you're doing and you experiment and you, you, you're cognizant of the things that you are doing. Um, so that way you can improve them.

This is like the practice just simply showing up is a good part of it. But you also have to pay attention to how you're doing. And I mean, I think that's the biggest strength of syntax. Besides the fact that it worked out of the gate is that Wes and I show up same time every week, record our episodes, have fun doing it. And...

yeah, whatever. It's like, how'd you get to 840, 43 episodes? No idea. Uh, it's like, it's been a time warp. It just kind of happens. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you're very process oriented. And, uh, my last question is about just how you have figured out like workflows that work and like you, do you spend a lot of time thinking about working more productivity, uh, productively and incorporating different like techniques and tools into your tool chain to, to get things done?

A lot of it has been learning how to adjust to the way that my brain works. As somebody who has focus issues, I can create a lot, but I can also just sit and stare at Reddit for half a day and lose a whole day or whatever. So for me, it's always been really paying attention deeply to what things break down

in my, my just general day to day and like how to avoid that. For instance, like I, at points I'd gotten really deeply into making, well, one I needed to do, I needed to do system to accomplish anything. My memory is so bad that if it's not in my calendar or my to do system, it will not get done. And, and,

Yeah.

Anytime I have something on my actual schedule, it needs to be in my calendar. Absolutely. Anytime I have an idea that pops into my brain, I need to capture it immediately. And otherwise, it's just gone. So whether it's creating content, I capture any idea I have immediately because they always come to you at random times. And I just capture everything and I'll look back at half of them and their bad ideas. Two, content.

I have to put everything I need to do in a to-do list and then I just get it done. Um, and that's really it. Those are my systems. Now. Um, I do get to like productivity wise, um, especially Monday mornings. I get to inbox zero every Monday morning. I tend to get to inbox zero in the afternoons as well, like after work. And I try to do that every day. Uh, like where the first 15 minutes of my day is just getting through my email. Um,

which doesn't seem like a lot of time, but I'm like the way that I get through my email is that if I need to do something right now, I just do it right now. If I need to do something in a bit, I snooze it and it comes back to when I need to do it in a bit and it goes in my, my to do list or whatever. And then it pops back in. So to get to inbox zero for me, it's like I either do the thing or I snooze it to when it needs to be done. And, um,

Yeah, then I got a clean slate. I close email. I don't even look at it for the rest of the day. I record. I write. I do our team stuff. I have meetings now. I have a lot of meetings now. That's new for me. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's part of being part of a big company, whereas before your meeting was just preparing for the actual podcast prep work.

Yeah, man. I have a feeling that you and I could probably talk a lot about productivity because I was like nodding the entire time. Like the two minute rule, right? Like as soon as something, or if it takes less than two minutes to do something, just do it immediately. Write things down immediately. Get to inbox zero.

I cannot tell you like, oh, silence all notifications is the other big one. Silence all notifications. It's actually a detriment to me. That's a problem because I'll get people being like, my dad's like, did you not see my text message? I'm like, what? It's just like, oh, I had it on do not disturb and it's been on for a day and I never looked at it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Scott, it's been an absolute blast. Like just getting insight from you, like you're one of the old hands of the industry. I say that as somebody who's like six years older than you, I guess. But like I really look up to you. I've always looked up to you. Likewise. You know, the Free Code Camp channel, like you prove the concept. You blaze the trail with these –

technical tutorials, just like the new Boston before you, you know, like just proving that the audience is there and that people do care. People do want to go deep. They want to learn these programming tools is not just talk about programming, but actually sit down and actually, you know, go through and code step-by-step building projects, you know, alongside you. And yeah, it's just been like a huge, huge,

inspiration for you and of course big listener of the podcast really enjoying it so keep up the great work any parting wisdom for the audience

No, you know, just be authentic with the stuff you're doing. You know, if you like to work on web or programming or whatever, embrace that. You know, so many people talk about how they hate their job or whatever. And yes, work can be a slog. Work can be terrible sometimes. But at the end of the day, if you really embrace your craft and you love it, you can get so much joy out of building things and creating

Being able to create stuff. Like, I mean, it's incredible. We're able to sit down and open a text editor and then like create something. Just, yeah, just enjoy that ability because it's really a superpower, I think. Yeah, 100%. Well, everybody, until next week, happy coding.