ALTERNATE UNIVERSE DEV

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Potluck - What is "State"? × Web Sockets × Remote Working × Firefox × Machines Taking Our Jobs × More!

It’s another Syntax potluck! In this episode, Scott and Wes answer your questions about remote work, AI agendas, motivation, fitness, the future of coding, and much more!

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Show Notes

2:03 - Q: I hear you both talk about “state” a lot in your podcasts. And while I understand a little about it, I never understand it in the context you both use it. Can you enlighten us?

6:52 - Q: I have an idea for a project that is suited for web sockets, push text/images/documents to a bunch of users in real time. I just learned about Firebase’s real-time database, and it looks like it would be pretty easy to implement my idea. What are your thoughts, pros/cons, of these two technologies?

10:42 - Q: How’s your fitness going?

12:15 - Q: Let’s say both of you gents were junior developers that had basic knowledge and skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript but you had all the experience and knowledge of how to best master those skills and where the industry was heading. What would be the outline and focus of your road-map knowing what you do now?

17:22 - Q: Is it worth it to find a remote dev job at an early stage of your career? Considering the stuff I learn from my seniors and other devs on the team, I wonder if I will lose the opportunity to learn stuff from my team members?

19:49 - Q: How do I keep myself motivated in coding?

22:47 - Q: What’s y’all’s opinion on using some obscure (at least in my opinion) features of a language, such as Javascript bitwise operators, in a production app that dozens of other engineers maintain, and will continue to maintain long after you leave the company? It seems hard to read and immediately understand, which possibly makes it harder to debug/refactor in the future. Is it the responsibility of future devs to learn if they don’t know, or should you find a different way to code the solution in the first place?

26:00 - Q: Wes, I keep hearing you talk about working from your Dropbox. Do you sync up everything? Even things like your node module folders?

29:26 - Q: Have you talked about Firefox Developer Edition? It looks like it should be very useful, but I can’t quite make the transition.

32:58 - Q: Hey guys, what your opinion of CSS naming convention methodologies such as BEM?

35:04 - Q: I would like to refer to the question from ep 140 about fronted development possibly dying. I don’t feel satisfied with the answer, so maybe I could state the question differently: With the machine learning being developed rapidly in recent years, will the web change, causing reduction of front-end jobs? Maybe we will just be training smart algorithms and developing them instead? What do you think?

40:32 - Q: How do you deal with anxiety and fear during interviews that might hinder your ability to give the best impression of yourself or solve coding challenges?

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