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

CSS selectors are a fundamental piece of CSS that allow it to select HTML elements based on a collection of parameters that the developer has set. CSS selectors can be used to select elements by type, class, ID, and can be written in a more complex way with the use of combinators. This week we discuss CSS selectors in great detail, covering their syntax, popular use cases, and clearing up (hopefully) some confusing bits that junior developers may struggle with. Show Notes: www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/css-selectors-crash-course

This week Mike discussed his experimentation with ChatGPT and other AI services, like GitHub Copilot. ChatGPT, Lensa, and other AI have been taking the internet by storm recently, whether it be through cool looking profile pictures, or the controversial ways they operate. In this episode we discussed things like how fast AI has advanced in such a short period of time, the opportunities innovators have to make their mark on the industry, and whether or not something like Copilot will take away your programming job.

Deadlines can be difficult for developers to hit due to the complexity and scope creep that happens to most modern web development projects. We've experienced our fair share of quickly approaching deadlines over the years and have learned a collection of time saving methods that we'll be discussing in this episode. Methods like not oversharing with your client - so they don't constantly contact you about every little thing, and doing projects with the tool that makes the most sense - to avoid pigeonholing your toolset based on preference, and more!

Developer relations (aka DevRel) is a newer position that many companies are starting to add to their teams. It's a popular topic among the tech Twitter community and can be a little confusing for those that aren't fully in the loop. So we brought on an expert on the topic, Raza (@razacodes) to explain exactly what a developer relations role is and how you could try your hand at it yourself.

CSS variables are a powerful vanilla CSS feature that you need to start using on your next project. You don't need any frameworks, plugins, or other tooling to get started. When used correctly, they can be a huge boost to your project's organizing and productivity - helping keep things readable and easily maintained. This week Matt & Mike discussed what CSS variables are and how to get started using them in your next project. Written Guide: CSS Variables – What Are They & How to Use Them | HTML All The Things Show Notes: www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/css-variables-what-are-they-how-to-use-them

This week we sat down with Chris Ferdinandi to discuss why he thinks the web is in a state of transition, moving away from bloated frameworks and other tooling, towards the use of more "vanilla" or "native" platform features. This less bloated web is where Chris believes we are already transitioning towards, with the hopes that it makes websites and web apps more efficient. Show Notes: The Transitional Web w/ Chris Ferdinandi | HTML All The Things Podcast

Web development has a lot of dos and donts, so today we decided to focus on what NOT to do in web development. Things that all of us have done, like pushing confidential credentials to a public git repo, through client interactions like undervaluing your work. And don't forget, the classic "don't deploy on Friday" which Matt thinks Mike should do anyway, for his upcoming film.

Your first job as a junior developer can be nerve wracking. Not only are you new to coding, but you're also new to the organizational systems that your office has. This week we try and alleviate some of that anxiety by discussing the onboarding process commonly used for junior developers, including the difference between working solo versus a team, as well as a day in the life of a developer.

Raising your prices as a freelancer, or web dev agency can be a challenging process. You have to weigh the possibility that some of your existing customers may leave for cheaper options, while trying to convince new customers that your pricing is worth it. This week we discuss how to raise your prices and how to justify them with the value your customer will receive from all the work you do.

Are you a good developer? It's a question that all of us have asked ourselves countless times during our career. It usually happens when we're at our lowest, when a site runs into trouble, and you have no idea what's going on. Sometimes when you're trying to learn something new, and you just can't figure it out. If you were a better developer, would you have these problems? Are you a good developer?

Dynamic content on a website is content that changes over time, based on the user's preferences, or other parameters. One of the most common examples of dynamic content is a blog, where the content changes all the time as writers submit new articles and ad banners flip through new ads based on your unique browsing history. Powered by various CMS, these dynamic websites are something that almost every web developer will work with and create in their career.

CSS pseudo-classes expand its capabilities into a tool that can style web pages using advanced sets of parameters, without the need for JavaScript. In this episode, we'll be looking into the :has(), :is(), and :not() pseudo-classes. We'll explore interesting use cases, using them together, how they work, and whether they're ready to be used in a production project.

Hacktoberfest 2022 is upon us, the annual open-source centric event that rewards those that contribute during the month of October. This year coders, bloggers, video producers, podcasters, and more can contribute their works to participating repos on GitHub and GitLab. In this episode, Matt and Mike discuss what Hacktoberfest is, and why you should contribute if you can.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week Mike and Matt discussed the skills they picked up from previous non-developer jobs and how they helped them in web development. Even when working in a kitchen, a factory, or an unrelated tech job - there are some skills that you can't learn anywhere else and yet still transfer over to web development.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week Mike and Matt discussed the many use cases for JavaScript. Over the past several years, JavaScript has been steadily exploding in popularity, with an appropriate number of frameworks and tooling being released alongside all the interest. With that though, is there anything that JavaScript can't do? What about what it excels at?

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week Mike and Matt discussed workplace communications including the importance of communication, some tips on being a better communicator, and of course some funny communication stories from past workplace experiences.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt discussed how to deal with customer budgets that didn't quite reach the amount you were hoping for. Maintaining a fair deal for both the developer and client is important and if implemented correctly there are a few methods in which you can stretch the customer's budget without needing to undervalue your work. These methods include various types of negotiation, breaking a project into separate phases, and cutting superfluous features. As a final note, Matt also discusses avoiding financial abuse from customers that would take advantage of you, and how to ensure you get paid what you're worth.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed the difficult decision on whether you should use a no-code platform or code up a custom solution. The duo go over the differences between custom code and no-code, comparing project types and where they'd create these projects.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed the importance of version control focusing on one of the most popular (if not most popular) version control systems, Git. The duo debated when to learn version control in your coding journey and discussed how difficult it is to learn in comparison to the coding language of your choice.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed different ways to learn web development including traditional school (college, university), online courses (free & paid), and the "tackle method." The guys discuss who is best suited for these different methods and debate the importance of project-based learning for absolute beginners.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed whether vanilla JavaScript is viable on modern projects. Vanilla JavaScript is of course the language that the browser understands, but with the increasing complexity in many of today's web development projects, frameworks like React, Vue, and Svelte have seemingly taken over as the tools of choice for web developers. Should you use a framework, or should you use vanilla JavaScript?

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed different ways to start a new web development project covering the differences between starting a completely new project with no prior version to worry about, versus updating/upgrading an old project with a variable amount of technical debt.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike answered a collection of questions regarding web design and web developers. If you're a developer, you might experience some imposter syndrome, or skill gaps, when you try and complete an entire project yourself (or with a small team). Often, the issues come from a lack of design skills, or a lack of confidence in your design ability.

This week we're doing our first-ever feed swap with LogRocket's podcast, PodRocket. This episode features a conversation with Jenn Creighton, a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix and podcast host of the show single-threaded: a software developer podcast. Topics explored in this episode include debugging, error handling, and Jenn's recent conference talk at React Miami.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed the very real possibility that we all face, which is of course the dreaded layoff. Even if the market is doing well, you can be laid off suddenly due to business issues, which means you should prepare yourself even if your employment is going well.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed the importance (or lack thereof) of website performance. We all know that Google PageSpeed Insights are used frequently across the industry, but are all those changes necessary? Should you spend time optimizing things that only change your load time by a second or two?

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed using code to enhance your no-code projects. There are a lot of people out there that use no-code tools to run a side hustle, providing clients with websites built on tools like WordPress and Webflow. Sometimes these clients want more than what a no-code tool can provide, leaving you mostly out of luck, unless you learn some coding.

Get back to basics with our first episode re-release. This week due to Mike being out sick and Matt being on vacation, the duo have decided to shine a spotlight on one of their most popular episodes that take us all back to the very basics of web development. Back to vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS - some of the most useful skills to have when making small websites or transitioning between different frameworks and technologies.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed what starting a new job in tech is like. Since many tech jobs deal with large teams and complex projects, there is a lot of onboarding that needs to happen to get you set up as a new team member. This includes things like getting access to git repos, your email address, and more. In addition to project management to-dos like understanding the team's organizational structure like SCRUM, when they do their standups, how sprints are scheduled, and so on.

This week marks the release of our 200th full episode. We've had additional releases in the form of the limited Before the Show, Tidbits, and standalone Web News - but as of today we've had 200 mainline podcast episodes released to all of you! I hope you've enjoyed the show so far, and I thank you for listening so far. We have so much planned, and we're so excited for the future!

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed the state of the web development industry with a focus on how no-code is influencing the industry at large. No-code tools are getting more complex by the day, to the point where web developers cannot ignore them anymore. The duo believes that web developers should be using no-code platforms as a tool in their arsenal to help deliver websites and web apps to customers at the right price, as quickly as possible. Matt's Note: This is our 200th episode, so I'd like to thank everyone for listening for these past few years. We hope to hit many more milestones like this in the future!

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed how to think like a programmer. When you're learning to code you may think that syntax is the most important thing since it is so hard to memorize. The problem with memorizing syntax is that if you ever need to move on to a new programming language, you'll have to start memorizing all over again. Instead, Matt and Mike believe that learning programming concepts is more important than syntax, as they allow you to apply that conceptual knowledge across any language you come across - it lets you problem solve as a programmer.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed serverless technology and how it challenges server-based hosting that has been the standard for years. Mike believes that this has revolutionized the backend developer and hosting game, while Matt is new to serverless and is still stuck configuring his servers the way he always has. Show notes You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed developer burnout, how it starts, and how to prevent it. Developer burnout can affect anyone and manifest itself in a variety of ways. It is not limited to those of us that frequently work long hours or have significant daily stress (although those are potential causes), it can affect those of us that simply dislike our jobs or have been doing the same tasks for too long.

Welcome back to the HTML All The Things Podcast your web development, web design, and small business headquarters. This week, Matt and Mike discussed sharing information with clients diving into how much you should share and how much you should keep secret to keep the project on track. It's easy to overshare with a client, overwhelming them with too many details and technical intricacies, but on the other hand, it's also easy to give them too little information, risking them misunderstanding what it is they ordered from you.

Welcome to the HTML All The Things Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things web development, web design, and small business. This week, Mike and Matt sat down to discuss how good habits can make developers more productive. The duo go over how habits are not a one size fits all situation, but instead should be tailored to each individual that is looking to boost their productivity - whether that's simply setting up a meal plan, choosing to cut off your work hours at a certain time, or just getting to bed the same time each day - we are all different, and so not every habit is best suited for our unique needs. You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

This week Matt and Mike tackle the questions "What is iconography" and "What does iconography mean" in a packed episode that covers the basics through the UX of icons. The duo also covers a variety of iconography examples and when text should be used instead of icons, or when text & icons should be used together and why. You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Thanks to FlyCode for sponsoring this episode, our listeners get a free trial via flycode.com/htmlall Tech interviews can be good, bad, or...really bad. Some of them take multiple interviews to complete, others involve hours of homework, and the worst of them include all the above. In this episode, Matt and Mike discuss tech interviews and how to make them better. The duo cover the good, the bad, and the ugly via a collection of horror stories, followed by some good practices for both the interviewer and interviewee. Episode Sponsor: FlyCode FlyCode helps product teams work like software engineers - to ship better products, faster with no-code You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Thanks to FlyCode for sponsoring this episode, our listeners get a free trial via flycode.com/htmlall Some developers see no-code as a threat to their jobs, they treat it as a form of automation, which will eventually replace them. In this episode, Matt and Mike discuss why they don't think no-code is coming for developers' jobs. Instead, the duo sees no-code as a mostly positive influence, bringing new and exciting opportunities to the expanding web development industry. Episode Sponsor: FlyCode FlyCode helps product teams work like software engineers - to ship better products, faster with no-code You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a crucial, yet exceedingly difficult to learn skill. Many people think it makes a page appear on the first page of Google search results and by doing it right you'll always be at the top, but it's not that easy at all. There's the competing aspect of paid search results versus free, then there's the competition between websites where other sites can steal your spot at any time. In this episode, we discuss all things SEO with Nat Miletic, an SEO and WordPress expert. Nat's Links Twitter | Clio (Web Agency) | SEO Course You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Learning APIs is a crucial skill for web developers to learn. They're commonly used to deliver content to websites from remote and local resources. They can empower entire platforms with vast databases of knowledge or be as simple as a connection to a CMS. This week Matt and Mike sat down with Pratham to discuss everything APIs including his new job at RapidAPI. Pratham's Links Pratham's Twitter | RapidAPI You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Full-stack web developers can work on all aspects of websites from the user interface to the database that drives the content. Combining the frontend developer and backend developer positions, full-stack developers boast a full set of skills that many recruiters find useful. With the ever-increasing number of features that are packed into websites and web apps, are full-stack development positions sustainable? Is it possible to know all the skills needed well enough to do your job on all parts of the stack? You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Learning new skills is crucial for web developers. Junior developers need to learn all the time to expand their capabilities. Senior developers need to learn throughout their career to update their knowledge. Learning these skills is not easy, however, with so many different frameworks and tools available to learn, alongside the difficult decision on how to learn them - college, university, coding bootcamps, etc. In this episode Matt and Mike discuss how to cut through the noise, identify how you learn, and decide how to learn. Show Notes You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

There is a lot of web tech that isn't talked about in social media or making headlines. Instead, these pieces of tech sit in the background, silently forming the foundation of what we call the internet. Thousands of sites powered by WordPress, web apps built in PHP, jQuery as a dependency, and much more. In this episode Matt and Mike discuss these pieces of tech, what they are, and why they're so important. You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 represent different eras of how people used the internet. Web1 mostly offered users the ability to read and research, with hardly any way to interact with what they were reading. Web2 got people involved with interactivity and connectivity as ever more power web apps and social media platforms changed how we worked and socialized online. Web3 is the third iteration of the internet that is not quite in full swing yet, but is bringing with it the likes of crypto currencies, artificial intelligence, the metaverse, NFTs, and much more. You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

In this episode Matt and Mike tackle some of your Twitter questions including topics such as Web2 versus Web3, when to learn TypeScript, how to tell when you should change your framework, and why influencers speak about new tech so much. You can find the questions from this episode here. You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Web development has a lot of love, hate, and everything in between. In this week's episode, Matt and Mike try and focus on the love and talk about all the things they love about web development...for the most part - sometimes some of the other sides and realities of web development hijack the conversation, but tangents should be no stranger to listeners of this show. Show Notes You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

In this episode Matt and Mike jump into part two of "Where Frontend Ends and Backend Begins" an almost entirely example-based episode, going over a basic web page and what parts should/could be frontend, or backend. This example site includes a CMS, slider, static text, calling from an API, authentication, form validation, and much more. You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

In this episode Matt and Mike sit down with the host of the Scrimba podcast, Alex Booker for a conversation on junior developers, social media, and much more. Alex is a self-taught developer that transitioned into developer advocacy where he helps junior developers break into the industry for the first time. Additionally with that group the guys discuss using social media and feeling at odds with posting, or promoting, yourself. You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub

Frontend versus backend development can be very confusing to a beginner. It's difficult enough to understand all the syntax and rules of thumb that you must follow, let alone be confused by the difference between client-side and server-side programming. In this episode, Matt and Mike discuss the difference between frontend and backend development, covering what client versus server-side is, and how the lines between the two roles blur more than you may think. You can find us on... Facebook | Twitter | Instagram RSS | Patreon | Spotify Medium | YouTube | GitHub