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

When you take your first job as a junior developer you may be nervous about what type of tasks you'll be assigned and the expected quality level of your deliverables. In this episode, Matt and Mike discussed some of the types of tasks that you may be assigned as a junior developer. They walk through how and what a manager may ask you to do, and how much detail you're likely to receive before getti...

Documentation helps web developers navigate CSS frameworks, WordPress plugins, and helpful npm packages. Without it, we're left doing trial-and-error for hours, or left to community support from potentially dated forums. When documentation is bad, it can cost the documentation owner customers and trust from the community, but when it's good, it can save developers time and drive trust in the produ...

Svelte 5 is coming and with it the addition of Svelte 5 Runes, a replacement for the let, =, export, and $: that we use in Svelte today. Runes replaces this old syntax with function syntax to achieve the same old things and more. In this episode, Matt and Mike discuss a brief history of Svelte before diving into what was shown off so far about Svelte 5 Runes. The duo then discuss the learning expe...

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is how websites prepare and portray themselves to search engines like Google and Bing. The goal of SEO is to generate as much traffic (ideally organic traffic) as possible from the right people - namely prospective customers. The problem with SEO is that many industries and specific keywords are very competitive and require a lot of effort by someone that knows wha...

Authentication is a critical part of modern websites and web apps. Everything from ecommerce stores through membership sites will almost always have some form of authentication for their users. As a web developer, creating an authentication system can seem daunting because of the security that's involved in storing people's passwords and sensitive account data. It's difficult to keep up with all t...

It can be difficult to choose the right tech stack for your website or web app because there are so many to choose from. There are more traditional stacks like LAMP, MERN, and MEAN...as well as new serverless stacks that use Vercel/Netlify, Next.js, and Planetscale (MySQL). Furthermore, if you're working for a client in an agency or freelance, a single tech stack might not cut it. It's not uncommo...

Project planning sounds like it's the job of a project manager, but the truth is that a web developer interacts with so many parts of an online project that project management skills are crucial. When working as a freelancer, or for a small business, there might not even be a project manager on staff, leaving the web developer to manage their own team, time, and communications. Sprints/scrum and a...

Side hustles are a popular choice when looking to make additional money on top of your primary income. There are seemingly countless ways to make a little money on the side and many of them are done online. With that said, web developers, whose job it is to create online experiences, should arguably have an upper hand in this space with their technical knowhow and exposure to online marketing. Thi...

Finding a job as a web developer is difficult right now. We're hot off the heels of the crazy hiring spree during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now companies are tightening their belts. We see tech companies constantly laying people off, and we've been hearing about a recession for the past year or so. The good news is that finding a job as a web developer isn't impossible, as there are still a lot o...

Choosing the right web host is crucial for your project's success. Web hosting should be seen as the foundation in which your website or web app is built upon. It doesn't matter if you make your app with this framework, that plugin, or have the best content in the business - if the hosting goes down, your project goes down. The problem here is that as a web developer and especially a junior develo...

Your first week as a junior developer can be nerve wracking and anxiety inducing. Not only are you meeting a team of new people, but you're starting a new job as a newbie to coding. This week Matt and Mike discuss how to make the most of your first week of the job, making a great first impression on your team members, and hopefully letting you absorb as much knowledge as you can. By handling socia...

Web development hackathons can be a fun way to do some friendly competitive programming. The result is often a few great portfolio pieces for those involved and a cool prize for those that come out on top. For Paolo Ricciut and Antonio Sarcevic they not only won the Best Ecosystem Integration award at the SvelteHack Hackathon, but they created a project that could help push the Svelte/Kit industry...

Learning JavaScript from scratch can be as much about syntax as it is programming concepts, especially when it's your first language. Concepts like knowing how and why you need a place to store bits of data (variables), re-using code snippets instead of writing them repeatedly (functions), making decisions (conditional statements), and working with collections of data (arrays and looping) are all...

Failure is a hard pill to swallow, but it's failure that allows us to grow as developers. When you're learning a language like JavaScript, there are a lot of concepts to take in, and even more ways to accomplish the same task. Sometimes, you'll choose a method that works...only to find out later that it's the "wrong" way to do it because of security, or efficiency. When that happens, many JavaScri...

Next.js is a popular React framework that recently made some controversial changes with its 13.4 update. App router was moved to stable in this release bringing React server components, nested routers & layouts, simplified data fetching, streaming & suspense, and built-in SEO support. Unfortunately, some web developers are not excited for this release, with a few questioning if these chang...

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are foundational web development technologies that Matt and Mike recommend web developers learn before trying out a framework (ie React, Svelte). Out of these three pillars, JavaScript is the most difficult to learn, especially for people that have never been exposed to programming before. Learning how to think and solve problems like a computer (programmatic logic) coupl...

Full-stack development is one of the most difficult web development positions as it covers both the frontend and backend of a website. The frontend is responsible for the user interface, including any logic that powers that interface (ie animations, show/hide elements). The backend is responsible for features working from a server, typically handling security-heavy functions (ie credit card usage)...

The tech world moves quickly, and web development is no exception...except that it seems like web development keeps re-inventing the wheel. Us web developers can make a blog in WordPress, Svelte + SvelteKit, React, Webflow, and many more. It seems like we spend most of our time arguing and creating new tools to develop the exact same end products, when we could be innovating and creating the next...

Learning JavaScript from scratch can be a real challenge, but once you're through it, your newfound programming knowledge will pay dividends for years into your career. JavaScript is one of the foundational technologies on which the web is built, alongside HTML and CSS. Knowing it gives you insight into how to "think like a computer" and offers a running start when you're ready to learn a JavaScri...

Coming back to a web development project after a long hiatus is difficult enough for a senior developer, let alone a junior developer. As a newbie when it comes to Svelte and SvelteKit, Matt tried to return to his passive income app weeks after his last visit, only to find himself stumped on what to work on next, and how everything he already had worked. This led him to question whether he should...

On top of the growing collection of "must-know" tools in a web developer's arsenal is the famous (or maybe infamous?) TypeScript - a high-level programming language that adds static typing with optional type annotations to JavaScript. Developed by Microsoft, TypeScript can improve the developer experience by allowing the data that is passed around the code to be typed to something specific (ie Boo...

Practice makes perfect, so it makes sense when senior developers tell aspiring juniors to "just code" and it will all work out. The problem with "just code" is that a complete beginner will have no idea where to start, or what to code up. Should they use HTML, React, or PHP? What type of project should they code up? In this episode, Matt and Mike hope to lay out a clear pathway on where to start l...

The web development community has a collection of hot takes that seem to continuously come up time and time again in social media discussions and podcast debates. Hot takes like the debate of whether or not HTML is a programming language, or if React is good. These, among several other hot takes, are typically rooted in divide among the community as friction points about what tools to use and how...

No-code platforms are useful tools for those that don't have the expertise to code up a web app, website, or mobile app themselves, but what if we told you that they can be useful for programmers too? No-code tools can save web developers time by offering a quick and easy creation platform that can typically be expanded upon with code (usually JavaScript). This week Matt and Mike discussed the imp...

Squashing bugs in your code can be as easy as finding a missing semicolon, but sometimes it can be a grueling process filled with torn out hair and console logs. In this episode, Matt and Mike discuss the various ways that you can debug your code using methods that span HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For HTML, the DOM inspector, markup validation, and accessibility checkers can ensure you have a clean...