Whiskey Web and Whatnot

In this milestone 100th episode, Chuck and Robbie are joined by a round table of industry experts and web developers with different philosophies, preferences, and experiences in the tech space to share their opinions on the state of web development. The round table includes Chris Coyier, Co-Founder of CodePen; Scott Tolinski, former Owner of Level Up Tutorials; Tracy Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of Thi...

Brian Douglas, Founder and CEO at OpenSauced, learned to code while pursuing his MBA and stayed up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies by tuning into podcasts and blogs. Brian’s passion eventually caught the attention of Netlify, where he joined as an advocate. Later, he became the first advocate at GitHub, building out a developer relations team. Brian shares insights into the open-so...

Chuck and Robbie are joined by Emmy Cao, Developer Advocate at Wix, and Yoav Abrahami, Chief Architect at Wix at the RenderATL 2023 conference to talk all things tech, including whether low code, no code tools are making developers obsolete. Emmy and Yoav delve into Wix’s code-first approach, where users can write code and then create screens that modify that code visually. They highlight the acce...

Chuck and Robbie catch up with Chance Strickland, Senior Software Engineer at Replo, at the RenderATL conference. Chance kicks off the conversation by sharing that he is now working at a small startup after leaving the Remix core team. The trio discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using signals, a tool that helps manage asynchronous JavaScript. They explore how signals can enhance code readabilit...

Chuck and Robbie are joined by Scott Tolinski, Executive Producer at Sentry, for a recorded chat from the RenderATL conference. The trio delves into lively discussions on various tech topics and shares their candid opinions on ongoing Twitter debates. Scott opens up about his role at Sentry and how the acquisition has impacted his other venture, Level Up Tutorials. He sheds light on the new direct...

Chuck and Robbie dive into their recent experience of building a new podcast site and all the frameworks in their toolkit including Next.js, Vercel, and surprisingly, React. Robbie shares the motivation behind building a new podcast site, with the duo wanting more control over analytics, customization, and the overall look and feel, rather than relying on podcast platforms. Robbie used a Tailwind...

Stephen Shaw is a Front End Developer at CodePen. But his journey into the world of web development traces back to his earliest memory, captured in a nostalgic photo from 1987 of him sitting on his dad's lap gazing at a computer tower. Today Stephen contributes to building one of the most widely used code editors for the web. CodePen, as Stephen reveals, is a dynamic social network where people sh...

Nathan Sobo, Founder of Zed Industries, is a founding member of the team that built Atom at GitHub. With nine years of experience under his belt, Nathan made the bold decision to leave GitHub and start a new venture: building Zed, a code editor that captures his vast knowledge and ambitious goals. Nathan opens up about the frustrations he faced with web technology, specifically Electron, which was...

Jarred Sumner, Founder and CEO of Oven, is bringing speed to the world of Javascript with his project, Bun. Bun is a next-generation Javascript runtime bundler, transpiler, and NPM package manager that promises lightning-fast speeds. It's already making waves in the industry. The company secured seven million dollars in funding to build hosting for Bun in August 2022. One of the secrets to Bun's s...

What happened to the blockchain? A few years ago, it seemed like the whole world had high hopes for the technology. Today, Chuck and Robbie wonder if it will ever make a comeback. In addition to following up on last week’s episode about input types, Chuck and Robbie remember the days when software piracy was rampant and how it affected the industry. This leads to a discussion about the blockchain...

Engineers often have the urge to create something bigger and better than what already exists, driven by their competitive nature. But this desire for innovation can sometimes lead to overengineering, resulting in a loss of valuable time and resources. Robbie shares his recent frustrating experience with the custom date and time pickers in an app that left him feeling flustered and confused. Chuck...

Tanner Linsley, Co-Founder and VP of UI/UX at Nozzle is known for creating some of the most popular open-source libraries in the tech space. These libraries keep the wheels turning by making things easier for him and many other developers in their day-to-day jobs. Tanner has built libraries, such as React Query and React Table, that are now part of TanStack, his branded collection of tools. TanSta...

When you think about the career journey of a software developer, teaching elementary school is not typically the first thing that comes to mind. But for Lucia Cerchie, Developer Advocate at Confluent, her elementary school teaching experience gave her a huge advantage in her work. In this episode, Lucia discusses her work with Kafka, a distributed event streaming platform, and how she creates cont...

Twitter released its open-source algorithm and developers like Robbie and Chuck are digging into the code to find out what they have been hiding. While the recommendation algorithm has been useful, it also has major pitfalls. Twitter’s algorithm categorizes and deprioritizes users from appearing on people's feeds which is frustrating when your page is the one being deprioritized. Google launched i...

The tech industry is still grappling with the aftermath of the second dot com crash. Executives are cash grabbing, banks are failing and the government seems to be turning a blind eye. Will executives replace all their developers with AI? It can be difficult to not turn your frustration to the C-suite when they seem to be getting more wealthy by cutting labor costs. Meanwhile, developers are livin...

Ryan Carniato, Creator of SolidJS and Principal Engineer at Netlify, has always had a love for music and tech. He set his punk rock dreams aside and settled down to become a full-time engineer. Ryan started programming at the age of 11 and got his first job at eBay where he contributed to their top open-source project, Marko. After building his network and experience in open source, he landed a jo...

Conferences are one of the best ways to network with like-minded developers and find new insights to bring back to your team. Plus, you might even be able to build your entire wardrobe for the year out of free swag. Chuck and Robbie are no strangers to the conference scene, they’ve attended their fair share back when developers had to find them by word of mouth. Today, there are some aggregators o...

It’s hard to find a good package manager, and even the most seasoned developers still struggle to figure them out. Robbie kicks off the tech talk by sharing his misadventures trying to figure out pnpm leading Chuck to ask the burning question “Would you wear a pnpm T-shirt?” Despite Robbie’s struggles in pnpm, he still believes it is the better option compared to alternatives like npm, Yarn V1, or...

Michael Paulson, aka The Primeagen, is known for his live streams, crazy memes, and unpopular opinions on Twitter. But he is also a software engineer with over a decade of experience in a legacy C++ codebase. Juggling engineering with any other hobby is difficult, so how does he make it work? The Primeagen, a software engineer at Netflix, is committed to content creation and passionate about encou...

Jason Lengstorf built up an audience on YouTube by doing unscripted live coding and sharing his mistakes with his community. He credits his background as a musician and frontman of an emo band for helping him get comfortable with looking foolish in front of people. As the host of Learn With Jason, he believes there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing a web development tool, as lo...

Astro 2.0 is launching new exciting features and it’s setting the bar for HTML frameworks. What makes Astro unique in web development and what are its future possibilities? Fred K. Schott, CEO of the Astro Technology Company, says it’s all in the framework’s content focus and island architecture. For Fred, the aim is to have a tool that's HTML-first but still sprinkles in interactivity and allows...

Astro has once again become a hot topic, capturing the attention of developers and impressing them with its user-friendly features. Astro 2.0 introduced new and improved error overlays that are functional and well-designed, making debugging more efficient for developers. Astro 2.0 is powered by the fast and efficient Vite 4, which has received high praise in the developer community. Robbie thinks...

The developer community can be highly opinionated. We find our favorite tools and fiercely support them because they help us meet our goals. Tailwind has been polarizing since it launched in 2017. Some developers swear by it, claiming it makes their code cleaner while others think it’s a waste of time. The State of JS results are in and they reveal that Ember is still lagging behind in retention,...

Slow page speeds and bad developer experience are huge pain points. If you can get those two things right, the developer community will likely rally behind you. CSS hit the bullseye when it introduced trigonometry functions to boost performance by avoiding Javascript. But Cypress has been a big letdown in DX. Before introducing trig functions, CSS was pretty limited and it relied on Javascript to...

If you’re like Robbie and you haven’t dug into SQL since college, learning the basics of SQL vs NoSQL is a great place to start. Working with data isn’t a part of every developer’s day-to-day, but it can’t hurt to understand the differences. NoSQL is gaining popularity among engineers because of the ease and flexibility of updating fields with new data. Some engineers prefer taking unstructured da...