The History of Syntax

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we've got the history of Syntax.

Wes realized we've been doing this podcast for a long, long time. And very early on in the podcast, we did kinda our origin stories where we told people about ourselves, but we've never really either followed that up or kind of explained the the process of syntax. You know? I was I was on an someone's livestream last week, and they're like, like, how did that even start? You know? It's been around for a while. So we thought, like, let's let's give you a little history of Syntax of where we started, how we met, and, like, what did we do over the years to get to where Syntax is today?

Yeah. Yeah. Because a lot of you may have found this channel recently Node that we've been publishing a lot more, or maybe you found the podcast over the Yarn. And, well, you might not know all of the whole whole bits and story. So, Wes, do you wanna kick it off with a little bit of, you know, pre syntax, what you were doing today? Lore? A little bit of lore on the Wes Bosch

story. Alright. So back around 2015, Scott and I were both making, like, web development tutorials in general.

And Scott was publishing quite a bit to YouTube at the time. I was doing my own courses. I did blogging and YouTube as well, but not as heavily as Scott was.

How we initially met was Scott had published a course called React for Beginners, and I had a course called React for beginners. And I said, hey. Could you not? Yeah. And, thankfully, he was really cool about it, and he's like, oh, yeah. No problem. And you renamed it to, I think, React for Everyone, which I was really happy about. And I was like, oh, by the way, I love your stuff. Like, I had taken Scott's sketch course at the time, so, like, I I knew who he was, but I had I never, like, crossed paths before that. So that was our, like, sort of first introduction.

And then maybe a couple months after that, I had this idea of creating what's called a mastermind.

And a mastermind group is where you get together with people who are in similar businesses as you and sort of just talk shop about what's working, what's not working, what are your goals, you know, keep each other accountable.

I was like, hey, Scott. Do you wanna do that? We we also had Joel from Egghead.

We had Josh Owens who JS running some meteor it's called, like, the meteor dojo or something like that. By the way, I ran into him on TikTok the other day. Now he's doing three d printing stuff. Cool. So he's he's in a different industry now.

But, basically, we talked for once every two weeks for a year and just gave you some tips, and it that was very helpful.

And then after about a year, we're like Wes kinda got what we wanted from it, but, like, Scott and I had gotten along really well.

We're like, dude, we should start a podcast. You know? Like, there's probably something else here. I've really enjoyed hanging out with Scott every week and and talking, and we're like, man, there's we have, like, a really good back and forth, good rapport, similar sense of humor, kinda in the same stages of life as well. So I I Wes like, hey. You wanna start a podcast?

Yeah. And and it's it's funny. So pre all of that, I was doing, like, you'd mentioned a lot of YouTube, and I had started, YouTube in in 2012.

And there's actually a little Honeypot did a little mini documentary about my my career that goes into a lot more details on some of that stuff. But, you know, the YouTube channel for me was just a a slow growth over time where I was publishing, like, nine videos a week for couple years and just, like, really, really working hard on the the YouTube channel itself. And Wes had really, like, really done a great job of making, like, really high end premium tutorial content. And, like, what I was making was not that. I mean, it was nine videos a week. You can't really do high end content at nine videos a week. I was more or less coming home from work and recording just, like, talking about what I was doing all day at work. So when we had that mastermind, you know, Wes was bringing a different angle to the same thing, and I was bringing a lot of YouTube expertise in 2015 at the time. You Node, the channel was in the middle of its rise. You Node? It it took a long time. I'll post a link of the, the chart itself for the growth of the YouTube channel over time. But, you know, it was just a a long steady growth of YouTube. And, you know, man so there was just a lot of domain specific knowledge I had about what makes for effective YouTube, especially, like, SEO stuff because I was living and dying by the SEO game on YouTube at that point. Yeah. But You're just cranking it out. I remember the one of the first things I asked you in the mastermind Wes, how do you how do you record so much content? You know? Like, you just crank you're cranking it out, and,

it it was good. Like, I I was taking them myself before I even knew you.

Yeah. And on top of that, I was doing videos for like, I did sketch videos for their website. I was doing videos for Meteor at some point. I was doing videos for Figma when they were still a tiny little company. So, you know, I I was doing even more than what I was publishing onto YouTube, but for me, it was all just, like, sit down and a little bit less polished. Just talk about what I'm doing. Explain through it. You Node? Record a nine to ten minute video here and there. But either way, the mastermind group for me was so helpful because I was trying to turn what was a YouTube channel that I was not supporting myself with. Believe it or Scott, at the time, you get 200,000 followers or whatever on YouTube, that still doesn't pay your rent. Right? So I was trying to pivot from working full time as a developer and doing this stuff in my free time to teaching full time. And so Wes was, like, a instrumental in, like, helping me turn my platform into something that that could, actually support me, which, you know, for a little while, it definitely, was very tough. And I had to pick up a job here and there extra because I just could not, break into it. But Wes expertise really helped out. You Node, we had been doing that mastermind group for a while, and we had talked kind of casually about doing a podcast.

But I did find that we created this initial planning document 04/16/2016.

And inside of the initial planning document was a lot of things from the name syntax at that point because we had a bunch of other, like some of them were bad. Some of them were decent names. We had a big old list of potential names. We just kind of decided what the vibe was going to be at this ESLint.

And we even hashed out a whole bunch of outlines for some potential episodes that we wanted to do. We decided that we maybe wanna kick off, like, three episodes. We'd even come up with the term sick pick at that point.

Sick tips. We had a bunch of other ones that we didn't end up using, like Pound It. That was a good one.

Yeah. We we didn't keep Pound It. I don't know why we didn't keep Pound It. Believe yeah. We were just, like, thinking of, like like, how do we make this not boring? And we're just kinda coming into the idea of, like, audio, drama mama, moments, tasty treats. Easy breezy, we never actually ended up using. Hot take time machine, hot takes from years past, which is hilarious because this was almost ten years ago at the moment. Is that list of of other possible names on here as well? I don't know. I couldn't find that. Man, I think I got it. Let me let me search one sec. Either way, we knew from

prerecording the podcast that what we wanted to do out of this was have it be a departure from dry tech podcasts.

We wanted it to be fun. We wanted it to be very, like, just a little bit more exciting because I think that's both of how both of us operate. We're kind of both high energy people. So we really just wanted to, like, have something that represented that high energy nature that both of us tend to do. So that was, like, really the core of it. We also both had a lot of experience listening to podcasts. I I had been an avid podcast listener. I had a huge list of things that, like, really bug me about people's podcasts.

We both had all the tech and audio stuff, so we knew that wasn't going to be a problem. So we'd made all this stuff in April of twenty sixteen and, just did nothing with it. It it we pretty much just sat on it. I was working at a job, and it was kind of consuming a lot of my life at that ESLint. And it was just really tough. Wes was doing his courses. We had this idea. And, again, 2016, April '20 '16, we just sat on it. It wasn't until well, this isn't even it. I found a tweet from 11/30/2016 where I said, 2017 syntax, let's make it happen.

We did not end up making it happen in November of twenty sixteen.

It took us until, like, May, July, or June of twenty seventeen before we actually kicked it off.

It just goes to show that, like, actually doing something like, ideas are a dime a dozen. Right? Yes. Yeah. But, like, actually getting up and doing it is the part that makes it happen. Obviously, it is. But, like, man, it it took us a long time to actually just go ahead and and start recording it. And I think that was just because there's a lot going on in life, you know, focusing on courses and whatnot. But once we started getting rolling on it, I'm like, man, we shoulda we shoulda did this two years ago.

Totally.

By the way, I did find the list of possible names for Syntax, and it says, originally, I had wanted to call my own podcast Boss Sauce. Oh, I love it. I I don't even remember that. Oh, that's great. Be fun slash funny and enough to grab people's interest.

Most of these are garbage, but I'm just spitballing.

So my ideas for the podcast were Node, code, code, exclamation mark.

Also, second one was just code, code, exclamation Yarn, so two.

The fun dev show?

Oh, yeah.

So stupid.

Devsauce, that's still pretty good. Sauce. Tips, that would have not been a good podcast name. Websauce, Blockscope. I think Block Scott is probably my favorite second one.

DevLife, The Node Life. Well, those are all of the ideas that we had there. And then finally, I forget. Syntax is not even on there. I'm not sure how we ended up landing on Syntax.

We had more names than this because I clearly remember one of them was was codetime with Wes and Scott. And I'm trying to find that list.

It's on the it was on the next page. Here we go. I I had to go back in, like, history and, find these in Google Docs history. So async, Node time with Wes and Scott, time code, code flow.

Okay. Yeah. Syntax is the best one. I think we all we kind of agreed on it. It's a it's a short word. It'll it's a cool looking word.

It represents what we do really well.

I still very much, I love the Syntax brand, you know, and and everything around it. And, like, we've we've morphed it over the years, but it still is it's the same logo, and it's the same name. And, And, I I don't know that I've ever liked something that long where Wes I'm like, that's a good name. You know? Nice, short, crisp Node. And, like, every other Node podcast that has come out since since then JS is a take on it. It's just one word about coding.fm.

Yeah. Yeah. It it was it was, you know, it was so fun. And then one thing that happened, I was working this job at a Scott up, and they were, really abusive.

And, like, as a developer there, it was a really tough work environment.

And, I've told the story before in the past, but it was the the week of the birth of my first child.

And it was like a Sunday at 08:00 on the week my child was Yarn, and they were, harassing me. And I mean this in the, like, the most aggressive, rude possible type of way about a broken feature in pre alpha software.

And it was just, like, so brutal to me, and I I pretty much quit the next day. And at that point, I didn't have an income beyond, like, Vercel up tutorials, which, you know, was tight at that point. And, yeah, I I think both of us, it was the right time. We had all this stuff down, and it was the absolute right time for me. So we just decided to make it happen and start recording. The initial plan was that we recorded a teaser episode, and then we recorded three, additional episodes. So that way, we would have three kind of ready to go as a buffer. And the initial plan was to just do one a week. That was the whole thing. We're gonna do one episode a week. It's gonna be on Wednesdays, I believe. And, I I think so. And it was gonna come out every Wednesday. Phases. Yeah. Yeah. You know? 07/05/2017,

we published the first episode on React tools, and this was talking about, like, where to host React, all of the different, like, libraries around it. Right? I'm just looking at the show notes here. Cloudflare, Next. Js, GraphQL, GraphQL.

Yep. Graphcool, which is now Prisma.

Yes. I've seen Vercel. Meteor, Blaze, React storybook. Oh, man. We were

early on the React storybook, man. Yeah. That is Is there still React storybook? That's crazy that it's been around that long.

My son was born at the May, and this first episode came out early June. So you can tell, like, just how fast that turnaround was for me personally to go from I'm working this job full time to now we're doing this podcast. So for me, it really needed to hit, and it hit. I think the initial reaction was great. It helped that Wes had a massive Twitter audience. And at that point, my I think my YouTube, it was, like, 200,000 or something like that maybe at that point. Fairly large. Yeah. So it it was a, I think, a great initial reaction. I think we did exactly what we wanted it to do. And at that point, Scott a lot of people knew my name, which was funny because, like, I'd been on YouTube for so long, but people I didn't put myself on camera that much. I was the Vercel Up Tuts guy, and, like, I didn't even really even say my name. I Wes like, this is Scott from Level Up Tuts. It's like, I didn't wanna burden people with having to, spell my last name. So it was like at that point, it was Wes and the Level Up Tuts guy. That was the that was the show.

Yeah. That that was really nice that we had, existing audiences that we're able to push people towards. I think it's a little easier now to get sort of, like, an algorithm hit Yeah. Totally. And be noticed. But at the time, it Wes, like, discoverability for podcast was was extremely low, and we were able to just simply say, hey. We got this thing and push people out to it. And then just luckily from day one, we had a fairly sizable audience that were were tuned in. I don't know that we woulda kept it going for so long if we hadn't, like, got all the feedback because it's you hear from people and they they email you and they they tweet at you saying, hey. I love this episode or you got this wrong. And I I love that part about doing it because you feel part of the community.

Yeah. People let us know right away that they, liked it and enjoyed it. And because of that, we ended up getting, you know, sponsorship pretty early on in the game. I don't remember what our first sponsored episode was. I think it was I think it was Delicious Brains, has a Yeah. Delicious Brains. Plug in WP Migrate DB Pro, which I was a heavy user of at the time because I was I was doing a lot of

maybe not then, but I when I in my WordPress days, I use that in every single website.

And we got an email from Brad, and he's like, hey.

Can we sponsor this thing? And I had I had not even thought about that. You know? Like, the podcast was just a medium for us to promote our own stuff, but we had not thought about taking on external money. But but, we're,

sure. Yeah. And Yeah. I forget how much it was. I think it was, like, $700 or something like that for the first episode. Good money. Yeah. So yeah. It Wes good money. That was our fourth episode. So we had batched those first three episodes. And by the time we recorded a fourth episode, we had, Delicious Brains as a sponsor. So shout out, Delicious Brains for being the first and and really doing that. And and for me personally, like, this was pre anybody getting signed to do a podcast deal. Podcasts existed. Podcasts were popular, but they weren't, like, a career. You didn't hear a lot of people saying, I'm a podcaster. You know? So weren't on Spotify

at the time.

No. It was it was much more of, like, a still, like, a tech thing.

You know? And even 2017 was not early. I'd been listening to Leo LaPorte for ten years before that. You know? Like, I literally had podcasts on my iPod.

Yeah. Twenty eleven plus. Yeah. Totally. But, yeah, it was

it was amazing. I and then once that came out, we started getting emails from all kinds of companies, which I now realize that these tech companies that are trying to get in front of developers, it's kind of a hard thing to do because you can't just use regular mediums. Like, you can't you can't sponsor, like, Joe Rogan, with, like, a a developer tooling company or something like that. Totally.

So these companies were were hungry to try new avenues. And, also, like, at the time, the display ads were were starting to tank, and and these developer companies were looking for new areas to advertise on and and to get in front of, in front of devs.

Yeah. Yeah. You know Node one of our first bigger sponsors was was FreshBooks, who then continued to sponsor us forever and ever and ever. So shout out to FreshBooks for also really believing in in Syntax really early on. I mean, they sponsored episode number seven. Let's see. They sponsored episode number six.

Yeah. So they they started really early with us. And, that that really made it a lot more viable, besides the fact that we were getting a lot of listens and everything like that.

Yeah. I think I think companies like FreshBooks have, like, scanners, and they look for new podcasts. Because I think what what happens is if a new podcast comes up, they get on it early. And if it pops, then they get really good money value for their money.

Yeah. They did get good value because we were trending on the technology charts at that point already. So it it worked out pretty well for us. And, yeah, we just kinda kept that going until we decided that we wanted to add another episode because we were doing so much, but we didn't want to have another long episode. So that's where we came up with the idea of doing the Sanity and the tasty treat where the hasty treat would be a short episode on a quick topic. Because sometimes Wes were finding there was all these things we wanted to talk about, but it would have been, like, totally wrong for us to talk about them for

an hour. Right? It would have felt like we warp just artificially dragging it out, which you don't wanna do. Right? So that group them together, like, three topics that have nothing to do with each other, group them together into a single show, didn't really make sense.

Didn't make any sense. So that's why we came up with the whole hasty and tasty treat. Next thing you know, we're publishing two episodes a week.

And, yeah, the whole time, I'm trying to turn LevelUp tutorials in the business, and you are, still pushing out your courses, still working on on that stuff in, like Mhmm. You know, recording a lot of content in addition to the podcast. The podcast was still, like, a one day of the week thing for us and probably remained a one day of the week for us until somewhat recently.

When we hit that, like, second episode that we added, it was it was partially because, like, we had stuff to talk about and partially because we had more people wanting to sponsor than we had room for. So we're like, yeah. We'll we'll add the second show. That'll be kinda neat. That worked out really well, and it started to become like a, I would say, not as I would say a significant source or a good source of income Yeah. Alongside my courses as well. That was kinda fun. I I hated chasing all the sponsors and having calls with them and and whatnot, and it was it was a tricky thing. A lot of people always say, like, why don't you just farm it out to, like,

some sort of company? But An agency. Yeah. There was a lot of people trying to to do that for us. There there was a Yeah. A lot of people being like, we will manage all your ads. We'll do this. We'll do that. And it's like But Alright. But then you're taking

a massive chunk of it. Yeah. They they wanna take, like, a warp, like, a 25%.

And then, also, the reason I think we were making more money per listener than most podcasts were because we had the developer audience.

And the people who were sponsoring, like, Sanity JS an example, they were partially sponsoring because they had a good audience, but they were also sponsoring because Scott and I would get to know their product and and and talk about it. You know? Like, I still talk about Sanity to this day. Yeah. Totally. And because I know it so well because of all those ad reads, and it's it's an awesome product. So it was like a thing where, like, you had to really do it yourself because you had to get on the calls. You had to try. You had to build something with it because they wanted you to talk about their product from a firsthand and not just, like, run a MeUndies robotic ad read. And and everybody loved them. And then people still talk about the transitions Scott would do from the show into the actual ad reads.

Yeah. You know what? It's funny. The transitions to the ad reads were something that I I did right away. I don't know, like, how I got to be decent at it, but I did pick that up, like, from another podcast. I don't know if you know this. There's a there was a hockey podcast, Merrick Vercel Tolinski, and, Greg Wyshinsky always did really good ad transitions, and I always thought that was very funny. So I I I decided to do it, but it I don't remember the first time I did that if I did it right away or whatever. But it was always a a thing that I wanted to do and aspired to do and kinda had never never a problem with it. I don't know why. It just kinda came naturally to me. So that was always kind of just initially part of that. But it did come from Greg Tolinski, so shout out to Greg.

And then right around middle of twenty nineteen, I'm just looking it up, we decided to start doing interviews, which is our fry which Wes our Friday episode.

I had never wanted to do interviews because I I feel like I wasn't good at them. I feel like I'm still not great at at talking, but people were like, oh, can I come on? Can can you get this person on? And I was like, it's not really an interview podcast, but we decided to kinda go for it. We had Sasha Grief and Cortland Allen on previously just to kinda talk to them. But it looks like our very first actual interview was Sarah Swaden talking about SVGs and front end UI and and CSS, which was

very good episode. Do you know why that was? I was out. I don't remember why I was out. I was sick. I was unavailable. For some reason, I was out. And that was the first episode I missed, and you were like, well, I'll find somebody else. So you found Sarah to fill in, for me, which is how that that came about.

But I remember that was really great, and it worked out really well. Yeah. I mean, obviously, Sarah's great. So but, also, we did a a live show in there before we decided to do interviews full time because Oh, you're right. Yeah. Episode 90 was our first live show. And that, coincidentally, was the first time that Wes and I had ever met in person, given that, at the time, you know, I was living in Colorado, and I still am, Wes living in Toronto. We had never been in person. We'd probably been in very similar circles and rooms, just never never met before until then. And, Yeah. It was it was pretty great. We did the live show, and I think it was really hilarious. I think that was, like, the one thing that we wanted to get out of the first live show Wes to have it be as fun as the show or more fun than the show in a different format. So we came up with a bunch of games. In the very first live show, we did, spicy tips where we where we did, like, spicy takes. We did this, that, or both, which was still to this day my favorite game that we do live where we I can't believe we came up with this for the first live show Yeah. Which was which was where we give you a word, and you have to say if it's an NPM library or whatever this was. So for instance like, is this a carbon fiber road bike or a package for,

modeling three d shapes in the browser or both. And those that was so much fun doing that. That was at with Jamstack Scott in San Francisco.

Yep. Yep. And then we also did Stumped where we were asking questions for people in the audience. Oh, no. We were trying to stump each other.

That was the one Wes were trying to stump each other. We did overrated or underrated Wes it's kind of rapid fire, and then we did a q and a. It was a ton of fun. And, shout out to the Netlify folks for throwing a Jamstack Scott. That Wes, like, a a great time, and it was just like a pretty I think it was a pretty sweet event for us because, again, we got to to experiment with the format a little bit. But we also got to hang out, which was, I think, important for us. Yeah. Yeah. People were surprised that we had never met. We did, what, 90 episodes together. 90 episodes together. ESLint person.

Been over a year of doing podcast. People had thought we had known each other our entire life, which is why I was like, yeah. That's we we clicked, and and that's why the podcast did so well. So we had a really good rapport and really good back and forth, especially at the time that there was a lot of podcasts out there, and they were all snooze Wes. They were highly technical, but had no personality.

And I I think that that has changed a lot with the with YouTube and, like, vlogging and, like, personalities becoming much more of a thing Node. At the time, it was just like, I am an expert. Therefore, I will blog and conference talk and do a podcast on it. And and now the entertainment value is is so much is so important alongside the actual learning things.

Yeah. That was pretty much it for a while. You Node? We did, live shows here and there. We were getting invited to do that stuff. We were doing conference talks. We maintained the podcast. We were now doing three episodes a week.

And, yeah, it was just got into a really natural flow of things. It it just kind of worked and and didn't stop working. You know, one thing that I really appreciate about US and, like, the show that we've been able to do is that I don't think there's ever been a single time where I've been like, I gotta do the podcast or,

I gotta talk to Wes. Like, Node. I'm always stoked to talk to Wes. Like, I'm stoked to talk to him all the time. So, you know, it it it's just a a good vibe all around. And and still Totally. People always ask that. Like, hey. Do you ever run out of stuff to talk about or or whatnot? And, like, some days, it's it's hard to figure out what to talk about and and, like, you gotta put all the content together. You know? Like, it's it's it's hard putting it all together, but the actual making it is very enjoyable.

And it's it's it's always been, like, a fun highlight of my week as well-being able to record it. And and also just, like, share what it is that I'm working on and share what I Node. It's it's a fun thing to be able to say.

Today, we're talking about CSS variables. You know? And you could just dive in, do all the research, figure out every little aspect of it, and then just deliver it in this tidy little neat package of an hour for somebody to passively consume.

And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.i0/syntax.

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.i0/syntax.

Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

Yeah. I do love diving deeply into a topic for a week and then getting to just fire hose that out in an episode. That was that was always just really, really super great.

So I guess the next big thing, because we had been, you know, really getting into that flow for a while, was getting acquired by by Century.

So, you know, we often say on this podcast, this show is brought to you or presented by Century, you know, those types of things. But Century was one of our longtime sponsors, and they would sponsor, you know, what, 52 episodes a year kind of repeatedly.

And Yeah. We had a really great relationship with them. Wes had known Ben Vininger over at Century for a long time. Did you know Kramer before, David Kramer?

Ben had Scott in touch with me before we even did the podcast, and he's like, hey. Do you if you ever wanna work together, let me know. And I had a Redux free course that was coming out. And I said, yeah. You wanna, like, sponsor the for the the Redux course? And, they said totally. So they paid me a bunch of money. I put Node of the videos of the course was me integrating Sanity into the React app and showing how it works and whatnot, and that really worked well. And then when the podcast came along, they're like, hey. We wanna sponsor this as well. And, like, immediately, they're just like, how many episodes can we get? You know? And they just they took as many as they possibly could, which I think they were a sponsor, yeah, 52 once a week for for many, many years. And it was a great relationship because Century never sent us anything to say.

Yeah. Maybe a couple times a year, they would drop us notes on new features that Century had and say, hey. Like, maybe this is some good talking points.

But it was always just like, well, you use it. Just just let her rip, you know, and we can kinda talk about it. And everybody always thought that that was like, felt really good coming from us.

And, yeah, it was it's always a really good, relationship, which is why when they approached us, they're like, hey. We wanna build this into something bigger. What do you think? Bring Syntax under the Century brand that you don't have to you don't gotta sell a whole bunch of ad spots, but, also, you can devote a lot more time to it. We can get you some people.

Seemed like a pretty good, pretty sweet proposition, enabled to just, like because that was that was a frustrating part about running syntaxes that we spent probably a full day recording every week, and then we had, like, I don't know, another half day run around doing sponsorship stuffs and talking with the editor, things like that. And it's it was it was quite a bit of work, and there was a lot of stuff that we wanted to do past that, but simply just did not have the time or resources.

Yeah. Considering I was at that time, we were recording syntax one day a week, and then I was doing, what, 24 videos a month with LevelUp tutorials.

Mhmm. So it was, you know, not even just four days a week. It was Saturdays and Sundays for me at that time just grinding on creating tutorials. So for me, I was feeling very, very tired of doing that. It was very exhausting, and I still love making that content. But I I'd really burned myself out on how many videos I had agreed to do. And once I'd made that agreement with my customers, I can't go back on that. I can't say, no. I'm gonna give you 10 videos a month or whatever. I'm gonna keep keep working on them. Now granted, we did bring in some third party content creators at various points, and that was definitely the direction. But people really liked my content, so I didn't wanna, like, skimp out on that. So it was a lot of work for me. So when this this came about, it was like, alright. Now we can invest all of my time into Syntax.

I can put that energy that I'm putting into my own tutorials into, like, a group effort instead of, like because I had a I had a business. I had a couple people working for me and stuff at LevelUp Tutorials.

But, you know, it felt really great to be able to have all that be in Syntax. So in addition to, like, having a nice working relationship with Sanity, I've also I had been using their product since before Syntax. Yeah. Like, long before for just JS a user. So I I was very familiar with the prod product itself, and I'd always had great experiences with the team. So when we started chatting and they they told us what they saw on it, and one of the big things that sold me on it was we're not gonna touch it. Unless you, like, need our help, we're not gonna tell you how to do it. You know? We just want you to think bigger, and we'll give you the resources to do so. So that was that was a big selling point because it's your your baby. You you Node, you have this whole brand. The last thing you want is the century to come in and say, make it purple. And I was like, oh,

okay. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. We've seen a lot a lot of like, that happens a lot. Right? And when we announced it, a lot of people were, like, happy but cautious.

They were like, Node hopefully, they don't ruin it. You know? Yes. And it Wes really nice after it JS. It's it's Wes something you love gets acquired, you always think, oh, that's it. There it goes.

You know? They're gonna start just, like, cranking it. Like, it's gonna be low quality. It happens with everything Everything. Except for us. So after, like, after a year of doing it and when we we launched we'll talk about whatever, but people started saying, that I'm so glad that they didn't ruin it.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And and so that was not great. Node it better. I should I should say that. It made it a lot better. Better significantly better because we were able to, hire a producer, Randy, who made it look better and sound better, and it freed us up from doing a a whole lot of stuff. Right? And Node we have a whole team. We'll talk about that in a sec, though. Yeah. Yeah. So Yarn of that was Level Up Tutorials was made free. You can utilize it Node, levelup.video.

It's available for a totally free resource for all of the courses that I made. So that was a whole part of it too. It's like, we're gonna take on LevelUp Tutorials and just make it free for the community, which was really admirable that they did that. They were like, we don't care about the money that LevelUp Tutorials is bringing in. The goodwill is better for us to make it free. So, the thing I got to work so hard on and, you know, I always felt bad about putting it behind a paywall given that, like, Wes I released a thousand videos on YouTube for free before I ever charged for anything. So it Wes like, I really wanted to give this stuff for free, but I could not live off of it that way.

So, it was really great that that ended up happening. And and, Caitlin Bloom, who was the LevelUp Tutorials marketing manager, she had been working for me for, I don't know, like, a year and a half at that point, maybe a little bit longer. I was really grateful to her. She took a chance on me because, you know, working for a single person at a business that is like, you know, just take that's a risky move. So, you know, shout out to Caitlin for, having the faith that LevelUp Tutorials was a a good bet, and it paid off for her. She got to join Sanity. She got to join the Syntax team, and she's now the Syntax marketing manager. And she's she's just great. And so it was the three of us for a little bit, and Ben Vinegar kinda whipped us into shape at Sentry. He he definitely got us working more like a team. You Node, Wes and I, we're a bit of

like, Wes just do stuff. You know? Oh, yeah. I'm a I'm a stallion, man. You can't pen me in. You know? I've never really had, like, a job. You Node? I've always worked for myself, and I should say, like, I'm still part time, what, however many hours a week, but the arrangement now is is much more formal. You know? Like, we have team. We have to communicate and things like that. And, I always tell my wife I'm a stallion. You know? I just kinda let her rip and and do what I want. And for the most part, that's still true, but, Ben came in and sort of helped us figure out goals and Yeah. What do you wanna do, and how do you hire somebody, and and all of that hard stuff, which I have zero experience in.

Yeah. Yeah. I I had been you know, as as doing that stuff for Vercel up tutorials, I had no experience in it either besides, like, what I was doing myself. So it was really, really helpful for me to be able to have that kind of training and and that kind of understanding.

So, yeah, the the next step was to grow the team. What do we need? Well, we need somebody who can take on the producer role of just defining the video look, moving to video at all. Before this, we were just audio.

And Wes hired Randy Rector for that, and he's just been a superhuman. He is just, you know, completely everything you see graphics wise and all that stuff.

Audio, he's, like, defined the entire visual aesthetic for the video of the podcast.

And he's done it all without much like, I don't know. I don't think I've ever told Randy do this, do that, whatever. He just does he's got great taste and does a great job. In fact, you can get that just from his YouTube channel because his his stuff all looked great beforehand, and and we knew bringing him in would be an easy transition for us. And it was. I mean, we were able to transition to video within, like, weeks of him joining the promo. Like, actually, probably a week of him joining the team. So

Yeah. He he has fantastic taste. And that was one thing when we were, like, trying to hire JS we wanted someone to tell us what to do and not the other way around. Yeah. You know? Like, we don't just want someone to click the buttons and and edit the thing.

He he obviously has those skills, but he more has, like, a he understands YouTube. He understands, how to ESLint, timing. Man, go watch the latest what is it? The the reacting to the desks video on YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. He took, like, like, thirty five minutes of us yapping and cut it down to, like, eighteen minutes of just and it feels so smooth. And I was telling Caitlin. I was like, unreal that he can take us yapping for so long and just make it so quickly cut, and it just flows really well. So just things like that. He's he's got excellent taste.

Yeah. So we moved the podcast to video, which is a big transition.

The, my baby, which was the Vercel up tutorials YouTube channel, converted into the Syntax channel. So the channel that you are watching this on, if you're watching it right now on YouTube, is formally my YouTube channel rebranded to be Syntax. You can go find probably all of my old videos there on there as well, which is great because we, you know, had a a big subscribership here already. And it's like trying to revive a YouTube channel was quite a bit of work, and we needed to, you know, bring people in. We had probably a good amount of, like, what are dead subscribers, people who subscribed in the past that don't exist anymore.

So it was definitely, like, an opportunity for us to really grow in this space. And and part of that was that we wanted somebody who's focused purely on making video content.

That was, like, one of our big things. We could have somebody who could you know, we could we can yap about projects on this show. We can talk about stuff, but we wanted somebody to go deeper and show you things. And it neither of us had the the time to do that is really what it came down to. So, that's why we we went to hire a creator, and that was a I would say that was a difficult job hunt. We had a ton of massively talented video creators interview and create stuff for us. And it was, like, emotionally difficult for me because I would have loved to hire so many people from that job hunt. But CJ stood out for being, like, very, very technically deep in a way that, like, you could throw anything at CJ and you felt like you'd be able to make a very well Node, technical, like, reliable, honest video about whatever it Wes. And and that's really what stood out for me. He he just genuinely a a smart and good dude.

That was that was really important to us as Wes. In in the same way that, like, Randy can, like, edit video, Photoshop, turn the knobs on audio, and and think about hooks for a a TikTok.

CJ does that for, like, understanding every single aspect of code, which JS, like, not everyone like, Scott and I are web developers, you know, and and we know a lot about server side JavaScript and databases and and caching techniques. And all the way on the other side, we know quite a bit about, like, front end and CSS and animations and stuff like that. And our we have a pretty wide breadth of of what we cover.

And and CJ, I I feel like he has even a deeper breadth on on some of that stuff. You know? He he actually has a computer science degree. Yeah. And then he's just, like, excellent at explaining how all of that stuff works as well.

Andy's just a genuinely likable dude, on top of all of that. You know? Like Cool mustache? Cool mustache.

Yeah. You don't feel like he is trying to be, like, an influencer or, like you know what? It's not it's like you don't feel like he's phony in any sort of way. The dude is who he is, and it's, like, such a positive thing to me. That's always a a character trait I I really enjoy. So adding CJ to the show is a huge value add for us. CJ had been doing his own stuff on Coding Garden. He had experiences live streaming. I had seen him doing live events in Denver around town. Perfect value add for us. Another thing we touched on was the merch store. So one thing we've wanted to do forever

is is to have some sort of merch. I've done T shirts once or twice myself. I've done stickers, but I've never had the ability to just, like, have stuff for sale all the time.

And that was one of the things when we joined centers. Like, hey. Can we can we do a merch store? Like, I wanna be able to to do some really cool stuff.

And, right off the bat, when we joined, we gave away, what, like, a thousand T shirts or 600 T shirts or something like that. And skate decks and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. We got skate decks. We have basketballs.

We got some really cool hats. By the way, really cool hats coming. Hoodies coming.

Probably by the time you listen to us, the hoodie should actually be live at century.shop.

So that was really cool because just having the resources of somebody to figure out how this all works and, like, we have a a whole fulfillment place. You know? It's it's a lot of work doing that,

and it's really nice having it all in place now. Yeah. That's the best part about having a team here for this JS because it's like, yes. We could we could probably have done a bad job of getting a merch store by just accepting, like, one of the numerous requests we had over the years for, like, we'll put we'll print your stuff and ship it for you. But so many of those things are just, like, bad, bad quality, bad everything.

And we just didn't have the ability and time to do it the right way. So that's why it was so helpful for, like, for Ben Vininger to be like, hey. I'll take over the the the store. Now Caitlin Bloom, is the point person on the store. It's like people have been able to really assist us in in the ways that'll have made this whole thing so much better. We don't wanna push out We don't I mean, we don't. We don't wanna to give you bad quality mugs and printed T shirts or whatever.

Make take five minutes to make a photoshopped image and throw it onto a a product. Like, yeah. Node into that. Yeah. The the print on demand stuff is not it's it's actually getting pretty good,

but it's it's not very fulfilling to do fun stuff. So we've been able to source some really neat stuff like a like a basketball and a skateboard. Those Yarn, with the fingerboard in the custom box.

We got some stickers coming pretty soon.

I grew up doing merch for hardcore bands. That's, like, how I cut my teeth in in this whole web development stuff. So being able to have that for coding is is such a cool thing.

It's so cool. And from there, yeah, we've been doing some events. We've been doing, Syntax meetups. We've been showing up. In fact, it's it's very funny. The very first Syntax, like, official meetup that we did besides doing live shows was the week that we flew to Toronto to discuss, potential acquisition with Century. And Wes, like, tweeted out, like, minutes you know, Node but, like, an a few hours before we were gonna do it. Hey. We're doing a live A couple days. Couple days? We're just like, hey. On a Monday night in Yeah. Hamilton,

not even in Toronto, we're doing, like, a meetup. And we had, like, probably, what, twenty, twenty five people come out? It was enough. Yeah. Enough people. It was fun. Super fun. I'd love doing those meet ups. We need to we're gonna do a few more of them because just it's great, like, actually hanging out with people that you've been conversing with online for years or or weeks or never.

Totally. And and it was it was great. A lot of people asking us why I'm there, which, was a a question I could not answer.

What did you say? Oh. Oh, I don't remember. Said we were just Wes were just doing some planning or something like that. You know?

Yeah. We're doing something. But the most recent meetup we did in SF for GitHub Vercel was incredible, because Century helped us plan it. We got a great venue for it. We gave away a ton of stuff. A lot of people showed up, and it was just a blast.

Yeah. That was really fun. We've done quite a few. We got some we did the GitHub Universe as well. We did React Miami or did a live show there as well.

Some some pretty fun stuff to doing over the years, and we've got a couple more coming up this year we're working on right now.

So that's the story thus Yarn, and I think the plan from here forward is to continue to make this platform better.

We want better shows. We want deeper quality. We want, you know, stuff that isn't out there. The last thing we want is, like, just more disposable junk on YouTube. So for us, that is the the big plan here, especially as we move more into video.

Obviously, the audio podcast is not going anywhere, and we're gonna continue to have that be just totally via a viable way to consume syntax. We don't wanna alienate any of the audio listeners or anything like that.

But we'll we'll be doing more on YouTube. JS EvidentSpire, our new Friday show, we've we've been Node, like

oh, man. We did the roasting desk setups. We did trivia. We did CSS battles. Junk that we don't do. You should watch the one where we react to your desk.

That's not that's possible. I guess it is a little bit.

It's fun. That wasn't supposed to I had a hoot doing that. It was hilarious. Have a hoot. Yes.

Sometimes it's okay.

Node when I do it, it's okay. That's, Wes.

Scott lots coming down the pipe. Lots of exciting stuff. If we also are always just always listening to to what you guys want. So leave us a comment down below or or send us a DM or an email, whatever ways possible. Love to hear what your thoughts are and what kind of stuff you wanna see.

Yeah. Absolutely.

So I guess it's a good time to get into sick picks and shameless plugs, which, again, we had these from the get go. That was part of our initial plan Wes to have SICK PIX and Shameless Plugs even by May. From day one. Yeah.

So this has been this has been a fun thing that we've been doing for a really long time here on Syntax. So, again, sick picks are the things that we like, we're consuming, we're utilizing all that stuff.

I have a sick pick, which is something that CJ had mentioned that he had gotten. So shout out to CJ for letting me know that these existed nowadays.

I hadn't bought an external hard drive in a very long time. Like, I had a NAS.

I, you know, I have that kind of thing for an external hard drive, but nothing that I could take with me.

What I ended up getting was will be the the catalyst was this. I was doing a lot of video editing, and my cache files were, like, taking up, like, 600 gigabytes on my laptop, which would just, you know, destroy my laptop's, you know, space in in about two seconds flat. So I got this four terabyte portable SSD.

It's made by Crucial. It's itty bitty, and it's four terabytes. It has 2,000 megabyte, read and write speed. So it uses, Thunderbolt for fast writing, and it's just tiny. I'm gonna put some Velcro on this and Velcro it to the back of my computer so I can take it with me. But it's shocking. Four terabytes in this little thing, it's essentially a USB flash drive. And I just basically told DaVinci to throw all my cache files on it. Now I never have to worry about that again. So edit right off of that? Like, scratch disk off of that? Yeah. I use scratch disk off of that. I think you could probably edit off of that as Wes. But I just haven't had the need to yet. But at least once a week, I I tell my wife. I'm like, I hate Apple. You know? I have a freaking two terabyte

MacBook. Yeah. And, like, I bought my wife a new, phone, and she had a 256 gig one. And she like, all of the apps on her phone are, like you know, where they, like, do that soft uninstall? I hate it. Every time yeah. And she's just like, I can't have any more apps on my phone because it's I have no space for anything. And my kids' iPads are always out of space. And I was like, how is this in in the year of 2025, how is this a thing where we're just running out of it? And they want you to do iCloud for a half thousand dollars a month.

It drives me nuts that it's so hard to get a lot of space on Apple devices.

Yeah. And, you have to literally tape a hard drive to the back of your laptop to make it work.

I was looking at, Mac Studio because we're getting Randy a Mac Studio, And it is. It's the the upgrade price to internally move your your internal storage from one terabyte on that thing to four terabytes is a thousand dollars.

A thousand dollars.

Crazy.

That's so silly. Yeah. I, I can't wait for the day that you can I don't know if this will ever come? They they wanna charge you for, like, cloud space or whatever. But, like, even already, I saw people are, like, hacking the Mac Studios or what are those square little square ones? Is that the studio? Mac Mini. Mac Mini, where, like, they are, like, making aftermarket drives for it Oh, yeah. Which give me that. I don't want a desktop computer, but give me that for my laptop. You Node? A thousand terabytes.

I want something like that. Yeah. I've been rethinking the I don't want a desktop computer thing. I don't know Okay. If I've talked to you about this. No. Tell me about it. I think virtual desktops have gotten pretty decent. And, like, a Mac Studio is so much more powerful than a MacBook Pro. I I was just thinking, like, when do I get my next MacBook Pro? Is it the next version? I think it probably is the next version. But what if I just kept this computer and did remote desktop into a

Mac Pro that is beefy? You know? You're gonna remote in real you think latency would not Yeah. Not be a thing? If I'm local, that wouldn't be too bad. The thing with your laptop is that you wanna be able to, like, bring it to a conference or bring it on an airplane or whatever and just have your stuff.

But when I think about it about it. Heavier work, whether that is, you know, work with LLMs locally or work with, you know, video editing and processing, those types of things Yeah. It feels like you could you could just offload that to a Yeah. Especially if you did,

you move all your coding projects to the cloud instead of doing them local.

That might be Local cloud.

Like yeah. Like, you know, you can use Versus Code as, like, a thin client, and then it just does everything remotely.

And if I'm wired connection at home, it's not gonna make a difference. The latency JS not going to be a killer there. No. No. No. At home, it wouldn't be an issue. Like, if you're, like, sitting on the couch and you're trying to remote in, it's when you're, like, somewhere else. That's my thing JS I always just wanna slap close the laptop and then put it in my bags and continue working. I do it all the time. I bring my daughter to dance. I sit in the parking lot for an hour. I do that exact same thing. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And now now I use the Vision Pro to have a giant monitor in the car, and I all the other parents get to look at me funny. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. Interesting. Alright. Well, I'm gonna sick pick I might have even sick pick this years ago, but this is a this is the best thing ever. Cordless glue gun. It doesn't matter which one. You can buy them third party now that fit your or yellow or red batteries or whatever. This is just the Ryobi one.

And, man, having a glue gun that can't get kicked across the Oh. House or, like, trying to glue gun something and you're like, you have to get an extension cord out. I hate that. So just having a glue gun that is on a battery is so key.

We have two actually, two of them. This is the big one, and then we also have one of the smaller craft ones. And it's so good for kids because they like kids love glue guns. And you can just, like, put it on the the table where they're working, and you don't have to worry about them, like, running by and kicking it in this Totally. Magma hot glue gun frosting.

Myself so many times on a glue gun when I was a kid.

I do that all the time still as well. Yeah. I do. Put it quite a bit of glue gunning. But the only downside is it takes a little while to heat up, maybe maybe four minutes or so. But once it's cooking, you're you're good.

I got a cordless, soldering iron recently, and that was Yes. A value add for me. Because, again, it took take a little while to heat up. Does not get as hot, definitely.

But, man, for me Node having to deal with a cable that I'm like, you know Oh, man. Yeah. I have I've got two of them. So I have the,

like, the TS 80, I think. It's a USB powered one, and then you just hook it up to a battery. And then I also just got the Ryobi one, which is I like the Ryobi one better, to be honest, because it has, like, a nice stand for it, and it's much bigger.

But if you're doing really fussy, tiny little stuff, I'll reach for the little USB powered one.

Sick.

Alright. That's it for today. Make sure you check us out on YouTube, syntax.fm/ nope.

Youtube.com/@Syntaxfm.

That's it. I'd always do them the backwards way.

Anything else to plug? Nothing.

Check us out.

Peace.