Keeping Up with The Fast and Furious Web

Hey, how's it going? Yeah, my name is Scott Talinsky. I am the co-host of the Syntax Podcast. Has anybody listened to Syntax out there? Yeah. So Syntax is more than just a podcast these days. As you heard CJ and I and my Wes Boss have all been doing a lot on YouTube, whether that is competitive coding games or just bringing the podcast to life in video or just bringing a lot of fun to education, we're on there at Syntax. I'm also an executive producer over at Century where I get to work on Syntax full time.

So I learned how to learn things quickly out of necessity. Back in 2012, I started one of the first web development channels on YouTube. I started making nine tutorial videos a week just on whatever I was working on. So at the time it was a lot of WordPress and Drupal and stuff. I would do these things all day at work and then come home, record a few tutorials, push it up online. That turned into 500 videos a year of making custom videos for companies as their training materials for doing endless amounts of tutorials.

Then that eventually was a brand new 24-video course every single month for paid subscribers. Now with Syntax, we've done nearly a thousand episodes of the podcast. All of this has been teaching web development. Throughout this time, I was always thinking about like, I have all this acquired knowledge from having to learn things to be able to teach it back really quickly. But when I really thought about it, it didn't start in 2012. It started way back because this was one of my first websites, the first one I had a screenshot of, and you can tell I'm 15. This is on AngelFire. It has a repeating background. There's a poll about zebras and I thought newsletter was two words and I spelled here incorrectly. It's hilarious.

But I was making this website for myself. To me, this was like as hideous as this is and terrible. It was like the pinnacle. I thought if I could put a poll, yes or no, or newsletter, that that was like next level. In 2002, that website wasn't just bad taste. I mean, it was not good taste, but it wasn't just bad. We had a limited work set. We had web-safe colors and table layouts and inline CSS and Internet Explorer hacks, slicing images and all that stuff. And then Flash, right? And then everybody had to learn Flash. We had to almost acquire an entirely new skill set where it wasn't HTML and CSS anymore. It was ActionScript and if you wanted video or multimedia on the web at all, you needed to learn at least a little bit of Flash, right? And that was a whole ton. And then we got HTML 5 with a whole host of new building blocks and CSS3 with all those browser prefixes that you had to learn or copy and paste from CSS3, please.

We had me personally, I was building a lot in WordPress and Drupal and doing a lot in PHP. And during the same time, people were picking up Rails and Django and other frameworks to build sites with. And personally, a lot of people got into JavaScript through something called jQuery, right? One of my first JavaScript projects was a jQuery plugin called DTF, down to fade. And it faded in elements on the page and again, I was like, this is now the new pinnacle for me. I can get like six things staggered loading on the page and it's like incredible. And then we had front end frameworks and interactivity, Backbone Emulator, and then eventually Angular. And me personally, I used a lot of Meteor to do real time and I was getting to build chat apps and now you're having to learn installing packages. I mean, Meteor was pre Node modules, right? And then you have MongoDB, which is like an entirely different way of storing data. And then you have JavaScript on the server all of a sudden, we're not writing PHP on the server, we get Express and Node modules. I was typing this up and I was like, there's really too much stuff to even put on these slides. I was running out of room. And even just like talking about it and thinking about all these changes that we've had to go through is exhausting.

Because then we got React and 27 new CSS, 24-7 new CSS features. Like there's probably CSS features that came out ten years ago that you've never heard of. TypeScript and a thousand new JavaScript frameworks, and then now a thousand more new CSS features. I mean, heck, you can make a squircle with corner shape. And if you don't know what a squircle is, well, now you're going to have to because everybody's going to be doing squircles with corner shapes. And we got all these new little things that come along with AI.

Now you got to learn what MCPs and how LLMs work and agents and prompts. And your AI starts spitting out who knows what, and all of a sudden, you got to become a context engineer to solve this problem. It's crazy. It's whatever new thing of the week and so on and so on and so on.

And it's funny to me, because like you, especially someone like me who puts out a lot of content, any time you show anything new on YouTube, people are like, another new thing. But like, I don't know, you just saw that there's been a hundred new things all the time, 24-7. No matter what, right? But it didn't used to feel hard.

So real quick, before we talk about how to learn things quickly, I want to give you quick eight truths about what hasn't changed. So that way, these are things you don't have to worry about. These are the things that should be your North Stars here. So one, you can still use almost everything you did before. A lot of the things we learn are additive. They add on to the core skills that we've picked up over our career. And sure, you don't have to use a JavaScript framework. You can just throw down some HTML and CSS and JS if you want to.

There's nobody stopping you from doing that. With the exception of some things that are no longer existing to download anymore, or like difficulty in installing packages. For the most part, most of the skills you've picked up, if you would like to, you can still use them. We have the power to build cool shit. We straight up do. And we always have, because that power is what initially probably drove you to build stuff in the first place, right?

Around the time that I made that site in AngelFire, I also really wanted matrix text crawling down the screen. And I copied and pasted some script from some website and then click a button and I got matrix text on the screen. And again, it was like, oh, I got the power to copy and paste matrix text inside of here. That rules. But eventually that cool stuff became different, because what used to be hard is now easy. And this is like forever true, where back in the day, building an interactive chat app would be difficult.

Building something real time. All that stuff took engineering teams. And then I built a competitive coding game that was real time, used your local file system and synced data in the background. And I did it in like four days. What used to be hard is now easy. I did it without AI too. I mean, it's not just AI. But especially with AI now, you know, what used to be hard is now easy. What's hard now is getting your app to be, I guess, performant with the 10,000 node modules you just dumped in there. All right. I'm going to sip a water real quick. This one.

It's all about your users and it really always has been. Experience over tech, right? And really this needs to drive kind of everything you do. What you're choosing to learn. What you're choosing to put into your stack. What you're choosing to spend your time on. Because if it's not about the people using it, even if it's just you using it, like, what's the point? So the choices that you make, the things that you learn, all this stuff, it's always about your users.

Because if it's not about the people using it, even if it's just you using it, like, what's the point? So the choices that you make, the things that you learn, all this stuff, it's always about your users. And the things that you spend your time on need to improve their lives. Accessibility is not optional. Some people will only care about accessibility when it impacts them personally. So whether it's temporarily or permanently disabled, we'll all experience this in life. Accessibility, never been optional. Shortcuts always have tradeoffs. And this is really especially true these days with AI. We're really seeing the rise of the programmer who doesn't know what their code is doing. And that's terrifying. And again, just like we had tradeoffs back in the day with, okay, you can pick a CMS, it makes it faster, but you lose some of the flexibility that you would have with a custom app. So it's what you're choosing to build. Nowadays, it's like, all right, well, if I'm having AI write out this code, now I'm a project manager or now I have to deal with all these new challenges and problems or I have to adjust. But this lesson has always been true, right? Things exist for a reason. And I think too often times in this industry we get bogged down with the idea of, like, I don't understand this use case, therefore it sucks, I don't need it, I don't understand it out of my life. But really a lot of the tools are created to solve problems. And whether or not you have the problem that the tool solves or not, it's about understanding what the problem that it solves so that way you know if the tool is for you or not. Burying your head in the sand is certainly not a viable strategy and there's a lot of people who especially with AI topics, they like to believe that if they pretend it doesn't exist then it simply won't. But you should at least be informed before you make a decision. So do you really need to use all the new stuff? Hell no. No, you don't. But it's our job to make sites better and faster and better for our users overall all the time. If a new API or a new framework is reducing the load or increases performance or FPS to a significant degree, we should really be paying attention to that. And it's not just about, like, again, understanding why it exists, but understand what problems it solves so that you can determine for yourself if you need it. So how do we keep up? What's worth learning? How do you prevent getting burnt out, because heck, I know it's really easy to get burnt out, especially at the rate of change in this industry. Finding time, you know, I got two kids, it's impossible to find time. And like really AI too, AI can either get in the way or it can help. Number one, fundamentals are always worth it, and this goes for any fundamentals in anything. It's always worth it. And browser APIs really don't go away for the most part.

Like if you spend all of your time focusing on those core browser APIs and what they can do for you, you don't need to install a package to copy and paste, or is the is even JavaScript package with a billion downloads or whatever. Just spend the time on the fundamentals, spend the time on the browser APIs, concepts, big concepts, and debugging. Debugging is another important one where oftentimes we're just trying to figure out what the problem even is, because once we know what the problem is, we can know how to solve it. So focusing on your fundamentals should always do that instead of library specific things. Not to say don't learn your libraries deeply or whatever, but if everything you bring into your life is the React version of this, when the DOM version of this already exists, you should probably take a look at that.

Find the content types that work for you. You know the number one comment I got, especially back in 2012 when I was doing YouTube, was like, nobody likes learning on video. Learning on video is bad. Which in 2025 sounds hilarious, because just how many video channels are out there teaching in general for all kinds of platforms? And I want to push back on the idea that, like, everybody should just fire up the documentation and read it start to end, because not everybody can consume that information in the same way. I say this as somebody with a learning disability, and like, reading blog posts is tough for me, so I'll have text to speech read it back.

In fact, when I first started dating my wife, my wife is a doctor of psychology, and to graduate she needed to administer tests. So we'd been dating a whole year, and she administered every single psychological test known to man. So she knew what she was getting into, right? And one of those tests, like the IQ test, right? And my IQ test is actually invalid, because I scored high on some parts, and I scored really low on some parts, and that gap invalidated the test. But in that gap is things like dyslexia, right? It's the things that prevent me from being able to read a blog post really well. And I used to try to shoehorn that in my life. Like, I used to try to read a lot of books. I'd buy the big books, and I would try to read them, and I wouldn't get anything out of it. And it wasn't until I started really utilizing the skills that I had, whether it was audio or my persistence in coding and getting my hands dirty, that a lot more unlocked to me.

So like really understanding, like, what works for you? Don't worry about what works for other people. Man, people love to tell you what the best thing is and what the worst thing is. And like, especially on Twitter or YouTube or whatever, people are just straight up lying for clicks or saying inflammatory things to get you to follow them. Just be careful about that. Usually if somebody says X is the only way to do something. It's usually not true straight up. And like it's especially visible for somebody like me because we don't take sponsorship at all on Syntax.

And I get a lot of DMs from companies wanting to push their thing. It's always crazy to me when I get somebody saying here's this big marketing push and say, no, no, we don't take sponsorship, right? And then like a week later, there's somebody making a video or a tweet or something that's like, this is the greatest thing ever and it's not listed as being sponsored. And you're just like, oh, I know what you're doing now. So keep your eyes open for that kind of thing because it is. It is like a lot of times those types of campaigns are influencing what you're choosing to learn and choosing to spend your time on. So keep an open mind.

This is the biggest one, exploring. I think we were just talking earlier today and CJ had mentioned that like kids learn so much through playing. And it's so incredibly accurate that when we get our hands dirty and we play with the code and we make things, it really accelerates the amount of time or the amount of progress that we're able to make, not the amount of time. And really, don't be afraid to dig into the code yourself and just start going nuts with it because that is a thing I think that people get paralysis on. They watch an endless amount of YouTube or they read the docs and they do all this stuff and they don't get their hands dirty with the code right away. Be fine with making mistakes because so much of that progress comes from hitting a barrier and pushing through that barrier.

Like for instance, go build something with a squircle. All right. Finding time. How do you find time for all this? So yeah, for me, there's always time to add one new thing to something you're doing. And we all have little things in our projects or our work that get in the way that you could build a small tool for yourself. Building a small tool, something for work, adding one more thing here and there can certainly help but a lot of us consume so much media ambiently that this is such a hack these days for learning things is put on audio, put on podcast, put on YouTube and just have it play. Like it doesn't always have to be focused learning time. It can filter in, especially if I'm learning something that I'm so far out of my depth on that I can put on eight videos on YouTube and by the time the eighth one is over, I'm going to recognize a lot of concepts and stuff that I hadn't recognized before and then I can dive into actually looking at real code and really working in it. Podcast and YouTube are great. I personally listen to Syntax FM every single day of my life, 24-7, and that's a good thing for you to do as well. Tune your algorithm too. Man, Instagram and TikTok love to serve you the most mindless stuff, right? So if you can tune your algorithm to be showing you things that are actually helpful, you're going to absorb that. I actually tuned mine recently to be giving me mostly design inspiration and it's been great to be served good design all the time and just get that feeding into my brain and getting your eyes used to it.

The biggest one is really it's not just avoiding burnout, but it's avoiding that wall that you hit when you're trying to learn something new. And for me, the passion is always the catalyst for this stuff. You don't learn the thing to build the app or you learn the thing to build the app, not build the app to learn the thing. And what I'm saying is like if I'm building a project to learn a new technology and I hit a wall, I'm going to kind of inherently give up sometimes, especially if you're out of your depth because you're going to hit a wall and you're going to say, I don't know what to do. I can't fix it. I'm done. But if you put the thing that you're building ahead of time and say, all right, I'm building an app for my mom. It's going to help her do this. And I'm going to learn this new tech along the way. You hit that wall. You're going to be like, ah, screw this. Mom doesn't get her app. Have a reason why you're making something and a reason why you're learning something, not just, oh, this tech seems interesting or so-and-so said that this was the greatest thing ever. Right? AI, don't trust it. It will lie to you, straight up. I actually trusted AI to book a flight for me here.

I actually trusted AI to book a flight for me here. Little did I know that it was going to book it at six in the morning. So I had to wake up at like 4 30 to get on a flight because I trusted AI. But don't rely on it too much when learning new things. Because just like somebody stepping in and doing it for you, it can really get in the way of hitting the wall and pushing through that wall. And that wall is where all of the learning happens. So read every single thing it writes for you straight up. If you're trying to learn something, if you're just trying to push out some slop, slop it up. But if you're having it like a new topic, avoid really using it. And use it for the aspects of summarize these docs, compare these things, and then verify and validate with the real docs and using it and getting your hands dirty. But don't let it do it for you.

The biggest thing is, is that I like to, I keep this screenshot on me because I like to remember, like I use it as a personal reminder of like, when I was the most excited about I got this ugly thing on the screen. That to me is so humbling to be like, at one point, this was the coolest thing in the world to me. And just think about it. Think about when that was incredible. Because over the course of time, the things that we're making have only gotten more incredible. And it's easy to lose sight of that. It's easy to not be excited by some incredible real-time thing that we're doing across the web. But just remember, we do. We straight up have the power to build really amazing things on the web. And it's only gotten easier and easier. So take your time, explore the web, be excited, and you can pick things up fast. Thank you.

Thank you. So this is the first question, I think the most pressing one that we all have on our minds. Yes. Which got archived. And I'm bringing it back. Bring it back. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do you think zebras will take over the world? Yes or no? Yeah. That was like, so funny that that question is there. When I thought, I don't remember writing that, but that was definitely like during the, ooh, so random. You know, it's so random. So random, Scott. Oh, somebody is going to see that and think that's weird. Yeah. But yes or no? Oh, at that time, I would say yes, but I don't think so anymore. Yeah, that'd be tough. Cool. This one is from Chris. What's your favorite topic to discuss on Syntax, be it front-end frameworks, vanilla JS, new standards, interviewing builders, et cetera? What's your favorite stuff to do? Yeah. Favorite stuff? For me, it's CSS. It's JavaScript-less applications. I love JavaScript every day of my life, and I love JavaScript. But I did a talk at JS Nation in Amsterdam about here are all the ways you don't need JavaScript anymore that you thought you did. And it's not because I don't like JavaScript, but it's like, oh, there's so many incredible new APIs that replace the need for all of this stuff that we used to have to just wire up really explicitly. So for me, personally, I love diving into the APIs that have hit all browsers, the stuff that reduces the amount of code that we have to write personally, but also improves accessibility because now I'm not having to do it all myself, and the browser can handle more things. And it improves performance because the browser can handle more things. So yeah, that's my favorite stuff. Nice. And speaking of syntax, I think we'll both answer this one.

Semicolons or no semicolons? Well, I'm not going to let you answer it based on whatever your answer is. Okay, so I personally don't like to use semicolons in my own work, but I will adhere to whatever the code base is, and our syntax code base does have semicolons. So I certainly don't mind. But at the end of the day, the format or whatever does it for you. Yeah, I think that's the best answer. Use what your team uses. Don't argue about it too much. What do you prefer? Semicolons is the correct answer. I knew that. Cool.

Of all the new exciting things coming out right now, is there anything new or recent that you think everybody should learn? Yes. Oh my gosh, yes. Local data caching is my favorite thing, and I feel like we're on the precipice of everybody having an opinion on this. I use a library called Xero Sync that is really fantastic, but Xero is one of many new libraries that allows you to write data to a local database, usually index.db, and then the process in the background syncs it. And oftentimes we talk about web apps maybe not being as performant as native apps in various ways, or hitting even like ... We do all kinds of crazy stuff like optimistic UI, but with syncing engines, it's just like infatimably fast to load thousands of records or to save instantly, and that background process can take care of it. It is game-changing and you get things like real-time sync and all sorts of stuff out of it too. Local data caching, TanStackDB, AwesomeTech, Xero, AwesomeTech, there's a lot of cool stuff there. Yeah, I need to do more of it. I think you've been trying to get me to do it for a long time now. I need to just bite the bullet in. Local first, for sure. Yeah, local data, I'm betting.

So this one, a little bit to think about. So how do you handle staying employed when hard tech that used to be your specialization is now standard knowledge taught in schools? How do you stand out? Yeah, I mean, standing out has kind of always existed as a problem. It's funny because people who came up in the boot camp era where it was really easy to get a job, they experienced a thing where everybody all of a sudden had this, there's a lot of jobs, there was a lot to be had there. But before then, it was pretty decently tough to get a job. There were times when I was applying for agencies that it was really a lot of competition for. But the things that make you stand out are always going to be being a good communicator, writing code that is easy to navigate and easy to read. But the process stuff, I think, it's underlooked sometimes where the stuff that you use in a day-to-day, your organization...

We actually, non-code related, we hired a video editor recently, and when she submitted her project, it was color coded. She wrote a clear organizational structure for it and broke down why she did things and understood her choices. And when we saw her project, I was like, dang, this is it.

So I think the things that are going to make you stand out are always going to be quality based and your breadth of knowledge. But also like, yeah, React specialists, great. But there's a lot of React specialists, I think, somebody who can pick up any framework, any library, understand the DOM, understand the entire process. I think if you can communicate to people, I think that will make you stand out. Word.

All right, we're out of time, Scott. Thank you so much. Thank you, CJ. Yeah.