HTML All The Things is a podcast for developers navigating the modern web industry.
Hosted by web development agency owners Matt Lawrence and Mike Karan, the show explores web development, AI-driven industry shifts, and the realities of building a sustainable career in tech.
Matt and Mike discuss foundational technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript along with modern tools and frameworks such as Svelte, Vue, WordPress, React, and Tailwind. But beyond the code, the show also dives into freelancing, running a web agency, dealing with clients, and how developers can stay competitive as the industry evolves.
If you're a developer who wants to sharpen your technical skills, understand where the industry is heading, and build long-term leverage in your career or business, this podcast is for you.
Episodes
Tuesday Mar 26, 2024
Tuesday Mar 26, 2024
Free tiers are no stranger to web developers as many look to them to get them started on a new tool, try out hosting, or help with some basic design work. The problem is that free tiers are sometimes downgraded, or even completely removed from existence if a service decides that they're more trouble than they're worth. For those relying on free tiers to do their work, this can spell disaster and even cause some businesses to shut down. In this episode, Matt and Mike discussed the dangers of free tiers, what they're good for, and why you should be ready to pay up at some point down the line.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/free-tiers-are-dangerous
Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings
Thursday Mar 21, 2024
Thursday Mar 21, 2024
Kevin Powell, known to many as the King of CSS, joins Matt in this packed episode to discuss the current status of CSS, how to tailor your content absorption for learning, and more. The duo discussed whether or not popular CSS toolkits (ie SASS, TailwindCSS) outweigh the need to learn vanilla CSS. They also discussed whether naming conventions like BEM are still relevant since most web developers use frameworks that have localized CSS per component. And that's just getting started, the guys also discussed tutorial hell mitigation, browser support + using features in production, focusing your educational content absorption, and much more.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/css-styling-the-web-learning-through-content-w-kevin-powell
Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings
Tuesday Mar 19, 2024
Tuesday Mar 19, 2024
WordPress is a very popular tool for making websites that can be easily extended to get the job done. While the original focus of WordPress was blogs, over time other websites started being created with it through the use of plugins like WooCommerce (eCommerce sites), ACF (dynamic data-driven sites), and Elementor (sites that can be built visually). This versatility fuels WordPress' continued popularity, but also brews a community that believes it's a bloated and dated tool. Having recently make a website with WordPress, Matt takes us through a deep dive of what he believes is an identity crisis stemming from Gutenberg/FSE, no built-in disaster recovery, and limitations forcing the use of multiple plugins.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/wordpress-is-a-no-code-tool-that-requires-coding
Learn with Scrimba: https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings
Thursday Mar 14, 2024
Thursday Mar 14, 2024
With the tech job market seemingly exploding with layoffs recently, nailing your technical interviews is possibly more important than ever. With that said, there are a lot of opinions out there on how much prep you should be doing and whether you should be applying everywhere, or just to a few select places so you can focus your studies. This week we had that pleasure of speaking with Kyle from TechSquidTV to discuss all things technical interviews. We also discussed what to do after you've been laid off and then switched gears to discuss the marrying of hardware and software together into unique projects.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/technical-interviews-exposed-w-kyle-techsquidtv
Learn with Scrimba - https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings
Tuesday Mar 12, 2024
Tuesday Mar 12, 2024
Progressing through your web development career is unique depending on the companies you decide to work for, but there are some common positions that companies will use to help guide their promotion process. These positions include junior developer, developer (intermediate), senior developer, tech lead, and staff engineer. Each one of these positions will have a unique flare depending on who's setting up the teams but in general as you climb the ladder through them you'll collect more cash, more responsibility, and slowly transition to less code/more management. In this episode Matt and Mike discussed the common promotions that web developers progress through and how they can vary company to company.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/junior-developer-vs-senior-developer
Learn with Scrimba - https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings
Tuesday Mar 05, 2024
Tuesday Mar 05, 2024
Work-life balance is an important topic to talk about in the tech field, especially in 2024 with the recent layoffs and overall industry downturn. It can be easy to sacrifice some personal time to log extra hours at the office in an attempt to give yourself some job security or impress your boss. The problem is that this can be a slippery slope that leads you to work all the time for no additional pay and if your company restructures, or has problems keeping up revenues, you may still get a layoff. Digital availability is also a major problem in the tech field and other industries that rely on technology heavily - work is always ready to be done 24/7, with messages and emails coming in at all hours of the day. It's easy to just "check one email" when you get home from a long day at the office, quickly leading to getting pulled into a situation that could have you working throughout the evening. During these trying times it's important that we keep our families, friends, and mental health in mind alongside our careers. In this episode Matt and Mike discussed the importance of work-life balance for web developers during these trying times.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/work-life-balance-for-web-developers-in-2024
Learn with Scrimba - https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings
Tuesday Feb 27, 2024
Tuesday Feb 27, 2024
Running a web development agency isn't easy from both the technical and customer service side of things. Luckily, Matt and Mike have been running their web development agency for 7+ years, making plenty of mistakes, and claiming even more successes over the years. In this episode, they lay out the top 5 tips insider tips that have helped them maintain a successful business for all these years including: presenting technical solutions to non-technical customers, avoiding scope creep, pushing back on customer ideas that won't work, and more.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/top-5-insider-web-developer-agency-tips
Learn with Scrimba - https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings
Thursday Feb 22, 2024
Thursday Feb 22, 2024
Almost everyone has a unique story on how they joined the field in which they eventually made a career, but many aren't as unique as Francesco Ciulla's. His development journey has lead him to work with the European Space Agency as a full-stack developer, developer relations at Daily.dev, become a Docker Captain, and most recently create a massive YouTube following in just a few short weeks. This week Matt and Mike had the pleasure of sitting down and discussing Francesco's unique developer journey at length discussing his previous jobs, education, passion for teaching and much more!
Show Notes - https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/francescos-unique-developer-journey
Learn with Scrimba - https://scrimba.com/?ref=htmlallthethings