The adventures of Matt Lawrence and Mike Karan through the world of web development, web design, and small business management. As web development agency owners for the better part of a decade, they’ve worked with all sorts of technologies, through the rise of responsive web design, the revolution of serverless computing, and the popularity gain of many no-code tools for small business owners. They commonly discuss foundational web development technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - including popular frameworks and tools such as Tailwind CSS, Svelte, WordPress, Vue, and more.
Episodes
Wednesday Mar 31, 2021
Wednesday Mar 31, 2021
In this episode Matt and Mike discuss asking for help. Even though it sounds simple, asking for help can be an anxiety-inducing activity because you don't want to bother your fellow co-workers, or be called out for not doing enough research if you ask on an online forum. There can also be hesitation to ask because you want to solve your problem yourself, but sometimes you're just way too stuck to go it alone.
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Wednesday Mar 24, 2021
Wednesday Mar 24, 2021
In this episode Matt and Mike discuss dealing with large projects with rapidly approaching deadlines. We all know that managing your time and tasks appropriately can really help alleviate stress and concern over large projects, however, all that management takes time - time you don't always have. Rapidly approaching deadlines can force your hand into just diving straight into a large project with minimal (if any) task/project management - which can put a lot of pressure on you and your team. The duo discuss how they deal with this stress and how they can even push that deadline back a bit without raising too much alarm from a client.
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Wednesday Mar 17, 2021
Wednesday Mar 17, 2021
In this episode, Matt and Mike sit down with Kilian Valkhof to discuss a browser that he made for developers called Polypane. Polypane lets you, the developer, test your website in various resolutions all at the same time - perfect for making responsive websites. But that is just scratching the surface, Polypane can help your website's accessibility, and offers a unique UI that's tailored for development over browsing. In addition to it's features, Polypane is a SaaS product so there's even some interesting business-oriented goodies inside this episode, as well.
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Wednesday Mar 10, 2021
Wednesday Mar 10, 2021
In this episode Matt and Mike discuss some of the bad habits that many web developers develop over time. Habits including procrastination, Tutorial Hell, and overengineering. These, among others, can slow down and even stop a web dev project in it's tracks - impacting your growth as a developer and "stealing" precious projects from your portfolio. Luckily, there are ways to help mitigate and correct these bad habits into good ones.
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Wednesday Mar 03, 2021
Wednesday Mar 03, 2021
In this episode, Matt and Mike have a special guest on the show - Monarch Wadia. Monarch is an advocate for new developers running online hackathons among other events in countries all over the world. He also runs his own software development firm out of Toronto, Canada.
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Wednesday Feb 24, 2021
Wednesday Feb 24, 2021
In this episode Matt and Mike do something a little different, Matt prepared the whole episode with Mike knowing, dividing it up into smaller parts and then getting Mike's opinion on each part. The overall topic being how to support a lot of users at once using methods like documentation, phone calls, instant messaging, and more. Supporting users can be a real pain, but it's also a necessity, so it's important that you ensure your business is ready to scale from just supporting a few users, to having to use full on productivity and efficiency hacks to ensure that several (maybe even hundreds) of users are properly supported.
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Wednesday Feb 17, 2021
Wednesday Feb 17, 2021
In this absolutely packed episode, Matt and Mike discuss a mash up of different topics from advanced data structures & algorithms through third-party server migrations. Data structures & algorithms can get very complex, but should they affect your daily web development journey? Imposter syndrome is something that almost everyone experiences in their life, web developer, or not - the duo discuss what they think might be a big cause of the syndrome. And finally, a rather niche - but important topic - server migrations, specifically those that you don't control yourself, but are instead dumped in your lap by third-party service providers.
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Thursday Feb 11, 2021
Thursday Feb 11, 2021
In this episode of the Web News, Matt and Mike discuss a UX tip that you can use on virtually any project. When you're in early testing of an app, or website, if you reach for something, and it isn’t there, treat that as if it’s broken. As you test with your family, friends, and colleagues you'll notice that they will instinctually reach for things, like a button, or gesture and when they do - nothing happens. While they can easily be overlooked, you absolutely should not let it slide. Instead, treat this missing functionality like a bug, treating it like an important issue that needs to be resolved (or at least discussed with your team).
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