HTML All The Things - Web Development, Web Design, Small Business

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

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

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

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

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
 

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

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

Web development, often hailed for its versatility, empowers us to create websites, progressive web apps (PWAs), mobile applications, and robust web-based tools. However, beneath the surface lies a complex landscape far from utopian. To make web development sustainable without the need for networking engineers, IT managers, and server admins - tools that go beyond the vanilla platform (HTML, CSS, JS) have become staples of the industry (NodeJS, Svelte/Kit, Angular, etc.). These tools provide web developers with the ability to perform complex and time-consuming tasks with relative ease and without having to touch the underlying layers of technology. The side effect is that many web developers are left learning an absolute ton of technology at a high-level, with very little expertise in one area versus another. In this episode, Matt and Mike discussed the current mess that web development finds itself in as they converse about the sheer amount of material to learn, abstraction layers, and more.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/web-development-is-a-mess-do-we-need-frameworks-is-there-too-much-to-learn
Scrimba Discount: https://tinyurl.com/ScrimbaHATT

Learn how to land a web development job with this week's guest, James Quick. James is a content creator that focuses on teaching web developers through his YouTube channel and podcast. Our discussion this week focused on landing and keeping a web developer role with our conversation focusing on what you should do before landing the job, immediately after getting into your role, and how to keep your career going into the future. First off, our conversation on what to do before getting a developer job focused on studying, coding practice, and standing out as an applicant. Second, we discussed what to do right after landing the role conversing about whether you should keep learning on/off work hours and whether you should make an effort to learn job-related tech or branch out. Lastly, we discussed what to do once you've had a developer job for a while, touching on whether you should bother having a side hustle, how much learning you should do, and if you should update your portfolio or not. At the end of the interview, we asked James to expand and explain Astro, a web framework for content-driven sites.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/how-to-land-a-web-development-job-w-james-quick
Scrimba Discount: https://tinyurl.com/ScrimbaHATT

Back in the days of Internet Explorer web developers struggled with keeping their websites compatible across various versions. This problem exemplified as more modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome were added to the mix, forcing many web devs to create websites that could utilize modern features and fall back onto old ones for users still on IE. Today, these problems are largely solved, but not entirely. There is still some feature disparity between Edge, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox...and even now some developers need to continue to support Internet Explorer. It's also widely known that as newer versions of these browsers seem to squash more of these differences, users won't always have the most up-to-date version of the browser due to update neglect, or system compatibility. In this episode, Matt and Mike focus on CSS feature disparity between browsers and how to handle site development when your user base doesn't all have the latest features that you're utilizing. When is it safe to use a new CSS feature on a production website? 
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/css-browser-support-when-can-i-use-this
Scrimba Discount: https://tinyurl.com/ScrimbaHATT