Transcript

[Banjo music]

MANTRA: Just Build Websites!

Dave Rupert: Hey there, Shop-o-maniacs. You're listening to another episode of the ShopTalk Show. I'm Dave Rupert. With me is Chris Coyier! Hey, Chris. How's it going?

Chris Coyier: I know what you did there. I know it.

Dave: What?

Chris: Because I still think of it sometimes. I've never actually watched the video, but you told me one time that you watched this video of this kid who somehow puts Rs into words.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: He goes, "Gr-r-r-ood day," or whatever.

Dave: Gr-r-r-ood day, Chris.

[Laughter]

Chris: I still think about it when I'm driving around sometimes, like, "Who's that weird and clever?" Apparently, this kid.

Dave: Well, and if somebody cuts you off, you go, "Br-r-r-ad drive!"

[Laughter]

Chris: That's great.

Dave: I hit my kids with this sometimes. They have no idea, but it's not safe for children. But you know. Hey. I hit my kids with it. "Gr-r-r-et a job."

Chris: Yeah. I also think, God, I need to listen to it because sometimes you get a little stodgy with the stuff I listen to. Same old YouTube channels. I need to spice it up.

Dave: Oh, man. If you need old Dave Rupert to wreck your algorithm, that would be a service I provide.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: I feed you links to just obliterate your algorithm.

Chris: Oh, man.

Dave: I could do it.

Chris: I'll take three links.

Dave: I think I have blown up my algorithm so much, it doesn't even know what to recommend me anymore. [Laughter] It's just like, "Does he like woodworking or waterslides? This guy loves waterslides." [Laughter]

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: I'm like, "No, man." There was one cool one in Indonesia, and I watched the whole two-mile waterslide, so that's what I need.

Chris: Yeah. Those make pretty epic Instagrams as well, those boujee, really wide long ones that are like, "We cut down 10,000 trees. Oh, we didn't tell you that part, but we did."

Dave: Yeah, we didn't--

[Laughter]

Dave: It's a resort. We cleared a rainforest just for a waterslide. A pretty good trade, you know. Yeah.

[Laughter]

00:02:17

Chris: Yeah, I could use it. Sometimes I get mad at the algorithm when it doesn't give me what it has been giving me.

Dave: Hmm...

Chris: I want consistency out of it. For example-- This is so boring, I probably brought it up before--I still watch this one called Cracking the Cryptic where they just solve sudoku puzzles, essentially.

Dave: Oh, I watched him the other day. Yeah, yeah.

Chris: Yeah, but I'm really consistent about it. When I lay down to bed, I open up YouTube, and it better as hell have a Cracking the Cryptic one at the top because that's obviously what I'm looking for. Don't make me look for it. [Laughter] You know?

Dave: Yeah. He puts me right to sleep.

Chris: Once in a while, it's not there.

Dave: Just, boom.

Chris: Oh, yeah. I'm a goner.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: Mm-hmm. So, all of them are like 50% or less listened to because they tend to be over an hour-ish, which is pretty long for YouTube. But I convinced myself that I'm almost learning because that's all logic-based. If you can follow along with the logic, I feel like it's brain training in a way.

Dave: I love how excited he gets. He's like, "Oh! Oh! That's... Oh, that's very clever! Oh!"

Chris: Yeah. [Laughter]

Dave: "I can put an 8 and a 6 and that cancels the 2 and the 9. And then--" You know? It's endearing. It's wholesome.

Chris: Mm-hmm. He has his own little language and stuff, too. It's not as clever as....

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: But it's good. British too, which helps.

00:03:38

Dave: I watched... I think I was telling you before the show, I watched Adam Savage Tested. It's his new thing after MythBusters.

Chris: Okay.

Dave: He rearranged his whole workshop. If you've watched any of his videos after MythBusters (or during MythBusters), his workshop is just filled to the brim with crap, like monster costumes, models of X-wings, a whole R2-D2, a cabinet full of lightsabers, tools. He has two wood lathes and metal lathes. He's got all this junk in his workshop.

He talked himself into a situation where ILM (industrial light magic) was getting rid of these big storage units for modeling materials that they used to build the Death Star, Boba Fett, or whatever. Right?

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: He was like, "That looks cool. I'd take that." They're like, "Cool. Come pick it up next week or it's going in the dumpster." It's like a two-ton shelf of stuff.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Anyway, he's like, "I have to figure this out," so he puts it in his office, and he takes a whole week to rearrange and clean his office. He divided it up, and he had an epiphany, like, "I'm going to have a hardware store section of my office, and I'm going to have a workshop, the mill section of my office." I thought that was really cool where you have an epiphany, like, "Oh, I'm going to have zones in my office, and they're going to do different things."

Chris: What I like about it is that it was an external thing that happened. You could know that you really need to do this job.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: You need to clean your garage. Heck, you might need even to clean your codebase--

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: --because there's some technical debt you want to pay down - or something. You could even really, really, really want to do it, but you just won't do it. But all it takes is one little drop sometimes. In this case, it was access to some new shelving or whatever that seemed cool. But it's always something like that, isn't it? It's a little--

You found a good deal on something on Facebook Marketplace - or something - and you bought that. That was the first domino. Then all the rest falls. But you need that first domino. It can't just be like, "I should get around to that," because you won't.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. No, without time or extra time on your hands, and who has that? You know?

Chris: Right. Like, "Oh, we should clean up our social login stuff." And the only reason we're doing it this week a little bit at CodePen is because our Facebook one broke. The app timed out or something.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: We needed new permissions or something, like, "Well, I guess we're doing that now."

Dave: Guess that's the priority. Yeah. No, I have a blog post actually cued up. Funny you mention that, Chris.

Chris: Yeah.

00:06:33

Dave: [Laughter] I have a blog post cued up about design systems and just how... A design system is probably in the "nice to have" range of a software pattern, right? It's not mission critical to building a website but it is to build a large website.

It's sort of this idea of, like, I think design systems are maybe an event-triggered phenomenon, kind of like what you're saying. You don't need it until you need it, until something happens, or some event happens that triggers the need to do it.

If you're a one-person shop, a five-page website, you probably don't need a design system. It's just you, and you probably can load all that in your mental brain. But if you're a 300-person shop and a 7,000-page website, you might need to figure that out.

Chris: Good. Good stuff. Hit the button. You've been hitting the button a lot lately.

Dave: Been busy on the old blog. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Actually, to be fair, I had a bunch cued up, like pre-Christmas. I was just blogging Christmas energy, nervous energy, or whatever. And you can't leave the house.

So, I cued up a bunch, and then it was like December 22nd, and I was like, "Well, I'm not going to post these now. Everyone is on vacation." [Laughter]

Chris: Oh, yeah.

Dave: So, I sort of stashed some drafts and just said, "You know when the new year hits, I'm just going for it."

Chris: Yeah. All right. That works. Yeah, your entire first page is in the last week. That's amazing.

Dave: Yeah. No, it's been busy. Let's see. I'm going to consult my Notion Kanban here. I've got 4 in final draft status, 3 in rough draft status, 22 outlined. Six of them are sort of started. So, anyway, I'm just kind of--

00:08:37

Chris: It's satisfying, isn't it? The one I hear... I feel like this week I heard (just in my little circles) a little bit extra loudness of that, like, "I miss the curated Internet. I miss the small blog. Where have all the websites gone?" That kind of thing.

Dave: I was just writing about that post, the literal... It's called "Where Have All the Websites Gone?" [Laughter]

Chris: Yeah, I think that one maybe started this latest wave, and then I've been hearing... There's an RSS one from Jason Lengstorf that I saw that was a little--

Ooh... my mouse just stopped working. It freaked me out. Are you still there?

Dave: I'm still here.

Chris: Oh, good. You know when your cursor freezes, you're like, "Was that a kernel panic or what?"

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: What'd I do here?

Dave: It's a bad omen. It's a br-r-r-ad omen.

Chris: Well, anyway, it made me feel like I don't want to be the old... the guy that's always like, "RSS, RSS, RSS," but I kind of can't help it because it feels like a pretty good technology still if you really miss the blogs of old. They're not gone!

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: They're just right there.

Dave: Frustratingly, content does not... [laughter] Some content does not delete itself. But yeah, there are lots of good blogs.

Chris: You want hand-curated stuff that you listen to? You can just have it! It's right there.

I was like, "Okay, well, sure." Fine. Somebody signs up for Feedbin on day one. It can be a little sad and lonely, right? I almost don't recommend... I have provided one of these at one time, like, "Here are 200 developers you can follow."

Dave: Yeah. No.

Chris: I do that because I'm just crazy like that and I've honed it to my taste over a long period of time. But if you did that, I don't think it's going to hit for you.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: But if you have nothing, that sucks, too. But what are ten then that you could recommend to somebody and be like, "Here you go"? I think the obvious one is Kotte. He's just such a high-taste individual. [Laughter]

00:10:36

Dave: Well, that's what I was going to say. In that, "Where Have All the Websites Gone?" from jason.com, Jason Velazquez, I think, he talks about curation and missing the curators and the aggregators. I think maybe if I'm going to give you an RSS prescription, you need at least one aggregator in there, maybe two.

Chris: Yeah. I see what you're saying.

Dave: Just to keep fresh content coming. Kottke is great. Gruber is probably a good one. A good standard, right? Gruber is probably a good one.

Chris: Yeah. He's even fun to disagree with sometimes. I know he's not everybody's cup of tea all the time and says boneheaded stuff sometimes, but that's what makes it fun. You don't want your stuff too bubbly.

Dave: For sure. Yeah. You need people who are good, well-intentioned, but also dumb sometimes. [Laughter] No, I'm just kidding. But people you don't agree with. I think that's kind of valuable.

I follow a few people, and it's just like, "Wow! You're out there, man. Okay, cool."

[Laughter]

Dave: Wow! All right.

Chris: Right.

Dave: But I think that's what makes it good. But then I think you follow Chris. You follow Dave Rupert. Lock that in. Just lock that. That's really important.

Then I think there are others. I think it's about following people in your network, people you have met. One of my favorite bloggers is Naz Hamid, Weightshift.

Chris: I don't know it. I've heard of it.

Dave: Yeah, so his whole thing right now is he does a lot of overlanding, so he takes all these beautiful photos just out in the desert camping or out in the mountains of Utah or whatever, camping and stuff like that. It's just wonderful. It's just wholesome, and it's very thoughtful content and stuff like that.

Anyway, but I know Naz, and so that's why I follow his blog and stuff like that. Start with people you know or like and have followed on Twitter - or whatever - for a long time. You'll probably like their blog.

Yeah, it's interesting to me when people are like, "Where have the websites gone?" and then, "I miss RSS," or whatever. It's still here. It's still here. It's still going. You could still do it. A lot of people quit putting them on their websites, but they're still there, and sometimes they're generating RSS without even knowing it.

Chris: Yeah. It just doesn't feel like... I don't want to feel like I'm 100 years old for doing it. You're saying you want your own hand-curated content from real human beings that are writing. You can fricken' have it.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris: Not that we shouldn't be mad about algorithms and stuff because it is... man, there was an awful lot of that there for a minute. But you're kind of showing your hand, too, aren't you? You're kind of being like, "I'm still on Twitter a lot."

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris: That's what you're--

00:13:33

Dave: You're sort of... Yeah. I went in and posted some stuff because I had a question, and I thought Twitter might be a great place. It was not. Six people engaged with it. But it's... I don't know.

Not to throw anyone under the bus. It's just interesting who is still there. There's a vibe still there. I just prefer Mastodon. I'm settled in. I know it's not for everybody.

Chris: I'm settling in more and more. It just seemed like the Web tech, that's where Web tech went.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: At least for the most part. You know?

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I don't see the React community embracing it so much, but whatever. But yeah, if you're going to ask a Web tech question or have a thing on that, I'm going to get ten times the engagement on Mastodon now.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: It's like, "Okay, that's good." That's what I wanted, and that's what I got. So, rock-n-roll. You know?

Dave: Yeah. No, that's great. I definitely feel the shift because I get bug reports on Mastodon for my open-source projects instead of on [laughter] Twitter, like, "Hey, your blog is missing a semicolon." Oh, well, I'll fix that.

00:14:48

[Banjo music starts]

Chris: This episode of ShopTalk Show is brought to you in part by Jam. That's jam.dev. An awesome URL. Go to jam.dev/shop.

It's a really clever bug-reporting tool, and it's for internally on teams. Imagine you're in Slack with a fellow developer, and they send you a thing, like, "Oh, on the item page, that's broken," or something.

I'm super guilty of sending this to people I work with. Just thinking in my head, like, "Well, just go to the item page and look. Then you'll see the error, too, if you're on my branch or you've pulled master or whatever."

But maybe they don't see it. That's not enough information. What if it was effortless to still be that lazy but also give that other developer all the information they could need to make sure that they can reproduce that bug?

It's just as easy as taking a screenshot. If you see the bug, and it's visual in some way (which that's my job in the world), you drag a screenshot over it in the browser, and then you can optionally annotate it, like point at it or write something if you need to - or whatever. But you don't even have to do that.

By virtue of you having done it in the browser, you get all this additional information like all the console output is there. If there's an error in the console, which is highly likely in a JavaScript application, they'll see that without you having to remember to screenshot that or copy and paste it - or whatever - and the network requests, and all the information about the browser that you're in at the moment, and version, and on what operating system and device, and all that stuff - reproduction steps. You can add comments to it, too.

But what you have to do is just take a screenshot quick and be like, "This is a bug." Effortlessly small. What a clever product. Then that becomes the bug report.

Check it all out at jam.dev/shop. I love it!

[Banjo music stops]

00:16:48

Chris: All right. Let's see. This is a nice opportunity to get into it is that there was some news, speaking of social network kind of things. You could call Substack that. People think of it as, "Oh, it's a place to host a newsletter," and then maybe start charging for it, too, which requires some knowledge, infrastructure, know-how, and stuff to pull off nicely. I think they're probably the most famous paid newsletter machine. The more famous they got, the more people choose it - in a way - which, good for them.

Then got into some... They just published one of those manifesto kind of things that it's free speech means free speech kind of thing. I don't want to mischaracterize it. I'm sure you all have seen it. The word "nazi" I had to read more times than I wanted to in the last couple of weeks.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris: Then they, of course, backed down but just a little bit, not to the complete satisfaction of the most maddest of people - or whatever. Then ultimately ended up (quite a few a few people in my bubble) leaving. Garbage today, and today in tabs, and the platformer was a really big one that left. Right?

I'm interested in that because a movement like that is interesting. But it had me thinking of a couple of things. One is it's pretty interesting that they allow you to export your paid subscribers elsewhere.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, that's weird.

Chris: Isn't it? Like, "Why? Who does that? That's actually pretty darn cool of them," in a way.

Dave: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I think they're your subscribers. But it is their platform that enables it. Yeah, it's weird.

The whole thing, it kind of started. I feel like it started in this weird moment where newsletters were kind of hot. They still are. But where there were some layoffs in news orgs, like switching to video and stuff like that. People kind of just jumped on it, journalists. Good journalists jumped on it as a way to make money. But then, yeah, it's just kind of--

Chris: It had a similar spirit to what we were just talking about, like, "Oh, I miss it when an individual person is talking to me and saying stuff. It's not just algorithms." Yeah, that's how we got Substack.

Dave: Right. It's not clickbait news. Yeah, it wasn't clickbait news. It was just authors on their own, self-funded, and you got some good content out of it.

00:19:29

Chris: I'm curious of when it matters and when it doesn't. This was a big blowup for Substack. A lot of people left, again from my bubble. But what I don't have a good sense of is, does it matter to Substack or not? Does it just seem like it matters?

It's just really hard to say. Sometimes it can be a really big deal for companies to have a big problem like this, and sometimes it just doesn't. sometimes it seems like a big deal. People tell you what a big deal it is. Then in the end you're like, [laughter] "That didn't do anything."

I remember there were blackouts on Reddit. I was pissed, and I actually did leave. I never opened Reddit anymore.

Dave: Wow.

Chris: Unbelievably, to me, I'm just totally gone from it because the app that I used got gone, and I think they did a bad job with that, and it made me mad. Then I just was like, "Well, screw it then." You know? That was the end for me.

But did it affect actual Reddit? Absolutely not. Huge waves of news - whatever. Reddit is just exactly how it has ever been. It just absolutely didn't matter.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is interesting what the tipping point is for you and then what's the tipping point for everybody. I think when it's nazi white supremacist stuff, you need to really start... You need to evaluate where you're at. Are you... I don't know.

Are you in Berlin in WWII, or are you saying, "I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm leaving"?

Who are you enabling? What system are you feeding? I go to Twitter, and the trending topics, the algorithm, the rage, it is just a noisy room, and it's just like, "I want out of here. I don't want to contribute to this. I don't want this to--"

So much is going on there. I just don't want to do that. I don't want to build up that platform anymore with my tweets and my jokes and my goofs and my code. You know?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I don't want to contribute. The same with Substack. If you guys are kind of iffy on the whole nazi information dissemination thing, maybe I don't want to be on your platform. I think they clarified or tried to. They kicked some people off, but I just don't like where--

I believe in the freedom of speech, but when it's like this speech actually results in people getting murdered, I'm just like, "Maybe I don't like that one. Maybe I'm not supportive of that."

Chris: Not a maybe.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: All the way.

Dave: But you know somebody could probably leverage the same criticism of Mastodon. Nothing is stopping nazis from starting a nazi Web server.

00:22:32

Chris: Well, that's an interesting thing. It ignited this conversation about infrastructure, right?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Is Substack just a tool, and they can just sit back and be a tool - or whatever? To the point where some companies that are in that infrastructure bucket get a pass like that. That people don't--

I was compared to Ghost at one time that it's just like - I don't know. It's just a CMS thing that you can use.

Dave: Right.

Chris: People aren't mad at Ghost because there's this one nazi guy that uses Ghost. You're like, well, it's just like people aren't mad at - I don't know - Tide for nazis washing their nazi uniforms with Tide. You can't stop that. It's just some nazi just bought some Tide and did that.

Dave: Right.

Chris: It's not like there's a nazi in a Tide commercial. It's a different thing. But it kind of got brushed aside to be like, "That's not what Substack is."

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I just got a newsletter this morning that was like, "Here are some suggested reads on Substack," and they have this Twitter clone thing in there. They're not just infrastructure. It's straight-up a social network that requires moderation and all that stuff. It's not the same.

00:23:42

Dave: This is related, and I'll tie it back. My whole family is on Duolingo now. I'm doing Japanese and Klingon and piano and my son is doing Japanese. My daughter is doing French. My wife is doing Spanish for her work. We're all on Duolingo. It's kind of weird in the mornings. You year four languages going all at once - or whatever.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: That's fun. That's fun, but I was telling the kids, "Duolingo is great. It's fun. You're learning a language. But it is not a language learning platform. It is an engagement-driven business."

They want you to be on it as much as possible. I log in. They're like, "Hey. Here's a 20-minute double XP reward," so now you're doing this. Now you've got to spend 20 minutes on here, and we're going to serve you an ad after every single puzzle you solve or every single dopamine hit you get.

I like Duolingo. I'm not saying it's bad. But it's a platform for engagement, and I think that's the same with Substack. It is very much a platform for engagement. You can't even scroll an article without getting a "Subscribe Now," "Sign Up," "Continue Reading." It's an engagement-driven business. And if they're going to drive engagement, they need to make sure they're driving engagement to not nazis - hopefully.

Chris: Uh... gosh. Right?

Dave: It's a pretty simple line, man. You know?

Chris: I know!

Dave: It's just right there, you know?

Chris: We have this. We have admin tools on CodePen, and we really don't have this problem, and I don't want to have this problem, of course. But I'll make this promise to you right now, and I'll make it over and over, and I'll write it anywhere you need to see it. If somebody puts some nazi pen on CodePen, you're just gone forever. I delete it and you and everything you've ever made and every comment you've ever left and everything.

Dave: Zero remorse.

Chris: Yeah, it's just so easy. It's not a... What? What are you talking about? But that one is easy, and I get the content moderation as a whole isn't always that easy and sometimes can be very overwhelming and difficult and emotionally challenging. I'm not trying to trivialize any of that.

I'm trying to say if there's a nazi, which I don't want to keep saying the word because I don't want people to be desensitized for it, but you know what I mean, that it doesn't mean anything because you've heard the word too much. They made people ovens. It's not cool.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: It's really bad.

Dave: It's very bad.

Chris: That's not okay.

Dave: Yeah. Nah. Yeah, it's said so much on the Internet, it feels like a joke. Right? But these were people in power that did atrocious things for racism, basically.

Chris: Could you imagine? And now you're some rich white boy CEO, and you're just like, "Well, but I don't want to kick them off, though."

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Where did you--? Where is your mom? What does your mom say? Gees!

Dave: We're an ideas marketplace. Really?

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: The genocide ideas marketplace? That's great. Cool, man. Wow. You've really... You've really--

Chris: We'll see if it matters for them in the end. You know? I don't know. Their balance sheet could say that 50 more people like people in my bubble could be leaving.

Dave: Kind of, yeah.

00:27:08

Chris: It doesn't mean anything. They don't even have to downsize or anything.

There were a couple of other shutdown stories that were kind of interesting. Artifact was the one by the Instagram founders. They just are calling it.

Dave: Oh, really?

Chris: They're just like, "It's not big enough. We're done. Bye."

Dave: Yeah?

Chris: Which I had it on my phone for a while. I was kind of in agreement with Gruber's main argument against it is that it's for news, and it learns what kind of news stories you want and then shows you those news stories. Then you click them and read them.

But you click them and read them in that browser that will not honor your ad blocker. And the mobile Internet, especially media sites, are notorious for being absolutely awful reading experiences. That's just what you're subject to.

It was just like, "How do you be this? That's your main thing and you're just not going to solve that somehow? That's really strange to me."

But it seemed like it had a lot of traction. There were a lot of users. They pivoted at one point to being, like, "You can post your own news." They added comments to it that seemed to be pretty popping.

Maybe it's not the crazy growth numbers that they were looking for, but that's such a predictable bummer to me, like, "Oh, we're not as big as Instagram was. Okay, turn it off."

Dave: Yeah. Isn't that wild? Yeah. The scale thing, like you have to be a certain scale to even be valuable in that world.

Chris: I see both sides of that, so I don't quite know what the right answer is. Should they have published usage numbers? How do we know, as users, if danger is coming? What promises are being made? Because it's none, so there's that.

But you know. It reminds me of the Google graveyard. You don't know when Google is going to kill something. Now people just assume that Google will because they do it so often. But I don't think it stops people from using new Google stuff.

00:29:08

Dave: Yeah. It's hard, man. I've been thinking a lot about another blog post I have half drafted up. It's really easy to spin up an app. You know what I mean? NPM install, bloop-bloop-bloop. I've got an app.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I've got a pretty big app. Bloop-bloop-bloop. A few more installs. I've got a very big app. I've got a very big... This is actually hard to maintain. I should hire people.

I should get a VC and go get money. Bing-bong-bing, I've got money. I'm going to hire more people to build more apps. Boom-boom-bing-boop-beep.

And it's so easy to build right now. I feel like it's artificially fast, so you build something that's almost too big to maintain.

You end up with all this stuff that's impossible for ten people to maintain, and ten people is at least a cool million-a-month burn rate - or whatever.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Is that right? A million a year.

Chris: Ten people?

Dave: Ten people is a million a year - or whatever. But $100,000 a month burn.

Chris: Yeah, that's even low. That's depending on... Not ten top-tier devs, yeah.

Dave: Right, right. But I'm just short-handing.

Chris: That's a good seed round, $1 million, which is higher than lots of places get. Andy Baio's Grid story about ELLO. I remember them. It fell out of brain, but they were trying to be this advertising-free social network company thing.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Their initial round was $450,000.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: But that was even controversial because they didn't really tell the world that they had VC backing, and then they got two more rounds.

Dave: Ah...

Chris: The VC just ate their soul, so kind of a predictable story in that way. But yeah, that's not enough money. Even though that seems like... and it should, I think, to everyone listening. $450,000 is a lot of money, god darn it.

Dave: It's a lot of money, but it takes--

Chris: But running a company, yeah. Yeah.

Dave: It takes a lot of $10 accounts to pay that back and keep staff going.

Chris: Yeah, it does.

Dave: That's the hard thing.

Chris: It does, but that's why it's just no wonder to me that companies, when they sniff enterprise, they just want a full snorted line of enterprise juice, baby.

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris: Screw $10 accounts. I want $900 accounts.

Dave: I've got to learn how to play golf. That's great. Yeah.

00:31:33

Chris: Yeah. [Laughter] Learn how to play golf. Yeah, just amazing. One enterprise client, though, it could break your back. You better be ready for it because the requirements of the few that we have at CodePen are just unbelievable.

Any day of the year, they could be like, "Oh, we have a new thing where you need to send us the last eight years of your financial history," or something "as a company in order for us to keep the account." Be like, "Oh, cool. I guess that's what we're doing today."

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Or like, oh, we have a new vendor policy where we're going to have a seven-hour call -- this is not even a joke -- coming up here that I have to attend.

Dave: Are all the numbers 32-bit integers?

Chris: Oh, god.

Dave: Oh... I don't know.

Chris: I once answered a 1,000-question vendor onboarding survey.

Dave: Wow.

Chris: You have to have special kinds of insurance. It's just amazing. But then it's like they're trying to... It feels like a joke, but they're trying to be very, very, very serious--

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: --about who they work with, how they work with them, because it'll be something like, "It's the government," or a bank or something. And you, as a consumer, want them to be that serious about who they work with and how and all that.

Dave: Right.

Chris: It's kind of fine, but it means you can't half-butt it.

Dave: Yeah. Definitely, it's a different world. I filled out a few of those questionnaires before, and you're just like, "I don't know what that is, so let me do a quick Google."

[Laughter]

Dave: Maybe is the answer.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, and some of them, they allow fuzziness because it's kind of like, "Do you have a policy about your data retention in this country?"

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: Do I have a policy? No.

Dave: No. Yeah. "Do you have any Azerbaijan data stores?" I don't think so. That's not--

Chris: It's amazing what you get. It'd be interesting.

What's crossing my mind, too, is all the companies that shut down. It's classic that you try really hard, and you can't make it. A lot of startups don't make it. Whatever.

Unless, Dave, you're an online code editor. Then every single one maintains themselves for eternity. [Laughter] God dang it! Will one of you fail?! [Laughter]

[Laughter]

Dave: Yeah. It's a bad year for startups, except for online code editors. Those are too ingrained.

Chris: Just fine.

Dave: Yeah. No, well--

Chris: Which is fine. I'm just joking mostly. I really don't want anybody's URLs to be ruined or anything like that. It's just funny hearing other people's industries being like, "Ooh, we succeeded because we held on," and be like, "I've been hanging on for a long time."

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris: All that's happening is more people are hanging onto the rope.

00:34:18

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I get it. I get that. We had a weird thing with Paravel. We're doing client services. Then all of our "competition" just got jobs at Facebook and stuff. We're just like, "What's going on?" [Laughter] It was good for business, but it was also just weird.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: It was just like, "Should I be getting a job at Facebook? What's going on?"

Chris: I remember there was an era where agencies (big and small) would just be like, "Oh, we just all work at Capital One now," or whatever.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: You're like, "Is that how that's supposed to work?"

Dave: Yeah, like R/GA, Tien & Lax, and all these just big shops were just like, "Goodbye." We're like, "What the heck?!" Weird times.

Chris: Yeah. Do we raise our prices, lower them? I don't know what to do with that.

Dave: Yeah. I don't know. I feel like we're in another weird time (just in the conversations I've had). It's just another weird time for people.

Chris: Oh, I think so, and mostly not good. The heyday of just being able to be like, "I'm in tech, so I'm rolling up into some job." Yeah, maybe not right now.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. It's different. You can't just... Yeah. You can't even just know JavaScript. You've got to know everything. Or people are more picky. It's a sellers' market or something. It's weird times.

00:35:46

Chris: Charles Beetle writes into the ShopTalk Show question box. "Are you familiar with the IndieWeb (capital I, capital W)? If so, do you have any thoughts?" So, indieweb.org is kind of the home base for it all.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Yes, I am aware of IndieWeb. I know they even have get-togethers and stuff. Certainly, a bunch of stuff has come out of it. It's been around for a long, long time.

Even stuff like microformats. Isn't microformats kind of an Indie Web concept?

Dave: It's under... Yeah. It's got a few standards. IndieAuth, which is kind of like OAuth, I guess, but it's kind of like I could build my own auth system.

Webmention, Micropub, and WebSub, Microsub. They kind of advocate for POSSE (publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere).

Chris: Sure.

Dave: Or PESOS (publish elsewhere, syndicate to own site). That's kind of my vibe, I think. Yeah, microformats, h-card, rel-me, all those little microformats.

Chris: They grew up out of this thing, which is really just a community group, right? I don't think they have any power or anything (aside from just being respectable and having past successes and such).

Dave: Yeah, I feel like Jeremy Keith and Tantek have kind of been involved in this over years. I don't know if they do it full-time or anything, but I feel like they've been involved over time.

Chris: Yeah. I don't know. Is there a president? I don't know. I'm sure I could just read this stuff. That makes for bad radio to just have no idea.

[Laughter]

Chris: Yeah, I think of it mostly as this overarching philosophy. It means, "Own your little part of the Web. Own your domain name. Own your website. Publish mostly on your own website. If you're going to publish elsewhere, use APIs and such to do that." That all kind of falls into the IndieWeb bucket, and I mostly agree with it all.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what else to say about it, really. It's worth checking out, I guess. But it doesn't mean that there's a tutorial that you follow and now you're IndieWeb - or something.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I feel like even though I use WordPress - or whatever - that's pretty IndieWeb to me.

00:38:11

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, it's almost like a culture. I think microformats is a great example. Just sort of like, "This is not a spec. This is not something you have to do. But if you do this, we can maybe start doing some cool stuff. We can maybe start building browser extensions."

What was that old website in the day that Anil worked on?

Chris: I don't know. Was it heavy on microformats for some reason?

Dave: Yeah, it was big on microformats. It just would aggregate stuff and then pull stuff out about authors and backlinks.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Anyway--

Chris: Well, that's an example, to me, of one that didn't take.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Because there wasn't enough benefit from doing it that it felt like, "Okay, philosophically, I'm going to do this," but it just is good for a future Web where everybody does it.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: But then there just wasn't enough incentive or something.

Dave: Well, then Google kind of did it. You know? But then I think they kind of switched over to their JSON schema LTD thing just because that probably saved them money. They didn't have to parse a webpage to figure out what products were on the webpage. You just send a chunk of JSON and they go, "Okay, thank you." Yonk. Steal. I'm going to serve that up.

Chris: Yeah, but you'll see little examples of it living on. Like if you want to verify your website on Mastodon, you have to go to your personal website, link to your Mastodon profile with rel=me. Rel=me was a little bit, a tiny part of microformats.

Dave: Yep. Yep.

Chris: I think it was. Maybe I have that a little wrong but, spiritually, it's in the same area. That actually has functionality, so people are doing it. You want your green checkmark? Use a little microformat. There you go.

Dave: Yeah. No, I think it's cool. Webmentions is kind of the one thing that is maybe always on my, like, "Should I be doing this?" list.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I think people who have it are pretty excited because you get--

Chris: The idea if Dave publishes a blog post and then, if somewhere on Twitter or Mastodon or BlueSky or anywhere, theoretically they write something about Dave's blog post that it makes its way back to your blog post, and then you can make a list. You can present it like a comment - in a way.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I'm very attracted to that idea because it seemed to me like of course, you would want that there. You want it all aggregated in one place. Otherwise, it's kind of lost forever.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Some random Mastodon post two years later, which might have had great comments on it, ain't nobody ever going to read that ever again.

Dave: Yeah. No one is going to find. No one is going to be like, "Dave Rupert, thoughts on chips, comments." No one is going to [laughter] search for my seminal blog post on chips.

Chris: Right. I know. Did you see Jonathan Snuck just responded to that blog post.

Dave: Oh, I didn't see that yet. No. That's awesome.

Chris: Just the other day.

Dave: Oh... shoot. I'm behind.

00:41:26

Chris: Well, you'll see it because of RSS but, theoretically, your Webmentions should have plucked that on there. I know you probably don't have it set up. Twice I've tried it, too, and I want it so bad. But there comes to be this point where you realize, and then you go over to Frank's website where it's the actual thing that makes it all work. There's some intermediary tool that you have to use that does the actual trolling of the other social media services to find the stuff. I'm like... This whole thing cannot be held up by one tiny little domino from one guy's website. That's not going to work for me.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. That's the... You have to pay to play, right? But it's one guy's little... You have to have a service that hunts down these links and stitches them together, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Which is okay. I guess I don't--

Chris: That's it. That's the weak point, I think.

Dave: I don't have a database, so I'm not going to do it. But, yeah, that's the weak point.

Chris: Yeah. The only way to do it without a database would be some kind of cloud function that, when they're discovered, crafts a Git commit or something.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Yeah, it asks for a database.

Dave: Didn't WordPress have pingbacks?

Chris: Right. As it's published, it looks at the links that you're linking to and shoots them a little cURL or whatever. Yeah, I guess it's called a pingback - or whatever.

Dave: XMLRPC, right? [Laughter] Something like that.

Chris: Just hit some little pingy-ding-ding-ding there. Then if that website is set to accept them, which some are and some aren't, it would show up as a comment there - or whatever.

WordPress is famous for having that built-in, generally, still. How well it works is--

Dave: But it was kind of noisy enough that you turned it off, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Is that where... If I spend all--

00:43:26

Chris: You could turn it off on either side. You could say, "I'm not going to ping other sites when I publish," and you can say, "I'm not going to listen for those pings either." If either of those two things are off, you won't successfully get the thing.

I tried to use it the other day. Matt Mullenweg's birthday, he's like, "Hey, write a blog post and link to this and then WordPress will see it," because I got my little - whatever they call them on ping-a-ding-ding.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I forget what they're called. Pingbacks, I guess.

Dave: Pingbacks.

Chris: But it just didn't work. I didn't see mine show up on his list. And I saw others on his list, so his must be working properly. So, there's just something wrong with my server. It didn't send the ping correctly.

Dave: Misconfigured.

Chris: Yeah, it was noisy. It tended to be a little annoying. What would get picked up is scraper garbage. When I was at the peak of CSS-Tricks stuff, 100 blogs would just steal whatever I published the second I pressed the button. Then some of them would go away. They'd be replaced by more - or whatever. They literally just scraped my content and republished it immediately. Then you'd get a pingback from that and be like, "Oh, great."

Dave: Yeah. You're like, "Now I've linked to them. I've given them SEO," yeah. Right? That's just--

Chris: You would if you... I always caught it, so there's none of that crap on my site. Then I turned the tables and that's why, if you've ever seen this when reading an RSS feed, they'll be at the bottom of the post. It'll say, "This post was originally published by," whatever. That's there so that when a scraper site picks it up that they end up linking to you then.

Dave: Ooh... Nice.

Chris: And not in reverse. So, I'm not sure that that got any juice. In fact, it might even be a little dangerous to have a whole bunch of spam sites linking to you.

Dave: Right.

Chris: But I rolled those dice. I always had great SEO at CSS-Tricks. I think it still does.

Dave: You just put a link rel canonical right in there at the bottom? That's good.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Hell, yeah. That's exactly what you do.

Dave: Ooh... Nice. Oh, yeah. It's interesting. I don't know. I think I'm traumatized from those spammy days where it's just like, "Buy FIFA coin! Buy FIFA coin!" You know?

Chris: ...all just worked better. Yeah, I know what you mean. Penguin bucks and all that.

Dave: Yeah.

00:45:45

Chris: Jeremy Keith takes it so far that he doesn't even reply on social media naturally. Every tweet, every reply, every everything is a post on his site first and then it goes out and does what it's going to do.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I always thought that was too far for me just personally. I don't know. I can't. it seems too much. I just want to hit the reply button.

Dave: It's too micro for me, but I know Jeremy, so that fits his ethos, so I'm like, "Very cool." Where that PESOS (publish everywhere, syndicate to your own site), where I actually like this and I'm having kind of a thrill doing it is because I'm in Mastodon, Twitter, or whatever. I'm just kind of in bullshit mode. You know? I'm just chucking rando ideas out there.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: Rachel Smith, Rach Smith was talking about how she hates sheet music - or whatever. I was like, "Here are ten problems of sheet music," or whatever. Right?

Chris: But it's not a blog post yet, right?

Dave: Not a blog post yet.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: But I could take it. Now that I've published it out, now I can take that little tweet and expand on it and put it in a blog post. I've done that a few times, and I actually kind of like it. It's kind of like, "Oh, that little thought about sheet music is still rattling around in my head, so I'm just going to steal my own reply and post it, you know, make it look like a blog post."

I think that's great. I think that's a fun way. If you're in this whole engagement sickness where you're like, "Oh, is this a hot idea? Is this my A Book Apart book?" tweet something out. See if people respond to it. See if there's anything to that idea.

Chris: I love that.

Dave: Then turn it into a blog post. Turn it into a talk. Turn it into a video or three videos. There's a way to do that that's wholesome and not scamming and scummy. But I think, yeah, there are levels of investment.

If you feel like you cracked a big idea, you've got the A Book Apart book, I hope you get it out there a bit and see if people are vibing it.

00:48:01

Chris: I've always loved that advice. Start on social media. Make it a blog post. Make it a local conference talk. Grow it up over time rather than just be like, "All right. Sit down at your typewriter. It's time to write this book." For a nonfiction thought that we end up with in tech, that's not the right path.

Dave: I know a few people who have done that route: grand idea, do a pitch, they get a book, they write a book, and they get injured doing it. It was a hard two years because they hadn't been talking about it or they hadn't been engaged on the idea and seeing what hits. I think it can be a shock to your system, and now you're committing to a year or two of writing a book. That's hard.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave: Wouldn't it be easier if you had this pool of already star, hearted content to pull from?

Chris: Yeah, theoretically. That's why I thought that would happen -- it still might some day -- with my email blog. I'm like, "If I blog every single week and just accumulate ideas and thoughts and references and stuff, then I can turn it into a book someday." I still might, but I don't know that.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: It doesn't feel like I'm much closer by doing that.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: But that's kind of the point, too, right? Rather than just assuming you've got what it takes to write this book, that you feel it out. If it gets lost somewhere along the way, well, so be it then.

Dave: Yeah. It doesn't always work out. A book publisher was like, "Hey, we're looking for authors," and I was like, "Well, I'd been talking about writing a book for a long time." I put together a book proposal on prototyping based on talks and stuff like that, and I felt really good about it and sent it, did another round of revisions on the outline, and it seemed good.

And then it was just unceremoniously sort of cut. It was just like, "Oh, okay. That didn't work out." It doesn't always work out either. Even ideas you think are good.

I can look back on it now. I may post it on my blog, the outline. [Laughter] But I also thought about maybe I'll just write the book and self-publish it. If I really think it's still a good idea, I can do that. But that's more a function of time than anything.

Chris: Yeah. Don't even think of it as failure, too, if it doesn't make it all the way. You still did something cool. You softened the blow of it. It's not really a failure at that point. It's just you only got so far.

Dave: Oh, yeah. Well, and you want to fail at the outline stage, not at the "I published a book" phase. You know? [Laughter]

Chris: Right.

Dave: That's where you want to fail.

00:51:09

Chris: Hmm... I like that. Let's do one more from Matt McGillivray. "I've been freelancing for the past year and able to charge, in my opinion, a healthy hourly rate because I'm established as an expert in a niche JavaScript library." That's kind of cool.

Dave: All right. Good.

Chris: Carve it out. Good job, Matt.

Dave: Good.

Chris: "I've contributed substantially to the open-source project and regularly answer people's questions." Yeah, even in our own Discord. What's up, Matt?

"Part of my job now, as I see it, is to be active on LinkedIn so that I may be top of mind when somebody realizes that they need assistance. This has got me thinking. Surely, each of you have had instances of being contacted for help. I would assume some people would be impressed with your knowledge and what you have achieved and think of you as a fixer where the client would have the perspective of "Whatever it costs, we know they will get it done." I'm assuming this is not how you make your money."

[Laughter] Yeah, we'll see.

"Not to mention, isn't it nice to have something to work on in the middle of the broken and critical Venn diagram?" [Laughter] "Having said that, I'm curious. What would someone of your status," our incredibly high status, too, just as high as it gets, I'd say, "charge?" How much would we charge?

"What about all the thought leaders in the coding space on YouTube and Twitter? Do they solely make money from courses and content or what? Do they use that reputation then to charge money for other things, et cetera?"

That's a good question.

Dave: Well, so the yacht costs a cool million a month to run.

Chris: [Laughter] Yeah. It's $100,000 just for the gas.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: It's a lot.

Dave: What would I charge is probably different.

Chris: [Laughter]

00:52:54

Dave: Uh... You know, I don't know the answer to this question exactly. I do think making content, in my experience, begets things. You produce blog posts; you get known for a thing, like a niche JavaScript framework. Awesome.

You might get invited to a conference. That conference might not pay you any money. It's just flights. Okay, too bad. But it's still good exposure. You should do it, probably.

You may meet somebody at the conference who is like, "Dude, I need somebody who knows niche JS," so they are going to hire you for a job. So, that could turn into work.

Then you get into, like, but then the next conference, they're like, "Well, we have a $500 honorarium that we'll pay." You're like, "Oh, that's better than the last one." Then maybe you'll hit the big time and it's like $3,000, $5,000, $10,000. Who knows?

I think you have to... I don't think that just happens overnight. I think that happens over time. That's where some money happens.

I'm always like the secret to a successful freelancer is they have a partner that works a stable job that has healthcare. [Laughter]

Chris: Hmm... Yeah, there you go.

Dave: That's an option to consider, a partner that has healthcare.

[Laughter]

Chris: Consider being a trophy husband because that might work for you.

Dave: It's a pretty great life.

[Laughter]

Dave: No, my wife ain't got no insurance.

[Laughter]

Dave: No. I think everyone's situation is sort of different. But I do think being a known quantity helps you. And so, if you're very known for niche JS and somebody is like, "I need somebody who knows that," you can kind of walk in and name your price.

We did that. We had a React project come across our desk. I know React, but I'm not day-to-day fluent in it, and so we talked to somebody who knows React, and they were pretty expensive. But it was like, you know, if the client is willing to pay that and we're willing to take that cut, then I think it could work. But it didn't work out because they hit whatever business cuts. This was pre-pandemic.

Chris: Yeah. It's cool it's working out now for you, Matt. I would say if that's fun for you and that your situation is accommodating to that and that all you need is more of it and charging more, yeah, man. I think you're doing good already - or whatever.

Be prepared that technology changes. It shifts and flows. You know. I feel bad for people sometimes that have this really specific set of knowledge in one area and then that tech goes away, like Flash or something.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Then they just don't want to learn a new thing. [Laughter] I'm like, "Aw..."

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I'm thinking of Solid or something like that. There are probably very few expert-experts in it - or something like that. Right? Or Svelte or something like that. There are probably more Svelte experts.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: You get good at it, and then somebody is like, "Hey, our Svelte developer left. Does anyone know Svelte?" You're like, "That's me. I can pitch in."

I think you're doing the right things, building networks and you want to be a helpful person on the Internet. The same could be said with podcasting. I'll recommend Chris Enns every single time I get because he does good work. There are not many people out there who will just do a really great job editing your podcast and be nice about it.

00:56:52

Chris: Yeah. What Matt really wanted was dollar amounts, so I'll tell you. I kind of just don't have time that much to help people super directly with stuff that's not my wife asking me really nicely to fix the school gala website or something. But I almost considered one over break. It looked like a legit freelance job, and it looked kind of easy to me or just really up my alley, just like this niche JavaScript library is for you, Matt, in a way.

I'm like, "I'm just too busy with life at CodePen. We're working on 2.0. It's a really big deal. I need to spend all of my time and effort towards that kind of thing." I was like, "Man, if I was going to do this," and I even quoted them on it, like, "I'm not saying yes but just to make sure we're in the same ballpark. How is $20,000 for a month of work?" I know I can't count hours. My brain, I just can't do it right now. I'm sure if I was destitute and somebody asked me to do it, I would be happy to count hours. But at the moment where I'm at, I'm like, "I'm not going to click a button and write down little invoices that I worked on January 18th from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m."

I was like, "I'll just quote you for the whole month, which is about how long I think it will take to achieve this," and they sounded fine with that. I didn't do the job, but that's kind of the number space I was at.

Dave: I'm probably similar. In my brain, I think that $20,000 a month is kind of on par with what I was thinking. For me, I don't have a hard number. Everything is flexible, but $1,000 a day or something.

If I look at a site, and I'm like, "Okay, it's ten templates, but I could probably do... The first one will take me eight hours to set up. That's a full day. Then probably four hours per page after that - or something like that." I can just run some math on it and be like, "Okay, that's like a five-day deal, and that's maybe $1,000, $5,000, or something like that." I could probably average out to $1,000 a day or something like that.

If that sounds like a lot to you, for sure for sure it's a lot. But also, in America, immediately 30% of that is just going to Uncle Sam getting taxed. They tax freelancers harder than they tax if you're employed at a corporation. That would be something; immediately, all that goes off the top.

Chris: Yeah. It's a safe way to think of, like, just cancel half of that.

Dave: Yeah. Just be like if it sounds like a lot, it kind of has to be a lot because so much disappears suddenly.

Chris: Right.

Dave: It's not like I'm buying a new car every month or something with that money. [Laughter] You know, a new Miata every month.

Chris: Yeah, and it's not every second of your day is paid.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: You have to make up for that time, too.

01:00:10

Dave: Yeah. You can also crunch your budget and figure out what you need to make. What's, like, end up in the black? You're just like, "We are net positive on money." Then you're like, "Cool. I want a vacation. I'm going to tack on some money. I have to make a little bit more so I can take that vacation in June."

Then if you're like, "Okay, I want to put this much into retirement," I need to make this much money. Then work backwards from there.

I'm not usually good at that, but I know Brad Frost has had success in that. If you're even like, "I want to retire early at 55," cool. These are your money-making years. You need to kind of just make it as best you can.

Maybe you just overcharge. The old "Double it until people say no." That's also hard advice to give in this economy here, but you could try it if you've got a lot of inbound. And if you're truly an expert in niche library, niche JavaScript library, I think you'll find people who will pay it.

Chris: I like it. Yeah, just be more considerate with what you're doing. It sounds like you're doing pretty okay at the moment.

You might want to roll that into a course, though. I'll tell you that, too. You know? If you're the niche guy. It's not giving away the secrets. It's almost establishing you more as "the guy" in this case.

Dave: Yeah. Pull a Kent C. Dodds test, React Testing. Become the testing person. Now people are just giving you testing bucks. People love testing.

[Laughter]

Dave: Find some people--

Chris: What do you think it is? What is the niche JavaScript library? Would you guess?

Dave: I'm going Solid.

Chris: Are you?

Dave: I'm getting Solid... or Svelte.

Chris: It feels Solid-y?

Dave: Svelte? Svelte.

Chris: I was kind of thinking GreenSock somehow.

Dave: Ooh... That's a good one. That's a good one.

Chris: I don't know.

Dave: Yeah?

Chris: I have no idea. But he maybe would have said forums, but I don't know. What comes up in our Discord a lot? I don't even know. I just haven't totaled it up. It's not like I'm not in our Discord.

Dave: Yeah. Is it our Discord? Is Matt in our Discord here? Let's see. Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt... I'm looking. Sorry, I should know this. But anyway.

Chris: We have three Matts.

Dave: We have a lot of Andrews and a lot of Matts and a lot of everybodys. But anyway, it could be any Discord, really. If you're in the technology-specific Discord, that's a great place to build your brand there.

Chris: Yeah it is. All right, y'all. Good stuff. Next episode--we should have mentioned this at the top--is number 600, which we got some write-ins for, so we're definitely going to be tackling that subject of what's the Web look like in 12 years, so as long as we've been on the air doubled.

Some interesting thoughts came in over social media and email. We'll take both. Lovely stuff. Good ideas. Well, some very futuristic things to some very HTML and CSS will probably be around.

Dave: Probably?

Chris: Yeah. [Laughter] Yeah. Either one, I like the extremes. Keep them coming.

Dave: I'm going to do a spoiler. We'll have at least one new element. Boom!

Chris: [Laughter] Twelve years.

Dave: Twelve years.

Chris: That's about how fast HTML moves.

Dave: We're getting one element, baby.

Chris: Slow like brisket. Right, Dave?

Dave: Slow like brisket. All right, well, thank you, dear listener, for downloading this in your podcatcher of choice. Be sure to star, heart, favorite it up. That's how people find out about the show.

Follow us on Mastodon. What is our thing? [email protected]. Then join us in the D-d-d-d-discord. That's where the party is happening. I want to give a big shout-out to our new chief meme officer, Ginger, just bringing home the memes.

Chris: Well deserved.

Dave: Well deserved. It's a first promotion in the old Discord, so congrats, Ginger.

Yeah. Thank you. Chris, do you got anything else you'd like to say?

Chris: Bah! ShopTalkShow.com. Berp!