The History of Syntax

with, like,

an hour. Right? It would have felt like we warp just artificially dragging it out, which you don't wanna do. Right? So that group them together, like, three topics that have nothing to do with each other, group them together into a single show, didn't really make sense.

are trying to get in front of developers, it's kind of a hard thing to do because

and they look for new podcasts. Because I think what what happens is

yeah, we just kinda kept that going until we decided that we wanted to add another episode because we were doing so much, but we didn't want to

existed. Podcasts were popular,

really believing in in Syntax really early on. I mean, they sponsored episode number seven. Let's see. They sponsored episode number six.

company or something like that. Totally.

You know? And even 2017 was not early. I'd been listening to Leo LaPorte for ten years before that. You know? Like, I literally had podcasts on my iPod.

Yeah. Yeah. You know Node one of our first bigger sponsors was was FreshBooks, who then continued to sponsor us forever and ever and ever. So shout out to FreshBooks for also

value for their money.

Yeah. So they they started really early with us. And, that that really made it a lot more viable, Syntax meetups. We've been showing up. In fact, it's it's very funny. The very first Syntax, like, official meetup that we did besides doing live shows very good episode. Do you know why that was? I was out. I don't remember why I was out. I was sick. I was unavailable. For some reason, I was out. And that was the first episode I missed, and you were like, well, I'll find somebody else. So you found Sarah to fill in,

tooling

Didn't make any sense. So that's why we came up with the whole hasty and tasty treat. Next thing you know, we're publishing two episodes a week.

you can't just use regular mediums. Like, you can't you can't sponsor, like, Joe Rogan, a job. You Node? I've always worked for myself, and I should say, like, I'm still part time, We're like, we have a a whole fulfillment place. You know? It's it's a lot of work nope.

sure. Yeah. And Yeah. I forget how much it was. I think it was, like, $700 or something like that for the first episode. Good money. Yeah. So yeah. It Wes good money. That was our fourth episode. So we had batched those first three episodes. And by the time we recorded a fourth episode, we had, Sick tips. We had a bunch of other ones that we didn't end up using, a very

these companies were were hungry to try new avenues. And, also, like, at the time, the display ads were were starting to tank,

in front of devs.

No. It was it was much more of, like, a still, like, a tech thing.

besides the fact that we were getting a lot of listens and everything like that.

but it would have been, like, totally wrong for us to talk about them for

Yeah. Twenty eleven plus. Yeah. Totally. But, yeah, it was and Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

Check us out.

that kind of thing for an external hard drive, but nothing that I could take with me.

have gotten pretty decent. And, like,

Sick.

did remote desktop into a Totally. And and it was it was great. A lot of people asking us why I'm there, which, was a a question I could not answer.

But we'll we'll be doing more on YouTube. JS EvidentSpire, our new Friday show, we've we've been Node, like

Thunderbolt

you know, video editing and processing, those types of things liked it and enjoyed it. And Figma when they were still a tiny little company. So, you know, I I was doing even more than what I was publishing onto YouTube, but for me, it was all just, like, sit down and a little bit less polished. Just talk about what I'm doing. Explain through it. You Node? Record a nine to ten minute video here and there. But either way, the mastermind group for me was so helpful because I was trying to turn

read and write speed. So it uses, my baby, which was the Vercel up tutorials YouTube channel,

you have to get an extension cord out. I hate that. So just having a glue gun that is on a battery

Nothing.

making aftermarket

I hadn't bought an external hard drive in a very long time. Like, I had a NAS.

you know, space in in about two seconds flat. So I got this four terabyte bad job of getting a merch store by just accepting, like, one of the numerous requests we had over the years for, like, we'll put we'll print your stuff and ship it for you. But so many of those things are just, like, bad, But,

junk on YouTube. So for us, that is the the big plan here, especially as we move more into video.

But when I think about it about it. Heavier work, whether that is, you know, work with LLMs locally or work with, My son was born at the May, and this first episode came out early June. So you can tell, like, just how fast that turnaround was for me personally to go from I'm working this job full time to now we're doing this podcast. So for me, it really needed to hit, have another long episode. So that's where we came up with the idea of doing the Sanity and the tasty treat where the hasty treat would be a short episode on a quick topic. Because sometimes Wes were finding there was all these things we wanted to talk about,

we had these from the get go. That was part of our initial plan Wes to have SICK PIX and Shameless Plugs even by May. From day one. Yeah.

for fast writing, and it's just tiny. I'm gonna put some Velcro on this and Velcro it to the back of my computer so I can take it with me. But it's shocking. Four terabytes in this little thing, it's essentially a USB flash drive. And I just basically told DaVinci to throw all my cache files on it. Now I never have to worry about that again. So edit right off of that? Like, scratch disk off of that? Yeah. I use scratch disk off of that. I think you could probably edit off of that as Wes. But I just haven't had the need to yet. But at least once a week, I I tell my wife. I'm like, I hate Apple. You know? I have a freaking two terabyte

We want better shows. We want deeper quality. We want, you know, stuff that isn't out there. The last thing we want is, like, just more disposable

It's fun. That wasn't supposed to I had a hoot doing that. It was hilarious. Have a hoot. Yes.

ways possible. Love to hear what your thoughts are and what kind of stuff you wanna see.

you have to literally tape a hard drive to the back of your laptop to make it work.

Obviously, the audio podcast is not going anywhere, and we're gonna continue to have that be just totally via a viable way to consume syntax. We don't wanna alienate any of the audio listeners or anything like that.

it has, like, a nice stand for it, and it's much bigger.

it's so hard to get a lot of space on Apple devices.

I like the Ryobi one better, to be honest, because I still very much, I love the Syntax brand, you know, and and everything around it. And, like, we've we've morphed it over the years, but it still is it's the same logo, and it's the same name. And, And,

That might be Local cloud.

I do that all the time still as well. Yeah. I do. Put it quite a bit of glue gunning. But the only downside is it takes a little while to heat up, maybe maybe four minutes or so. But once it's cooking, you're you're good.

Crazy.

MacBook. Yeah. And, like, I bought my wife a new,

portable given that, at the time, you know, I was living in Colorado, oh, And Yeah. We had a really great relationship with them. Wes had known Ben Vininger over at Century for a long time. Did you know Kramer before, David Kramer?

I have a sick pick, which is something that CJ had mentioned that he had gotten. So shout out to CJ for letting me know that these existed nowadays.

powered one, and then you just hook it up to a battery. And then I also just got the Ryobi one, which is a a developer okay. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. We've seen a lot a lot of like, that happens a lot. Right? And when we announced it, a lot of people were, like, happy but Some some pretty fun stuff

powered one.

That's so silly. Yeah. I, And it's it's it's always been, like, a fun highlight of my week as well-being able to record it. And and also just, like, share what it is that I'm working on and share what I Node. It's it's a fun thing to be able to say.

man, Node. At the time, it was just like, I am an expert. Therefore, I will blog and

from one terabyte on that thing to four terabytes is a thousand And we even hashed out a whole bunch of outlines for some potential episodes that we wanted to do. We decided that we maybe wanna kick off, like, three episodes. We'd even come up with the term sick pick at that point.

And,

that wouldn't be too bad. The thing with your laptop is that you wanna be able to, like, bring it to a conference or bring it on an airplane or whatever and just have your stuff.

having a glue gun that can't get kicked across the Oh. House or, like, trying to glue gun something and you're like, personality.

Yeah. Not be a thing? If I'm local, with everything Everything. Except for us. So after, like, after a year of doing it and when we that was our, like, sort of first introduction.

a Mac Studio is so much more powerful than a MacBook Pro. I I was just thinking, like, when do I get my next MacBook Pro? Is it the next version? three,

hacking the Mac Studios or what are those square little square ones? Is that the studio? Mac Mini. Mac Mini,

I hate it. Every time yeah. And she's just like, I can't have any more apps on my phone because it's I have no space for anything. And my kids' iPads are always out of space. And I was like, how is this in in the year of 2025,

Node when I do it, it's okay. That's, Wes.

Yeah. Absolutely.

where, like, they are, like, give me that. I don't want a desktop computer, but give me that for my laptop. You Node? A thousand terabytes.

So I guess it's a good time to get into sick picks and shameless plugs, which, again,

We have two actually, two of them. This is the big one, and then we also have one of the smaller craft ones. And it's so good for kids because they like kids love glue guns. And you can just, like, put it on the the table where they're working, and you don't have to worry about them, like, running by and kicking it in this Totally. Magma hot glue gun proposition, originally, I had wanted to call my own podcast Boss Sauce. Oh, I love it. I I don't even remember that. Oh, that's great. Be fun slash funny and enough to grab people's interest.

like, the TS 80, I think. It's a USB So and it says,

That's not that's possible. I guess it is a little bit.

somewhere else. That's my thing JS I always just wanna slap close the laptop and then put it in my bags and continue working. I do it all the time. I bring my daughter to dance. I sit in the parking lot for an hour. I do that exact same thing. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And now now I use the Vision Pro to have a giant monitor in the car, and I all the other parents get to look at me funny. Oh, that's cool.

you move all your coding projects to the cloud instead of doing them local.

Myself so many times on a glue gun when I was a kid.

I, you know, I have

Mac Pro that is beefy? You know? You're gonna remote in real you think latency would not

frosting.

SSD.

Youtube.com/@Syntaxfm.

A thousand dollars.

how is this a thing where we're just running out of it? And they want you to do iCloud for a half thousand dollars a month.

And if I'm wired connection at home, it's not gonna make a difference. The latency JS not going to be a killer there. No. No. No. At home, it wouldn't be an issue. Like, if you're, like, sitting on the couch and you're trying to remote in, it's when you're, like, find these in Google Docs history. So async, Node time with Wes and Scott, time code, code flow.

Peace.

gig one. And she like, all of the apps on her phone are, like you know, where they, like, do that soft uninstall?

And it is. It's the the upgrade price to internally move your your internal storage I would say that was a difficult job hunt. We had a ton of massively talented video creators

Make take five minutes to make a photoshopped image and throw it onto a a product. Like, yeah. Node into that. Yeah. The the print on demand stuff is not it's it's actually getting pretty good,

Oh. Oh, I don't remember. Said we were just Wes were just doing some planning or something like that. You know? with the fingerboard in the custom box.

is is to have some sort of merch. I've done T shirts once or twice myself. I've done stickers, but I've never had the ability to just, like, have stuff for sale all the time.

just it's great, like, actually hanging out with people that you've been conversing with online for That's it. I'd always do them the backwards way.

things when we joined centers. Like, hey. Can we can we do a merch store? Like, I wanna be able to to do some really cool stuff.

because Century helped us plan it. We got a great venue for it. We gave away a ton of stuff. A lot of people showed up, and it was just

and, like, Like yeah. Like, you know, you can use Versus Code as, like, a thin client, and then it just does everything remotely.

I grew up doing merch for hardcore bands. That's, like, how I cut my teeth in in this whole web development stuff. So being able to have that

the week that we flew to Toronto to discuss, Sometimes it's okay.

And, right off the bat, when we joined, we gave away, what, like, a not even in Toronto, we're doing, like, a meetup. And we had, like, probably, what, twenty, twenty five people come out? It was enough. Yeah. Enough people. It was fun. Super fun. I'd love doing those meet ups. We need to we're gonna do a few more of them because and and these developer companies were looking for new areas

but it's it's not very fulfilling to do fun stuff. So we've been able to source When we hit that, like, second having calls with them and and whatnot, and it was it was a tricky thing. A lot of people always say, like, why don't you just farm it out to, like, Yeah. What do you wanna do, and how do you hire somebody, and and all of that hard stuff, which I have zero experience in.

We got some stickers

bad quality, bad everything.

or, like you know what? It's not it's like you don't feel like he's phony in any sort of way. The dude is who he is, and it's, like, such a positive thing to me. That's always a a character trait I I really enjoy. So adding CJ to the show is a huge value add for us. CJ had been doing his own stuff on Coding Garden. He had experiences live streaming. I had seen him doing live events in Denver around town. Perfect value add for us. Another thing we touched on was the merch store. So one thing we've wanted to do forever What I ended up getting was will be the the catalyst was this. I was doing a lot of video editing, and my cache files were, like, taking up, like, 600 gigabytes on my laptop, which would just, you know, destroy my laptop's,

coming pretty soon.

some really neat stuff like a like a basketball and a skateboard. Those Yarn,

years or or weeks or never.

a blast.

we just didn't have the ability and time to do it the right way. So that's why it was so helpful for, like, for Ben Vininger to be like, hey. I'll take over the the the store. Now Caitlin Bloom, is the point person on the store. It's like

Probably by the time you listen to us, the hoodie should actually be live at century.shop.

likable dude, It's so cool. And from there, yeah, we've been doing some events. We've been doing,

that was one of the

for coding is is such a cool thing.

We got some really cool hats. By the way, really cool hats coming. Hoodies coming.

And very tired of doing that. It was very exhausting, and I still love making that content. But I I'd really burned myself out on how many videos I had agreed to do. And once I'd made that agreement with my customers, I can't go back on that. I can't say, no. I'm gonna give you 10 videos a month or whatever. I'm gonna keep keep working on them. Now granted, we did bring in some third party content creators at various points, and that was definitely the direction. But people really liked my content, so I didn't wanna, like, skimp out on that. So it was a lot of work for me. So when this this came about,

was

thousand T shirts or 600 T shirts or something like that. And skate decks and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. We got skate decks. We have basketballs.

on top of all of that. You know? Like Cool mustache?

And

Yeah. You don't feel like he is

Yeah. We're doing something. But the most recent meetup we did in SF for GitHub Vercel was incredible,

yes. We could we could probably have done a

Yeah. That was really fun. We've done quite a few. We got some we did the GitHub Universe as well. We did React Miami or did a live show there as well.

cautious.

we launched we'll talk about whatever, but people started saying,

you know, what, 52 episodes a year kind of repeatedly.

Ben had Scott in touch with me before we even did the podcast, and he's like, hey. Do you if you ever wanna work together, let me know. And I had what's working, what's not working,

a whole bunch of ad spots, but, also, you can devote a lot more time to it. We can get you some people.

And, they said totally. So they paid me a bunch of money. I put Node of the videos of the course was me integrating Sanity into the React app and showing how it works and whatnot, and that really worked well. And then when the podcast came along, they're like, hey. We wanna sponsor this as well. And, like, immediately, they're just like, how many episodes can we get? You know? And they just they took as many as they possibly could, that you can I don't know if this will ever come? They they wanna charge you for, So my ideas for the podcast were Node, code, code, exclamation mark.

hire a producer, Randy, who made it look better and sound better, and it freed us up from doing a a whole lot of stuff. Right? And Node we have a whole team. We'll talk about that in a sec, though. Yeah. Yeah. So Yarn of that was Level Up Tutorials was made free. You can utilize it Node, levelup.video.

I've also I had been using their product since before Andy's just a genuinely So this has been this has been a fun thing that we've been doing for a really long time here on Syntax. So, again, sick picks are the things that we like, we're consuming, we're utilizing all that stuff.

new features that Century had and say, hey. Like, maybe this is some good talking points.

the time or resources.

a Redux Alright. That's it for today. Make sure you check us out on YouTube, syntax.fm/

better because we were able to, He he obviously has those skills,

But it was always just like, well, you use it. Just just let her rip, you know, and we can kinda talk about

once a week like, existing audiences that we're able to push people towards. I think it's a little easier now to get sort of, like, an algorithm hit Yeah. Totally. And be noticed. But at the time, it Wes, like,

I can put that energy that I'm putting into my own tutorials into, like, a group effort instead of, like because I had a I had a business. I had a couple people working for me and stuff at LevelUp Tutorials.

So, you know, we often say on this podcast,

for for many, many years. And it was a great relationship because Century

gets acquired, you always think, oh, that's it. There it goes.

Syntax. Yeah. Like, long before for just JS a user. So I I was very familiar with the prod product itself,

and I'd always had great experiences with the team. So when we started chatting and they they told us what they saw on it, and one of the big things that sold me on it was But, you know, it felt really great to be able to have all that be in Syntax. So in addition to,

you know, not even just four days a week. It was Saturdays and Sundays for me at that time just

a couple times a year, they would drop us notes on And and CJ, I I feel like he has even a deeper breadth on on some of that stuff. You know? He he actually has a computer science degree. Yeah. And then he's just, like, excellent at

Mhmm. So it was,

the century to come in and say, make it purple. And I was like,

like, having a nice working relationship with Sanity,

which I think they were a sponsor, yeah, 52 of somebody to figure out how this all works

never sent us anything to say.

this show is brought to you or presented by Century, you know, those types of things. But Century was one of our longtime sponsors, and they would sponsor,

It's available for a totally free resource for all of the courses that I made. So that was a whole part of it too. It's like, we're gonna take on LevelUp Tutorials and just make it free for the community, which was really admirable that they did that. They were like, we don't care about the money that LevelUp Tutorials is bringing in. The goodwill is better for us to make it free. So, So I guess the next big thing, because we had been, you know, really getting into that flow for a while, was getting acquired by by Century.

really, really super great.

enabled to just, like because that was that was a frustrating part about running syntaxes that we spent

just fire hose that out in an episode. That was that was always just Wes, do you wanna kick it off with a little bit of, you know, pre syntax, what you were doing today? Lore? A little bit of lore on the Wes Bosch we're not gonna touch it. Unless you, like, need our help, we're not gonna tell you how to do it. You know? We just want you to think bigger, and we'll give you the resources to do so. So that was that was a big selling point because it's your your baby. You you Node, you have this whole brand. The last thing you want is and I still am, Wes living in Toronto. We had never been in person. We'd probably been in very similar circles and rooms, just never never met before until then. And,

Yeah. Considering I was at that time, we were recording syntax one day a week, and then I was doing, what, 24 videos a month with LevelUp tutorials.

relationship, which is why when they approached us, they're like, hey. We wanna build this into something bigger. What do you think? Bring Syntax under the Century brand that you don't have to you don't gotta sell doing that, podcast was was extremely

free course that was coming out. And I said, yeah. You wanna, like, sponsor the for the the Redux course?

grinding on creating tutorials. So for me, I was feeling very, you know, working for a single person It took us until, like, May, July, or June of twenty seventeen before we actually kicked it off.

Yeah. Maybe and and caching techniques. And all the way on the other side, we know quite a bit about, like, front end and CSS and animations and stuff like that. And our we have a pretty wide breadth of of what we cover.

for so long if we hadn't,

the part that makes it happen. Obviously, it is. But, like, man, it it took us a long time to actually just go ahead and and start recording it. And I think that was just because there's a lot going on in life, you know, focusing on courses and whatnot. But once we started getting rolling on it, I'm like, man, we shoulda we shoulda did this two years ago.

GraphQL,

We had more names than this because I clearly remember one of them was was codetime with Wes and Scott. And I'm trying to find that list.

Yep. Graphcool, But I remember that was really great, and it worked out really well. Yeah. I mean, obviously, Sarah's great. So

like, actually doing something like, What did you say?

it was like a Sunday

yeah, I I think both of us, it was the right time. We had all this stuff down, and it was the absolute right time for me. So we just decided to make it happen

ideas are a dime a dozen. Right? Yes. Yeah. But, like, actually getting up and doing it is

Yeah. That that was really nice that we had, tasty treats. Easy breezy, we never actually ended up using. Hot take time machine, hot takes from years past, which is hilarious because this was almost ten years ago at the moment. Is that list of of other possible names on here as well? I don't know. I couldn't find that. Man, I think I got it. Let me let me search one sec. Either way, we knew from

Yeah. People let us know right away that they,

Okay. Yeah. Syntax is the best one. I think we all we kind of agreed on it. It's a it's a short word. It'll it's a cool looking word.

discoverability And we got an email from Brad, and he's like, hey.

Totally.

taking on external money. But but, we're, second one.

I I don't know that I've ever liked something that long

we published the first episode on React tools, it. And everybody always thought that that was transitions Scott is so key.

we were able to just simply say, hey. We got this thing and push people out to it. And then just luckily from day one, we had a fairly sizable audience that were were tuned in. I don't know that we woulda kept it going conference talk and do a podcast on it. And and now the entertainment value is is so much is so important

additional episodes. So that way, we would have three kind of ready to go as a buffer. And the initial plan was to just do one a week. That was the whole thing. We're gonna do one episode a week. It's gonna be on Wednesdays, I believe. And, defining the video look, moving to video at all. Before this, we were just audio.

harassing me. And I mean this in the, like, the most aggressive, rude possible type of way about a broken feature in pre alpha software.

and like, got all the feedback because it's you hear from people and they they email you and they they tweet at you saying, hey. I love this episode or you got this wrong. And I I love that part about doing it because you feel part of the community.

so brutal to me, and I I pretty much quit the next day. And at that point, I didn't have

The fun dev show?

And So that's the story thus Yarn, and I think the plan from here forward is to continue to make this platform better.

where Wes I'm like, that's a good name. You know? Nice, short, Yes. I've seen Vercel. Meteor, Blaze, React storybook. Oh, man. We were

of possible names for Syntax,

Oh, yeah.

low, and

and start recording. The initial plan was that we recorded a teaser episode, and then we recorded

crisp Node. And, like, every other Node podcast that has come out since since then But if you're doing really fussy, tiny little stuff, I'll reach for the little USB and, to advertise on and and to get in front of,

it was, like, 200,000 or something like that maybe at that point. Fairly large. Yeah. So it it was a, I think, a great initial reaction. I think we did exactly what we wanted it to do. And at that point, Scott a lot of people knew my name, which was funny because, like, I'd been on YouTube for so long, but people I didn't put myself on camera that much. I was the Vercel Up Tuts guy, and, like, I didn't even really even say my name. I Wes like, this is Scott from Level Up Tuts. It's like, I didn't wanna burden people with having to, spell my last name. So it was like at that point, it was Wes and the Level Up Tuts guy. That was the that was the show.

I I think so. And it was gonna come out every Wednesday. Phases. Yeah. Yeah. You know? 07/05/2017,

that would have not been a good podcast name. Websauce, Blockscope. I think Block Scott is probably my favorite like,

And, I've told the story before in the past, but it was the the week of the birth of my first child.

It just goes to show that, phone,

early on the React storybook, man. Yeah. That is Is there still React storybook? That's crazy that it's been around that long.

for resources That was that was really important to us as Wes. In in the same way that, like, Randy can, like, edit video, Photoshop,

Most of these are garbage, but I'm just spitballing.

And, like, as a developer there, it was a really tough work environment.

DevLife, The Node Life. Well, those are all of the ideas that we had there. And then finally, I forget. Syntax is not even on there. I'm not sure how we ended up landing on Syntax.

it hit. I think the initial reaction was great. It helped that Wes had a massive Twitter audience. And at that point, my I think my YouTube,

this was these tech companies that And, yeah, it was it's always a really good, Anything else to plug?

at 08:00 man so there was just a lot of domain specific knowledge I had about what makes for effective YouTube, especially, like, SEO stuff because I was living and dying by the SEO game on YouTube at that point. Yeah. But You're just cranking it out. I remember the one of the first things I asked you in the mastermind Wes, how do you how do you record so much content? You know? Like, you just crank you're cranking it out, and,

an income beyond, like, Vercel up tutorials, which, you know, was tight Delicious Brains as a sponsor. So shout out, It represents what we do really well.

at that point. And, because of that, we ended up getting, you know, sponsorship pretty early on in the game. I don't remember what our first sponsored episode was. I think it was I think it was Delicious Brains, has a Yeah. Delicious Brains. Plug in WP Migrate DB Pro, which I was a heavy user of at the time because I was I was doing a lot of So, yeah, the the next step was to grow the team. What do we need? Well, we need somebody who can take on the producer role of just angle to the same thing, and I was bringing a lot of YouTube expertise I was looking at, Mac Studio because we're getting Randy a Mac Studio,

It's on the it was on the next page. Here we go. I I had to go back in, like, history and she had a 256

Also, second one was just code, code, exclamation Yarn, so two.

So stupid.

talking about, like, where to host React, all of the different, like, libraries around it. Right? I'm just looking at the show notes here. Cloudflare,

promote our own stuff, but we had not thought about explaining how all of that stuff works as well.

And it was just, like, one thing that happened, I was working this job at a Scott up, and they were, really abusive.

JS is a take on it. It's just one word about coding.fm.

Next. Js, Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And and so that was not great. Node it better. I should I should say that. It made it a lot better. Better significantly

04/16/2016.

followers or whatever on YouTube,

in 2015 at the time. You Node, the channel was in the middle of its rise. You Node? It it took a long time. I'll post a link of the,

was very tough. And I had to pick up a job here and there extra because I just could not,

what was a YouTube channel that I was

couple years and just, like, really, really working hard on the the YouTube channel itself. And Wes had really, like, I want something like that. Yeah. I've been rethinking the I don't want a desktop computer thing. I don't know Okay. If I've talked to you about this. No. Tell me about it. I think virtual desktops

But I did find that we created this initial planning document

Yeah. And on top of that, I was doing videos for like, I did sketch videos for their website. I was doing videos for Meteor at some point. I was doing videos for Yeah. It feels like you could you could just offload that to a Yeah. Especially if you did, you could throw anything at CJ and you felt like you'd be able to make nine videos a week for dollars.

growth over time where I was publishing, like, I got a cordless, soldering iron recently, and that was Yes. A value add for me. Because, again, it took take a little while to heat up. Does not get as hot, definitely.

that still doesn't pay your rent. Right? So I was trying to pivot from working full time as a developer and doing this stuff in my free time

break into it. But Wes expertise really helped out. You Node, we had been doing that mastermind group for a while, and we had talked kind of casually about doing a podcast.

And there's actually a little Honeypot did a little mini documentary about my my career that goes into a lot more details on some of that stuff. But, you know, the YouTube channel for me was just a a slow

YouTube in in 2012.

not supporting myself with. Believe it or Scott, at the time, you get 200,000

making, like, really high end premium tutorial content. And, like, what I was making was not that. I mean, it was nine videos a week. You can't really do high end content at nine videos a week. I was more or less coming home from work and recording just, like, talking about what I was doing all day at work. So when we had that mastermind, you know, Wes was bringing a different trying to be, like, an influencer potential

Yeah. And and it's it's funny. So pre all of that, I was doing, like, you'd mentioned a lot of YouTube, and I had started,

actually support me, which, you know, for a little while, it definitely, It's made by Crucial. It's itty bitty, and it's four terabytes. It has 2,000 megabyte,

it it was good. Like, I I was taking them myself before I even knew you.

really done a great job of

dude, we should start a podcast. You know? Like, there's probably something else here. I've really enjoyed hanging out with Scott every week and and talking, and we're like, man, there's we have, like, a really good back and forth, good rapport, And I I think that maybe not then, but I when I in my WordPress days, I use that in every single website.

similar sense of humor, kinda in the same stages of life as well. So I I Wes like, hey. You wanna start a podcast?

it was really great that that ended up happening. And and, Caitlin Bloom, who was the LevelUp Tutorials marketing manager, she had been working for me for, I don't know, like, a year and a half at that point, maybe a little bit longer. I was really grateful to her. She took a chance on me because,

So, people have been able to really assist us in in the ways that'll have made this whole thing so much better. We don't wanna push out We don't I mean, we don't. We don't wanna to give you bad quality mugs and printed T shirts or whatever.

what, however many hours a week, but the arrangement now is is much more formal. You know? Like, we have team. We have to communicate and things like that. And, I always tell my wife I'm a stallion. You know? I just kinda let her rip and and do what I want. And for the most part, that's still true, but,

would be an easy transition for us. And it was. I mean, we were able to transition to video within, like, weeks of him joining the promo. Like, actually, probably a week of him joining the team. So

really had,

fantastic taste. And that was one thing when we were, like, trying to hire You know? They're gonna start By the way, I did find the list

at a business that is like, you know, just take that's a risky move. So, you know, shout out to Caitlin for, having the faith that LevelUp Tutorials was a a good bet,

Yeah. He he drives for it Oh, yeah. Which

JS probably a full day recording every week, and then we had, like, I don't know, another half day run around doing sponsorship stuffs and talking with the editor, things like that. And it's it was it was quite a bit of work, and there was a lot of stuff that we wanted to do past that, but simply just did not have

and it paid off for her. She got to join Sanity. She got to join the Syntax team, and she's now the Syntax marketing manager. And she's she's just great. And so it was the three of us for a little bit, and Ben Vinegar kinda whipped us into shape at Sentry. He he definitely got us working more like a team. You Node, Wes and I, we're a bit of

wanted someone to tell us what to do and not the other way around. Yeah. You know? Like, we don't just want someone to click the buttons and and edit the thing.

of us yapping

Yeah. Yeah. I I had been you know, as as doing that stuff for Vercel up tutorials, I had no experience in it either besides, like, what I was doing myself. So it was really, really helpful for me to be able to have that kind of training and and that kind of understanding.

Ben came in and sort of helped us figure out has

the latest what is it? The the reacting to the desks video on YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. He took, like, like, thirty five minutes

and cut it down to, like, eighteen minutes of just and it feels so smooth. And I was telling Caitlin. I was like, unreal that he can take us yapping for so long and just make it so quickly cut, and think about hooks for a a TikTok.

Yeah. So we moved the podcast to video, which is a big transition.

the thing I got to work so hard on and, you know, I always felt bad about putting it behind a paywall given that, like, Wes I released a thousand videos on YouTube for free before I ever charged for anything. So it Wes like, I really wanted to give this stuff for free, but I could not live off of it that way.

goals and just, like, cranking it. Like, it's gonna be low quality. It happens Devsauce, oh, man. We did the roasting desk setups. We did trivia. We did CSS battles. Junk that we don't do. You should watch the one where we react to your desk.

like, Wes just do stuff. You know? Oh, yeah. I'm a I'm a stallion, man. You can't pen me in. You know? I've never Yeah. And, thankfully, he was really cool about it, and he's like, oh, yeah. No problem. And you renamed it to, I think, React for Everyone,

And he's done it all without much like, I don't know. I don't think I've ever told Randy do this, do that, whatever. He just does he's got great taste and does a great job. In fact, you can get that just from his YouTube channel because his his stuff all looked great beforehand, and and we knew bringing him in it was like, alright. Now we can invest all of my time into Syntax.

but

we

a massive chunk of it. Yeah. They they wanna take, like, a warp, like, a 25%.

robotic ad read. And and everybody loved them. And then people still talk about the Scott lots coming down the pipe. Lots of exciting stuff. If we also are always just always listening to to what you guys want. So leave us a comment down below or or send us a DM or an email, whatever

Yeah. You know what? It's funny. The transitions to the ad reads were something that I I did right away. I don't know, like, how I got to be decent at it, but I did pick that up, like, from another podcast. I don't know if you know this. There's a there was a hockey podcast,

And It drives me nuts that

the show into the actual ad reads.

from a firsthand and not just, like, run a MeUndies

Merrick Vercel Tolinski, which is now Prisma.

would do from

and,

the people who were pretty sweet

and I always thought that was very funny. So I I I decided to do it, but it I don't remember the first time I did that if I did it right away or whatever. But it was always a a thing that I wanted to do and aspired to do and kinda had never never a problem with it. I don't know why. It just kinda came naturally to me. So that was always kind of just initially part of that. But it did come from Greg Tolinski, so shout out to Greg.

sponsoring, like, Sanity JS an example, they were partially sponsoring because they had a good audience, but they were also sponsoring because Scott and I would get to know their product and and and talk about it. You know? Like, I still talk about Sanity to this day. Yeah. Totally. And because I know it so well because of all those ad reads, and it's it's an awesome product. So it was like a thing where, like, you had to really do it yourself because you had to get on the calls. You had to try. You had to build something with it because they wanted you to talk about their product and it just flows really well. So just things like that. He's he's got excellent taste.

middle of twenty nineteen, I'm just looking it up, we decided to start doing interviews, which is our fry which Wes our Friday episode.

And,

more money per listener than most podcasts were because

Yeah. Alongside my courses as well. That was kinda fun. I I hated chasing all the sponsors and to doing over the years, and we've got a couple more coming up this year we're working on right now.

Greg Wyshinsky but they weren't, like, a career. You didn't hear a lot of people saying, I'm a podcaster. You know? So weren't on Spotify of twenty sixteen.

And then, also, the reason I think we were making Can we sponsor this thing? And I had I had not even thought about that. You know? Like, the podcast was just a medium for us to Seemed like a pretty good,

out really well, and it started to become like a, So that was really cool because just having the it was amazing. I and then once that came out, we started getting emails from all kinds of companies, which I now realize that Yeah. I think I think companies like FreshBooks have, like, scanners,

yeah, the whole time, I'm trying to turn LevelUp tutorials in the business, and you are,

for me, which is how that that came about.

we had the developer audience.

And then right around GraphQL.

always did really good ad transitions, still pushing out your courses, still working on on that stuff in, like Mhmm. You know, recording a lot of content in addition to the podcast. The podcast was still, like, a one day of the week thing for us and probably remained a one day of the week for us until somewhat recently.

wanting to sponsor than we had room for. So we're like, yeah. We'll we'll add the second show. That'll be kinda neat. That worked that's still pretty good. Sauce. Tips,

The, we did a a live show in there before we decided to do interviews full time because Oh, you're right. Yeah. Episode 90

really grow in this space. And and part of that was that we wanted somebody who's focused purely on making video content.

very technically deep in a way that, like,

like, Scott and I are web developers, you know, and and we know a lot about server side JavaScript and databases which I was really happy about. And I was like, oh, by the way, I love your stuff. Like, I had taken Scott's

every single aspect of code, which JS, like, not everyone Yeah. Interesting. Alright. Well, I'm gonna sick pick I might have even sick pick this years ago, but this is a this is the best thing ever. Cordless glue gun. It doesn't matter which one. You can buy them third party now that fit your or yellow or red batteries or whatever. This is just the Ryobi one.

a YouTube channel

a smart and good dude.

converted into the Syntax channel. So the channel that you are watching this on, if you're watching it right now on YouTube, that's why we we went to hire a creator, and that was a

very, Yeah. They did get good value because we were trending on the technology charts at that point already. So it it worked out pretty well for us. And, Audio, he's, like, defined the entire visual aesthetic for the video of the podcast.

is formally my YouTube channel rebranded to be Syntax. You can go find probably all of my old videos there on there as well, which is great because we, you know, had a a big subscribership here already. And it's like trying to revive

interview and create stuff for us. And it was, like, emotionally difficult for me because I would have loved to hire so many people from that job hunt. But CJ stood out for being, like,

like, reliable, some sort of company? But An agency. Yeah. There was a lot of people trying to to do that for us. There there was a Yeah. A lot of people being like, we will manage all your ads. We'll do this. We'll do that. And it's like But Alright. But then you're taking it neither of us had the the time to do that is really what it came down to. So, was our first live show. And that, coincidentally, was the first time that Wes and I had ever met in person, That was, like, one of our big things. We could have somebody who could you know, we could we can yap about projects on this show. We can talk about stuff, but we wanted somebody to go deeper and show you things. And to teaching full time. And so Wes was, like, a instrumental

technical, prerecording Yeah. Yeah. It it was it was, you know, it was so fun. And then in, like, helping me turn my platform into something that that could,

and if a new podcast comes up, they get on it early. And if it pops, then they get really good money and, like, vlogging and, like, personalities becoming

CJ

turn the knobs on audio, at the time that there was a lot of podcasts out there, and they were all snooze Wes. They were highly technical, but had no

honest video about whatever it Wes. And and that's really what stood out for me. He he just genuinely a man, for me Node having to deal with a cable that I'm like, you know Oh, man. Yeah. I have I've got two of them. So I have the, what we wanted to do out of this was have it be a departure from dry tech podcasts.

So it was definitely, like, an opportunity for us to

well Node,

does that for, like, understanding at the time.

before that. So

both making, like, web development tutorials in general.

sketch course at the time, so, like, I I knew who he was, but I had I never, like, crossed paths like, felt really good coming from us.

It's been around for a while. So we thought, like, let's let's give you a little history of Syntax of where we started, how we met, and, like, what did we do over the years to get to where Syntax is today?

I had a course called React for beginners. And I said, hey. Could you not? I would say, not as I would say a significant source or a good source of income cloud space or whatever. But, like, even already, I saw people are, like,

Scott was publishing quite a bit to YouTube at the time. I was doing my own courses. I did blogging and YouTube as well, but not as heavily as Scott was.

And

story. Alright. So back around 2015,

either followed that up or kind of explained the the process of syntax. You know? I was I was on an someone's livestream last week, and they're like, like, how did that even start? You know?

How we initially met was Scott had published a course called React for Beginners, and

recently Node that we've been publishing a lot more, or maybe you found the podcast over the Yarn. And, well, you might not know all of the whole whole bits and story. So,

Yeah. Yeah. Because a lot of you may have found this channel

as fun as the show or more fun than the show in a different format. So we came up with a bunch of games. In the very first live show, we did,

I gotta talk to Wes. Like, Node. I'm always stoked to talk to Wes. Like, I'm stoked to talk to him all the time. So, you know, it it it's just a a good vibe all around. And and still Totally. People always ask that. Like, hey. Do you ever run out of stuff to talk about or or whatnot? And, like, some days, it's it's hard to figure out what to talk about and and, like, you gotta put all the content together. You know? Like, it's it's it's hard putting it all together, but

alongside the actual learning things.

Yeah. That was pretty much it for a while. You Node? We did, live shows here and there. We were getting invited to do that stuff. We were doing conference talks. We maintained the podcast. We were now doing three episodes a week.

Yep. Yep. And then we also did Stumped where we were asking questions for people in the audience. Oh, no. We were trying to stump each other.

modeling three d shapes in the browser or both. And those that was so much fun doing that. That was at with Jamstack Scott in San Francisco.

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.i0/syntax.

much more of a thing that I'm so glad that they didn't ruin it.

and really good back and forth, especially

which was where we give you a word, and you have to say if it's an NPM library or whatever this was. So for instance like, is this a carbon fiber road bike or a package for, was quite a bit of work, and we needed to, you know, bring people in. We had probably a good amount of, like, what are dead subscribers, people who subscribed in the past that don't exist anymore.

that has changed a lot with the with YouTube

just got into a really natural flow of things. It it just kind of worked and and didn't stop working. You know, one thing that I really appreciate about US and, like, the show that we've been able to do is that I don't think there's ever been a single time where I've been like, I gotta do the podcast or,

Today, we're talking about CSS variables. You know? And you could just dive in, do all the research, figure out every little Yeah. And,

but, also,

spicy you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.i0/syntax.

the actual making it is very enjoyable.

tips where we where we did, like, spicy takes. We did this, that, or both, which was still to this day my favorite game that we do live where we I can't believe we came up with this for the first live show Yeah. Which was

And, And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, acquisition with Century. And Wes, like, tweeted out, like, minutes you know, Node but, like, an a few hours before we were gonna do it. Hey. We're doing a live A couple days. Couple days? We're just like, hey. On a Monday night in Yeah. Hamilton, yeah, it was

aspect of it, and then just deliver it in this tidy little neat package of an hour for somebody to passively consume.

Yeah. I do love diving deeply into a topic for a week and then getting to

Been over a year of doing podcast. People had thought we had known each other our entire life, which is why I was like, yeah. That's we we clicked, and and that's why the podcast did so well. So we had a really good rapport

Yeah. It was it was pretty great. We did the live show, and I think it was really hilarious. I think that was, like, the one thing that we wanted to get out of the first live show Wes to have it be Delicious Brains for being the first and and really doing that. And and for me personally, like, this was pre anybody getting signed to do a podcast deal. Podcasts

That was the one Wes were trying to stump each other. We did overrated or underrated Wes it's kind of rapid fire, and then we did a q and a. It was a ton of fun. And, shout out to the Netlify folks for throwing a Jamstack Scott. That Wes, like, a a great time, and it was just like a pretty I think it was a pretty sweet event for us because, again, we got to to experiment with the format a little bit. But we also got to hang out, which was, I think, important for us. Yeah. Yeah. People were surprised that we had never met. We did, what, 90 episodes together. 90 episodes together. ESLint person.

We wanted it to be fun. We wanted it to be very, like, April '20 '16, we just sat on it. It wasn't until well, this isn't even it. I found a tweet from 11/30/2016

just a little bit more exciting because I think that's both of how both of us operate. We're kind of both high energy people. So we really just wanted to, like, on the week my child was Yarn, and they were,

the name syntax at that point because we had a bunch of other,

We both had all the tech and audio stuff, so we knew that wasn't going to be a problem. So we'd made all this stuff in April of twenty sixteen

like Pound It. That was a good one.

Yeah. We we didn't keep Pound It. I don't know why we didn't keep Pound It. Believe yeah. We were just, like, thinking of, like like, how do we make this not boring? And we're just kinda coming into the idea of, like, audio, drama mama, moments, They were like, Node hopefully, they don't ruin it. You know? Yes. And it Wes really nice after it JS. It's it's Wes something you love

have something that represented that high energy nature that both of us tend to do. So that was, like, really the core of it. We also both had a lot of experience listening to podcasts. I I had been an avid podcast listener. I had a huge list of things that, like, really bug me about people's podcasts.

where I said, 2017

like some of them were bad. Some of them were decent names. We had a big old list of potential names. We just kind of decided what the vibe was going to be at this ESLint.

did nothing with it. It it we pretty much just sat on it. I was working at a job, and it was kind of consuming a lot of my life at that ESLint. And it was just really tough. Wes was doing his courses. We had this idea. And, again, And Wes hired Randy Rector for that, and he's just been a superhuman. He is just, you know, completely everything you see graphics wise and all that stuff.

and, just Cool mustache.

And inside of the initial planning document was I think it probably is the next version. But what if I just kept this computer and and it's really nice having it all in place now. Yeah. That's the best part about having a team here for this JS because it's like, My name is Scott.

a lot of things from

We did not end up making it happen in November the chart itself for the growth of the YouTube channel over time. But, you know, it was just a a long steady growth of YouTube. And, you know,

syntax, let's make it happen.

the podcast that

2016,

We had Josh Owens who JS running some meteor I had never wanted to do interviews because I I feel like I wasn't good at them. I feel like I'm still not great at at talking, but people were like, oh, can I come on? Can can you get this person on? And I was like, it's not really an interview podcast, but we decided to kinda go for it. We had Sasha Grief and Cortland Allen on previously just to kinda talk to them. But it looks like our very first actual interview was Sarah Swaden talking about SVGs and front end UI and and CSS, which was episode that we added, it was it was partially because, like, we had stuff to talk about and partially because we had more people he more has, like, a he understands YouTube. He understands,

what are your goals, you know, keep each other accountable.

And

and just gave you some tips, and it that was very helpful.

And then after about a year, we're like Wes kinda got what we wanted from it, but, like, Scott and I had gotten along really well.

I was like, hey, Scott. Do you wanna do that? We we also had Joel from Egghead.

it's called, like, the meteor dojo or something like that. By the way, I ran into him on TikTok the other day. Now he's doing three d printing stuff. Cool. So he's he's in a different industry now.

a mastermind group is where you get together with people who are in similar businesses as you and sort of just talk shop about how to ESLint, timing. Man, go watch I can't wait for the day

And then maybe a couple months after that, I had this idea of creating what's called a mastermind.

But, basically, we talked for once every two weeks for a year

Wes realized we've been doing this podcast for a long, long time. And very early on in the podcast, we did kinda our origin stories where we told people about ourselves, but we've never really Scott and I were

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we've got the history of Syntax.