RobbieTheWagner 
Charles William Carpenter III Robbie Wagner: [0:00:09] Hey everybody, welcome to another Whiskey Web and whatnot, with myself, RobbieTheWagner and my co-host, as always, Charles William Carpenter III. We are doing a special live edition here from Render8TL. We’re excited about that, and we have our special guest today, Scott Tolinski. What’s going on, Scott?
Scott Tolinski: [0:00:30] Oh not too much enjoying the conference and walking around and just yeah, so it’s a wild one. It’s just a lot of stuff going on here.
Robbie Wagner: [0:00:38] Yeah, it’s crazy, the lunchroom and like sponsor setup is just packed for people.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:00:43] But yeah, yeah, for context, I think they said somewhere like 2,500 plus people. Oh, wow, attendees and I don’t know if that would include speakers and everyone else too, because there’s what like 80 speakers give or take.
Robbie Wagner: [0:00:56] Yeah, something like that, yeah, yeah.
Scott Tolinski: [0:00:59] Like stages and, yeah, it’s wild, I would say sensory overload from my old eyes.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:01:05] I’m like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? I’m going to go back in this little room and record a podcast.
Scott Tolinski: [0:01:09] Yeah, I know I’m here by myself, so I’m just going to be like oh all, right, yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [0:01:13] Yeah, Yeah cool. So probably a lot of people have heard of you, but for those who haven’t, do you want to give a couple of sentences on who you are and what you do?
Scott Tolinski: [0:01:22] Sure, yeah, my name is Scott Tolinski. I’m the co-host of the Syntax podcast and the creator of Level Up Tutorials on YouTube and the Level Up Tutorials educational platform that I’ve been working on for about 10 years now. So, yeah, I’ve been teaching web stuff since just about I started coding. Really Nice, nice.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:01:41] All right. So today we let Scott pick what our whiskey would be and he selected the Macallan 12 year. So this is a special version of the 12 year that is double cast. So it’s finished in the regular used sherry barrels like they do any other McCallan, and then a second finishing in American oak barrels. I couldn’t find out if that was used or new or whatever, but you know they doubled up on it. It’s a single malt, so that’s the only grain used in the mash bill and it is 86 proof. Okay, so not too bad, it should be a pretty smooth one. Yeah, I’m going to get my Get the pour sound in there.
Yes, this is kind of our thing. I love it. All right, pass the bottle. Thank you. I haven’t had to do that very often. Yeah, thank you, everyone’s so polite, I appreciate that Hmm. I smell like raspberry jam a little. I don’t know. You know I make these things up every episode, Scott.
Scott Tolinski: [0:02:46] Yeah, you ever watched the some? Yes, yeah, and they’re always like tennis balls.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:02:51] Yes, Fresh opened can of tennis balls. But then they’re also guessing like on the you know whatever river on the left bank. it’s the second row And I’m like how do you know this?
Robbie Wagner: [0:03:04] Sorry, it’s the third row.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:03:05] Yeah. That smells scotchy to me. It’s got a light PD flavor. It’s got again I’m going to say a jamminess to it. So some sweetness probably from like the sherry casks there, but not a rough finish, no pleasant.
Robbie Wagner: [0:03:22] Yeah.
Scott Tolinski: [0:03:22] Pleasant to drink Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [0:03:25] What’s the level of apricot that you get there?
Chuck Carpenter: [0:03:26] Dried apricot is one of my frequent terms, that’s my tennis balls reference, I guess. Nice, yeah, a lot of things seem to have apricot to me. I think apricot is a fruit that has a little taste of like a little mango, a little orange a little, I don’t know. So it’s an easy one to kind of dial into.
Robbie Wagner: [0:03:43] Yeah, I’m having a hard time picking notes out of this one, but probably because I don’t have my special glass.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:03:49] That might be it. I’m the only one with. I have this travel case. I was going to say, yeah, do you travel with that? This would be the first time, but I bought it for that purpose, like being able to travel with whatever I don’t know alcoholic looking sample thing but, it’s nice to have a nice glass.
Yeah totally Okay. So we usually rate the whiskies from one to eight tentacles, because we’re clever, and octopus thing, one being disgusting never give this to me again Eight, obviously being amazing, I’ll drink nothing else and everything in between there. So, obviously, like in that sense, four is not bad. But in the realm of whiskies and I know you said that you haven’t had a ton, but you probably have a few things that you like, totally What you like.
Scott Tolinski: [0:04:28] Yeah, And it’s so funny. I feel like you know like the standard, like bullet and tin cup and man, there’s like some Colorado ones that you see like very frequently Strain hands or something like that.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:04:39] Yeah.
Scott Tolinski: [0:04:40] So we always get like the special edition strain hands. That’s like the Costco special for us is strain hands all day. So yeah, that’s usually what I’m drinking.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:04:49] Yeah, I like strain. I think they make a good product. Oh, totally.
Scott Tolinski: [0:04:53] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:04:53] Yeah, yeah, no, it’s good. So where do you think then, compared to your regular drinker, is strain of hands? Where would you place this Macallan 12 double oak?
Scott Tolinski: [0:05:02] Yeah, I would put it in eight. You know it’s better than typically what I’m drinking. Yeah, definitely about an eight. Yeah, I’ll drink this all day.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:05:10] Cool, Robert?
Robbie Wagner: [0:05:19] Yeah, I don’t love Scotch, so but for Scotches in the Scotch realm for Scotches, it’s pretty good for me. Maybe a six for me, okay.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:05:22] So I don’t love lots of Scotches but I do like I have a soft place in my heart for Macallan, shared with my father-in-law many times and he’s shared a lot of variations of it. This 12 is very approachable, decently easy to get at most stores, so I like that too. I’m probably I’m in the like the six seven range because I’ve had like Macallan 15, 18 and a few other ones and there are some that are just like chef’s kiss, but this is like not far behind, so I’ll give it a seven. Yeah, I would drink this at any time offered.
Scott Tolinski: I need to step up my game.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:05:22] I don’t know, you are the executive producer at Sentry and I have a free web whiskey podcast, so I’m not sure that you would take career advice from me.
Robbie Wagner: [0:06:06] One of those probably pays more money than the other.
Scott Tolinski: [0:06:09] Don’t take life advice from me. That’s all I’m saying.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:06:11] Yeah, But we can dig into that a little bit. First we go through, we have a section of questions that we try to ask everyone quote, unquote, hot takes. It usually just comes out of anything you’ve seen on tech Twitter that people argue about arbitrarily. Yeah, we’d like to get some opinions about things. Sure, let’s do it Alright, Robbie, do you have one in mind? Oh yeah, I can start off.
Robbie Wagner: [0:06:30] Yes, please. So for TypeScript, inferred types or explicit types?
Scott Tolinski: [0:06:34] I’m an explicit type dude, return types. I type them all day and I get the arguments around it. But like there’s something about that, like I, when I’m writing the function, I want the function to complain while I’m writing the function, not like later down the line. Okay, that’s fair.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:06:49] Yeah, it’s almost like test-driven development in a way. You’re just saying like very much like that Yeah, it’s broken if it’s not giving you this thing. I expect.
Scott Tolinski: [0:06:56] Totally Yeah, and I find it. It saves me trouble when I’m writing. So I err on the side of explicit even though I get the, I get the arguments around both. Yeah, yeah, so I do inferred.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:07:08] You’re like this is already done for me, yeah, plus, the word implicit sounds makes me sound smart.
Robbie Wagner: [0:07:14] I’ll just go with those things All right.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:07:17] The big one around Tailwind or vanilla CSS?
Scott Tolinski: [0:07:22] I’m not allowed to talk on this, because last time I said anything about tailwind.
Twitter got really angry at me. No, i, i, I just vanilla CSS. You know, I think a lot of the arguments that I hear when I say anything about tailwind is that oh it’s, it allows you to have a system, it allows you to be consistent, it’s concise, you can componentize your CSS. I can do all that stuff without it. So, like, to me it feels more like I understand the people getting angry when you say this, but like it does feel like bootstrap, where it gives you those predefined styles, and to me that’s what the benefit is, cause I can get a system through CSS variables. I can get componentized workflows through scoped CSS And, in my opinion, what I use is Sveldor style components before and react.
So I don’t need the other things that it gives me And therefore I choose not to learn the new shorthand. But I get the benefits and I get why people like it. I think in many use cases it’s really nice to have, but I personally don’t need it or don’t want it. I don’t want to learn something new and have an extra dependency, and I also don’t like the, the class vomit in the you know, yeah, yeah, like hurt your eyes sometimes.
Robbie Wagner: [0:08:28] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:08:29] And I don’t like your complaints about it.
Robbie Wagner: [0:08:31] For sure, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:08:32] But I do appreciate your perspective around, though in both of these questions, of saying like I’m not saying that there is a right answer. I’m just saying this is what I like to do.
Scott Tolinski: [0:08:40] And it’s all personal preferences and like what you’ve used to me The times like people conflate specific technologies with ways of doing things. So they’ll say I don’t like tailwind. Or I’ll say I don’t like tailwind And they say, well, you must not like separate, or you must like separation of concerns. No, I keep all my stuff in one spot. Well, you must like this or that or whatever, or you must hate utility class. You know I use utility classes. I just like writing my own and only having a couple of them rather than having like a whole library full of them. But yeah.
I get it And it’s cool. It’s just not for me.
Robbie Wagner: [0:09:08] Yeah, that’s fair. Everybody likes different stuff. I use Ember and no one else does.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:09:12] Oh yeah, you’re that guy. Yeah Yeah, he just really likes hamsters. Yeah, yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [0:09:19] Yeah, their mascot game is on point.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:09:21] Totally Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [0:09:23] Yeah, so get rebased or get merch.
Scott Tolinski: [0:09:25] Merch, yeah Yeah, like the whole workflow around. It was never something that I invested a lot of time into like really learning in a practical way And like I’m always working on a team of like two or three people, so it’s really easy for me to say here’s the branch, merge it in, here’s a branch, merge it in, and I never end up in the situation where a rebase is going to save me versus merging. So I’ve always just kind of stuck with merging and never really needed to adapt out of it. But I think that’s probably something that I It might even be like a hole in my knowledge of like what am I missing without using rebase? And because I’ve never had the need or like a big problem where rebase saves my bacon, I haven’t really dove into it.
Robbie Wagner: [0:10:16] Yeah. So follow up question to that. Then I guess, do you squash or like what? if you have a hundred commits, how do you handle that? You know, like, do you just merge all hundred in? I just merge all hundred in, yeah.
Scott Tolinski: [0:10:28] Okay, one thing I do is I was using when I had a, you know, larger team, I was doing conventional commits and everything like that. I tend to keep my commit, especially commit messages. I keep it all really clean. I commit frequently and I keep the commit messages clean And I like a history of being able to see could step by, step by step, rather than like the full feature. I like kind of like to go back and see exactly what I added at what time and whatever. Okay, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:10:53] Oh yeah, so you probably do at least like commit messages that aren’t gibberish, along the way to correct. Save this, not save this Was real mad, yeah, like whatever.
Scott Tolinski: [0:11:05] The only time I do that is with GitHub actions, and I have an alias in my command line that quickly adds a commit message. That’s like action, not working, testing or whatever. Right, just a like draw up a quick one.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:11:17] Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could see that like perspective of it And I guess I could see like from the perspective of the team size or whatever. Oh, yeah, like a merge doesn’t make a big deal when there’s just a few of you and a handful of commits going through in each PR, and but if you’re on a team with multiple teams of four to six people and possibly thousands of commits could be going in per day unless you were like restricted them to, you know guidance. I don’t really believe so much in like craziness around like pre-commit hooks and things like that to enforce standards, right, hopefully, you just have like some trust and whatever. I’m just kind of OCD about things being messy. Yeah, I think that’s really the only reason why I prefer rebase is just like I just don’t want it to be messy And I also have a weird thing in my head of the order that it goes in. I want to make sure that is all in the right order too. Yeah, I don’t know, that’s just probably a me problem though.
Scott Tolinski: [0:12:08] No, I think I need to do more research on when rebase would save me verse just merging.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:12:13] Yeah, right, right, yeah, you go into that and then you can go into like interactive rebases and such a cherry pick out, and all this other crazy stuff. So, yeah, that tends to get real fun. Do you want to talk about signals, Robbie, or are we done with signals?
Robbie Wagner: [0:12:28] I don’t know Why not. Yeah, let’s go through the whole list. What do you think?
Chuck Carpenter: [0:12:31] about signals. Any feelings on signals? Yeah.
Scott Tolinski: [0:12:33] Yeah, I mean. So okay, I prefer the signal based style of things. Svelte subscriptions are signal like and because of that it makes it easy for me, But also, like I don’t know, I come from like a meteor background before that and there’s signals like things there. So for me I never particularly liked the react state side of things, And so signals always made more sense to me to the point where I didn’t understand why it’s a big deal that people were talking about them.
Now I always felt like yeah, but these things have kind of been around And I really applaud the new quick and solid for making signals like a big part of what they’re doing, Because to me it makes way more sense. You know your event driven essentially And I like that. So, yeah, no, I’m pro signals.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:13:20] I don’t use signals per se because I’m using Svelte state instead, but, yeah, very similar, Yeah it’s an interesting thing the way that, like the tools you use become almost like a form of religion or your favorite sports team or like that serious.
Robbie Wagner: [0:13:35] Yeah, very serious Yeah totally.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:13:38] You must listen to me and my way is the right way. Yeah, And my thing you know.
Scott Tolinski: [0:13:42] And people just repeat what the library authors have said over and over again, even if they don’t necessarily know what that means or the context around it.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:13:50] Yeah, It’s no understanding of what’s going on under the hood, but they’re like good marketing.
Scott Tolinski: [0:13:55] Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:13:57] Yeah, I just tend to pick the things from my favorite podcast guests.
Scott Tolinski: [0:14:01] Yeah, totally.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:14:02] Yeah, all right, that guy was cool, I’m gonna use his frame.
Robbie Wagner: [0:14:05] Yeah, we haven’t had anyone on to talk about React hooks, though, so we’re not being fair.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:14:09] Yeah, right, right Yeah because, yeah, all Kent talked about was remakes at the time and yeah, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there’s a note for future possibility. Yeah, yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [0:14:23] So yeah, your talk is tomorrow, right.
Scott Tolinski: [0:14:26] Yes.
Robbie Wagner: [0:14:27] Yeah, tomorrow afternoonish And it’s next-generation CSS stuff. Do you wanna give us a little preview of the kind of stuff you’re gonna be talking about?
Scott Tolinski: [0:14:35] So we’re going through like four classifications of different types of like wow, new features in CSS. And the idea is, if you weren’t aware of these things, or even if you have like a cursory awareness of these things, we’re gonna be telling you directly. I’m not we, I’m gonna be telling you directly can you ship this or not? So here’s a new feature. All right, we have media query ranges. Can you ship it? Yes, you can ship it. It’s supported in all major browsers.
Here’s a new feature like a custom media queries, where you define a media query and the same. Can you ship it? Well, the standard’s not there, but the PostCSS plugin is really just a string replace So you can ship it easily. Ship it. I’ve been shipping it for over a year. So here’s how you can ship it, And so that’s really it’s gonna be rapid fire. I’m hitting about 20 or so features in CSS And then I have a compendium to go along with it. That’s just like links to blog posts to teach you any of these features If you wanna actually dive and learn the features, the progressive enhancement aspects of them and stuff like that. Gotcha cool, cool.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:15:33] Well, that’s nice. Is that site Can I Use still a thing?
Scott Tolinski: [0:15:35] Yeah, it’s still a thing. Oh yeah, I’m referencing it quite frequently.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:15:40] I used to love that site and used it all the time as like standards were coming out And you’d read about a cool thing and you’re like, but can I use?
Scott Tolinski: [0:15:46] Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. And there’s a new thing from Google called baseline too. That’s gonna be very similar. Now I was a little bummed out because I thought baseline was gonna be like an embeddable thing that I could just take and throw into my slides. But it isn’t. I had to make my own. But the way they’re doing baseline is they’re gonna be saying like here’s almost like a, not a spec, but here’s almost like a release of CSS, Kind of like we had with CSS3 or whatever before HTML5. And they’re gonna say which browsers does this fall on? turn Like which grouping, so that you can add a glance Like can I use on MDNC, Is it supported in the major three, four browsers? easily.
Robbie Wagner: [0:16:24] Yeah.
Scott Tolinski: [0:16:25] That’s a new thing. That’s gonna you’re gonna start seeing pop up a lot more on MDN and all over the place.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:16:29] So this kind of brings to mind like, real talk Is Safari the new IE?
Scott Tolinski: [0:16:38] No, I think Firefox is man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, ooh, yeah, that is a hot take. I love it. That might be a hot take, but I think when you look at it between Firefox and Safari, they’re really close into who has the worst support for things, and I don’t want to say worst is like a negative way. I’m saying, like, chrome is obviously the leader in support for stuff, but between Firefox and Safari, the features that I want to use the most Safari has in Firefox doesn’t, for instance, has, oddly enough.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:17:06] Yeah has, has, yeah.
Scott Tolinski: [0:17:08] Has is supported in Safari but not Firefox, and you’ll see in my talk a lot of similar things. A lot of the coolest stuff is actually supported in Safari right now, not in Firefox. Now there’s some things where Safari has fallen behind, but man, the team at Safari has really stepped it up in the past year. I mean I definitely would have maybe been honking that Safari is the new IE horn, like a couple of years ago. I think it’s really changed. I don’t use Safari personally. There’s like some weird lag in the auto search. that’s like it’s like milliseconds of latency, but it gets me every time.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:17:38] It’s enough to keep you away. It’s enough to keep you away.
Scott Tolinski: [0:17:40] Yeah, I’m an ARC head now I use ARC.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:17:44] Oh yeah, see, I downloaded it and I started using it a little bit And then, I don’t know something just didn’t work. Naturally I jumped back over to Chrome and then just kind of never came back again. So I keep meaning to go down that, yeah, it’s worth it just cause it gets rid of my tabs.
Scott Tolinski: [0:18:00] Honestly, It gets rid of all my tabs.
Yeah, if it did nothing else I would take that Okay And I like it, because the command palette is assigned to command T, So you’re always used to opening up command T, have a new tab and start typing. But the cool thing about the command palette is is if you already have that tab open somewhere, it just takes you there instead of opening up another tab with that same link, Right? So in Chrome I would end up having like eight tabs of Tweet Deck open or you know. I would just keep opening a tab of the same thing over and over again, But ARC just takes me to the one I had open. So that’s typically what I like most about it no-transcript.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:18:31] For a second I almost said, well, sounds like arc is gonna be syntax sponsor. But Yeah, different territory. How is it not to not to have to sell ads anymore?
Scott Tolinski: [0:18:45] That’s what, though, always been the worst part for me, because I’m not a great planner, I’m not super organized, it takes everything for me to hunt down, like hunt down sponsors to send in voices, and I have to set reminders and all that stuff. so When they pitched it to us as you can do the same thing you were doing, but we’ll give you more resources to do it, you can do it better, you can do it with video, you can do it live stream and you don’t have to serve up ads It was like okay.
Robbie Wagner: [0:19:16] Okay, yeah, which is a little confusing to me about like so they don’t want to even put in Sentry ads. Yeah like I would think they would want some of that, but I kind of still do we have the shameless plug section?
Scott Tolinski: [0:19:27] They didn’t ask me to do this but like, I’ll shamelessly plug, like the syntax discord channel or syntax related things. But I often now shamelessly plug Sentry stuff because it sounds ridiculous. But I Was a longtime user of their product before they sponsored syntax and before, you know, I worked for them. But, like, for me, it’s really easy to talk positively about that product, right, when I know so much about it and I’ve used it for so long. So you know, we use it on everything and always have, so it’s really easy to be like All right, let me, let me shamelessly plug this thing I did on a century today and, yeah, give them some love. So, yeah, no, they’ve been really awesome and the hope is really just that by being associated with syntax and by being the sponsors and the, the owners of syntax, that it raises their, their profile amongst our listeners. And, you know, I think that’s a good call on their part. They’ve just been nothing but amazing to work with.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:20:21] Yeah, yeah it’s nice to talk about things that you use actually to you’re like I use and like this, so it’s not a big deal.
Scott Tolinski: [0:20:27] Yeah, and that was the biggest self. We had a lot of sponsor requests for things that we didn’t like or use and we didn’t take those on You know a lot of this stuff.
We we had the luxury of being able to choose if we wanted to do a sponsorship or none, and and typically these companies Whether it be like sanity or some of our longtime sponsors It’s like these are products that we have like, actually really like and really use. Oh it’s, it turns out. It’s really easy to sell something when you actually like it, you know.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:20:54] Yeah, yeah, that’s a nice place to be and just sort of pick and choose some and say I’m gonna endorse this if I’ve actually used it or would Recommend it to a friend for real and I think it helps too.
Scott Tolinski: [0:21:04] It helps the like, the genuine nature of the ad reads, one thing that you know. I had some friends in advertising who work in ad sales and stuff and they were like, wait, you just do that ad reads live on the spot, like they don’t give you ad copy and you don’t prepare for them. No, no, we just know the stuff and we use it and we just make it up on the spot. Yeah, what and what’s the fun in that anyway, and they let you do that. It’s more genuine. Yeah, it works. Yeah, we know, we know what we’re talking about.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:21:29] Yeah, yeah, so, speaking of other things, that and I don’t want to spend all the time on the business aspect- Yeah, but it is kind of interesting in this acquisition Your place within Sentry. And then how does that affect Level Up Tutorials?
Scott Tolinski: [0:21:43] Yeah, so Level Up Tutorials. The URL is now levelup.video. By the way, I made that change when we did a launch of the redesign. I just felt like Level Up Tutorials was so long for people to type.
In fact, We used to be Level Up Tuts, but net net tuts got mad about us, so I had to change it And so we became Level Up Tutorials and I was like, as a mouthful, so Level Up Video, Level Up Tutorials, and it’s all free now. So it’s free if you’re out there and you want to pick up some new web dev tutorial stuff. We have countless tutorials from, like, really talented creators Amy Dunn, Amy Kamprodek, Colby Fayak, who’s here at the conference, James Quick, who’s here at the conference. They’ve all done courses for us and it’s all free now. So, as well as thousands of videos from myself. So, yeah, you can find all that now.
Level up that video. You can create an account, but you don’t even have to. You can just start watching any of the stuff now for free. So that was part of the deal. Is really that? Sentry was like, well, if you wanted to do bigger things with syntax, what would you need to have in life? And I was like, well, I have a business that I’m running, yeah, and that’s like 90% of my time. They’re like, well, what if we took that off your hands and just open it up for free.
I was like well, I think people would really like that and it would free me up. So, yeah, yeah, that’s how that came about. It was a big surprise for me.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:22:54] Yeah, well, that’s super cool that all of that is available to everyone here, and I’m sure you’ve talked about it a bunch, but I didn’t know. And yeah, that’s a good, good piece to share with the world, and so you don’t have to just buy you to me courses or something of that nature. You can actually have improved quality courses here and we’ll still be releasing too.
Scott Tolinski: [0:23:12] Whether or not those new releases come underneath the syntax banner eventually. What’s the timeline looking like that? I don’t know yet, but a Level Up Tutorials content will be integrated into the syntax site and it will fall under the syntax brand Eventually, and I still will be releasing full courses, like I have been just now, for free, like I always wanted to. Yeah, right dreams, do you come true?
Chuck Carpenter: [0:23:34] Yeah, Yeah, yeah yeah, it’s.
Robbie Wagner: [0:23:36] It’s rare you get to do what you’re passionate about and not have to worry about like money or Building a business or doing any of that.
Scott Tolinski: [0:23:44] Yeah, yeah, it only took 10 years of doing 240 videos a year.
Robbie Wagner: [0:23:49] Yeah, a lot of work, but yeah pays off.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:23:52] Yeah, you didn’t do that right out of code bootcamp.
Scott Tolinski: [0:23:54] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:23:56] Well, you know, days are different now.
Robbie Wagner: [0:23:59] Whiskey web and Whatnot is brought to you by Emberconf. Emberconf is back in person this year in Portland for a special celebration of 10 years since the 1.0 release of Ember. Been a long time. There are lots of great talks, as always, but I’m particularly excited about one: Walk the Line Convention in Country Music and Development. So that just sounds like a really interesting talk linking those two things together. And I’m, of course, excited for whatever magic Ed Faulkner drops in his keynote always fun stuff there.
This year the workshops are a little different and they’ll be included at no extra cost and a two-hour block during the second day of the Conference. There’s a lot of cool options there. There’s a deep dive into building v2, addons, an intro to animations in Ember and, of course, a live recording of this podcast. That’s right. Whiskey Web and Whatnot will be live at Emberconf recording an episode in person. So if you’re a fan, we would love to see you there. Space is limited for all of the workshops, so register soon to make sure you get space in your preferred one. I’m definitely excited to be back in person this year and hope to see Ember friends, new and old, in Portland July 20th to 21st for one of the best conferences in the business. Get your tickets now at Emberconf.com.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:25:13] Actually I wanted to. I think this is a good piggyback into a question that I had around. You know we’re talking about the latest and greatest at this at this conference people talking about, like Different ways to architect apps and all these tools, and you know there’s a lot of those players here as vendors and whatever else. But, like to a point, there’s also It’s not the only way to get things done Mm-hmm, and I promise a question’s kind of and like what do you see kind of out in application development, web development, whatever that? like it’s already really good and we already can make some pretty cool stuff. So like not to like shit on someone else’s work. But You know, like we’re in a good place already and we have these bivvy of choices. Is there anything where you feel like Tailwind could be a thing in that like yes, it helps some people and You don’t need it to make good stuff?
Scott Tolinski: [0:26:01] Yeah, right, yeah, I mean I think you know nowadays Everybody wants to do everything very framework based, and I love frameworks. I’ve always used JavaScript frameworks. I think they’re wonderful. But like you get to a point, especially in like react world, where you spend so much time avoiding the platform, avoiding the DOM, avoiding the DOM, avoiding these like very platform-specific things, that you can forget that sometimes things are really super easy to do with DOM API’s. For instance, I have a video on YouTube called you don’t need a dependency the clipboard API. It’s like people don’t realize that to use the clipboard API, it’s a one-liner of JavaScript that is really easy to remember, but everybody reaches for a library like, oh, let me get our react clipboard input.
Man, you just need an input and a button and one line of JavaScript right And so sometimes like those types of things, I think, get in the way of people’s progression in the industry, because they They really get zeroed in on this and if they don’t have their dependency and they don’t have their their library-specific code, they don’t know what to do. So for me, I’ve been, like, more recently, diving deeper and deeper into the DOM stuff. I did a course on it called exploring browser APIs. That’s just One video on all these different browser APIs. You might not know. Hey, did you know you can access the user’s local file system in the browser? Did you know you can do this or whatever, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:27:18] Yeah, I think that’s awesome. Yeah, there’s, I think, a good nugget in that in look at some of the simplest ways to get things done. Reference the Mozilla developer docs, like go there all the time. I’m always discovering some new things there. Yeah, all of those native APIs are smart thing to. If you’re not using it right away, that’s one thing, but to know what’s in your toolbox, what’s built into your browser, what could be like an easy thing to implement without? Yeah, I think that students some students in recent years have been done a disservice by being just trained to react, not the basics of JavaScript itself. Totally Because the job descriptions say React developer and they don’t say front end development or JavaScript essentials or any of those things. Like an understanding of that comes, I think, way late in the process, unfortunately.
Scott Tolinski: [0:28:11] Yeah, I used to do a talk about learning things quickly and learning fundamentals being like a big aspect of learning things quickly. But as a YouTube creator, I used to get a lot of comments, especially teaching React early on, when React first had versions whatever 14, 13 or whatever And people would see the whole dot map for loops And they would say why does it say dot map and not dot loop or something It’s like oh, that’s a JavaScript API, that.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:28:36] I’ll put in the right way.
Scott Tolinski: [0:28:37] People almost didn’t understand the micro aspects of what they were typing. They were just typing it because somebody on YouTube told them to type it.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:28:44] Yeah, without a great understanding, they would just, oh, to get this thing done.
Scott Tolinski: [0:28:47] here’s the yeah, but if you don’t know what dot map is, you’re not gonna ask the question. Why am I doing a dot map here? Yeah, well, because React needs an array. But I don’t even know that this is outputting an array, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:28:57] Yeah, I think we’re seeing a bit of a trend of that across the board, in that our basic tools for putting information and interaction on the internet really should be looked at again. Like you know, the popularity of things like Astro about saying like HTML is king, HTML is first, because that is how we put these things together initially and how we organize the information, and from an accessibility standpoint, it’s also like paramount to have those things right too. So having an understanding of your basic tools in order to like get a job done.
Scott Tolinski: [0:29:26] Yeah, turns out, when you don’t do everything in JavaScript, you don’t need to work on accessibility as much, because the browser can help you out a lot more. Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [0:29:36] Absolutely. Yeah, we talked a lot about, like, all the input types I didn’t even realize existed these days, whereas, like everyone’s like, build a date picker or use a library, they exist, just use the browser one, like you know. So there’s a ton that it’ll just do for you, which is crazy.
Scott Tolinski: [0:29:50] It’s endlessly amazing And you know, when an API that we started using on the new, we did like a giveaway when Syntax was acquired And on that side we used the new like dialogue API to building modals and dialogues, and I was like this is easy and it’s supported. Oh my gosh, like it feels like nobody’s using this kind of stuff And I just saw the popover API is getting like major support and, like man, HTML and CSS, they’re just evolving every day And we can often forget that So many of the things that we end up shipping KBs of JavaScript for we don’t necessarily have to, and that’s a wonderful thing.
Robbie Wagner: [0:30:26] Now, Yeah, it’s a fun game with Astro to try to ship none.
Scott Tolinski: [0:30:30] Yeah, I know. Yeah, Astro is sick, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:30:34] So then I will, on the other end of the spectrum, conversely, what things?
Scott Tolinski: [0:30:39] and you’ve kind of touched on a couple of them, but if anything else comes to mind around, like what things are coming that get you excited, Yeah, so a lot of the CSS stuff really is is really what it is right now, because for me, I come from a motion background, so motion graphics and those types of things I love in the page transitions API, the scroll animations API, are two of like the biggest, coolest things coming to the browser because they allow us to do native style app transitions and animations in CSS in ways that we don’t have to optimize.
I don’t have to write some code that steps in, loads all of my elements twice in the virtual DOM and then swaps between them with JavaScript. I can write actual CSS code and not have to ship a whole library for animations but also not have to write that code that has to do that and add things to the DOM. And it’s really those are really cool APIs. In fact, when I was like doing we’re working on the new syntax site right now and I added the browser transitions API to it because the fallback’s really nice and found out there’s a baked into the browser fade transition Even if it’s easy, you don’t have to write your own animation fade in CSS. You can just say hyphen, hyphen or hyphen what is like one hyphen, something fade And it’s like baked into the browser automatically Like all right.
An actual CSS transition baked into the browser. Okay, I’ll take it, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:31:57] Yes, absolutely. I’m not having to hack through these things anymore And, like you said, out of overhead for polish, I guess I consider those things polish a lot.
Scott Tolinski: [0:32:05] Oh, totally polish, Yeah, and what’s so cool about it is that you don’t have to worry about optimizing them yourself. The browser is going to optimize it, they’re going to figure it out. Let the browser figure it out is like something that I have really started to take on more of.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:32:17] It’s like yeah, I think you should have that as a syntax swag.
Scott Tolinski: [0:32:21] Oh yeah, and just says, let the browser figure it out.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:32:24] See, you’re welcome. We’re looking for swag ideas. right now, I’ll take that. If you want to hire me as a swag, a swag guy swag consultant.
Scott Tolinski: [0:32:32] I’m in Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:32:35] OK, so we might talk a little bit about more of the whatnot side of things.
Scott Tolinski: [0:32:39] Yeah, no worries.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:32:40] So here’s a thing I was curious about that I found in your past. And here comes the art. No, just kidding. So tell us about your time as an accountant.
Scott Tolinski: [0:32:52] Yeah, so I was fresh out of college And so this is funny I had a job in New York ready for me as a video editor and a production assistant for Guitar World magazine, and the job would be to show up and film famous guitarist XYZ at any given day. And I did this as an intern because my uncle was the editor-in-chief, so it was an epitome job.
My uncle was the editor-in-chief and he got me this internship And it was awesome. I met all these cool people And I got to do this great work. And he was like, well, the one guy, the assistant’s leaving And the job’s going to be available for you And you graduate if you want it. And it was a well-paying job. But my wife was getting her doctorate in Michigan And we weren’t married at this point, we were just still dating And she was like do not turn down this job for me.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:33:39] I do not want you to turn down this job for me. I don’t want that kind of pressure.
Scott Tolinski: [0:33:42] Yeah. So I turned down the job for her Because I just knew that if I went to New York that might be the end of our relationship. She was willing to do long distance. It’s like I knew she was the one And I knew I didn’t want to ruin that. So I turned down the job And my parents were like if you turned down this job, you better have something ready and waiting for you.
So I was a music student at the University of Michigan And a friend of a friend knew the record label owner for Ghostly International And they were based in Ann Arbor, michigan. They’re a techno label. I didn’t know a ton about techno. Boom, boom, boom boom.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:34:23] That’s what I know.
Scott Tolinski: [0:34:24] In fact, I kind of pissed off the owner when I told him that I started playing the records really slowly And it was like boom, boom.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:34:31] He was like what are you doing, man?
Scott Tolinski: [0:34:33] That’s not what it’s about. I was like, well, it’s kind of cool that way. But I got the job interview And he was like well, you’re a Michigan student, you can just show up and be the accountant. So that’s what. I took the job as just a holdover, so that I would have something to hang my head on and say, oh, I have a job here. I did that for about a year. Working a record label was cool I’ve met. It’s a small label in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and people would just famous musicians would just walk into the door. I remember man, who was it. One day I was just sitting in the office by myself because everybody had gone to lunch And some really famous electronic music DJ showed up And he’s like, “hey, is Sam here?”. And I was just like, uh yeah, I recognize you.
Oh he’s not here, but it was a cool experience And they let me take home a record, one record a week that I worked there, so I got to you know, I have a huge collection of techno records.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:35:24] I’m like you’re trying to go to sleep. Yeah, Yeah, it was an acquired taste.
Scott Tolinski: [0:35:30] Acquired taste.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:35:31] Absolutely Yeah. I think when you get behind the scenes and probably have a newfound respect for the production of it.
Scott Tolinski: [0:35:36] Yeah, when you understand the intricacies of it. Yeah, and they were featured in some techno documentary that was going on, so I got to go to the premiere of that and learn the whole history of techno and really get an understanding for it. Interesting.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:35:48] But in the end I think it all worked out for you.
Scott Tolinski: [0:35:50] Yeah Well, it was not a good account. I was basically just paying royalties and making sure artists got paid. I did not do any analysis or like whatever. It was like none of that. I don’t want to say too much. But one of the artists Matthew Deere on the label had a song in Grand Theft Auto V.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:36:08] Or.
Scott Tolinski: [0:36:08] Grand Theft Auto IV OK.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:36:09] Yes.
Scott Tolinski: [0:36:10] I remember the first modern one was and Whenever that check came in, everybody was like all right, make it count. But yeah, it was a cool experience.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:36:21] Nice, nice, I will say I’m going to guess. no one who works there listens to this podcast.
Scott Tolinski: [0:36:25] Yeah right.
Robbie Wagner: [0:36:26] Probably for you to say whatever.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:36:28] Yeah, that’s an interesting ride. I didn’t know you had like so much early experience in music and video production and all that, so this all kind of makes sense. It all kind of comes together.
Scott Tolinski: [0:36:38] Yeah, I went to school for the program was in the School of Music, for Media Arts was the program And the general philosophy was like, if it’s related to music and technology, that’s what this is about. So I took, I had to take singing, I had to take dance, but I also took dance production and theater production And I had to take. I took a projection installation art class where I did video programming for video I did like a, a theremin out of my webcam and stuff like that. So it was like all this mix mismatch of like a tech programming and music and a lot of the people that came out of that program either now work in tech a lot of them worked at Google actually or they went in hard into music. I, the Wolfpack there’s a famous band Wolfpack. They were in my program and my buddy is their, their engineer And one of the guys the guitarist for Jared Leto’s band 30 seconds to Mars.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:37:32] 30 seconds to Mars, Yeah like people.
Scott Tolinski: [0:37:33] Like one of the people I graduated with got second place on The Voice. Like people just went to do it.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:37:38] Wow Well, stuff in the music, yeah Oh, it sounds like a pretty good program. How does that bridge into break dancing?
Scott Tolinski: [0:37:48] Hey, is this something you know? you know, in high school I saw like I would see the first music video I saw for was the crystal method name of the game and there was a guy with a giant nose break dancing And I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And it was like later that year I didn’t know this at the time but later I found out my band was playing at the Warp Tour And there was a guy doing a demo of break dancing at the Warp Tour And that was the same guy from the music video. I had no idea until much later, but he was a part of the rock city crew, which is like the crew in the 80s that had like really popularized break dancing, and I was just like thought it was the coolest stuff.
And I met that guy and he was like listen, if you want to learn how to, if you want to learn how to dance, you just find who’s in your area and start showing up And it’s like, oh, you can do that. Oh, okay. So I was an extreme sports guy. I used to be like a sponsored skater, and for rollerblading, not for skateboarding.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:38:39] Oh, okay, yeah yeah, yeah, much less cool.
Scott Tolinski: [0:38:41] Much less cool, and it was like right around at the time where rollerblading was like starting to get not cool, so like it just was like into that kind of like action sports thing and breaking. I had no dance experience So breaking was like really tough for me to transition to. People would like used to like laugh at me when I would say I was going to learn it, like they’re like you the guy with no rhythm.
It’s like oh, whatever, I’m a drummer, I can you know I have rhythm. And 20 years later, man, I’ve been doing competitions all over the US. I’ve danced for NFL and NBA teams.
I’ve been in a lot of really bad music videos and just like countless bad music videos, and I’ve won a lot of competitions and, you know, got to compete against some of the best in nationally. Really I never won anything big time nationally, I’m more of like a regional winner. But still have been doing it for a long time. Still do it once a week now And at the studio we practice at it’s called the B-Boy Factory and their Olympic level, because now we’re in the Olympics in 2024. Wow, yeah, one of the potential Olympic hopefuls is from our studio.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:39:42] So it’s a high-level people. Yeah, yeah, that’s really cool. I’m impressed. I wonder, like, as you age, how much more challenging does it get It?
Robbie Wagner: [0:39:50] sucks Because you lose some flexibility. It sucks.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:39:53] You’re like creaky the next day.
Scott Tolinski: [0:39:54] Extremely creaky. I mean, I went from practicing like eight hours a week to practicing, you know, one and a half hours a week, and that’s like all my body can handle. I currently have a torn rotator cuff on this side. So I’m like from I was on one arm and I was like, oh, I used to do this and I popped over and it’s just like ugh. So I’m battling injuries 24 seven and I feel awful all the time.
Robbie Wagner: [0:40:17] But it’s fun, you promise.
Scott Tolinski: [0:40:18] Yeah Right, it’s the best use of like. There’s absolutely nothing like it in terms of endurance or athletic anything. It’ll kick your butt. My dad was like you know he was a gymnast, who he was, you know, really high-level Palmer Horse gymnast, so it’s very like similar to what I was doing, and he was like you’re going to hate yourself when you’re my age And I was like whatever, whatever And, like you know, and I’m getting close to 40.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:40:44] And I’m like oh man, Yeah, You’re like those creaks. Oh, it’s a little cold out. My elbows and wrists are hurting.
Scott Tolinski: [0:40:50] I spent a long time spinning on my head And I went to get an MRI recently because I had some back issues And they’re like yeah, your back’s not great, you got a slipped disc this or that, but your neck looks perfectly fine. I was like are you sure? Like if you get the MRI, like there’s no possibility. That seems wrong, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:41:07] But apparently you made it really strong.
Scott Tolinski: [0:41:09] Yeah, right, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:41:11] So OK, so we’ve talked about meeting rock stars you know accounting for electronic dance music record label long time. If you were beatboxing too, that would be cool.
Scott Tolinski: [0:41:24] Yeah, yeah, I wish All right.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:41:25] So what is the most uncool thing that you like to do?
Scott Tolinski: [0:41:29] The most uncool thing I like to do. That might be programming honestly.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:41:32] That’s right, yeah, but in this audience it’s not true. Maybe in the you know out in the world.
Scott Tolinski: [0:41:38] No, I like video games. I play a lot of video games. I have a Steam Deck that I play all the time. Ooh, because I don’t know if that’s considered uncool. I watch reality TV with my wife all the time.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:41:49] So is it like 90 Day Fiance and that kind of stuff?
Scott Tolinski: [0:41:51] No, more like Vanderpump rules and Bravo kind of stuff, because they’re equally bad. Yeah, totally So I know way too much about like Bravo reality TV. I guess that could be considered uncool in some. Yeah, I’m going to give you the approval that.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:42:02] That is very uncool. I watched some of that with my wife, but I put it on the nope if you’re not going to watch superhero shows with me, I’m not watching that with you, yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [0:42:10] And so that’s kind of our separation You’ve got to have your separate shows. Yeah Well, the Steam Deck has allowed me to play video games while she has that on, so now.
Scott Tolinski: [0:42:18] I’m like oh we can hang out and I can play video games And yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:42:21] Yeah, I do that too, Because I started playing the New Zelda recently, Oh nice. And so I’m like I’m doing what I like. You’re doing what you’re like, but we’re chilling here Having a glass of wine together or whatever.
Robbie Wagner: [0:42:30] We’re in the same room. Yeah, that’s a win. Yeah, it counts. Yeah, it counts. Yeah, let’s see what else we got on here We have more questions. Cool, yeah, I mean we were a little late getting started anyway, I guess, so we could kind of wrap it there. Anything you want to plug before we end?
Scott Tolinski: [0:42:50] Yeah, I mean, well, one Level Up Video is free. So if you’re interested in, you know, one of our most recent well, we have a lot of Svelte content now, because that’s really what I’m into a lot. We have courses on Remix, we have courses on Astro, we have courses on a lot of courses on React. We do 3D and React. We do 3D and Svelte, Vue.js. We have a lot of content on there. So, if you’re interested in learning stuff, Level Up Video is free. Also, the Syntax podcast, syntax.fm.
We’re going to be putting out live episodes. We’re going to be putting out video episodes, doing video training and stuff and working on a big rewrite of the site right now. So that’s also working in public too. So it’s on GitHub. If you want to check out what we’re working on, what we’re talking about. We’re doing fun stuff with AI in it. We’re yeah, we’re doing a lot of cool stuff because it’s like we have, you know what 600 episodes of us talking. Let’s take those, turn it into transcripts, let’s pipe it into some AI stuff And now you can have AI based transcripts that tells you who’s talking when they’re talking. You can almost have live close captions that are popping up for a podcast transcripts and stuff like that. But also you can make it all searchable, you can ask it questions. You can really easily quickly find what you’re looking for. So working on a lot of cool stuff there.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:43:59] Yeah, that does sound really cool. Well, thanks for sharing that with us And also, like, thanks for sharing your tutorials with the world.
Scott Tolinski: [0:44:05] Oh yeah, and then that’s been the goal from day one. So happy to have them for you.
Robbie Wagner: [0:44:10] Yeah, cool. Thanks everybody for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave us some ratings and reviews and we will catch you next time.
Chuck Carpenter: [0:44:21] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you liked this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating and maybe a review, as long as it’s good.
Robbie Wagner: [0:44:35] You can subscribe to future episodes on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. For more info about Ship Shape and this show, check out our website at shipshape.io.