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Episode 20: How Wes Bos Went From MySpace Hacker To Teaching Code To The Masses

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Dude, so like, in this totally tubular podcast episode with Seth, Jake, and the coding guru Wes Bos, they're all, "Yo, what's up?" and chat about their coding journeys. Seth, this gnarly full-stack developer for over a decade, Jake, this barber from Augusta, Maine, just kickin' it in code for seven months, and Wes Bos, this coding legend with 23 years under his belt and famous for his coding courses, they all share their stories, man.

Wes talks about how he got started, building websites and tackling gnarly projects. He's all about how coding is like a tool for solving problems, and he loves dropping knowledge to help others on their coding quests. He's all about the importance of stickin' with it and getting hyped about what you're building, especially when JavaScript's throwing you for a loop.

They dive into the challenges of web development, and Wes talks about those days when you're like, "Whoa, did I even code today?" But they all agree, those tough days are where you grow. They chat about when you're "ready" for a coding gig – Wes says it's when you can build CRUD apps, even if you don't know it all, as long as you can troubleshoot and learn on the fly.

Wes also shares his journey, goin' from odd jobs to freelancing, and how the job market's got room for folks with potential and a hunger to learn. They're cruisin' along, talking about how to start in web dev, Wes says to kick it off with HTML and CSS, man, get those basics down. He's all about soft skills and communication, too – says networking's key and that everyone's learning and problem-solvin', no imposters here.

Then they get into flexin' those career paths, from full-stack to specializing like in WordPress. Wes drops some wisdom about adaptin' your learning path to your goals and what gets you stoked. Finally, they wrap it up, showin' gratitude to Wes, pluggin' his courses and the "Syntax" podcast, and tellin' aspiring devs to ride that wave of enthusiasm, stay persistent, and ride to success in the coding world, man.

Check out Wes Bos's rad courses at wesbos.com/courses, and ride the coding vibes with the Syntax podcast co-hosted by Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski for some sick web dev insights, dude. And remember, keep the stoke alive and ride that coding wave to success, bro!

Special thanks to Diarrhea Planet for our intro and outro music and @SkratchTopo for our artwork.

 

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(Auto-Generated) Episode Transcript:

Seth Whiting: Hey everybody. I am Seth Whiting. I'm a full stack developer from Portland, Maine, and I've been coding for about 10 years now. And I'm Jake

Jake Pacheco: Pacheco. I am a barber from Augusta, Maine, and I've been coding for about seven months now.

Wes Bos: And I'm Wes Boss. I've been coding for about 27 years now. Hokey. Holy Snikies. 27 years. Or, sorry, 23. 23. I have a 23. I have a live counter on westbow.com/about. Nice. Oh, nice. Go check that out,

Jake Pacheco: everyone. I feel, I feel like anything north of 20 is just , okay. Yep. You're bonkers. You're

Wes Bos: doing it. Yeah.

Quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Well,

Seth Whiting: you you heard it here first folks. We've got our first, our very first guest ever on the show. And it's none other than Mr. Westboss, which we're so stoked about, , I was thinking that we would have to, , cycle through a good, , 12 guests before we get to the West boss level, but

Jake Pacheco: here we

Wes Bos: are, but here we are.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I'll come on. It's the thing. People ask me all the time to come on the podcast and , if, if they're just like, if I'm, if it's just like a, send me a link and we'll show up for that. I like, I like talking. Yeah.

Seth Whiting: Cool. Well, we'll see you next week then too.

Jake Pacheco: Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. Welcome to the show.

Sweet. Well, yeah. Not sure how much you've looked into our podcast that much or anything, but basically we're just kind of more or less an educational and a guiding kind of helping hand for people like myself, just getting into it. I'm very new to it. And. We've kind of gone over a lot with Seth on , how he started and what it was for him, the why he started and everything, what he might have done differently, and so basically the idea of this episode and any other interview type episodes that we're going to have is Basically, to ask you and really dig deep into your, you know, 23 years ago, where'd your start basically, what, what made you start, you know?

So I guess that's where, yeah, that's where we can start is basically , like how'd you get started into this and what, you know, made you press the

Wes Bos: gas pedal on that. So very early on, I had the internet. , I was the first kid on the block, first kid at my school to have internet. My dad was in IT, so I was kind of exposed to it way back and I was always curious about , , how do you get something like, how do, how do people get the stuff on there?

Like, where's the internet? You know? So I, I kind of dipped around and played with that a little bit. I made a PlayStation 2 website before it went up, which is funny because , I'm not a gamer at all. , I have no, no interest in games at all. I think they're stupid. But I got super into the idea that PlayStation 2 was going to be a rare and I made a website about it and I slept overnight.

Did all this kind of cool stuff. So I had a popular website on PlayStation two back then. And then , it really ramped up when my space became a thing. I don't know if you remember that, but I was pretty involved in the hardcore scene with all bands and whatnot. And I have no musical skills or ability.

But I love the whole idea of punk and hardcore and all that. So. I was , like, well, can you, what can a computer nerd do? You know? So I, I was making websites, designing t shirts, all kinds of stuff like that. And pretty much from there, I've just been hacking away, making stuff, building websites ever since.

Yeah. Nice.

Seth Whiting: I forgot to say it for anybody who doesn't know who Wes is, which , of course you should, this, he, he's done so many courses. If you go to west boss. com slash courses, he's basically here to help out people learning how to code. So he's got one called beginner JavaScript, full stack advanced react and graph QL ES six for everyone.

So , Up to date JavaScript and JavaScript 30, which is 30 one off projects. Is that right, Wes? Where you just sort of make something cool with, with JavaScript. And there's 30 different things that you can make.

Wes Bos: So that's my way of tricking people into learning JavaScript. I like it.

Seth Whiting: So from, from way back then till now, you know, he, he's done a lot.

Not, not only have you improved in your coding and everything, but you've also helped so many other people improve in their coding. So that's, that's really awesome. And that's, you know, what our show is all about. Yeah,

Jake Pacheco: definitely. So I, so yeah, clearly you started then with, I mean, back then was CSS really that big of a thing anyways, or was it just HTML at that point learning and toiling

Wes Bos: with, it's always been, always been CSS actually, like that's That's kind of how I got into it because in my space, you could add your own HTML, but if you wanted to style the existing HTML, you gotta, you had to figure out how to select the things on the page and apply styles to them.

So , that's really my first, not my first, but , that's, that's really where I got into. Separation of concerns and to be able to select stuff off the page and apply my styles to it. Yeah, yeah,

Jake Pacheco: I, I get that. I think that that's a lot of us didn't realize we were coding when we did that, when we were messing with our MySpace pages and stuff.

So yeah, that, that's sweet then. So when, when do you think JavaScript became, came onto your radar and you really started getting into it and thinking of it? As more of like, Oh, there might be a future in this

Wes Bos: for me. So I had been out of high school or sorry, not a high school, out of university, I went full on into being a freelance dev running my own kind of consultancy shop.

That's cause I had had a couple of jobs during school and I realized , I don't like this at all working for anybody. I want to be able to do my own thing. So I was . Doing the, building websites for small businesses, you know, pool company and hospital nurses, things like that, building websites.

And I, the, the application started to become more and more complex or the websites became more complex. And, and I thought , wow, this JavaScript thing is like, it's becoming pretty popular. Right. And as it was at kind of the same time where node was starting to roll out as well. And I thought , Hmm, maybe I should just bet the whole farm on this JavaScript thing.

So, I kind of went all in and said , I'm a full stack JavaScript dev. I'm using Node on the backend. I'm using whatever Angular React on the front end. And kind of said , I'm, I'm just going to go all in on this. And it was a bet that thankfully paid off.

Seth Whiting: Yeah. Did you ever get into PHP or any of the other, the other ones before you got into

Wes Bos: it?

I pretty much started with PHP. So I had built a lot of WordPress, tons and tons of custom WordPress, but also I, I was pretty into the CodeIgniter, CakePHP. So I probably did three years of mostly being, maybe four years of mostly being a PHP dev with a little JavaScript sprinkled on top.

But as the industry not changed away from that, but obviously Laravel was, I don't even know if Laravel was around then, but. I, I kind of went all in on JavaScript. Mm-hmm. .

Jake Pacheco: Yeah. Yeah. Huh. I, and I, I guess a question, just so we have kind of a timeline. What, how old were you when you were kind of starting off on your own as well?

Like when you're like, okay, I, I want to just do my own thing. Be out from underneath other people and yeah. And go off doing your,

Wes Bos: your stuff. , it's tricky because I was, In grade nine or ninth grade, as y'all say down there, I assume you're, you're both American, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're, we're very close to Canada.

So I mean, okay. Yeah. Yeah. There's like weird, weird things where we say grade nine and you, you say senior and all these weird words that I don't know what those mean. But basically it's a grade nine. I don't know how old you are in grade nine, maybe 14 or something like that. Yeah, I was like, I was like getting paid to build my spaces and websites for friends, parents and all that stuff.

So I had always been making money all the way through high school, all the way through university. And it was, it was kind of like, I had these co ops where I was , I worked for axon mobile. I worked for investment bank, , big corporation. Co ops and , I realized this sucks.

I remember, love it. I'm like, I'm going to be like Bay Street, which is Canada's Wall Street. I'm going to be like the Bay Street banker. You know, it was sick. I went, I worked on the trading floor. That was, it was still during this time where they all sat in a desk and picked up phones and trades and stuff like that.

And I was like, like, this is dream job that a lot of people would love. And then I realized . It was cool, but it's not what I really wanted to be doing. So by the time I hit my last co op term in school, which I'm so glad I had co op, I convinced them to let me co op for myself. Basically, so I just like, I just like ran my own business and and got credit for it.

And the government gave me some student startup money to buy a laptop and stuff. So it was awesome. It was awesome. Thank you. So yeah, I always talk about the boat getting close enough to the dock to make that jump. And I was really lucky to have the, to know that before I graduated, before I had any real things in life that I had to care about, that I was like, Oh yeah, I can foresee that I don't want to get six years into this job and have to make the change.

So I'm going to try and make that jump to full time now. Yeah.

Seth Whiting: Yeah. That's awesome. But is co-op like a, you work someplace while you're still in school? Is that, is that what the

Wes Bos: Yeah, so my program took a a four year program and I went to school for business management or business technology management.

So , it's a, it's a business degree, right? It's not, it wasn't like a coding degree or anything like that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. . So it took a four year program and stretched it into five years. And then between that extra year and a couple of summers that I think there was room for four, six, three or six month co ops in between there, and they would try to place you in different types of jobs to sort of get a taste for it.

And it's really sweet because a lot of those co ops will just try to hire you right out of,

Seth Whiting: of that. So it sounds like an internship.

Jake Pacheco: Yeah, or work study

Wes Bos: kind of a thing. Gotcha, okay. Exactly, yeah. Huh, cool, cool. That's cool.

Jake Pacheco: And I, I guess, just cause I'm, I'm new to all of this where, where are you from if you didn't say are you from Canada or are you

Wes Bos: from?

Yeah, yeah, I'm just I'm from Hamilton, Canada, which is just outside of Toronto. Oh, okay. Alrighty. Right where,

Seth Whiting: Counterparts is from, if

Wes Bos: you, oh, you know, counterparts. Yeah, I've got, I've got tickets for them in October with the devil wears nice. So

Jake Pacheco: nice. Sick. I saw devil wears Prada back in the day at the station, I think in Portland, but

Wes Bos: cool.

Hey, a bunch of hardcore kids anyways.

Jake Pacheco: I yeah. So I guess, I mean, that's awesome. So quite a different story than I. Then to what I'm doing where I'm, you know, 31 years old and just now getting into this, I've a little bit of background on me. I've built computers. I've, you know, I've, I've always been very good with my hands, building things I've never, but coding was always like the one thing that I was like, ah, that's, that's just, you know, voodoo.

That's such a untapped thing. I, for me. Seth and I have been friends for a few years now and I knew that he was so I was like, Oh man, , I would really love to learn that and eventually have a career in that just because with barbering it's you really have to be behind the chair all the time. I to it's it.

The retirement plan is not there, you know, yeah. And with coding it's just, there's a lot of I mean, there's just so much, there's so much you can do with it. So I, I've been pretty excited about that. And when I told Seth, he was very forthright and excited for me to learn it and stuff. But what I've noticed is like yourself, I, I, I asked , he's like, Oh yeah, what's.

What's possible is going to be on the show. And I was like, why? Cause it was just , so , it's, it's just so cool that the coding culture, it seems is so welcoming and wanting to help all the time. Is that, is that kind of where in the beginning you said. The doing, it was kind of just a fun thing and you were just intrigued in general by it.

Has it now become more of a thing where you just want to help other people code or what's what, what I guess is your, do you feel is your purpose in coding nowadays?

Wes Bos: Yeah I my, my purpose is , it's, it's super fun to be able to build stuff and to solve your own problems because. Maybe a lot of people listening to this are, are like you, you're, you're technical.

You're able to figure a lot of things out. And for a lot of people, it's really frustrating when they hit that coding limit. I, I see the flip side on a lot of electronics tutorials where electronics go from hardware into, okay, now I gotta do a little bit Arduino. And people are always like, ah, it's not my, not my forte, you know?

So it's nice to be able to have those skills where you can say, , I can literally build anything. I'll literally to do that. So yeah, there's that and there's the other part, which is , I love being able to share and learn new things and help people along their journey. In learning to code, because I've been at it long enough where it's , there's a lot of people who took my courses that are now much smarter than I am and much further ahead in their, their coding journey, because they're , like, they just needed to like, I think like coding is just a tool, right?

, and if you're, if you're a problem solver, you know how to make things once, you know, coding, you realize, oh, I can, I can solve problems. I can build things. Yeah,

Jake Pacheco: yeah, I get that. It's, it's just kind of laying the groundwork, the foundation of , oh, now I have all of these tools in, in my brain that I can just be like, oh, I'll, I'll create this.

And this is how I create this. And Seth has told me many times where , I'll say , oh, here's an idea for an app or whatever. And he's like, he'll think for a second. He's like, Yeah, I know exactly I know how I'd do that. You know what I mean? It's it's it's wild to me to see that but I guess it's just like anything it just takes a lot of practice and a lot of studying and stuff for me.

I don't know. I There's some things they Right. And you might be able to remember back when this was a reality for you as well, where it's like, you pick it up and it's like, Oh, this makes sense. And there's some things that you're just hitting your head against the wall, just trying to figure out, , what does it mean?

, like, how can I apply this? And , , there's, there's been a few times where, you know, you kind of get stuck in the mud with that stuff. Do you remember any times like that? Like, certain Yeah. Yeah. With, with JavaScript anyways, cause that's pretty much what I'm doing.

Wes Bos: I remember, I remember being very clearly even I remember very clearly where I was and thinking maybe the JavaScript is not, not for me.

Maybe I'm not cut out for it because it's so frustrating to piss away an entire day, especially when you're trying to learn to code, you don't necessarily have all the time in the world. You're trying to squeeze it in on evenings and weekends and whenever you can. And if the fricking thing just won't work, it's so frustrating that you just want to , you want to rage quit it.

And a lot of people unfortunately do because it, it honestly does take a whole lot of time and it's very, like anything there's, it's much easier just to sort of bow out and say, this is not for me. This is, I'm not the type of person that can, can do this type of thing, which is, I very clearly remember being like, maybe I should just give up on the JavaScript stuff and just sort of.

Stick with my WordPress customizations and whatnot, this CSS, because this is, this is way too tricky and I don't understand it all. But , I just kind of kept going through it and I'm, I'm very glad I did because now it's, it's a lot, it comes a lot easier to me. I can pick up, pick stuff up much quicker, but that, that initial hump is, is a real slog.

Jake Pacheco: Yeah, it's, it can be a beast. I've, I've gone through a few of those. And, and like you said, I think that the hardest, like the most difficult thing for me is that I also have to, you know, work at the barbershop. Yeah, I, I, so I, I'm, I business owner as well. I, I run my own barbershop with a few of my friends and and.

Yeah. So I have to kind of run that, keep an eye on that. And then I'm building a house also. And then I have this also, and I'm, I just wish that I could just spend all my time doing this, but it ends up being put on kind of the back burner a lot of the time, just because I'm, I'm doing other things that, you know, I need a house and I need money.

Right. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I need to work, you know? So yeah, yeah. I, I, I guess then a question would be, was there ever a time where you're Yeah. I mean, I guess you just kind of said it where you kind of felt like tapping out in a sense, but you always had to fall. You could have fallen back on the PHP thing and stuff like that.

Was there ever a time where you, yeah, yeah. Was there ever a time where you kind of, I don't know, a bit further in your career where you're like, this isn't for me or anything, or did it always just feel like such a, a broad horizon that you could just go in any direction because you already knew what

Wes Bos: you knew?

I, I think because I like it so much, which is like, you don't have to love writing JavaScript. It can just be a job. And I think like that, a lot of people are like, you got to live and breathe this type of stuff. And like, a plumber is not necessarily loves cutting pipes and whatnot. A lot of them do.

A lot of them are enthusiastic. A lot of them have plumbing tick talks. And they go to trade shows and all of that stuff. And it's because they love that stuff. And I am very lucky that I am that person in the coding community where I literally can't wait for new stuff to come out. I'm reading the results and I'm not feeling overwhelmed.

Like, Oh my gosh, so much new stuff is coming out. So that's, that's a major benefit on my end. But you certainly don't need to be there. My, my advice there would be. Try and build stuff that you are excited about because that's, that's the way where you don't have to , feel like I gotta find time to, to, to work on this.

I gotta go to the gym, you know, like that type of stuff where it's like, no, you, you're gonna want to, to do that stuff. You will get there. That's, that's why I have that JavaScript 30 course as well. Is that , you've got to get those little small wins in and, and, and you got to build fun stuff and not just sit there looping up, like you said, , , why would I find that useful?

Where would I even want to use that? That's the most frustrating part is I just sat through two hours of tutorials and now I'm just like console logging. And I don't realize where I would actually use that. So I don't know if that answers your question, but No, it does. It does. Yeah. Okay.

Jake Pacheco: Yeah. It answers other questions too.

So what, whatever you have to answer is great for me.

Seth Whiting: Yeah, I had I had the exact same experience where I started getting into JavaScript and it was like, this is hard. I don't, I don't like hard things. I don't, you know, I don't really want to do this anymore. But then I had the same thing. I got over that hump that you were talking about.

And that's, that's when I started, that's when it started getting fun, you know, once you know how to kind of assemble things in the correct way to where it's like, I have this problem. And I just need to follow these steps in order to, to solve it. That's, that's when it becomes really fun. And that's, you know, what I keep telling Jake is like, just stick with it, you know, when, and all of our listeners .

You will get to the point where basically once you, once you have, once you stop having to think about it so much, then you can build anything and you, you've, it's, it's fun and you have a sense of power and whatever that you didn't have before. Do you still face big challenges today in coding?

Wes Bos: Yeah, oh yeah, there's all the time, like a couple of days ago, again, I pissed away an entire day on some WASM FFmpeg issue, which is just like, it was combining two areas of programming that I'm not completely comfortable with, and I just didn't know, , how to debug this type of thing or anything like that, so, I have lots of those days where, , you, you look back and you realize, , I, I got nothing done today or , you're like, this is garbage, the, what I've built.

But , that's, unfortunately that's part of the learning process and, and those wasted days are, are not actually wasted in that you, you are learning how to, as frustrating as it actually is, those are, that's a good practice for you. Yeah, I feel

Seth Whiting: like those, those lessons that take the longest are the ones that you will remember the longest, , I will never make that mistake again.

Jake Pacheco: Yeah. Yeah, it seems it's always seemed to me that the things that are really difficult to kind of grasp or just difficult in general, they take a long time to do something , by the end of it, it has a lot of staying power, because you remember everything you learned, because it was such a struggle to learn it.

You know,

Seth Whiting: you spend so much time

Jake Pacheco: with it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, I, how long In the JavaScript, did it take you, do you think to where you really felt like, yeah, I'm very comfortable. I know what I'm doing and all of this.

Wes Bos: Probably , like four years in, I, I kind of said to myself, I don't, I certainly I still, I still don't know everything, but I know that I could probably figure it out.

And , that's a, , that's an attitude that you should have towards a lot of things in life. And I feel like that's just a, , I feel like I have that attitude in almost every aspect of my life, whether it's, I built this, this this office that we're in here right now. And I have audio recording stuff and , I didn't know how to do any of that stuff, but it's, it's, it doesn't stop me because I say I can probably figure it out.

If not, I can probably ask somebody if not, I can probably hire somebody, you know, you got to figure out like what's the. What's the worst possible scenario that we could, we could hit here, you know? Yeah. Yeah, of course. So that's, I think that's a, a good attitude to, to have at it. And now , I, there's lots of things where I don't necessarily know how to do them, but I know, okay, I, at least I know the fundamentals of JavaScript.

I'm not struggling over semicolons and scoping issues and things like I know that part. And it's more just about , how do these things work together and how would you structure this item? Why is something slow or how is something breaking and yeah, once you know, those fundamentals and you've, you've gone through enough of the errors, you say, ah, I probably figure this out.

You know?

Jake Pacheco: Yeah. Yeah. Of course. I, I, yeah, I also, I, I build cars and, and like I said, I'm building my own house right now. So I very, very much have that mentality as well, where it's like, yeah, I'll figure it out. If I don't know now, I'll figure it out. And that's, that's very much how I am with this, with coding too.

I'm like, I, I know I can figure it out. It might take me a while. It might, you know, I, I might be banging my head against the wall sometimes, but I, I will figure it out. And I think that it's kind of that I, that blind confidence and going into any problem being like, yep, I got this. Like the, I dunno, it's, it's gotten me to anywhere that I have been in my life has been because I have that kind of mentality.

So yeah, I fully agree. I, I, yeah,

Wes Bos: a hundred percent. I hear you. It's true. And I, I know that I know you'll probably do amazing at being a developer because you have those skills in other aspects. I have friends who are in the trades. And they say, I bet you probably would be a good contractor because not because I'm good at sawing logs or anything like that.

I hate it. It makes me sore. It's, I don't enjoy it at all. But they, you're like, you can figure things out. You're a problem solver. You can look at an end result and break it down into little smaller pieces and not be, be overwhelmed with it. There's this. There's, there's one YouTube channel I follow, Aging Wheels, or the guy, he works on cars and buses and electronic stuff And I watched probably 10 of his videos and I was like, this guy for sure was a developer before he was started this YouTube channel.

So I looked it up and of course he was the Android dev and I was like, I could tell that because of the way he approaches problems. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

Jake Pacheco: And that's kind of what Seth is, right? He said to me when I first started getting into it too, he's like, Oh yeah, you'll, you'll take to it. You'll figure it out.

, and I think that Seth had more confidence in the beginning than I did with this which I appreciate because you kind of need it when you start. And I think that that's, I, I guess, that's a question also, did you have kind of a, I, you said your father is an it and stuff. So was he kind of a support?

Supporter of you doing all of this or did you have other friends

Wes Bos: in it when you first started in stuff or,

Jake Pacheco: or was this just you doing your thing?

Wes Bos: Kind of all of the above. So , I think probably the biggest thing I had was free roam access. To be able to, to try to build these things. So I had a computer, I had to split up with my sisters, but I got 20 minutes per hour.

So I, from the 20 to the 40 of the hour, I got to go on. And at a certain point I saved up enough money to be able to go buy my own computer and, and to learn this stuff on it. But , I was looking at like I won't say who it is, but , I have a friend who has a kid and they brought their iPad over and they're like, Hey, can you teach me to code?

And I was like, all right, , let's open this website. He's like, no, my mom has to approve this website. And I was like, I, I need to talk to them and be like, you need to give, , the best thing you can have as a developer is wide open blocks of time and access to the incredible world of the internet just to figure stuff out.

And it's not some coding app and whatever, like those things are great. You just need sheer amount of time to put into the stuff at the end of the day, that that's it. So I was luckily lucky to , that's why I'm so glad I could, I learned it early on because , I had a lot more time than I do now to, to learn new things, right.

So yeah, my, my dad gave me lots of access to the computer and that type of stuff. But , what else, I figured, I figured out a lot of it on, on my own as well. And then when I was in university, I had a couple friends who were able to bounce questions off of and whatnot. So it was really lucky to have like a phone, a friend, because certainly you take, you take on projects or you say, I can do that.

What happens in you? You can't. You know, it's so nice to be able to have a phone, a friend that can at least point you in the right direction. So

Seth Whiting: did you ever take any, any courses or any, anything at all? Or is it like, are you 100 percent

Wes Bos: self taught? I took, so I took one elective which elective in school is when I got a course of your life.

You can, you can choose anything you can take rhythm and dancing or something. So I chose to take introduction to C. So I did one course on C which was nothing. I couldn't write a line of C to save my life right now. So everything else is, is completely self taught over the years, which is good.

Like I don't, my schooling was amazing because I had, again, copious amounts of time. , you know, I don't think I realized at the time of how much free time I had, but copious amounts of time to sort of just noodle around and hack on stuff. When I was in university. Yeah.

Seth Whiting: So do you think that that course in C helped you at all with JavaScript conceptually, , like loops and conditionals, anything like that, or

Wes Bos: did you already I already, I already knew all that type of stuff by then.

So if anything, it taught me how awesome JavaScript is because you don't have to allocate memory for a freaking variable. Yeah. Yeah.

Jake Pacheco: Nice. Thank you. That's cool. So, really, what was your, you said right out of high school or around ninth grade or whatever, you had your first kind of I don't know.

I'll call it business plan. I guess. Did you continue after high school to go on to just work for yourself and have you done that most of the time? Or did you go to university and work for a few places? You said you did the what'd you call them? Co op. The, yeah, the co op, work study type things.

Yeah. After that, were you just like, did you work for someone else or did you just go off on your own and just start doing your thing? And what have you done since then,

Wes Bos: I guess? Yeah, so in high school, it was just odd jobs is mostly just bands who needed myspace t shirt design Graphic design stuff like that in university.

It was Still some of that but as the scene stirs age they become business owners They own barber shops and things like that They need you to to build stuff for that or their parents need somebody to build stuff So I did a lot of that through university And then I, , did some, , contracting a company called JetCooper here in Toronto.

They eventually were bought by Shopify, so I got to, , experience a little bit more of the, , agency life through them and understand what that's like. And, , man, agency is, it's, it's tough, but it's, I'll say the best because you get a new project every month. There's all, you're getting thrown into random projects that you don't know the tech stack of.

And you, you get skilled up very quickly and you get to start stuff fresh all the time, versus the product that's been, you joined Facebook. You're not going to be building stuff from the ground up. But if you're doing agency life, you're, you're building 30 apps a year or something like that.

So, it's really, really good for that. So I did that. I did three co ops. I worked at ExxonMobil oil and gas. I worked at. Investment bank, and then I worked at a video agency and that, that one was really cool because they, they produced video, but then a lot of their projects needed web stuff to go along with it.

So I was like in charge of the web stuff. I rebuilt their website and did stuff like that. And then by the time I was ready for my fourth co op, I was like, you know what? I don't, I don't like this whole job thing. I don't like working for other people. And , I was also making more money. Freelancing in the evenings and weekends.

Then I was working for a job. And I remember the, the last co op was like, Hey, we'll hire you full time. And I was like, yeah, 65 bucks an hour or something like that. And they're like, there's no chance, you know, the, the, it does not work out for that. They're like, we can get, I think they like, we'll give you 23 or something like that.

So we're like, we're so far apart. I'm like, well, I'm just going to go do it myself then. . I, I have the business acumen, you know, I'm able to do the emails and marketing and pick up the phone, all that, that side of the business. So I kind of went for it there and I was just working with clients since then.

So I, that was my claim to fame is I've never had a job before. I've been in many offices, many I've worked on many teams as a, as a consultant freelancer, but I've never had a. Honest to goodness job. Wow, bug move. That's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. I,

Jake Pacheco: yeah, that's cool. I, cause, I don't know.

Obviously there's, you know, a thousand different avenues. My, I, I, I like the concept of the agency. I think that's kind of a cool idea and I think that that's kind of what Seth wants to set me up with eventually. Or try to get me to is to that. And I don't know, we've talked a lot about timelines and stuff, and I'm like, you know, it, it's, it's, it's tricky.

'cause I'll talk to some like I, I had a web developer in my chair the other day actually. Trying to remember what language he, he was doing. I think it was, I think he was in c, like c plus plus or something. He was working in robotics. Don't know what that, you know, if, if that tells you anything, but anyways and, and I was like, yeah, so , you know, how long, how long do you think it takes for someone to , get ready for this to , be ready to actually , go into the coding world and start as a junior, junior developer and learn on the job and stuff.

And he's like, Oh, if you're asking, then you're ready. And I'm like, I'm not ready. But like, I'm genuinely curious, , have you. Have you, because you've done so much in education and stuff, have you talked to people and kind of gotten an idea of how long it takes for someone to actually start getting a job in it or anything like that?

Or

Wes Bos: is it? Yeah. I think it's the answer to that is before you think you are because I've heard from lots of people being like, well, I just threw my hat in the ring and someone said, yeah, we'll take you. And I thought, oh, I've. For sure not ready, you know, and it's, it's way over my head, but it's amazing how quick you get skilled up when you're on a team, especially someone who's willing to train.

Cause I'm not sure how true this is in the last six months since the economy starting to go down, but there's like a, there was, and still in a lot of places, a major shortage of good developers. So there's always companies kind of like, NBA scouting, looking for undiscovered talent, because it's way easier to , Oh, let's find this.

The developer who's just learning to code, but a good manager is able to see past not understanding the syntax, but can see , Oh, clearly you have good communication skills, good problem solving skills, you know, the rest of the package of being a good developer, the one part where is they don't know the method syntax for looping over an array by heart and they have to look it up, you know?

So people are like, Oh, I'm just going to , I'm going to make my own 10 X developer. So yeah. Yeah. When do you know you're ready? It's really hard to say. , I think as soon as you, maybe if you could build an application. That is a crud, you can create an item, you can maybe not even necessarily behind off, but you have a form on the page, you style it to look nice, you can type in the box, you hit submit, and you can list all your data, that's a reading, you can update each of the individual ones, and you can delete an item, if you could build an app that can do that based on a framework, not necessarily from scratch.

I think you're in pretty good shape to do, to start at, start something. Jake,

Seth Whiting: if that went over your head, CRUD, do you know that one?

Jake Pacheco: I, I, we've talked about it before. I know that, but , no, no, go ahead.

Seth Whiting: Create, read, update, and delete. Those are sort of like the four basic functions of an application.

Jake Pacheco: So it's just being able to a to-do

Seth Whiting: list edit in the background

Jake Pacheco: and stuff or in the yeah,

Seth Whiting: yeah. At the backend. Yeah. Saving data to a database. Mm-hmm. Reading it from the database, updating the data in the database, and then deleting the data from the database, basically. Yeah. All the way from, from the front end to the backend.

That's like if you can build a CRUD app mm-hmm. , then you can kind of modify it enough to build most things. Yeah,

Jake Pacheco: yeah, cool. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's kind of the answer that I've gotten from, you know, if you Google it online or anything like that, everyone's like, yeah, it's pretty much they'll A lot of places will kind of teach at the, on the job, which is really sweet.

And what you said with that, where the, you're, they're looking more for a personality even than a coder who's, you know, really well versed in all the syntax or something. It's speaks volumes to , it's exactly how I look for barbers that work in my barbershop. It's, I can't make someone have a good personality.

I can, I can make just about anyone be able to cut hair well, but if they cut hair well and they don't have a good personality, then I can't fix that, you know, so it's, it's, you do kind of have to have someone that has the personality that can adapt to it. So yeah, what you said, just , yeah, it, it makes perfect sense.

Seth Whiting: I had a question, Wes, what do you think about, I so basically at the start of all of this, I was like, you should skip building websites and just go straight into building apps. , just let's just commit to that go big or go home kind of thing. , let's learn everything from the front end to the back end.

But what do you what do you think about that? , do you think there that he should maybe start at a WordPress dev shop or something, and then kind of work, work into. More back end heavy stuff or

Wes Bos: what do you have an opinion on all of that? I, I, that's a good question. I don't necessarily know what the, the best way forward, but I don't know that skipping the whole website thing would be a good idea, especially because a lot of the the, the trends we're starting to see now is we're going back to a lot of .

Web fundamentals, form submits, server rendering, all that good stuff. So, a lot of, of what I learned in my PHP days is becoming very relevant these days. So also , I think probably a lot of the stuff you're going to be doing early on is HTML markup and then CSS making it look good. So I think that those are probably the things that you need to sort of.

Nail first and then looking into adding functionality, contact form, and then, oh, okay, well then now let me list things. And , even your own barbershops website is probably a good spot to start with something like that.

Seth Whiting: Yeah. Yeah. So I was thinking , basically if you can, if you can get your head around JavaScript and get into it and excited about JavaScript, then sort of picking up HTML and CSS.

On the way, sort of like as a necessity for making your JavaScript work in a webpage is sort of in my mind, a more kind of interesting way to go about it. It will keep you

Wes Bos: interested more. That's true, because at least you can make stuff that does something a lot, you know, that.

That's the thing is like I was trying to teach my nephew to code and he immediately wants to make a game. He immediately wants it to do something and look sweet and do cool things. And the, the layout is not as, as exciting for someone. So , honestly, follow your heart, right? Whatever it is, that's most exciting to you.

That's probably the cheat code is yeah. Yeah. The thing with Jake

Seth Whiting: is , Jake doesn't really know, . What's possible yet like he wouldn't know , Oh, I should start with HTML and CSS before I get into JavaScript, or I should start with JavaScript because it's more interesting or whatever. Yeah, it's kind of depending on me to steer him in the right direction.

And now I'm

Wes Bos: depending on you to help like

enough basics. Just , you don't have to know everything. People always say , get to know your fundamentals 100 percent before you move forward. And I don't think that's necessarily true. I didn't learn that way. I started with WordPress and jQuery and kind of worked my way back because like you said, it does something immediately.

And then I said, and then as you hit issues, you sort of fill in the gaps that you want, right? So it, of course, linearly, it, it might make sense to, to learn that way, but a lot of times you're, you're taking something that already works or a template or something like that and kind of tweaking it to, to do what you want.

I think a lot of people work very similar to that in my experience. So it's, it might not necessarily be a bad idea. So if

Seth Whiting: you, if you had somebody approach you. From square one, you know, blank slate. What do you, do you have an idea of what you would advise them? , where should they start kind of thing?

, or some sort of roadmap for , start here and then do this. Kind of thing. I

Wes Bos: always tell people you got to learn some basic HTML and CSS first. So build a site or two, do a simple layout. It doesn't have to be complex. It doesn't have to be like grid layout. Just put some stuff on the page, change the fonts, change the colors.

Understand what an element is, you know, be able to inspect and debug and, and change the colors on that. And, and that's what I always tell them. Cause , I don't have a beginner CSS or Java or sorry, I don't have a beginner HTML or CSS course. So I always tell people who are brand new to coding, like, Hey, can I take your JavaScript course?

And the answer to that is , no, you have to, you have to understand what, what a button is and what an element is as soon as you understand that. Just enough to squeak by then, okay, now we can start getting into the JavaScript and making it dynamic and whatnot. And, and then once you understand what event listeners are and what looping are and what arrays are and all the different data types, then maybe you can start dipping your toes into a framework like React or Next.

js or SvelteKit or

Seth Whiting: something like that. Yes. My, , quandary is , I know that full stack development basically is going to be the most , profitable or whatever, like it's going to have the most you know, the, the biggest value at the end of the day. Yeah. But there are several things that you could do that would take less time that wouldn't necessarily make as much money as that, or , you know, sustain, make you, you self sustainable as much.

But it's . Yeah, basically the trade off is , do you go big and go for the big pain stuff, you know, but commit to learning a while before you get anything, or should you kind of take an intermediary step and make websites

Jake Pacheco: first?

Wes Bos: My dilemma. Yeah, that's a really good question. , I think if you can try to figure out how to, how to go straight for what people are hiring for, that's probably your, your best bet.

Because , at the end of the day, you're, you're trying to, trying to get a job, trying to get your foot in the door to get that first job, you know? So if you can sort of hack it, and , I'll, I'll also say this, is that there's probably, A lot of people who are willing to hire for JavaScript where your HTML and CSS aren't ideal.

There's not a lot of jobs out there where you can just do HTML and CSS and you don't have to touch JavaScript. A lot of people always ask me, I was like, do you think I can get a job and just do HTML and CSS and leave the JavaScript for somebody else? And I don't think those jobs really exist all that much anymore.

So if you have to. Hack it and go straight for JavaScript. That's probably better than the alternative. Yeah,

Seth Whiting: I'll,

Jake Pacheco: I was just gonna say that, I'll say when, because I started with JavaScript, learned a bit of that and stuff, and then when I went into learning H T M L and C S s, I was like, oh, this is so, so much easier to pick up than JavaScript was.

Mm-hmm.

Wes Bos: or

Jake Pacheco: is, you know, just 'cause there's so, there's so much depth to JavaScript and I'm sure there is with HT m l and CSS that I haven't, you know, uncovered yet, but just it seems very The way that everything is put in place with HTML and some with CSS is like, wow, this is so straightforward. It makes sense that all of this does all of this, whereas, and also even just in the language, them, the way that they'll, , teach it to you, where It's like, yeah, no, this is a paragraph.

It makes sense. Whereas , they're like, Oh yeah, this is your variable. And you're going to adjust these variables and this array with this. And it's like, you're learning all of these, term and all this terminology all at once. And it's like, Oh my gosh, what, you know, just trying to keep track of what every.

Thing is object variable array. It's, it's, it just becomes a lot of the JavaScript sometimes. But, but then when you start doing it in react and it all works together, kind of, it, it starts to, I don't know. I liked the way it handshakes a lot more. And, and it, and the way things are written, it, it, it makes sense.

It's like, yeah, in this paragraph, I want these things adjusted and this is written like this.

Seth Whiting: And,

Jake Pacheco: , I, I, I don't know. I, I, I guess, I guess from the learner's perspective, I'm like, the minute I started doing, writing things in react, I was like, Oh man, why wasn't I doing this the whole time, just because when am I ever going to just write just vanilla JavaScript, you know what I mean, I guess is other than, I guess, what's it called?

When I'm adjusting legacy code or something or old code that someone might've written that isn't in react.

Wes Bos: I don't know. Yeah. It's like, I think the, I think the thing to know is that when you're writing react, you're writing JavaScript, right? And , you still do know, need to know how events and all that stuff works.

And I think if you were to dip into a lot more vanilla, you'd be like, Oh, this is in react. But it, it kind of does away with all of the, . Why doesn't this change when this changes, I remember one of my students put a variable in a paragraph and then they updated the variable and they're like, why isn't the paragraph updating?

And I'm , well, it's not reactive. You have to update the thing and it becomes a mess very quickly, right? It's, it's kind of hard. That's why we have, that's why we have frameworks. So if you can do away with a lot of those, tripping hazards. I like to call them, then it makes the learning a lot easier because there's not all these like, well, here's all these little gotchas you need to know and literally just go ahead and make the thing you want.

Seth Whiting: So I guess, I guess the the two options in my head are full stack development versus , go get a job at a WordPress dev shop. , I think people are still hiring for that kind of thing and I, I don't know, yeah, basically the route that I kind of decided to put him on was the former as opposed to the

Jake Pacheco: latter.

But let's also say he didn't just go, Hey, Jake, this is what you're going to do. He was like, well, what would you rather do? Would you rather learn all of it, which is going to take you a while, or do you want to just get into it to get into a job? Any old job will do just in web development, regardless. And I said, a hundred percent, I would rather , I would love to be able to build something from the beginning to the end and know everything that it does.

So that's. And now we're here,

Wes Bos: you know, yeah, there you go.

Seth Whiting: Yeah. So, but a big thing for beginning developers, especially the ones who just got their first job is the concept of imposter syndrome. Did you, did you ever feel

Wes Bos: that less in your career? Yeah. Not as much as I think a lot of people have, because we're talking about the.

My wife always says I have the, she said, unapologetically confident. She said that I was just like, Oh, I think I could figure it out. But yeah, a lot of times where you take on a job and you go, Oh, I don't know what I'm doing. Or first time I got asked to speak somewhere. You want me to speak there?

, I don't know what I'm doing, that type of thing. I think what you need to realize is that everybody is just winging it. Everybody's Googling everything. Everybody's just figuring it out. There's very few people that are literal geniuses and , and, and often those people don't have very good communication skills or whatever.

So if you, if you look and you , see somebody who's like a God amongst programmers. They are either just like you or me and they've, they're just have been hacking away at it for, for so long, or they are one in a million and most other people are, are just regular people, Google and stuff, figuring it out.

And you need to know that it's not uncommon at all. Yeah.

Seth Whiting: Who would you consider to be a, a God amongst programmers out

Wes Bos: of curiosity? I don't even know, cause , I don't, I don't necessarily , like that type of stuff where people put developers up on pedestals and say , they're because , it's, it's all about community and , there's certainly a lot of framework authors who I think are really clever and smart and I appreciate their insights into quite a bit of stuff.

But. , if you think about someone like Linus Torvald who made Linux, you know, Fabrice, I forget his last name and the guy who made FFmpeg, which is just amazing. Or the guy who works on YouTube DL, you know, they're just prolific type of stuff they made. And generally those types of people are working on low level projects that are next, next level.

, Ryan Dahl is probably a good, a good example is that Ryan Dahl had not a whole, he's the creator of Node. js and if you go and watch the first talk that he did to explain what Node. js was, it was very clear that he was 99 percent programming genius and 1 percent good at it. And , he's one of those people who's just like, yeah, you are working on a next level programming language, stringing together these ideas.

People are calling you crazy for doing what you're doing. And to me that type of person is amazing, but most of us are updating variables on a page. Yeah.

Seth Whiting: So those are the people that we need to reach out to for being guests on the show. Next. Yeah.

Jake Pacheco: Just to rewind a small bit is when you were saying how your wife looks at you when when you just pick up things and stuff like that. It reminds me of maybe my favorite quote. And it's he attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence.

And it was often difficult to tell which was which. That's like my favorite quote. Because that's Yeah. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I can do that. And it's like, yeah, but you might be being naive. Yeah. Whatever. I'm confident I can do it.

Wes Bos: Yeah. Sometimes you realize, you know what? I couldn't do that. Or , I definitely dropped the ball there and but that's, it's the frenzy made along the way that really matters.

Right. And you

Jake Pacheco: learned something. You learned you couldn't do it.

Wes Bos: It's exactly. Yeah,

Jake Pacheco: it's Douglas Adams. So, you know, someone who is probably from the twenties

Wes Bos: gets credit. Yeah. Somebody asked me that, , I, I fix a lot of stuff around the house, a lot of electronics and everyone says like, Oh, I would be too scared to open that up.

But I'm just like, you know what the, the amount of time I throw it in the effort bucket is, is very high, but I'm not afraid. It's just throw it in the effing bucket, you know, I'm like, worst case, this thing gets thrown in the trash, best case, I fix it. Yeah, worst case,

Jake Pacheco: it's just as broken as it was when I touched it at first, it's just already broken, it doesn't matter, yeah, exactly.

Seth Whiting: Wes, you mentioned just, just a second ago, , just in passing, you said, , oh, I dropped the ball on that one, can you, can you remember any, , Career moments where you feel like you dropped the ball.

Wes Bos: Oh I think I

Probably block those out of my memory. Let me think. , it's like those

Jake Pacheco: traumatic, seared

Wes Bos: out. Yeah. . Yeah.

I don't necessarily know about , dropping the ball or letting people down. Mm-hmm. , because I've, I kind of worked for myself. I've always Right, yeah. I've always tried to be very upfront with clients and, and whatnot, and that's sort of avoided that. But just projects that fizzle out or things that I think are gonna be a good idea and also put a whole bunch of time into it.

And then, , I've written, I wrote, I was writing, , a book on, , build tools maybe, , eight years ago. And then, , I got, , like, six months in, I realized, , you know what, , this stuff changes so quickly and it's so complicated and it's so dependent on everything. I don't think that this will make a very good piece of content.

So, I, I sort of scrapped it at that point. Yeah. I guess that's one example we have there.

Seth Whiting: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So, as far as in your career, I guess you, you depended on getting clients and stuff a lot. So one of the questions that we had written down to ask you is how, how much of a role do you think people skills and soft skills or whatever played in, in your

Wes Bos: particular career?

Quite a bit, I think. So I don't have the best interpersonal skills and. I'm not necessarily the best at formulating my thoughts, which is hilarious because I'm, I have a podcast, but yeah I think being able to write a good email to pick up the phone, writing a good email is, is a really important one.

I often have Scott, my co host before we sent off it, when we were doing sponsors and stuff, you'd always send it through me. And I that? People don't know how to address tone. And to get that stuff across. So, I think that is super important. Knowing how to get thoughts across. Clearly communicate what it is you're trying to convey.

And just, yeah, , a lot of times, a lot of the jobs are from, you go for beers with somebody and then they say, Oh, you know what? I have a buddy who needs the website or , so much of that was just word of mouth. And it was all based on . I , I don't know how good of a JavaScript programmer this West guy is, but seems cool.

I bet I can probably figure help you out, you know, so that was, and a lot of the jobs I got early on or just from going to , they were tweet ups at the time. So I would go to . A bar and there would just be a bunch of Toronto, Twitter users there. Cause Twitter was so small that you could fit all the Toronto Twitter users in a room.

And you'd meet a lot of people and a lot of those people were in tech and, and that's how you get a lot of the jobs. So , it's, it's just about shaking hands, kissing babies, getting to know people it's such an important skill to have, I think. How many

Seth Whiting: babies do you think you kissed in your career?

Wes Bos: A lot of grown men. Yeah.

Jake Pacheco: Same, same.

Seth Whiting: That's awesome. But yeah, if you if you didn't know, if he didn't tell you Scott actually agreed to be our second guest. Oh, there you go. Yeah.

Wes Bos: Bring up that story. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that, that's a perfect example of having good people skills is that Scott, my co host on the podcast released a course under the same name of a course that I had.

And I emailed him and said, Hey, . Could you not , and because both of us have good people skills, I was able to word an email nicely enough. And that sort of showed my point of view and he was able to understand, Hey, maybe I can work with you. And we became friends after that and started popular podcasts, you know, , yeah, because If, if both of us were jerks, then that would have never happened.

And it's amazing how many doors can be opened by being cool to someone.

Seth Whiting: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I, I fully

Jake Pacheco: agree

Seth Whiting: with that. Yeah. I wonder, how, do you think that a developer can make it in the field if they don't have good

Wes Bos: people skills? Oh yeah. I, I, I think so. Because. A lot of developers are, are just really smart, you know, I, I think most of them have good people skills, but , if your smarts can outweigh the fact that you don't have good skills and a manager can manage you then, then absolutely, but , at least in my journey where I've , never really had a manager, you know, it's just been communicating with people that's been pretty important.

And I think those initial, You Introductions I got from meeting people were super important,

Seth Whiting: right? Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I think, you know, I, I've met, I've definitely met a bunch of developers with varying people skills, you know, and some of them, some of them are really good and don't have a lot of people skills and you know, some of them are the opposite.

Wes Bos: It can also, it's, it's something that can certainly be learned. , it's not like, Oh, I'm not good at people skills. , cause. We had Ryan doll on our podcast a couple of months ago, and the guy is so eloquent in the way he speaks. And he has such good outlook on life and everything, even the way, he had a sick pick and it was, it was a kite and , he's like, go fly a kite.

And he explained why flying a kite was such a nice thing to do. And I was like, this guy's like a poet with his words go back 12 years ago. And, and he had a hard time. Explaining why Node. js was such an exciting thing. So obviously he's, he's learned and gotten really good at that communication point of view and that coupled with being a literal genius is, is worked out for him.

Yeah, that's

Jake Pacheco: awesome. Yeah. I actually

Seth Whiting: remember that episode. That was a good episode.

Jake Pacheco: Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah, I, I had a feeling. I mean, I think that's how it is with a lot of jobs. , I know I've gotten jobs before I was a machinist before I was a barber and that I didn't know I had never been Touch the machine before I had never a vertical lathe, horizontal lathe, , any of that stuff was , just gibberish to me.

So, but I was able to, you know, kind of talk my way into the job and I was like, Hey, I have mechanical skills and I figure it out. Yeah. And, you know, I just, yeah, that again, approach it with that confidence kind of a thing and it's, and it worked out and Seth and I have kind of talked a lot about that and I feel like there's a misconception about programmers in general, though, that they're all very , kind of reclusive kind of cryptic , you know, quiet people and it's, but every, every programmer that I've met so far has only, tried to help me get into it or been actually pretty talkative about it And it's it's yeah, it's kind of odd that that's that's the misconception that's gone around I guess Yeah, it's just cuz it's like you're at home on a screen a lot of the time or something So they kind of assume that

Wes Bos: I could be totally wrong that has changed from the Early days, you know, yeah, right.

Seth Whiting: That's what I was gonna say. I feel like it was sort of that was the thing a while ago, but I feel like I think because it's become a lot more accessible in the past, decade or two or whatever, , I feel like more people just normal people, not Linus Torvalds or anyone like that.

It is like, Oh yeah, I can actually do this. Everything is so abstracted now. Like, Oh, I just need to put these building blocks together and I can actually make something now that , you know, your average, everyday person can just pick it up and run with it. They don't need to start with writing machine code and to, to make their own video games.

Wes Bos: Exactly. Yeah. You don't need to be some . Dungeon basement dweller to learn. Yeah, she got to be a problem solver.

Jake Pacheco: Yeah, sometimes you can be like me and love talking to people, love D& D and learning coding. Yeah, maybe all the things, who knows so I, I

Wes Bos: guess,

Jake Pacheco: just a, the, the, the full question I guess is if you were to start it, start coding right now, or, you know, I.

Do you have someone really close to you that are your clone? It needs to learn coding. And you're like, Hey, this is how you get started in web development with JavaScript. How would you get them started? Do you think?

Wes Bos: I'd say obviously start a little bit of HTML, CSS, be able to build a page, lay it out and then I'll, I'll plug my, if it's a friend of mine, I'll give them free access to my beginner JavaScript course. Because that is, that's literally people ask me, , how do I get started with JavaScript? And that's beginner JavaScript.

Or if people say, yeah, I understand the basics of it, but I just want to get better. That's what my JavaScript 30 course, that one's free. It's basically, you need to build a lot of stuff, you know, you need to over and over and over again before you get better. So that's it. , there's no single ticket.

To it, I often people say , Oh yeah, I want to, , I got six months. I want to learn. I want to get a job. And yeah, that's a little bit more messy than that. Right. It's a little bit more of find your own way. And of course there's courses and stuff that can speed you up quite a bit versus the time it took me to learn.

But you, you just got to put in the time you got to build stuff. And ideally you'll get excited about it. And have ideas and start to go off on little tangents because that's, that's what I see the, the most exciting thing is when someone takes my course, they say, yeah, I took your course. And sometimes they're like, I didn't even finish it, but I got 80 percent of the way through and I thought, you know what, I have an idea, I'm going to build something else.

And I was able to take your app and turn it into what I want. I was able to understand enough of the parts and build it into what it is I wanted to build.

Jake Pacheco: That's cool. That's wicked cool. I mean, that must be super exciting for you also to be able to see , you know, people actually like creating careers out of the stuff that you're teaching.

That must be . Yeah, the, you know,

Wes Bos: the app Riverside we use to record our podcast is built on one of my node courses. And he said, there's still code from the course. I use this thing like three times a week to record a podcast and it's the guy who built it. , I don't even know if I could build that thing, but the guy who built it.

took my course to learn how to learn the fundamentals and said, okay, I can see how I can now turn this. That's

Jake Pacheco: sick. Yeah. Cause that's what I was talking to Seth about was Riverside recently. I was like, Hey, should we do this? But

Wes Bos: that's so cool. Huh? Interesting. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, cool.

Jake Pacheco: Yeah. Yeah. You

Seth Whiting: know, we've, we've taken up a lot of your time, but you know, super, super appreciate it.

Before we go Definitely want to open, open the floor to you to , plug anything that you want people to check out or anything like that. We, we don't, we haven't done sick pics before, so we probably won't start it now, but shameless plugs, we can

Wes Bos: do that. So, westboss. com, W E S B O S dot com forward slash courses, list of all my courses, bunch of free ones, bunch of paid ones.

I have. cssgrid. io, which learns, you'll learn cssgrid, flexbox. io, it's a free one for learning flexbox some intro ones to React, some advanced ones, beginner JavaScript, just take a look and see what you got there. I'm kind of in this business to help people to learn to code and to launch their careers off of it.

Seth Whiting: And I would definitely say if you, if you are into developing Enough to where you kind of feel a bit comfortable. That's a perfect time to start listening to Syntax. , when I, so Syntax is Wes and Scott Chalinsky's podcast, which is the best web development podcast out there. I started listening to it in 2017, I think.

And that's, that was a huge catalyst for , Holy crap, I'm learning so much and , I'm able to apply this immediately today to what I'm working on. So that's, that was a huge, huge boost in my career. So thank you for, for making that,

Jake Pacheco: that

Wes Bos: podcast

Seth Whiting: and yeah, so if you, if you are listening to this.

And you already know a little bit of how to code, I would say, you know, start checking them out too, for sure.

Jake Pacheco: And I also just want to say thanks so much for being on here with us, bud. It

Seth Whiting: means a lot

Wes Bos: less. Thanks. Oh, you're welcome. Yeah, it's fun. I'm glad to join you. Awesome.

Seth Whiting: Thanks. Well, yeah, as always, listeners stick with it.

Keep going and keep swimming and get over the hump and get, get on Wes's

Wes Bos: level. Get it together.

Jake Pacheco: Thanks.

Wes Bos: Yeah.