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The web development industry has felt pretty turbulent lately - AI disruption, layoffs, hiring freezes, and endless doom-scrolling. So in this episode, we’re flipping the script. There’s actually some genuinely good news happening in web development right now. From developer job numbers quietly ticking back up, to Nvidia’s internal AI experiment showing productivity gains without eliminating roles, to Interop 2026 launching with all major browser vendors aligned on compatibility - the industry may be stabilizing more than it seems. We also talk about how AI is making our jobs easier (yes, really), why frameworks like React, Vue, and Svelte have matured into stable foundations, and why the “AI bias” toward certain tools is starting to disappear. In this episode Matt and Mike cut through the noise and highlight what’s actually going right in web development - and why this might be one of the best times to adapt rather than panic.
Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcast/some-good-news-for-web-developers
Use our Scrimba affiliate link (https://scrimba.com/?via=htmlallthethings) for a 20% discount!! Full details in show notes.
So Mike tells me that this episode is going to have some good news in it. In fact, he put it in the
title. I don't know if it's going to remain the title or whatever. Maybe by the end of this episode
it'll be like the hopefully good, but probably bad news. Come on. It's a good news episode.
But though, we've been hearing a lot of, I don't know if it's gloom and doom, but there's a lot of
changes going on in the web development space, whether that's AI, the job market, the way people
code things, which is, I mean, largely changed due to AI. Some people are mourning the craft of
seeing that article pop up in my daily dev a few times. I haven't read it. And so it's a big
kind of a mess. And so we're hopefully going to shed some light on some good news here in this
episode. So if this sounds interesting to you and want to support the show, you can go and check
us out on that Patreon, leave a review or writing on your podcast app, join us in our discord server,
share this with your friends. And if you want to help out not only yourself, but us as well,
you can net yourself up to 20% off a scrimber pro plan. And you can do that via the link in the show
description and the show notes with full details and the show notes on HTML all the things.
.com. So Mike, you actually wrote up this episode. You were in charge of the episode. I was in
charge of the web news this week. So sir, why don't you let us know why I should not be so sad.
Yeah, no, absolutely. So honestly, like, my life, I said this a little while ago, actually,
on one of the episodes where my happiness, not even happiness, but like my optimism indicator,
keeps doing this where like sometimes I'm super optimistic. Everything's great. And sometimes
I'm super down. So right now, I'm trying to make myself go on the upswing because everything kind of,
I don't know, it's tough. It's a tough time out there. Like I'm tired of the negativity.
There's a lot of negativity around development right now. You know, every single one of these AI
companies is coming after us apparently. So it's just not great. But having said that,
it's not all doom and gloom, right? Like, you know, there's some, there's some light points in our
industry and there's some like positive news. And that's what I want to talk about this week.
I want to have a nice light episode where we can discuss all the positive stuff. We don't have
to throw in all the negative stuff in this. Obviously, we might touch on some negatives to contrast
and compare to what we're going to be talking about. But all of the topics here that I have today
are positive, which is great. And I'm excited to talk positive things with everyone.
And having said that, is that your ASMR voice? Did you transition? I transitioned to my calm,
relaxing ASMR voice. Everyone can just relax now if you're driving. Feel free to close your eyes.
No, I'm just joking. Say, don't do that. What the heck?
But yeah, no, let's let's jump into some positive things. And the first positive thing here
is that in 2026, it's looking like job numbers for developers in general are actually going up.
Wow, isn't that weird? Like we were looking at it last year and everything, you know,
there's a bunch of downtrends. There was a lot of layoffs. But in general,
since the start of 2026, we're seeing a pretty big upswing in the job market. This is
specifically for the United States. And I got this little chart here coming from actually a post
on X from Per Borcan, who is the CEO of scrimba, one of our affiliates that we have. And yeah,
it's looking like the job market is rebounding a little bit. And there are jobs opening up
for web developers, which is great news. Like I love to see that. It's obviously not like
spiking exponentially high. There's still going to be a challenging market. But overall,
we're seeing an upwards trend, which is exactly what I was hoping to see in the job market. And I
don't know. It's just it's one of those things where if you look at social media, right,
everyone is talking about layoffs. Everyone is talking about the recession, the incoming recession,
which is the trademark to be incoming for the last 10 or 15 years. I was going to say,
which reference are you talking about? The 2019 one, the 2021, 2021, 2021, 2022. Please let me
stop. Like it might come. I'm not saying it won't come. You know, there's indicators, whatever.
We're not economists. We're not economists. And we can't plan for every single little thing.
Have a nice safety buffer. That's great. You know, like, you know, save some money. That's not
bad news. That's not bad advice, regardless of what the situation is. But all we can do is look
at the numbers as they are today. And today, the index is going up, right? Like the index,
and by index, I mean the index of how many developers are being hired. And that's good news.
That's what I want to celebrate, right? Like this isn't something, you know,
yes, we can bring it back down to reality and be like, oh, what about compared to 2021
when the market was moving? No, like that wasn't a realistic comparison. That was a crazy
market because of a global pandemic, right? Like that was a completely different conversation.
We can't compare stuff to that. Can we compare it to pre-pandemic? The numbers are going up
to pre-pandemic, which is good, right? Like yes, it's harder to get a job. You can't just call
any tech company and be like, I just finished my bootcamp. Can I have a job and get, you know,
$100,000 thrown at you? That was never going to be a realistic outcome of the web development
industry anyway. So people that took advantage of that, I'm really happy that that was around.
But now with, yeah, it's a competitive landscape with jobs that are available to be had. And I can
even say this, Iaring has become a lot more difficult than you would think. There's not a lot of
very high level applicants out there. I've personally felt it. I've talked to other engineer
managers that I felt it. Like hiring time to hire has gone up over the last like six months,
because AI put in a big wrench into things of being like a bunch of candidates are just using AI
to create their resumes and tailor their resumes. And then a bunch of, because of that, or not,
not even because of that, maybe it was the opposite direction. Employers are also using AI to filter
candidates. So like this AI versus AI matchup is happening, which makes it very difficult to know
who's real and who's not, who's a real good candidate and who's not. And like a lot of times you'll
get on an interview even and the interviews seem off because you're kind of, you're kind of doubting
someone's ability because maybe they're using AI during the interview. I've personally had that
experience a couple of times where some people have like most obviously used AI. They had the AI
pause every time I asked the question. So like it's a weird time to hire. So if you're a legitimately
good developer and you're very, you know, you've hit the basics that we've talked about a lot
on the podcast where you have the good foundation, you've done the social media stuff, you've gone to
meetups, you have a good network, you have projects in your portfolio, you have the social proof
that you can get in. If you're, and you have experience, especially, there's, you know, it's
not impossible for you to find a job right now. That's what I'm seeing at least with these numbers.
And again, if you get in front of someone and you're, you're being genuine with them,
they can usually feel that, right? Like you say, oh, I don't know to, honestly,
the people that said, I don't know to a question during my, during the interviews that I had,
were the people that I most trusted if that's weird. Now, there were plenty of people that were
really good, that knew every single answer, because a lot of my questions were very straightforward.
But regardless, like I would be like, oh, you don't know, that's good. So, you know, not everyone
knows everything. And usually the, it's followed by, I don't know, but I can probably look it up here,
here, and here, I can do this, this, and this. And like they'll explain what they would do to
actually understand the concept that I'm asking. And that's perfectly fine. So be genuine,
be good at, be good in the interviews. And I do believe that we're at a point where we can see
that job numbers start going up. And that could open up more positions. I don't know what that's
going to do for the junior market. I still think that there's a little bit of negativity there maybe.
But I do think that if the job numbers keep going up and you can adapt to the current landscape
of AI, you do have a chance as well, just like it was before pandemic.
Well, I was actually going to mention something to you here is that you and I were discussing some
ideas of some content and some business things that we were, that we were going to do before this
podcast. And one of the things that I noticed is like the like you were talking to me about
development. And even though I don't like code all that much, usually I can generally understand
what you're talking about enough to talk shop. And you were talking about some stuff that I
had no idea what you're talking about. You were talking about some AI things that I sincerely was
just like, I've heard the name, but I don't know how to integrate that. And you're like,
oh, try this side of that. Like, you know, move this around to this. And I'm just like, I don't
know. And so I was thinking, you know, I'm kind of an idiot. And then I brought up something that I
use, which is like a new or AI tool. And you're like, what is that? And so immediately, I'm like,
oh, like, okay, like maybe I'm not a fool. Maybe there's just a lot of stuff out there. The reason
why I bring that up is because I wouldn't be surprised if the, if the junior market, and this is an
assumption, but the junior market is going to suffer from this general landscape. And the reason why
that is is because now it's like, hey, you know, know all this coding stuff so that you can answer
these interview questions because I assume the interview questions haven't changed less
having more AI questions. So now it's like, here's our five or 10, let's just say it's 10 and 10.
10 questions on the coding knowledge, which you need to know. And without AI being present in
the room effectively. And then here's 10 questions of, you know, you coding with AI. Now, maybe that's
changing. I don't know. I haven't been in a job interview, but I can see the anxieties, the
worries, and the issues there for junior devs because if you were somebody even just last year,
if you were like, you know what, that's it. I'm going to, I'm going to learn JavaScript,
or I'm going to learn a programming language of any kind, Python, whatever. And you've never
done it before. You know, you're still really kind of, depending on how much you're training
yourself, you're really kind of mastering the idea of sort of thinking like a computer and
breaking problems down into logical bricks and things like that. And then people are coming in
and being like, yeah, but now you also need to be the manager of these agentic pipelines. And
you need to do this and you need to do that. And before instead of the agentic pipelines and stuff,
really the anxiety of the workplace anxiety was the version control. And that could be solved
relatively easily by with some basic commands and things with Git. And then it was maybe CI,
you know, continuous integration. It was like, those type of things may be writing tests. And then
I mentioned that to you, Mike. And you're like, well, tests are all written by AI now. And like that,
I didn't know that. You know, I'm mostly doing project solo. Like I don't, I do a lot of tests,
but I don't really write tests and do code reviews and all this because who am I bouncing it off of,
you know, me and then me and the future. So it doesn't make sense for my project. And so,
like thinking, if I were today, be like, okay, that's it. I'm going to go for a job interview.
Those are my primary anxieties is I've been, you know, I'd have to study up on some code stuff,
fine, granted, but then I have no idea what all this other stuff is. And by the way,
it's one of those things where there's people that have quote unquote mastered it,
but it's all brand new and it's moving so quickly that even you don't recognize, you Mike,
don't recognize some of the tools that I use and I don't recognize some of the tools you use.
Yeah, there's no one that's mastered it. I can, I can confidently say that everyone is still
very early stages of what's going on. And anyone that would claim they mastered it, I wouldn't listen
to them for any work, like anything worth of salt. Anyone that says, Hey, like I've been using this
for the last couple of years, I've gotten this, this, this, this done, but I don't know what I'm doing.
Those are the people that I would listen to because that's the reality of the situation. Like,
a lot of people, there's a lot of new things coming out every single day and how we
prompt how we use these AI tools is changing, like the most efficient way is changing very rapidly.
We had a web news, we had a web news last week where we talked about the models changing very
rapidly. So like the capabilities are changing very rapidly. So to assume that you've mastered
something that has been around for very little time and probably has changed a million times
while you were using it is, is wrong. But having said that your worry of like ramping up in it,
I think that would go away if you started to use it for like a week or two because you start to
re, I think you'll start to realize that, Hey, this isn't, this isn't rocket science. I have this
foundation of development. This is really just building slightly on top of that. And really it's,
it's a lot more human language than technical language, if that makes sense. Now, there's a lot of
caveats in this. And the reason that I think jobs are going up is because it's not like a
layman person that doesn't have any technical background cannot walk in and start orchestrating
agents to build them crazy sophisticated systems that are scalable to the to infrastructures.
Not possible. I don't know when that will be possible. I hesitate to say if ever like because
you know stuff can change. But I wouldn't, even if it was possible, I wouldn't want that to happen
because these systems that are need to be used by critical infrastructure by people, right?
You want someone that understands what's being built, building them, right? So that they can go in
and troubleshoot them and help people and talk, talk to them in the right way and, and make
sustainable systems and not make one-off applications that don't make any sense, right? Like so,
that's where I see the safety in the industry where expertise is still very, very valuable.
Because we can do a lot now with AI that's not necessarily making us like super fast. Like,
I think there were some studies done last year where it's not, it's showing that like,
yes, we're committing more code, but it's not like fundamentally the code, the
features that are being built out aren't really changing that much. Because what the reality is
is that the pipeline, like where the bottleneck is for building features isn't code. It would never
was code. It was always the product to people and it was always the see, like the management,
the product, the finance, like it was always many, many lines down. The communication.
The communication. Exactly. And so the code was always done. And yeah, we can code a little bit
faster now, but that's not going to change the timelines that much as much as you think. Because
regardless of how fast we can code, are we coding the right thing? How are we using it? Like the
iterative cycle has become faster, which is good means that we can test something out quickly
and see if it's actually worthwhile and then move on to something else, right? Like we can actually
do run proof of concept tests very quickly. That's the advantage that I see more than anything
with these with these tools, rather than just, hey, let's replace developers. It's not really a thing
because if you want to build those tests and if you want to build those proof of concepts and
if you want to get those features done, you're still going to be relying on developers with a
caveat, developers that adapt to AI, developers that embrace these tools and learn about them and
continuously improve, which is what I'm seeing right now is most developers. Everyone that I talk
to pretty much like we have the open call, by the way, Matt, for a while now, where like anyone
that has isn't using these tools and is finding success and is fine with it and his bosses are
fine with it and they're refusing to use the tools. We want you on the podcast because
it's something we want to talk to you about and we want to get your point of view and we want
other people to hear it as well because it's not something that I'm able to like actually find.
I'm seeing like YouTube warriors talk about this stuff, but that's it. Like I don't know if they're
bots. I don't know if they're actually developers. I don't know who they are. No one has
agreed to come on the podcast. No one has really talked to every developer that I know in my personal
life is embracing these tools, some reluctantly, but they're embracing them and using them and seeing
benefits from them. Period. It's pretty fun. You say that because I've started to see on social media,
the odd posts for people who are like, I think we're in a bubble because I talk to this group of
developers or these developers at this huge enterprise or these developers at this corporation and
they've never heard of Claude code. They've never heard of this. They've never heard of that and
some of them are just getting into it maybe or whatever. That's one issue with social media and
internet and algorithms in general is like, if you are on the everything is going down, we're in
a recession and the job market's terrible, that's what the algorithm is going to show you more of
naturally. I want to touch on one thing you said too, is you're saying for me, you're like,
if I started to learn this pipeline stuff because it's natural language, a lot of the anxieties
would go away. I agree with that, but from the junior developer perspective, it's once again,
yet another legal block that they have to learn. I'm coming at it with that foundation like you're
saying. It's another thing where it's like, man, I just learned how if statements work and now it's
like, well, you better pass it on to an agent. You don't know what that is. All right, let's get the
old agents fired up and this again goes back to the thing I've mentioned on the show a couple of
times where the websites we're building are the same websites. We are building the same websites.
The same websites are being built over and over and over and over again, and I'm talking yes
websites. I know there's unique web apps and things that come out, but it's crazy. Sometimes I'm
speechless when it comes to like, here's another 18 tools. Okay, what does it do? Well, it ensures
that the slider, the slider shows up. It's like, I've had sliders for 15 years. What's going on?
Like yeah, like there is a lot of that, but I have seen like this is another kind of good news topic
that I have here is that stuff is maturing quite a bit. I'll do this a little bit out of order,
but frameworks are maturing, right? It's like, that's my next good news topic because
I don't know if this is related to AI. I'm not sure if it may be it is, but regardless,
I'm seeing there be a lot less new frameworks coming out. There's still some, but it's not
anywhere near the amount that was coming out maybe three or four years ago where it was like
literally every week, there was some new framework that was big and popular and then it was just
gone or something like that. Now, it's it seems to be pretty solidified like Svelte React view
and then you know, the meta frameworks around them, solid JS, next JS Svelte kit, like those
those have remained to fluctuate a little bit, but even they are pretty solidified as well.
And that's been pretty nice because we don't have to go out and like keep an eye on every single
little thing, every single little new thing that's coming out, that's revolutionizing the
revolutionizing the industry. Really, these frameworks have all become so stable and good at this
point that I have no problem recommending either like all three of them. React has gone through a
little bit of a rocky patch with its vulnerabilities being pretty severe with their React server
components, but like, regardless, it's not really that big of a deal. It's all fairly easily
fixable. That stuff will happen. But regardless, all three of these are solid. All three of them
have good resources. All three of them are known by AI now, right? Like that was another point that I
had last year where like, I think there, I thought there was going to be this moat that React creates
that no other framework could survive. But what what's been happening lately is all these newer
models that are trained on newer and newer things are becoming better and better at all the other
frameworks. So like realistically, the I models that I'm using can write Svelte just as good as they
can write React now, which is awesome. And reviews the same thing. And so like, it seems that they've
got they've understood how to provide the right data to AI models to ramp up on newer technologies
pretty quickly. And so AI can help you out in pretty much any technology now, especially if you
enable like docs reading and stuff like that. It's just it seems to have gotten a lot better,
which is nice. So you have choice. It's not an overwhelming amount of choice anymore,
which is kind of cool. And all the choices are good. So it's kind of like, it's good news.
Like I like that. I like having choice. I like having all the choices be good. And all the communities
are kind of like supportive of each other, even I've noticed that too. Like no one's like raw raw
only React people. A lot of people I see are like, oh, React's cool. You can try out other ones.
They're all fine too. Like that's how I'm seeing it for the most part. I'm sure there's corners of
the internet where there's a little bit more agnostic or antagonistic, but like, not that I'm seeing,
which is good. And yeah, like it's it's not, you know, a huge good news thing, but it makes our
life simpler. Well, I guess, I guess one one question I have there with the maturing is like,
we saw like that tailwind CSS, for example, was like really suffering because like they didn't have
the traffic going to their documentation. And then therefore like that's kind of where they're
advertising their products and things like that. But I assume, you know, things like spell,
react and view like they don't really have, you know, that same pipeline, which is good. I guess
my question though is that tailwind CSS situation, if we blame it on the lack of web traffic, would
it eventually mean that less websites would be made slash web apps? Because you're like, look,
yes, it can teach you these web app tools so much better, but websites aren't getting traffic
anymore. So then what is the value of the website to the person that owns the website?
So there's a bit of a question. A bit of a devil's advocate in a positive episode,
but something that I got an all kind of a deep thought I had, I suppose. To be honest,
obviously, yes, that is that is the case, but a lot of work like development work out there
isn't building public facing stuff. Most development work, like I don't have a number for you.
And I'm not, you know what, I'm not even going to throw out a number that I think because I have
no stats to prove this, but I will say that from my understanding and from my own experience,
most development work out there is building internal like internal applications,
right? Like so you're building a dashboard, you're building an internal admin panel, you're
building a finance tool for your internal teams, you're building connections between one CRM and
another CRM, you're developing on top of a CRM. Like all those are the most hired positions from
what I'm seeing. The developers that are working on public facing stuff, there might be less of that
moving forward, right? Like that might be the true case, but I feel like that will be supplemented
by the need for more internal applications due to the velocity at which people can build internal
applications. Like if before we were talking about, hey, CRM's like, you know, HubSpot ruled the
day and no one can replace them, right? Because they're just so established. I see the future where
instead of paying millions of dollars for HubSpot subscriptions, because that's how much they cost
in some large corporations. A company will decide, hey, why don't I just hire three, you know,
developers that have good experience to build me the solution with AI and maintain it with AI?
And that'll be much cheaper than the $3 million HubSpot subscription. And so that's why if you're
looking at the stock market today, a lot of these large court like SaaS companies are actually down
quite a bit, right? Because their futures are looking a little bit rocky. Like we're not sure if
they'll be able to sustain the thing. So they hire a lot of developers, so that could affect
the developer market. I want to make that clear, but they might they might have to pivot to something
else. Like they might have to find another way to utilize those developers to make more money,
right? So it might provide a little bit of a catalyst in the market to change up how these
old systems used to work. It's not going to be universal. You're not going to see every single
company move away from stuff like HubSpot. That's not going to happen. The reason that we're
looking at predictions like future markets is that it's just unstable. It's just unknown. That's
why the market's going down. It's not because everyone's just going to drop HubSpot and they're going
to lose millions and millions of dollars overnight. It's just like their path to gain more millions
is now a little bit more rocky. And that's true. But that could potentially benefit the developer
market by allowing more developers to be hired in different companies, like spread them out.
And maybe smaller companies to be formed that can do the job of HubSpot in specific ways.
I don't know. Like again, this is a good news episode. I'm trying to put my optimistic hat on.
I do agree that yes, the internet will change. So there will probably be less public facing stuff.
There will be a different way to browse. There might be these weird apps that like personal apps
that people create in one prompt. We'll talk about that on the web news at some point. But like,
regardless, whatever it's out, whatever whatever happens, it's probably going to be different
than we have today. But that doesn't mean that there will be less developer jobs because of it.
Okay. Yeah. Like, and I agree. Like, I know that there are companies that are totally,
totally doing asset management and things using internal tools. Obviously, the licensing fees for
some of these SaaS, like some of the subscription fees are getting out of control. I mean,
we see people grow out of places like Webflow. For example, if they go all the way to their top
plan, which is a call, which my last check was, you know, hey, you got to call Webflow,
contact us to like get a price. And then sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, it's 40 grand a month
or whatever. And you know, that's not sustainable, depending on your profit margins, things like that.
I get that. It's just, it is, it's just a question, like, you know, because it's like,
spell in that they don't rely on that web traffic. And so it's just a, I don't know, there's
still a lot of unknowns, I guess. Yeah. Open source is seeing a very different world over the
past three or four years. Like most profit, like most open source projects that are trying to be
profitable are now looking to be bought by like developer tooling essentially as far as I understand.
So like for example, Svelte and next JS and Svelte kid are owned by Versel, like it's not owned by
like it's still an open source project that anyone can fork and contribute to, but the creators of
them are working for Versel and all of the creators are working on those products. So Versels
is essentially paying them to work on an open source project, right? And the same thing is
happening with something like bun, which is like a Node.js competitor. Anthropic just bought them
because they built cloud code on top of bun. So they wanted the creator to come in and help them
stabilize it and help them with a bunch of stuff. It made sense. So a lot of these
open source projects are being subsidized by larger corporations, but that are remaining
open source. It's a little bit weird and like, Iki, right? Like you think about it, you're like,
oh, these open source creators are brilliant on all this money coming from these essentially
VCs, like a lot of these massive companies are VC funded, which is scary because anytime the VC
drain dries up, it could mean that these open source projects get abandoned. We haven't seen that
happen yet. I anticipate in the next five years, that'll probably happen with a big project.
But the great news is that they've left the same licensing. So if the creator of the project
does step down because of something like that, that doesn't mean that the project is dead,
that just means that there's probably some other maintainer that has to take it up. So,
I don't know. I remain a little bit optimistic on it because I've seen some benefit from that,
like Svelte being able, like Rich Harris, which is the creator of Svelte being able to work on
it full-time has made it a lot more stable. The same thing with like the next JS creators,
like having the ability to allow these creators to work on these projects full-time rather than
as a side job. I've personally seen the benefit of that, but I don't know how it will play out
in like five or six years. So that's actually another kind of a little bit of at least today good
news that could backfire later on, but at least it's nice today. Cool. With that, let's move on
to the next good news topic here. And this one I actually did not know existed and apparently
has been around for a little while now. But there's this thing called interop, which is a kind of a
conglomerate, not a conglomerate, a consortium, I should say, of different companies that work on
browsers. So for example, there's an interop 2026, which apparently just launched in February,
on February 12th, which a few, as actually a week ago, where Google, Apple, Microsoft,
Mozilla, and Agalia, I'm not sure who Agalia is. Maybe it's Opera or something like that. They
didn't know idea, but they all met together like their browser teams all met and they decided on
what to work on for the next year so that we can they can make the interoperability of browsers
better. So that I would say that, you know, 2025 best year ever for a browser interoperability,
not perfect. Obviously, there's still some things on Safari that don't work on Firefox and Chrome
whatever. But like compared to 10 years ago, it's like night and day, like 90, 97% apparently,
like this is the statistic from 2025 of pass rate across all browsers for all for the
like features working consistently across browsers. That's crazy. And so this year, they're doing
the same thing. They're trying to tackle again in other 20 focus areas for this year to try to
again, bring all the browsers to have a similar or the same feature set and make it easier for us
developers to develop for like less testing across browsers, less, you know, discrepancies across
browsers. That's only a good thing for everyone. There's still competition in the space. Mozilla
is still alive, which I'm happy about, even though I don't really use it that much. I like where
that's headed. I like that they're working together. It's not like, you know, we're trying to build
something and not not help each other out there, help each other out there, making sure that
all the browsers can be used in the same way and allow the competition to succeed.
I mean, definitely good news because I remember when we first started, this was the number one
annoying thing where you'd build something, you'd go to another browser and it was like all messed up.
You'd have to have like another layer that would convert it. What was that babble or whatever
to convert it for you? That's what a lot of the website builders would use in fact at the time.
I don't know what the status of babble is now, but it was like a really big issue, especially
with internet explorer. And then eventually like edge, not edge chromium, but the original edge,
it certainly was better than internet explorer, but unfortunately it still had its own kind of
quirks and then you had to mess around with that. And I will say there are still some quirks,
but usually it's something stupid like, oh, you know, I'm trying to do this like weird box shadow
thing. And in this one browser, it's one pixel off, you know, is it, is it like an absolute showstopper
issue? No, before it would be like, oh my god, like my box shadows in the top left of every single
page. For some reason, and it's not around the box, like what's happening here? And the page
would just be completely broken and absolutely destroyed. So this is totally some good news.
I also looked up what a galea is. So a galea, this is just from their description of their website,
is a highly specialized company developing innovative open source solutions for a large set of
software and hardware platforms. And then related to this, it is the top consultancy in open source
browsers with the most expertise found in the consulting business. They play an essential role
in several open web projects such as Chromium slash Blink, WebKit, Firefox, and Servo.
So they're like the glue that keeps all this together. More or less. Yeah. Wow. Okay.
Well, I've definitely seen the name of galea, but it's one of those things where you kind of see it
in the bottom of a footer, like copyright galea or whatever. And then you're just, I'm not going to
Google every copyright thing that I see all over the place. Obviously. Yeah.
And like to add a little bit to the browser stuff that the browser market has never been better
in my opinion. There's a lot of like these little smaller browsers that seem to be competing
with the larger browsers stuff like helium. It's a really good open source Chromium style browser
that has a bunch of cool features. What's the other ones? Zen, which is like a Firefox-based open
source, not open source, but it's a Firefox-based browser. And it has some really cool features.
Like there's a bunch of these browsers because I've been actually looking for a new browser. I'm on
ARC and I've just it's still works. I'm still I haven't been able to switch. So it works.
It just has these sticky features for me that I can't replicate on any other browser. And the problem
with ARC is that its performance is not great, but my thing is is that I have a MacBook that's
fairly modern. And I don't notice the performance being bad. The only time I notice it is when the
memory starts to get like used like crazy and all of a sudden I'm out of memory, which happens
sometimes like once every month or something like that. So it hasn't been enough for me to switch
because I like the way that they handle workspaces. And I have not found a single browser that handles
workspaces in the same way that's Chromium-based. So Zen is actually the closest one to ARC that I
almost switched to because it's but because it's Firefox has these weird inconsistencies that I'm
not used to. And I just couldn't make the switch fully. I might try it again some other day. Like
I tried it maybe like six months ago. So it might have gotten better because it consistently does
get better. So like it's definitely the closest one to ARC that that says almost made me switch.
But the other ones I just I haven't I don't know. I got too sticky with it. It was my own fault.
It was my own damn fault. I'm never I mean like I mean we've talked about this in the past. But like
man man do I just like I'm just like oh he's Microsoft stuff like oh we have this edge thing now.
All right. And edge is a great browser. Edge is one of my favorite browsers to be honest. And
if it had workspace handling I would be using Edge. It actually the supply or no I should.
What do you mean by workspace handling? Like what do you mean by that? Yeah. So this is kind of
hard to explain. But essentially I have a work Google account and I have a personal Google account.
Makes sense. Yeah. Right. How most Chromium-based browsers handle that is that you open up two
separate windows and those windows have separate accounts and that's mostly fine. Yeah. I don't know
if you've I don't know if you've done it before. But like that's on edge. Yeah. Okay. Perfect.
So that then you know what you know what it is. Two separate windows. Now how our candles it
is that it's in the same window. But you can switch between tab group switch between the groups by
just going to like the side panel and just clicking forward or back on your mouse. And it goes
between one workspace and another workspace. And you can have as many work spaces you want.
Obviously it's super easy to switch between them. You don't have to switch windows. Right.
You're switching literally like it's a really really quick switch. And they're still very
segregated. And the other thing that's really cool is you can send one window from one workspace
to another. And I do that pretty often just because like I'll open it I'll accidentally open it
in the wrong workspace. That happens to me on the other platforms as well. Obviously depending
on which one I had opened before and I need to send it from one to the other. So it's just like a
quick shortcut to send it. I have not been able to replicate that experience in any other browser.
I'm surprised that no one's been able to do it. Even as like an option like you know it doesn't
have to be default like it could be just an option. But yeah that's that's been my that's been my
thing. So I was going to say this I don't know how available something like that would be to an
extension. But maybe you should make an extension. Maybe I don't think it's fully available to
an extension. I mean we made some pretty crazy stuff though when we were making Chrome apps.
And a lot of that stuff was just using sort of the APIs or SDKs or whatever it was.
The options available to extensions because those those were available within Chrome apps
for the most part if not entirely. And we were able to like get rid of like have a completely
separate like cookie set. And that's almost kind of what I envision what you would need.
Because you would have like your work cookie set effectively. And then your session storage
and all that crap too. But like your storage set I guess you have your like work storage set.
And then you're like personal storage set. And you could just like invoke that upon like a click
or so. I don't know. I don't know if that's possible. I've made extensions in a while. But
it might be possible. It might still not be as smooth as this. That's my problem is like it could
be as easy as adding a shortcut to your keyboard and switching between switching between workspaces
like that. And that might be enough. But like I haven't been able to get used to that. I tried
that in a couple of different browsers. And still having the separated windows was still iffy for
me. Like I still didn't like that. I like being able to quickly hover over and switch between
them. I don't know. This is this is a this is a me problem. This is not a your guys problem. I do
not recommend arc right now. It's still fine. The positivity to the positive episode. I a little bit
a little bit. But like it's not really. Yeah, not really. Exactly. Like it's it's you know,
it's a very, very first world problem who cares because arc is still fine. Like that's the thing.
Like they they're still maintaining chromium versions in arc. They're still updating it like
weekly or monthly or whatever. They're just not adding any new features. And I don't really
care. Like I wish they were improving the performance. Yeah. If they did that, it would be the
perfect browser. But as long as they maintain security updates, I'll probably continue to use
it. As soon as they abandon it completely, I'll immediately jump ship. Obviously and suffer
through learning another browser. It is what it is. But how much are you learning another browser?
Though I I don't know what to tell you, Matt. I've tried it three or four different times. I
can't get past that part of it. Now there are a few other things that have made me angry at
browsers. Like there's some really like security conscious browsers. I don't I think helium is
one of those where like they won't even allow you to use the Google password manager. Like they
they don't want to be so separated from Google that Google password manager can't be used inside
their browser. That makes sense. Up to them. Absolutely. Up to them. But for me, like I do
still use it. And it's still more convenient. And again, it's another sticky point. And again,
arc supports it. What other other things like there's little just little things. I don't know,
like it's it's a weird. It's a really weird issue that I'm having that I can't switch browsers.
An arc has absolutely taken over my life, which is frustrating because I wish I could switch
browsers and be happy about it. But I can't. So and I've accepted that. And it's fine. I'll survive
on a non updated browser who cares. I don't need the AI features or whatever that are being built
into other browsers anyway, which is pretty much what every browser is working on now by the way.
That's like 90% of their core teams are working on AI features. It should be it should be edge was
an AI browser for years now. At this point, I think I just don't need that. I'll use a different
browser for AI if I need to. I haven't found a use case for it. But yeah, I just thought of
something too. Like you were saying you're saying or whether we were talking about just to kind of
reiterate, but we were talking about like the frameworks maturing and them being like kind of
bought up or whatever and people working for Versailles and that whole that whole web that also
indicates not only that the products like spelled you and that are maturing, but it also indicates
that the market is maturing. Yeah, because as markets mature as we see like financial institutions
buy each other, they'll gobble each other up. You know, I'm even like small like small town banks
will like gobble each other up even, right? Because like banking is mature and credit unions are
mature and stuff. And they'll gobble each other up mergers and purchasing and takeovers and
get all that all that jazz. And so you know, like spelled we act in view or now like so pivotal,
I guess you could say that it's no longer just sort of like a small the small segment, I guess in
terms of the business, if you will, like it's more of a foundation foundational technology. Because
if we think if we take a look at like WordPress, it's like WordPress is like what 40 some odd
percent of the web. And WordPress has like through their business, they're their business doings
rather they have like WordPress calm. Then there's the WordPress has soft host. I think that's WordPress
org that you also have your your automatic, which is your hosting. They have their they had that
whole ACF blow up and now they have their own secure custom fields or the heck it is now and
like all this stuff at the point. Like that's a whole scandal and everything else, but the point is
is that the WordPress ecosystem in my opinion is the stabilized it's ever been. I accidentally
actually left auto updates on a client website like a full auto updates, not just like maintain
like maintenance. And it was running for like two years. And I was weirdly I was like I have vlogs
that email me that tell me it was updated. And then I test it after the update. And I just never
realize it was actually going through do WordPress versions. And then I was going through to do some
plugin updates. And I thought, man, like, you know, I should update WordPress as well. And I couldn't
I thought, Oh, great, something's wrong with it pulling. And it's like, Oh, no, this is just the
latest version. So it was stable for over two years with my monitoring. But I just didn't realize
that the version was was changing. And so like this is another piece of good news is like as things
mature like this. So it reacts whenever I mean, if we apply that to the WordPress ecosystem, I mean,
I'm using some pretty big plugins. Of course, gravity forms, ACF, all that stuff,
Elementor. But if you, in my case, I'm using the big, the big plugins WordPress is no longer
crashing every time you turn around. And that was absolutely the case whenever you want to do
something custom. And yes, I was new at it or whatever, but it was it was like, Oh, there goes
there like, Oh, let me let me. It was a meme. Yeah. It was only back then. Yeah. We had issues where like
the all the home page will work fine. So you think your website's fine. Then none of the other
pages work or all the pages would work, but just not the main page, like the front page,
slash home page, it was just a mess. And like, I'm sure there's issues. I've seen that say,
you know, we've had issues with Elementor update this morning or whatever. I'm sure there's
issues that happen. But it's no longer like, well, all our websites are now, you know, white screen
of death. Now, what do we do? And it's like, well, just delete that plugin that has all your data.
Okay. And that's like, yeah, just delete that, don't we? Just to host houses,
that was thousands of articles. No big deal.
Amazing. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I think we're at a place where the web is pretty
damn mature. A lot of these, you know, companies are working together somehow. And like, yeah, it's
just overall, it's in a very, it's still kind of crazy. Like, obviously, there's still like a
million things that you can connect together. And it's still pretty chaotic in that way, right?
Like the difference tech stacks that you can create for a single project is probably still too much.
But it's getting, it's getting more solidified. Like, you can now search AI or online, like on
Google. And it'll probably give you a pretty consistent answer across different,
across different questions, which is nice. Because before again, it could be the same exact
project. And you could tell, it could tell you to do it five billion different ways. And all of
them would be somewhat correct. And you'd be like, okay, I'm screwed now with like a million
different jargony words. Well, the thing is too, as I would say, is like, AI is not mature.
Number one, not yet. Not even close. It's still almost in like the pioneering stage where there's
still like run around homesteading or something. Yeah. If you will. And like the other thing too,
is I heard this somewhere, or maybe I read it on Instagram or something, but it was a quote from
a podcast. Certainly, I want to say I saw it as a quote on Instagram, but that doesn't matter.
But I was hearing that, you know, all this AI talk about how AI is going to replace this and
replace that and replace this and replace that. That is people, that is coming from people that
need venture like VC capital. So these are these AI tools are coming in. And this is like,
this is actually good news is like, we're all worried. My God, it's going to take all our jobs
because they're saying it does. Well, of course they do. I mean, doesn't your detergent get out
every single stain possible? Well, not in real life, but in the commercial it does. And so these
people need VC funding. These people that are running these AI tools, AI companies and AI,
whatever. And so they need that funding. And so they need to sell that saying, this is going to be
the next revolutionary tool. You don't need software engineers. Look how good my tool is. Please
give me $20 million. So that I don't go under. Absolutely. And so that's mostly positive, right?
Like that's a positive no for the human worker, at least at this point, you know, the future of what
is it hold? I don't know, but we could also be in Mars. So I don't know. Yeah. We're not talking
about the future in this episode. This is the today. And you're absolutely correct. In today's
world, yes, only the people that are talking about everyone losing their jobs or the people that
will benefit benefit from it the most, the anthropics, the Googles, the open a eyes, those are the
people that are constantly claiming in six months, there will be no need for developers. I think
even today, the one of the anthropic, the cloud, the developer that created cloud code came out and
was like software engineer will no longer be a title in six months. It's like, come on.
You can't just keep saying six months. You know what was going to happen in six months and then
six months of the six months of recession. Yeah. Do you know what didn't happen? It saw as
it happened. Like what's going to happen here? Yeah. Like you're just it's rubbing off on the
people that are using your product the wrong way. That's my problem with it. It's pissing people
off. It's pissing people off. And like you keep reiterating it because yeah, you need the
investments and I get that. But you also like pissing off your main audience enough for them to
start looking for competitors. Like they'll start looking for people that aren't pissing you off.
I'll shout out a competitor to Claude code right now open code. That's not pissing people off.
It's an open it's a Claude code competitor. You can use whatever model you want with it.
It has its own kind of like Zen platform that you can buy and it's great. Like it's a great
piece of tooling that orchestrates your agent that makes it makes it easier for you to write code.
And it's the CEO of that I can guarantee you is not saying that replete developers are going to
be replaced within six months. He is saying the opposite. DAX is a cool guy. I definitely recommend
people trying out open code and also for the fact that you can just try out different models.
Not just anthropics models. So it it's annoying. Like the just constantly being told that we're
going to lose our jobs. Isn't annoying thing. Well, I would say it's an attack. It's really it is
absolutely an attack. It's an attack. It's like we're going to take your your thing but use our
tool in the meantime. Yeah. And help us build it. Like yeah, help us build it. Like yeah,
because he's saying it to his own company, right? Like he's saying it to his own developers that
are working for him. And then he'll say like, Oh, I don't mean them to lose their job. What do you
mean? Like, okay, so you're going to they're all going to be janitors at your company. Like,
what are you talking about? Like the cleanest floors you've ever seen. Yeah. The cleanest floors
on what was the engineering wing. Yeah. Like just nuts. I don't know. It's it's frustrating.
But it is. And remember that I have heard because like to build up, you said like is like I have
heard people argue and say, yeah, but those big CEOs know more. Remember, we're also being the
metaverse right now. We shouldn't be doing this podcast in the real world. I should be plugged
into some sort of some sort of VR chair. And like I should have walked into our VR office. And we
should have been in meta horizons or something doing our podcast live so that we could have visual
of a little, a little bit of an audience who could have like a viewing window in here, a little
on air like all in the metaverse. This is where we should have been all the row COVID or the beginning
of COVID, whatever. It was like the metaverse is that like that's it. You know, is it?
Yep. Yeah. That was on great. We're not the metaverse right now. No. It's just Facebook. Drop the
up. Okay. So I have a last point here. This one might be a little bit controversial. I'll say it
right off the bat. But we're going to have to, you know what? You might have to stop listening
right now. I'm kidding. Listen. It's okay. AI is currently actually just making our jobs easier.
Sorry. That's it. It's cut. I'm getting out of my metaverse chair and I'm out of here.
If you embrace it, if you learn it, if you figure out the workflows that work for you and work for
your job and you're constantly editing, like constantly changing them and, you know, having kind of
fun with it a little bit to try to have fun with it. You can actually find ways to make your job
easier by having AI do most of the code writing and just getting good at reviewing code and being
able to do more with less, more, more with less time, I should say. And it's kind of nice. Like it's
kind of nice having to write boilerplate anymore. I'm not going to lie. It's kind of nice not having
to write tests. Matt and I were talking about that recently. Like I never liked writing tests.
Now my code is more tested than it's ever been. It is not 100% tested. I still don't condone 100%
testing. Please don't do that. It's just a waste of time and resources and tokens. But it's very
tested. Like all the major things are tested and there's, there's good tests. I've reviewed them
myself and they help, they've helped catch bugs and the AI, it actually helps the AI makes not
break shit, right? Like if you have a good test suite, what you could tell the AI to do is after
it does any change, run the test suite and it runs it and it's like, oh, I broke this. I should go
back and make sure it's not, it works again. So like my code, personally, I could say this pretty
confidently now for the last couple of months at least. It's gotten higher quality, less buggy,
the more robust in the sense of like, I can do more. Like I can, I can write more complicated
things than I could before. I don't know if it's much faster that I'd still not sure. Like I
have gone back and wrote some code recently and I was able to write code pretty quickly, even without
AI. So I'm not sure about the speed of it, but I do think that the code is better, which is again,
maybe a little bit controversial, but I'm starting to kind of like it. Like I'm starting to kind of
like the new workflow that I've established and the ability to write some really cool things and
being able to work on kind of multiple features at once and have them reviewed and just
focus on getting better at reviewing and trying out things. Like I kind of like the fact that I can
just like, you know, I had this thing where I want, I want to get better at reviewing code. So I
built a little like code reviewing tool that helps me review code. I have like a little AI agent
that reviews it a little bit and gives me some indicators on what I should be looking at like the
critical points of the code. And I look at them and I'm like, oh, okay, this is where I need to look.
It kind of helps me focus on things. It doesn't do the review for me. It focuses me.
And I like that. I wouldn't have been able to build that in my spare time before
because I have very little spare time without these tools. And now I'm slightly better at reviewing
code and it's caught things and I've been able to provide better reviews. So like these little
things, these little workflow changes have made me better. I could say that pretty confidently.
Does it make me a little bit anxious? Yeah, absolutely. It does. And again, I have this like up and
downfueling, right? But overall, I think it has made our jobs a little bit easier. And I've talked
to other developers. This is not just me where I'm like, what do you guys do? And they're like, well,
we mostly just prompt. Like we don't write code anymore. We mostly just prompt. And I'm like,
is it easier? And they're like, yeah, it definitely is easier. Are you anxious? Yeah, for sure,
because who knows? But it is like if you embrace it and you do it well, it is easier. I'm sorry,
it's just it just is. And you can take advantage of that right now. Like just have a little bit of
more relaxing time like debugging. Oh my god. That's been that was the most stressful thing for us,
right? Like I don't know Matt, like how many times have you seen me bash my head against the table?
Like we've had hackathons where we like spent 80% of our time debugging one issue.
Yep. That's not an exaggeration. Certbot. I think Certbot should be a big trigger for you.
That shit is pretty much I think of the past. That debugging complex issues is way easier.
Now being able to feed it traces being able to get it to actually trigger the issue itself,
read the logs itself, look at the UI itself and see what the issue is and then iterate itself and
add extra logging itself. And like it is so good at debugging. It is ridiculously good at debugging.
And I that was probably my best skill, which is the sad part. It is way better than me at it.
So I mean it's it's objective when you have a bug you're sometimes pissed off or like scared
if it's like a time sensitive thing and this thing just looks and goes like yeah well there's a
missing semicolon, bro. Yeah, that too. Like it can detect stupid things that I would miss because
it's a computer. Right. It's not a human. It's a computer. Like it can it can use computer things.
So yeah, that's it. That's all I have. That's all I got. I think that's a good amount of good news
honestly for for one episode and all right now onto the bad news Matt's bad news. I'm not doing
bad news. I'm not doing bad news. There's enough bad news out there. But yeah, that's it.
Yeah. So I unless you have anything else to add Mike, I think that's the good news. Actually,
I would like actually I have a bit of funny bad news. I have both my phones. I've worked
for a personal phone on do not disturb and someone and it is not a person I know is taking
advantage of the fact that on do not disturb you can repeat call and someone really wants to
sell me a cruise or something because they are calling me. I just turned around if you're watching
the video version I turned to the right because my work phone started going off even though that
thing's in do not disturb and if I don't know if the mic picks it up but there was something else
going off over here and I've turned this thing to don't ring. And for some reason,
it started ringing it's in a tone I've never even heard of. So I assume that means there's an
emergency like someone is trying to emergency call me and it is not the same number and the
significant of it. So Mike, if there's the bad news, can an AI agent handle this? Can an AI
agent handle my calls for me? Yes. You could absolutely set up an AI agent to handle your calls.
I don't have an exact like framework or I will hand you this phone in the metaverse or in this
is a fake world. And I am 99.9% sure that you not only could you set it up but you could have
it sound like you and respond like you and tell people to f off and like you could do whatever
the heck it is you want to do to these people that call you and they most likely unless they're
really plugged into it wouldn't even know that it wasn't you talking to them. So have at it. Great
project. Great side project. I like it. Get them. Get them. Anyway, a tangent aside. Remember that
we're on Patreon if you want to listen to episodes like this positive episodes negative episodes
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HTML All The Things - Web Development, Web Design, Small Business

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

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