Some Good News for Web Developers

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,

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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

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