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Episode 21: Leveling UP with Scott Tolinski

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Dude, in this gnarly podcast episode, Scott Tolinski, like, totally drops some knowledge bombs about his wild 21-year coding journey, man. He takes us back to the early days, you know, high school websites and all that. And then, he's like, "Whoa, mentors are where it's at," teaching us everything from project management to how to deal with clients and working in a team.

And then, the vibe totally shifts to Scott's rad experiences with Meteor, this full-stack JavaScript thing. He talks about how it's all real-time, like, super cool for chat apps and stuff. But then, he cruises into the switch to React and SvelteKit, and he's like, "Whoa, it's not all rainbows and butterflies."

Now, let's ride the wave to Scott's Level Up Tutorials project. It's this epic journey from struggling to make it work, to hanging ten with Wes Bos on the Syntax podcast. And he's all about finding your stoke in personal projects, man.

So, it's all about, like, asking questions, taking a break when you're stuck, and knowing it's cool not to have all the answers. You know, don't be fooled by the social media highlight reel, folks. Learning's a marathon, not a sprint. And, by the way, Sentry.io's got your back for tracking code errors and stuff. Cowabunga, dude! 🤙

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

 

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(Auto-Generated) Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Seth Whiting: Hey, what's up, everybody? I'm Seth Whiting. I'm a developer from Portland, Maine, and I've been coding for about 10 years now. And I'm

[00:00:08] Jake Pacheco: Jake Pacheco. I am a barber from Augusta, Maine, and I've been coding for about a little over seven months now,

[00:00:14] Scott Tolinski: almost eight. I'm Scott Talitsky, and I'm from Denver, and I've been coding for 21 years now.

Wow.

[00:00:22] Seth Whiting: 21 years. Nice. Heavy hitter.

[00:00:26] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, wow. That's a while. Nice. Nice. Yeah.

[00:00:29] Seth Whiting: Well, yeah, as you, as you just heard, that's Scott Talinsky's, the the other co host of Syntax, which is the,

[00:00:37] Scott Tolinski: the,

[00:00:39] Seth Whiting: my, one of my all time favorite podcasts, for sure. I've been listening for a long time and definitely a huge inspiration for me and my career, but also a huge inspiration for this podcast starting in general.

So thanks so much for coming on, Scott.

[00:00:55] Scott Tolinski: Also a little, little

[00:00:57] Seth Whiting: more background is he is also the founder and

[00:01:00] Scott Tolinski: creator of Level Up Tutorials. Is that fair to say? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about like what, what that is? Sure. Yeah. I, I started Level Up Tutorials in 2012 as just like a YouTube resource.

For teaching stuff and really what it came down to is that, you know, I was working all day at my job as a dev and I would hit issues in some of my projects specifically it was Drupal was the big thing I was working in a lot and at the time. And there was a lot of things that were either undocumented or documented poorly or you're having your forum posts.

I, I did this maneuver and it, it gave me a white screen. Why did that happen? Oh, read this blog post. Okay. You read the blog post. Why, why isn't this information available or the install instructions for XYZ don't show this? So. I was kind of tired of hitting stuff like that. And I was like, well, anytime I could do anything, I'm just going to document it.

And I threw it up on YouTube. And at the time there's only like a handful of YouTube programming channels and certainly nobody doing the content that I was. So it was really easy for me to build an audience and then eventually turn that into a. You know, premium streaming service and kind of led me to where I am today in my career, where I was able to actually, you know, quit my job as a dev and work full time on level up tutorials until the eventual, eventual acquisition by Century.

Nice. That's awesome. That's awesome.

[00:02:28] Seth Whiting: So Jake, if you didn't know Drupal is sort of like a another content management system. So it'd be like the equivalent

of

[00:02:34] Scott Tolinski: like WordPress. Awesome. That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was curious when you said that. I was like, yeah. And Drupal is still pretty, pretty pretty used at, you know, I actually really preferred Drupal for a long time to WordPress.

So I was like, I was very much in that, in that community, which was great because there's a lot of people doing WordPress at the time. So it was a nice way to like get some specialties going. Yeah.

[00:02:56] Seth Whiting: Is it like a niche?

[00:02:58] Jake Pacheco: So is it it's probably not

[00:03:01] Scott Tolinski: written in PHP or is it still it is PHP. Yeah. Okay. Huh? Yeah.

Yeah, it's a different approach to the WordPress. I'm trying to, you know, the WordPress. Drupal had like a very specific Drupal way of doing things. And you could do like out of the box, it was very much focused on custom content types. And a lot of the things you could do in Drupal, you didn't have to reach for a plugin the same way you did in WordPress out of the box, but at the same regard, everything was a plugin in Drupal there was just a lot more core plugins and it was very flexible.

You could do anything with it. So a lot of people didn't like it. I happened to really like it at the time. So. That's cool. So you, you

[00:03:42] Jake Pacheco: said what was it? 21

[00:03:43] Scott Tolinski: years? Was it? Yeah. Yeah. And not professionally. You know what? I started really, I started learning HTML. And flash mostly when I was in high school specifically to make my band's website, you know, we had, I had a band in high school and had to get it online.

Next thing you know, you have an angel fire was the service I was using. And angel fire was kind of like. a website builder, but you could get into the templates and you can get into HTML. And next thing you know, I'm installing guest books and forums and whatever. It was, it wasn't my career path until much later, but it was something that I took from there and was always a hobby of mine.

Any little thing I was doing, I was kind of thrown off a website for. That's cool. When,

[00:04:31] Seth Whiting: when did you start like

[00:04:32] Scott Tolinski: getting paid for it? Yeah, that's kind of what I was going to have to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Nice. I got my first dev job in 2011, but I had been working freelance for maybe like five years before then doing small gigs and mostly like grabbing projects off of Craigslist, which were almost always awful and a disaster, but it definitely allowed me to, you know, cut my teeth a little bit and get some project experience and stuff.

Nice. Nice. Nice. Yeah, nice. And I

[00:05:03] Jake Pacheco: guess when did you start writing things in like JavaScript and working in that and starting to learn that?

[00:05:10] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, I was a bit later to JavaScript than you know, my co host Wes was. He was definitely early on to JavaScript and for me it always felt very difficult. I did do quite a bit in Flash for a long time and Flash has had, well, it had ActionScript, which is very similar to JavaScript.

It was ECMAScript based. So it was very much like the core of JavaScript in there. But I was pretty bad at it. And for the most part, like I was doing interactive Flash bits and I was really trying to get good at it, but I just wasn't, it took me a really long time, like my focus was almost entirely on.

CSS for a very long time. It wasn't until much, much later. I would say it wasn't until I picked up like Angular one that I really dove into JavaScript heavy and have been there ever since early. Just for me and for any lists that aren't

[00:06:05] Jake Pacheco: really a hundred percent on timelines of like when Angular was used and stuff when,

[00:06:09] Scott Tolinski: when around, would you say like ballpark?

2013 ish that I, you know, I, I, I was kind of bored at my job at the time I was working as a dev for the university of Michigan and I was really good at finishing my projects very quickly and I would finish a project. And I would present it to the project manager and they'd be like, well, this project's due date isn't for like two months from now.

And I would be, I'd be like, well, it's done. So they, you know, I guess, what do I do? I just sit around and do nothing now. So I just started pouring myself into learning. There was like three major JavaScript frameworks at the time. Ember, Backbone and Angular and Angular is the one that like spoke to me the most.

So I just started like really getting into building interactive stuff with it. And yeah, that's cool. That's awesome. And so you were

[00:07:06] Jake Pacheco: pretty deep into, I mean, you're a year or two into working like your first actual stable job.

[00:07:14] Scott Tolinski: You said it was at a

[00:07:15] Jake Pacheco: university, right?

[00:07:16] Scott Tolinski: Yeah. And then I actually, it was my second job.

I changed jobs already by then. Actually, it might've even been 2014. I'm trying to think of the timeline. Early on, I was getting a lot of job transitions. It was like really, really kind of chaotic for a little bit. Yeah, I, I, I

[00:07:34] Jake Pacheco: kind of hear that a lot of people kind of do that just to kind of level up quickly in a way.

[00:07:39] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, did you understand that? Scott, did

[00:07:42] Seth Whiting: you, did you ever get to the point where you felt like you were kind of like at that, like a hump that you had to get over? Like, did you feel like there was like

[00:07:53] Scott Tolinski: a difficult

[00:07:55] Seth Whiting: part of your, Like coding career early on that you had to get over to in order to feel like comfortable after that

[00:08:04] Scott Tolinski: or Did you, did

[00:08:05] Seth Whiting: you ever face that?

Or was it always just kind of like steady?

[00:08:09] Scott Tolinski: I, I felt that very much breaking into the industry. So I, you know, I, I didn't study computer science or anything. I went to school for music. And I worked a bunch of really odd jobs for a long time and wasn't really getting the type of work that I'd wanted to be doing.

So like I was doing free freelance. Dev stuff, but it wasn't until like I landed my first full time dev job and even then It wasn't like automatic, but I had a boss who was like a super good mentor for me. And somebody like really prominent in my career, his name was Ben Schaaf. And he he was my very first boss.

He hired me at my first job and then. I took over for him and took his job when he left to go work for the University of Michigan. And then he brought me into the University of Michigan because he wanted to give me a nice little salary bump and move up to like a nice little better job. And then I got a job working for Ford and I brought him to Ford.

So he and I kind of helped each other out in our careers and stuff. So yeah, he's a big mentor of mine. That's pretty cool. Remember any,

[00:09:17] Seth Whiting: like Concepts or anything that were like difficult for you to to grasp

[00:09:21] Scott Tolinski: back then Yeah, I, you know, the stuff that was the hardest for me was always especially in a sort of like, non visual type of thing, like, you know, structural HTML stuff and CSS were always my specialty.

So once I started getting into. Like PHP, the fact that you could, you know, miss a semi colon and blank out the app was like very tough for me to be like, Oh, this stuff's really temperamental. And, and, and so those concepts for me when I first started were, were, were pretty difficult. And once I really learned how to dive into error messages, error logs, pages, and find.

How to fix things that are broken. It like really opened up the world for me because I, I, you know, I'm pretty I'm good at sticking with something if it's not working or whatever, if I can't, if I have no idea where to go, how to fix things or anything like that, it can get really frustrating. So once I figured out, Oh.

There's a whole treasure map here you can lead yourself into figuring any of these things out on your own just by finding the errors, googling the errors, or getting into those stack traces and stuff. Once I figured out how I could solve my own issues instead of having to ask somebody else, Hey, why is this broken?

Yeah, it opened up a lot for me. Yeah, it's kind of

[00:10:34] Jake Pacheco: kind of learning the troubleshooting aspect of it in a way.

[00:10:38] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, totally. Yeah, that definitely

[00:10:40] Seth Whiting: makes sense. Yeah, I guess that would

[00:10:42] Scott Tolinski: be like a big like breakthrough moment for you

[00:10:46] Seth Whiting: Can you, can you remember any specific, like, concepts or lessons or anything that, that you remember

[00:10:55] Scott Tolinski: learning from Ben?

Yeah, you know, I think the things that I learned even the most from him was project management skills, timeline stuff working with clients and delivering and those types of things because, like, if, if he was giving me a project, He was really good about just like tossing me in and saying, this is your project, figure it out.

And then if I was ever running into any major issues or whatever, you know, he could obviously help me out. But you know, the things that I picked up the most from him was like truly how to work within an organization. Instead of just, you know, goofing around on some code writing, writing more organized code.

I had to write, write code that other people were going to be looking at instead of myself. I, you know, I used to be sloppy and unorganized and things like that. And he definitely helped me with those aspects. That's cool. I and

[00:11:50] Jake Pacheco: it was this, I guess, when was it where you started really diving deep into like JavaScript?

What job were you working when you say, I guess your work? I mean. Sorry, I know what what job was your first job where you actually used that stuff because you said you were doing it in your off time while you were working at the university

[00:12:14] Scott Tolinski: did

[00:12:15] Jake Pacheco: wasn't right at Ford when you, you know, started using

[00:12:18] Scott Tolinski: that, or, yeah, it was very much that opportunity.

And it was a good thing I took the time in my free time. At work to develop those skills because, you know, people sometimes hate on LinkedIn, but I, I got a DM from a recruiter on LinkedIn. About this really great job for building interfaces for Ford. And sure enough, I got to use a lot of those things that I built as like just little hobby projects.

Like I made a fun little animated interactive launch checklist for our. Projects. So at Michigan, we are shipping a lot of sites. It was an agency. So we were shipping sites all the time. Okay. I'm going to make a launch checklist and it's going to save to local storage and it's going to have little cool CSS animations and stuff.

And I was able to present that as part of my, you know, portfolio when I applied for that job and it, it got me the job. And sure enough, like my very first thing in that job ended up being a somewhat large JavaScript project. So we were working on. Well, a page that we were calling like the showroom page and the showroom page was a giant filtering system for every single model, make everything that Ford has, and I never, never went live or anything like that, which was another whole aspect. My, my team was my team was like a, a team of like 30 people that was there to build experimental interfaces that Ford could see if they wanted to implement in their actual web properties. So we weren't shipping things.

The customers were shipping them to a Ford exec so they could look at this stuff, but either way, you know, the very first, it was the first month on the job. They gave us these little projects and my project was not the showroom. My project was something else. And the dev had a chance to display his, his showroom project.

And he was using a bunch of like jQuery plugins and kind of hacking it all together. And they looked at it and they let him go like. 24 hours later, they were like, this is not what we're looking for. We're looking for people who have a better handle on JavaScript than this. And if that was me. I would have been let go because I probably would have produced something that was very similar to that guy.

Because, so me and my other co worker, because there were three of us devs, we kind of looked at each other and we were like, all right, now it's time to get serious. And he and I had to like spend a week hacking on an Angular version of the showroom that was like really good. And we put it together in about a week or so, and it saved both of our jobs, which was great.

But it definitely like kicked me into gear a bit. Yeah, it was, it was, it was pretty shocking actually. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:10] Jake Pacheco: I'm, I'm sure you felt pretty like in the fire at that

[00:15:13] Scott Tolinski: moment. Yeah, I felt in the fire. Yeah. And it was also my introduction to like, Oh, I mean, I've shipped. Things that were like have a hard deadline, but now I had a hard deadline to like forward executives And I remember like the night before it was due I was up to like 4 in the morning with my co worker He and I were both just like pushing commits to this thing left and right trying to get it done and it was very intense Well,

[00:15:39] Seth Whiting: yeah, I was gonna ask you how much sleep do you think you got that week?

[00:15:43] Scott Tolinski: it was it was rough and the project manager at all like gave us both like a Big thing of whiskey for our troubles. And I was like, guys, you saved my butt. Well, thank you. Awesome. I mean, at least he's cool about it or the project. Yeah, they were, they were cool about it. Nice.

[00:16:00] Jake Pacheco: So when did that start to like smooth out and you feel like, like you weren't so much in the fire and you started to like, kind of feel more comfortable about that job?

Or were you

[00:16:10] Scott Tolinski: just there for a little bit? It was almost right after that. I worked there for two years. It was a two year contract. And oddly enough, One thing that I made shipped to their actual website. And it was something that the designers didn't even put together. It was something I did for fun, like myself personally.

And, and for some reason they were like, Oh, we like this. It was just like a square grid. And you hover over and the photos zoom in, in like these little square. I have no idea why they chose to use that or whatever, but it was so weird because the stuff, even that we were building They had, like, each of their own markets, there was like 90 markets or something.

Each of those markets had their own CMS and their own dev teams. So we were shipping prototypes that we would give to the dev teams. It was up to those dev teams to implement the stuff. So it was, it was just totally weird that they chose to use that one little, little bit of my work. I have no idea why.

Yeah. That's crazy. Someone liked it. That's cool. Yeah, right. Yeah. Somebody liked it. It was like that. When,

[00:17:10] Seth Whiting: When did you start using like, when did you start doing like backend development?

[00:17:16] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, around the same time. When I was working at Ford, especially just for my you know, cause I had been doing the PHP stuff, but I had never, you know, that's CMS work and it was a little bit different than getting into writing like full stack app.

So, for me, it was specifically around that time. I was going to JavaScript meetups with my boss and mentor Ben and we were learning about node and express and I totally didn't get like why. Or interesting at all, but Meteor was a, a project that came out around that time. And I went to a meetup and they were showing us Meteor.

And I was like, Oh, Meteor felt like a really nice hybrid between writing it purely from scratch and a CMS. Because with Meteor, it came with a database. It came with real time. It came with user login and accounts and like a templating system. And But you could also write the database inserts yourself.

You were writing the UI code yourself. You weren't working in templates. So it was like this really nice, like hybrid step between like a full CMS and like, just writing it from scratch. And so for me, I like really latched onto it. I ended up writing Meteor for a really long time. And it was like pretty deep into that community.

That was like definitely one of the big places where I both grew my educational content, but also like. I don't know, really learned how to build software that people were using. Yeah,

[00:18:39] Seth Whiting: so Meteors Jake, if you didn't know, we haven't talked about it. But it's a, it's like a full stack

[00:18:46] Scott Tolinski: JavaScript framework

[00:18:47] Seth Whiting: and it's sort of, sort of in, in that sense, it's sort of like Next, but it's written completely different.

Do you, do you want to kind of go into like a bit, like maybe like the differences between, between the two or, or anything like that? Scott? Yeah.

[00:19:04] Scott Tolinski: Yeah. Well, it was, it was wild. So Meteor was. Came out before package JSON and NPM, so they had their own package system. So, what's really neat, you had a, a package file and you just pasted the name of the package you want and Meteor went off and to their own package repository, went off and grabbed that package and installed it and did all that stuff.

It was, it was NPM essentially before that existed. And eventually they ended up adopting NPM. But it was very early on in the world of, of Node stuff. So everything was a little bit different and they had their own front end templating system called Blaze, which was really similar to View and Spells in many ways.

And actually Evan, Evan, you, the creator of Vue, worked at Meteor for a little bit. So, you know, there's definitely an inspiration there. It, it, it was, the big sell on Meteor was that it was real time real time, as in like, you could build a chat app without having to do any kind of crazy work. It was all based on WebSockets.

And real time apps were effortless. If I saved something to the database, no matter what, without me having to do anything, It would always populate live on whoever, anybody else who was looking on the screen for free. You didn't have to do anything. It was like automatic. And in many ways, like I miss so many of the things that Meteor did for us.

And when I went to start working in React for a long time, I, I was often like very depressed that like, I left the system that was so nice and easy to work into something that like you're having to do everything yourself and pull 800 levers to get something to go

[00:20:45] Seth Whiting: right and that, that used Mongo or uses Mongo still potentially.

Is that right? Mm-hmm. Mongo is so Mongo. Yeah. Totally a NoSQL database. I've been telling Jake more about like Postgres and that he would probably end up using that, um mm-hmm. at some point, but Yeah, I guess, I'm not sure if it was because of that or what, but Meteor kind of got the reputation that it like, wasn't super scalable at some point.

[00:21:14] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, there was a lot of weird stuff around there, you know, especially, I think once it had that reputation, it was hard for it to shake because it definitely was scalable and I think one of the problems they had was out of the box. The defaults probably made it one insecure and unscalable out of the box.

Databases weren't even password protected. You had to do that, but it was recommended as like the first step, but people would see that out of the box as being a thing. And likewise, there was a thing called mini Mongo. Where you would write database queries in the UI itself, kind of like what you're almost doing now, and those would get data from the database and you're writing your database queries in the client side code and not on the server side code.

But. In production media or like performant media, you, you were almost never necessarily using that feature as it is. It was almost like a wow to get you started, but people would work with it and then be like, ah, this isn't sustainable. Well, it's not supposed to be, it's supposed to just be like a prototype feature to get you up and running.

So I think they had a little bit of like almost even marketing problems where they weren't you know, people were feeling like they, they were unable to make it. Faster or scale big. Right. And me reputation there too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They, they sold it. It was owned by the media group who now works on Apollo for graph QL.

But yeah, they, they sold it to a company who's been, who's still been working on. I have not, sadly have not been checking in. I held on a very long time in the media because I just liked it so much. Cause

[00:22:49] Seth Whiting: level up. Tutorials itself was written on, on Meteor for a long time. Was it, wasn't

[00:22:54] Scott Tolinski: it? Very long time.

Yeah. Yeah. And

[00:22:57] Seth Whiting: then you switched to SvelteKit.

[00:22:58] Scott Tolinski: Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I actually even switched to like a Vite powered React app because my UI for level up was written in React with Meteor. Cause you could use React. So it was React and Meteor. And then I eventually replaced the Meteor bit with just a straight Node GraphQL API.

I don't know. I'm, I'm kind of a glutton for replacing things that don't need to be replaced. So yeah, it's, it's, it was in SvelteKit now and it's all that way. And actually we're, we're working on the new syntax site right now, which is also built in SvelteKit full stack. So nice. That's

[00:23:35] Seth Whiting: cool. Can you tell us about some like hard lessons that you had to learn or like any, any like big mistakes that, that come to mind in like your

[00:23:43] Scott Tolinski: career?

Yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch, you know, I learned early on, especially for freelancing. Stuff that, you know, communication is extremely important. Getting things agreed to upfront contract sign, checking in timelines and those things like that for freelance projects was always like a big thing for me because I got burnt several times on either a client's.

I'm not paying or being hard to track down or being slow. And then like the client I'm waiting a month for an answer for a client. And then all of a sudden they want things done right now. No, no, no, no, no. So like, learning those communication skills and staying on top and having like a clear timeline and being like a true professional was hard for me to learn because I was so used to just like, Oh, I'll get it done rapid, whatever.

But it's not always on you. It's oftentimes on, you know, much bigger things you're waiting on this. You're waiting on that. There's like bigger lessons to be learned there, but also like, I think I learned in general that working with people can be very tough. I've been on, I've been on some projects where luckily.

You know, I, I got out of things okay, but like, we're, we're, people are just hard to, hard to work with and it's almost always non developers. Sometimes it's other developers, but just, you know, people make assumptions about the way things are, the way things should be. And as long as things are spelled out and everybody's aware of how, how it should be, you know, we can work together to have a successful result at the end of the day.

Yeah, like

[00:25:17] Seth Whiting: maybe non developers ideas of how long something will take kind of thing.

[00:25:23] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, yeah. That and even just like expectations people assume all kinds of crazy stuff. Oh, you get a free iOS app every time you build a web app or something. Oh, it just works. You know, this stuff just works or the, you know, people are so used to using technology that's written by you know, developer teams of 20.

30 people that when it's like one or two people working on something, they don't necessarily know what the limitations are there or how it's different, right? Especially if it's like a short term project. I want a short term project that is Facebook. Can you make Facebook for me? Well, no, I can't. But you know, and it's not always bad like that.

You know, I think one of the things I really liked about working at agencies with project managers is that most people could. Layer the expectations into the project and I'm, I'm there to push out the cuff. I was always good at doing that stuff myself too inside of organizations, but especially when you're working on your own and you're the only person it's, it's, it's a little tough.

Yeah. Basically.

[00:26:23] Jake Pacheco: So if I'm understanding correctly, effective communication of what people should expect, like, and

[00:26:28] Scott Tolinski: kind of tampering

[00:26:29] Jake Pacheco: expectations, just to be clear, like, Hey, this is what a one person team can do, or a couple of people can do in X amount of time. And don't expect a lot more than

[00:26:41] Scott Tolinski: that kind of like, yeah, this is what you get.

And this is like, why it's great. And, you know, I'm, I'm definitely great at, at selling the work or Even like training and teaching people, you know, what it, what it is that they've, they've now purchased essentially. But at the end of the day, yeah, it is, it is a lot about managing expectations or, or even like, for instance, here's a, when, when I was working with a really difficult client at one of the agency jobs I had, they were a paper store that.

sold like kind of rare and odd paper paper, people would come from all over to buy their paper because they have this massive warehouse full of different like specialty papers. And they had an e commerce store. And we're doing orders by Writing the, the, somebody would place an order on their website. It would send the credit card number in plain text to an email.

They would write down the credit card number and type it in on their little machine and charge their credit cards that way. And so for me, having to explain to them why we can't do it that way. And there, there's, it's not, when it's not legal, here's all these PCI compliance things. And unfortunately, your new store is going to require you to do things in a much different way.

You're going to have to run your inventory through the website because otherwise things are going to get wacky here and there or whatever. And being able to communicate those things effectively to them. You know, it, it, it was a, a learning opportunity. and me.

Yeah, I could

[00:28:08] Jake Pacheco: definitely see how that could be kind of tricky

[00:28:10] Scott Tolinski: in a way, you know, I mean, yeah, they, they have like 80, 000 products or something to which is also to make it that much more difficult. It's like, it's like they're

[00:28:18] Jake Pacheco: trying to keep the paper system going by. Yeah,

[00:28:22] Scott Tolinski: paper folks at the paper system.

Yeah. Yeah. Big paper. Yeah.

[00:28:27] Jake Pacheco: I'm curious how long I Before you were like, Oh, like I, I could be like, like, I'm kind of the senior developer on this job or like, I'm, I, I've kind of made it in a sense, you know, how

[00:28:42] Scott Tolinski: long do you think? I got tossed in there pretty quick. So I had worked my first job. I got it in March 20, 2011.

And I'd worked there for a couple years. And my boss, my mentor, Ben had taken that job at Michigan. And. He recommended me for his role as the senior dev. It was only two people there. So that was my first senior dev title was like two years into my career, professional career. And all of a sudden I had one dev and a dev intern below me really quickly.

So it was, it was, it was kind of out of nowhere, you know, but at the time I was I was dumb enough to think that I was like, yeah, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm the man, I got this or whatever. So I, you know, I didn't panic too much about it and it was really great because I got to take the lead on implementing some cool things that you know, he was really smart about because he had been working there for a long time.

So he knew, you know, What's a good use of time resources and stuff. And, and for me, I wasn't necessarily, I was a little bit dumber than that. So I was like, all right, we're going to change our workflow in these ways. We're going to implement now. Cause we weren't doing version control or get or anything at all at that point.

I'm like, we're going to switch over to a fully get based workflow. We're going to start doing node projects. We're going to do this and that, like, which all of it ended up being totally fine and fun. It probably caused a little bit more, more stress in the beginning, but it was a really cool way for me to take control over that.

And really feel like I had something like that was like mine about the process there.

[00:30:12] Seth Whiting: Yeah, that's was there any point in your career either then or later or earlier that you felt like you were in over your head or like you felt like an

[00:30:24] Scott Tolinski: imposter. I definitely my first week at the job. He was at a conference, and I've been giving my first client assignment already.

And like here I am my first dev job. I've gotten a client and I. Like, don't even know the processor, or I don't know the tools, I don't know the systems, I don't know anything about it, and I don't have anybody there to like help me, so I only had like a week to like really struggle before he could like, to help me, but I would say every single job that I started it out.

Every single job I started, I felt in over my head and that's like probably a very good thing for my professional growth because you show up to the job and if you already know everything, you know, you're, you're only getting so much out of that job, but if you show up to the job and you say, I'm really in over my head This stuff is all way too tough, as long as you, you step it up and rise to the occasion there, next thing you know, you're, you're light years ahead of where you were even like a month before.

Yeah, it's

[00:31:29] Seth Whiting: kind of like

[00:31:29] Jake Pacheco: that. Yeah, I was just gonna say it's kind of like, it's kind of like the concept of if you're in a room, and you're the smartest person in the room, then find a better room.

[00:31:38] Scott Tolinski: Exactly. Yeah. Get anything out of it. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. And that was actually one of the problems I had.

I, that Michigan job I had only kept for like six months because that was one of the problems with it. And I didn't feel like I was the smartest person there, but I truly felt like the drive wasn't there from a lot of, not other developers, but some of the employees that were working there. Like we were given, I was given like a website that had rasterized icons and we were already in the era of vector based icons.

In fact, this is when a time when icon fonts were like a thing, but before then, the way everybody's doing, even like little tiny icons is they'd make a, a raster based pixelated image and then slice it up and put it into what's called a sprite sheet and then select just that one and use background position to show that one little image.

But that technique was so long and gone at that point, when I had gotten like one of my first designs from a designer. And I was like, Oh, where's the icon set for this? And he was like, Oh, you just pull them from this image. I'm like, but they're raster. And he was just like, Yeah, that's fine. And it's like, No, that's not fine.

Like, that's not the type of work I want to produce. Yeah. And it felt like I was like, shoot, I'm in a place now where I went from having As this, the senior guy in my last position, being able to make those decisions and tell the design team, cool, this is what I need from you. And this is like how it turns out.

Well, to being like, here, this is what you get. You can produce a a site that, you know, is maybe not up to your standards, but you gotta do it. I think

[00:33:06] Seth Whiting: going back to what you said before, where it was like. At every job you felt in over your head, you know, at least at the beginning, is sort of a testament to, like, when people ask, like, how do I know when I'm ready for my first job?

It's like, you're not. You're not gonna be. You know, you just, you just kind of have to jump into it, and you'll, you'll figure it out.

[00:33:25] Scott Tolinski: That kind of thing. Yeah. And that helped me back for a little bit. It's one of the reasons why I didn't apply for a lot of dev jobs. And when I was first starting, I was thinking I got to get more experience here and there.

I got to get more under my belt. I have to get more skills. And thankfully my wife was like really like there, there was the, the job that I had gotten my first dev job. It was like at an agency that was kind of by our house. And I used to walk by it all the time and think. That would be so cool to work at this place.

It was like a small 12 person agency. The building was cool. They were like doing obviously cool work in there because everybody looked, you know, all the everybody looked hip that was going into work there. And I was like, designer and stuff like that'd be such a cool place to work. Well, the job opened up and I was like, I don't know if I can apply for this.

My wife, like convinced me to write like a really nice cover letter and like, You know, tell them how I walked by that place and really wanted to work there and stuff. And it, you know, it definitely landed when I made that job. But at the same time, I was so intimidated by the prospect of working at a place like that.

But I just didn't think that I could do it. But yeah. So

[00:34:27] Seth Whiting: you owe your entire

[00:34:28] Scott Tolinski: career to your wife. Oh, oh, yes, absolutely. Especially because I'm like, I'm scatterbrained and ADHD and all these things. I want to do too many different things. I want to do this and that and whatever. And she really helped me dial in and focus.

No, you're not going to focus on web design and web development. You're not going to focus on graphic design. You're not going to focus on video production. You're going to focus on. Just straight up web development. One thing, nail it down, get, get more narrow in your focus. And it, it definitely worked for me.

Good on us. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah.

[00:35:04] Jake Pacheco: I mean, I guess that I guess that. It answers the question of what's the best decision you made in your career, just being with your wife. Oh, yeah,

[00:35:13] Scott Tolinski: seriously. Yeah, I know. And actually, what's funny is that that was actually a huge decision because I had a job.

I had a job offer to be a video editor for Guitar World Magazine in New York. My uncle was the editor in chief and had been the editor in chief since like the early 90s or something. So it was like a nepotism job, but it was still a job I was qualified for because I'd interviewed there or I'd interned there and I was I was good doing video editing and that job was on the table And she was gonna stay and get her master's degree in michigan and I was like, well, it's either you know Go to New York and potentially leave this like really great thing or, you know, stay here and see, see what this could become.

And sure enough, I chose the decision to stay and I ended up working as a bunch of weird jobs as a projectionist and accountant and all these other things, just trying to find, you know, income. And yeah, it was, it was a good decision. I felt ready for that because, you know, the job was there was a great job.

But you know, right decision. Awesome. So, I

[00:36:17] Jake Pacheco: guess a question then that I'm just curious about, and I don't even know if this is a question that there's a real answer to, but I, I guess, when do you think that people would know when you're like, ready to work as a developer? I, I know I'm a barber right now.

Yeah. And I make pretty decent money and stuff. Like it's, you know, I, I get by with it, but but when is it like, Okay, time to actually go into development and like, do you, when you do that, do you expect like, okay, I'm going to be like taking a cut and pay for a while and then I'll get into it and hopefully it gets better or like, I guess, how long do you wait before you're like, yeah, I can, I can do this.

[00:37:02] Scott Tolinski: You don't really think that you're ready whenever somebody is willing to pay you for the work and like that salary is. is good enough for whatever you can do. Because like, I mean, you know, actors here, if you're taking a big cut, and that like becomes a huge lifestyle shift for you, and it's not possible to live off of that, then it's just straight up not doable.

But like, if the, the salary is somewhat comparable, and it's like good enough, and you know, I've definitely taken a decrease in pay. Or a lateral or a, you know, little, little downward slant just to go into something. In fact, to do that, I did that for my first dev job. I was getting paid more as a projectionist, but that job was soul sucking.

I was you know, being a projectionist in the age of digital projectors is as really as exciting as walking into a projection booth and turning on the projector at Eight in the morning and then turning it off at five. And if something goes wrong you fix it in, in that time. So it was like, it was like, you know, for some type, some type of person, that would be the perfect job.

You do absolutely nothing. But for me, it was not the right type of job. So, yeah, I use that time to like. Study and learn dev stuff while I was making sure the projector didn't turn off. Yeah, but I took a pay cut to to work as a dev and it paid off after about a year, you know, where I got a raise and then another move to another dev job and, you know, it eventually, it definitely, definitely paid off in the longterm. But you know, it's hard to say, I would say whenever somebody is willing to pay you a wage that, you know, you're comfortable with is, is when you're ready, because the biggest jumps I've ever had in terms of my knowledge increase have always come on the job and they did not come from myself learning on my own.

That's, did you do, that's like a lot interesting. Lot of,

[00:38:48] Seth Whiting: did you do a lot of like job hopping? I feel like that's sort of like a common

[00:38:51] Scott Tolinski: theme for, for devs. I did. Yeah. And, and I know a lot of, you know, older school folks won't love that. But I did, you know, I worked my first dev job for a couple years and it was great.

I didn't wanna leave that job 'cause I really liked it that. But the, the pay bump was like literally a, a more than doubling of my salary. So to work at Michigan and I was like, I will take a doubling of my salary. I had and then the floor job came and then. And that one, again, I'd only worked in Michigan for like six months and these people hit me up in my inbox and I'm not considering a job.

I just started working at this one, even if it's not like the most ideal job, it's still like steady and solid, whatever. And then they let me know about the the contract and the contract was like even a bigger amount. I was like, I can't turn this down. And then I almost took another job at GM.

GM at the time was Building, I don't know if they still are, but at the time they were starting to build out the dashboard interfaces with JavaScript and they were looking people to build those and the pay bump was again a good pay bump and I told them I would take it. But then Ford was like, we'll match it.

So then I didn't take that job. So I almost hopped again. And then the only reason I left that job though, was because it was like a two year contract. And once that contract was over, I was like, I'm going to try. Cause at this point, level up tutorials had, you know, already grown to like a couple hundred thousand followers on YouTube.

So I was like, you know what, I'm going to try to do this full time for a little bit and see how it goes. It was, it was very tough. It didn't go super well. And I ended up having to take a job at a startup for. Like a year after a year or so that also did not go very well. This, the startup, did the startup just go under or something?

Yeah, the founders were rough. The founders were what you would like. You would describe the founders as being completely toxic. They were calling them all the time. And I think that, you know, there were, there was, I've like lost track of all of the different, really bad things that happened in that job.

I was the the lead dev on the project. It was a small team. I was like really into the work and I was doing a good job doing, doing the site building, but it was such a, like, I, I remember one time I was at, I was snowboarding and they like pulled me off the mountain to like work on something. And we're talking like pre alpha stage.

Nobody's using the project and they, we need this done right now. Like, but I'm literally on it's my day off. You got to get off the mountain. Okay. And then the, the final straw was the this Sunday day of the birth of my first son. So my first child was born, and it was like two days later. My, my parents were here and everything like that.

Maybe it was maybe like a week after, sorry, maybe like a week after he was born, because my, I was, I was right about to fly my parents or drive my parents to the airport, and it was a Sunday night. At 10 o'clock and the owner of the company is calling my phone and like literally screaming at me about something, something broke when she was trying to use the app and she's screaming at me because something that nobody is using.

I'm like, like this is, this is how this goes. This is like, and also like, I just had a child like four or five days ago. Yeah. Like, yeah. And so that was Sunday and I quit on Monday. , I just straight up, I, I don't know about you, but like quitting that your job as the you know, you know, the main income of our household.

My wife, my wife worked, but, you know, my income was more than hers. And at the time it's like, Is this crazy? I'm going to quit my job, you know, like days after my son was born and but I couldn't, I could not imagine like going back to work there and I, I quit and there was two founders. And when I quit to the second founder, because I didn't even want to talk to the other one.

And, the first thing she goes is she's like, yeah, I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. And I was like, yep. All right. See you later. I'm out of here. And it was literally like that week that I, I messaged Wes because Wes and I had already been friends for a little bit at that point. And I asked him if he wanted to really do the podcast full time.

And we just jumped into the podcast. So that like, it was a big career step for me. And that was like part of the genesis of syntax. So yeah, that's cool.

[00:43:09] Jake Pacheco: I mean, and it sounds like you knew yourself worth at that point. You're like, nah, like,

[00:43:13] Scott Tolinski: yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah.

[00:43:15] Jake Pacheco: Yeah. Yeah. Like, I get that. Yeah.

[00:43:16] Scott Tolinski: I've, I've, I left, you know, like, yeah, I left.

Level up tutorials, which I was, was struggling. I was struggling to turn it into a real business at that point, cause it was a free YouTube channel. And then I tried to turn it into a business. I was getting a lot of people really mad that I was trying to charge for something that used to be for free and it was really struggling, but I probably could have pulled it out of the nosedive.

And instead, I was like, I'm going to take this job, it's a steady income, and then I won't have to worry about pulling it out of the nosedive. But yeah, yeah.

[00:43:51] Seth Whiting: So then, after the, the startup thing, you went back to LevelUp and, and, and then pulled it out of the nosedive,

[00:43:59] Scott Tolinski: or, or like? Pretty much, yeah. I changed everything.

I, I, I There's some, some bit of like mental clarity that you have when you have kids. It's like, I don't even know what it is. I didn't like, I, I like suddenly saw things very clearly. I was like, I'm going to start this podcast. I'm going to change the business model entirely. I was trying to do the West boss model where you release a big course, charge a lot of money for it.

And have it be this big substantial package, right? But I didn't do all of the work, like, that he did beforehand to build the trust of an audience to pay a lot of money for a really nice package. So I built this, like, really great substantial course and sold, like, 10 copies of it and was like, oh, this is, no, this is, and then I did a second one.

So I only did two and that also bombed and I was so upset about it. Cause people were just so used to getting stuff from free for me. Right. And then I took a look at it and said like, well, what is like truly like, what do people like about my content? Are they like that? A lot of variety. They like that.

They get something new all the time, so I changed it up to saying, all right, I'm going to do a 20 some video course every single month. I'm going to give you like the first six videos for free so that way you can like see if you like it. And I'm basically, I'm going to not stop doing things for free on YouTube.

I'm going to still continue to do things for free on YouTube. I'm just going to do, to do both of them. And sure enough, like when I made those decisions, it was like, it was not sustainable longterm. It had to be, but it wasn't. But it definitely worked. And honestly, the podcast really helped too, because the podcast was really successful.

And even though I had a huge audience on YouTube already, those people weren't super excited to pay for stuff. But Wes's audience they, they bought content cause they were used to buying content or they were working for companies and companies would buy content. So once Wes and I combined forces, I think it, the podcast really helped.

My course career take off and level up tutorials was able to be more successful and I could devote a lot of time, hire and have third party creators and all sorts of stuff. Nice. Awesome.

[00:46:04] Seth Whiting: Yeah,

[00:46:04] Jake Pacheco: that's, that's wicked cool. And, and impressive.

[00:46:06] Scott Tolinski: It was a. Truly. Wild. It was very scary for a long time. Yeah, that, that, yeah.

I

[00:46:12] Jake Pacheco: can, I can only imagine.

[00:46:14] Scott Tolinski: Is there anything

[00:46:16] Jake Pacheco: in your career or your journey with all of it that you would have done differently? Or anything that might have accelerated your journey, do you think? Or do you think that the way you did it is pretty much how you'd do it again?

[00:46:29] Scott Tolinski: Yeah I would, I would.

Do a lot differently. I, I think for me, I, it took me a long time to recognize what my own strengths were. And, you know, I had a lot of like ideals or ideas of like things I wanted to do in my career that probably weren't like a good fit for my. Learning capacity, my brain type, the way that I work and I saw myself as being like some things I wasn't necessarily like, I didn't see myself as a developer.

I saw myself as a designer and a graphic designer and all this motion graphics artist who just did development on the side for fun for cash and a hobby when in reality, it's like. That's the thing I like doing. That's my, one of my favorite part. Like I, it took me so long to recognize it's the thing I really like doing and the thing I'm good at doing and the thing that I could like make money on.

But for some reason I didn't like, it was like chopped liver to me. I was like, yeah, it's just a hobby, you know, but I should have recognized. A lot earlier. I would have gone to school for, for computer science. I mean, my dad was like an engineer. I very clearly have as an engineer. I should have gone to school for computer science.

I should have done that. But I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be a professional musician and I was not going to let that go. And then when that didn't work out, I'm going to be a graphic designer because I'm an, I'm an art guy, you know? Yeah.

[00:47:53] Seth Whiting: Do you, just a side tangent, do you play the drums? Is that,

[00:47:57] Scott Tolinski: is that what you played?

Yeah, I play a lot of instruments, but I have played the drums and I went to school for music technology, so it was like recording and which obviously with my recording stuff has all definitely come in handy. When you want to start doing YouTube videos, oh, I already have a nice microphone and I already have, you know, right?

Yeah, yeah.

[00:48:15] Seth Whiting: I've heard people draw the parallels of like, People who are musical tend to pick up development better like more more easily.

[00:48:25] Scott Tolinski: Have you heard that? Yeah. Yeah. So I went so the program I did was performing arts technology is what it was called, but I would say half of the people. In my little program became developers.

And half of them became professional musicians or producers. So, it's like, it's like really split down. It's so funny to think, like, how many people that I went to school with that ended up becoming a developer. In fact, one of my, one of my best friends from, from school works at Google and has worked there for like 15 years now.

So it's like, yeah, yeah. That's really cool.

[00:48:59] Seth Whiting: Do you remember, like,

[00:49:01] Scott Tolinski: Like, I guess your,

[00:49:03] Seth Whiting: your original reason for learning how to code was more just like to make websites for, for your, your band or, or whoever, you know, whoever would pay you to make a

[00:49:14] Scott Tolinski: website. Is that, is that right? Is that like your

[00:49:17] Seth Whiting: original reason for learning how to code was basically

[00:49:20] Scott Tolinski: just, To make websites.

Yeah. And I think that was part of the thing is it was always a utility for me. It was like, I'm going to do this because I want a website for X, Y, and Z. Yeah. I need a, I need, I need a website for myself because I want to sell my songs. I want to sell my art. I want to do this, but it was never like, I'm going to make a website to get better at making websites.

It just so happened that I was like really good at persevering through it because I saw the end result. Also, one of the things that I think really helps learning web dev anything is to focus less on the, the technique of building the, the application or the site or anything, and to focus on the end result, the product, what is the thing I'm trying to build?

Like, that's what like pushes you through. And I had that. I just never recognized, recognized that I actually had the skill and ability to become a professional developer. Yeah,

[00:50:09] Seth Whiting: yeah. Do you know, like, do you have a sense or like an idea of like what your Your like reason for being a developer is now like,

[00:50:20] Scott Tolinski: it's sort of a weird

[00:50:21] Seth Whiting: question, but like, do you have like a personal kind of like, kind of like mission or anything that you're like working toward?

[00:50:31] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, I don't know if I necessarily like for me right now, especially with what we're doing with the syntax podcast and my mission for a little bit now has been letting, letting my. Intuition like drive me into interesting technology and then like sharing that in into a way that you can help other people accomplish tasks because I don't necessarily feel like I'm the guy who's going to build.

A startup that's going to make a ton of money. I'm not going to build some monolith giant software application, but like, I'm, I'm really good at diving into like little demos and like getting excited and getting curious. And so I think for me, it's that like curiosity bit of like, Ooh, can I do this?

Can I do that? Here's some things that people aren't thinking of trying it out and then taking that. Exploration, distilling it down into something that can be easily shared with others and get other people excited about building things. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you, you,

[00:51:31] Seth Whiting: like you said, you put out a new course on like a new thing every month.

So like, it's crazy to be able to figure something out in that amount of time enough to like teach other people how to figure it out and talk

[00:51:45] Scott Tolinski: about it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, I've been doing that for so long for free on YouTube that by the time I was doing it as a product, it was like, well, that's not the hard part.

The hard part is how do I get people to buy it? You know, the hard part isn't making the demos and learning things and distilling it into a way people can understand. It's like, I now got to worry about marketing and email and customer service. Yeah. While worrying about the next course, right? Like. Yeah, yeah, while worrying about the next course and luckily I've always been an idea guy, that's very much the way my brain works and when Wes and I started the podcast, before we even had a name for the podcast, we had like 30 different episode ideas.

So for us, like, we're both really good at cranking out ideas and me, I had a long list of tutorial courses I would like to do. Like 20 courses I would like to do when the, the, when I, and I had worked at a magazine. So when that course is released and here comes the next one, I got my big list and I could say, here's all the things that I've been wanting to do.

Which one of these is speaking to me right now? All right, I'll pick one that's speaking to me right now. And then I'll spend a whole week really diving into the topic. I mean, it's oftentimes it's related stuff. So it's stuff that I'd either been working on, you know, if I. If I'd been using styled components in the level up tutorial site, Oh, here's an opportunity now for me to do a course on styled components or GitHub actions or whatever, you know?

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:53:14] Seth Whiting: Yeah. Cool. That's

[00:53:16] Scott Tolinski: cool. Yeah. Just out of

[00:53:20] Seth Whiting: curiosity, do you, do you have any like, and this is sort of like unrelated to the whole purpose of this podcast, but like, do you, do you have any like big lessons in marketing that you've realized

[00:53:33] Scott Tolinski: or like figured out? I'm still bad at it. Yeah. For me, it's like, listen to Wes, whatever Wes thinks is right is, yeah.

It's so

[00:53:42] Jake Pacheco: funny because yesterday I did haircuts for charity for, for kids going back to school, who can't afford it, anyways and I get there and it's another company that like puts all of this on and stuff and we're just, you know, they invite us and we, we go in there and just put in a few hours.

And I, like, go to our table and there's two other shops, and

[00:54:06] Scott Tolinski: and there's a big poster

[00:54:08] Jake Pacheco: that says, Oh, yeah, provided by, and it says, like, the first shop's name, the second shop's name, and then our name, and they, like, Completely messed it up.

[00:54:19] Scott Tolinski: Like added like, oh no, four extra words into the .

[00:54:23] Jake Pacheco: Like so, so I, I mean, uh uh, here's information.

My barbershop is Water Street Barber Company and they called it, but our symbol is like wss. They called it wss State Street Barbers.

[00:54:39] Scott Tolinski: And I'm like, none of this is right! No! No! No! I'm like, how do you, why would I ever name my shop that? No! It was, it was wild. So,

[00:54:50] Jake Pacheco: like, the marketing thing, I'm like, maybe I should have, like, told someone, but also, like, how don't they know?

[00:54:55] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, yeah. It was wild. It was, but,

[00:54:58] Jake Pacheco: yeah. So I, I get the whole marketing thing. I've never been really, we've, I, I rely heavily on word of mouth. That's my favorite way of people finding out anything that

[00:55:07] Scott Tolinski: I do. That was the best part about me, especially for early YouTube is that like, if I was, if I was doing a course on, let's say SAS or something, and there was no other SAS courses, YouTube's doing the marketing for me, people are searching, I want to learn SAS or H, you know, CSS, whatever.

And my stuff just pops up. I'm not having to convince anybody. It's like, Oh, the thumbnail, it looks good enough. It looks professional enough. You watch the video. I have good audio. I have Like I've learned the lessons of making my font size the right way and stuff, but I'm not having to go out and bring people here.

I mean, you know, the search engine is doing that for me. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. It's a, it's a, once I lost that, it was very, very hard for me. It was a hard road for me. Oh yeah.

[00:55:53] Seth Whiting: Yeah, because, well, I guess, but you still, you still had content on YouTube, but like your main thing was elsewhere at that point.

[00:56:01] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, but it was hard to convince people on YouTube to buy things. Yeah. They used to get things for free, so that was a whole challenge. In fact, my wife came to my defense once because somebody left a comment and it was like, I can't believe he wants us to pay for this now. And like, she wrote a paragraph, giving you 2, 000 videos for free, you

[00:56:21] Jake Pacheco: ungrateful.

Aw, that's so sweet. He has to feed our babies. I

[00:56:25] Scott Tolinski: like, I like, you don't have to do that, but it's cool, thank you, you know. That's so kind though. I'm good at just deleting those comments, yeah. I like that she did that though, kudos. Oh yeah, totally, yeah. Go ahead, Jake.

[00:56:37] Seth Whiting: Well, so if you, if you were to basically like talk to somebody, if somebody asked you, like, I want to learn how to write code, you know, where, what kind of like path would you set them on?

[00:56:50] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, I think that the biggest thing is like, finding like truly, like what excites you in, in building things like, does the, does the idea of building you know, X, Y, and Z excite you. I want to build something that does. Animation. I want to do something. Oh, I saw this really cool site on Instagram.

When you scroll, it does all this cool stuff. I want to learn how to build that. Like to me, that's the biggest thing is knowing truly what excites you and start there and work backwards. So like, all right. To get to here, I need to learn these following things because so many times people say I, I, I gotta, I gotta learn react.

Okay, but what are you building with react? I'm building a to do list. Well, is that, is that exciting? You know, like what are the other things that a to do list can be that is actually exciting to you? And for me, you know, I've always taken those ideas in my own life. When I want to learn something, I build something useful to me.

I. I've talked about this before on syntax, but like, I I've watched a lot of Kung Fu movies and there's a studio that put out like 500 plus movies over the course of 30 years. And so I'm going to build an app for myself to catalog and log all of the movies that I've seen and would like to see. Is that essentially a to do list with like a rating?

Yeah, it pretty much is, but it's at least exciting to me and I'm going to use it. And the drive there isn't. To learn the technology, it's to have something that, you know, I would like to use. And, and so I've always kind of taken that approach. It's like, what are the types of things that would actually excite you?

I want to build something that I can use myself, or I just want to build something that does a visual, I want to build a visualizer for an audio visualizer. Okay, well, where do you start? You start with Canvas and JavaScript and whatever, but it started the, the what and work backwards from there has always been a good strategy for me.

Yeah, that's actually how I got into like, even like CMS style development. My parents were opening up a tea store cause my, my dad, I forget what had happened. I don't know. I think he got laid off, but he, for some reason he was starting a tea store and then he had like contacts in China to import green tea.

So we were importing green tea. And so I was like, Oh, I'm going to have to learn. magenta or whatever e commerce shop there is. At the time there was like one option, so I need to learn how to build an e commerce store for my parents for their tea shop. All right, start there and then work backwards to figure out what it is.

All right, php and whatever and go for it.

[00:59:14] Jake Pacheco: Yeah, that's cool. I mean, that's, we've, we've kind of ended up on that road for the most part. I mean, with like the keeper app creating an app basically for scheduling feedings and lay like egg laying schedules and stuff for my reptiles and stuff.

'cause I have a bunch of

[00:59:30] Scott Tolinski: reps. Oh, cool. So Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So,

[00:59:34] Jake Pacheco: So that's, we've kind of fallen into that a bit. And yeah, so that's cool to hear that. Like you, you'd kind of,

[00:59:39] Scott Tolinski: reach into something that

[00:59:40] Jake Pacheco: would be useful to you in general. And we ended up on that after, you know, starting to teach me JavaScript and stuff, but I guess another question would be with what on Seth's question, like, yeah.

[00:59:55] Scott Tolinski: What

[00:59:56] Jake Pacheco: resources would, would you use nowadays now that, you know, there's a million billion resources and so many tutorials and stuff, where would you tell someone to go?

[01:00:06] Scott Tolinski: Do you think? I think part of it is identifying what engages you well and like what you learn well. So I, I personally, I know this cause my wife's a doctor of psychology.

She she knows how my brain works and she was able to tell me, Hey your auditory processing is way better than your visual processing in terms of reading. So I'm not a good reader. I'm dyslexic. You put, you put a how to blog in front of me and I'm like, but you put on a YouTube video, I can watch the YouTube video on my own speed.

I can listen to it. I can play it back. And it was such a critique I got early on in my career. Nobody wants to learn programming through video. You know, like that's, I got, I got that comment over and over again. I was like, well, I do. That's what I would, that's the way I learned that. So I feel like if I do, then other people do.

So for me, YouTube has always been the number one. To learn and I can learn anything on, on YouTube, whether it's, you know, house housework or whatever. I, I can go to YouTube and, and find something. So for me, I always go to YouTube first and I search for the thing I'm trying to learn and just to even hear somebody the explain that works best for me.

But to, I think the place you start is when you're learning something, pay attention to which ways sit best with you. Is it just straight up looking at code? Is it reading blog posts? Is it being in a discord chat that you can talk to? Is it even now, like one of the things I really like is with these AI, like open AI things chat, GPT, you can pass it in code docs now with plugins.

And I can say, here's a repo consume this repo. And then I can ask you questions, even though I'm reading it and it's not like speaking it or whatever, I can still get the things out of it. In the words that I want to hear I can use metaphor. I can say, is it like this? Is it like that? Whatever. And for me paying attention to truly like, what are those ways that the information sticks best with you?

And then just not worrying about anything else. If the audio video works for me, I'm going to go all in on video, and I'm going to listen to video, and I'm going to start there. If there's nothing there, I'll go other places. But likewise, if, if reading the code works, then I'm going straight to the code.

Hmm. Yeah, that,

[01:02:28] Jake Pacheco: that makes sense. I mean, yeah. Yeah, like I was saying, there's so many different options and stuff, and for me, I've found this. Yeah, yeah, the YouTube is like a massive way that I learned as well.

[01:02:40] Scott Tolinski: YouTube and

[01:02:41] Jake Pacheco: different forums, I definitely like reading people talking to each other about a subject versus if someone's just saying, this is this, like 500 times, like, I kind of it, I have to read it 20 times before it actually gets in there.

[01:02:59] Scott Tolinski: Yeah. Yeah, I also like to the aspect of we're like, you know, somebody might look if you have somebody who is ignorant to a topic asking questions about a topic that can really help too. And sometimes we do that on the podcast intentionally on syntax where West has not used a technology like svelte and then he can play the role of somebody who doesn't know anything about it.

And if I'm teaching it, he can stop me at any point and say, wait, is that like this? Or is this, am I off base here? And we can hash through those questions. Because I think that's like really, truly where this stuff comes into play. When you hear anybody teach anything, everybody always just assumes you have the same knowledge base or, you know, they throw a jargony word.

They say it's the immutable redux. Like they're just tossing out words and everybody's supposed to be like, yeah, I get it. But at the same time, not everybody has that same, that core base of whatever, you know, you're trying to understand. So for me, that's always been a big part is like getting through the jargon into like a, a basic brain area where like, Hey, coming at this from a place where.

And, you know, we all don't have the same background and how do you distill those like core ideas down? Yeah, yeah,

[01:04:12] Jake Pacheco: yeah. We've definitely mentioned it before where it's like, Seth explains it very eloquently and perfectly and everything and then I put it through my filter and go like, like this,

[01:04:23] Scott Tolinski: you know, it usually works out pretty well.

[01:04:25] Jake Pacheco: I mean, that's kind of our

[01:04:26] Scott Tolinski: whole premise, if you will,

[01:04:29] Jake Pacheco: is me starting to understand

[01:04:31] Scott Tolinski: it, you know. And that's one of the things I truly miss about working in an office. Now, granted, I do have, you know, Slack and now since working at Century, I have coworkers where, but before it was like, I missed that, that aspect of not being able to bounce ideas off of other people, but again, that was like such a huge thing for me.

And my first job, second job, third job was I could go to the guy, sit next to me and say, Hey, I'm thinking about doing. Is this a dumb idea? Is this the right path? How would you approach this same problem? And those, like, were always such, like, the biggest, most illuminating things for me. It's getting, like, somebody else's brain on something.

Yeah. Yeah.

[01:05:08] Jake Pacheco: I've done a lot of stuff on Codecademy, and there's been a few moments where I

[01:05:12] Scott Tolinski: just messaged Seth.

[01:05:13] Jake Pacheco: What are they even saying in the first place like, yeah, it's, yeah, it's happened to me multiple times now and and it's, I found that, like, maybe the most helpful of everything of anything that I've done is like just talking to stuff about it. I'm so like, grateful for his help. And then so grateful now for other people actually wanting to come on the podcast like yourself, like to kind of you.

Not only help me, but help others, but like, selfishly, I'm very excited to be helped by, you know,

[01:05:44] Scott Tolinski: with all the vast knowledge of you guys. Makes a big difference. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,

[01:05:49] Seth Whiting: definitely. And it's cool to listen on Syntax, like just yesterday I was listening to one where you guys were talking about, like, the, like, upcoming stuff in JavaScript.

And Wes was explaining something about. What was it? It's like promise dot with resolvers or something like that. I was just listening to this today. And you were like, I think that, like, I think now I get it. Like,

[01:06:15] Scott Tolinski: since you just said that one thing. Yeah. Sometimes it really truly takes a sandwich metaphor or a pizza shop metaphor or whatever, you know, to process it.

And I'm thankful for those moments. Yeah. Yeah. But

[01:06:28] Seth Whiting: there, I know that there are some, you know, that go the other way where like you're explaining something and Wes is like, Oh, no, I get that now.

[01:06:36] Scott Tolinski: So it's, it's cool to, to hear on your show. Yeah. That's actually been the best part about doing the show is that I look once a week, I get to sit down with another developer who, you know, I really truly respect and admire and get to hash it out, hash out questions and work on problems together in that kind of way.

So. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, cool.

[01:06:59] Seth Whiting: So when early on in your career, was there any ever any point where you felt like,

[01:07:05] Scott Tolinski: Like it was too hard, like you wanted to give up? Before I answer that question, right, because I'm noticing in my recording has stopped at some point. Oh, we have the zoom recording as well.

Yeah, I am, at least. You know what? It, it, it has like, you know, QuickTime, it has the square instead of the red circle. So it seems like it's recording, but the number is no longer counting up. So, I don't know why the number's not counting. Who knows? Yeah, if it, if it doesn't work out, we've got the Zoom one.

Yeah, the, the,

[01:07:38] Jake Pacheco: yeah, the Zoom audio has sounded good all, this whole time. So,

[01:07:41] Scott Tolinski: so I'm not too concerned. So, so sorry about that. No, no, no worries. Good looking out. Yeah. You know, I don't know if there was a time particular I wanted to give up with development. There's, there's a lot of micro times in which I wanted to give up on what I'm doing, you know, X, Y, and Z is not working out or I'm frustrated with this.

And I want to you know, change direction with programming and with dev stuff, it was, it was always kind of like the thing I really liked. To do as a hobby, again, like I wanted to work on this after hours because I wanted to make things. Just the, the, the idea of getting to make something out of nothing with code was like, so exciting to me.

So I, you know, you know, there's oftentimes where, you know, I'll be working on a side project and put it in a drawer for a little while because I've had enough of it, but you know, not, not in programming itself. I think it's good to. Again, like have that drive of wanting to produce something or, or, or make something specific because then moments where you're, you're feeling like this is a hard, like, no, I, I, I feel like a complete a dummy because, you know, all these people are talking about this, like, it's easy.

And even like as recent as like, I'm trying to think of whenever Redux dropped it, I felt like I couldn't get a handle on it. And for some reason, why do people like this? I don't get it. I don't, I don't truly get it. And then some eventually for, for me, but for a long time, I was like, man, I, this is like making me truly doubt my abilities here.

And then nowadays, even even like stuff on Twitter will pop up and people are arguing about this or that. And it's like you're I don't think these are, this is a big deal. Like, is this, why, why are we all making this seem like a big deal? Is it a big deal? I'm just like, truly not with it. Like, and that's why I don't think it's a big deal or is it not a big deal?

And then, you know, who knows, maybe it's just dialogue or whatever, but there's never been a time where I'm specifically like, Oh, I'm, I'm done programming, you know, just maybe like I'm done right now with what I'm doing. Yeah.

[01:09:48] Jake Pacheco: Yeah. I was just going to say, what kind of gets you through when you're like.

Having those moments of like, Oh, I'm trying to learn this thing and it's just not sticking. Like sometimes I'll have a moment where I'm just like, Oh my word. Like I, like I'll sit down and a lot of times it's probably just because I'm doing it after work and I've, you know, just talked to 15 people for half an hour.

[01:10:12] Scott Tolinski: But it's often times like what it is. Yeah. Yeah. But it's eight years. Sometimes I just really spent. Yeah.

[01:10:18] Jake Pacheco: Yeah. So it's, yeah, I just thought sometimes I just have that yeah, that stuck in the mud kind of a thing, which I'm trying to work on, but it's, it's

[01:10:25] Scott Tolinski: hard sometimes, you know, it's hard. Yeah. And for me, you know, I think there's like several things you can fall back on.

One thing that always worked for me was like taking a walk, taking a walk with a coworker and talking it out or something. Always work, just clearing your head, putting on, putting on music for me helps sometimes where you're just like. Doing something else or even just like stopping to do some exercise like getting the, the physical blood flowing can like really truly help in a, in a way that like often feels like not the most productive thing at that moment.

You're like, I got to push through this. I got to get done this done. Oh, maybe I could take 10 minutes and do some, you know, movement or whatever. You know, take the dogs for a walk or something and like, come back to it. And it's almost every single time it works, it puts you in a different head space. It gets you thinking a little bit differently.

And it's so it's so hard to do. And I, at the same time, I'm like really not great at doing it, but it almost always, always works to reframe or. Simply going to sleep, going to bed and calling it for an evening. There, I cannot tell you the amount of times that I've chosen to push through a problem that I truly felt was like, this is.

Ruining my life right now, I need to get this done and I'm very upset about it and I'm going to work, work, work, work, work, and then I get nothing out of it and I eventually go to bed angry and then I wake up the next day and I say, Oh, that was the wrong approach entirely. What was I, why was I spending so much time on that approach?

Like, I should have been doing something completely different. And then, you know, there's so many times you just got to know when to know when to pack it up and take a break. Yeah.

[01:12:02] Jake Pacheco: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Yeah, it's, it's one thing that I've I've found to be pretty difficult. So right now I, I, I work three days barbering four days, usually four days I work.

I I'm building my own house right now. So I'm doing that. And then, and I'm trying to code and I keep saying to everyone, I'm like, all I want to do is just. Sit down and just code, like, just cause I want to learn it. I want that to like, I really hope for that to be kind of my future career, kind of a thing.

And you know, maybe I'll sprinkle in some barbering, but this is my main goal is to eventually be into this, you know? So yeah, but sometimes it's just, you know, you just brain fried, you know? And I, so, so yeah, I wasn't sure if. if you ever got that or if that if that kind of resonates with you as far as like just being like yeah like you know

[01:12:54] Scott Tolinski: yeah and it's especially frustrating on topics that it seems like other like A lot of other people have no problem with, which, you know, too often times, that's the thing we see.

Everybody has no problem with this topic. I'm the only person who cannot understand this very simple thing that everybody else is doing, you know, and it can feel very, very frustrating and oftentimes it is just like. You're, you know, connected, having connected and the moment it connects, you're going to never look at it the same way again.

And all of a sudden you're looking at this thing with different eyes and you could take that next step. I'm a big fan of like ambient kind of learning to where I'm putting on YouTube videos while I'm. Doing the dishes and just listening to them or the podcast, you know, I listened to the podcast to just get a general idea of what they're using.

You hear these things enough times they start to sound normal and you hear them in context and you start to like gain a little bit of information about the context, even if it's not, you know, I I'm, I'm starting to get into more rust programming and it's way harder to me personally than You know, web dev stuff and such a visual programming type of guy, a language.

That's not like a GUI specific thing. You know, you're not building interfaces inherently. I mean, you can, but you're not, it's not like CSS JavaScript where you're manipulating the webpage. And for me, I would just like put on Rust podcasts and just listen to them to hear about things and let some of it make its way into my brain somehow.

Yeah, that makes sense.

[01:14:27] Seth Whiting: Yeah, that's definitely like taking walks, taking naps, that kind of thing. Those definitely... We'll get you through some stuff and like, sometimes like, I feel like I've heard it's maybe even happened with me before, but like in your sleep, you'll figure something out,

[01:14:49] Scott Tolinski: you know?

Absolutely. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your brain is working still. Yeah. And another thing too, is like, get some of the pressure off yourself because man, people are, everybody's. You know, it seems like people aren't struggling with this stuff, but everybody struggles with a lot of stuff and people struggle with a ton of concepts.

And it feels like oftentimes, like, yeah, I'm the only person struggling with this. And it's like, never the case. It's just, you know, you're seeing the 10 people talk about they got it and they've mastered it. Yeah. You're conflating that with everybody in the world knows this thing, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

[01:15:27] Jake Pacheco: Yeah, I'd say I was just gonna say it's one of those things where you know, when you first get into it at all, and you just, you know, go on YouTube and web development, whatever.

And like, there's like, a bunch of people that are like, Oh, yeah, how I learned web development in a year. And like how I'm just like, like how I went from zero to senior developer and so yeah, like, yeah, okay, guys,

[01:15:50] Scott Tolinski: I mean, maybe, but like, I genuinely like hate that aspect of social media nowadays where everything is.

So. So like, I, it like bugs me to no end and it used to really bug me the video, you know, I don't want to, cause there's a lot of creators that do these types of videos that I really like and appreciate. So I don't want, I'm not talking about any creator specifically, if you're hearing this and thinking I'm talking about a creator, but like the type of YouTube videos that would be like.

X topic in 10 minutes. And I would just be like, that's not how it works. Like that's straight up. Not how it works. And I get what they're trying to do and it works and it always drove clicks, but I never saw it as anything other than this is like a click driver and that's it, you know, right.

[01:16:37] Seth Whiting: Yeah. Or in 100 seconds.

[01:16:40] Scott Tolinski: Yes. Yes. Yes. They should just, they should just take the

[01:16:44] Jake Pacheco: hundred seconds and explain how you cannot learn that much in a

[01:16:48] Scott Tolinski: hundred seconds. Yeah.

[01:16:49] Jake Pacheco: Right. Like, that'd be cool. Like, yeah, I always like, I'll tell people about like the house build and stuff. They're like, Oh, so when are you going to be in? I'm like, Oh, let's.

That's like,

[01:16:58] Scott Tolinski: yeah,

[01:16:58] Jake Pacheco: hopefully I'm like, if it pans out, it's cool. But if it doesn't, I've just spent a lot of money on nothing.

[01:17:04] Scott Tolinski: It's

[01:17:05] Jake Pacheco: just, just to kind of combat that kind of mentality of like this, like, I don't know, I, I don't, I don't post much on social media or anything like this is the most social media thing that I do by a mile.

And it's because it's like, people post like the highlights of their, you know, the highlights of their lives. Not showing like the low lights. You know what I mean? That's

[01:17:27] Scott Tolinski: the struggle. Yeah. Like I'm like,

[01:17:30] Jake Pacheco: like with, with like building the house, like, Oh, that's so cool. I'm you're building a house. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, it's suffering.

It's

[01:17:35] Scott Tolinski: like, it's all I do. It's

[01:17:37] Jake Pacheco: all I think about. I have to become an engineer and a bunch of other stuff in, you know, as I'm doing it. And it's like, yeah, no, it's not, it's not a small thing, you know?

[01:17:46] Scott Tolinski: It's consistency. It's showing up and it's exactly little tiny steps. It's like, yeah, you, you sit there working all day.

[01:17:56] Jake Pacheco: For something that really didn't make a huge difference, but now it's done and you have to just tell yourself, hey, you did it,

[01:18:03] Scott Tolinski: you know, you did it, but you also gained a little small little there. You gained a little bit. Yeah, your knowledge in some way. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:18:12] Jake Pacheco: So that kind of goes along, I guess, with what you're saying with like the with like the listening to podcasts, even if it's in the background or something, maybe you heard something and you're like, Oh, I was just trying to learn that.

And now that makes sense because

[01:18:24] Scott Tolinski: they said it a certain way and stuff. Some dots connect some context somewhere. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, just trying to kind of

[01:18:31] Jake Pacheco: surround yourself with the knowledge, even if you don't understand every single word and everything.

[01:18:36] Scott Tolinski: Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, it makes sense.

[01:18:39] Seth Whiting: Well, I think that's all the, the time that we want to take of yours.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much for, for sitting around with us for, for this long. And that was, you know, definitely a lot of really, really good advice there for sure. Yeah.

[01:18:54] Scott Tolinski: Yeah. Awesome. I hope it

[01:18:55] Seth Whiting: helps. Yeah. Thanks so much. Thank you so

[01:18:58] Jake Pacheco: much. Really

[01:18:59] Scott Tolinski: appreciate it a lot.

[01:19:00] Seth Whiting: And before we go, is there, is there anything?

That we didn't talk about that you want to talk about like anything you want to plug or anything like

[01:19:07] Scott Tolinski: that. Any websites that people should go to or anything? Yeah, I will plug Sentry at S E N T R Y dot I O. It's the company I now work for. They they're, they're making great software, and the software is there to make sure that, you know, if you ship bugs to production, that you can find those bugs and fix them easily.

And, you know, one of the coolest things about working for Sentry, it was a tool and a it's a tool that I had used for a long time. Before one, they sponsored me on syntax and two, they acquired my company and I work for them. So it's like, it's a very cool thing that I get to work for them now. And I, I'm just like, I feel very grateful to them for taking the chance on the podcast and everything.

So century. io really great place to track your errors and exceptions.

[01:19:49] Seth Whiting: Awesome. Yeah. I first heard about Sentry from the Syntax Podcast and definitely

[01:19:55] Scott Tolinski: like used

[01:19:57] Seth Whiting: Sentry on every project that I've worked on since. So and it's, it's been, it's, it's definitely an amazing tool

[01:20:04] Scott Tolinski: to use. And as an employer, you know, one of those companies that like, you feel good about working for them.

You know, I think there's a handful of companies that I would feel really upset if I had to collect a paycheck from them and I just like really admire, admire the people that I get to work with and for so, and the product, you know, it's all, all good stuff. Nice. Awesome. Yeah. Super helpful.

[01:20:27] Seth Whiting: Cool. All right.

Well, thanks so much again. And to our listeners, you know, just keep at it and you'll get to be on, on Scott's level in no time. A couple of weeks, a hundred seconds, you'll, you'll, yeah,

[01:20:40] Scott Tolinski: exactly a hundred seconds, 20 years. Awesome.

[01:20:43] Jake Pacheco: Yeah. Well, thank you again, Scott, really, thanks listeners and just keep

[01:20:50] Scott Tolinski: swimming, just keep swimming.

Talk to you next time. All right. Thanks.