---
title: Wes Bos - Your Web Boss
date: 2022-02-08T05:00:00-05:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-3/wes-bos-your-web-boss/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Guest Wes Bos
I'm a full Stack JavaScript developer from Canada ??. I create free + premium courses and do a twice-weekly podcast called Syntax.
[ ](https://twitter.com/wesbos)
Season 05 Episode 3 – Feb 08, 2022
44:58 [Show Notes](#show-notes)
## Wes Bos - Your Web Boss
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[](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-05/S05-E03-Wes-Bos.mp3)
We talk to Wes Bos all about web development, soft skills, and everything needed to succeed in web development.
### Show Notes
- Wes's history and background in web development
- How does Wes learn enough on a new technology to start teaching it?
- How to decide what to learn with new technology or languages
- Important advice for a new developer
- Most important technical skill
- Learn the fundamentals
- No code design
- Weakest development skill
- Online courses vs Bootcamps
- Emerging technology
### Show Links
- [Canada Learning Code](https://www.canadalearningcode.ca/)
- [Amanda Lutz's episode](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-2/how-to-talk-to-your-web-developer/)
- [Juno College (Previously Hacker You)](https://junocollege.com/)
- [The Great Divide (Chris Coyier)](https://css-tricks.com/the-great-divide/)
- [Beginner Javascript](https://beginnerjavascript.com/)
- [Owen Craig's Episode](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-11/from-novice-to-bootcamp-instructor/)
- [Purchasing power parity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity)
- [Javascript 30](https://javascript30.com/)
- [All Wes Bos courses](https://wesbos.com/courses)
- [Wordpress](https://wordpress.org/)
- [Svelt](https://svelte.dev/)
- [Svelt Kit](https://kit.svelte.dev/)
- [Prisma](https://www.prisma.io/)
- [Sanity](https://www.sanity.io/)
Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.
**\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hello and welcome to their website 101 Podcast, the podcast for novice web developers and small business owners who want to learn more about running and optimizing their websites. I'm Sean Smith, your co-host, and with me today as always is Mike Mello.
**\[00:17\]** **Mike:** Hello, Sean, how's it going?
**\[00:20\]** **Sean:** It is going good. I'm very excited because we have a really awesome guest with us today. is the West Boss of Syntax FM and your favorite online course teacher.
**\[00:35\]** **Wes:** Wes, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
**\[00:41\]** **Mike:** Yeah, excellent to have you on the show. So Wes is a bit of a Renaissance man. If he's podcast, he does web development. He does tutorial stuff and all kind of educational stuff. It's going to be really interesting to learn about this.
**\[00:55\]** **Sean:** Yeah, so Wes, can you introduce yourself to us a little bit about your history and how you got into teaching online?
**\[01:04\]** **Wes:** Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a full stack developer from Canada actually, just outside of Toronto, so pretty close to you guys. And I've been a developer for, I don't know, probably 15, 20 years now. And I've been making websites. And I leaned pretty heavily in the JavaScript direction. I did a lot of WordPress back in my day. And I bought, I don't know, maybe eight years ago, I started dabbling in YouTube and blogging and things like that.
And that led to me teaching in person, which was really fun. I taught some in-person courses for this thing called Ladies Learning Code, which is now Canada Learning Code in Toronto.
And people are like, Hey, I love the way you explain things like, I don't know where you come up with your analogies and whatnot, but it's awesome. It just makes sense to me. So that's that's great.
So between the YouTube, the blog and doing that, I'm like, I should, I should start teaching stuff. So I had written a book on sublime text and I did a bunch of videos along with that. And that sold super well.
And it kind of just came out of the gate, like working really well for me. And I really enjoyed it. So I sort of like said, all right, well, this is my thing now. I had been doing client work at the same time, and I did that together for three or four years.
But over time, I did more and more teaching and eventually got into podcasting and making courses. And now I'm full time. The guy that teaches you to build things on the internet.
**\[02:44\]** **Mike:** Okay. So yeah, that was going to be one of my questions. So you have done direct client work in the past, but now you've sort of pivoted over to just doing the educational stuff, is that right?
**\[02:54\]** **Wes:** Yeah, yeah. It was about four years ago, as my course stuff was doing better and better.
I took on less and less client work, which is a little sad because I love, I actually really enjoy doing client work as always, different stuff that was working on, different types of teams.
learned a ton doing client work, and I'd suggest it to really anybody who wants to get up to speed really quickly is to not necessarily just work for yourself, but like an agency, as crazy as agencies are, you get you skill up really quickly because of all the different things at play.
But eventually it was just like, yeah, I need to go full time on this, and I still have lots of dev work to do because I have my own website, I have this huge course platform that I've built to sell my courses and what people stream and all that stuff, so it's not like I'm that teacher that doesn't actually, doesn't actually dev, I spend most of my days writing code.
Yeah, you still get your hands dirty, right?
**\[03:57\]** **Sean:** Yeah, you mentioned working with an agency, that is, I was kind of working a little bit on the side when I was living overseas and it came to Canada and I wanted to go full-time of. I got a job at a local agency here. That 18 months really boosted my skills and knowledge. It helped with understanding soft skills needed and business skills needed as well as just, you know, the hard code languages and stuff. So yeah, I would agree with you and recommend that.
**\[04:30\]** **Wes:** The soft skills is really underrated and like honestly, like if you can get pretty good at being a developer, but also you're very good at answering your phone and replying to emails and explaining things to a client like there is unlimited work out there for you if you can master both of those things.
**\[04:49\]** **Mike:** So we actually, here's a, whatever, sidebar. We had a meetup yesterday, just last night, me and Sean and a friend of ours who's been on the show, Amanda Lutz, we'll put her episode in the show notes. He's a huge fan of yours West, I believe she was really excited to learn that.
**\[05:07\]** **Sean:** She literally jumped up and down in her seat and we told her that we were talking with you tomorrow.
**\[05:12\]** **Mike:** She went all-thang, girl, on you. We had that exact conversation where we acknowledged that because in our, we're not, we're no spring chickens, as I always say, we're not young guys in the industry now. So we're always worried about ageism in tech and that kind of thing. We were acknowledging last night that it's having those other skills of communicating with clients or whatever, just being able to do stuff that a kid just at a school might not be used to. It can be really, really valuable and put you ahead. Oh, yeah.
**\[05:49\]** **Wes:** Absolutely. Totally agree.
**\[05:51\]** **Mike:** So Amanda gave us a few questions too. I'm going to throw some of these in that you wanted us to ask you. All right. So, what resources do you use to learn the stuff that people know you as someone who teaches them, who teaches whatever technology, JavaScript, whatever, what do you use to teach yourself new things?
**\[06:12\]** **Sean:** You're going to learn this new language or something that you want to teach, because it's picking up in popularity. How do you teach yourself well enough to be a teacher?
**\[06:21\]** **Wes:** Yeah. It's a mix of reading through the docs. funny, that's something a lot of people don't actually do is I'll literally, when I'm picking up something new, I'll just sit down and read through the entire documentation of a framework. Not every single word, maybe not necessarily every single word, but I'll read as much of it as I can to sort of understand the surface area of a framework or library or technology.
What that allows you to do is have like a really good, I think the word surface area makes it understandable, is that There is this much to it and this is what it covers and then I know that if okay I'm trying to fix this thing or work on that I know that okay that that is part of this library or that is not part of this library so there's that reading through examples often I'll just go through the actual source code on a that's nothing I could do when I was when I was first getting into web development but if you like now that I'm a bit of a more experienced developer I'm more and more as my skills grow, I'm able to jump into the actual source code of of these libraries and understand what it is they are actually doing. So there's that often all, just like reach out to the, it's a bit of a privilege I have is that library authors want me to use their stuff. So they'll often say like, hey, like, any questions, let me know. and I'll just be able to reach out or we'll jump on a screen sharing call and just pair through an issue I'm having.
So there's that conference talks is another really good one to get an idea of surface area. Almost always when you're getting into a technology, there'll be a conference talk from somebody who works on that technology and just put it on 2X, skip through the first five minutes of, I'm from Idaho and I love these are my children, put it on 2X and you can get through an hour-long conference talk in like 20, 25 minutes while you're having lunch. So that's another good way to just like speed and just all of that. And then there's also like, there's that aspect which is libraries and technologies and then there's also like core languages.
So like how do you know these things are added to the language? There's this new stuff in JavaScript every couple of months and CSS and now there's TypeScript and new stuff in React and I'll pay very close attention to browser release notes will often tell you what tech is new, the spec, people who work on the spec, the spec is this thing that they say, okay, we're gonna add the ability to make a bold in CSS, and they'll standardize that, and then all the browsers will go and implement that. So if you sort of pay attention to the spec and the process of adding things to the language, You sort of have some idea two or three years ahead of before everybody gets to use it. So that's a big one for me as well.
**\[09:20\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that was one of my other questions is, how do you keep up with the fast paced changing environment of web development? But yeah, I never thought about that. Just have a look at what the browsers, because ultimately, they're almost the gatekeepers of what's gonna work and what's not. If browsers decide they're not supporting flash, forget about flash, sort of thing.
**\[09:42\]** **Wes:** So there's that often all,
just like reach out to the, it's a bit of a privilege I have is that library authors want me to use their stuff. So they'll often say like, hey, like, any questions, let me know.
and I'll just be able to reach out or we'll jump on a screen sharing call and just pair through an issue I'm having.
So there's that conference talks is another really good one to get an idea of surface area. Almost always when you're getting into a technology, there'll be a conference talk from somebody who works on that technology and just put it on 2X, skip through the first five minutes of, I'm from Idaho and I love these are my children, put it on 2X and you can get through an hour-long conference talk in like 20, 25 minutes while you're having lunch.
**\[10:29\]** **Sean:** of how it all works. All right. So my next question for you is what is the most important advice you you can give to a new developer?
**\[10:43\]** **Wes:** It's that your skills are incremental and having daily momentum is extremely important. So, you're gonna, you're learning to build the websites and learning this tech is extremely frustrating, especially in your early years. And there's gonna be a lot of times in your early years where you start to doubt whether you're cut out for this
**\[11:06\]** **Sean:** because I still don't whether I'm cut out for it.
**\[11:09\]** **Wes:** Yeah, yeah, and like that goes away at some point, somewhat, but it's extremely difficult. And if I were to look at myself from 10 years ago, there's no leaps and bounds in my career as a web development or understanding all this. It's literally just tiny little stair steps every single day. And I get a little bit better every single day.
And that's a really frustrating thing for people to hear because they want me to say, like, you know what, I've got the course for you $6,000 and you're going to come out the other, like people email me all the time and they say, hey, well, as if I take your course, will I get a job? And the answer's no, you probably not. You have to keep doing this stuff. You got to build it over and over.
You got to do a CSS layout for the hundreds time before it. Okay, I think I finally get this type of stuff and that small incremental improvements day-to-day, that momentum is unstoppable because certainly we also see people who are really excited about it and then take six months off and then get really excited about it and take six months off. And then like, if you do it, not every day, you're gonna get burned out if you do it every single day but if you have a sort of a steady momentum where you keep coming back to this thing, given that it is hard, you're going to make some big improvements.
**\[12:32\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I would have to agree with that. It's really important to keep going at it. So my weakest skill is JavaScript. I'm really not particularly great at it.
And I've taken your courses, and it didn't make me a great JavaScript developer, as you said. But that's because I took the course when I had a slow period in my business.
And it's like, oh, Gung Ho about it. And then I business picked up and I didn't continue to apply what I had learned. So I went back to JQuery because, well, JQuery is easy. Yeah.
So yeah, I mean, you need to do the continual improvement, use it over and over otherwise you're gonna be starting at the beginning, again.
**\[13:21\]** **Mike:** Yeah, we both, Sean and I have both been working the industry as well for like 20 years or so is what like you yeah and it's interesting what you said there I think back on my career and I too can't think of any particular moment when I suddenly leapt forward in my abilities it was all this incremental change like you said yeah
**\[13:41\]** **Wes:** And it kind of sucks as nobody really wants to hear that but unfortunately it's that way with literally anything - investing money or going to the gym and getting extremely fit - there's not not going to be any single one big thing that's going to blow it apart as much as we all want to find that secret.
It's, it's just that day in, day out. If you really want this thing. Yeah.
And also like put yourself in a, there's also I think devs who get comfortable in what it is that they are doing. I get emails like this all the time where someone's like, you know what? I've been doing the same thing for four years now. I don't feel like I'm improving.
And whether that's through your job or through side projects, you always have to put yourself in a situation where you're you're like 10% uncomfortable with what you're doing, because that is what is gonna push you forward. If you're just doing the same thing every day and you know how to do all this type of stuff, you might not be making those jumps either.
**\[14:33\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I've heard a lot of people say that what you have to, if you're don't, I don't, you know, people word it in different ways, but like if you don't feel slightly afraid of the work you're doing, you know, then you're, you're not doing it right, sort of, you know, it's basically what you just said, yeah.
**\[14:47\]** **Sean:** Yeah, that's both a blessing and a curse of the industry. You always have to be learning, You can't just coast, because if you coast, after a few years, you're gonna be so far behind that you're not gonna be able to keep up with what is current.
**\[15:02\]** **Wes:** Yeah, yeah, totally. And that scares a lot of people about this industry and you think, oh, you're always gonna be updating, it's always going out of date, but you get into a rhythm where this stuff does not move as fast as you think it does, but if you learn a couple of things a year, you're not gonna be going anywhere.
**\[15:19\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so this brings us to our next question. how, I don't know how you could articulate this, but how comfortable do you personally feel like you need to be before you are willing to create a course about it to teach other people? Like how do you evaluate your own ability and like, okay, now I can start teaching this.
**\[15:38\]** **Wes:** Yeah, that's a good question. I would say there's certainly no better way to absolutely slam dunk a technology than to try to teach other people.
I remember when I first started teaching hacker U, which is like a bootcamp. I had all of the initial course notes and the whole curriculum. I built the whole curriculum and like I would have to go upon like things like floats and like that's how long ago we used this thing.
Yeah. We had floats and what were some of the other basic CSS positioning and stuff like that. And I would be like, I kind of knew how position, absolute and relative worked and whatnot. But in order to explain it to somebody, how it reflows the document and all that, oh, man, like, you really have to understand how it works and it's a great way
and that's not necessarily to do course, but you could be writing a blog post on a specific, how to send it to them, something in Flexbox and that blog post will make you really understand how it works. It's the same thing with the podcast as well, someone yesterday, somebody asked me how redirects in all there's like seven different kinds of redirects in in serverland and it's crazy you think I just redirect somebody but there's there's so many tiny little minutia of HDD verbs and whatnot and like I was like oh like I understand how it works but if I were to explain it to you give me 10 minutes and I gotta do a deep dive on all the little ins and outs and now I know I'll talk about that yeah so back to your original question how do you how How do you know if you're good enough to do these types of things? I don't know if I necessarily have an answer to that.
**\[17:41\]** **Mike:** that type of thing. Yeah, so it sounds like almost preparing the course itself is a way to get yourself more familiar with it because you're doing that thing where you educate yourself by putting yourself in position where you're educating someone else. Yeah, and Sean, you do this too. I know that whenever you learn a new skill or a new technique to do something in craft or whatever,
**\[18:05\]** **Sean:** you just make a blog post immediately about it, right? Yeah, that's what my blog is. It's writing to to future me. I've actually forgotten that I had a blog post and Googled it and found my own blog post. So I've done that many times. I actually encourage going back to what we gave advice for new developers is write a blog post, teach a colleague something. We have, me and Mike were in this little Slack group where there was about seven or eight of us and we're always giving advice or asking questions of each other and it's a really great way to learn things and solidify what you already know.
**\[18:46\]** **Wes:** Yeah, absolutely.
**\[18:49\]** **Sean:** So Wes, what do you think is the most important technical skill, not a soft skill, technical skill for a developer, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, maybe a framework like Bootstrap or JavaScript
**\[19:02\]** **Wes:** I know that I'm pretty good at JavaScript. I know that I'm pretty good at explaining how things work. Then I also make sure that the thing that we are building, I understand it inside out. If somebody were to ask me a question about how anything works in it, I'd either be able to say it right off the bat or do a little bit of research dive into the code and answer
frameworks, like ReactorView. I think having a good enough set of fundamentals in JavaScript is probably, I think if you think about like most bang for your buck getting a job being paid well, I think at least right now having like a good set of JavaScript fundamentals is the most important because when you have like a good set of JavaScript fundamentals, you are able to jump into literally any framework or problem or whatever has popped up even other languages because once you understand objects and strings and looping and whatnot, Those things apply to every framework in every language out there, and how you do that in that framework is usually just a Google away, okay, I understand that.
So that's not to say that you should spend years and years slam dunking your fundamentals before you even touch a framework because I learned jQuery before I learned vanilla JavaScript and all of us did that. Yeah, I dipped into a React way before I was super comfortable with JavaScript, but I had a good enough set of fundamentals that I was able to dive into them. And now, like, something new comes out. I'm not stressed out that my React skills are going to go out of date because there's this new cool framework. I said, yeah, okay, I can learn that thing in probably a day or two. And then I'm that type of developer now. So that's my advice to everybody is just make sure and the same is probably true for CSS as well.
**\[21:38\]** **Sean:** Yeah, it's interesting that you said that because I hear a lot of people say, oh, tailwind is easy for people who don't know CSS but actually in my opinion, I think tailwind is better if you already have a strong foundation in it because I know maybe I don't know the exact tailwind class but I know what I want and I know how to search for it.
**\[22:00\]** **Wes:** Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think people sometimes mix up tailwind UI and just tailwind itself. I think that's the difference is that you can slap some classes on something and or copy paste a bunch of classes to make a layout but you don't actually know how to debug the thing whereas like yeah, the library itself is you have to know CSS in order to use the thing. It just makes it easier.
**\[22:25\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I guess tailwind UI kit would be similar to like bootstrap or foundation. Yeah, exactly. Just copying and pasting. Okay, this is how you do tabs. Copy and paste this in. Boom, and it works.
**\[22:36\]** **Mike:** Yeah, exactly. Actually, speaking of this, not to put you on the spot, but what do you think about the emerging, I guess it's already emerged, movement of no code design where people have entire careers being able to make websites by dragging and dropping things and they literally don't write a single line of code. Do you have any thoughts on that?
**\[22:58\]** **Wes:** Yeah, I see a lot of developers immediately say like, that's dumb, like that'll never work. You have to know how to actually write code and I'm certainly not in that camp because I don't know what's gonna happen. Like certainly, if you take a look at GitHub co-pilot, that's not no code, but it's literally writing the code for you. So it's not a stretch to think that computers will be able to do this thing at some point.
I have dipped into a bunch of these no-code tools. What I see at least right now is that a lot of times there's limitations, or the thing you're building is just this web of connect this to connect this, and if this than that, and it just is really, really frustrating. Or it's slower than actually writing the code yourself. So there's certainly a spot for it.
I think just as website builders sort of replaced a lot of these $3,000 WordPress developers, the no code movement probably will do that as well. But then there's also, I don't think that if you are trying to learn to code right now, who those tools are targeting versus what you should be building is probably not the same thing. And I wouldn't worry about it too much at least
**\[24:20\]** **Mike:** right now. Yeah, and that's what they, I guess, the, what, I think Chris Coir is called at the great divide where there's almost like the split happening where there's a certain group of developers who are going in the no-code direction and others who are really diving deep into whatever it is, react and all that other stuff. And they might be, there might be like
**\[24:39\]** **Wes:** a schism between them emerging. Yeah, I think that's fair to say is that there's, there was Because the crop of developers that were right a little bit of code, click 14 WordPress plugins together, skin this popular WordPress theme, and you're done. I think that those days are pretty limited. I've seen many, many WordPress agencies go out of business because that was their bread and butter is the $5,000 website for the bakery down the street, and now it makes sense for that bakery, just to sign up for Squarespace.
**\[25:15\]** **Sean:** Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, something like that.
**\[25:18\]** **Wes:** Yeah, all of those things, but on the other hand, all these tools, I can build an entire application that can have user accounts, and all of that stuff is way easier than it was 10 years ago. And that's because these tools are getting really better. So yeah, it's kind of interesting to watch. definitely keeping my eye on it. But also, I dipped into some of this stuff, and what was it? One of the Wix, I had a couple calls with them, they wanted to do some videos, and they're like, yes, now we have serverless functions, which is cool because what if you do want to write a little bit of code inside? Because at a certain point, you hit that limit, and if that's a hard limit, then you're like, what do you do, right? So now they have serverless functions, but I'm like, oh, cool, I can NPM install stuff. They're like, well, you can NPM install some stuff. And they're like, here's a list. I'm like, no, I need everything. I want to be able to, I don't want those limits on me because then this stuff doesn't make sense to me if I know that there are hard limits ahead of me. I'm not gonna go down that road.
Yeah, right.
**\[26:30\]** **Sean:** Yeah, well, if you need a truly bespoke solution, you're not gonna be using Wix or Squarespace in any case.
**\[26:37\]** **Wes:** Totally, totally. And honestly, that's not what most people need either. I always talk about it on the podcast. I were all just making boxes, typing into those boxes and saving those boxes to a database. That's pretty much what web apps are, but.
**\[26:49\]** **Mike:** But. Okay. Hey, this is Mike here, and we're currently looking for topic and or guest suggestions. So if there's anything you'd like us to talk about, or anyone you'd like us to talk to, please reach out. website 101podcast.com slash contact. So here's a curve ball. What's your weakest web devs skill you personally? What are you the least good at?
**\[27:20\]** **Wes:** SVG, I would probably say. Oh yeah. There's this whole world of whole world of SVG and animation and writing these things and whenever I get into them, it's a little tricky. Like if you go to, which website is it, my beginner JavaScript.com, there's this little wave design that like it's a kind of like drips on the design and that's using some CSS masking and the mask is in SVG and when I was doing that, I was like, why can't I get this drip to work and how to like reach out to some friends that were better with both like design tools and with SVG to actually get it working for me, which is a frustrating.
So I would probably say SVG. I don't know. My wife always says I'm really confident for what I am. I'm not that good of a developer, but I have the confidence where I could probably figure it out.
**\[28:25\]** **Mike:** That's probably an even better skill than being a good developer, being confident enough
**\[28:32\]** **Sean:** Yeah. You're learning how to learn. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So Wes, you taught in boot camps previously. You mentioned Hacker. You. Yeah. One of our previous guests was a student of yours there. Oh, and Craig. Oh, yeah. Remember. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I know him really well. Oh, cool. He's actually now teaching at another bootcamp. So that's pretty cool. So you taught at Bootcamp previously and now you do online courses as an instructor, what do you like about in-line courses and
**\[29:10\]** **Wes:** the online asynchronous courses? What do you dislike? What I really like about online courses is that you can reach literally anybody. So not everybody has, I don't know, what is it?
10, 9, 12 grand to take a bootcamp course or a couple of grants to take an evening course and not everyone has the time to do that. Everybody has different life situations. And I think that if you want to skill up very quickly and be in an environment where you can learn to code, I think, if you ask me, what's the fastest way I can learn to code? I'm going to say you should join a bootcamp.
Absolutely. But if you want to improve your JavaScript skills or learn a new framework or go a little bit slower and do it in the evenings, you've got a couple hours and night, you can do that. Then online course is amazing for that because like also like I have people taking my courses all around the world and it's amazing to hear these stories of people being like yeah like I took a couple of your courses and I worked really hard and I built some websites and now now I actually have a paying job. I moved from this totally different industry into now I'm a web developer and I've been in it long enough that you see people move and move through their careers and a lot of them are senior developers while I'm working at Google and Facebook and things like that.
And it's not just because of my courses.
**\[30:34\]** **Sean:** And you helped them start that career. Yeah, that's going to be a really amazing feeling
**\[30:37\]** **Wes:** that you're really good at. Yeah, it's really good. I did that. I don't want to take all credit because certainly it's not me. It's them putting in the time what we talked about earlier. So that's what I love about online courses that it's accessible to literally everybody, especially like the free ones are accessible to anybody that has internet connection that wants to take this type of thing and the paid ones are accessible to anyone who's got some money to invest in their skills.
**\[31:04\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I was gonna say one of the things that I really like that you've done with your courses is I use purchasing parity power.
**\[31:11\]** **Wes:** Yeah, maybe I got the wrong term. purchasing power parity. I always mix up the order of them.
**\[31:19\]** **Sean:** Yeah, so you take into account the exchange rate for various currencies and countries and it may be cheaper for somebody to buy it in Pakistan than someone in the United States.
**\[31:32\]** **Wes:** Yeah, yeah, that's something I started. Not out of frustration, but I was getting dozens of emails from people being like, Okay, I am from India or Brazil or Pakistan. And I don't make that much money. This is, your course is two week salary for me.
I can't do that. And I would always have to be like, okay, well, like how much can you afford, like how much do you make as a developer? And it both took a lot of time, but it was also like a lot of emotional energy because you had to like sympathize with these people and try to help them out. Because yes, I'm trying to run a business, but also I'm a little bit passionate about actually people learning to code, right?
So I sort of, I was like, how do I automate this? So both I can sell more courses as well as help out these people. So over two years of asking people, how much do you make? And in this country, whatever, I just kept all that data and a spreadsheet and I came up with this big list of what I think is fair.
And I'm not an economist by any means and that's the reason I don't make that list public because I don't want to be the bearer of how much people should pay. but it works out super well.
**\[32:43\]** **Sean:** I think that shows your leadership in the industry because I know that there are a couple of other course creators. Yeah, everybody does it now. Yeah, I don't know names off hand, but I've seen other course creators doing the same thing. And as far as I know, you're the first. So that makes you a leader in the industry.
**\[33:01\]** **Wes:** I'm pretty surprised that it caught on and initially it was annoyance because other course creators would be like, what are you doing now everybody's asking me for a discount and I don't wanna, it's worth it. And I'd be like, well sorry about that. And now there's SaaS startups around figuring out how much they should pay and there's dozens of other course creators and it's to a point where I think almost every course creator does it which is pretty cool to see.
**\[33:30\]** **Sean:** Yeah, that's nice. It's now become the industry standard.
**\[33:34\]** **Wes:** Yeah, I'm glad that it did it, it's cool. It's funny that people now message me and say, like, I'm glad that you're doing this like this other course creator is doing. And I'm like, I invented that. That is really awesome, Wes.
**\[33:52\]** **Sean:** Seriously, seriously awesome.
**\[33:55\]** **Mike:** What's your most popular course topic that you offer?
**\[34:02\]** **Wes:** JavaScript. So my most popular course by far is javascript 30 at javascript 30.com. And this is a free one, right? Yeah, it's a free course.
And this was an answer to kind of what we were talking about earlier, and it was an answer to my in-person students who were saying like, hey, Wes, do you have more exercises or like what do you want to, I need to build more stuff. Because I keep telling them, just keep building stuff, keep building stuff, you're going to get better, keep doing it, they're like, okay, great. But like, what, what do I build? and I'm like, oh, I'm constantly just building stuff.
I have unlimited ideas in my brain of things that you could possibly build, but a lot of people don't. They don't know what to build. And even if they did know what to build, like, there's no answer key in the back of the book to actually look at if I did it right, you know? So I built this JavaScript 30.
That is literally that. It's 30 vanilla JavaScript coding challenges. It's fun, it's not just console logging and looping over bottles of beer on the wall or food bar bags. That's taken that course.
Yeah. people it's boring for a lot of people so I built this thing I was really fun and it's this 30 exercises and there's fun stuff is webcam and data fetching and animations and video players and all kinds of voiceinator all these fun things and I have this thing on there there is no formation without repetition and that's it like you literally need to do this for a thousand a thousand days and here's 30 of them to get you going so that's that's my by far my most popular course. And then behind that is the react ones are probably second most popular. And those are paid courses?
Yeah, I've got React for beginners, advanced react.com. And then I also on the CSS side, my most popular ones are flexbox.io and CSS grid.io. Those are really popular because whether you've been at it for 15 years or for one year, You have to learn these new things to CSS.
**\[36:02\]** **Mike:** So our friend Amanda had another really great question. Do you have any tips about emerging technology? You mentioned earlier that you troll through the browser codes and all that kind of thing and find out what's coming down the pipe or whatever. Any hot tips that people should be keeping an eye on and technology that's happening?
**\[36:26\]** **Wes:** Yeah, I'll preface this with saying that you're not gonna miss this technology. Like when we move, the biggest move we've had so far is we move from jQuery to react or vanilla JavaScript. And that move was like a six year, seven year move and still jQuery is extremely popular today. It's not gonna wake up tomorrow and be like, oh my gosh, what happened?
No, everything is different, you know, like this stuff, it moves quick, but not that quick, not that quick that you're gonna see it. So like if you hear somebody talking about something and you've never heard about it, it's probably too early, right? That said, like popular things right now, Svelte and Svelte kit seems to be getting some huge traction. What it is is it's a, Svelte is a library That is similar to react or angular or ember things like that and it is super super simple So if you are a newbie and you're trying to learn react It's good thing to do because there's lots of jobs for react But it's also frustrating.
There's lots of like weird things that you have to just know You just got to understand how it works and this is how it's done and react And you just be like oh that's weird or that seems to be a lot of code to updated variable and it's felt It's much easier, much simpler, and you know, I think it's much more beginner friendly as well. So I'm really excited, but that's felt kit is from the Svelte team, and I think they're just going to merge it all into one or it is already. And it is the framework for building websites, so that you want pages. If you want to be able to route from page to page, if you want to be able to bundle this thing, it sort of like does it all for you.
It's similar. Similar to next JS in felt world if next JS is in react world So that's one that I would probably keep an eye on or even dip into it if you're say like when am I going to learn next now that I'm like Okay at JavaScript felt seems pretty fun to to dip your toes into cool cool good tip awesome
**\[38:38\]** **Sean:** Actually, I had one last question that I just came up with yeah so you're mentioned previously about WordPress developers and add a whole bunch of plugins and things like that. So it seems like you're not so hot on WordPress anymore. Is there a CMS that you would recommend or that you would prefer to use? Or is it still WordPress? So WordPress is an interesting
**\[39:06\]** **Wes:** spot. There are a lot of developers who absolutely hate it. And I think that is mostly unfounded. I think that most people hate WordPress because they learned WordPress as the first technology and they built some garbage website that was very hard to maintain, or they had to jump into some garbage website that somebody else built and for that reason they think all of WordPress is awful.
Well, if you dip into the actual WordPress community, there's lots of really good devs out there that are building really slick things and I myself run a couple of WordPress websites for people in my life. So I really, really liked that. And if you were to ask me, like, what's the best thing that clients can update that's, like, free, except for hosting it, is easily customizable. You can bolt on functionality without having to pay for something.
WordPress is that. And it's still that. And there's lots of other CMSs out there. I'm big on Keystone.
JS is a really big one. There's hosted options, Prisma, Sanity are really good version, hosted, like those are paid options out there. There's all kinds of stuff out there, but nothing has WordPress, nothing has the ease of WordPress and the catalog of all these extensions that you have there. So while you can certainly get yourself in trouble with WordPress, I still I don't think it's a really good option, especially now that even if you aren't using the whole theming system, you just want to use it as like a data store, it's still a really good option.
**\[40:46\]** **Sean:** That's awesome. That is a ringing endorsement for WordPress, so yeah, yeah, it's a weird place.
**\[40:53\]** **Wes:** People always push back against that because people hate PHP and WordPress in general, and I think most of it is unfounded and just because they did some bad stuff in their early days are also like people think that it makes them look smart, like this is if newbies are listening, people who are aggressively anti-assert and technology are usually doing it because they think it makes them look smart and makes them look like a good developer. They're not people who are comfortable with their skillset are not going off on some technology but why it's awful. They're just They're living their life and building stuff with the stuff that they prefer, right? Like, why would you spend your days trying to hate on something that you're not using?
It doesn't make sense to me. And I also think like there's all kinds of different devs out there. You get the plug-in wizards that are just bolting stuff together with no backups and whatnot and never update their thing. But also, that has changed a lot in the last bit.
People think WordPress is super insecure. But now it auto updates and there's a lot of stuff out there that has fixed that, but people don't seem to remember, they just remember what it was like six, ten years ago. Yeah.
**\[42:08\]** **Mike:** Cool. Well, this has been so fascinating and I really appreciate you coming on the show. I know that you've got a lot of websites that for your various courses and whatnot, you've listed a few of them throughout the conversation. Is there any main website kind of thing that you would direct our listeners to if they want to learn more about your stuff?
**\[42:29\]** **Wes:** Yeah. So it's westboss.com, W-E-S-B-O-S. That has links to courses, it's westboss.com, Fords.courses. You can see a list of all of them, all the free and all the paid ones on there.
There's also a whole text guide on there for beginner JavaScript. So I took my entire, I have this course called Beginner JavaScript. That's what it says. It teaches you from zero to intermediate JavaScript.
And I had the entire course transcribed, and then I had them turned into actual readable notes by a technical writer. So if you aren't the type to watch video but you much prefer just to read, it's totally free it's at westboss.com for it's as JavaScript. And you can read and learn on there. It's huge.
I forget how many words it is, but it's like 700,000 words or something like that. It's massive. Wow. Cool.
It's one massive read, but I'm sure it'd be really helpful. Yeah. And you don't have to read the whole thing. You can just dip in, I don't understand how promises work.
You can dip into the promises section.
**\[43:40\]** **Sean:** and cool, nice. Well, Russ, this has been really great. Thank you so much for coming out. And one last thing, a couple of weeks ago on our Slack channel that I mentioned earlier, somebody was talking about you, and they made a typo. They called you web boss. And I thought that was, I thought that was so funny. So you are the web boss. The web boss.
**\[44:02\]** **Wes:** Yeah, that happens a lot, that in web OS, I get corrected too, a lot, that's cool too.
**\[44:09\]** **Mike:** All right, thanks a lot Wes for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
**\[44:12\]** **Wes:** You're welcome. Thank you for having me on, it's fun.
**\[44:17\]** **Sean:** The Website 101 Podcast is hosted by me, Sean Smith. You can find me on LinkedIn. My username is caffeine creations or on Twitter where my username is caffeine creation. C-A-F-E-I-M-E-C-R-E-E-8-I-O-M. or at my website, caffeinecreations.ca
**\[44:39\]** **Mike:** And by me, Mike Mella, you can reach me online at BeLikeWater.ca and also on Twitter and LinkedIn, where my username is Mike Mella, that's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-A.
Close Transcript
Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).
[](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 05
- 1 [ Meet your Host - Sean](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-1/meet-your-host-sean/)
- 2 [ Meet Your Host - Mike Mella](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-2/meet-your-host-mike-mella/)
- 3 [ Wes Bos - Your Web Boss](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-3/wes-bos-your-web-boss/)
- 4 [ Tailwind CSS with Adam Wathan](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-4/tailwind-css-with-adam-wathan/)
- 5 [ Starting my own Website with Bill Campbell](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-5/starting-my-own-website-with-bill-campbell/)
- 6 [ CSS is Awesome with Kevin Powell](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-6/css-is-awesome-with-kevin-powell/)
- 7 [ Meet Your Host - Amanda](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-7/meet-your-host-amanda/)
- 8 [ 11 Things to avoid doing on your website](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-8/11-things-to-avoid-doing-on-your-website/)
- 9 [ Vanilla Javascript - Fundamentals before Frameworks](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-9/vanilla-javascript-fundamentals-before-frameworks/)
- 10 [ Hiring Junior Devs and How to Stand Out from the Crowd](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-10/hiring-junior-devs-and-how-to-stand-out-from-the-crowd/)
- 11 [ AlpineJS with Caleb Porzio: Lightweight javascript in your markup.](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-11/alpinejs-with-caleb-porzio-lightweight-javascript-in-your-markup/)
- 12 [ Contract Opinions From Not a Lawyer](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-12/contract-opinions-from-not-a-lawyer/)
- 13 [ Talking to a New Dev](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-13/talking-to-a-new-dev/)
### All Seasons
- [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/)
- [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/)
- [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/)
- [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/)
- [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/)
- [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/)
- [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/)
- [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/)
- [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/)
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