Kent C Dodds Podcastleri

The path of teaching yourself to code isn't for the faint of heart. It takes consistency, discipline, and the ability to recognize you're actually making progress. Tutorials are an excellent tool, but they are also a trap. If all you do are tutorials, retaining the skills you learn is going to be extremely difficult. Without applying those skills t…

It's easy to become entrenched in what you already know how to do. You might have a fun project idea that requires creating really awesome CSS animations, and it might seem out of reach if you haven't done anything like that before. But getting through that mental block is an extremely rewarding experience. You gain technical skills and improve you…

There is a diverse range of philosophies when it comes to CSS. Settling on something that fits the needs of your team and application can be a real challenge. Mark Dalgleish, the co-creator of CSS Modules, has been working on an option that might make that choice less of a challenge! Vanilla Extract is kind of like "CSS-modules in TypeScript", allo…

Scott Moss is a retired Navy Veteran who made the career change into software engineering after becoming a father. His journey wasn't an easy one, and as a dad, he had to learn many lessons in work-life balance. For us developers who have kids, his struggle is one that almost all of us can relate to. This industry has an extremely high ceiling, and…

Whether you know it or not, we all have a "personal brand". It's the summary of the part of yourself that you present to the public. And while there are negative connotations to the term, it doesn't have to be that way. Building a personal brand for yourself is a very useful tool for cultivating a community of like-minded people. But it's not a qui…

Constantly learning is something that we all have to do as developers. If you're a JavaScript developer then chances are CSS is something that hasn't been easy to learn for you. It doesn't have the error messages JS does and when things go wrong you can have no idea what's even happening. Well in this episode Josh Comeau gives us some effective str…

We have to remember that we are all human beings with social and emotional needs. Our career suffers when we fall into a pit of negativity or when we put up mental barriers that prevent us from interacting with people we might've wanted to talk to. In this episode, Tracy Lee chats about the importance of remembering that everyone, even the awesome …

Side projects are important in our line of work. They sharpen our skills and sometimes they can even take off and lead our career in a new direction. But seeing people create these amazing projects over a weekend can be demotivating as a junior developer. "How can they do that when I'm five days deep into a todo app? What do they have that I'm miss…

Building our apps to be accessible is absolutely necessary, but building a great a11y friendly experience is extremely challenging when we ourselves aren't in a situation that requires the use of a screenreader is keyboard-only navigation. We can't fully rely on tools to audit the a11y score of our apps. With the challenge being distinctly human, c…

Everything that developers do is DX (Developer Experience). But, it can be hard to know when it is appropriate to spend the time to improve the DX at your workplace. You also might be curious about what you can do to enhance the DX. Repetitive tasks are an easy one to look out for. If you find yourself doing something again and again it's probably …

"I should really get more involved in open-source" is something that's always on the back of our minds. You are fully aware of how rewarding it could be but that perfect opportunity to contribute never comes up. Ian Sutherland, a maintainer of Create React App and contributor to NodeJS, used to be in that position. He had always struggled with gett…

Vlad Magdalin is the founder of Webflow, a powerful visual development tool that enables people to create professional websites without writing code. Webflow is on a much lower level of abstraction than something like Squarespace, and users still need to understand the core fundamentals of web development. You might think that tools like these are …

Teaching what you know is a great way to give back to your community, grow your reputation as an expert, and to even make some extra income. But, just because you're an expert doesn't automatically mean you'll be able to effectively transfer your knowledge and skills to others. Taylor Bell works for egghead, and one of his main focuses is helping i…

Software development has always been a fast-paced sector. New and better technologies are constantly coming out and if companies don't keep up they'll soon be out of date. Daria has experience with multiple teams who were upgrading their stack, and through that has discovered joy in being a generalist who is capable of working with a variety of tec…

TypeScript has been taking over, and for good reason. Have you ever had good end-to-end or integration tests that ended up being invaluable during some refactoring? You can think of TypeScript in the same way. It's amazing when it's done well, but when done poorly it's misleading and a huge headache. Because of this, migrating to TypeScript is not …

Twitter and Instagram had a problem that would ordinarily be simple on smaller scales. They needed to be able to generate IDs on the order of millions per second. Twitter used a brute force method of having a triple-redundant service that generates the IDs. However, Instagram had the elegant solution of inserting a little script that could generate…

The JavaScript ecosystem is vast and solves a wide array of problems. Because of this, it is key that you have a foundational understanding of JavaScript if you want to be able to work across the JS spectrum. It is also helpful to know the layers of abstraction that are going on. Become familiar with what comes with the browser like the navigator A…

Titus Wormer does a lot of work with natural language processing. He is the creator of Retext, Remark, and many many more open-source projects. In this episode Titus chats about his extensive open-source work, and goes a bit deeper into his ecosystem of natural language processing tools and plugins. You'll also learn about abstract state trees and …

It's time to embrace ESM (ECMAScript Module). NodeJS is providing support for ESM out of the box. With ESM modules coming out of the experimental stage we're going to see a lot of packages begin to embrace it. ESM provides superior organization of your code by allowing you to more easily create smaller, reusable chunks of code. ESM gives you a "mod…

Will Johnson used to work for call centers and factories, but he managed to make the daunting career change into tech. This especially isn't easy when you're clocking in 12 hour days. To make time to grow Will was waking up early, staying up late, and doing stuff on weekends. "It was very, very time consuming, but it was one of those things where l…

Web development isn't as simple as it used to be. We can't view the source of any webpage and be able to recreate it anymore, it's all bundled and obfuscated. That increased complexity comes from the increasingly larger role that the internet is taking on in our society and the need for our websites to do more than display static information. The g…

Modern web development has given us a cornucopia of powerful abstractions. But as we've moved to higher levels of abstraction Ryan has noticed that we are reinventing the wheel in places, especially with what the browser provides by default. Remix aims to solve this problem. Remix is trying today's benefits of a highly dynamic page, but still have …

Landing your first developer job isn't easy. Companies don't want to take the risk of hiring a junior, they have no idea how competent you are. A traditional resume doesn't adequately prove your abilities. Why would they just take your word for it? In order to standout you need to show those hard-earned skills off! You need to publicly showcase you…

Almost everything we experience in the world we experience through metaphor. Even when we talk about abstract things that don't have physical form, we talk about them in terms of directionality and bodies. Stock markets go up, our moods are low, and past years are behind us. So what makes this useful to us on the internet? Strong visual metaphor is…

Kent's spent the last several months completely focused on rewriting his website, recording new episodes for Chats with Kent, and creating an all new podcast called the Call Kent Podcast. Michael Chan joins Kent to ask him about the motivation to rewrite kentcdodds.com with Remix. Kent explains what technology he used to create the unique experienc…

Tanner Linsley is the creator of react-table, react-charts, and react-query. Tanner also has a startup called nozzle.io where they track rankings in Google and do cool things around technical SEO. A lot of Tanner's libraries were born out of necessity at nozzle. We often reach for abstractions that were built to solve problems that we don't have an…

Serene Yew runs Pixeltree, a software consultancy that focuses on sourcing junior talent and providing them with the mentorship that they need so they can bridge the experience gap and get a job. What better way to incite change than to be that change? You can have a huge influence on someone by taking on a mentorship role. And, not only does mento…

Saron Yitbarek started a company called Code Newbie, which started as a Twitter community and grew into a couple of podcasts and a conference. Saron first became interested in technology after she read the Steve Jobs book, it was the first time she got introduced to technology in a way that she could relate to, where tech was talked about through t…

Software development isn't limited to "nerds." During her time at Andreessen Horowitz, Preethi met thousands of entrepreneurs. What she realized was that software engineering is what these entrepreneurs use to change the world. They're able to code the future they believe in using software engineering. A lot of people were surprised that Preethi ga…

One of the things Michael loves about React is that it's a lot easier to make a black box of abstraction with iron-clad React components that don't leak. Something that concerns Michael deeply about any technology is when we put too much inside of it. We saw this pretty early on in React, where everyone was taking all manner of state and putting it…

It was around 2008-2010 when Michael's family's business went under due to the recession. From that point, Michael spent every spare second he had reading whatever he could. He'd be reading Ruby and JavaScript documentation while he pushed his son on the swing. In this episode, Michael talks about what it takes to break into the tech industry. He e…

Most applications on the backend and the front end get built as a monolith, but you could improve your developer experience and performance if you broke your applications out into microservices. The pros and cons are the same for monorepos and microservices. Microservices is a different paradigm. And so, there's a lot of training that goes involved…

What does it mean to test in production? Simply put, testing in production means testing your features in the environment where your features will live. So what if a feature works in staging, that's great, but you should care if the feature works in production, that's what matters. An excellent tool for testing in production is feature flagging. Fe…

Dr. Michaela Greiler is focused on helping teams make code reviews their superpower! During Dr. Michaela's time at Microsoft, they found that developers were spending six hours a week doing code reviews. You have to ask yourself if that time is really being well spent. How do you ensure that code reviews are worth the time? There is a huge variety …

The internet is one of those resources that we have available to us, and it's fantastic at what it does. However, there's a lot of content that isn't super curated and isn't in a format that makes it digestible. Courtney is interested in making the web accessible not only in the way we typically think of accessibility for people with disabilities w…

In her free time, Amelia Wattenberger enjoys creating "code sketches." On the surface, they might just look like silly examples, but she's learned concepts or ways of doing things through these tiny code examples. You can learn a lot by playing with something in isolation and then trying to see how you can apply it to a production application later…

Thorium is the software that space centers use for the computer controls and the flight director controls of simulated space ship experiences! The cool thing about Thorium is that it's entirely web-based. Alex is using React to build Thorium and a 3D universe. The 3D universe is being driven by react-three-fiber by Paul Henschel, which is a fantast…

Laurie has a tough time saying no, and she ends up trying a lot of different things, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Attempting to learn something new gives you the fresh perspective of a beginner starting from nothing. We get comfortable and take for granted the pieces of knowledge we have on our skills. You have to find a balance, though.…

A lot of times, when people are learning something new, they feel, "Oh, I have to learn this fast and my manager's counting on me to learn this," and everything's super stressful. As software engineers, we continually have to learn new things, and carrying that stress is tough on our mental health, so we must learn how to mitigate it. Don't worry a…

Almost every demo Ken has done at a conference was wildly out of his league technologically. The deadline for the conference pushes him to grow rapidly. Conference-driven development. Elon Musk says, "If it's physically possible, then we can make it happen." Take stock of the situation and ask yourself what the reality of it is, is it possible? If …

Erik built the Redux Form library to help manage form states in Redux. He decided to open-source Redux Form, and it exploded and became very, very popular. People kept coming up to Erik with additional use cases, and the form library itself kept growing to the point where the bundle size got out of hand and saying yes to all the requests for featur…

Visual testing is like snapshot testing with images. So when your application is in the state that you want it to be in, you verify this as a human being, and then utilize tools to take a picture of your application in that state. Visual testing isn't a new concept, but the technology was previously flaky. But now, Applitools is using AI and machin…

How do you stay optimistic when being bombarded with negativity every day? Nader reminds us that, statistically, we are living in the safest and most prosperous period in human history. Nader went through a lot of hardship growing up, and it caused him to assume the entire world was that way, but in reality, it wasn't. Try to maintain perspective, …

Kelly got into personal finance while she was struggling financially in grad school. Your very first step to getting your money under control should be to know where your money is going. Sit down and look at the last three months of your bank statements and categorize your purchases. Being able to visualize and measure where your money is going is …

Jen puts knitting before the fact that she is a senior software engineer when she defines who she is; this doesn't make her a worse engineer than someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes code. With each new thing you learn, whether you're good or bad at it, you'll tend to discover something about it that teaches you something new. With everything Jen…

Henry Zhu's transition from a programing role to a more managerial role as Babel's maintainer has been hard. As programmers, we tend to value our work based on the number of commits or pushing features. When you are a manager, you're not writing much code anymore. There's still an expectation that maintainers should be writing code. Still, maintain…

Jenn has been working with React since 0.13. She has a background in creative writing, and it melded well with React. One of her big early mistakes with React was focusing too hard on making components reusable. When you try to make your component one-hundred percent reusable, you end up with a massive stack of props. In our effort to make things r…

We're all really busy but we are also ambitious and have goals, but a lot of the time those goals aren't defined so well. It's important that our goals are well defined and manageable, we're hard on ourselves when we aren't making progress towards them. You want to expend your energy on the things that are providing you with value, and when you exp…

When Lindsey started, she didn't know what accessibility even meant. She would see that there was an "accessibility error" and fix it, but she didn't understand why she was fixing it. A11y clicked for her when she realized that the point of accessibility was to make the web usable for people with disabilities. Code, at its core, is about people, an…

Shirley Wu has been freelancer since 2016, creating data visualizations for her clients. In this episode, Shirley talks about the four projects that had the most significant impact on her. In 2017 Shirley created an interactive visualization of the musical, Hamilton. It blew up on the internet. It was the first time a project of her's had a signifi…