The Bos of Sublime Text

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Howdy Howdy. This is Carrie Dils. Welcome to office hours FM episode #55. I have got Wes Bos on the show today. Wes how you doing?

Wes: I am doing fantastic. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: I am so glad you’re on today. We have got probably more territory ever we can hit in an hour. I am confident that we can make some good trails. A quick hello to everyone who is joining us and listening live either via YouTube or Google+ or Twitter. Hopefully you’re not having issues if you’re watching it over on office hours.fm. If you are, head over to Google+ I’ll post that link and you can watch there. I’ve got a couple of show sponsors today. As always thanks to ManageWP which is a one-stop shop for managing all of your WordPress dashboards and you can get 10% off by using the link cdils.me/ManageWPme and our other sponsor DesktopServer who recently relaunched their website over at serverpress.com. Wes have you ever used them?

Wes: No I haven’t actually.

Carrie: They are pretty much the bomb digity when it comes to spinning up WordPress sites.

Wes: I have heard awesome things about them

Carrie: Oh yeah. They might be life-changing and revolutionary. As always thanks to the sponsors, I appreciate those guys and appreciate you listeners for tuning in. If you have questions for Wes you can shoot them over on Twitter to #officefm or or the twitter handle @officehoursfm. All of that said…hello Wad..uh…Wes.

Wes: Hello.

Carrie: Was…is like?

Wes: You can call me Was if you like.

Carrie: You can call me…whoa…Carrie Dils …that would be Kills Or Dairy. You can call me Dairy.

Wes: Dairy. All right. (laughing)

Carrie: So you are up in the cold but sunny Toronto area?

Wes: Yeah. Actually today it’s not too cold. Which I am thankful for. We just got past a pretty brutal winter. But now we’ve got the summer weather here which is fantastic.

Carrie: Sweet. Is that a Google pillow behind you?

Wes: Yeah a Chrome pillow. I think I actually have it upside down. Yeah it is a Chrome pillow. My buddy Darcy gave that to me.

Carrie: That is awesome. Is it homemade?

Wes: No. No. You can actually buy them on the campus. In Mountainview, I think it is?

Carrie: Interesting.

Wes: Yeah I sleep on it and when I wake up I know more JavaScript. It’s great.
Carrie: (laughing) It’s like the osmosis pillow. I love it!

Wes: Yeah it works. It works really well.

Carrie : OK. If I go off-line it’s because I’ve run over to grab myself one of those pillows. All right. I’ve seen some twitter chat that there are some issues on the iPad watching the show over on officehours.fm . I promise I tested this not 30 minutes ago. So apologies if there are issues. I will have to dig into those. So Wes, you first came on my radar..I believe it was back in December. I had Jared Atcheson and Bill Ericson on the show. They were talking about your book Sublime Text Power User then of course I had to… immediately as soon as the show was over I went picked up your book and started reading it which gives a ton of just helpful shortcuts and little user tricks for sublime text. Can you kinda run me through your background of what is that you do, where your specialties lie and then we’ll get into the book a little bit later.

 

Wes: OK. So I am a front end developer. Full stack developer, which means that I help people build their products. I work for startups and companies building whatever it is that they need to build. I do quite a bit of wordpress on the backend. I do quite a bit of Node.js on the back end recently as well as on the front end. I’m my pretty JavaScript CSS3 heavy on on those things sort of . In addition to that is what I like to build stuff and it’s a lot of my time building stuff but I also have a flip  side of that which is teaching. So I’m part of prepping the next generation of developers in for skills so I do it through my blog, my book and I also teach at something here in Toronto called hackerYou. What we do is that we have boot camps and part time classes to teach people a lot development skills so CSS, HTML, JavaScript, WordPress, Ruby. We’ve got classes on all kinds of stuff related to web development. So pretty much I build stuff and I teach people how to build stuff you could sum it up as.

Carrie: I don’t know when you ever have time to sleep on your Chrome pillow.

Wes: (laughing) Yeah that’s why I have that chair back there. I just take little naps on it. In between.

Carrie: We were talking before the show. You are a new daddy. So Congratulations.

Wes: Thank you. Thank you so much. We’re thrilled.

Carrie: Does she have like chrome sheets in her crib?

Wes: (laughing) She  doesn’t have Chrome sheets just yet but she did get HTML for Babies at the baby shower and she’s got a couple of latest learning code shirt and a hackerYou shirt . Definitely  my geek friends have rallied around me and been like this little girls going to know how to code.

Carrie: Awesome.Well she is getting it by osmosis. Is your wife into code or tech?

Wes: My wife is actually a designer. So she’s into calligraphy and print design and she does a bit of web design as well. She’s sort of the analog to my digital.
Carrie: That might have been the cutest thing I have every heard.

Wes: (laughing) We make a good pair. We both work from home here which is kind of nice.

Carrie: Very cool. Do you get into each other’s way?

Wes: Yeah. We used to work just on a table. She used to be right next to me because I have a really long desk here. But since we moved to Hamilton, we’ve got enough room for both of us to have an office. We love each other but she definitely likes to have her own office. Stay away from me being crazy.

Carrie: I am really thankful that my husband works out of the home because I think that murder would go down. I love him. It’s really hard…I like a lot of quiet around men when I work and it’s really hard to concentrate when you Taylor Swift videos blaring. I just outed him as being a Taylor Swift fan by the way.

Wes: Uh oh. He’s gonna get you.

Carrie: He keeps me on top of any teen pop music. For some reason he’s into that genre. Wow! That was a…I don’t even know how we even got onto that topic. I’m bad. We’ve got some good questions already coming in. So let’s first…I would bank that most people listening to the show know what sublime text is. But in case you are listening and haven’t heard about it .. in short a text editor for really just about any kind of code. I don’t know how many languages it supports.

Wes: Yeah. It supports all kinds of languages out there. It seems to be the most popular in the front end development. It is a fantastic editor. It’s nice and quick. The whole front end community as well as the PHP community has sort of picked it as their editor of choice.

Carrie: Give us the kick run down on your opinion or are pitting a sublime text against a full IDE like NetBeans or PHP storm?

Wes: I think those are still important. I don’t do heavy PHP development. So if I was I would probably use a full blown IDE. There is like plugins and stuff for sublime. At the end of the day it’s not a full blown IDE. It’s just a text editor   in which you can really beat yourself up. If you need that low level integration and debugging…that’s part of what makes editors slow but also helpful but you may want to go with a full blown editor in that case.

Carrie: Ok. The question I have from Jackie is, what makes sublime text essential for developers… You kind of touched on it. It’s fast. It’s lightweight. But what would you say?

 

Wes: I think just the ability to customize it and integrate it right into your workflow. On the surface it looks really really simple. But when you really get down into it and you take a look at what is my workflow and how can I integate it? Chances are that it is going to work really really well for you.

Carrie: Any tip to just blow my mind right now. I don’t know…like some shortcut or something like that.

Wes: I think my favorite part about the editor is the Command Pilot. It let’s you access all of your files and all of your commands right from opening up this little window from within your thing. A lot of us are used to doing the wholde clicking in the sidebar, or dragging and dropping files. We’re really GUI focused and you can still do that was sublime but my favorite part about sublime is that you don’t have to touch the mouse in order to access any of your files. It’s as much quicker to be able to just filter for them.

Carrie: I was at a little retreat with some developers last year. I swear nobody ever touched their trackpad or mouse. It was like all keyboard all the time.

Wes: Yeah.

Carrie: I was so inspired to improve my own workflow. It just speeds things up. It really does.
Wes: It takes work to actually learn how to do those things. Most people are like ugh..I can’t be bothered to figure out the shortcut. When something like that happens, just stop. Take the three minutes to figure it out and do it. Next time it’s gonna be faster. By the time you’ve done that like five times, you’re totally good. You’ve remembered it. It’s made it’s way into it. You’ll say like…why didn’t I learn this earlier? So it’s definitely worth the investment there.

Carrie: Well I was going through your book and some of the shortcodes…or…shortcuts that you referenced I already had those in use by another app on my machine. I went through… I wanted to stick with the book …try to get it down the Wes Bos way…so I changed my other app to some different…you know just throw in one extra key on those …and so it’s really screwed up my whole muscle memory.     I tried to do one thing. But I am mashing four or five keys and hoping that (laughing)   I am going full screen…part screen.

Wes: That can be an issue if you’re used to using a shortcut for something else on your computer. And now it’s telling you to use that. But that’s totally fine. You can just remap them. As long as you know what they are that’s all that really matters. Just remap them to something else you aren’t using.
Carrie: All right. Fair enough. Let’s see. We got a question from Leonica.   She’s asking…this is going to be a tough one. Which three packages are amust-haves for sublime text.
Wes: Oh boy. That’s a great…

 

Carrie: Why don’t you first back up and explain what a package is.

 

Wes: Ok. So a package is to sublime text as a plug-in is to WordPress. So by default sublime text is great. However they can’t add everything. There’s all these use cases for like a python developer is gonna have a totally different use case from a CSS guy. What a package does just add additional functionality for you.

Carrie: Ok. And then you three must haves?

Wes: Oh three of them. This is gonna be hard.. I have so many because I try them all out and I really like them. By far my favorite on is called Emmet. And what Emmet does is…I have an entire chapter on it in my book on Emmet. It helps you write HTML and CSS more quickly. You can write these kind of sort of short CSS selectors and hit tab. And what that will do is  exand on out into HTML. If you are using HTML, or haml or jade if you are using one of those. On the CSS side, it’s got rather than writing out your whole text decoration none or float left in CSS you can just write the first couple letters of the property value of CSS and hit tab. It’s not just a snippet which is a bunch of snippets. It essentially takes what you write and pairs it against all of the CSS values and it will inject the one that it thinks you want. So TDN is probably Text Decoration None. FL is probably float left. And you just to just…I don’t write CSS . I just write these shortcuts. Hit tab. And it will expand on out into it. So that’s one. What else? I’m a big GIT user. So there’s one called GIT Gutter. Essentially all it does puts a little + in your gutter that allows you to see if the line is new. It puts a minus – where you’ve deleted lines of code and it puts a blue square where you modified it. So rather than jumping back to your terminal for using a GIT plugin you can just immediately see what has changed in that file. And then I do a lot of CSS – so I think it’s called color highlighter. What color highlighter will do is it will if you’ve got SAS variables or less variables that your using and if you’ve got HEX codes or RGVA values rather than to set something and view it in the browser, it will just highlight it with whatever color that is. So if you know D1:20:20:8 is a red, congratulations. I don’t.

Carrie: (laughing)

Wes: Well I know that one. But it will just highlight it. It will surround it in that red color. It’s just a visual way to see what’s going on.

Carrie: Nice.

Wes: Yeah I thought so. I don’t know I’ve got so many. But that was kinda like full stack dev. That is some of my favorites.

C: Cool. Gary Jones was piping in on Twitter that  there is also a snippet for Genesis WordPress packages. Which is pretty cool. There’s literally packages for everything under the sun. So if you’re working in a specific language, there are packages for specific languages. There’s even some like a WordPress resource package. You highlight a word and then immediately…
Wes: The WordPress one is fantastic. Essentially what it does…if you start typing the word the, underscore, it will start to populate did you want the excerpt or the content or the tags or something like that. And when you hit enter and you kind of rest your curser inside of that template tag, it will populate it will pop up a little window and say something like…this is it. These are the arguments, so you don’t even have to go to the codex to grab that.  Which is really cool.

C: That is very cool. Jackie is not going to read your book right now, so she wants to know if there’s an easy shortcut to reindent your PHP or CSS. I’m just kidding Jackie.

Wes: Ha Ha! Yes. I’ve got it mapped to Command R. It’s not that by default. If you go to Edit, Line, Reindent. What that will do is just reindent all of it. Then there’s some other packages. HTML pret-ify will actually handle a bunch of different types of code and it will reindent it all for you.

Carrie: Would your book be appropriate for somebody who is just starting with Sublime Text? Or do you recommend it for somebody who is already a little comfortable in that type of environment.

Wes: Yeah. No. It’s for pretty much anyone. I assume that you don’t know too much. I explain what it is in the first couple of chapters. But if you are already kind of seasoned and you understand what the command palette is, it’s Ok to just kind of skip through one of those. The book is, I like to call it hop around. Because you can kind of just take what you want from it. You may look at the GIT Chapter and be like Oh! I love GIT. I am going to use that. Or be like I am not using GIT too much so I am not going to read that chapter. So it’s totally beginner friendly.

Carrie: When you say hop around it makes me think of a song Jump Around by House of Pain. Now that is rolling through my mind. Thank you very much.

Wes: (laughing) You’ll have to play that song when you read the book.

Carrie: Jump around. So we’ve got some users…one is currently using Notepad ++ and another user is on Adam. Can you kind of compare / contrast Sublime Text. It is better? Or is it just..you know boil down to preference?

Wes: Yeah. I definitely think it comes down to preference. I have this talk a lot with people. Where people come to me and their like what’s better? Notepadd++, Adam or Sublime? Or Vim? What’s better grunt or gulp? What’s better Ruby or PHP. People will get into this locking horns as to like…what is better? It doesn’t matter. Just build websites. Just make websites. And as long as you are invested in building something cool. As long as you are invested in really learning your editor, then you are going to be way better off than anyone who’s not invested. So Notepad++ is good. I used it. I haven’t used it too much but I like a lot of the stuff that is Sublime over it. And then Adam. So if you don’t know,Adam is a free editor that is from Github. They have pretty much just mimicked what Sublime Text offers which is great. The upside to it is it’s built in actually HTML, CSS and javascript. And it’s free. So that’s the other upside. Downside is that it’s still being developed and it’s kind of slow unfortunately, because it’s built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. As much as I’d like to see that go fast, apparently if you have large files (which I don’t know who’s opening 2mg files) but it crashes on 2mg files as well. So, yeah they’re all good. A lot of people initially went to Adam but kinda came back after the sluggishness. But I hope to see that kind of turnaround. Because, I am all for it. Right?

Carrie: The more the merrier?

Wes: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I really like Sublime. I really like Gulp. But if you’re going to use Adam and grunt then go nuts. I think that’s great that you’re even spending some time to invest in that.

Carrie: To add one more in the mix. Paul said he used to use a tool called Popstyle lite that was specific for like CSS. Are you familiar with that one at all?

Wes: Popstyle light?

Carrie: Topstyle? I wanna say that one may have been…oh what was that… Adobe Macromedia layer like back from that product chain. I could be making it up.

Wes: Oh. No I was just looking at it here. I never used that before. It looks interesting though. There’s so many editors out there. I think whatever works for you. I think the important thing is that you give everything an honest shot.   And you don’t write it off before you give everything a run for it’s money.

Carrie: Fair enough. So Sublime text v. 3 is still considered beta?

Wes: Yeah. Yeah. Sublime text had about a year where the author of Sublime Text was sort of missing in action. There were only a couple of updates and very little communication from the mother ship, which is what made a lot of people move to Adam. But fortunately, in  the last two months he’s been extremely active in the forums and pushing out a lot of new versions. So it looks like 3 is going to be…even though 3 is what everyone’s using…I recommend everybody switch to it because it’s much faster and much more stable than 2. He is just finishing up a few more features, which is really good to see. I think we will probably see 3 released in a couple months….or a month or two.

Carrie: Cool. Yeah I was gonna ask about if you were in the know of that sort of development of Sublime Text and if its being actively developed and if you think it’s gonna be around for awhile. But you sort of touched on that. Any more thoughts on the mothership? Do they allow contributions?

Wes: That’s definitely something that concerns me. Sorry you are dropping off a sec.

Carrie: Sorry. Carry on.

Wes: Ok. That definitely is something that really concerns me as well as the community. Is that if it’s not being actively developed are you going to spend some time learning it? But it is being actively developed. He’s got has a lot of people using it. He is really active in the forum. It’s not something that I am really worried about any more. The skills you learn in Sublime text they easily transfer on over to pretty much any editor. So if you do want to change, it’s totally fine.

Carrie: If you are following along on Twitter I have a column set up to monitor the officefm#. Ben has posted the PHP hammer…which you never ever…you can use any tools that you want but when it comes to the PHP hammer don’t put that one down. Thanks Ben for that. Melanie wants to know if you would describe your work flow. I am not sure which part of the work flow but I’ll go ahead and specify from …Let’s say from your git init repository spun up and go from there to deployment.

Wes: Yeah. Absolutely. This is something that I have been really tinkering with lately. Just because the whole workflow around WordPress is a little bit weird. Because sometimes the content and the images go in the wpcontent folder and the uploads folder and sometimes they are in the theme and all of that…so…Where I’m at right now, I am using a gulp..gulp basically if you’re not familiar with it…it’s kinda is a code kit or a preprosa but you write your own.   So when I start a new WordPress project or multiple WordPress instances or a WordPress podcast, I do my gitinit which essentially starts it all up. I do the entire WordPress directory usually in GIT…as well as… I start up my gulp which will do the gulping of my entire theme.  I usually have some tasks in there that I use to minify my Images which are in the theme. I’ve got some tasks in there that will compress my CSS, compile my CSS I’ve got some stuff in there that is going to compile and compress all my javascipt. So that’s kind of how I start it off. I work locally with MAMP to build all my stuff. When it comes around time to do the whole put it on the server, which is where most people start say screw it. I’ll use ftp, and just work live off the FTP thing because they can’t figure it out. So what I’ve been working with there is I’m either been using GIT as well which essentially allows me to have a GIT instance on the remote server a GIT instance on my computer, and any changes that happen to the file on either end and will kind of push. For the database I have been using wpmigratedb. Which is expensive but well worth your money.

Carrie: That yes. Is well worth your money many times over.

Wes: Yeah there are some gulp and grunt tasks that you can use to do the day to day database migration, but your time is only worth so much and they figured out all the hard stuff in that case. So I’ve done that. The one kind of hole I had there was image compression. When users upload their images, so whenever someone goes into the WordPress backend and uploads their image, what tends to happen is that they upload a huge image. It’s not compressed properly. I’ve been using a Krakin.io. What that is if the image compression service and they’ve got a fantastic little WordPress plug-in that you can it just basically intercepts your images when you upload them to the media and it will do the compression for you. So you don’t have to like all your clients , Hey can you please select run your images through this compression before you upload it off your digital slr… something like that. So yeah this is kind of my whole thing. The one part but still a bit of a pain point for me is that when you’re working locally and you’re working you’ve got a client working remotely and they make changes to the database, synching that data is really tough so what I tend to do just pull down whatever is remote and work off of that. But I still am not totally happy with something like that.
Carrie: Yeah there doesn’t seem to be at least I’m not aware of a really great solution there. Say even you pull down their database in the time that you are making changes and push back up your changes they could’ve made…could have posted a new blog post or something.

Wes: Yeah that’s something that plagues every single database cms, right? It’s when they get out of sync there’s no as far as I know, these’s no version control for the database entry so..I’ve done it before where we have a staging build and what we do is we take the staging build is where we work do all the development as well as add all the content and then when we’re happy with it, we will take everything from staging and push it to the production environment with the exception of the comments table which is obviously the users are adding comments in there. So I was pretty happy with that set up as well.

Carrie: Oh I just my..oh…there it is… I lost my train of thought and I just found it. You mentioned Krakin.io. Is that Crac? Oh I’ll just let you spell it. (laughing)

Wes: K-r-a-k-e-n.io. Kraken.io. It’s kind of cool. They have a free kind of web interface for uploading stuff. I pay about 4 bucks a month and I hook all of my clients WordPresses up to it. It’s really just one more step to make your WordPress faster.   I’ve also been using…what is it? I’ve been using … it was quick cache. They rebranded into some other plug-in. If you pay for the pro version it will allow you to do the mitification of your CSS and your JavaScript right from WordPress which is kind of cool. Not everyone is really interested in getting a whole gulp setup up and running. What this will do is allow you to minify all of your assets without needing any that process. I’ll look up the name of it.

Carrie: So kracken only works in a grunt…oh excuse me….a gulp workflow?

Wes: No kracken will work in a gulp workflow but they also have a WordPress plug-in. But that only covers your images.

Carrie: Ok.

Wes: But you also want to mitify your Javascript or CSS as well so what is called? It’s called ZenCache now .

Carrie: ZenCache.

Wes: You pay for the premium version of ZenCache, it used to be called quick cache. they will do all of the compression of your CSS and your JavaScript provided  you’ve enqueued them properly.

Carrie: Sweet. You’re just a tool dropping fool today.
Wes: (laughing) That’s what people call me right? I find all of these little tools that make… I don’t know if I am lazy but I like to figure out what the tools that all fit together to just make a kind of a rock hard, battle tested workflow.
Carrie: I like that. We are always in search for the perfect workflow and I know there’s no know …whats the perfect workflow for you might not be ideal for me for whatever reason so there’s you can’t say definitively this is the workflow but…you know I am always curious and I know my listeners are curious as about how other developers work in the little things they do to speed up the cycle.
Wes: Yeah, exactly.

Carrie: So all the time you save using those tools is that how you found time to write Command Line Power User?

Wes: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a little video series that I put together. Actually how these things kind of come about is that I get my students asking me about them over and over and essentially at the end of the day I get sick of telling them. Or I can’t write it sending an email so I’ll just got of flip on my recorder and talk through how I’ve done that. So that’s how Command Line Power User came up. It’s like just people kept asking me like how did you do that in your terminal or is also trick you did…or how did you get the cool prompt in your terminal? I was like I gotta do a little video series that I can put together and give away for free so people can learn how do this as well.

Carrie: Sweet. So if you head over to commandlinepoweruser.com you can check those out. If you’re command line curious. I think that’s an official term on a…
Wes: Yeah. Yeah. It’s part of your workflow if you’re interested if you find yourself…I find that the developers in the last couple years…your starting to if you use the command line a little bit here and a little bit there and the more you used it the more it’s like oh this isn’t so scary after all especially when you’ve got some videos like this.
Carrie: Cool. Speaking of that sort, well of speaking of that. Gary had a question asking do you prefer to use sublime text to handle the command line or ftp or all that kind of stuff word are you using different tools for that?

 

Wes: Yeah different kind of tools for that. Let me actually pull up that question. We had that right here. I initially wanted to have sublime text to just be the everything app. I just wanted my ftp to be inside of sublime. I wanted my terminal to be inside of sublime. I kind of wanted it to be a one stop shop. What I realized is like sublime is fantastic for the editor but it’s not great for the command line. Well a lot of people use it for FTP but for that I use transmit so I don’t use it for that. I feel you can get a lot better job really getting to know your terminal and your command line. For standards checking…absolutely. I do use it. I think that’s the perfect spot to check it. And if your not familiar…standards checking or may have heard of it…called code linting before. Essentially what that does is it takes a look at your code and it will tell you if there’s errors. There’s PHP linting there’s CSS linting, there’s JavaScript linting. It will say this is an error or this is a bad practice. So before you get the white screen of death in WordPress you can catch it in your editor. So yeah, I use that in sublime text not for ftp and stuff like that. I tend to go outside of that. I am slowly try to wean myself off of using FTP coz I think there is a lot more streamlined workflows that I think you can have.

Carrie: Yeah. I have not completely broken free yet. I want to. I hate myself every time I fire up filezilla . I do love on the CSS Linter Website which for listeners there is a package you can install in sublime text Wes was just saying. But they also have a website where you can just plop in some CSS and run it through the linter and it says…will hurt your feelings (laughing). And I love that because it will. You will think that you have written something beautiful and then run it through there…and no. It’s crap.

 

Wes: Yeah. And with all these things they all have settings. So the big one in the big one in CSS Lint is you don’t ever use an ID. You should use classes for styling. And sometimes you’ve got to use an ID you just don’t tell anyone. Close the curtains and use an ID to style and it will yell at you for doing that. You can go into your CSS lint settings file and turn that off.

 

Carrie: Good point there. If we have any ate joiners to the show, I want to welcome you. You are listening to officehoursfm episode # 55. I’ve got Wes Bos on the show. If you want to follow up later, I will have show notes up on this episode so it’s page @officehoursfm/podcast/55. And if you want loving reminders each week of the show you can head over to officehours.fm/subscribe and I will send you a little e-mail every Thursday morning with a heads up. So if you want to ask questions for Wes, you can hop over on Twitter and send that to @officehours fm or @#officefm. That’s not confusing. And yeah Ok. So get your questions in and we will carry on. So Wes, you teach, you write, you code, you mentioned that you’re speaking at Wordcamp Hamilton just outside of Toronto here soon.

Wes: Yep

Carrie: It seems like education though is your main passion.

Wes: Yeah. Yeah. That’s really what I am all about. I love to build things. I think that’s really important, that I keep building things. For my own sanity as well as…We have all had the teacher that can teach but can’t actually do. So I want to be the teacher that is actually really good at what I do. Hopefully I can break it down and simplify it for my students. Yeah education. I am really passionate about that.

Carrie: Your comment reminded me…just a random aside. But my mom grew up in small town Texas and had a Spanish teacher whose spanish was apparently so horrible. One time she went to Mexico and no one could understand her.
Wes: Oh wow.

Carrie: Yeah, anyways.

Wes: Yeah. That kind of what’s broken about the education system right now is that you’ve got these teachers and like..bless them…but they don’t know what they’re talking about. So you need to really get industry people in to teach you how things are actually going because that stuff changes really quickly.

 

Carrie: True but sometimes industry people…oh how to put it delicately…they’re boring. Like it’s really hard to listen to you know a delivery and discussion on by someone use not interacting with humans.

Wes: Oh Yeah. That’s a whole another skill right? Is being able to be personable and make people listen to you right? So my thing is to tell jokes. I try to tell all these Dad jokes while I teach.

Carrie: You got one for us? You can’t just leave us hanging…

Wes: Oh..I don’t know. It’ll come around. Don’t worry. I will try to pop one off before the end of the show.

Carrie: Yeah. When you feel the inspiration…just let it out. Let it go. So let’s…What was your original…you were talking about what you do now but how did you get into all of this?

Wes: Myspace. Do you remember Myspace?

Carrie: Oh my Gosh. I think it was  last week on the show was talking about… Oh yeah, it was Russell Aaron I had on last week and he was talking about starting with MySpace.
Wes: It’s actually..It’s a bit before that. When I was growing up I was always interested in computers and made a few websites here and there. But when MySpace rolled around, what happened is you could put your own CSS into like the comment box and it would apply it to the entire page. It’s like horrifying. Nobody lets you do that anymore. That’s how I figured out how CSS works. I can apply all the styles myself which is pretty cool. And then from there I was pretty involved in the music industry here in the Hamilton Burlington area. I was just like building lots of websites and designing stuff for bands. So by the time I got to University I was still really into building websites. I needed money , so I started building sites for people and it kind of snowballed in from there. I’ve been doing it ever since.

C: Awesome

Wes: Yeah. It’s funny. You meet a lot of people and you ask them how they got into it. And a lot of people around my age they’re just like ex-musicians or ex people from the scene that were just in bands and needed to make their own website or their own Myspace. And since they really liked it they got into the web development industry.
Carrie: Ok. I hate to just totally go in a different direction. I have an urgent pressing question from a listener.

Wes: Yep?

Carrie: What kind of dog you have?

Wes: Oh. I have a King Charles Cavalier. His name is Snickers.

Carrie: Is Snickers banned from the house when you’re podcasting?

Wes: Yeah because what he does is he growls at people when they walk by. It’s bad for my podcast and he’s got jingly tags. So all you’d hear right now is jingle, jingle, jingle (laughing)
Carrie: Well…from me to Snickers I’m sorry Snickers but you’re outcast.

Wes: That’s all right. He is napping on the couch downstairs.

Carrie: Yeah. I banned mine to the backyard when I am doing the show. Otherwise they’d do the same thing. They bark at every butterfly that rolled by the window. We love dogs. Pets of all sorts here on officehours.

Wes: I have to do like a blooper reel of my videos. Coz I’ve got so many videos where I am all right well now that you’ve selected your text, go ahead and hit…Bark, bark bark. Snickers shut up. Then I have to start again. (laughing)

Carrie: I was talking to Matt Maderios the other day. It would be really funny to release kind of a bloopers reel of these things.
Wes: The would be fantastic.

Carrie: Another off-topic question but an interesting one. Your last name? What’s the origin?

Wes: Dutch. I am 100% Dutch. It’s funny like whenever you find other dutch people they’re a magnet to you and they start talking about all the amazing dutch things.

Carrie: Leonica can nailed it . Nicely done. All right. So, what are we not covered? We touched on your book a little bit, touched on your videos over at command line power user…what’s next? Is there another power user series?

Wes: Yeah I’m currently kind of thinking about what I should be working on next. I’ve got a couple ideas. There’s one book around tooling that I’d like to write which is everything like the ocommand line and using gulp and tools that you can use to export your photoshop or your sketch documents and there’s all these little tools that you hear about but you never really get around to try. So I think that there’s some sort of book there that will show people how to use all of that. As well as like get all these things installed, like what is npm? What is a gem? All these things. Especially like I’m a PHP JavaScript guy. Sometimes I have to venture to the Ruby world to install some tool that I need. It’ like, where am I? Somebody help me. So there’s that. Sorry…were you going to say something?

Carrie: No. I was just catching a fly.

Wes: (laughing) The other thing is, I am really into entrepreneurship business. Basically, passive income writing a book for yourself. I self published it. I’ve got a bunch of blog posts about being a sole proprietor which is a small business here in Canada. So there is some sort of book around passive income, working for yourself, working from home. How to do it? How to live this life, whatever it is, so I haven’t totally hashed that out. I am pretty passionate about talking about stuff like that. I am sure I could squeeze a book of it or video series or something.
Carrie: How about a podcast?
Wes: Yeah. Actually I was tweeting out a couple of days ago. I’m not sure if you saw it. I am thinking about starting like a quick 5 minute – 10 minute podcast that will essentially attack one little topic .  Like…How do I get into speaking? Or what’s the best way to write an e-mail? Should I use grunt or gulp? What are some ways that I can start earning a little bit of side income on the side? Stuff like that. I don’t know. I’ve got a lot to say. So I think that would be kind of a cool format in that it’s just me kind of spit balling. So…I am currently dreaming that up.

Carrie: I would tune in.

Wes: Would you? Well there you go. One listener. I am now taking sponsors. ManageWP is now sponsoring my show.

Carrie: There you go. And you have lots of love from migratedbpro.

Wes: There you go.

Carrie: I am envisioning something like Chris Coliers shoptalk meets…like you know.

Wes: Yeah like a mixer G. Not like a mixer G but like I love shoptalk because they just talk about shop. Right? But I also love business and talking about how things work and what worked out for people. When I launched my book I  realized that there’s a whole society of people who talk about and who are freely giving away information about how to best market your stuff. And how to best get the most money out of something and how to price your stuff. So I would like kind of interesting to share that I’ve learned here.
Carrie: Yeah that’s awesome. I appreciate when people are willing to share their knowledge to that’s how of the rest of us learn.

 

Wes: Exactly. That’s how I learned web development right? Is just people having free information online so why not pay up for it now that I know thing or two.

Carrie: There you go. Love the spirit. We got a question from Ben. He’s asking is the front end dev in your opinion…when is a customized theme, taking an existing theme and changing out some things. When does that become a custom theme and what sort of things would cross the line?

Wes: Yeah like from a theme that you buy and customize versus just building one from the ground up?

Carrie: Exactly.

Wes: Yeah. That’s kind of the big question that a get from people. I’m totally in the camp that I build it from the ground up. Not that you should build from the ground up but since I am a pretty heavy front-end developer which means that I do a ton of customizations… everything that I do it is very very custom. So I generally start from scratch or from my own little starter theme that I use.  That said it’s not a bad thing to take an existing theme and sort of poke around. That’s how we all learn WordPress right? So when does it …I don’t think it really matters when it when it changes because at the end of the day only me and you know that. You can look at it and go….um…that is a theme that I saw on theme forest or something. But nobody else really knows that. All they know is that these are some really know is that these are some nice looking web sites. Regardless of it was done with a theme or not.

Carrie: Yes. Only the developers care.

Wes: It’s true. Only a developer is gonna do a right click view source. And what I do, this of a little tip if your ever concerned…Since I’m a pretty big developer sometimes people get a little bit snarky and try to view source on all of my code. And kind of call me out on something that I’ve done wrong. Or maybe it’s not the best practice. On most of my sites, if you do a view source you’ll a little ASCII picture If you go view source WesBos.com there is a picture of myself a little Ascii Hey! Glad you dropped by.  And what that does is it kind of diffuses the situation. Or someone goes like who does this Wes Bos think he is? He thinks he is so great at coding. I bet he’s really crappy. Oh funny little thing in his source. All right. He’s cool.

Carrie: Wait! Who’s setting out just to smear the name of Wes Bos as a developer?
Wes: I don’t know. Every now and then you get these people who…in general the WordPress community and the development community is pretty happy. Sometimes you get people who are just out to kind of find something wrong with what you are doing so…with the view source on my Website you’ll see some…there is a picture of me and there’s a big WordPress logo in my source.

Carrie: Awesome.

Wes: It’s good for a few laughs. (laughing)

Carrie: As soon as we get off the show, I am going to go check that out. Hater’s are gonna hate.

Wes: Exactly, Right?

Carrie: Let’s see a few more minutes here if you’ve got a question to Wes get that in. We did have another question. Somebody is using Dreamweaver and is it worth it to switch to sublime text and do rewind if you joined us late. We had some great conversation early on on that. Wes do you have anything to add regarding Dreamweaver?

 

Wes: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that Dreamweaver is a tool that most people get started in. Because it comes with the whole photoshop illustrator suite. It’s a pretty bloated little…or…big editor. It comes with a lot of stuff that you don’t need. It will slow you down. Switching is never easy for anyone. Switching from one thing to another is really hard. Most of the time you’ll kind of scamper back to what you know and find comfortable. But I would definitely encourage to just take Dreamweaver off your computer for a week. Just give yourself a week. You can bring it back if you really don’t like it but there is a reason that no one who is a really good developer out there uses Dreamweaver. It’s because there are better alternatives out there. I think that you’ll really enjoy it once you get the hang of it. Or buy my book and get it.

Carrie: (laughing). Nicely done.

Wes: See how I did that? Just right in.

Carrie: There really is like a fly or something kind of bugging me. Though I wasn’t trying to catch it with my mouth earlier.

Wes: Oh Man.

Carrie: Ben had a great question. Have you ever coded a website that your wife designed?

Wes: Yes. A couple of times. It’s kind of interesting to work with your wife on that but before it was couple years ago…the process it’s still sort of is…the process before used to be like you get your Photoshop document done…and then you code it. It’s like a one-two waterfall approach to it. That’s kind of how we did it. It wasn’t too much a clash on that. It’s actually kind of fun to do with your wife because you can call her over from the next room and say hey like what were you thinking about this hover effect? Or what were you thinking about when you scrolled or something like that. So, I’ve done it a couple times but she is more into doing logos and she does a lot of like food labels and stuff like that so we don’t really cross paths too often. We refer each other a lot of business though.
Carrie: That’s excellent. Speaking of business what’s your ideal project?

Wes: My ideal…I just got finished like a six-month build of…it was a WordPress site that it was really heavy with HTML. It was heavy with HTML5 video and JavaScript. It was really kind of like a merse of experience in video and audio, images and stuff like that. That was a fun site website that pushed the limits of what I could do. Also, I’ve been into angular js quite a bit, which is a JavaScript framework for building kind of applications and interactive websites. I like that stuff. My ideal project is something that I’ve never done before. Because I am addicted to learning.
Carrie: Nice. Not to be confused with Addicted to Love. Which is another song that you can now get into your head as soon as you finish listening.

Wes: Amazing. I hope you put Youtube video with these songs in the comments so that we can all listen to them.

Carrie: I will do my best to get those in there. A few minutes left.

Wes I am going to give you a question to think about before I come back and make you answer it.

Wes: Sure.

Carrie: If there was one thing that you could see changed, improved or removed from WordPress what would it be? And while you are pondering that, just mention again thanks to our sponsors, ManageWP who is an on line service you can use to manage all of your WordPress passwords on one little location and you can get a 10% discount. You can actually try them out for free and if you sign up you get 10% off by using the link cdils.me/ManageWpme. And our other sponsor the beloved DesktopServer who makes it super…Wes you are going to go have to check them out. You mentioned that you use MAMP. It’s got the database. It’s got the PHP server. All of that rolled into one.

Wes: Oh Wow.

Carrie: You can just spin up your WordPress installs. You can check them out at @serverpress.com. All right. So Wes….drumroll….

Wes: Yes. What would I like to see add, removed, whatever from WordPress?

Carrie: U huh.

Wes: There was something…I forget who it was. There was a blog post I have to find it…essentially it was just talking about WordPress being moved to an api. Which means that…so right now…when you want to write an interface for WordPress…with WordPress. Whether it be something on the admin side the backend or something on the frontend which is your theme , you need to write that in PHP right? Because that’s what your theme is. And that’s kind of some people don’t like PHP. I really like it but it’s not for everyone so what I think WordPress is doing is that they’re going to make the entire interaction of WordPress via the api. Which means that you can use whatever language, probably JavaScript you are already seeing this with the media uploader, it’s built in back bone…We’re going to be able to build just custom interfaces both on the backend and the frontend for our specific use cases. So on the backend, a lot of people are using square space lately. That’s because square space has a really configurable, customizable back end that you can really make specific. But imagine if you could buy like a car dealership backend? Or you could buy like a restaurant backend or something like that was really suited toward the specific use. As well at the front end we are  starting to see a lot more stuff built on angular react backbone or whatever it is you are using. That kind of separation of WordPress being….it’s still built in PHP but it’s an api that you interact with a language with whatever you find comfortable. So when I saw that…I though that’s pretty exciting! I love WordPress. I think it’s a fantastic tool to manage content sites.

Carrie: Awesome. Will you at your leisure tweet out that reference?

Wes: Yeah. Absolutely. I think I tweeted out about a month or two ago. I will have to go back and a month or two ago. I’ll have to go back and find the link of it.

Carrie: Cool. No offence. But sometimes I don’t see every Tweet.

Wes: That’s fine. I don’t see everyone’s Tweets either.

Carrie: I’m looking. I’m watching.

Wes: Oh yeah. You don’t have a column in your Tweet deck that’s just me. No?

Carrie: Well you know I did. But I only started it. We’ll take this one last good one from Gary. He has a two parter. When have you written and released any packages for sublime text?

Wes: I have. I don’t it’s very active anymore yet though. Essentially what it is I was writing a lot of copy script at the time. Copy script is language that compiles into JavaScript. I was getting JavaScript snippets from the web and I was needing to get them into Copyscript so I wrote a little package how to convert them. Packages in sublime are written in python. I don’t really know python. It was kind of hacked together. Being like we do it this way and PHP or Javascript..how would I do it in python? Yeah. So that was one little package I had done.

Carrie: Interesting. I did not know the python bit.

Wes: Yeah. It’s the reason why Sublime Text is so fast. It is written in Python which is a very quick language.

Carrie: New tidbit. Hot tip. Popcorn. Cotton Candy.

Wes: (chuckles)

Carrie: The second part to Gary’s question was are there any key missing features missing from Sublime Text?

Wes: Yes. Absolutely. There’s two main things that I really want. Part of the reason is that I have a theme and a color scheme to sublime text called Cobolt 2. That’s a package as well. Part of the thing that’s missing is that if  you want to theme the sidebar. You can put a little icon on the sidebar. You can’t really control how it looks. You can’t really control how specific icons for special file types. There’s no like sidebar api as we’re asking for. That is one of the things we are asking for. That’s one thing. The other thing-tool tips which if you ever like have something pop up in sublime text while you’re typing that’s the only way you can display it. There’s no way to like graphically change that. That’s something that’s like starting to be worked on. He’s been posting in the forums. So…yeah the tool tip api is kind of what I’m looking for as well. Those two things I hope will be coming in the next six months or so.

Carrie: Cool. You are a fount of knowledge. A tool dropping fool. Wes: A tool dropping fool. I like that.

Carrie: All around awesome. I appreciate you being on the show today and taking the time to share a little knowledge. I hope that when you launch that podcast you are going to keep me posted.

Wes: Oh. Absolutely. I will for sure.

Carrie: I can come heckle you.

Wes: If anyone else is interested in seeing that podcast let me know. Still trying to see if people are interested in seeing something like that.

Carrie: So where can people let you know that they are interested or otherwise say hello?

Wes: Probably the easiest way is Wesbos.com. You can sign up for updates on there or follow me on Twitter @wesbos. I think..yeah it’s right there. Do it right now.

Carrie: Right there.

Wes: Yeah. I drop knowledge bombs on Twitter every now and then….so….you won’t be disappointed.

Carrie: Awesome. Well thank you Wes. Thank you to everyone who tuned in and had questions. You can of course hear this after the fact by heading over to iTunes or to Soundcloud or to officehours.fm or to Youtube or go Google + . Really I just don’t want you to feel limited in your options to connect with the information here on the show. Once again thanks to everyone for tuning into episode 55. We will see you next week. Thanks Wes.

Wes: Thank you. I appreciate it!

Carrie: Bye