S1:E4
Todd Libby: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Front End Nerdery Podcast, a podcast about front end development and design. I'm your host Todd Libby, and I'll be talking with people in tech about a number of different topics about front end design and development and what they're working on and doing.
Today is a little bit different because we're going to talk about a little—we're going to talk about topics that are not specifically front end focused, but today I have with me full stack web developer speaker and Twitch streamer extraordinaire. My guest today is Prince Wilson, Prince, how are you today?
Prince Wilson: [00:00:37] I'm doing amazing. Thank you for asking. Thank you for having me here.
Todd Libby: [00:00:40] You're welcome and thanks for—thanks for coming on. It's definitely—I've been looking forward to this one and we'll go into the—in—into the reasons why in a little —the listeners a little bit about yourself?
Prince Wilson: [00:00:54] Yeah. like you mentioned before, like outside of my day job, I do Twitch streaming. I love to program live on Twitch with a bunch of folks, because one, it's kind of a way for me to show off what I'm learning as well as to take everyone along with me through the journey and then during my day job, I work as a—a full stack web engineer at a company called Newsela where we help educate people or we help schools K through 12 with our product where we actually take articles from different publications like the New York Times, the AP, and we level that so students at different reading levels can be able to read that and I work on our design systems team.
Todd Libby: [00:01:31] Excellent, excellent. I am a big design system fan myself so I love to talk about them. Okay, so first question is how did you get started in your journey in web design and development?
Prince Wilson: [00:01:48] That's a great question. So I was fortunate enough, like my, like what started my journey, essentially it was really, I really wanted to make video games, but I was like, this is kinda hard.
I got one of these, it's an older book now. But it was like how to build a video game in C-sharp and I was like, “Oh, this will be great. I'll need this.” and then I started reading. I was like, “I don't understand any of these symbols that I'm reading, I don't know what I'm doing.” and I was like, “Oh, I'll put this away.”
But I got closer to graduating high school and then I was like, “Oh, you know, I want to still pursue this somehow.” and eventually kind of switched gears from going straight to video game development actually to building applications cause I saw—I was like, “Ah, you know, this kind of correlates to what I want to be doing in—in school.”
I studied computer science, which—which I was very fortunate to have that as an opportunity but I was like, “I'm not learning anything that's actually directly helping me to what I want to be doing.” and so I helped start my schools like, tech club, where we actually build applications and whatnot and we—that's how I essentially built my community and that took me all the way to now being into a career, doing the things that I love, the careers started with developer relations and then switched into education and then to actually being a full-time engineer.
Todd Libby: [00:03:01] Cool. So on the topic of streaming I know you—you know, you mentioned, and I know you stream on Twitch.
I do, I haven't for awhile. I, you know, I just go on and do my thing, whatever I'm doing then, and I know you through the Party Corgi Discord, and you know, you touched a little bit about what you do on your streams. So in your mind, what is the best part of streaming?
Prince Wilson: [00:03:31] Oh, that's a great question.
For me, I think it's like, I really enjoy being able to share the aha moment with everyone. I think like, for me, that's like when I was teaching people how to program, I loved seeing the aha for them and so being able to like collectively be able to go through this journey together and have everyone be like, “Ah, like we're building this thing together.”
It's not just like I'm teaching to them or they're teaching to me. It's like, we are collectively saying like, “We get to shape the—the app as we want.” for me that's been exciting and especially when I do things that are like out of my comfort zone, it's like, “Oh man, we just like finally made it through.”
It's like, that's, that's the juicy high, I guess I'm trying to find.
Todd Libby: [00:04:17] Yep. Yeah. That—that—that aha moment you—you mentioned one of my streams I was working on something and I had that aha moment and I'm like, “Oh wow!” and the—and the, I had a few people in the chat and chat went nuts and I was, I was like—
Prince Wilson: [00:04:34] Everyone's here to hype you up. Like, they're just they're there and I think that's what I love about Twitch too, is that you get to have that as an opportunity, right?
It's like you have to have people who get to cheer with you in that celebration, in that moment, which is sometimes really hard, especially, you know being in a dev job sometimes it's—you don't get to see like everyone around you get that aha and so I think that's why I really like the Twitch format.
Todd Libby: [00:04:56] Yeah. Yeah. So anyone out there that is thinking of, you know, cause I know a few people that are thinking of, “Yeah, I want to. I want to stream on Twitch but I'm kinda like hesitant or nervous.” What advice would you give to those people that are thinking about it or starting out?
Prince Wilson: [00:05:16] There's a few different things I'd give first and foremost is just push record. I like just push go live, like just do it. I think the, the, the very first one feels like the most intimidating, because it's like, oh my gosh, like, will everything go right? Like when people show up and th—the, the most important part of that is like, you don't have to have people show up to still enjoy doing the thing.
Like you're doing something that you love and people are getting to share that with you and I think that's like the most important, like thing to ground myself in always it's like, I don't care if there's a bunch of people there. Sometimes it might be just me. Maybe it's just like a handful of people, but like, those, those people that are coming there want to be there for you.
And I think that's like always a reassuring thing is like, people want to see you do the thing and you can, they want to share that experience with you, whether you're doing things, that are programming, or if it's even just playing video games, like Twitch's kind of brand is like, everyone actually just wants to see you do the thing.
Todd Libby: [00:06:12] Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:06:13] The other thing is don't—don't worry about whether or not you have like the top, most top quality, like things and whatnot cause like at the end of the day, like you might not like doing it, which is totally valid. Like you do after you do it the one time you do a few times, you might be like, “I don't know if I really want to do this.” and that's totally valid.
So don't invest—over invest into having all this like, fancy equipment if you're not interested in doing it for longer.
Todd Libby: [00:06:37] Yeah. Yeah. People can look into my kitchen. So it's like, it doesn't matter. You know, I have a nice, you know, for me, this is a real nice microphone set up and everything and I just. I just plug and play—
Prince Wilson: [00:06:53] I think—
Todd Libby: [00:06:53] and that's all I do.
Prince Wilson: [00:06:54] That's totally fine. Right. Like as long as you're doing the thing where it's reaching people, like people at the end of the day won't care and I think like they're here for you and not the quality of it, the quality of the items themselves.
Todd Libby: [00:07:08] Right. Right. And—and also—and you've probably had, you know, people doing this during your streams that, you know, you have the people that are like, “Oh, I didn't know that and now I learned something. I learned how to do that today.” and that gives me the feeling of if I can help one person with this issue that makes my day.
Prince Wilson: [00:07:34] One hundred percent and that happens whether you're like an experienced developer or a beginner developer. I think like that I learned something new is sup—it doesn't matter who it's coming from.
But like, I think that in itself is like, it doesn't matter where you always have the opportunity to learn something new and I think that's what Twitch affords people is like that space of creating new.
Todd Libby: [00:07:55] Yeah. Yeah. So on that note, you know, helping people out and web development. What advice would you give to people looking to get into web development or even just starting out in web development?
Prince Wilson: [00:08:14] I think that—Oh, I wish—I wish I had good advice. I think—I think my advice really comes down to having the patience. I think—I think for a lot of things, especially programming in—in a whole. Things aren't going to work the first time.
Things may not work the second time. They might not work to the tenth time but you, each time you like afford the ability to learn something about why it didn't work and I think that's one of the things that like I really enjoy about programming is I get to learn what doesn't work to—to the pathway of like, “Okay, what is the thing I need to have?” and I think for web development, it's especially challenging because you're working not only in like your own system of like your computer and like the specific stuff that you have, but you're helping other computers with different systems that you don't know, different devices, different things in general and so it's like hard to know everything as well.
So like, just be comfortable with not needing to know everything. You might need to know just enough things, but between like making mistakes and that, and being comfortable with not knowing everything like that's, those are the two things that's totally fine.
Todd Libby: [00:09:20] Yeah, yeah—and I mean, I've learned from people just starting out. Oh, I didn't know that that's—or, I totally forgot about that because you know—
Prince Wilson: [00:09:33] You just see it for so long and you're like, this is like, you just don't draw the connections and things are changing. Things constantly are evolving. Even when, even the things that are new become newer and it's like, how did that happen?
Like when did this happen? And I think that's kind of the fun part of web development is that there were problems that exist. There's still problems that do exist, but it's cool to see how technology is adapting and becoming more uniform for people so that way we can like easily learn these things and not have to do weird random hacks to make it work.
I think—I think of like the—the aspect ratio stuff right now, whereas like aspect ratio is like, you got to do this min, like min percentage, and then you gotta make sure that you do it this way, but now they're like, all right, here you go, here's the ratio and like, thank God we've had this for how long now?
Todd Libby: [00:10:22] Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I actually, when you brought up the point of, you know, you don't get it right the first time or the third or the fifth have—I started doing some stuff with—I—I wanted to start learning Rust. So I started doing some Rust stuff. I think it was the Rustlings?
Prince Wilson: [00:10:46] Okay.
Todd Libby: [00:10:47] And I came across something.
I think it, this was the one where you do the—the—the different kind of, I guess I'll call them modules for the lack of a better term and I got stuck on one and I'm like, “Ah, that's not right.” and then I got to the tenth time, and I’m like—that's not “Okay, I had to do a little bit of research.” Research is important to me—
Prince Wilson: [00:11:10] Yes.
Todd Libby: [00:11:11] As far as is—is, you know, if you're stuck on something and asking questions cause I asked a couple people that I know in another Discord server, I'm like, you've played around with Rust, you know, can you help me out with, and, and it turned out they were able to help and I was able to figure it out and learn at the same time. So that's important for me—
Prince Wilson: [00:11:37] Yes.
Todd Libby: [00:11:37] and—and you know, I think you agree that asking for help is—is—is important and—
Prince Wilson: [00:11:45] One hundred percent.
Todd Libby: [00:11:47] Yeah, yeah, and I tell people when they say, “Oh, you know, this may sound like a—“you know I don't want to, I want to use the right words.
“This may sound like a silly question,” but that's—there's no such thing as a silly question, just, you know, just go ahead and ask the question and if I can help now, or if I can guide you and lead you in the right direction, I will. So a—
Prince Wilson: [00:12:11] One hundred percent.
Todd Libby: [00:12:12] Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:12:13] I agree with that. especially with like, for instance, like on Twitch, people are always expecting everyone to have answers and I like, one of the things I made sure to take into my heart is like as a teacher, you don't have to have the answers. Like it's okay to be like, “I don't know.”
I think that's like very, important skill to have as an engineer and that's something I also do on Twitch is I do things I don't know and I'm willing to ask for help immediately there, which is very—it takes a great amount of courage to do those things, both just to ask for help, but also to do it in front of everyone but I think it's very important to the growth of yourself.
Todd Libby: [00:12:51] Yup, yup and yeah, like with me and accessibility, I am no expert by any means and I don't know, you know, there's a lot I don't know and people, you know, I'll get questions on, but I have no idea, but I'll find out or here's this resource you can use and you know, it's yeah, it's—to me, it's impossible to know everything.
Prince Wilson: [00:13:22] Exactly. There's just no way.
Todd Libby: [00:13:25] Yeah. Now I've popped into your streams a few times here and there and said hi, and you do a lot of Rust related programming. So I wanted to talk a lot about that as my schedule clears, thankfully, I'd like to start dabbling in that a little bit more.
So from—for the people that are, you know, listening or watching. Can you tell us about Rust and what Rust is?
Prince Wilson: [00:13:56] Yeah, I think it's—it’s sometimes—I find it challenging to kind of like describe Rust, I think, cause it just—it touches so many new things now, but I think the best ways of thinking about it is, it's one of the other languages out there that's really trying to make it easier, predictable to how to write a type safe program.
Rust is a type—a strongly typed language. So unlike something like JavaScript, where you can kind of put anything into any kind of holder or variable, Rust specifically is—tries to make sure that you declare like how the types of the variables are and that you can control like how often did they change in like the simplest of words, I guess is the way I'm trying to phrase it there.
You'll see Rust in different applications, such as like hardware. You can see it also into the web. We are seeing a lot more with Web Assembly. That's a direction that it's going, which I think is really cool because one of the abilities that it affords us is to be able to connect the stuff that we're already doing with the web, but using something like Rust that basically allows us to have the type safety and through Web Assembly, put it into the web and that's kind of like what its applications kind of look towards.
We're seeing a lot of bigger companies also trying to adapt and use Rust, which is incredible. We see like a big surge of Rust developers moving into Amazon, into Microsoft, into Facebook, all these different, bigger companies, which is really neat because it means that it's definitely being adapted and being used.
Todd Libby: [00:15:33] Cool.
When I first looked at it I went, “Oh, I like challenges. I like interesting stuff.” So that's kinda what drew me to—to it and all the talk about it and—so when I first, you know, started reading into it and everything it was like, “Oh, this is—this is going to be like, you know jumping out of an airplane.”
Sky diving for me anyways because I've been more heavily, in the last decade front end focused, but I've been a backend developer as well so—it was interesting and piqued my curiosity.
So, you—you know, you gave some good examples. That was one of the questions—other questions I had was some real world examples of where Rust is out in the—in the wild we should, I'll say. So, I want to step back to the Party Corgi community because I have been so busy lately and—
Prince Wilson: [00:16:45] You're doing a lot of things.
Todd Libby: [00:16:47] I—I have full calendar. I don't know how it got that way, but it got that way.
Tell us a little bit about the Party Corgi community and you know, I—I definitely, you know, talk about, you know, touching upon community and I have my own little Discord community as well and I've been a part of communities for—for awhile now, since—since I got on the (web), it's been a while you know, bulletin boards and forums and all that good stuff way back then.
So could you tell us about Party Corgi? And what are you, you know—there's a lot of people in there, a lot of great people in there, a lot of great, you know, information going back and forth I see. So could you tell us a little bit about that and you know, the community there?
Prince Wilson: [00:17:43] Yeah. So the Party Corgi Discord, like in its inception was focused around like bringing content creators into a space.
And this is like mostly focused around like development programmers and I think that in the course of its growth, like it kind of naturally continued to just—boom in different dimensions.
So we like start with talking about like how content creation from things from like blog posts, from videos, from Twitch, from YouTube, all these different dimensions.
But then we also realized like, it's important to think about the whole self, like what are the things that make us cause like that's the—when I like using the word community, because it's like a community, isn't just like, I only talk about the things that bring us together. I think it's the things all about us, right?
Like it's the full slices of us together. So even though we primarily around the content creation, it's things like, like what are the things that we're learning? What are the things that we're trying to do? We have different channels inside of our Discord for those sorts of things.
For instance, like we have a section for baking and cooking because we're human beings. Like, we want to share in the things that we do. We have things for like mobility, endurance, and power. Kind of exercising and whatnot. There's also things for like art, for doodles and sketches.
I love the—we kind of grow the community in that way, where we're talking about, not only like the things that bring us together but all of that, all of us, like the whole self. Which is like a loaded thing that I know like companies have taken advantage of and like, use.
But I really do truly believe because we're not like a part of any company, like that's—it's a safe thing to really describe it as is that we, we don't have to just talk about only content creation. We're not just content creators, we're people first.
Todd Libby: [00:19:34] Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the important part that kind of reminds me of, you know, when we're doing our thing, doing our, you know, when we're working and we're putting in all that time and working the we gotta step back and say, “Okay, I gotta take care of me.”
Like today, this morning I got up real early and went to the gym for a workout before I started my day and my day will go until seven o'clock—past seven o'clock tonight here. So it's been, it'll be a long day, but I—I, you know, I—I always like sharing food, especially lobster rolls. I—can’t get enough of those. You know, it's important and it's always been that way since, as far back as I can remember being a part of any community that I have been part of where, you know, it's just not this niche thing.
It's not just, you know, like you said, it's not just content creation. It's right. You know, food or travel or photography or stuff like that. So it's good to kind of step away from the—from the norm and kind of focus on something else. Like when I go hiking or something and share pictures of that too.
Prince Wilson: [00:20:46] Exactly.
Todd Libby: [00:20:47] Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:20:48] I—I love the ability to be able to share more of it cause I want to, you know, I want to people to see that I care about them and so I love the fact that we can like take that space and also like, have people participate as much as they want.
I think that's like another dimension of like what makes community really healthy is like, you don't have to be fully engaged all the time because you can't keep, like now that we are so large, you can't keep up with every message that is there. So it's like important to like set those kinds of moments as well as it'd be like, ah, let me like participate now.
Like now that I have the space capacity, to do so.
Todd Libby: [00:21:22] Yeah, definitely. Are you a part of any other communities? And if so, you know, what about the—what—what about community you, I guess, love about— Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:21:38] Hmm. So I am a part of other things, nothing related to web development, which is ironic because, you know, I, you feel like I would be a part of so many things.
I think like, especially with a lot of online communities, it's hard to like, To keep up with everything. So I try to limit how many more I joined, but the other stuff that I keep up with is like related to video games and the people that make those video games and like, it's really interesting to see how the dynamics are different as far as like how people, like, like how—how much cultivation people do to their communities.
I think that that's something I've really kind of learned a lot is like figuring out how people say like, oh, this is like what, these are our norms and like, this is how we show our norms. That's something I'm learning a lot more about when I joined other places and like kind of peek into them and I think about that when I think about like the Party Corgis, like what are the things that make us, us and like, what are the ways that we set like this, this is what is acceptable for us beyond just saying we have a code of conduct and like, we go and abide by our code of conduct.
Todd Libby: [00:22:41] Yeah, yeah definitely. And the thing too about community with me is, yeah, the stuff that sets that community apart from other, some, some sort of a unique quality, like, you know, this one was content creation because at the time when I joined, I was like, you know, that—I was kind of timid about it. I was like, “Hey, does anybody know how to I can join?”
Because I was just starting out, I wanted to know, you know, how to do the Twitch thing and how to, you know, share what I've been able to learn over the past, you know, twenty-two professional years, close to a little over forty total from just doing it—
Prince Wilson: [00:23:30] Doing, yeah.
Todd Libby: [00:24:31] and loving what I do, so. That's what attracted me to that community.
But at the same time, you know, like we were talking about it's those extra things and those extra things also attract me. You know, it's not just like with, with my channel.
It's you know, it's, there's a little bit of programming stuff in there, you know, a little bit of front end stuff, but there's also, there's also that you know, that, you know, do you like taking pictures, here's a photography channel or, you know, food for me, food.
I always post pictures. So—
Prince Wilson: [00:24:08] Gotta have a lobster roll. Can't—
Todd Libby: [00:24:13] Yeah, yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:24:11] Cannot.
Todd Libby: [00:24:13] Cool. so I did want to ask and I kind of skipped over these questions, but I wanted to get back to these about Rust.
What's your favorite thing about Rust or favorite part about Rust programming?
Prince Wilson: [00:24:31] Ironically, it's not the programming part. It's, it's really the community. which is—it's—it—it all comes back.
I think a lot about like, I think a lot about how languages are set up both by like how, how do people write the code, but how do people also talk about the code? Like how do people—how do people like agree upon things? Like, I think Rust sets a really good example around like how to set organizationally.
Like, how do we talk about writing Rust? What are the ways that we can do it better? What are the ways that we can do health checks? Like, I think a lot about those sorts of mechanisms, because like not a lot of languages really do that. Right? Like a lot of languages aren't kind of aren't—aren't—aren't fully community driven.
I think that sometimes we say they are, but I feel like there's always going to be some arbiter. Some—somebody who, or some group that's always going to be like, “No, we're not going to do this.”
Even if the, the entire community feels differently and I think Rust takes a kind of slightly different approach with how it engages the community about these things and like what the acts have to be in order to make something new.
And I think that speaks to the health of like what programming languages will go towards, even though it's like a—it's not—it's really not a new language per se. Like, it's been around for a hot bit. I think around like 2012 is like when it's officially came out, which is—is short in some languages, if you're comparing it to something like C or Java.
But I think in terms of like a lot of people don't know that it's actually like. It's been longer than just the hype has put it in there. And I think that's what surprises a lot of people, but in the same token, starting with the foundational knowledge of like community and like how that needs to happen I think that's what sets it apart from a lot of other languages.
Todd Libby: [00:26:22] Yeah. And I took a—took a little—a little while back, but you know, I took a look into the community and I like communities that are, you know, inclusive, welcoming and it—it’s very, very much so those things, so. And so this next question, what are some good resources for folks to learn Rust?
And I can, you know, we can get some links together and I'll put those in the show notes for our, for after for everybody.
Prince Wilson: [00:26:53] Yeah, so right now there's like, that's one of the things that Rust especially is trying to work on. One of the things that they said in those like latest survey, like finding more resources for people to learn both from like a textual format.
I think we do a really good job at prioritizing, like here are books to read through, Rust kind of has this concept of making books they kind of like use the Markdown book format, so that way they do it Rust has an official, like the Rust programming language book. Which is I can send that link over to you.
And that's like, what I use to learn it. It's very comprehensive from beginning to end, as far as like, what are the mechanics of Rust, how to think about it, what are some of the problems that it goes through? And I like that kind of format, if you're a really kind of a traditionalist that like go from beginning to end and you want the depth, the other tool that you mentioned before is the going through Rustlings and like going through a more exercise, exercise based approach.
So it takes like concepts and puts them into exercises for you to learn, which kind of facilitates the research bit. So you've got to research and figure out like, hey, this is how to do that thing. Chris Biscardi actually has an Egghead course that he does going through each of the exercises that work for Rustlings, which I highly recommend if you're a video person and want an explanation to a solution, cause that's one of the things that didn't have at the time was, it didn't have any solutions, which is kind of makes it hard to know, like, “Did I do it right or wrong? Am I thinking like a Rustacean?” That—that's what we call Rust folks.
Todd Libby: [00:28:20] Yep.
Prince Wilson: [00:28:21] And then Chris recently also just made a, there's like an early access Egghead course, if you're an Egghead subscriber that is also learning about Rust, which is a more like project based thing, which I think is also going to be really good and so those are the things that I know of off the top of my head.
Todd Libby: [00:28:41] Right, right and I did go through those videos of his as well. Those are great too. I'll—I'll put that out there. we've got through pretty much all the Twitch stuff and the—and the Rust stuff. So we both spoke about this a little bit before, before we s—we started on, about wanting to touch on removing biases
Prince Wilson: [00:29:03] Hmm, yeah.
Todd Libby: [00:29:04] and let's go into that. I'm always, you know, trying to fit in during my day to remove biases.
Originally, I would think of bia—when I hear the term bias, I would hear you know, I don't like that certain thing. I prefer this certain thing over that certain thing. So let's go ahead, you know, talk about that a little bit.
Todd Libby: [00:29:35] And—there's a great book out there by David Dylan Thomas and it's from A Book Apart and I do not have that on me, unfortunately, but I'll look at the—check and get that and pull that up. Hold on.
Prince Wilson: [00:29:47] It's the Design For Cognitive Bias,
Todd Libby: [00:29:51] Yes.
Prince Wilson: [00:29:50] I believe is the book, yeah.
Todd Libby: [00:29:51] Yep. Okay.
So what would you like to, you know, go into a—on removing biases in—in—in the call to action that you were, you were talking about?
Prince Wilson: [00:30:04] Oh, that's a—oh, there's so much. I think that, like, I think for me, the thing that I really want to emphasize for folks is recognizing that you are not the user per se of whatever you're building.
Anything that's such an—it's such a really hard thing to, to step away from because you'll build something thinking like yourself, being like, this is how I will see this thing and you will be like, this will be amazing and this, this will be perfect. But like, ultimately you are not necessarily the end user of everything that you create.
If you work for a corporation nine out of ten times, you're probably not the end user of this thing. In addition to that, even if you are the end user, you may not be the person that it's designated for and if you use yourself as that, you're limiting the scope of who you're trying to reach.
Right? If—if we're thinking about like creating a world in which anyone has the ability to use this thing, we have to be really thinking about who are the people who would be using this and what are the ways that they'll be able to use this thing and that's something I challenge everyone to really look into is like, really think about what are the people who might struggle with your application?
What are you doing to build the affordances? So that way they have access to it and it's really easy to be like those people like, “That wouldn't be a thing!” and it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Like there are many people in your life that you may not even realize that have things that make it difficult for them to do the same thing as you and you might, you might not realize that, but that's very important to be cognizant of, especially in the world of the web where it's really easy to kind of forget how everyone else has different access.
Todd Libby: [00:31:43] Yes, and that's really a focal point regarding accessibility, which I am heavily into. Right. as somebody I know who—who puts it, you know, you want to using, you know, you said, you know, we're not the user totally agree, but this for this person also uses the term, you know, designed for the people on the other side of the glass.
Prince Wilson: [00:32:12] Yeah.
Todd Libby: [00:32:13] I thought that was absolutely perfectly almost to put it.
Prince Wilson: [00:32:18] Perfect.
Todd Libby: [00:32:20] You know, we ran into an issue where I was doing an accessibility audit for a company and that stakeholder told me, “We don't have disabled users.” and I said, “You don't know this.” and this person said, “I know my—our customers.” and I said, “You still don't know.”
Prince Wilson: [00:32:40] Right.
Todd Libby: [00:32:40] “You still don't know.” All this while he's wearing eye glasses. And I said, “Those eye glasses are an assistive technology.”
Prince Wilson: [00:32:48] Right.
Todd Libby: [00:32:49] So after reading the book and I have it pulled up here is book number 33 on A Book Apart. It's abookapart.com, it's Design For Cognitive Bias like you said, it's a great book.
I've gone through it. I'm going to probably go through it again. it touches on a lot of the different biases that I never even would have ever thought.
Prince Wilson: [00:33:10] There's a lot.
Todd Libby: [00:33:11] Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:33:12] There is quite a bit and you know, like in, in our us being humans, we—we will face them and th—the unfortunate parts of it is that we'll never get rid of them.
Right. Like we can't get rid of our biases. We can only be made aware to try to reduce the amount that the bias affects us. I think that's a very important kind of like thing to be cognizant of, because if you kind of resist it, you make it worse.
Todd Libby: [00:33:34] Yes. Yes. And that touches to the point where I've been trying to get better with, when I'm designing something or developing something, I got to make sure that is—that's going to affect a certain type of user, you know, is this going to affect somebody with a vision disability? It's going to have some—it's—it's going to affect somebody with a cognitive disability. So, all of those and being like you said, cognizant of what we're doing is one step in, you know, the right direction on not, you know, eliminating them, I guess I would say, but being more aware of there, those biases are there.
Let's do our best to push them off to the side and, you know, avoid them so we can create better things on the web or even in general life.
Prince Wilson: [00:34:42] Absolutely. And I think like for instance, like a great example of like, of ways to do better for like in Twitch, even in, you know, I'm gonna throw it back into this, even for something like a podcast.
Right. I am sure there's something that you're thinking about with regards to transcripts. Like, I like those are, those are things that people think, “Oh, no, one's going to read this.” I'm like, “No, like people read these things. Like people need these things.” and it's—I think we so much live in a world where we only think of like how we interact with the world.
So it's hard to remember that these are, there are other people that are not, like I said, don't have the same ability to, it's not like we hate people because we just don't realize that everyone experiences the world different and it's our goal as individuals, as people to figure out how do we make sure everyone can have the same access and same access, meaning like the ability to have the resource, not necessarily like, oh, you, you now only get to see a video or you only get to see an audio, but more so like, how does everyone get to say I have the experience.
Todd Libby: [00:35:53] Right, right. And I make sure to have those transcripts available, those transcripts I have available on gists on GitHub and I put the link in with the video that I have on that I upload to YouTube for the YouTube channel that has captions and I—I spend a lot of time and I make sure that it's right.
So that's a good point you just made where I will take the—the—the file from the recording and transcribe it to put into YouTube and then hopefully YouTube gets the captioning right. Which sometimes—most of the time, it doesn't and I have to go through and I—I've spent a good you know, few days fixing my captioning just so there's that piece of being inclusive and making sure, you know, the people, the folks that need those captions to be well timed and you know, that it happens. So that's definitely, you know, that's always on my mind and I have it written down here, make sure you do the captions.
Prince Wilson: [00:37:09] And that's just ways that we're just becoming better I think.
Overall we're thinking more like, I'm sure like when podcasting and like video series were first starting people didn't realize, you know, there's actually a really an important need for these things and that's—it's, it’s—I—I try to avoid, I think one of the other things is I try to avoid the—like rationalizing around shame.
I think people like when you shame somebody like, ah, you didn't do this thing. That's like, not necessarily, always the most helpful thing. So it's like realizing like this is the affordance, like this is how to change it into support so that it turns into actionable ability. Like you're already doing this work.
So like, let's get you to do this work. You already made the video now, now that you have the video, getting the transcripts will make it even better. So that way everyone has access to it.
Todd Libby: [00:37:58] Yeah, yeah and shame—the shame game is, yeah, that doesn't—so I—I've—I was speaking—talking about this the other day with somebody and I said, “You know, I don't—I try not to, unless it's, you know, a case that's very...”—I don't know how to put it.
Prince Wilson: [00:38:27] There are tools. There are reasons to use shame for corporations specific.
Todd Libby: [00:38:31] Yes.
Prince Wilson: [00:38:31] I will. I will. I met individuals. It's difficult. I think that there is, it's not like one—there's no like right or wrong answer. I think it's more of a spectrum but like for instance, the corporations that have loads of money.
Todd Libby: [00:38:43] Yeah, exactly.
Prince Wilson: [00:38:44] Should—should not have an excuse to not be able to do these things, you have the resources, you just have decided not to invest into them.
Todd Libby: [00:38:51] Right, right. Thank you. I was trying to say so with individuals, it's more of being diplomatic lately for me. Do I forget? Sometimes I do.
Prince Wilson: [00:39:05] We're humans.
Todd Libby: [00:39:06] But with corporations it's different.
Prince Wilson: [00:39:10] I, one hundred percent think that we should expect corporations to be able to do more they're made of individuals, of course, but I think that a big part, like we just said, it's the reducing and it's our responsibility to be the advocates for the people in the room that may not be in the room and I think that's why it's so important for us to like, be aware of those things and really draw from who—who our users, not just the users that we are and that's what I go back towards like, that's something that we think about at Newsela is before we released any of our new types of content, like we did audio and video, we were like, we need to think of developing.
This is like the bottom line. How do we develop audio descriptions? How do we develop subtitles and captions?
Like how do we do those things? Because those are our bottom line to have access for everyone. Like we need to think what does access actually look like?
Todd Libby: [00:40:03] Yep. Yep. So getting back to that conversation I had, I equated the shaming of individuals to when I was a teenager. I didn't want my parents telling me what to do.
So that's the approach that I take with the shame game. Like, you know, “Oh, you did—you didn't use the, you know, you didn't, you didn't meet the standards for color contrast for instance.” I use the color contrast all the time as an example.
Prince Wilson: [00:40:38] Right.
Todd Libby: [00:40:39] I don't go at somebody and say, “You know, shame on you, you—you need to do this.”
It's kind of like, “Hey, you know, kind of, you know, just to let you know, this doesn't mean, you know.”
Prince Wilson: [00:40:55] And it's kind to tell them that I don't think you're trying to put them on blast or anything. You're telling them, like, you, you know you can do better and you just want them to be able to do that and that they—this is how, and I think like, that's it, that's important.
Like we can't ignore it. We need to be able to do better and I think—I think it's really hard because it's a part of the bias, it's a part of our feelings, because we're like, oh no, it was like a problem of me, but it's rather, it's like this action that I needed to, to correct or this thing I need to correct.
It's not speaking about you as a person, unless you retaliate and if you retaliate then that, then—then you're digging your own hole. I have nothing to say about that then.
Todd Libby: [00:41:35] Yeah. Yeah. And I've—I will admit I've been down that road a few times. A lot in the past.
Prince Wilson: [00:41:42] We're human.
Todd Libby: [00:41:42] Yep. So, it’s—it's all a learning experience.
Prince Wilson: [00:41:46] Exactly.
Todd Libby: [00:41:46] Yeah. So, you know, we don't have a hard stop. I've got three last questions that I usually ask folks that are on and I'll ask you, what about the web these days that excites you and keeps you excited in what you do?
Prince Wilson: [00:42:08] I what keeps me excited about what I do? I think for me, I think for me, the thing that really keeps me excited is like the kind of, of era that we're in now, where we're seeing a lot more dev tools being created for helping us build better experiences.
I think like being able to, like, in addition to like having tools like libraries and frameworks and all these things, I think it's really incredible to see browsers becoming more equipped with like how to actually tell, like how will it webpage be interactable I think like recently Firefox just made it, so you have like the tab order actually being determined directly inside of the developer experience, the developer edition of their web browser and I think that's like one of the things that I like love is like, we're figuring out how to do more things that we have to be able to do, and we're putting it in the forefront for us and that makes me excited to continue to do more web development, that's cause we're thinking about like, how do we make sure to make this the priority?
Or like, how do we make access once again, the focus? It's not like a—“Oh, we forgot to do it.” It's more like it's in front of you, you have the tools because the hardest parts are knowing what we have to look for and then also having the tools to do it.
Todd Libby: [00:43:22] Right. They do have that the—the—where is it? Pulling it up here. [Long pause as Todd was looking for where the option was in Firefox to toggle tab index in Firefox Dev Tools] What tab is that under? [Todd searches more, smaller pause]
But of course. Anyways, they do have the, you know, where you can find what the—the tab order is. They also just, I was reading a day or two about how they have, you can—you can see the—you can test for prefers-color-scheme.
Prince Wilson: [00:43:52] Oh, I didn't know that now. I think Chrome has something like this too, where you can, it can change it for you. You can't do the test. I think it can change it for you though.
Todd Libby: [00:44:02] Yep. Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:44:03] That's so cool.
Todd Libby: [00:44:04] Yeah, yeah. I—I have to agree. Those are some of the things that I—I'm looking at and thinking, “Well, yeah, this is.”—I remember when CSS wasn't a thing. So this is—it's all awesome. You know.
Prince Wilson: [00:44:18] It's truly a—I think it's incredible to see it go from, you know, like being something we just have like Netscape and then we're like, “Alright, let's keep building more and more.” and then we're like, “Oh crap. Like, wow. This is like, I think even to the fact that we have access to it on a mobile device is incredible because like living through an era of like not having smartphones very, very different from now living through a—an era of smartphones and then being like, what's next? Like how do you get further from here?
Todd Libby: [00:44:50] Yeah.
So my next question, if there was one thing that you could change about the web we know today, what would that one thing be? Could be anything.
Prince Wilson: [00:45:04] I had—the first thing that popped into my mind, it's going to be very controversial and I'm sorry to bring it—to bring it.
Todd Libby: [00:45:11] I like that.
Prince Wilson: [00:45:14] I don't think it's going to be—I don't think it's gonna make you upset, I think it's gonna make other people upset. I wish that we prioritize HTML and CSS as core components to building websites as opposed to fully relying on to a lot of JavaScript. I wish that we, I wish that we had more resources put into that.
So that way we didn't have everything that we have today. I think—I think that was a mistake. I think that we're we realize how—how drastic of it, it—it—it—it ended up being, but I really hope that's something I would see in the next decade is like, we find ways to do more things natively where we don't need to like rely on extra tools.
And it's not to say JavaScript is inherently evil or anything like that, but it's like, there—we shouldn't—we shouldn't have to rely on JavaScript to do things that what native web should be able and capable to do and we need to figure out ways to bring that back
Todd Libby: [00:46:18] Right. Yeah, I—I'm on the same page.
Prince Wilson: [00:46:22] I think it's—I think that there's a lot of affordances, of course, like, we get to do things that we never were able to do before, but I wished—I think that if I had to change anything, I really wish we could have just invested to making HTML and CSS stronger.
Todd Libby: [00:46:36] Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Prince Wilson: [00:46:38] What that looks like, I have no idea.
Todd Libby: [00:46:41] Yeah. That would, that—that would be something I would have to, that's going to make me think later on, which is great, cause I, you know—CSS I know could be if we had, for instance, box-sizing: border-box in the browsers, instead of having to put it in our style sheets all the time, that would be great, but we can't do it because everything built on twenty, twenty-five year old legacy code.
Prince Wilson: [00:47:18] If we had the tools that we had today, back then, I think the web would look very different.
I think we had HTML and CSS though. The way that we have it today, I think we wouldn't—we wouldn't be nearly in where we are today. I—I—I'm interested to think about like, what would that look like without a JavaScript world.
Todd Libby: [00:47:33] Yeah. Yeah. And I fired off a tweet a while back about it had to do with performance and accessibility.
Now, it wasn't. It was, you know, there was a webpage out. I was auditing, it was two megabytes, but over half of it was JavaScript.
Prince Wilson: [00:47:51] Wow.
Todd Libby: [00:47:53] And it was
Prince Wilson: [00:47:53] Wow.
Todd Libby: [00:47:56] It wasn't it wasn't a—I guess, content heavy or page, but at the same time, I'm thinking about that person who's out in the middle of nowhere—
Prince Wilson: [00:48:06] Yeah.
Todd Libby: [00:48:06] With a 2G or 3G phone and not being able to access it and that got a lot of flak.
Prince Wilson: [00:48:15] It's—and this goes back to bias, right? Like we think, we think that everyone is on a MacBook and we develop for those three sources and it's not to say like, oh my gosh, like you're insensitive because you, you didn't, you didn't think about these people. Like it's, it's, there's so much more loaded into that.
There's so many things that happen, right? Like, like it just—The web in itself, wasn't capable of doing the things that it needed to do. And I wish that we could have, we could have those tools before, like w where we are now, we had to learn a lot of things along the way to get to this point. But I hope that we could take those lessons back, then throw it into here and we'd just be dandy.
Todd Libby: [00:48:57] Yeah. Yeah. And originally it was just, the web was made to—for scientists to transfer documents back and forth. A lot of people don't realize that now.
Prince Wilson: [00:49:07] I love the joke of like, there's these like, cables that run under the underwater, right? Like this—this—this is how the internet works but then sharks are the most dangerous things to—to—to the internet because they can actually interfere with the cables.
Todd Libby: [00:49:22] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What was the—there was another thing about this. So something about tubes, there was some politicians that were talking about tubes a few years ago. That the internet was a series of tubes or something kind of, kind of like when you put the w—the little canister into the bank thing, and it just flips it back up, back to the teller.
Prince Wilson: [00:49:42] That's just, that's honestly how I described the internet to a lot of people. I just like, that's just really all it is. This is just information coming back and forth through big old pipes.
Todd Libby: [00:49:49] Yup, yup. So—our last question.
Prince Wilson: [00:49:55] Let's do it.
Todd Libby: [00:49:57] Favorite part of front end development that you really like the most and tying in with the theme of, and the title of the podcast. What do you nerd out over?
Prince Wilson: [00:50:09] Ooh, this is a great question. Ooh, I don't the thing that I—I—I nerd about, I guess I like, I'm just like, so fascinated about is—is not even something I'm good at. I just am so fascinated by generative art and I think like, I guess like that might be not specifically front ends technology, but I think it's interesting to see people using like CSS and HTML and JavaScript to build these things, like to build art.
And I'm like, I don't know how it works. I—it's not like I have no explanation to it, but it is truly one of those things where I see it. I'm just like incredible the people who use HTML/CSS to make like, just art in general is incredible. The amount of work that people do and like, how do you do it? How do you do this?
I think of a single div and like that in itself is like so much skill.
Todd Libby: [00:51:16] Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of reminds me of the CSS art that we've seen on CodePen, for instance—
Prince Wilson: [00:51:27] Yeah.
Todd Libby: [00:51:31] There’s phenomenal—there’s one with a lighthouse, a coastline there's—
Prince Wilson: [00:51:34] Like how do they do that? I don't know how to do it, but it definitely is. It's definitely the things that I am like talent, like skills and talent is being shown.
And I—I wish I had just enough skill to make a website. Like they can just make art, like, this is incredible. And I—I am so grateful that they share that with us. Like they share that the things that they create.
Todd Libby: [00:51:57] Yeah. Yeah. That's, you know, that—that's next level stuff that I I'm left scratching my head going, how do they do it?
I mean, I, I looked at it, it was just a simple I think it was—somebody did a CSS thing with I think it was just like an old cassette player,
Prince Wilson: [00:52:20] Yes!
Todd Libby: [00:52:20] if I'm not mistaken? And I was looking at it like, that is awesome.
Prince Wilson: [00:52:24] But like how? How do they do that?
Todd Libby: [00:52:25] And I looked at the code and I went—yeah, I looked at the code and went, “How do they do that?” It's just, I'm on the same page again. I think it's awesome. Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:52:37] Like, it's incredible. I—there there's like many things like, you know, I spend spend most of my day looking into different things about accessibility, but like, I don't think I'll ever have this skill of being so crafty at like making this art.
I won't have it and I, I recognize it, but I will always admire other people's work that like, it's just so cool to me.
Todd Libby: [00:52:59] Yeah, yeah.
And I—I—I especially love it when there's a little bit of animation thrown in or a lot of animation. Like the there is a CSS kind of like it's a game that you can literally play in CodePen.
Prince Wilson: [00:53:17] Interesting.
Todd Libby: [00:53:18] And I'll have to dig up that link. I played it one day, a little while a like a month or two ago. I should have kept the link I'll have to forward that to you because it's, it's like, it's like being on, you know I'll when I, it gave me the feeling of being on an Atari 2600 again as a kid. So it—
Prince Wilson: [00:53:43] That’s amazing.
Todd Libby: [00:53:44] was really, really cool. It is amazing. So I've got all my questions that I had for you. I want to thank you for coming on. Thank you for a—
Prince Wilson: [00:53:52] Thank you for having me once again
Todd Libby: [00:53:53] great conversation. So usually when I close out, I let my guests, you know, tell the listeners or the viewers, what they have currently going on and where they can find you online. So the floor is yours.
Prince Wilson: [00:54:07] Yeah. As far as what I've got going on I am wonderfully here in this podcast. I will be doing some things later on into the year, which I'm excited for. I can't really speak about them. Yeah. But you can find me anywhere on the Twittersphere. I am basically almost anywhere on the internet under my tag, Maxcell.
Funnily enough, Maxcell is my first name. So M A X C E L L, ah, but I go by Prince, it's much easier for people to say. So you can find me anywhere on the Twitter on the internet, specifically my website, which is prince.dev, which short and succinct.
Todd Libby: [00:54:47] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Twitch?
Prince Wilson: [00:54:48] Ah, yes. Twitch.
Todd Libby: [00:54:48] Are you doing any streaming?
Prince Wilson: [00:54:54] Yes, you, you are totally right.
So I do Twitch streams every Tuesday at 6:30 PM. Eastern standard or Eastern daylight. Now, I guess now that we're in that time period, right.
Todd Libby: [00:55:05] Which is, I don't know about you, but that's thrown me off for the past. Well, since we had to spring forward
Prince Wilson: [00:55:13] I love sun. I love waking up at six o'clock to the sun.
I am originally from Florida and I now live in New York and the winter seasons are things that I'm not accustomed to and the cold, the darkness, I just don't know how people do it. Florida just had just rain.
Todd Libby: [00:55:39] I’m—I'm fairly close to you. I'm up in Maine, so yeah, yeah. I know all about the winter and I—I’m—I just turned fifty this year, so I'm getting a little bit cranky about the snow and the cold and the weather. So yeah, I—
Prince Wilson: [00:55:56] It's unbearable!
Todd Libby: [00:55:56] I need sun to, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I—I moved, I w—I lived in Orange County, California and in San Diego for a little while and that just spoiled me.
Prince Wilson: [00:56:09] Just sunlight, just, just sun. Warmth.
Todd Libby: [00:56:13] Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:56:13] But the lowest, what? Seventy degrees?
Todd Libby: [00:56:15] So Twitch, Tuesdays at 6:30 PM Eastern time, daylight or standard.
Prince Wilson: [00:56:23] Yeah, I will be there. We'll always be hanging out. We usually more than not are doing stuff with Rust. So if you're ever interested in learning, if you ever have any questions, you're always welcome to be in the Twitch chat. You're also welcome to just lurk around and just hang out.
Todd Libby: [00:56:40] And that's it? Anything else?
Prince Wilson: [00:56:41] Nope. That's, that's all we're at.
Todd Libby: [00:56:43] Alright, well again Prince, thank you so much for coming on. I, again, enjoyed the conversation, enjoy talking about community, Rust, and everything. It's always a pleasure to see you and hear from you and you know, see the tweets and everything and I will try to get into a stream, Tuesdays aren't bad for me anymore so I think I'm going to find the time to make sure 6:30 is clear.
Prince Wilson: [00:57:14] Hang out, chill out, chill around, you know.
Todd Libby: [00:57:16] Come in and say hi and I recommend other people to pop into the stream and links will be provided in the show notes again and it's—it's a great time. I love seeing you working on the Rust stuff. The Rustaceans are a very, you know, cool group of people so, and before I close this out Rust, Rustacean, it's so close to crustaceans and I have a fondness for lobster, so that was another thing. That was—
Prince Wilson: [00:57:46] Exactly it all came, it came, the stars aligned. It’s that new programming language?
Todd Libby: [00:57:52] Yeah.
Prince Wilson: [00:57:53] Perfect food-like pun like just here we are.
Todd Libby: [00:57:57] Yeah. Yeah, that was great, and when I saw that, I was like, oh, this is great, this is cool, I'm going to have to do this. So again, thank you very much. I want to just say please like you know, comment you know, subscribe to the YouTube channel. This has been the Front End Nerdery Podcast. We'll be back or I'll be back next month with a brand new guest and brand new topics to talk about and until then we shall see you all later.