This episode features an interview with Salma Alam-Naylor, Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. Originally beginning her career as a music teacher, Salma transitioned to technology in 2014, working as a front end developer and tech lead. She also writes code live on Twitch to bring inclusive and accessible technology to people around the world. In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Salma to discuss how music and code influence each other, streaming, and saving engineering for last.
This episode features an interview with Salma Alam-Naylor, Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. Originally beginning her career as a music teacher, Salma transitioned to technology in 2014, working as a front end developer and tech lead. She also writes code live on Twitch to bring inclusive and accessible technology to people around the world.
In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Salma to discuss how music and code influence each other, streaming, and saving engineering for last.
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Episode Timestamps:
(01:58): What Salma is working on
(07:33): What Salma’s day-to-day looks like
(11:13): What tools Salma uses
(14:42): How Salma got into the industry
(21:18): Rapid Fire Questions
(34:43): Random Segment Generator
(43:56): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“I approach writing code like I approached my composition, especially with functional programming. It's about motifs and repeatable things. You have an overarching journey that you want to take. A beginning, a middle, and an end, basically, even on a function level or an architecture level. It’s exactly the same thing. It's not even about maths, I think it's just about logic and problem solving and creativity.” – Salma Alam-Naylor
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy Williams: Hello everyone and welcome to the Dev Morning Show (At Night). My name is Cassidy Williams and I am accompanied by my wonderful co-host Zach Plata. Hey, Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey, Cass. Are you watching anything on Netflix or Hulu or whatever these days?
Cassidy Williams: Once again, I am watching alone where I am learning about wildlife every single.
And I am, I am shocked that people choose to put themselves in that position because I love being indoors.
Zach Plata: I agree wholeheartedly. .
Cassidy Williams: That being said, speaking of awesome people who are indoors and outdoors. Salma, welcome to the show. Salma is a staff developer, experience engineer at Netlify. Hello.
Salma Alam-Naylor: Hi there.
Thanks for having me. I am mainly inside. Full disclaimer. Don't like that. I
Cassidy Williams: was going to ask, are you like a camping person?
Salma Alam-Naylor: Mm-hmm. No. No. . No. Thank you. I mean, I love the idea of. Right. But the effort of taking things, you know, I need comforts. I can't just sleep in a field.
Cassidy Williams: Agree. I like the idea of glamping.
Mm-hmm. glamping is great where if you have plumbing mm-hmm. and you don't have to like strive for food. I love that idea. Yeah. Yeah. But, I, I have learned that as I've gotten older, I am an indoor cat.
Zach Plata: It's
Salma Alam-Naylor: just a lot easier. It might be safer to camp in the United Kingdom where I live compared to the United States of America, given the wildlife situation.
So maybe that's a thing to consider and maybe I should count myself lucky and go camping right after. That's true. I
Cassidy Williams: think as long as none of us camp in Australia where like a spider could eat us alive, I think. I think we're good. Good point. Anyway, Salma, what are you working on right now in work outside of work?
Salma Alam-Naylor: So the main project I'm working on right now is, uh, a fun little thing called WTF, What The Framework. And I'm, I'm building it live on stream on Twitch, and it is a tool to help you choose your next JavaScript framework based on the product features that you need for your, for your new project. Of your new app.
I don't wanna get into any of the hype. I don't want to. Biased about anything, you know, who's doing the new coolest thing? I just wanna allow people to choose something based on what they need, and then maybe they'll discover some new frameworks in the process.
Cassidy Williams: I think that's very necessary because the hype cycles are real for all of these different frameworks.
Mm-hmm. .
Zach Plata: Is this kind of like a choose your adventure kind of thing with a bunch of questions that spawn into Yes.
Salma Alam-Naylor: Yes. Um, it's fun. It's very prototyping at the moment, but it mainly consists of, uh, three questions or two questions at the moment. It's just like, do you need your, uh, website project to be static, dynamic or a combination of the.
And then I haven't figured out the best way to ask this yet, but basically, do you need an sspa or an mpa? And then here's some to choose from. And then we could get deeper into the details such as, do you want a CLI for that framework? Do you want it to, uh, support type script and all these different little technological things, but I kind of don't even wanna get bogged down with the tech.
It doesn't need to be that, that complex. Basically. What type of product are you building? Here's some of the things that you can use to build it and have fun.
Cassidy Williams: So how are you building it?
Salma Alam-Naylor: I'm building it with Astro. I'm building it with Astro. Ooh. Uh, because I've, I've tried to use Astro a few times since it came out at like version zero.
And I haven't got very far because it was still quite early on, but now they're like officially version one and they've got more features. And I think right now I've come up against no issues with the, and I'm even doing some really complicated rooting, so I'm really enjoying it. Um, don't wanna jump on the hype and, and influence anybody's choice by saying I'm using Astro, but that's just what I'm using because also the community is absolutely beautiful as.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Well, and I also think there, there's so much opportunity, first of all with this project in general, like the fact that you said all of these acronyms, like S Spa, mpa, C. We probably know those, not everybody does. And so like an opportunity for defining what those terms mean and, and explaining like, you probably don't need this.
Or, or
Salma Alam-Naylor: circula something. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's it. Because a lot of people, so I'm in the JAMstack Discord, um, kind of part of my job, but also I'm, I'm there for the community. And the biggest question, the most asked question we get in the Discord is, Hey, what framework should I use to build? Mm. And you, you can't advise people like that.
It's always, it depends. It's always like, what are you building? What features do you need? Do you need a cms? Are non-developers working on your product? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so you need, you need to be informed when you're choosing. , uh, your tech stack, and I think there are, I've seen too many people just jump in with the stuff they know and love.
Hey, just use x js. Hey, just use this. Hey, just use that. And, uh, it's, it's not always the right choice. And someone who is asking that type of question. Might not actually be equipped with the type of information that they need to, uh, gather down the line anyway, cuz they might just be starting out. They might never have done it before.
And so my new project is to hopefully equip people with the knowledge about the questions to ask as well about when you're choosing your tech. And it could go, it could blow wide open. It could even be like, okay, so uh, now you've chosen a framework. What CMS do you wanna choose? Do you even need a cms?
And now, now, Other things you want to choose, so it, it could get a bit much, but you know, opportunity.
Cassidy Williams: It could get hairy or it could end up being even bigger and you could make it so it scaffolds out a project. Oh, no, but that, that's Oh stop. You'll make me outta into my Trello board. I know. I'm so sorry.
As I was saying it, I was like, oh no, I'm creating work for you, .
Salma Alam-Naylor: But I like it. I like it. See, there's a lot of possibilities and, and right now for the prototype, I thought I'd have to ask about 20 questions, but actually it works. Just asking. And, uh, or maybe even two. So it wor like, I think it gives value in a, in a, in the most basic way and present you with some frameworks.
So we could, we could iterate on it or we could not. And I think in the state it's in, even though it's got no design yet, I think it's still pretty valuable. So let's see what happens.
Zach Plata: Well, speaking of awesome tools, it is time for our ad read. The Dev Morning Show (At Night) is a sponsored podcast, means someone has to pay the bills around here we're sponsored by LaunchDarkly.
And LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster. How? By gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they. Fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business teams.
Thanks for the money LaunchDarkly.
Cassidy Williams: So, so much. Besides this one project that has got my mind spinning, what does your day to day look like?
Salma Alam-Naylor: So I work in the dev re industry, if you wanna call it that, developer relations. Some people think it's marketing, some people think it's not. Um, I'm definitely more on the developer experience side, which is actually helping improve the experience of, uh, the Nety product.
Right? So I, um, so one of the things that I think is a little bit of a misconception is obviously I create a lot of content, but my content is. The result of all the other things that I'm doing is part of my job. So I am learning about frameworks, um, in order to help people build with frameworks, and I am educating people about new features of Nety, uh, by learning how to use them myself and helping improve them during the process.
One of the biggest, um, examples of this is actually with the most recent release of the next Js Run Time by Netlify and. I had a lot of fun working like, like this, uh, with the engineers a week and a half. Um, I was producing my tutorial content, um, in parallel to the product development. And basically I said, engineers, this is what the developer experience needs to look like.
Please make it so, and they did. And that was, you know, that's, that's the main part of the job. It's like, I'm a developer. I was a developer for eight years before I got into this industry. , I've done all sorts of development, front end tech, lead backend, project architecture, and I use that experience and real world, um, experience to inform how I know developers want to work and want to use a product.
And that's like the bottom line. It's like my, my vested interest is. Making the product easier and more joyful to use for developers. And I get to do some fun stuff on the side, you know, like this, uh, because a big part of the job is remaining authentic as a developer, you know, I'm not here to shill a product to you.
I'm not here to market or sell anything to you. I'm here to advocate for developers. . I do that through a variety of different mediums, um, and content is how, is how you gain, I don't wanna say like views and stuff, but it's how you gain reputation as a professional in, in the field. And without that credibility, I, I don't really have a like to stand on, so to speak.
So it's about building relationships with the community through getting to know what they. Informing the product development of Netlify through doing that and then writing about it, streaming about it, building weird projects about it, and yolo, deploying unfinished websites over and over again. Of course, ,
Cassidy Williams: I think the, the developer relations.
Industry, quote unquote, it. It's interesting how it's changed over time because I think initially it really was like a combination of engineering and marketing, but now I think it has definitely transformed into a combination of like engineering and user experience with like drops of marketing because you're producing content as
Salma Alam-Naylor: a result.
Um, very, yeah, the, the UX part, the user experience part, I think is critical cuz developers are the users of the product that I work for and so I am advocating for their use and, and to make it good. It's a very nice way of putting it actually, I never. I never put the UX with it. It's cuz they call it dx, don't they?
They call it developer experience, but it is UX cuz developers are users. So I'm gonna take that with
Cassidy Williams: me. Ooh. Take it in your packet.
Zach Plata: Well, on your day to day, you know, what kind of tools are you using, like editor and terminal and all that good stuff.
Salma Alam-Naylor: So I try to keep my, my tool set as, as streamlined and simple as possible because I've tried all the fancy schmanzy hyped ones and I just, they're just, they're just too much.
I use I term two, right? With a little customized shell knob. No, it just puts a little fire emoji and colors it up a bit and gives my, uh, gives my GI branches some, some style and I use vs. And, uh, with, with some very minimal plugins, most notably power mode that people will see when I live stream, which gives you sparkles and fireworks every time you type, which now I don't see anymore because it's just there and I'm used to it.
But I think I'd probably notice if it went just a few little things. Um, and then Trello is a big one that I used to organize my a, a, a blurry lined mix of. My, my individual projects compared to my work projects, which we use Notion at work, but it's mainly like Trello vs. Code and item too. And I've got a lot of like other gadgets on my desk, like some stream decks and my split keyboard and, and blah, blah, blah.
So I always had to think of tools as both software and hardware, but it's about just keeping, keeping a streamlined affair of tools. I've tried the latest and greatest and they're not the greatest really for, for getting on with your life. They need to be out of the way and just allow yourself to, to work.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. I think there is such a thing as over-engineering your own setup that like it plateaus and effectiveness over time. Absolutely.
Zach Plata: I also think it's like a learning curve with a lot of new tools too, where it's like they preach like simpleness and like. Flexibility and stuff, and it's like I don't have the time to like, you know, try and learn
Salma Alam-Naylor: these things.
I know Cassidy like loves Obsi. And I've downloaded obsidian before, I think twice, and removed it twice. So I'm like, I need to get onto this new, like hype train of note taking, and I just look at it and I'm like, I don't really have a use for this. I'll just put a note on my trolley board. Or I'll just, oh, I use the Reminders app, the Apple Reminders app and the Apple Notes app all the time because it's synced to my devices.
So again, I, I, I still, it looks pretty, it looks beautiful, but I just don't have a personal use for it. I don't think you. Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: I think, I think for tools like that you just have to use what works for you. With obsidian, it didn't work for me at first. Mm-hmm. , and then I saw how uh, Ben Hong, who is also on the nullify team and is just an obsidian power user, uses it.
And I was like, I cannot replicate his work. It's glorious. But that is, it's, it's to an extreme that I can't do. And so finding like your own path to using a tool effectively I think is I. I think
Salma Alam-Naylor: there's also this misconception that if you use the latest and greatest tools, you will be more productive and work better.
But that's not always the case. It's always a personal kind of recipe that you need to develop over time. And just because you're using the next best terminal doesn't mean you're gonna be a 10 x develop.
Cassidy Williams: Anyway. So besides all of this amazing dev stuff, you said that you were in the industry developing for eight years, and in general, what got you in tech in the first place?
Salma Alam-Naylor: It's a very long, weird story and I always try to make it shorter every time I tell it, and I'm not sure that I can. Basically, I always wanted to be in tech from the age of six when I wrote my first lines of basic on a Commodor 64, but wow. Where I grew up, it wasn't possible. It was in the nineties. There was no internet in in households.
There were no online tutorials. There were no hashtag a hundred. Nothing, I didn't even know anyone who, who did tech. So I became a musician and I did a music degree. Um, I majored in composition and wanted to be a film composer that didn't work out. Um, and so I started teaching, initially teaching kids in rock bands.
And then I decided to become a qualified teacher in the UK where I taught 11 to six, 11 to 18 year olds in.
Fast forward a few years. I mean, it's like a different life, isn't it? Fast forward a few years and I decided that it wasn't for me. Um, teaching is difficult. Um, it's a, it's emotionally draining, and I did not have the emotional maturity in my mid twenties to carry on teaching. Full disclaimer. So I, I just quit and I ended up working in a call center, and that was the beginning of my tech career.
Uh, I was working for minimum. And my manager, his girlfriend had recently left a small little magazine startup at the top of a furniture shop. And uh, they needed a graphic designer. And I had graphic design on my CV cuz I was doing some, I was doing web dev in my spare time. I was doing album art for my musician.
Mm, I was using some, some old tech to make websites. And anyway, I went for an interview at this place and I got the job as a graphic designer and sales person. And there was one IT guy who worked there who did everything backend front end. He wrote his own CMS infrastructure, DevOps, everything. And I sat on the same desk bank as him and I got to know him and I was like, Hey.
I wanna do tech. And so I moved my, my desk next to him and he showed me the rope. So I was, as a teacher, I was teaching him how to teach. And as someone who was very technically experienced, he was teaching me tech. I learned, um, php. It was this really obscure PHP full stack framework. And I, um, learned coffee script before JavaScript and SaaS before css.
Anyway, I, um, successfully during my six months there. So there used to be two separate websites, one for desktop, one for mobile. I successfully pretty much on my own amalgamated the two into one responsive, uh, website for all devices. Nice. And that was my
Cassidy Williams: initiation
Salma Alam-Naylor: into the industry. And after that I got a series of front end jobs and moved quite quickly to being a tech lead I think cuz of my teaching leadership experience.
And, um, at the beginning of the. Is when I started streaming, when I started meeting people online in the tech industry, and that's how I got into developer relations through Twitch. Wow.
Cassidy Williams: I'm also surprised that you only started streaming at the beginning of the pandemic cuz your stream is so fancy. Like it's, it's one of the most polished streams I've seen in the tech world.
Salma Alam-Naylor: I mean, I'm a front end developer on I, and every, every stream you make, every part of my stream, every part of my stream is a browser page. So, you know, it was, and it's great stream content right to, to create stream overlays while you are streaming. So yeah, so I've been streaming for just over two years.
Oh, amazing.
Cassidy Williams: Wow. And the, the, the music angle is, is always so fun cuz I feel, I feel like there's an absurd number of dev people who are musicians or have been musicians. Everyone on this call plays some instruments and, and it's, it's cool to see and I wonder why it works that way, why that overlap
Salma Alam-Naylor: exist.
So I remember when I, when I, so music does something to one side of my brain and coding does something to the other side of my brain and when I'm doing both together, that's when like my brain is on fire. But I think, so I was gonna give a talk that was postponed a few weeks ago as part of the developer downloads in the JAMstack Discord.
And the title of this little chat was How Writing. Code is exactly like writing music, and I think they are both exactly the same in my brain at least, and I approach writing code like I approached my composition. It's, especially with functional programming, it's about motifs and repeatable things, and a you, you have a, an overarching journey that you wanna take and a beginning, a middle, and an end, basically even on a function level or an architecture level is exactly the.
It's, it's not even about maths. I think it's just about logic and problem solving and creativity. So I think, I think they're the same and I, I can't wait to talk more about it, uh, when I actually finally do that chat thing.
Cassidy Williams: That's awesome. Have you seen that one functional language that lets you generate music?
It's, it's, looks like elixir, but it, or, or like Lis or something, but it generates actual musical tones.
Salma Alam-Naylor: No, but I need to look into this now. You're giving me more tasks to do. Thank you very much.
Cassidy Williams: I'm so sorry. I will send it to you though cuz it's, it's really cool. And we can drop it in the show notes after as well.
I wonder, is that sonic Pie?
Salma Alam-Naylor: Yes. Yeah. Oh, that's use Sonic Pie. Oh yeah. I did some, a couple of streams on Sonic Pie. I loved it. I loved it. The only problem with me is, so I do a lot of like, record, well, not a lot anymore, but I used to. Um, so I, the most recent bit of music I recorded was for the fyi, Fridays Netlify series is I've been releasing.
Um, but when I write music, I like to perform. And not just click buttons and stuff. And so I tried to hook up like, um, the midi with Sonic Pie and the like pitch bend and the modulation, but there was too much latency, which made me very upset and frustrated. I wanted to be able to play into Sonic Pie to perform like that rather than just writing codes.
So, My musician in me was taking over more than the coder in me . Um, and I was getting very, very frustrated. So I abandoned that for a while. But I, I do love sonic pie and I just, the whole concept of merging the two is very interesting
Cassidy Williams: to me. It's, it's so neat. I, we could talk about this forever, but it is time for rapid fire questions.
We're going to ask you questions rapidly. So first, we all have a domain name or 10 that we're squatting on. What are some of yours?
Salma Alam-Naylor: Two that come to mind. Number one, when does a biscuit become a cookie.info ? Because in in the UK right, we have biscuits, but we also have cookies. But cookies are like, Soft things and biscuits are small, hard things, and there must be a point at where the threshold, where a biscuit becomes a cookie, and I would wanted to build a, a website that delved into that haven't yet
Cassidy Williams: I also just want to know I, oh me do
Zach Plata: Me too. I always thought it was just, yeah. Biscuits.
Salma Alam-Naylor: Yeah. Well we have cookie, we get, you know, bags of five cookies from the local supermarket is a big thing. Anyway, uh, the second one, shouting.dev. So I wanted to build a webpage that, um, that you leave on in the background when you're coding.
and at random intervals, a video would pop up and shout, encouraging words to you. , I guess a bit like centered app, um, but on a webpage, uh, randomly and not at, not at sensible intervals, so it would probably scare you out of your skin. Um, haven't done that one yet either. I admit when
Cassidy Williams: you first started describing this, I thought it would just go like, ah.
Salma Alam-Naylor: I was like, that's great. That's a great console log. Well done, .
Cassidy Williams: Just don't forget to commit early and
Salma Alam-Naylor: often. Yeah, exactly. And if it, if I was clever enough, I might be able to, um, actually hook it up to vs code where if I'm seeing someone, uh, type in console log, that's when the console log video would play.
If I'm seeing someone doing a, a class or a function, um, I could shout you. It doesn't matter what you choose, as long as it gets the job done. You know, things, things like that. , I love
Cassidy Williams: it.
Zach Plata: What is the most recent thing you over optimized?
Salma Alam-Naylor: You know, the, the Internet of Things is rife in this world, and there are far too many internet of thing things in my house, so that even if like the internet, like disconnects momentarily, I have to reset like all the lights in my house.
And it's painful. It's painful. I have like an Apple home pod in every room. It's stupid. and, but I'm in too deep now and so I need to stay there because I'm just so, I'm so used to not touching light switches. Fun fact, actually, this, this room is my office in the garden and not enough is optimized in this room actually, because the, all these lights behind me, they need to be turned on by switches.
And I feel like I'm in the dark ages compared to the rest of my house. But, you know, so I mean, less is more I think, but now I'm just, I, I, I'm too far in. Uh, so that's, that's my life. I
Cassidy Williams: definitely, a, a large percentage of my house is the exact same way. Like every, every light in my office I can control is my voice, and it is very, very fun.
Except for, like you said, when the internet goes out or if one might get a condition such as C where you can't use your voice. ? Yes. Oh. What is your golden rule for coding?
Salma Alam-Naylor: Build first engineer later. Ooh. It's good. So this works on a personal level, at a team level, at a product level, at startup level, at any feature, iteration level.
Uh, just build something and get it out there. Don't overanalyze the types of code you're writing. Just don't, maybe don't add too many tests straight away. You know, just like get something out there and deploy it. Don't, you know? So if you've seen me stream, You'll notice I release a lot of websites after I've spent two hours on building some kind of prototype.
I'd have got no css, I've got no anything. I just, oh, let's put it online because I can. Right. And once it's out there, , it's kind of like, it's a thing. It's like you've achieved something rather than sitting on it for months and months and months and months and months and obsessing over the quality of it and being a perfectionist and like, oh, maybe that should go there.
Maybe, uh, just, just build it, get it out, go deploy it, and then if it works, if it's something that you wanna carry on doing, if you've got the data that says that maybe this is something that the world needs, then go and engineer it and, you know, separate your concerns and have one source of truth and make it dry.
But when you're just proto typing, Just build it and don't, don't stress and see what happens.
Cassidy Williams: I agree with that so deeply because I fall victim to it so often where you over optimize so much at the beginning and then you end up. Not finishing so many projects and there's,
Salma Alam-Naylor: then you get bored of it, and then you, then you get, you get, you get weary of it, and then it's such a wasted opportunity to see if something could be useful to someone.
And, uh, you know, but I, I do get a lot of like, confused people. Why are you releasing that website when there's no CSS on it? How, how, how could you? It's like you are, you are walking out of the house with your underwear on it, but that, that's still a valid outfit really, as long as your private parts are covered.
Go, go for it and be seen. Uh, so, you know, just yolo.
Cassidy Williams: I would like to take a clip of just that .
Zach Plata: Yeah, I
Salma Alam-Naylor: was just thinking that too.
Zach Plata: No. All right. Um, what is your favorite? It depends. Question.
Salma Alam-Naylor: How do I get started in web development? Mm. Such a big question. I actually, I was quite proud of an analogy I put out on Twitter a little while ago asking that question. How do I get started in web development is like saying, how do I get started with cooking?
It's like, what do you wanna make? What are you hungry for? Do you wanna do pastry? Do you wanna do sauce? Do you wanna do salads? Do you wanna specialize in meat? And, um, you need to, again, it's like, like with the what? The framework project. You have to ask a lot of questions to get the. To give the right answer.
And I always find like it's a very hard question to answer because you have to ask so many more questions to help people correctly and in a more sensible way. And, um, you know, how, how do I get started with exercise? . I mean, yes, just do it, but actually can you walk? Can you run? Do you need special help with specific movements?
You know, uh, do you suffer really badly from acid reflux? That kind of thing. So there's, it's, how do I get started with general term here is very difficult. And so if you're thinking about asking that question, I wanna encourage you to think about what do you wanna. How do I make a blog site? How do I make a lasagna?
How do I make bread? Is, is far more useful and you'll get more useful answers after it.
Cassidy Williams: That's a great point. That's a great one. What's the oldest piece of tech that you still
Salma Alam-Naylor: own this? What is that? A manual thermometer that you put on your head? To take your temperature, and this was given to me by my mother-in-law.
um, who used it on her children in the eighties, and it's quite fascinating how it works. And this is literally the oldest, I mean, I, I, it was working. You can, it was, it was getting colored. There you go. Look, that's, I didn't leave it on for long enough. Wow. I didn't know those existed. I know, and it's in this little case, and I don't, I would try to actually discern what year this was from.
Uh, but it doesn't say on the, on the instructions, but here it is. And I still use it on my child now. It's like a family
Cassidy Williams: heirloom. Wow. Well, and if it works, that's
Salma Alam-Naylor: amazing. It works. It works. There you go. It's fascinating that there's just
Cassidy Williams: like buy it for life subreddit. Yeah. And I feel like that would be the perfect entry for it.
Yes.
Salma Alam-Naylor: I'm gonna give it to my child if he has children.
Cassidy Williams: or just for himself
Salma Alam-Naylor: to walk. Yeah. Yeah. Just live. Relive your childhood. When mommy put the thing on your head,
Zach Plata: All right. Um, have you written a piece of cringy code, and if so, what was.
Salma Alam-Naylor: I'm really ashamed. I'm not ashamed, I'm not ashamed of this, but it, I, right.
Cassidy Williams: That's, that's the best
Salma Alam-Naylor: kind. Yeah. . So I was building live on stream when I was building what the framework just like two, two weeks ago, one and a half weeks ago.
And the first prototype, um, of this first page was a form, it was an HTML form and I wasn't using JavaScript with the form. I was just like using HTML native form stuff with query parameters that would put be put in the URL when you press. and I thought, oh, I need a way if someone's booked, mark, if someone has bookmarked the page with the query parameter in, I need to allow them to clear it.
Clear the query parameter, right? Just in case they wanna start over again. And so what I did was I built another form that had a hidden input with an empty value in and had a submit button so that when you press the submit button, the query parameter will be cleared to blank. When I could have just used a link that, uh, redirected you to the homepage.
That's
Cassidy Williams: what I was Yeah, I was going to say. So a homepage link, but
Salma Alam-Naylor: a form. Yes, I was too, I was too deep in the whole form HTML thing, and somebody kindly pointed it out to me before I committed it, and I was like, what on earth? Has gotten into me, um, funny story, right? But you know, it's like, but this, this, this, this is the thing about the web.
You could do so many things in so many different ways. It wouldn't have worked. It worked, but it was silly. But it worked. You're,
Cassidy Williams: you're allowed to do unholy things in Aku.
Salma Alam-Naylor: Yes, yes, yes. So a very, the first, very ashamed, but luckily it didn't get committed into version history, so actually didn't. . Exactly.
Cassidy Williams: No one's gonna know.
This is the only record of it. , what is your favorite programming pun?
Salma Alam-Naylor: It's not a pun per se, but every time I, I say the word Jason, like Jason Langor, I, I say Js O as in like the Js O JavaScript object notation, but also, The way I say j o, I'm doing it now. Like I can't say it without saying just song like pka and I, I dunno what it is with me, but that's my favorite thing.
The word just song, I have to say it French and, and I dunno why, but it's not a pun. And I'm sorry this is a terrible answer, but, I hope that you go forth with this knowledge and every time you are looking at a package, just song, uh, you think
Cassidy Williams: of me, I'm now going to pronounce it like that in my head.
Constantly. I dunno
Salma Alam-Naylor: what it's, but the package lock, it's just a package lock. It's not a p look, it's, it's, it's a package lock. Um, but P's your song. Song, take it, take it, leave it.
Cassidy Williams: It reminds me one time someone said, oh, you should check out this rapper and the rapper. Json like it was, it was like J apostrophe s o n uhhuh, and I was like, oh no, I'm gonna Google this, but.
My search results are going to be very skewed towards coding things. And so I wrote JSON Rapper, but then it just thought that I made a typo, , and that its, it just, I never found out amazing that rapper was . Oh, no,
Zach Plata: All right. And then so around things out, what is your most used emoji?
Salma Alam-Naylor: It's the, it's the Co Joy Co in Slack. It's the crying, laughing, that used to be sweating, and the meaning changed over time, and now it's just everywhere. And although, so this is my most used one, but I'm slowly moving to the sideways ruffle.
Cassidy Williams: Oh yeah. Like the, like the, the quirky
Salma Alam-Naylor: ruffle. Um, I, I, I'd never use ruff. Rolling on the floor. Laughing. I never use ruffle in, in text. I use Lull. Um, but I also like the fact that because so many people I know, even if I don't work with them, use Slack, if anywhere doesn't support emojis like that, I can write co on Joy Co on and everyone knows what I mean.
Uh, so it's kinda synonymous with, with the, but a lot of people say that this is a boomer, uh, emoji. You know, it's not what the cool kids use. Like, also like thumb. Thumbs up is not cool anymore. Yeah. But I'm, I'm gonna roll with it. I'm gonna keep using joy and I hope to spread joy across the land. At the same time, I've,
Cassidy Williams: I've learned from the youth that if the emoji is showing teeth, then it's cringe what I know.
Oh God, that's a lot of emojis and I disagree. Now I don't wanna show my it's teeth.
Cassidy Williams: Anyway, it is time for the random segment generator.
We are going to randomly pick segments and ask you questions. And the first one is dev. Oops. What's something that you broke
Salma Alam-Naylor: once? I think this is, um, a rite of passage for. New developer. Um, I was working at, uh, a startup. I dunno why I have to say this quietly. It's very, very, I'm very ashamed of this. I'm not because I, no one anyway, for, let's, let's carry on.
I was working at a eCommerce startup, right? And as part of the eCommerce startup, um, builds process, we had a number of like alpha customers. And, uh, as a, a very small developer team, there were like three. Three developers. We all had root access to all the live production servers via a terminal uhoh. What I needed to do at this point, because we didn't have any like development envi concept of development environment versus production environment kind of C I C D thing, it was all very.
Very lofi. I needed to go into the server, uh, ssh in, zip up a file of images, download the tar of the images, and use that in development so I could build a product image carousel or something. Anyway, I thought, so I got, I zipped it up, downloaded it, and I thought, I don't, I need to clean up the server. I need to leave it nice and clean and ti.
So I typed RM dash RF images tab auto complete. Enter. No, didn't need to do RF for a zip file, so I deleted all the images on the server on the life site and spent the next 24 hours restoring most of them from a cashed backup or something. Never have I ever, ever been more modified in my life, but, you know, uh, things happen.
I use that story to, um, hopefully make other devs who've made mistakes feel a bit better about their lives. Uh, so, uh, I, I'm very careful when I use. These days, even now. Mm.
Cassidy Williams: It's, it's, it really is a rite of passage. I feel like we all have one of those stories where like, we messed up really bad and we gotta deal with it now.
Zach Plata: That sounds like a great website idea, like, RF stories.
Salma Alam-Naylor: Oh, stop. Stop giving me my ideas. Cause I can make to the Trello board and yo deploy it. And there you go. There's my first one. Let's submit them , because I can do HTML forms can't I? Because I write forms all the time, even when I don't need them.
Zach Plata: Moving on to the next segment. It's 4 0 4 s and Heartbreak. So what is something that was taken off the internet or it's like a page not found, um, that you missed dearly, uh, in
Salma Alam-Naylor: the, in the late nineties, early two thousands, one of the most fascinating saying corners of the very young internet was a site called hell.com and, uh, it.
Like nothing I've ever seen. Okay. Um, it would change really often, like you'd go onto hell.com one day and it'd be completely different the next day. And it would be like a series of random rabbit holes and links and, uh, existential questions and art. , sometimes a Google search in bed. Like it was, it was weird.
Now, I, I, I looked this up on Wikipedia a few months ago cause I was talking about it on stream and there is a big write up about the evolution of hell.com and who was behind it and what it was for. But I think I quite liked having, not knowing that, I quite liked not knowing that, but I know about it now.
And when you look on the way back machine, it doesn't work because it used flash. Oh, it used flash and so you can't like the experience of it. I can't share it with anyone. It's in my head, but it, it will never leave me the feeling of that intrigue and wonder and fear cuz the internet was new. I, I felt like I was in a.
I was in a different place, and I think we've lost a bit of that about the internet, about like the, the intrigue of the unknown and actually how does this work and where am I and what am I doing? And I wanna bring that back. I, I actually wanted to recreate hell.com and I, I added it to my Trello board, but actually I couldn't do it justice.
I, I couldn't. do it. And I didn't wanna ruin my feeling inside of this website, but anyway, if you wanna go, it's, you can see some iterations of it on hell dot on, um, on the way back machine, but it, it's because it uses flash. You, you can't really get the full picture. But it was fascinating. So I'd love to know if anybody out there knew of hell.com at the same time as well, so I can share my fandom with you.
There
Cassidy Williams: was so much cool. Weird. things there, there's so many things that, that the internet just, there's so much order to the internet now. It's, it's not the barren wasteland where people just throw things up as much as it they did before, and I feel like we do need to bring some of that back because it was, it was fun and chaotic and for better, for worse, just really weird.
Yeah, bring it back. And our last segment is the mild panic trivia Fun game. Ah, okay. We have 10 seconds to ask anyone a question or compliment them fast. Zach, you
Zach Plata: go first. Okay. Salma, um, what is your favorite instrument or instruments to play
Salma Alam-Naylor: Piano. Mm mm. Do I explain it or do we just keep mild panicking onto the
Cassidy Williams: next bit?
I actually would love to learn, do you do like the electric keyboard type piano or, or like a a piano.
Salma Alam-Naylor: Piano. Any piano. Uh, as long as it has a full, it's a full size because the, the Tom Bra, uh, difference between the low note and the high note, you can just create some lovely things and you can make a, you can like playing the piano.
Is accessible to so many more people than just playing a single instrument because it's a full experience for them and what they're used to listening to on the radio kind of thing. So I think playing the piano is great for the player to, uh, be able to experience creating a full sounding thing, but also great for the listener and great for accessibility to music because you can do everything with it.
Yeah. That's great. All right, you're next, uh, Cassidy, if you could Hello. Eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Cassidy Williams: Oh, no, just one. Just one. I would probably, it would probably be bread and olive oil with like tomato and basil. I could eat that every day, all day, constantly. I love that combination so.
It's
Salma Alam-Naylor: like a Pusha.
Cassidy Williams: It is, it is. Yeah. I love just, I love basically things that are a vessel for olive oil in general. Like I, I just put it in my veins. I love good olive oil, and so especially with bread and, and tomatoes and, and basil like that, that just combination. And of course some cheese, like some manchego or, or mozzarella, so good.
But yes, it is very much like a pizza. Even more so with the cheese. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's very true. Um, Zach, if you could pick up a new hobby right now, what would it be?
Zach Plata: Pogo sticking. Oh, I cool. I don't know why, but I thought about that recently and I just think back to like when that was a huge fad in my childhood and people would just like be hopping up and down the.
PO sticking and now I really want one and I wanna learn how to do it.
Salma Alam-Naylor: I know. Good. Clean, fun, good, healthy, clean, fun. Now I want to get on a PO stick. Yeah. I kind of
Cassidy Williams: wanna try I, cuz I know I did it like as a child. Mm-hmm. , I don't know if I have that balance now know,
Zach Plata: maybe that's a good one. I feel like in the pandemic, like roller skating or roller blade.
Like just blew up as like a hobby of things to do outside. And I, I wonder if POS stick ever had that like little niche community ,
Salma Alam-Naylor: well, it would be all over the internet now. There'd be, there'd be Twitter communities. There'd be people live streaming it. There'd be be people blogging about it. I mean, I reckon there is a big pos stick community that I think we should now just try and find.
Because I
Cassidy Williams: find it, Zach, go,
Salma Alam-Naylor: let's do it and report back.
Zach Plata: Perfect. Will do.
Cassidy Williams: It is time for Cassidy Sage advice. It's time for advice that I give. Sagely,
my advice to you is to make a Trello board or any type of tool for tracking your projects, because like Salma said, multiple times in this episode, She just writes down her project ideas, and it's great to do that because even if you don't get to them, or you might start to over-engineer them by actually writing them down, you don't forget them and you can kind of noodle on them.
And for myself, I don't necessarily do a Trello board. I just have a list of project ideas in my note taking app. I've seen. So many different variations of it. I've known people who email themselves. I know people who have a notion board there. There's, there's so many options, but write down your ideas because if you ever are hitting some kind of writer's block, but for code.
You can have ideas that you can pull from and just start making something. Because when you have that, then you can kind of keep your creative juices flowing and really think about how you wanna build things.
Salma Alam-Naylor: That being said, and, sorry, sorry, you, I know this is your advice, but, and you can gift those ideas to other people if you have made for them further.
Cassidy Williams: Exactly. That's a great point. Exactly. And they don't have to be very good ideas either. Sometimes it. A fun idea to see like, can I do this? Cool, and you roll with it. That being said, Zach Salma, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Thank you
Salma Alam-Naylor: for having me. Thank you.
Cassidy Williams: Salma, where can people find you on the internet?
Do you have any plugs for us? Well,
Salma Alam-Naylor: uh, the, the biggest thing that I'd like to plug it is my live streaming, because I'm building what the framework and if people are interested in it, then come on down and, and see what I'm doing. Uh, it's twitch.tv/white P four Nth. Three R and I guess the link will be somewhere around here.
Uh, you can find me as White Panther everywhere on the internet, uh, Twitter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, uh, come on down. Say hi, I'm, I like to get messages from people when you say nice things and you want help.
Cassidy Williams: And once again, because making podcasts is expensive. This show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly.
LaunchDarkly Toggles. Peaks of 20 trillion feature flags each day, and that number continues to grow, and you should use them. You can head over to LaunchDarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible. LaunchDarkly. I've been Cassidy Williams. You can find me at cassidoo. C A S S I D O O on most things, and I'm CTO over at.
Contenda
Zach Plata: I'm Zach and I'm a DevRel at Rive, and you can find me on Twitter at ZachPlata
Cassidy Williams: thank you for tuning into the Dev Morning Show (At Night). Make sure you head over to our YouTube channel where you can like and subscribe. You can also listen to the audio version of this wherever you get your
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