Web Dev with Matt

Hosted by Matthew Setter

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Want to learn web development from the comfort of your chair, car, when you're out for a run, or doing some random house work? This is the show for you. Every week, in 20 - 40 minutes, I help you improve your web development skills with new knowledge, tips, pointers, random facts, inspiration, and some general chit chat. Tune in to have a fun, engaging, and friendly conversation about web development.

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36 recent

August 19, 2026Episode 3712 min

If you want to be a developer, you have to read

This is something that I've thought about a lot during the (roughly) 30 years of my career. If you want to be a developer, if you want to write software you have to read! Whether that's a project's official documentation, the code, the docblock or inline comments, or related places such as forums like Reddit and Stack Overflow - you have to read. Sure, AI can summarise content for you, and can help with projects that have poor or no documentation. But, whether you use AI or not, there's no getting around reading. There are no shortcuts. In this episode, I go into depth about having to read as a developer, explain how it's unavoidable, and also why reading is a good thing. Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

August 5, 2026Episode 3624 min

If I Were Starting Over as a Web Developer, How Would I Do It? (Part 3)

In this episode, I'm finishing up the 3-part series showing by stepping through how to pick a set of software development languages for your web development journey. As with the previous two parts in the series, I'm doing that through a series of questions to get you thinking. These include: What are the established languages What is a good IDE or text editor that supports your language of choice What are the technologies and stacks and tooling that is available for those languages What are the frameworks available for each language that you're considering To make the process as hands on as possible, check out the resources below, which will provide you with a wealth of detailed information to help with your decision making process. Links from the episode The Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey 13 Best Languages for Web Development in 2025 Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

July 29, 2026Episode 3524 min

If I Were Starting Over as a Web Developer, How Would I Do It? (Part 2)

If you've been wondering how to get started as a web developer, but were unsure how to do so, in this episode of the podcast, I'm continuing to step through how I'd get started if I were starting over. In this episode, I'm talking about how to pick the right software language and tech stack for your web development journey, before you dive in and commit to mastering them. To help you do that, I'm asking questions such as: Which languages do you enjoy using? How big are the communities around each language? What is the language's available tooling like (e.g., Composer for PHP, Maven and Gradle for Java, Cargo for Rust, etc)? What job openings are available? Here's the quote from the show: " There are only two kinds of programming languages. Those people always complain about and those people never use ". Links from the episode Seek Indeed: Job Search TIOBE Index for July 2026 PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (Technology) The Top Programming Languages 2025 (IEEE Spectrum) Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

July 22, 2026Episode 3422 min

If I Were Starting Over as a Web Developer, How Would I Do It? (Part 1)

If you've been wondering how to get started as a web developer, but were unsure exactly how to do so, in this episode of the podcast, I'm stepping through how I'd get started if I were starting over (knowing what I know now). I'm not talking about tech stacks and software development languages in this episode. That's coming in part two. In this episode, I'm starting with helping you understand your motivations so that you get a clear focus on where you're at and why you want to get into web development. Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

July 8, 2026Episode 3311 min

Make your Command-Line Experience More Enjoyable and Efficient with Shell Aliases

If you've used the shell, terminal, or command-line all that much, you'll know that it's powerful and extremely flexible. However, you'll also know that that power and flexibility comes with a cost. Commands can be hard to remember, have options and parameters that become complicated to type consistently, without overlooking options or typing them incorrectly. That's why you need to learn about shell aliases! They let you create short, punchy, and memorable names for commands and command pipelines, no matter how complicated they are. In this episode, you'll learn more about them, and how to create, list, and remove them, both temporarily and permanently. Links from the episode The alias description on Wikipedia Bash shell initialisation files Z shell initialisation files Windows macros (which are analagous to aliases) Windows PowerShell set-alias command Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

July 1, 2026Episode 3226 min

Don't use Markdown for technical documentation

If you've written technical documentation, you'll know about Markdown. It's easy to get started with. It's easy to write. It's supported by just about any and every platform and service you're going to use, e.g., GitHub, GitLab, StackOverflow, Reddit, LinkedIn, and numerous other services. Despite that, it's not the best choice for technical documentation! However, there are two formats: AsciiDoc and reStructuredText, that are. What's more, these formats were designed with technical documentation in mind. In this episode, I step through my frustrations documenting software with Markdown, and give a healthy plug for why you should use AsciiDoc instead. It's loads better and far more enjoyable to document your code with. Links from the episode AsciiDoc reStructuredText GitHub Flavoured Markdown - Basic writing and formatting syntax R Markdown Markdown Extra CommonMark Markdown Guide Aaron Swartz John Gruber Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

June 24, 2026Episode 3123 min

6 Git Log Options I Use That Make the Command-line Better Than a Git GUI

You might think that Git GUIs are more efficient for using Git than the command line. I disagree. In this episode, I'm going to share with you six options that I regularly use with Git Log that make the command-line way faster. Links from the episode Git Log Glob expressions The less command Grep cheatsheet The tutorial behind the episode Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

June 17, 2026Episode 3015 min

Getting Started With Git Reflog

Git Reflog shows you a lot about what's going on in your Git repositories, and let's you clean them up better than other commands can. For this reason, and because I have been known to accidentally include things in commits that I need to purge, I'm coming to love this command. So, in this episode I'm going to give you a good introduction to the command, and step you through how I completely removed a commit from a repository I was working on recently, so that no one could ever recover an image that I'd committed with an unredacted credential. Links from the episode BFG Repo-Cleaner Git Reflog Git Log Git plumbing and porcelain The blog post where I go into greater detail about using Git Reflog Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

June 4, 2026Episode 2938 min

What I Learned Implementing the Same Program in Eight Languages

One of the tasks that I took on at work, recently, required updating the details of an existing code project. The project originally showed how to send SMS in each of the seven languages mentioned, except Rust. Now, however, it needed to show how to reply to an SMS as well. I've worked with each of the language over the years, except for C#, so thought that it would be a fun challenge to brush up my skills in each one, and to learn just enough about C# to complete the implementation. Over the course of implementing the required functionality in each language (PHP, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, C#, JavaScript, and Java), I had the unexpected pleasure of learning a lot about each one, and seeing many of their similarities and differences. In this episode, I'm sharing some of what I learned. I hope you'll be as interested in what I learned as I was. Links from the episode What I Learned Implementing the Same Program in Seven Languages (the blog post that inspired this episode) Rust ownership documentation Maven Gradle The net/http package ASP.Net Core Minimal API The Slim Framework Flask Axum Sinatra Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

February 23, 2026Episode 2814 min

What I'll be Focusing on in 2026 and Why (in greater depth)

As I started talking about in the last episode, this year I'll be focusing primarily on accessibility , testing , and deployment . In this episode, I thought it important to set out why in a decent amount of depth. So, why? Well, essentially, because they're of interest to me, because having a more narrow rather than broad focus makes life easier to focus and learn, and because they're areas that I messed up in over the years and want to do much better at. Links from the episode Troy Hunt Have I Been Pwned Want to grow your knowledge further? Check out the books below, where you can grow your web development skills in a very focused, very hands-on way. Deploy with Docker Compose Mezzio Essentials Hosted and produced in Bundaberg by: Matthew Setter . Website: https://matthewsetter.com . Follow me on: LinkedIn . If you like the podcast, and want to support it, how about buying me a coffee? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★