Behold
Photo of Chris Coyier. Red CodePen hat on, looking up and to the right.
He/Him. Cool with They. More Photos
Howdy!

I’m a web designer and developer and my career arc is about helping you get better at those things. Sometimes people talk to me about that.

With Alex Vazquez, I’m the co-founder of CodePen, a social front-end web development environment. With Dave Rupert, I’m the co-host of a podcast called ShopTalk.

I built CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, and ran it for 15 years, from 2007 to 2022.

I’m big on the power of writing as a way to think better and improve yourself.

Speaking
I give presentations at events occasionally, typically about (you guessed it), building websites. I keep a list of upcoming and past events and more information, which is useful for both of us, really.

I’m super close to getting productivity-sniped by Godspeed. It appears there is quite a few cool features. I like the focus on speed. I like the file attachments to individual to-dos. I like that recurring to-dos seem like first-class citizens. I like the commitment to keyboard-first usage and the “just remember Command-K” thing. I’m Apple-y […]

We’re all familiar with processes like “write a weekly status update” that start strong and eventually fade out to low participation, engineers automating their updates, and gibberish. When you ask people why participation faded you hear the same thing over and over, “It didn’t feel like anyone was reading it”. In this scenario, we’ve Pushed. […]

The glider was a sister to the lilac and the bee, the slime mold and the earthworm, blossoming forth, bubbling up from the generative froth of the universe, its spontaneous complexity cascading from page to page, filling the grid with evidence for a theory that could not be articulated and did not need to be […]

Like Water

Shaw with some helpful advice on live audio: A friend explained it to me like water. Gain is controlling how much water to let in, and Level is controlling how much water to let out. Lower gain means less sound picked up overall (which helps with feedback) and the level will control how much you […]

Live Audio Situation, Part II

This all started here. Where that ended was ordering new gear that seemed better suited to this recurring gig than what I was doing. All that gear has arrived and I’ve used it now, and I’m happy to report it was a good improvement. The setup is: Those five inputs to to a Mackie ProFX12v3 […]

Brad follows up on some some of the chatter and happenings since the big Global Design System concept dropped. In addition to many of the positive responses, I heard plenty of skepticism, open questions, and apprehension. So much of it is valid and shared by me! Chris Coyier published a great post that sums up a lot […]

Great story from Chris Zacharias about slipping a browser support banner into production on YouTube that probably did more to drive down usage of that browser than the collective public whining of web developers at conferences. Instead of outright dropping IE6 support, what if we just threatened to? How would users react? Would they revolt […]

I’m going to leave the title off this post and see what happens. Titles are a lot of pressure! I think there is a reason that the big text-based social networking sites (Mastodon, X, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, etc.) don’t have titles. Especially for short posts, the title just isn’t necessary. Just say the thing. […]

Where I’m at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

It was March 2022 when I sold CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean. So it’s been just about 2 years now. This was me and my wife’s thinking: After the sale, things seemed kinda fine for a bit, and that was encouraging. It was cool seeing new voices publishing new work I had nothing to do with. Then […]

Cops & Computers

I watched the Netflix Documentary American Nightmare. It feels like standard fare at this point, where we dip back a decade or two to some crime story that had a few twists and turns in it and make it freshly popcorn worthy again. This was the “is this the real life Gone Girl?” case. Denise […]

An Unfinished Live Audio Journey

I have the opportunity to play out at our friends Bar Rio here in Bend, Oregon somewhat regularly. I’ve got one gig in the bag already. It went OK, but I’ve got a lot to learn and improve about handling the live audio sound situation. Here’s that story so far. At this particular gig, I […]

PDF Document Scanners

I’m still a Dropbox user, and a small feature I like on their mobile app is the Scan document option. You press the big blue + icon and it’s one of the options there. It opens the camera, you point it at a document and hold steady, and it takes a scan of the document. […]

Thoughts on a Global Design System

Dave and I just had Brad on ShopTalk Show to talk about his idea for a Global Design System. I love Brad’s optimism on all this. From Brad’s perspective, he’s seen, and helped build, the same set of components over and over over (and over) for design systems. On a very professional level! While design […]

Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is a political technique where voting districts are drawn to advantage one group over another. In practice, it looks incredibly silly. There are geographical districts that make no sense whatsover, snaking through territory with no other purpose than to bring power to some in-group. An example is an area having some large population of […]

NX on Prime

My favorite TV show, Northern Exposure (1990-1995) was entirely unavailable on any streaming service since streaming services existed. If you wanted to watch it, you had to get your hands on the DVDs. I totally have them. The first two seasons came in a little cute parka around the case, then they cheaped out and […]

Who Pays Technical Writers?

New-to-me, a site from Philip Kiely: Who Pays Technical Writers. Shout out Paul Esch-Laurent for suggesting Boost and it getting added. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I don’t see robots being able to craft the kind of technical writing I like. It’s that kind that clearly comes from deep personal experience, laden with real examples, […]

How was your experience?

I just want to echo Josh’s sentiment: In a way, it’s hard to blame companies because they honestly want to know and, in the best-case scenario, actually use what they get to make things better. But it’s oh-so-overwhelming. Just constantly about every single little thing. One of my favorites is when you log into hotel […]

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