Podcasts about css tricks

It turns out we had a lot of news to cover in this week's episode. We kicked it off discussing how RedwoodJS is the latest framework to support React Server Components, and has some pretty nice illustrated docs to help devs get started. Then, there was a rapid fire of interesting topics including a great new article about modern CSS from Mr. CSS Tricks himself, Chris Coyier, a new documentary film on the origin story of Node.js from the team that created the React and Ruby on Rails documentaries as well, and a footnote about a new antitrust case the US Department of Justice has leveraged against Apple. At NG Conf earlier in the week, it was announced Google's internal framework Wiz might be combining with Angular after the two teams successfully worked together to launch Angular signals primitives for 100% of YouTube's mobile web traffic to great effect. We can only hope the resulting combined framework is renamed to Wangular. And to round it all out, yet another CSS framework has popped up claiming to have all the answers to the ever pervasive feeling that CSS is hard. Will Nue CSS have the good to back up its claim? We'll have to wait and see, and give the new Promise.withResolvers a spin in the meantime.News:Paige - Wiz and Angular combine forcesJack - RedwoodJS supports RSCsTJ - What You Need to Know About Modern CSS, DOJ antitrust case against Apple, and Node.js: The Documentary | An origin storyBonus News:Nue CSSPromise.withResolvers() MDN Docs and a helpful explainer tweet from Wes BosWhat Makes Us Happy this Week:Paige - Masters of the Air TV seriesJack - Learning stuff! Like vector DBsTJ - Booking tours of the U.S. Capitol and White House through local repsThanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, reach out to us via email or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.Blue Collar Coder on YouTubeBlue Collar Coder on DiscordReach out via emailTweet at us on X @front_end_fire

In this episode, we explore the latest in web development with Astro unveiling Astro DB, a fully managed, blazing fast SQL-based database that is “ridiculously easy to use.” Next, you may not know the name, but Speedometer just released version 3.0, which further solidifies its status as the browser benchmark for web app responsiveness. Next up is Pigment CSS, a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS solution from the makers of the Material UI component library that works with Next.js' app router and React Server Components. And to cap it all off, we've got new details about Rolldown, the Rust-based version of Rollup, and Chris Coyier's honest thoughts about what happened to his CSS Tricks site after it was acquired.News:Paige - Astro DBJack - Pigment CSSTJ - Speedometer 3.0 announcement. Run the test yourself.Bonus News:Rolldown - the Rust-based JS bundler is in betaChris Coyier's take on CSS TricksWhat Makes Us Happy this Week:Paige - Elgato PrompterJack - Big Shark movieTJ - Dune 2 movieThanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, reach out to us via email or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.Blue Collar Coder on YouTubeBlue Collar Coder on DiscordReach out via emailTweet at us on X @front_end_fire

Scott and CJ dive into a potluck of developer queries, from their favorite tech reads to essential web dev fundamentals. Tune in as they dish out expert advice on migrating React projects to TypeScript, crafting precise timers for countdown apps, and navigating the world of free-tier plans. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:20 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 02:16 What book changed your life? Whatever you think, think the opposite It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be Crucial Conversations thanks @benvinegar 04:58 What are the web development fundamentals for beginners? Command Line Power User 08:39 What are your thoughts on Chris Coyer's post on his sale of CSS-Tricks? Chris Coyer's Post 11:51 Advice for migrating an existing React project to TypeScript. 20:38 Countdown apps, performance vs accuracy. 25:19 Are you listening to podcasts? Which ones? 31:46 With AI on the rise, will free-tier plans become a thing of the past? Coolify Syntax 730: Own Your Own Paas 35:59 What is SemVer anyway? semver.org npmjs TypeScript on Semantic Versioning 40:14 A question on ergonomics, home office aesthetics and productivity. 47:59 Do you ever stop to consider VueJS in 2024? Why or why not? unjs.io 52:12 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks Scott: Ellenos Yogurt CJ: Flat Iron Pepper Shameless Plugs Syntax.fm YouTube Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott:X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Allereerst moeten we onze verontschuldiging aanbieden voor de kwaliteit van deze aflevering. Helaas hadden we wat technische issues waardoor de kwaliteit van Joran niet is zoals je van ons gewend bent. Doe daarom maar net als of we Joran hebben laten inbellen via de telefoon ;). We bespreken met Joran alles over Data Science en AI en hoe hij in deze wereld terecht is gekomen. Verder bespreken we nog even kort de dood van CSS Tricks en wat oud-eigenaar Chris Coyier daarover te zeggen heeft. 01:05 - Chris Coyier over CSS-Tricks - https://chriscoyier.net/2024/02/28/where-im-at-on-the-whole-css-tricks-thing/ 04:50 - In gesprek met Joran, leraar AI en Data Science aan de Hanzehogeschool Groningen 1:08:30 - Shōgun 2024 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2788316/ 1:11:10  - The Creator - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/

Show DescriptionMiriam Suzanne stops by to talk about CSS updates and news on container queries, rolling out cascade layers, !important things to remember, custom properties, exit animations, CSS functions, state queries, and more. Listen on Website →GuestsMiriam SuzanneGuest's Main URL • Guest's TwitterCo-Founder of Oddbird, core contributor to Sass, author for Sitepoint and CSS Tricks, invited expert to the w3c CSS Working Group. Links mirisuzanne (Miriam Suzanne) Miriam Suzanne on CodePen Autoprefixer CSS online Lightning CSS Select an element which doesn't descend from another in CSS | chriskirknielsen Susy | OddBird Posts | OddBird Demystifying CSS Container Queries | OddBird Demystifying CSS Container Queries SponsorsMiroFind simplicity in your most complex projects with Miro. Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com

We welcome back THE CSS guy, Chris Coyier, founder of CSS Tricks and co-founder of CodePen, as he talks to us about why he loves CSS, how to use the newest features of CSS, understanding colors, and more. Links https://chriscoyier.net https://codepen.io https://shoptalkshow.com https://twitter.com/chriscoyier https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-coyier-1aa843100 We want to hear from you! How did you find us? Did you see us on Twitter? In a newsletter? Or maybe we were recommended by a friend? Let us know by sending an email to our producer, Emily, at emily.kochanekketner@logrocket.com (mailto:emily.kochanekketner@logrocket.com), or tweet at us at PodRocketPod (https://twitter.com/PodRocketpod). Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Chris Coyier.

The amazing Chris Coyier (founder of CSS-Tricks.com and CodePen.io) sat down with us to tell us all the things in CSS that he's bad at. He even brought us a list.

Is Apple's Numbers amazing or the worst? Customer support at various levels of software, Figma and P3 color, imagining a colorspace property in CSS, what's Dave doing for productivity, how has offloading CSS Tricks affected Chris, and should we build different websites for mobile vs desktop?

字体回落的现象普遍存在于用户界面，大至系统，小至网页；字体回落也是诸多软件工程的常备机制。本期节目，我们将简要介绍字体回落的基本原理，及其在当下网页设计和开发中值得了解的实践方案。 参考链接 汉仪第五届字体之星设计大赛将于 2023 年 4 月 28 日截稿 Font Karuta（字体歌牌） 豆瓣网友灭灭关于 Adobe Illustrator 中文复合字体相关的使用指南 W3C CLReq issue 534：列出中西文共用码位的标点符号 微软在 Bing 搜索引擎中引入了基于 OpenAI 大语言模型的人工智能辅助功能（AI copilot） Android 系统的 fonts.xml 配置文件 启发式算法（heuristic） CSS-Tricks 推荐的 system font stack 配置，适用于西文字体 CSS Fonts Module Level 4 system-ui ui-serif ui-sans-serif ui-monospace ui-rounded Google 字体渲染、文字处理专家 Raph Levien，曾撰文总结字体回落技术相关的问题和经验 Chrome 团队曾撰文介绍网页字体回落的优化配置 Chrome 决定不再支持 JPEG-XL 图像格式，引发自由软件社区的批评 字谈字畅 064：Kerning Panic·字谈字串（六）Emoji（再次）拯救世界 主播 Eric：字体排印研究者，译者，The Type 编辑 蒸鱼：设计师，The Type 编辑 欢迎与我们交流或反馈，来信请致 podcast@thetype.com​。如果你喜爱本期节目，也欢迎用支付宝向我们捐赠：hello@thetype.com​。

In deze afleveringen hebben we het over het mogelijke einde van het GSAP framework middels animation-timeline, een dashboard van de overheid die alle overheidswebsites inzichtelijk maakt en in hoeverre ze toegankelijk zijn, redesign van W3C website en een stukje geschiedenis over Design Thinking en waar het in de toekomst naartoe gaat. 1:14 - CSS-Tricks verkocht en verliest passie - https://mastodon.social/@veroandi/109910005145779409 6:38 - animation-timeline - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/animation-timeline 14:29 - W3C redesign - https://www.w3.org/blog/2023/02/w3c-launches-beta-of-its-new-website/ 19:18 - Overheid dashboard DigiToegankelijkheid - https://dashboard.digitoegankelijk.nl/ 22:47 - Design thinking vroeger en nu - https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1067821/design-thinking-retrospective-what-went-wrong/ 38:49 - Everything everywhere all at once - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6710474/ 40:37 - Netatmo CO2 meter - https://www.coolblue.nl/product/788384/netatmo-slimme-indoor-co2-meter.html 42:30 - ChatGPT in dagelijks gebruik - https://chat.openai.com/

The state of the world, green engineering, James' wedding, Elon's meltdowns. To round off the year, James and Josh look back at the many ups and downs from the world of tech and beyond. 00 - State of the world 01 - Good to be back in the office 03 - Figma & its Adobe acquisition 04 - Mozilla started to accept Crypto then halted 05 - Web3 06 - Google Fonts Privacy & GDPR breach 07 - Reducing the web's carbon footprint. Optimising & green engineering 08 - Building a Greener Web talk by Michelle Barker 09 - Netify sponsoring open source eleventy 10 - MDN Mozilla Dev Network refresh 11 - '5 Web things that you don't need Javascript for' 12 - CSS Tricks acquired by Digital Ocean 13 - US announced plans to make daylight saving time permanent 15 - Devs for Ukraine 17 - Twitter embeds 18 - Duck Duck Go for Mac & other Chromium forks 20 - US court reaffirmed that web scraping is legal 21 - All Day Hey! 2022 22 - Blogging making a comeback - Own your own thoughts 23 - Is Mastodon any good? 25 - Mailing lists are back 25 - CSS Day is back 26 - Internet Explorer was retired 27 - Stranger Things had a hacking scene that featured Flexbox 28 - WWWDC - Human interface guidelines 29 - Apple Passkeys 30 - W3C became a public interest not-for-profit enterprise 31 - UK Online Safety Bill - a disappointment that targets individuals not big tech 33 - Cookie Pop-up failure of policy 34 - Heroku down all the time 36 - James got married 37 - Chrome version 105 38 - No Code Tools Article 40 - Don't throw away code - article 40 - GitHubs - What's your first github contribution 42 - Source code webkit is now managed on GitHub 43 - Heather Burns - Data Privacy Book 44 - Chris Coyier - Talk 'The web is good now' 45 - Cloudflare SVG support for images 46 - Leeds Digital Festival - DALLE event 48 - btconf - Berlin Trip 48 - PassKey Support by Google 49 - CSS Working Group - The View Transition API + Scrolled Linked Transitions 51 - Way Back Machine Turned 21 53 - Hey! Presents Social in Leeds 54 - ffconf pod episode 54 - Advent of Code 55 - Josh on 'Another Idea Podcast' - Creative Podcast 55 - Web Sustainability Resources 56 - Practical Accessibility Course 57 - re:Invent episode 57 - 'Engineering management for the rest of us' - book by Sarah Drasner 58 - Google switching to a continuous scroll 59 - 25 years since Microsoft FrontPage 98 61 - Parallax won many awards this year 62 - Chatloop Resources: * Figma (https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1049994768493726219/Inspect---Export-to-HTML%2C-React%2C-TailwindCSS) * hidde.blog (https://hidde.blog/the-web-doesnt-have-version-numbers/) * https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/01/using-google-fonts-breaches-gdpr/ (https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/01/using-google-fonts-breaches-gdpr/) * https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/02/reducing-web-carbon-footprint-optimizing-social-media-embeds/ (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/02/reducing-web-carbon-footprint-optimizing-social-media-embeds/) * Building a Greener Web by Michelle Barker (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdiSM9wLPAM) * https://lexoral.com/blog/you-dont-need-js/ (https://lexoral.com/blog/you-dont-need-js/) * https://www.devsforukraine.io/ (https://www.devsforukraine.io/) * https://heypresents.com/conferences/2023 (https://heypresents.com/conferences/2023) * https://webkit.org/blog/12840/web-platform-and-web-extensions-features-highlighted-at-wwdc22/ (https://webkit.org/blog/12840/web-platform-and-web-extensions-features-highlighted-at-wwdc22/) * https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/07/11/your-compliance-obligations-under-the-uks-online-safety-bill/ (https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/07/11/your-compliance-obligations-under-the-uks-online-safety-bill/) * https://adactio.com/journal/19370 (https://adactio.com/journal/19370) * https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/09/understanding-privacy-pre-release/ (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/09/understanding-privacy-pre-release/) * https://2022.cascadiajs.com/speakers/chris-coyier (https://2022.cascadiajs.com/speakers/chris-coyier) * https://blog.cloudflare.com/svg-support-in-cloudflare-images/ (https://blog.cloudflare.com/svg-support-in-cloudflare-images/) * https://leedsdigitalfestival.org/events/dall-e-2-how-ai-will-shape-the-future-of-creativity/ (https://leedsdigitalfestival.org/events/dall-e-2-how-ai-will-shape-the-future-of-creativity/) * Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/episode/1yYKMSm3K308c1d7zXYtdL?si=4ca3795bb0ad4e50&fbclid=IwAR3Hsg5A3z8cmjkvUyc9iuE9FGGJ4eVu3GaXVr_FytTmaoMC28BGiD-POj4&nd=1) * https://css-irl.info/web-sustainability-resources/ (https://css-irl.info/web-sustainability-resources/) * https://practical-accessibility.today/ (https://practical-accessibility.today/) * https://www.engmanagement.dev/ (https://www.engmanagement.dev/) * https://bima.co.uk/nexus-parallax/ (https://bima.co.uk/nexus-parallax/) * https://www.cssdesignawards.com/sites/nexus-by-hexagon/42228/ (https://www.cssdesignawards.com/sites/nexus-by-hexagon/42228/) * https://www.awwwards.com/sites/nexus (https://www.awwwards.com/sites/nexus) * https://thefwa.com/cases/nexus-by-hexagon (https://thefwa.com/cases/nexus-by-hexagon) * https://www.chatloop.com/ (https://www.chatloop.com/) Find out more about Stac and Parallax: * Stac (https://stac.works) * Parallax (https://parall.ax)

In deze aflevering gaan we uitgebreid in op kleurcodesysteem van Pantone, hebben we het over handige checklists bij het designen en hebben we het onder andere over CSS container queries en andere nieuwe CSS tricks. Oh ja, vul ook even de UXTools survey in, we zijn super nieuwsgierig naar welke tools er dit jaar bovenaan komen te staan! 2:14 - Checklist.design - https://www.checklist.design/ 5:12 - UXTools survey 2022 - https://uxtools.co/survey/ 7:01 - Component gallery - https://component.gallery/ 10:46 - Material Design 3 figma design kit - https://material.io/blog/material-3-figma-design-kit 13:40 - Pantone kleurenstaal niet meer gratis in Photoshop - https://twitter.com/funwithstuff/status/1585850262656143360 31:23 - Font-variant: numeric - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-variant-numeric 36:52 - CSS draft sibling-count en sibling-index - https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4559 41:09 - CSS Container queries - https://css-tricks.com/early-days-of-container-style-queries/ 46:07 - Tom Scott newsletter - https://pad26.aweb.page/subscribe 47:15 - Zonneplan (verdien je zonnepanelen terug met deze link) - https://start.zonneplan.nl/vriendenactie/zonneplan-3627

If you are a web developer, chances are that you used CodePen more than once. You're also probably very familiar with CSS-Tricks for, well, more than just CSS tricks. The man behind these experiences, Chris Coyier, actually started his journey some time ago with a programming language called Turbo Pascal - many steps removed from web development. I sat down with Chris to talk more about his career, lessons in getting CodePen out into the world, and so much more.

Wir sind zurück! Die Welt dreht durch, alles wird teurer, zum Glück gibt es mit der Rückkehr von #WWSIV eine Konstante, einen Rettungsanker im Developer-Leben. In unserer Staffel-Anfangs-Retro sprechen wir über CSS-Tricks, Smarthome, Heizthermostate, Solarladegeräte und ganz viel AI-Bildgenerierung mit DALL-E, Midjourney oder auf dem eigenen Rechner mit Stable Diffusion und warum wir glauben, dass das so einiges durcheinander wirbeln wird. Ein bunter Strauß an Themen, viel auch Abseits des Developer-Lebens, aber dafür kennt man uns doch auch, oder?

Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we've officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And…not only has it been a journey for us, but it's also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.

Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we've officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And…not only has it been a journey for us, but it's also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.

“Creator” is a word that has really come into focus in an industry in the last few years. But content creation is nearly as old as the internet itself. And building businesses from your content…that's not new either. Just ask Chris Coyier, the founder who recently sold his hugely popular blog, CSS Tricks, to Digital Ocean. We talk about his journey, how he made money, and answer the question: are we seeing an uptick in content acquisitions as more companies realize it's a great way to establish trust. Top Takeaways: Kickstarting the CSS Tricks redesign generated a lot of revenue, but ended up resulting in a loss. Still, it did its job: it gave Chris capital to build the business.CSS Tricks has always been about ads as a way to make money. It started off as handshake deals at conferences, but the process became more formalized.The best thing you can do for advertisers and offer packages. Get them in front of all of the eyeballs you have access to. You can charge more and deliver better results. Show Notes: Chris CoyierChris on TwitterWP JukeboxKickstarter CSS TricksJoin the Creator CrewSponsored by: Nexcess | TextExpander | LearnDash

A mai adásban szó lesz egy újabb JAVA sérülékenységről, az új JDK 18-ról, emojikkal is foglalkozunk kicsit, a Microsoft adatlopása mellett sem megyünk el, búcsúzunk a gif atyjától, sok egyéb trend és érdekesség. Hallgassátok!  Résztvevők: Róka István Újabb sérülékenység a JAVA körül https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/cve-2022-22965-springshell/ Kiadták a JDK 18-at https://www.infoworld.com/article/3630510/jdk-18-the-new-features-in-java-18.html Emoji hírek :3 https://jschn.github.io/FaceApp/ https://towardsdatascience.com/this-item-does-not-exist-2defbac76b39 https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/ Új trendek https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/ui-trends-2019/ Hackerekhez jutott pár microsoftos forráskód, így biztonsági hibákat vehetnek benne észre https://telex.hu/tech/2022/03/22/oriasi-adatlopas-erhette-a-microsoftot Meghalt a gif atyja  https://telex.hu/tech/2022/03/24/gif-meghalt-stephen-wilhite css tricks, egy csepp a digitális óceánban https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/css-tricks-joins-digitalocean Hallgasd kedvenc lejátszódban, ne csak a legfrissebb részt! Google Podcasts - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaXZvb3guY29tL2VuL2RldnRhbGVzLXBvZGNhc3RfZmdfZjE1OTg1OTdfZmlsdHJvXzEueG1s Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/hu/podcast/devtales-podcast/id1386667284?mt=2 CastBox - https://castbox.fm/channel/DevTales-Podcast-id1295470 Pocket Casts - https://pca.st/podcast/5a10e180-5077-0136-fa7c-0fe84b59566dSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/4fS3YtJknqn1gSKa4HqKAt YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5nbDGKvuSK9NwOIJOiiwnARSS - https://devtales.shiwaforce.com/feed/podcast Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/devtales Twitter - https://twitter.com/_devtales Slack - https://devtalespodcast.slack.com Email - devtales@shiwaforce.com

News There is a call for WordPress users to help with the upcoming release of WordPress 6.0. This release is scheduled for May 24, 2022. There have been over 400 updates and 500 bug fixes since the last release and they could really use everybody's help to test. Jump over to make.wordpress.org to join the core slack channel and get involved. WooCommerce The WooCommerce blocks roadmap has been released. There are a lot of cool things happening over at WooCommerce with most of the work taking place right now in the WooCommerce Blocks repository with store editing. Take a look at the ways you can contribute. The plan is to release quarterly updates. From Our Contributors and Producers If you missed it, go check out the latest eCommerce minute, on the WPMinute with Dave Rodenbaugh. He provides additional news and perspective on the owner of FAST, the one-click checkout provider. Jodie Fiorenza wrote a great article on Omnichannel marketing over at WebDevStudios. With an omnichannel strategy, the customer becomes the focus of the campaign. Take a minute to read Jody's article and see if you can consult with a customer using multi-channel marketing in your business. The Admin Bar community created an anonymous WordPress Agency survey for all of their community members to ask them questions about their revenue, and various focuses (including accessibility, SEO, hosting, etc.). The results were very interesting and worth checking out. The first issue of Tiny Press went out this week by our contributor Daniel Schutzsmith. The article covers 3 WordPress design and development links. There is also a great interview of Chris Coyier from css-tricks.com by Nathan Wrigley on the WPTavern podcast about his sale of CSS Tricks to Digital Ocean. This is a great podcast to learn about Chris' journey. Friend of the show Scott Bolinger is seeking a buyer for his pop-up plugin Holler Box. New Members: We would like to thank Courtney Robertson for buying a coffee this week and joining as a monthly member. Next up: Simplified Business Minute with Sam Muñoz “Block Editor Dev Minute” by Aurooba Ahmed Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Lisa Sabin-WilsonBirgit Pauli-HaackDaniel SchutzsmithDave RodenbaughLiam Dempsey

This episode of Developer Experience is about Developer Education. It's a wonderful time to become a developer: the demand has never been higher, and there's a literal ocean of free and paid content to kick start a new career in tech. This firehose of educational content is a side-effect of such a high demand for developers, and it makes it difficult to spot actual quality content that's worth investing in.- What makes really great educational tech content?- How do beginner and advanced developers want to learn today?- And what does it teach us on communication and reaching clarity?To answer these questions, Sarah Dayan is joined today by Jason Lengstorf, VP of Developer Experience at Netlify, where he and his team ensure that developers make the most out of the platform. You may also know Jason from his dozens of lessons and workshops on Egghead.io, Frontend Master, and as the host of Learn With Jason, his fantastic developer show where he learns new technologies in 90 minutes with experts from the field.Jason Lengstorf: @jlengstorf / jason.af / Learn With JasonSarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io / sarahdayan.devNetlify: @geteslint / netlify.comAlgolia: @algolia / algolia.com"Learning to Learn", article by Sarah Drasner on CSS-Tricks

On the podcast today we have Chris Coyier. Chris has been a user and educator in the WordPress and web development space for many years. He's an author, podcaster, developer, but is perhaps best known for his website CSS-Tricks. CSS-Tricks has been a valuable source of information about CSS for over 15 years. Updated multiple times a week, the site has articles about every aspect of styling your website. It's gone through several iterations over those years, not just in how it looks, but in the manner in which it is managed and maintained. If you're searching for any CSS related content, it's quite likely that CSS-Tricks will be one of the top results. A few weeks ago Chris decided it was time for CSS-Tricks to find a new home and it's now owned and operated by Digital Ocean, a popular cloud computing service provider. This podcast is all about the journey that Chris has had running CSS-Tricks. We go right back to the start and talk about what his motivations were for starting, and then continuing to run the site. Were there any low points where he lost his motivation to keep it going? How has the site changed over the years? Why did he finally decide to sell the site, and how he landed upon Digital Ocean as the new custodian? It's been a remarkable journey, and you'll hear that there were many twists and turns along the way. Useful links. CSS-Tricks Chris' personal website Digging into WordPress Codepen

On the podcast today we have Chris Coyier. Chris has been a user and educator in the WordPress and web development space for many years. He's an author, podcaster, developer, but is perhaps best known for his website CSS-Tricks. CSS-Tricks has been a valuable source of information about CSS for over 15 years. Updated multiple times a week, the site has articles about every aspect of styling your website. It's gone through several iterations over those years. A few weeks ago Chris decided it was time for CSS-Tricks to find a new home and it's now owned and operated by Digital Ocean, a popular cloud computing service provider. This podcast is all about the journey that Chris has had running CSS-Tricks.

Dave has questions about CSS Tricks sale to Digital Ocean, what's involved in selling a blog in 2022, the tech behind CSS Tricks, liberal coding to accept more than you anticipate, hidden attributes in HTML, and Inert in Safari 15.4.

Síguenos en: Stripe se ha convertido en unos años en un estándar en cuanto a pasarelas de pago, especialmente útil para pagos recurrentes y suscripciones. Hoy echamos un repaso a sus características y algunos trucos prácticos. ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther De esas semanas anómalas y con temas familiares que nos sacan de nuestra rutina, pero siguiendo con actualizaciones de instalaciones de WordPress muy desfasadas. Semana Nahuai Retomamos las charlas en persona de WordPress Terrassa https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/Terrassa-WordPress-Meetup/ Contenido Nahuai 3 nuevos tutoriales en Código Genesis, de los cuales destaca: Tema de la semana: Stripe es una de las pasarelas de pago más populares y que se caracteriza por tener una API muy potente con unas comisiones razonables. Prácticamente todos los plugins de eCommerce de WordPress lo soportan (WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro, Gravity Forms....). A su vez muchas plataformas de facturación ofrecen integración con Stripe (Factura Directa, Quaderno...) Crear una cuenta de Stripe y dar acceso a tu desarrollador web (a veces necesario perfil de admin)Tarjetas para realizar pagos de prueba https://stripe.com/docs/testingElegir cada cuanto se envían los pagos a tu bancoAñadir días gratis a un suscriptor (desde la suscripción) - Ajustar también los días en el pluginForzar pago de nuevo (desde la factura)Enviar una factura para que realicen un pago puntual (práctico cuando la actualización de tarjeta no funciona bien a través del plugin)Ajustar saldo cuando no hace bien el cambio de membresía o similaresEnviar metadatos a Stripe (plugin o código)Soporte para adeudo domiciliario SEPA (comisión de 0,35€)Utilizar payment linksComisión reducida para micro-pagos (menores a 5€, contactar con ellos)Stripe ofrece comisiones reducidas a organizaciones sin ánimo de lucroStripe Climate (1% de ingresos)Stripe Radar Novedades Digital Ocean adquieres CSS-Tricks.  Newfold Digital adquiere Yith.  Gravity Forms consigue el dominio gravity.com. Menciones Antonio nos comenta que usa un pantallazo de Lighthouse en Google Chrome Ragose comparte el episodio de WPO Gracias a: Este episodio está patrocinado por StudioPress, los creadores de Genesis Framework, el entorno de trabajo de temas más popular de WordPress. Ya está disponible Genesis Pro para todo el mundo, 360$ anuales que dan acceso a: Genesis FrameworkChild themes de Genesis de StudioPress1 año de hosting en WP EnginePlugin Genesis Pro (Diseños y secciones, restricción de bloques por usuarios…) y Genesis Custom Blocks Pro.

Síguenos en: Stripe se ha convertido en unos años en un estándar en cuanto a pasarelas de pago, especialmente útil para pagos recurrentes y suscripciones. Hoy echamos un repaso a sus características y algunos trucos prácticos. ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther De esas semanas anómalas y con temas familiares que nos sacan de nuestra rutina, pero siguiendo con actualizaciones de instalaciones de WordPress muy desfasadas. Semana Nahuai Retomamos las charlas en persona de WordPress Terrassa https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/Terrassa-WordPress-Meetup/ Contenido Nahuai 3 nuevos tutoriales en Código Genesis, de los cuales destaca: Tema de la semana: Stripe es una de las pasarelas de pago más populares y que se caracteriza por tener una API muy potente con unas comisiones razonables. Prácticamente todos los plugins de eCommerce de WordPress lo soportan (WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro, Gravity Forms....). A su vez muchas plataformas de facturación ofrecen integración con Stripe (Factura Directa, Quaderno...) Crear una cuenta de Stripe y dar acceso a tu desarrollador web (a veces necesario perfil de admin)Tarjetas para realizar pagos de prueba https://stripe.com/docs/testingElegir cada cuanto se envían los pagos a tu bancoAñadir días gratis a un suscriptor (desde la suscripción) - Ajustar también los días en el pluginForzar pago de nuevo (desde la factura)Enviar una factura para que realicen un pago puntual (práctico cuando la actualización de tarjeta no funciona bien a través del plugin)Ajustar saldo cuando no hace bien el cambio de membresía o similaresEnviar metadatos a Stripe (plugin o código)Soporte para adeudo domiciliario SEPA (comisión de 0,35€)Utilizar payment linksComisión reducida para micro-pagos (menores a 5€, contactar con ellos)Stripe ofrece comisiones reducidas a organizaciones sin ánimo de lucroStripe Climate (1% de ingresos)Stripe Radar Novedades Digital Ocean adquieres CSS-Tricks.  Newfold Digital adquiere Yith.  Gravity Forms consigue el dominio gravity.com. Menciones Antonio nos comenta que usa un pantallazo de Lighthouse en Google Chrome Ragose comparte el episodio de WPO Gracias a: Este episodio está patrocinado por StudioPress, los creadores de Genesis Framework, el entorno de trabajo de temas más popular de WordPress. Ya está disponible Genesis Pro para todo el mundo, 360$ anuales que dan acceso a: Genesis FrameworkChild themes de Genesis de StudioPress1 año de hosting en WP EnginePlugin Genesis Pro (Diseños y secciones, restricción de bloques por usuarios…) y Genesis Custom Blocks Pro.

It's the WPMinute! I am Birgit Pauli-Haack with the following news and updates. This episode is brought to you by the WPMinute. This is a great place to be a part of the community, get access to the private Discord server and be part of the news. You know how it goes, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. News Does WordPress need more than one Block Theme? Justin Tadlock over at the WPTavern wrote a recent article covering different opinions of having thousands of Block Themes when Full Site Editing is really becoming a thing. There are strong opinions for having one theme or having many. Do you provide one block theme that builders can expand on OR do you offer many themes to provide a site for new users to fill in their custom information? Go read the article to understand each approach. If you would like to test out a block theme with FSE check out the article by Misha Rudrastyh on Learning Full Site Editing with the Kubrick Block Theme. It is a great basic tutorial that clearly explains. WooCommerce WooCommerce started rolling out automatic updates with patches for WooCommerce 3.5–6.3. This fix contains important security improvements for the PayPal Standard payment gateway (deprecated since July 2021). Please make sure to update your site if you don't get the update automatically. Events Buddy Works is having a Webinar on How to Automate Gutenberg block development in WP projects on March 23rd, 2022 at 5:00 PM UTC. If you are interested in how to start WordPress block development head on over to their website to register. From Our Contributors and Producers Voting for Torque's 2022 Plugin Madness is now open. In its seventh year, this bracket-style competition pits the best plugins from around the community against each other. CSS-Tricks has been acquired by DigitalOcean. Chris Coyier will still be working at CSS-Tricks so you can expect things to pretty much remain the same with DigitalOcean continuing to produce high-quality content on front-end development. Ronald Huereca wrote a detailed article for WordPress plugin development with a table of contents over at Media Ron. He covers the Tips, Tricks, and Guidelines for Navigating WordPress.org.  Tim Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg are in Antarctica on the most recent podcast of the Tim Ferriss Show.  They explore personal fears, discuss bucket lists, grief and craft some life missions. You can even hear Tim's Best Penguin Impressions (#578). This is a long podcast full of interesting tidbits and you get to hear Matt in an informal setting. There is a new update for LearnDash. The onboarding wizard in 4.0 automatically installs plugins like Certificate Builder, WooCommerce, and Course Grid depending on what options you select. To check out all the new features, jump over to LearnDash.com. Apologies to Joe Casabona for not including his "Podcast Plugin" in the recording this week. We look forward to his Creator Clock Minute in the WPMinute next week. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Michelle FrechetteBirgit Pauli-HaackMatt Cromwell Thank you to @brand_on_fire for becoming a new member of the WPMinute. ★ Support this podcast ★

Matt Lawrence is our guest, and he is challenged with the biggest heuristic so far: “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”, also known as “Jakob's Law”. The heuristic is part of the “Jakob Nielsen Usability Heuristics” and can be found here: https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/.   Matt shares his experiences when it comes to usability, and what challenges you are faced when the system users are attached to a website. We discussed the different techniques that are valid to fulfil the user's needs when it comes to usability.   Matt recommends: UX Podcast - https://uxpodcast.com/ UX Podcast Episode #235 - https://uxpodcast.com/235-internet-anxiety-david-swallow/ Twitter as a source of knowledge W3 Schools - https://www.w3schools.com/ CSS Tricks - https://css-tricks.com/ Matt Lawrence (LinkedIn) is the co-founder of Digital Dynasty Design in Canada.

In this episode, I talk to Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from the Shop Talk Show! We talk about all sorts of topics having to do with front end development, design, and accessibility. Specifically, web components, CodePen, Eleventy, Astro, and much, much more! Intro/Outro music graciously given permission to use called, "Settle In" by Homer Gaines. Sound editing by Chris Enns of Lemon Productions. Transcripts can be found at: https://toddl.dev/podcast/transcripts/shoptalkshow/ Show Notes https://twitter.com/chriscoyier - Chris on Twitter https://twitter.com/davatron5000 - Dave on Twitter https://chriscoyier.net/ - Chris's Homepage https://daverupert.com/ - Dave's Homepage https://codepen.io/ - CodePen https://paravelinc.com/ - Paravel https://css-tricks.com/ - CSS-Tricks https://shoptalkshow.com/ - Shop Talk Show https://www.youtube.com/realcsstricks - Real CSS Tricks YouTube https://larahogan.me/donuts/ - Lara Hogan Donut Manifesto https://www.deque.com/axe/ - axe (Deque) https://tenon.io/ - Tenon https://webaim.org/ - WebAIM https://wave.webaim.org/extension/ - WAVE browser extension https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ - Google Lighthouse https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ - WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) https://twitter.com/goodwitch - Glenda Sims (@goodwitch) https://astro.build/ - Astro https://slinkity.dev/ - Slinkity https://www.netflix.com/title/81228573 - Komi Can't Communicate --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/frontendnerdery/support

In the first episode of Season Two, I got to sit down with my good friend, Jason Pamental, and talk about variable fonts. Lots of great discussion about what variable fonts are, favorite fonts, usage, and we talked about Jason's projects and his new role at Chewy as Principal Designer of the Design Systems team! Intro/Outro music graciously given permission to use called, "Settle In" by Homer Gaines. Sound editing by Chris Enns of Lemon Productions. Transcripts can be found at: https://toddl.dev/podcast/transcripts/pamental #variablefonts #fonts #designsystems Show Notes https://rwt.io - Jason's website https://rwt.us6.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=0019faab58713ad49bce9acc3&id=b35d41a2eb - Jason's newsletter https://twitter.com/jpamental - Jason on Twitter https://instagram.com/jpamental - Jason on Instagram https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpamental - Jason on LinkedIn https://medium.com/@jpamental - Jason on Medium https://codepen.io/jpamental - Jason on CodePen https://github.com/jpamental - Jason on GitHub https://letterfromjail.com/ - Letter From Jail Variable Font project https://mobydick.wales - Moby Dick Variable Font project https://css-tricks.com/dark-mode-and-variable-fonts/ - Robin Rendle article on CSS-Tricks https://djr.com/font-of-the-month-club - David Jonathan Ross Font of the Month Club https://variablefonts.io/ - A Variable Fonts Primer https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/proxima-nova - Proxima Nova font https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/marksimonson/proxima-vara/ - Proxima Vara font https://www.marksimonson.com/ - Mark Simonson's site https://georgia.gov/ - State of Georgia web platform https://rwt.io/blog/2021/08/quahog-design-system-web-platform-state-rhode-island - About the Quahog Design System https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/responsive-typography/9781491907085/ - Responsive Typography on O'Reilly --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/frontendnerdery/support

タイムライン 00:53 検索エンジンアーキテクチャの進化 06:33 Terraform Provider Algolia 09:19 Autocompleteで@メンションを構築 関連リンク (英語記事)Evolution Of Search Engines Architecture - Algolia New Search Architecture Part 1 (日本語ブログ)検索エンジンアーキテクチャの進化 – Algolia New Search Architecture Part 1 (Terraformレジストリ)Terraform Provider Algolia (GitHubリポジトリ)k-yomo/terraform-provider-algolia (日本語ブログ)k-yomoさんのTerraform Provider Algoliaを試してみる (Qiita)Algolia Advent Calendar 2021 (CSS-TRICKS)So, You Want to Build an @mention Autocomplete Feature?

Chris gets to chat with George Francis, an incredible digital artist in the generative art space as well as educator and all-around developer. George has been all over the place lately, producing really outstanding work (CSS-Tricks uses a Houdini paint worklet from George in the header and footer). Not only does George make art that […]

Is it harder to make a website in 2021 than in 1996? Are site building tools making life easier? Does Dave use scoped styles in Vue? How could Vue help with design systems? And Chris tries making a CSS Tricks book on the web, while Dave is workshopping a web components talk.

Jim is a multidisciplinary artist from Baltimore, Maryland. He makes tiny dioramas with paper, wood and ink drawings. He loves to compose and record music. He's a stop-motion animator.Jim earned my B.A. in music composition from Washington College, a certificate in computer programming from the Community College of Baltimore County, a graduate certificate in information technology from Johns Hopkins University, and an M.F.A. from Towson University. He began teaching Web design and WordPress at the Community College of Baltimore County and MICA in 2006. He makes my living as a Web developer/designer.My work has been exhibited across the USA, in Europe and in the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. He's been fortunate to have been featured on many websites, including This is Colossal, Beautiful Decay, The Order of the Good Death and even CSS-Tricks.Jim identifies as a surrealist, a metaphysicist, and a pescatarian.To find more amazing stories from the artist and entrepreneurial scenes in & around Baltimore, check out my episode directory.Mentioned in this episode:Jim's websiteSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or listen on my website, follow on Instagram (where I am most active), like on Facebook, or email mtrthenetwork@gmail.com!★ Support this podcast ★

01:09 - Todd's Superpower: Advocacy For Accessibility * Getting Started * Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman (https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Standards-Jeffrey-Zeldman/dp/0321616952) * The A11Y Project (https://www.a11yproject.com/) * W3C (https://www.w3.org/) 06:18 - Joining The W3C * The W3C Community Page (https://www.w3.org/community/) 07:44 - Getting People/Companies/Stakeholders to Care/Prioritize About Accessibility * Making A Strong Case For Accessibility by Todd Libby (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/07/strong-case-for-accessibility/) * Diplomatic Advocacy * You Don't Want To Get Sued! / $$$ * “We are all temporarily abled.” 15:20 - The Domino's Pizza Story * Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino's over site accessibility (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html) 18:21 - Things That Typically Aren't Accessible And Should Be * The WebAIM Million Report (https://webaim.org/projects/million/) * WCAG (https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/) * Color Contrast * Missing Alt Text on Images * Form Input Labels * What's New in WCAG 2.1: Label in Name by Todd Libby (https://css-tricks.com/whats-new-in-wcag-2-1-label-in-name/) * Empty Links * Not Using Document Language * Triggering GIFS / Flashing Content * Empty Buttons – Use a Button Element!! * Tab Order * Semantic HTML, Heading Structure 26:27 - Accessibility for Mobile Devices * Target Size * Looking at WCAG 2.5.5 for Better Target Sizes (https://css-tricks.com/looking-at-wcag-2-5-5-for-better-target-sizes/) * Dragging Movements 28:08 - Color Contrast * Contrast Ratio (https://contrast-ratio.com/) 33:02 - Designing w/ Accessibility in Mind From the Very Beginning * Accessibility Advocates on Every Team * Accessibility Training 36:22 - Contrast (Cont'd) 38:11 - Automating Accessibility! * axe-core-gems (https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core-gems) Reflections: Mae: Eyeballing for contrast. John: We are all only temporarily abled and getting the ball rolling on building accessibility in from the beginning of projects going forward and fixing older codebases. Mandy: Using alt-tags going forward on all social media posts. Todd: Accessibility work will never end. Accessibility is a right not a privilege. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 251. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mae Beale. MAE: Hi, there! And also, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hi, everyone! I'm Mandy Moore and I'm here today with our guest, Todd Libby. Todd Libby is a professional web developer, designer, and accessibility advocate for 22 years under many different technologies starting with HTML/CSS, Perl, and PHP. Todd has been an avid learner of web technologies for over 40 years starting with many flavors of BASIC all the way to React/Vue. Currently an Accessibility Analyst at Knowbility, Todd is also a member of the W3C. When not coding, you'll usually find Todd tweeting about lobster rolls and accessibility. So before I ask you what your superpower is, I'm going to make a bet and my bet is that I'm 80% positive that your superpower has something to do with lobster rolls. Am I right? [laughter] Am I right? TODD: Well, 80% of the time, you'd be right. I just recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona. So I was actually going to say advocacy for accessibility, but yes, lobster rolls and the consumption of lobster rolls are a big part. MAE: I love it. That's fantastic. MANDY: Okay. Well, tell me about the advocacy. [chuckles] TODD: So it started with seeing family members who are disabled, friends who are disabled, or have family members themselves who are disabled, and the struggles they have with trying to access websites, or web apps on the web and the frustration, the look of like they're about ready to give up. That's when I knew that I would try to not only make my stuff that I made accessible, but to advocate for people in accessibility. MAE: Thank you so much for your work. It is critical. I have personally worked with a number of different populations and started at a camp for children with critical illnesses and currently work at an organization that offers financial services for people with disabilities – well, complex financial needs, which the three target populations that we work with are people with disabilities, people with dementia, and people in recovery. So really excited to talk with you today. Thanks. TODD: You're welcome. JOHN: When you started that journey, did you already have familiarity with accessibility, or was it all just like, “Oh, I get to learn all this stuff so I can start making it better”? TODD: So I fell into it because if you're like me and you started with making table-based layouts way back in the day, because what we had—Mosaic browser, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer—we were making table-based layouts, which were completely inaccessible, but I didn't know that. As the web progressed, I progressed and then I bought a little orange book by Jeffrey Zeldman, Designing with Web Standards, and that pretty much started me on my journey—semantic HTML, progressive enhancement in web standards, and accessibility as well. I tend to stumble into a lot of stuff [laughs] so, and that's a habit of mine. [laughs] MAE: It sounds like it's a good habit and you're using it to help all the other people. So I hate to encourage you to keep stumbling, but by all means. [laughter] Love it. If you were to advise someone wanting to know more about accessibility, would you suggest they start with that same book too, or what would you suggest to someone stumbling around in the dark and not hitting anything yet? TODD: The book is a little outdated. I think the last edition of his book was, I want to say 2018, maybe even further back than that. I would suggest people go on websites like The A11Y project, the a11yproject.com. They have a comprehensive list of resources, links to learning there. Twitter is a good place to learn, to follow people in the accessibility space. The other thing that, if people really want to dive in, is to join The W3C. That's a great place and there's a lot of different groups. You have the CSS Working Group, you have the accessibility side of things, which I'm a part of, the Silver Community Group, which is we're working on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 3.0, which is still a little ways down the road, but a lot of great people and a lot of different companies. Some of those companies we've heard of—Google, Apple, companies like that all the way down to individuals. Individuals can join as individuals if your company isn't a member of the W3C. So those are the three things that I mainly point to people. If you don't really want to dive into the W3C side of things, there's a lot of resources on the a11yproject.com website that you can look up. MANDY: So what does being a member entail? What do you have to do? Do you have to pay dues? Do you have to do certain projects, maybe start as an individual level, because I'm sure we have mostly individuals listening to the show. Me as a newbie coder, what would I do to get started as a member of this initiative? TODD: Well, I started out as an individual myself, so I joined and I can get you the link to The W3C Community Page. Go to sign up as an individual and someone will approve the form process that you go through—it's nothing too big, it's nothing complicated—and then that will start you on your way. You can join a sub group, you can join a group, a working group, and it doesn't cost an individual. Companies do pay dues to the W3C and if your company is in the W3C, you get ahold of your company's liaison and there's a process they go through to add you to a certain group. Because with me, it was adding me to The Silver Community Group. But as an individual, you can join in, you can hop right into a meeting from there, and then that's basically it. That's how you start. JOHN: What are the challenges you see in getting not only the goals of a W3C, but I'm assuming specifically around accessibility? TODD: Some of the things that I've seen is buy-in from stakeholders is probably the number one hurdle, or barrier. Companies, stakeholders, and board members, they don't think of, or in some cases, they don't care about accessibility until a company is getting sued and that's a shame. That's one of the things that I wrote about; I have an article on Smashing Magazine. Making A Strong Case for Accessibility, it's called and that is one of few things that I've come across. Getting buy-in from stakeholders and getting buy-in from colleagues as well because you have people that they don't think about accessibility, they think about a number of different things. Mostly what I've come across is they don't think about accessibility because there's no budget, or they don't have the time, or the company doesn't have the time. It's not approved by the company. The other thing that is right up there is it's a process—accessibility—making things accessible and most people think that it's a big this huge mountain to climb. If you incorporate accessibility from the beginning of your project, it's so much easier. You don't have to go back and you don't have to climb that mountain because you've waited until the very end. “Oh, we have time now so we'll do the accessibility stuff,” that makes it more hard. MAE: John, your question actually was similar to something I was thinking about with how you developed this superpower and I was going to ask and still will now. [chuckles] How did you afford all the time in the different places where you were overtime to be able to get this focus? And so, how did you make the case along the way and what things did you learn in that persuasion class of life [chuckles] that was able to allow you to have that be where you could focus and spend more time on and have the places where you work prioritize successful? TODD: It was a lot of, I call it diplomatic advocacy. So for instance, the best example I have is I had been hired to make a website, a public facing website, and a SAAS application accessible. The stakeholder I was directly reporting to, we were sitting down in a meeting one day and I said, “Well, I want to make sure that accessibility is the number one priority on these projects,” and he shot back with, “Well, we don't have the disabled users,” and that nearly knocked me back to my chair. [laughs] So that was a surprise. MAE: There's some groaning inside and I had to [chuckles] do it out loud for a moment. Ooh. TODD: Yeah, I did my internal groaning at the meeting so that just was – [chuckles] Yeah, and I remember that day very vividly and I probably will for the rest of my life that I looked at him and I had to stop and think, and I said, “Well, you never know, there's always a chance that you're able, now you could be disabled at any time.” I also pointed out that his eyeglasses that he wore are an assistive technology. So there was some light shed on that and that propelled me even further into advocacy and the accessibility side of things. That meeting really opened my eyes to not everyone is going to get it, not everyone is going to be on board, not everyone is going to think about disabled users; they really aren't. So from there I used that example. I also use what I call the Domino's Pizza card lately because “Oh, you don't want to get sued.' That's my last resort as far as advocacy goes. Other than that, it's showing a videotape of people using their product that are disabled and they can't use it. That's a huge difference maker, when a stakeholder sees that somebody can't use their product. There's numbers out there now that disabled users in this country alone, the United States, make up 25% of the population, I believe. They have a disposable income of $8 trillion. The visually disabled population alone is, I believe it was $1.6 billion, I think. I would have to check that number again, but it's a big number. So the money side of things really gets through to a stakeholder faster than “Well, your eyeglasses are a assistive technology.” So once they hear the financial side of things, their ears perk up real quick and then they maybe get on board. I've never had other than one stakeholder just saying, “No, we're just going to skip that,” and then that company ended up getting sued. So that says a lot, to me anyways. But that's how I really get into it. And then there was a time where I was working for another company. I was doing consulting for them and I was doing frontend mostly. So it was accessibility, but also at the same time, it was more the code side of things. That was in 2018. 2019, I went to a conference in Burlington, Vermont. I saw a friend of mine speaking and he was very passionate about it and that talk, and there was a couple others there as well, it lit that fire under me again, and I jumped right back in and ever since then, it's just then accessibility. MAE: You reminded me one of the arguments, or what did you say? Diplomatic advocacy statements that I have used is that we are all temporarily abled. [chuckles] Like, that's just how it is and seeing things that way we can really shift how you orient to the idea of as other and reduce the othering. But I was also wondering how long it would be before Pizza Hut came up in our combo. [laughter] MANDY: Yeah, I haven't heard of that. Can you tell us what that is? TODD: [chuckles] So it was Domino's and they had a blind user that tried to use their app. He couldn't use their app; their app wasn't accessible. He tried to use the website; the website wasn't accessible. I have a link that I can send over to the whole story because I'm probably getting bits and pieces wrong. But from what I can recall, basically, this user sued Domino's and instead of Domino's spending, I believe it was $36,000 to fix their website and their app, they decided to drag it out for a number of years through court and of course, spent more money than just $36,000. In the end, they lost. I think they tried to appeal to the Supreme Court because they've gone up as high as federal court, but regardless, they lost. They had to – and I don't know if they still have an inaccessible site, or not, or the app for that matter because I don't go to Domino's. But that's basically the story that they had; a user who tried to access the app and the website, couldn't use it, and they got taken to court. Now Domino's claimed, in the court case, that he could have used the telephone, but he had tried to use the telephone twice and was on hold for 45 minutes. So [laughs] that says a lot. JOHN: Looks like it actually did go to the Supreme Court. TODD: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think they did not want to hear it. They just said, “No, we're not going to hear the case.” Yeah, and just think about all these apps we use and all the people that can't access those apps, or the websites. I went to some company websites because I was doing some research, big companies, and a lot of them are inaccessible. A little number that I can throw out there: every year, there's been a little over 2,500 lawsuits in the US. This year, if the rate keeps on going that it has, we're on course for over 4,000 lawsuits in the US alone for inaccessible websites. You've had companies like Target, Bank of America, Winn-Dixie, those kinds of companies have been sued by people because of inaccessible sites. MAE: Okay, but may I say this one thing, which is, I just want to extend my apologies to Pizza Hut. [laughter] MANDY: What kinds of things do you see as not being accessible that should be or easily could be that companies just simply aren't doing? TODD: The big one, still and if you go to webaim.org/projects/million, it's The WebAIM Million report. It's an annual accessibility analysis of the top 1 million home pages on the internet. The number one thing again, this year is color contracts. There are guidelines in place. WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, that text should be a 4.5:1 ratio that reaches the minimum contrast for texts. It's a lot of texts out there that doesn't even reach that. So it's color contrast. You'll find a lot of, if you look at—I'm looking at the chart right now—missing alt texts on images. If you have an image that is informative, or you have an image that is conveying something to a user, it has to have alternative text describing what's in the picture. You don't have to go into a long story about what's in the picture and describe it thoroughly; you can just give a quick overview as to what the picture is trying to convey, what is in the picture. And then another one being another failure type a is form input labels; labels that are not labeled correctly. I wrote a article about that [chuckles] on CSS-Tricks and that is, there's programmatic and there's accessible names for form labels that not only help the accessibility side of it, as far as making the site accessible, but also it helps screen reader users read forms and navigate through forms, keyboard users also. Then you have empty links and then a big one that I've seen lately is if you look up in the source code, you see the HTML tag, and the language attribute, a lot of sites now, because they use trademarks, they don't have a document language. I ran across a lot of sites that don't use a document language. They're using a framework. I won't name names because I'm not out to shame, but having that attribute helps screen reader users and I think that's a big thing. A lot of accessibility, people don't understand. People use screen readers, or other assistive technologies, for instance, Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice input. But at the same time, I've got to also add accessibility is more than just deaf, or blind. I suffer from migraines, migraine headaches so animation, or motion from say, parallax scrolling can trigger a migraine. Animations that are too fast, that also trigger migraine headache. You have flashing content that can potentially cause seizures and that's actually happened before where an animated GIF was intentionally sent to someone and it caused a seizure and almost killed the person. So there's those and then the last thing on this list that I'm looking at right now, and these are common failures, empty buttons. You have buttons that don't have labels. Buttons that have Click here. Buttons need to be descriptive. So you want to have – on my site to send me something on the contact form, it's Send this info to Todd, Click here, or something similar like that. MAE: Can you think of any, John that you know of, too? I've got a couple of mind. How about you, Mandy? MANDY: For me, because I'm just starting out, I don't know a whole lot about accessibility. That's why I'm here; I'm trying to learn. But I am really conscious and careful of some of the GIFs that I use, because I do know that some of the motion ones, especially really fast-moving ones, can cause problems, migraines, seizures for people. So when posting those, I'm really, really mindful about it. JOHN: Yeah, the Click here one is always bothers me too, because not only is it bad accessibility, it's bad UX. Like HTML loves you to turn anything into a link so you can make all the words inside the button and it's just fine. [laughs] There's so many other ways to do it that are just – even discounting the accessibility impact, which I don't want it. TODD: Yeah, and touching upon that, I'm glad you brought up the button because I was just going to let that go [chuckles] past me. I have to say and I think it was in the email where it said, “What's bothering you?” What bothers me is people that don't use the button. If you are using a div, or an anchor tag, or a span, stop it. [laughs] Just stop it. There's a button element for that. I read somewhere that anchor tag takes you somewhere, a div is a container, but button is for a button. MAE: I love that. The only other ones I could think of is related to something you said, making sure to have tab order set up properly to allow people to navigate. Again, I liked your point about you don't have to be fully blind to benefit from these things and having keyboard accessibility can benefit a lot of people for all kinds of reasons. The other one is, and I would love to hear everybody's thoughts on this one, I have heard that we're supposed to be using h1, h2, h3 and having proper setup of our HTML and most of us fail just in that basic part. That's another way of supporting people to be able to navigate around and figure out what's about to be on this page and how much should I dig into it? So more on non-visual navigation stuff. TODD: Yeah, heading structure is hugely important for keyboard users and screen reader users as well as tab order and that's where semantic HTML comes into play. If you're running semantic HTML, HTML by default, save for a few caveats, is accessible right out of the box. If your site and somebody can navigate through using let's say, the keyboard turns and they can navigate in a way that is structurally logical, for instance and it has a flow to it that makes sense, then they're going to be able to not only navigate that site, but if you're selling something on that site, you're going to have somebody buying something probably. So that's again, where tab order and heading structure comes into play and it's very important. JOHN: I would assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, or if you know this, that the same sort of accessibility enhancements are available in native mobile applications that aren't using each HTML, is that correct? TODD: Having not delved into the mobile side of things with apps myself, that I really can't answer. I can say, though, that the WCAG guidelines, that does pertain to mobile as well as desktop. There's no certain set of rules. 2.2 is where there are some new features that from mobile, for instance, target size and again, I wrote another article on CSS-Tricks about target size as well. So it's if you ever noticed those little ads that you just want to click off and get off your phone and they have those little tiny Xs and you're sitting there tapping all day? Those are the things target size and dragging movements as well. I did an audit for an app and there was a lot of buttons that were not named. A lot of the accessibility issues I ran into were the same as I would run into doing an audit on a website. I don't know anything about Swift, or Flutter, or anything like that, they pretty much fall into the same category with [inaudible] as far as accessible. JOHN: I also wanted to circle back on the first item that you listed as far as the WebAIM million thing was color contrast, which is one of those ones where a designer comes up with something that looks super cool and sleek, but it's dark gray on a light gray background. It looks great when you've got perfect eyesight, but anybody else, they're just like, “Oh my God, what's that?” That's also one of the things that's probably easiest to change site-wide; it's like you go in and you tweak the CSS and you're done in a half hour and you've got the whole site updated. So it's a great bit of low-hanging fruit that you can attach if you want to start on this process. TODD: Yeah. Color contrast is of course, as the report says, this is the number one thing and let me look back here. It's slowly, the numbers are dropping, but 85.3%, that's still a very high number of failures and there's larger text. If you're using anything over 18 pixels, or the equivalent of 18—it's either 18 points, or 18 pixels—is a 3:1 ratio. With that color contrast is how our brains perceive color. It's not the actual contrast of that color and there are people far more qualified than me going to that, or that can go into that. So what I'll say is I've seen a lot of teams and companies, “Yeah, we'll do a little over 4.5:1 and we'll call it a day.” But I always say, if you can do 7:1, or even 10:1 on your ratios and you can find a way to make your brand, or whatever the same, then go for it. A lot of the time you hear, “Well, we don't want to change the colors of our brand.” Well, your colors of your brand aren't accessible to somebody who that has, for instance, Tritanopia, which is, I think it's blues and greens are very hard to see, or they don't see it at all. Color deficiencies are a thing that design teams aren't going to check for. They're just not. Like you said, all these colors look awesome so let's just, we're going to go with that on our UI. That's one thing that I actually ran into on that SAAS product that I spoke about earlier was there was these colors and these colors were a dark blue, very muted dark blue with orange text. You would think the contrast would be oh yeah, they would be all right, but it was horrible. JOHN: You can get browser plugins, that'll show you what the page looks like. So you can check these things yourself. Like you can go in and say, “Oh, you're right. That's completely illegible.” TODD: Yeah. Firefox, like I have right here on my work machine. I have right here Firefox and it does this. There's a simulator for a visual color deficiencies. It also checks for contrast as well. Chrome has one, which it actually has a very cool eyedropper to check for color contrast. If you use the inspector also in Firefox, that brings up a little contrast thing. The WAVE extension has a contrast tool. There's also a lot of different apps. If you have a Mac, like I do, I have too many color contrast because I love checking out these color contrast apps. So I have about five different color contrast apps on my Mac, but there's also websites, too that you can use at the same time. Just do a search for polar contrast. Contrast Ratio, contrast-ratio.com, is from Lea Verou. I use that one a lot. A lot of people use that one. There's so many of them out there choose from, but they are very handy tool at designer's disposal and at developers' disposal as well. JOHN: So I'm trying to think of, like I was saying earlier, the color contrast one is one of those things that's probably very straightforward; you can upgrade your whole site in a short amount of time. Color contrast is a little trickier because it gets into branding and marketing's going to want to care about it and all that kind of stuff. So you might have a bit more battle around that, but it could probably be done and you might be able to fix, at least the worst parts of the page that have problems around that. So I'm just trying to think of the ways that you could get the ball rolling on this kind of a work. Like if you can get those early easy wins, it's going to get more people on board with the process and not saying like, “Oh, it's going to take us eight months and we have to go through every single page and change it every forum.” That sounds really daunting when you think about it and so, trying to imagine what those easy early wins are that can get people down that road. TODD: Yeah. Starting from the very outset of the project is probably the key one: incorporating accessibility from the start of the project. Like I said earlier, it's a lot easier when you do it from the start rather than waiting till the very end, or even after the product has been launched and you go back and go, “Oh, well, now we need to fix it.” You're not only putting stress on your teams, but it's eating up time and money because you're now paying everybody to go back and look at all these accessibility issues there. Having one person as a dedicated accessibility advocate on each team helps immensely. So you have one person on the development team, one person on the dev side, one person on the marketing team, starting from the top. If somebody goes there to a stakeholder and says, “Listen, we need to start incorporating accessibility from the very start, here's why,” Nine times out of ten, I can guarantee you, you're probably going to get that stakeholder onboard. That tenth time, you'll have to go as far as maybe I did and say, “Well, Domino's Pizza, or Bank of America, or Target.” Again, their ears are going to perk up and they're going to go, “Oh, well, I don't really, we don't want to get sued.” So that, and going back to having one person on each team: training. There are so many resources out there for accessibility training. There are companies out there that train, there are companies that you can bring in to the organization that will train, that'll help train. That's so easier than what are we going to do? A lot of people just sitting there in a room and go, “How are you going to do this?” Having that person in each department getting together with everybody else, that's that advocate for each department, meeting up and saying, “Okay, we're going to coordinate. You're going to put out a fantastic product that's going to be accessible and also, at the same time, the financial aspect is going to make the company money. But most of all, it's going to include a lot of people that are normally not included if you're putting out an accessible product.” Because if you go to a certain website, I can guarantee you it's going to be inaccessible—just about 99% of the web isn't accessible—and it's going to be exclusive as it's going to – somebody is going to get shut out of the site, or app. So this falls on the applications as well. Another thing too, I just wanted to throw in here for color contrast. There are different – you have color contrast text, but you also have non-text contrast, you have texts in images, that kind of contrast as well and it does get a little confusing. Let's face it, the guidelines right now, it's a very technically written – it's like a technical manual. A lot of people come up to me and said, “I can't read this. I can't make sense of this. Can you translate this?” So hopefully, and this is part of the work that I'm doing with a lot of other people in the W3C is where making the language of 3.0 in plain language, basically. It's going to be a lot easier to understand these guidelines instead of all that technical jargon. I look at something right now and I'm scratching my head when I'm doing an audit going, “Okay, what do they mean by this?” All these people come together and we agree on what to write. What is the language that's going to go into this? So when they got together 2.0, which was years and years ago, they said, “Okay, this is going to be how we're going to write this and we're going to publish this,” and then we had a lot of people just like me scratching their heads of not understanding it. So hopefully, and I'm pretty sure, 99.9% sure that it's going to be a lot easier for people to understand. MAE: That sounds awesome. And if you end up needing a bunch of play testers, I bet a lot of our listeners would be totally willing to put in some time. I know I would. Just want to put in one last plug for anybody out there who really loves automating things and is trying to avoid relying on any single developer, or designer, or QA person to remember to check for accessibility is to build it into your CI/CD pipeline. There are a lot of different options. Another approach to couple with that, or do independently is to use the axe core gems, and that link will be in the show notes, where it'll allow you to be able to sprinkle in your tests, accessibility checks on different pieces. So if we've decided we're going to handle color contrast, cool, then it'll check that. But if we're not ready to deal with another point of accessibility, then we can skip it. So it's very similar to Robocop. Anyway, just wanted to offer in some other tips and tricks of the trade to be able to get going on accessibility and then once you get that train rolling, it can do a little better, but it is hard to start from scratch. JOHN: That's a great tip, Mae. Thank you. TODD: Yeah, definitely. MANDY: Okay. Well, with that, I think it's about time we head into reflections; the point of the show, where we talk about something that we thought stood out, that we want to think about more, or a place that we can call for a call of action to our listeners, or even to ourselves. Who wants to go first? MAE: I can go first. I learned something awesome from you, Todd, which I have not thought of before, which is if I am eyeballing for “contrast,” especially color contrast, that's not necessarily what that means. I really appreciate learning that and we'll definitely be applying that in my daily life. [chuckles] So thanks for teaching me a whole bunch of things, including that. TODD: You're welcome. JOHN: I think for me, it's just the continuing reminder to – I do like the thinking that, I think Mae have brought up and also Todd was talking about earlier at the beginning about how we're all of us temporarily not disabled and that I think it helps bring some of that empathy a little closer to us. So it makes it a little more accessible to us to realize that it's going to happen to us at some point, at some level, and to help then bring that empathy to the other people who are currently in that state and really that's, I think is a useful way of thinking about it. Also, the idea that I've been thinking through as we've been talking about this is how do we get the ball rolling on this? We have an existing application that's 10 years old that's going to take a lot to get it there, but how do we get the process started so we feel like we're making progress there rather than just saying, “Oh, we did HTML form 27 out of 163. All right, back at it tomorrow.” It's hard to think about, so feeling like there's progress is a good thing. TODD: Yeah, definitely and as we get older, our eyes, they're one of the first things to go. So I'm going to need assistive technology at some point so, yeah. And then what you touched upon, John. It may be daunting having to go back and do the whole, “Okay, what are we going to do for accessibility now that this project, it's 10 years old, 15 years old?” The SAAS project that I was talking about, it was 15-year-old code, .net. I got people together; one from each department. We all got together and we ended up making that product accessible for them. So it can be done. [laughs] It can be done. JOHN: That's actually a good point. Just hearing about successes in the wild with particularly hard projects is a great thing. Because again, I'm thinking about it at the start of our project and hearing that somebody made it all through and maybe even repeatedly is hard. TODD: Yeah. It's not something that once it's done, it's done. Accessibility, just like the web, is an ever-evolving media. MANDY: For me. I think my reflection is going to be, as a new coder, I do want to say, I'm glad that we talked about a lot of the things that you see that aren't currently accessible that can be accessible. One of those things is using alt tags and right now, I know when I put the social media posts out on Twitter, I don't use the alt tags and I should. So just putting an alt tag saying, “This is a picture of our guest, Todd” and the title of the show would probably be helpful for some of our listeners. So I'm going to start doing that. So thank you. TODD: You're welcome. I'm just reminded of our talk and every talk that I have on a podcast, or with anybody just reminds me of the work that I have to do and the work that is being done by a lot of different people, other than myself as well, as far as advocacy goes in that I don't think it's ever going to be a job that will ever go away. There will always be a need for accessibility advocacy for the web and it's great just to be able to sit down and talk to people about accessibility and what we need to do to make the web better and more inclusive for everybody. Because I tweet out a lot, “Accessibility is a right, not a privilege,” and I really feel that to my core because the UN specifically says that the internet is a basic human and I went as far as to go say, “Well, so as an accessibility of that internet as well.” So that is my reflection. MAE: I'll add an alt tag for me right now is with a fist up and a big smile and a lot of enthusiasm in my heart. MANDY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Todd. It's been really great talking with you and I really appreciate you coming on the show to share with us your knowledge and your expertise on the subject of accessibility. So with that, I will close out the show and say we do have a Slack and Todd will be invited to it if he'd like to talk more to us and the rest of the Greater Than Code community. You can visit patreon.com/greaterthancode and pledge to support us monthly and again, if you cannot afford that, or do not want to pledge to help run the show, you can DM anyone of us and we will get you in there for free because we want to make the Slack channel accessible for all. Have a great week and we'll see you next time. Goodbye! Special Guest: Todd Libby.

This week's episode is sponsored by Cloudflare Pages (https://enjoythevue.io/cloudflare-pages)! Laurie Barth, or Laurie on Tech as she is well-known in the dev industry, is a software engineer who started as a mathematician, currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Additionally, Laurie is a content creator and technical educator across various mediums. She is also a frequent conference speaker, speaking at events across the globe, and a technical blogger contributing to publications such as CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and A List Apart, as well as an active member of the TC39 Educator's committee and a Google Developer Expert. In today's episode, we share some of our more memorable job interview experiences, both good and bad, but mostly terrible, and we dive into how those experiences could be improved upon, starting with the company setting realistic expectations for potential candidates from the beginning. We also touch on unnecessary and unfair technical demonstrations, the value of affording candidates the option to show themselves in their best light, and the inherent biases that exist when interview panels aren't diverse, and Laurie highlights the power that candidates actually have given the shortage of engineers making this appeal to listeners: take some of that power back! Tune in today for all this and so much more, including, of course, our weekly picks. Key Points From This Episode: Laurie shares a terrible technical interview that stands out from her experience. Why a generic interview format very rarely makes sense for any company. Why companies need to set their expectations at the beginning of the interview. The importance of recognizing how much time it takes to develop a technical interview. Why you can't steal an interview from elsewhere rather than writing one yourself. The value of judging what is important based on the signal a company is looking for. Alex talks about one of the more memorable (read: terrible) interviews he has been through. Ari reflects on a pair programming interview that she describes as ‘interesting'. The pressure that is put onto incoming developers to demonstrate their technical skills when it isn't necessary for the role they will fill. Laurie emphasizes why companies should be looking for someone to augment their team. Why it's not about working with people ‘smarter' than you, but people you can learn from. Laurie's frustration with the use of trivia questions and the benefits of offering candidates options to present themselves in their best light. Tessa's turn to share her experience with a terrible interview that featured live UI coding. The disconnect that exists between hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates. Laurie highlights the power that candidates hold given the shortage of engineers and urges listeners to take that power back. What Ari calls ‘douchebag alert' questions, how people answer, and what it says about them. The gender bias that typically exists when interview panels aren't gender diverse. Why it's important for team members to meet potential candidates and vice versa. Tessa shares the acronym, REACTO: repeat, example, approach, code, test, optimize. How interviews tend to cater towards those who are extroverted, outgoing, and talkative. Laurie highlights some positive interview experiences and what companies can do better. Alex shares a tip about asking the same question of everybody, such as “what is the focus of your company?” Tweetables: “People can't read your mind. You need to preface, you need to set your expectations at the beginning [of the interview].” — @laurieontech (https://twitter.com/laurieontech) [0:07:45] “I want to work with people who are smarter than I am, but here's the trip: everyone is smarter than I am. It depends what the measuring stick is and what category we're talking about.” — @laurieontech (https://twitter.com/laurieontech) [0:26:51] “The goal of an interview, in my mind, should be for people to show you what they know instead of what they don't know. If you're giving people options, you are giving them the opportunity to present themselves in their absolute [best light].” — @laurieontech (https://twitter.com/laurieontech) [0:29:59] “Right now, in this moment in time, unless you are an entry level candidate, the candidates have all the power. There's such a shortage of engineers. I would like to see people taking that power back a little bit.” — @laurieontech (https://twitter.com/laurieontech) [0:38:41] “Interviews, pretty much no matter what you do, will always somewhat cater to people who are extroverted and outgoing and talkative. The only way I challenge that is I think people who can't communicate about their code at all are probably not great engineers.” — @laurieontech (https://twitter.com/laurieontech) [0:48:47] Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: laurieontech.com (https://laurieontech.com) @laurieontech on Twitter (twitter.com/laurieontech) Fortnite (Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, iOS, Android) (https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/home) LEGO (https://www.lego.com/) Wingspan (https://stonemaiergames.com/games/wingspan/) (Boardgame) Heal & Glow Facial Serum (https://www.shopplantbasedbeauty.com/shop-our-store/organic-heal-and-glow-facial-serum) How Not to Be Wrong (https://bookshop.org/books/how-not-to-be-wrong-the-power-of-mathematical-thinking/9780143127536), Jordan Ellenberg Special Guest: Laurie Barth.

In this episode, Lindsay, Steve, and Luke talk with David Atanda, product designer and developer. We talk about his path from building products into development, and some of the products he has built. We also talk about how David looks at products and determines what to build next. After that, we discuss his blog post on authentication in Vue, and some of the decisions that need to be made for authenticating an SPA. Panel Lindsay Wardell Luke Diebold Steve Edwards Guest David Atanda Sponsors Dev Influencers Accelerator Links Tackling Authentication With Vue Using RESTful APIs Kiwano Learn In Public PHPSandbox VoV 104: Exploring GraphQL in Vue with Vladimir Novick | Devchat.tv The Ultimate Guide to handling JWTs on frontend clients (GraphQL) Creating an Editable Webpage With Google Spreadsheets and Tabletop.js Forrest Brazeal - 168 AWS services in 2 minutes. *inhales* Forrest Brazeal - An ode to Infinidash - the imaginary AWS service! David Atanda, Author at CSS-Tricks Twitter: David Atanda ( @Davidpreneur ) Picks David- Y Combinator Launches Co-Founder Matching Platform Lindsay- The StoryGraph Lindsay- Nuxt Nation Conference Luke- Publer Luke- XSS - localStorage vs Cookies Luke- GitHub | Atanda1/whatsapp Steve- Nuxt Image is here! And it's a game changer Steve- New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional Contact Lindsay: Twitter: Lindsay Wardell ( @lindsaykwardell ) Contact Luke: QuasarCast Twitter: Luke Diebold ( @LukeDiebold ) Contact Steve: Twitter: Steve Edwards ( @wonder95 ) GitHub: Steve Edwards ( wonder95 ) LinkedIn: Steve Edwards

Amy and James walk through the tech behind Compressed.fm and some of the unique challenges they faced when building the site.SPONSORSPathwire / Mailgun / MailjetPathwire is a powerful email API and intuitive email marketing solution that delivers over 250 billion emails a year for 400,000 companies around the world.You can sign up now and try Mailgun or Mailjet for free today. Mailjet offers a trial that allows you to send 6,000 emails per month for free, forever. Mailgun offers a 3 month trial for 5,000 emails per month after which you only pay for what you send.For more information, simply visit Pathwire.comVercelVercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Their platform enables frontend teams to do their best work. It is the best place to deploy any frontend app. Start by deploying with zero configuration to their global edge network. Scale dynamically to millions of pages without breaking a sweat.For more information, visit Vercel.comZEAL is hiring!Zeal is a computer software agency that delivers “the world's most zealous” and custom solutions. The company plans and develops web and mobile applications that consistently help clients draw in customers, foster engagement, scale technologies, and ensure delivery.Zeal believes that a business is “only as strong as” its team and cares about culture, values, a transparent process, leveling up, giving back, and providing excellent equipment. The company has staffers distributed throughout the United States, and as it continues to grow, Coding Zeal looks for collaborative, object-oriented, and organized individuals to apply for open roles.For more information visit their site.Show Notes0:00 Introduction2:53 Powering the backend: Sanity.io3:22 The difference between client-side and server-side rendering5:50 Sanity's differentiator: Portable Text8:35 Sponsor: Vercel9:13 Finding a challenge in every project11:14 Working with Framer Motion13:26 Animating a hamburger menu with 2 CSS Properties13:33 YouTube video explaining animating the hamburger animation14:29 Josh Comeau14:43 Authentication with Auth017:59 Experience with Next-Auth18:54 Sponsor: Pathwire / Mailgun / Mailjet20:00 Custom Audio Player22:45 CSS Tricks article: Let's Create a Custom Audio Player24:31 Big Automation Kick25:03 Sponsor: ZEAL25:55 James's Discord: Learn Build Teach26:06 Grab Bag Question #1: What's the best way to set up SEO metadata in Next.js?26:40 React Helmet27:02 Compressed.fm Source Code on GitHub27:47 Grab Bag Question #2: Have you ever had an issue with Tailwind normalizing or overriding the text coming from Sanity?29:05 SelfTeach.me Source Code on GitHub29:36 Grab Bag Question #3: Where are you storing access tokens in Next.js apps?31:00 James's Pick: [Webcam Swivel Arm ($20 on Amazon)](https://amzn.to/3tlY0EW31:51 James's Plug: Learn Build Teach Discord Server32:01 James's Plug: His YouTube Channel32:17 Amy's Pick - Gravel Gravel Blanket33:20 Big Blanket Co34:00 Amy's Plug - SelfTeach.me on YouTube

I spoke with Ido Shamun. Ido is the co-founder, CTO and, for now, the solo developer of daily.dev. daily.dev is an aggregator about development news, built as a Google Chrome extension, which gets feeds from all major tech news outlets including Smashing Magazine, The New Stack, CSS-Tricks and many more. daily.dev started as an internal initiative within Ido's previous company, The Elegant Monkeys, and eventually they decided to open it for anyone to use. Him and the team of 3 people, started daily.dev just about 6 months ago, in August 2020 and they already have around 80 thousand weekly active users. Unbelievable to see how much can be done these days with such a small team! One aspect that surprised me was the fact they decided to make it open source, so if you want to look under the hood of daily.dev, you can! As a coder, daily.dev can help you to get up to speed with what's going on in the coding space. Have a listen to the stories of Ido Shamun, Israeli solo coder at daily.dev! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/77

Who is your go-to for learning how to do things in Divi? Tune in to find out where the Divi Chat crew goes when they need to learn something new! Hosts Present: Stephanie Hudson - FocusWP / FB Cory Jenkins – Aspen Grove Studios / FB / @aspengrovellc Sarah Oates – Endure Web Studios / FB / @endureweb Resources Mentioned: Josh Hall: https://joshhall.co/ Divi Space: https://divi.space/wordpress-and-divi-code-snippets/ Divi Space Learning: https://learning.divi.space/ Divi Life: https://divilife.com/divi-tutorials/ Divi Popups Without Plugins: https://divihacks.com/how-to-create-a-popup-in-divi-without-a-plugin/ WP Gears: https://wpgears.com/ Quiroz (Geno): https://quiroz.co/category/all-divi-tutorials/ Auto-Update Year Tutorial: https://www.peeayecreative.com/how-to-set-an-auto-updating-footer-copyright-year-in-divi-without-code/ Just Bode: https://justbodeproduction.com/our-blog/ CSS-Tricks: https://css-tricks.com/ Elegant Themes: https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/category/divi-resources Darrell Wilson: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5alq-VmYnfQZt7YaNgdcGw MAK: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaRLBpsQIuusREXx_xK56Kw Divi Promo Bar Tutorial & Generator: https://divilife.com/creating-slide-in-promo-bar-in-divi/ agirlandhermac: https://agirlandhermac.design/resources/ Focus On Your Biz (FB Group): https://www.facebook.com/groups/focusonyourbiz Divi Lover: https://divilover.com/divi-resources/ Divi Cake: https://divicake.com/blog/ Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/divichatpodc… Twitter: https://twitter.com/divichatpodcast Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/divichat Website: https://divi.chat/ Leave a (5 ⭐) Review: https://ratethispodcast.com/divichat Join us Live on Youtube or Facebook every Tuesday @ 9 am Sydney (Wednesday) 2 pm Los Angeles 5 pm New York 10 pm London Or Listen Anytime @ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/divi-chat/id1166016136?mt=2 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5UwghkH9OErcrihKWyXOGH?si=4aZ1HoezQuyr7YjKV1XLxw YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/divichat Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Icjg3enorxbhnhyiqumvyi23rxi?t=Divi_Chat Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9kaXZpLmNoYXQvZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0Lw%3D%3D SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-670805739 Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/divi-chat FeedBurner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DiviChat Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/toM6 Castbox: https://castbox.fm/x/13d2P Divi Facebook Groups: Divi Theme Users – https://www.facebook.com/groups/DiviThemeUsers/ Divi Theme Help & Share – https://www.facebook.com/groups/DiviHelpAndShare/ Divi Web Designers – https://www.facebook.com/groups/diviwebdesigners/ Divi Theme Examples (+ Extra Too) – https://www.facebook.com/groups/divithemeexamples/ Divi Community – https://www.facebook.com/groups/ElegantThemesUserCommunity/ Divi Freelancers for Hire – https://www.facebook.com/groups/divifreelancers/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAvZ-MBPWoU&t=6s

Who is your go-to for learning how to do things in Divi? Tune in to find out where the Divi Chat crew goes when they need to learn something new! Hosts Present: Stephanie Hudson - FocusWP / FB Cory Jenkins – Aspen Grove Studios / FB / @aspengrovellc Sarah Oates – Endure Web Studios / FB / @endureweb Resources Mentioned: Josh Hall: https://joshhall.co/ Divi Space: https://divi.space/wordpress-and-divi-code-snippets/ Divi Space Learning: https://learning.divi.space/ Divi Life: https://divilife.com/divi-tutorials/ Divi Popups Without Plugins: https://divihacks.com/how-to-create-a-popup-in-divi-without-a-plugin/ WP Gears: https://wpgears.com/ Quiroz (Geno): https://quiroz.co/category/all-divi-tutorials/ Auto-Update Year Tutorial: https://www.peeayecreative.com/how-to-set-an-auto-updating-footer-copyright-year-in-divi-without-code/ Just Bode: https://justbodeproduction.com/our-blog/ CSS-Tricks: https://css-tricks.com/ Elegant Themes: https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/category/divi-resources Darrell Wilson: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5alq-VmYnfQZt7YaNgdcGw MAK: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaRLBpsQIuusREXx_xK56Kw Divi Promo Bar Tutorial & Generator: https://divilife.com/creating-slide-in-promo-bar-in-divi/ agirlandhermac: https://agirlandhermac.design/resources/ Focus On Your Biz (FB Group): https://www.facebook.com/groups/focusonyourbiz Divi Lover: https://divilover.com/divi-resources/ Divi Cake: https://divicake.com/blog/ Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/divichatpodc… Twitter: https://twitter.com/divichatpodcast Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/divichat Website: https://divi.chat/ Leave a (5 ⭐) Review: https://ratethispodcast.com/divichat Join us Live on Youtube or Facebook every Tuesday @ 9 am Sydney (Wednesday) 2 pm Los Angeles 5 pm New York 10 pm London Or Listen Anytime @ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/divi-chat/id1166016136?mt=2 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5UwghkH9OErcrihKWyXOGH?si=4aZ1HoezQuyr7YjKV1XLxw YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/divichat Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Icjg3enorxbhnhyiqumvyi23rxi?t=Divi_Chat Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9kaXZpLmNoYXQvZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0Lw%3D%3D SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-670805739 Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/divi-chat FeedBurner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DiviChat Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/toM6 Castbox: https://castbox.fm/x/13d2P Divi Facebook Groups: Divi Theme Users – https://www.facebook.com/groups/DiviThemeUsers/ Divi Theme Help & Share – https://www.facebook.com/groups/DiviHelpAndShare/ Divi Web Designers – https://www.facebook.com/groups/diviwebdesigners/ Divi Theme Examples (+ Extra Too) – https://www.facebook.com/groups/divithemeexamples/ Divi Community – https://www.facebook.com/groups/ElegantThemesUserCommunity/ Divi Freelancers for Hire – https://www.facebook.com/groups/divifreelancers/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAvZ-MBPWoU&t=6s

Browsers Episode.CSS Mastery Book.CSS Tricks.Smashing Magazine.CSS Weekly.Front End front.Tailwind css.World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web.Picks:Alfy: https://www.recallact.comLuay: Pulumi.

Chris and I talked about how people don't like to leave comments anymore, and how that has affected css-tricks.com, if at all. It used to be just him spinning up blog posts, but now he has a staff and they put much more effort into each post. We also talk about his journey creating and monetizing codepen.io, and how that is going. Other things we discuss include JAMstack, React, WordPress and more.

An interview with Steve Schoger, designer and creator or co-creator of many online tools like Tailwind and Refactoring UI and Heroicons and Zondicons. Refactoring UI book Refactoring UI website @SteveSchoger on Twitter Transcription sponsored by Larajobs Editing sponsored by Tighten Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to the Laravel podcast season three. Today, I'm going to be talking to Steve Schoger, co-creator of Refactoring UI and about 10,000 other products you probably already use. Matt Stauffer: Stay tuned. Matt Stauffer: All right, welcome back to Laravel podcast season three. It has been a minute. It's been a couple months since the last one, and we're going to roll up, finish up season three. And I let you all vote on who you wanted to hear from. So, we got three people who were at the end. And the first one is Steve Schoger, designer extraordinaire, Twitter fame, making books, and making dollars. Matt Stauffer: And Steve and I have known each other for a while. We work together at Titan for a while. I've also learned a lot about design from him. So, I'm really excited to hear not about Steve the designer quite so much, but about Steve the person. Matt Stauffer: So, first of all, Steve, the first thing I always ask everybody is first of all say hi to people, and then second of all, if you're meeting somebody in the grocery store and they ask what do you do? How do you answer that question of them? So, let's get started with that. Steve Schoger: Yeah. Sure. I usually introduce myself as my formal title. I usually say UI graphic designer. Even that's weird, because depending on where you work, my job title might be different. It's either UI graphic designer, visual designer, but I usually say like, yeah UI designer. And usually they have a clueless look on their face. I usually say I design websites. Is the easy answer. Matt Stauffer: It feels like it's a little bit of a lame answer. I say the same thing all the time. I'm like, "I make websites." Steve Schoger: I know [crosstalk 00:01:48] get all technical, but they won't get it. Matt Stauffer: Exactly. Steve Schoger: And then some people are just completely like, if I'm talking to someone older, they'll be like, "Oh, so you design books?" I'm just like, "Yeah, I do." Matt Stauffer: It's easier to say yeah and move on and by your tomatoes than actually have to answer it. Steve Schoger: Yeah this conversations over. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. My go to for a while has been I make websites, and I'm getting more and more dissatisfied with it, because I did it for a good reason. It's hard to have that conversation with those people, but then everyone's like, "oh, can you make my website for my Mom and Pop Sausage Shop." Or something like that in WordPress. And I'm like, "No. No, I'm sorry." I know some people who make websites. So, now I'm like, "I make web applications." I don't know anyway. Matt Stauffer: So, okay. So, you are right now coming off the heels of a successful launch of Refactoring UI and everybody in the entire internet heard about this thing and it's super exciting, but just a couple years ago, you were working a nine-to-five, and you had not achieved the level of Twitter fame. So, we're going to walk through that process. But before we go there, I want to learn a little bit about who makes the man who we know today. Matt Stauffer: So, where are you from originally? And when did you first get into design? Even in the earliest stages. Whether it was drawing on your wallet at age three or whatever. What are the steps you can remember that really got you to the point where you realized that design or art or creativity in general were things you might be interested in long-term? Steve Schoger: Yeah. So, to your first question. I'm from Ontario, Canada, and I'm from a city called Kitchner. Which is about a hundred kilometers outside of Toronto. And it's a population of 200,000, is the city of Kitchener, but it's this Tri-City thing. There's three cities next to each other to make one big city, which is about about half a million people. And I actually grew up on a small town outside of ... that's the city I live in now, which is Kitchener, which is a city, a small town of 200, 300 people. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Steve Schoger: Yeah and and I started getting into design, I guess, when ... kinda what you said, I started drawing when I was a little kid. I guess, my mom put this miniature horse in front of me when I was ... I can't even recall this, it was like when I was a baby almost and I'd draw it, but I could ... she acknowledged that I could draw depth. You know when people draw a horse or something, they draw a stick figure or something, but I actually drew the depth of it. Matt Stauffer: The angle of it. Steve Schoger: Yeah, exactly. And she saw, "Okay. There's Talent here." And, I guess, that's the earliest form of what I do. So, I've always been into art and when I was younger, I wanted to be an animator/ I'd watch a lot of cartoons cool stuff. And I didn't really ... when I was younger, the job I have now was not even a job. So, I never designed on the computers until I got to like ... Actually, the first time I used Photoshop was my first day of college. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Steve Schoger: Yeah. So, I'd be doing art and stuff and I'd take graphic design courses in high school, but they're not computer based graphic design. It's school, low-budget, you're working with pen and paper, and you're drawing letters and stuff. Matt Stauffer: Using rulers and all that stuff. Steve Schoger: Yeah, exactly. Matt Stauffer: Now, what was that, because your teacher said, "Oh, there's all this newfangled stuff. But we want you to know the basics." Or was it not even in the context of the newfangled stuff and they just said this is what graphic design is? Steve Schoger: Yeah. I mean, I didn't really ... I guess, that's what I thought graphic design was, and then when I got to college then I started using Photoshop, and everyone around me in the classroom got a handle on Photoshop. They already knew their way around a little bit, but the course I took, it wasn't graphic design. It was multimedia design production. So, that's everything from graphic design to to video, to a little bit of development, to even a little bit of music production, because I didn't know I wanted to do graphic design. So, I took a ... but I knew I wanted to do something in media. Matt Stauffer: Okay. So, when you went up to college, you just said, "I want to do something media-related." And you were still trying to figure out what exactly, so you just tried a lot of different classes or? Steve Schoger: Well, it was a course called multimedia design and production. All those things I just said. And yeah, I just wanted to get my hands wet with everything, and figure it out from there. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I went to college. I didn't know what I wanted my career to be, let's put it that way. Matt Stauffer: But you did have a sense that it was going to be creative and you were going to making ... So, basically was that class the full spectrum of potential careers you were thinking of that point? Steve Schoger: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Okay it was a perfect all-in-one experience on all them. Did you come out of that class then knowing graphic design is it? Or did it still take some time to figure it out? Steve Schoger: No, no, because like, I guess, in high school, I wanted to be a rock star in high school. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Tell me more about this. Let's pause college. Tell me more about this. Steve Schoger: Yeah, I play guitar. I picked up a Guitar when I was grade eight. So when I was 12, I guess. And I got really into it, I'd spend four hours a day. I'd come home from high school and play guitar until I went to bed. Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. All-electric or were you an acoustic as well? Steve Schoger: I started on acoustic. The way I got a guitar is my great grandma passed away and it was my inheritance. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Steve Schoger: She didn't have the guitar, but the inheritance money went towards a guitar. So, I started playing acoustic and then I always wanted an electric guitar. So, I picked one up maybe first year of high school or something like that. And that's all I did. And I played in the high school bands and stuff. I played bass guitar in the high school band and stuff. Steve Schoger: And, I mean, that was just an unrealistic dream. But when you're in high school you're just, "I'm gonna make it. I'll be ..."- Matt Stauffer: So, when you were in high school, you legitimately were interested enough in that dream that you thought, "I'm going to graduate from high school and I'm going to join a band or start a band. And I'm going to tour the world, and that's where my money's going to come from."? Steve Schoger: Yes. That's what I believed. Matt Stauffer: Because some people say that ... is kinda like the side dream. That was the dream. So, what dissuaded you from that dream? Steve Schoger: Well, my parents. They were like, "Well, you should consider going to school first, then maybe think about doing that." Matt Stauffer: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, they were and trying to weave them together a little. Steve Schoger: Yeah. So, even when I was in multimedia design, I still had this music industry dream in mind. So, I did the multimedia course. I graduated from that, finished it, and then there was this music industry arts program at the same college. I went to Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. And it was really hard to get into it. But I applied for it anyway, right after I graduated from multimedia, and they accepted me. So, and I'm thinking, "Well, I might not be a rock star, but I'd love to be in the music industry right? I'd love to show you music production." Steve Schoger: So, that course covered everything from music business, to just being in the studio and recording artists, and all that stuff . Still an unrealistic dream. Look at the music industry now, right? But I took that course and, I mean, that's still my hobby today. So, I don't regret taking that course. I learned a lot out of that course, but then when I finished that program, I was interning at small record labels. And they all saw the multimedia design on my resume, and that's what I ended up doing at those labels, right? I end up doing a lot of web stuff. A lot of designing little brochures and one sheets. A lot of stuff like that. Steve Schoger: So, I was doing that more and more, and I kinda enjoyed it at this point. Because I was kinda doing it for something I really enjoy doing. But I wasn't getting paid, it was all internships and stuff. Matt Stauffer: Oh. Got it. Steve Schoger: Right. And then I'm like, "Well, I got to get a job in this,." And I tried to follow my music industry path, but there was no money in it. So, I'm like, "Well, I just enjoy doing this anyway." So, this is in like 2009. So, right at the peak of the recession. It was impossible for me to get a job. I couldn't get a job anywhere, right? Steve Schoger: So, I'm thinking "Well, not a bad time for me to go back to school." And I already took multimedia, and I'm thinking "Well, what can leverage all these skills?" What can add to this? And I was thinking, maybe I'll take a look at marketing course or some kind of copywriting course. So, I took advertising and copy writing at Humber College. Steve Schoger: But, when I was in school, in that course, I spent way more time working ... I was making ads, and again in the course, I was making fake ads, right? But I spent way more time working on the creative, than actually the writing the copy. And that year I also spent a lot of time just learning web development. And I learned a little bit of this when I took multimedia, but I forgot everything I learned. So, I was real learning that stuff. And it was easy to pick up again. Matt Stauffer: Real quick. What were you learning? Was it mainly HTML and CSS? Steve Schoger: Html and CSS. Matt Stauffer: [crosstalk 00:11:20] did you get into a CMS or anything like that, or not at that point? Steve Schoger: Yeah, I learned about ... I knew about WordPress and stuff. But even that was ... it was a little too technical for me at that point too, because WordPress you can use the templates, but I really wanted to make something unique. WordPress is always just like, you got the header, the content area, and the sidebar. Ad I didn't want that. I don't want that constraint. So, I just started hand coding, and I learned about a few other CMS's at the time. I don't even know what they were called if you asked. But I tried them out, and I found one that worked for me, and I built a little blog for myself, and I would never write, at all. But that's everyone who starts a Blog and has the attention of write a post every week. And some people succeed at it and I did not. Matt Stauffer: I'm there with you buddy. Steve Schoger: Yeah. Steve Schoger: So, I was doing that. And then during this time in school, maybe in the second semester, it was a one year program, like a post grad program. And I took, in the second semester of that, I spent a lot of time ... I realized I wanted to do web design, at this point. And if I found a job before I finished school, I would have just dropped out of school, because I already had two diplomas at this point. So, it wouldn't phase me to drop out. But I couldn't find a job, but I was doing informational interviews, where I would contact the company and say "I'm not looking for a job. I just want to learn what you guys do day-to-day, and learn about the company." And I did a quite a few of those, and it was my way of networking. And you know what? I did do a little bit of like, "Oh this job. This place is hiring a designer. I'm going to ask if they want to do an informational interview." And I did it with a few companies. And one of my informational interviews turn into a job interview and they offered me a job the day later. So, that's how I got my first job. Matt Stauffer: So, tell me about the difference between an informational interview and a job interview when you know they're hiring? Was it, because you didn't think you would have the qualifications or do you think you're more likely to get in for the informational interview? What made you want to do this one type of interview versus just applying for the job? Steve Schoger: Well, if I did an informational interview, it's this ... my sister recommended that I just reach out and ask for informational interviews. And, I guess, I didn't think I was qualified for the job. So, I didn't apply for the job. And I feel like they're more likely going to have me in, if I have no intention of this Matt Stauffer: Ulterior motive. Steve Schoger: Exactly, exactly. Matt Stauffer: So, that's really interesting. Steve Schoger: I recommend anyone, I recommend to everyone does that. If you're a student in school, and you're just maybe not confident enough to go for that first job interview. Just shoot ... most people ... very few people turned me down, for an informational interview. Matt Stauffer: I mean, it makes sense. We've had a few people reach out for that. It seems so unique that I'm like "Yeah. Sure, I'll talk to you for a little bit. We can't always give you a full hour, but we'd love to chat with you a little bit about Titan." So, I hear that. That's really cool. Steve Schoger: Yeah, and I bring my portfolio in, and say "Hey, can you take a look at this and give me some feedback?" Matt Stauffer: I'm a student. I'm still learning and I'd eventually like to work at a company like this. That kind of thing? Steve Schoger: Yeah, exactly. And I was more thinking about, I was going for visual design jobs, but then I was interviewing with companies, and they're looking for UX designers, and I didn't even understand the role at that point. What the difference between a UX designer and a visual designer is. And sometimes I still don't understand the difference. Matt Stauffer: I think most people still don't get it. I still struggle. Steve Schoger: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Okay. So that was what? 2010, 2011 at that point? Or was it- Steve Schoger: That sounds about right. So, I think, so. Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Were you married yet at that point? Steve Schoger: No, but I was dating my now wife at the time. I met her in high school. And she's my high school heartthrob, and she rejected me in high school. Matt Stauffer: Oh snap. Steve Schoger: Well, she liked me. She later confessed that she liked me, but friends and influence from that. Kind of like, "Oh no, he's gross." Matt Stauffer: He's a rock star, you don't want to be with that kind of a guy. Steve Schoger: Yeah, but then later on we connected after I graduated from Fanshawe. We were talking on MSN at the time. MSN messenger. And that's how we really started to get to know each other, and then she came to visit me a few times, then we started dating. And then I sat a year off between when I graduated from Fanshawe and Humber, and that's when I really, I also spent that year figuring out what I wanted to do, working on my web design skills. And I was just getting to know my now wife at the time. And then we moved into together when I moved to Toronto. Matt Stauffer: Okay. So, during those years in between, when you weren't in school, the reason I asked about her, I mean, first of all, I'm always curious, but also, were you living alone, working just side jobs while you figured this all out? Or what was your life situation during that time? Steve Schoger: The years between- Matt Stauffer: So, basically you got a you got a job in 2010. We're about to talk about what, I think, was the first design job that you got. So, prior to 2010, where you in school the whole time, or where there any years in there where you were - Steve Schoger: [crosstalk 00:16:52] going back and forth here, because I'm stressing out and forgetting things. There was that year between Fanshawe and Humber. And that was me just getting more familiar with Photoshop again, because I haven't touched it in a long time, getting more familiar with code. And I was living with her, but not living with her. She was still a student. And I was just living at her place. Like, I was still living with my parents, but I was just always over at her place. I brought my computer over there and we just pretty much lived together. Matt Stauffer: Were you doing freelance work at this point or? Steve Schoger: No, I was [crosstalk 00:17:26] I was just learning. I took one job that I just was not qualified to do. And I started doing it and I'm like "I can't do this." And I had to say like, "Yeah, I'm not ... sorry." Because you ... I think, the best way to like ... you just got to try, right? That's how I am with ... maybe this is a conversation for later on, but- Matt Stauffer: No no, lets do it. Steve Schoger: That's how I am with speaking. I am really uncomfortable doing public speaking, but I just force myself to do it, and now I'm doing a lot of talks this year, and I regret are doing every one of them, but it's like, "Well, I gotta do them." And I put myself in that situation, but it's like ... anyways. Steve Schoger: So, yeah. I was just working on my craft, I guess, in the in that time, right? With my girlfriend. And that's how I ... and I just bring a lot of blog posts, learning how to design. Matt Stauffer: So, in 2010, you got your first job, and it came out of an information interview. So, a couple questions around there. What was your actual job supposed to be? And at that point where you primarily thinking of yourself as a UI visual designer? Had you started thinking about any of the other aspects of design that you do today? Because today obviously you're doing interface design, but there's a lot of UX embedded in the stuff that you're working on as well. So, how did you think of yourself then? And what was the actual job that you got? Steve Schoger: So, the formal title of the role, and this is goes back to different places have different titles, but the formal title was "interactive designer." And that could be the same as UI designer at our company, visual designer at another company. So, the work I was doing there was more like ... it wasn't so much software design, which I mostly focus on now. It was more like doing websites. And just doing the creative, mostly. Matt Stauffer: So, you'd basically be the one who says "Hey, we're working for Joe's Plumbing. Here's the font that Joe likes." And you'd put together Photoshop documents. Would you also convert them or are you mainly delivering fat Photoshop documents to web developers, and then moving on? Steve Schoger: Yeah. I remember when ... So, going back to the informational interview I had. The moment it turned into a job interview, there's that transition in that part, and I got all excited. He asked if I code. And I knew a little bit of code. I coded enough to build my own personal website, and that's all he wanted to know. He saw my website. He saw that it's probably not the best code, but he made it. And and I didn't need to code for the job. But he liked that I coded, because it just made it easier to communicate my ideas to the developer. Matt Stauffer: And probably also, because you understood the constraints that the developers are under. One of the things I said, when we first started working with you one, of the reasons that we were excited to work with you, and we'll get to here eventually is, because you were a designer who understood that for example, you can't deliver something with an image that would theoretically have to go wider than the browser, but you didn't give us what the image should look when it goes wider than the browser, right? Like when the browser gets a little wider. It's so clear what it's like working with a print designer, who doesn't understand ... not even responsiveness necessarily, but just like, you literally can't curve a thing that way in HTML. It's literally not possible. Matt Stauffer: As someone who understands what it's like to implement something, your brain was set in a different space, I think. Steve Schoger: Yeah, I think so, because everything was print design back then. There was no responsive design. Yeah, that's for sure. And everything was ... even if you wanted to use a custom font, you embedded it as an image. So, I was a big font guy. I didn't like using just the web defaults. So, I always searched for new fonts, and I'd export that as an image. Steve Schoger: So, I did a lot of the exporting stuff. and, but then yeah, I'd usually hand that off to the front end developer. And I was, when I was working there, I was the only designer at the company. It was a small company. I think, there's eight or ten of us in total. Matt Stauffer: Was it a consultancy? That just took client work and did a design- Steve Schoger: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Built the front end, maybe integrated CMS, deliver it, move on to the next client? Steve Schoger: Yeah, and they specialized ... they worked with a lot of media companies. So, television production companies, and I think, that was just as a result of ... they worked with one, and word of mouth and ... Matt Stauffer: Its who you know. Steve Schoger: It often works that way. Steve Schoger: Yeah. So, I was doing a lot of that stuff. Matt Stauffer: Okay. So, what was your next transition after that? I mean, did you stay at that job for a couple years and regardless, what made you want to move to something Different? Steve Schoger: Yeah. So, I was working in downtown Toronto at this point, at this company. And I worked there for two years, I think. And it was good. I liked being in a small company, but there's also part of me, "It's my first job. What else is out?" So, I was curious, and I interviewed at other companies, but then we also wanted to move back to our hometown, Kitchener, because Toronto is so expensive. By the way, I wish we bought a house in Toronto at that time, because it was- Matt Stauffer: Because now it's so different. Steve Schoger: We could have sold our house then and had no mortgage whatsoever and moved back here. But whatever. Matt Stauffer: [crosstalk 00:23:14] you could predict the future. Steve Schoger: Yeah, right. Steve Schoger: But I wanted to move back to Kitchener, Waterloo. First of all, Kitchener had this ... we have a little bit of a tech scene here. Blackberry, you know Blackberry? They put our name on the map, our city on the map. And we have at the University of Waterloo. So, a lot of trucks, a lot of engineering talent. And this created this little tech community. And I saw this from Toronto, and I was really interesting in it. But there was no design whatsoever. It was all engineers, right? And I'm thinking "I could have a huge competitive advantage if I go there. There's no designers whatsoever." And there was a company ... So, I was interviewing at a company called "Desire to learn." And they're an educational company. Matt Stauffer: I feel like I know somebody else who worked there, or did you- Steve Schoger: [crosstalk 00:24:19] it might be me. Matt Stauffer: Oh okay. Sorry. Keep going. Steve Schoger: And are you familiar with Blackboard? Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Steve Schoger: The same kind of- Matt Stauffer: Can you give a real quick intro to anybody who hasn't heard before though? Steve Schoger: Yeah. It's e-learning software. When you go to school, it's your login portal, and that's where you can get your grades and your assignments and all that stuff. And I even used Desire to Learn when I was at Fanshawe. That was one of their first clients. And I had a friend working there and I was really interested in the company, but they never had any design either. I was their very first visual designer. Steve Schoger: But, to step back a little bit. My friend recommended I apply for this job. So, I applied for it. But at the same time, the company I was working at, we had a really low time, it was not good. And right when I got offered the job, the day later, my boss, before I even got to go into his office and say "I'm quitting." He basically said I gotta lay everyone off. We're closing the doors. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Steve Schoger: So, it was like the same day. I'm like, "Wow. Perfect." Matt Stauffer: Talk about timing. Geez. Steve Schoger: So, I had a little tweak break there, before I started my new job, because I basically I said "I have to put my two weeks notice in." Matt Stauffer: And then turns out you didn't. Steve Schoger: I think, I had a week. We were still wrapping things up and I had nothing to do. Matt Stauffer: Okay. So, you moved back, because you said Desire to Learn was in Kitchener. Steve Schoger: Yeah, moved back to Kitchener. But my wife was still working in Toronto. So, there's a little bit of ... I moved him back in with my parents that summer, is when I moved in. And Caitlin was still in Toronto, living at the place we were renting out. Steve Schoger: So, the summer we were living a little bit long distance, but I mean, we were an hour away from each other. So, I saw her on weekends and stuff. And she was interviewing locally at that time. And I started my job as Desire to Learn. And like I said, I was the first designer there, and UX was such a buzzword at this time. No company understood. They're like we need to invest in UX, but no one knew what it meant. And I worked at that company for two years. And in the two years I was there, I don't think anything I actually did saw the light of day. It was one of those situations. And it maybe has since I've left right? I've made these projects and they were sitting there, and you could work on them. But yeah. Matt Stauffer: That's tough. Steve Schoger: And right when I was leaving, they hired a ... I think, they have a good design team, now. They grew their design team since I have left them. Matt Stauffer: So, is that why you left? Because you just felt what you were doing wasn't actually- Steve Schoger: I was getting burnt out. And I was really passionate about what I was working on. Where I took my work home with me. And it was so frustrating to not have any of my work see the light of day. So, that just burnt me out. And plus, other factors were going on in my life where, we were renovating our house. And I'm not sure if you've been through a process like that, but never again. Matt Stauffer: It's definitely a second job. And it's a second, more stressful job. Steve Schoger: Yeah. So, it's just all these stressful things in my life, to the point where "Man, let's just get out of this city and let's go move to California." And I even went for a job interview in California. They flew me down and stuff, and that was kinda fun. And I didn't get the job. I think, the reason I applied for the job was because I was just depressed, and I just wanted something to change in my life. Matt Stauffer: Maybe some change will make everything better. Yeah. Steve Schoger: Yeah, right? But once I left my job at Desire to Learn, and the house was done, we finished renovating the house, everything settled down, and I felt good I didn't make that decision. Steve Schoger: So, when I left Desire to Learn, I went to an insurance company, a local insurance, well not a local, it's a Canadian insurance company. Well, do you guys have Sun Life in the states? Sun Life? Matt Stauffer: Sounds familiar, but I'm not sure. Steve Schoger: Maybe, because I've talked about it. Matt Stauffer: Probably. Steve Schoger: Yeah. So, it's an insurance company. And it's just a huge company, a huge Canadian company, thousands, tens of thousands of employees. Matt Stauffer: Are they based out of Kitchner as well? Steve Schoger: We have an office kitchener ... I say we as if I still work there. There's an office of Kitchner. I don't even know where the head office is. In Toronto, maybe. But there's offices all over Canada. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay. Steve Schoger: And I worked there for two years. And when I started that job, this is when I started freelancing with you guys, Titan. And it was around that same time and it's around the same time I met Adam. And I'm trying to think of a way to tell this story that has this nice, seamless, flow, but I'm trying to remember everything that happened. Matt Stauffer: So, let me let me turn it and maybe this will help you out. So, a lot of us, when we met you and Adam. So, Adam worked at Titan, I think, when I first heard about you. So, he would say "Yeah, I got these buddy that I'm working with, and we do these design things together blah blah blah." So, we just started hearing your name more and more often, and eventually he's like, "Yeah, why don't you guys, consider pulling him in for something?" So, we would and we're like "He's really great." Matt Stauffer: So, we had this idea, especially because, I actually meant to mention this to the listeners that this Kitchner, Waterloo, that whole triangle, is really weird, because there is an excessive amount of technological ... I don't know if I want to say excessive amount of talent, but I don't know. But there's an excessive number of people who do the type of work that I do in that one little space. Matt Stauffer: You're there, and Adams there, and Vehicle's there, and all these other folks are there, and every time we open up a job posting. It's a guaranteed that at least several of the qualified applicants come from this little tiny circle, out of the entire globe. This little tiny circle. Steve Schoger: Well, it's like I said, we do have this tech thing going on here, and I don't want to say it like ... people will say "Well, we're the Silicon Valley of the north." But everyone says we're the new Silicon Valley. But it's like "No, but there definitely is something going on here." Matt Stauffer: And I hear a lot of people say like, "Oh, we've got a nice little tech community." People say that about my local town here. And what they mean is "We have more than nothing." But that's not what it is where you are. There is seriously a lot of people all doing the same stuff there. Matt Stauffer: So, when I start hearing about you, what I figured was, Adam and Steve have known each other since high school, they grew up together, they live down the road from each other, they happen to be very talented, and when I've only learned pretty recently that that's not the case. So, why don't we- Steve Schoger: [crosstalk 00:31:13] no that's not true, yes. Matt Stauffer: Why don't we come at it from the angle of how did you meet Adam in the first place? Steve Schoger: Yeah. Steve Schoger: So, I met Adam, because ... I was always working on a lot of side projects. So, when I was working at Desire to Learn, I'd be working on my ... I'd spend a lot of time working with just startups, helping them out, and just getting my hands dirty, right? And a friend of mine that I went to high school with, his name's Chris Albrecht. And I always wanted to work on projects with him, but he was always busy. He had a kid at this point. He was always doing house renovations. He's one of those guys that's good at everything. He can build a house, and he's a developer, and he's just ... and you want to hate him for it. Matt Stauffer: You don't, because they're also good at being a wonderful person, but you want to hate them a little bit. Steve Schoger: And that's the problem. Yeah, you want to you want to hate him. Good at everything. But then he's just an awesome person, so you can't hate him. So, like "Well, God, man." Steve Schoger: But he took a a software development course at Conestoga College, which is a local college. And that's where I met Adam. And, I think, the two of them were the top of the class. So, Chris talked very highly of him, and he said Adam works on a lot of side projects like I do, I should connect with him. Steve Schoger: And I said, yes sure. And I just sent Adam a message on LinkedIn, and it's funny, I tweeted that recently, the the message I sent to him. It's funny when I re-read it, because I dug it up, and I re-read it. And it's not how I talk to him, at all. It's like, I'm really proper. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, I was gonna ask if it was was really formal. Steve Schoger: Yeah it was a really formal, "Hey, we should connect. I heard a lot of great things about you. I hear you're a good designer, and you're a good developer. It's a really rare combination." And now we just talk like bros. But it was funny reading that and I just said "We should meet up and grab coffee." And I just showed him some of the work I'm doing, and he showed me the stuff he's working on, and I said, "We should work on a project together, just to get a feel for each other and see what it's working with each other, and maybe about can turn into something else." Steve Schoger: And, I think, the very first thing we worked on was, he happened to be working on this Resume Builder app. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I remember that. Steve Schoger: And I had this idea for a Resume Builder app, and I was designing one, but they're both separate projects. And we're like, "Well, we're working on the same thing. Why don't we build this together?" And we never took it seriously, right? We just wanted to get a feel of what it was like to work with each other. So, we did it, and we got it half done, and that will never see the light of day. Matt Stauffer: Right. That was enough. Steve Schoger: Yeah. Nut I did like working with them. That's what we learned about each other, right? I really like that he's got a really good sense of design, and I have that way of ... we talked about earlier that, I understand a little bit of code. So, I can communicate with him effectively. So, I think, we had that good dynamic that worked well together. Steve Schoger: And, I think, I met him ... I'm not sure if I met him when I was working at Desire to Learn or when I went to Sun Life, but ... no, I met him when I worked at Desire to Learn, because the reason I went to Sun Life, it's like I was going there because, A) it was a pay increase. So, that was nice. But I knew I was going into this big company, that was just a huge bureaucracy. Matt Stauffer: You're a cog. Steve Schoger: I'm going to be miserable there. But I went there, because this is around the same time I was talking to you guys. And I'm like, "Well, I can make this transition into freelance maybe." And you guys were my first starting point there, and what brought me to Sun Life is "Well, I'm going to work my nine to five, and when I get home from work, I'm going to turn that off. And then turning that off and then I can work on freelance projects." And that's what I was doing for you guys. Matt Stauffer: And that's the type of job you want to have, if you're going to start that transition to freelance, is the type of job where you can turn it off at the end of the day. Which, if it were your soul thing, it would be worse, because you want a job you love, but if it's the thing that's helping you transition, you actually want one that you don't love and you don't care about, that goes away. That's really interesting. Steve Schoger: I almost didn't care if I got fired. It's that kind of thing. I didn't want to get fired, because it paid the bills, but it's ... Matt Stauffer: You weren't emotionally or mentally tied to it, other than showing up and doing the things you should do to get the paycheck basically. Steve Schoger: Yeah exactly. Matt Stauffer: Huh. Okay. Steve Schoger: So, this is where you get more familiar with where I come into the picture. Matt Stauffer: Lets pretend like I don't know it. Steve Schoger: So, I'd work on a few projects with you guys, and I was also doing a few projects with Taylor. And, I think, the first thing I did for him was spark. I did the first Spark website. I did the website and I did a logo for him. And, I think, I did that before I started work with you guys, because Adam recommended me to Taylor, and then he recommended me to you guys. Steve Schoger: And I knew nothing about Laravel at this point. I only know about Laravel, because of Adam. Adam got Laravel famous. And I said, "Hey man, I come with you?" Matt Stauffer: Me too. That's hilarious. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. So, I remember that you were doing that transition stuff. When did you leave Sun Life? What was the the moment right? Steve Schoger: Because I was talking ... I did a few you projects with you guys. And then I'm not sure who suggested it first, but we basically had an arrangement. I think, it might have been you who suggested it. It doesn't matter. But you guys wanted a designer, because you never had a designer at your company. And Taylor just wanted an ongoing designer, but neither of you had enough work to fulfill a 40 hour week. Steve Schoger: So, the arrangement was, well, I do one week with Titan, one week with Taylor, and then I'd have an off week to go find any other freelance work. So, we had that arrangement worked out, and then you guys matched my salary at Sun Life. So, it felt easy going into, it was easy to convince my wife it all worked out. Steve Schoger: So, I made that leap. And that's what brought me to that thing, an I've been working with you guys for ... how long have been with you guys for now? Matt Stauffer: Has it been two years with this arrangement? Steve Schoger: It's funny. I've been with ... every job I've had has been two years. Matt Stauffer: That's it. That's your magic number. Steve Schoger: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I think, it's been two years. Because, I think, we did one year, and at the end of the year, we thought about it, and we re-upped it. So, it's probably been two years this way as well. Steve Schoger: Yeah, and, I mean, we're on pause right now, right? And that's ... we're talking about that shortly. Matt Stauffer: [crosstalk 00:38:17] story. Yeah. Steve Schoger: So, I was doing that, and I don't know ... next question, I guess. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: So, I think, that worked really well, and, I think, it was really great for us. I mean, that's a curious business thing that anybody else can ask any of us more about, is that idea where Dan and I since ... Dan and I are both liberal arts Majors, with the design aesthetics, who are programmers. So, we always wanted a designer. From the earliest days of Titan, we wanted a designer, but it was hard for us to really justify at the beginning. Matt Stauffer: So, this was a really cool way to do this transition. And now we have a full-time designer, and have had Steve working with us for a while. But it took us this kind of experience to start building design into our workflows, and our ways of building. So, just anybody who's curious about that, it worked out really, really, really well, for us. Matt Stauffer: But the next part of the story was what you used in that third week. And that third week, was a combination of, I think, finding other clients, but also starting to become not just Laravel famous, but eventually just web development, broad internet famous, and then there's books and stuff like that. Matt Stauffer: So, where were you thinking? What was your approach? What was your attack? What was your mindset? What were the first steps you took to start using that time and start garnering a reputation? Steve Schoger: Yeah, I think, for the first year, I was doing a lot of ... I was just doing ... I was using the time for freelance, and I was finding new freelance clients. And I don't even remember any of the projects I did in that time, even though it was like a year ago, probably. Two years ago. But they're just a little one off things right? Steve Schoger: But it was still ... the tricky part about that thing. It's like, well, I work on a freelance project for a week, but there was more to do after working after that week ... For you and Taylor, we all had this understanding. Well, I'll be back with you in two or three weeks. But when I get a new client, it's like, well, I had to be ... Full disclosure. I have this [inaudible 00:00:28] going on, so I can work with you this week, but I won't be back with you 'til the following week. Steve Schoger: And they had a deadline, so it's like ... Well, I don't know how long I could do this for. I could only pick certain projects that last ... It was hard to find clients that worked that way. Matt Stauffer: [crosstalk 00:00:40] one week or less at any given moment. Steve Schoger: Yeah. So what I spent my time doing is just working on my personal brand, or working on little side projects, and the first project I did was Hero Patterns. That was a website for ... It's SVG background patterns. You can go on heropatterns.com and it's just a bunch of patterns that you can use for a hero background or whatever you want to use it for. I built that just as a fun project. I wanted to learn more about SVG, so that seemed like the right step, and I just wanted to add it to my portfolio and add to my personal brand. Steve Schoger: Then I released a bunch of icon sets. That's what I was doing in that time, just working on free, open-source projects. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. And those took off pretty quick. I remember seeing Hero Patterns, and I think [Zomicons 00:01:40] as well, on things like CSS Tricks. So it was pretty early on that you were releasing these things, and they were getting picked up pretty broadly. Steve Schoger: Yeah. Well, the Laravel community has certainly helped with growing my Twitter following, because it's such ... The whole community is really active on Twitter, first of all. Then I had Taylor and Adam retweeting my stuff and that really helped. Taylor had probably 50,000 followers at the time, so it all helped. I was growing my following there, and then Hero Patterns was getting posted on Product Hunt, and that really helped. Steve Schoger: From there, where does that bring us to? I was doing all these little open-source projects, and then I started doing the tips. Let's move up to that, 'cause I don't know what else ... Oh, I released another little project, Heroicons, which is like SVG icons, marketing icons ... They weren't meant for in-app experiences, but more if you go on a marketing page, and you're showing a features section. You can put the icons there and customize the colors. I thought it was a pretty interesting idea when I made it and it was a fun little thing, and I could make some money off of it. Steve Schoger: I released that and it did okay. I think I made $10,000 in the first few months, over that period. But Adam was launching his books and his courses, and they were doing insanely well. I saw him doing that and I'm thinking, at this point, I think I could maybe do a design book or something like that. I had all these ideas for what a design book could be for developers, and I was sharing these ideas with Adam. He encouraged me to build my following first. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. Steve Schoger: 'Cause that's what he did and that's what made his launches so successful. He proved that what he was making was worth it. Steve Schoger: I started doing the tips on Twitter to prove that I know what I'm talking about, and I can provide little ... Basically the tips, if you're not familiar with them, they're little bite-sized design tips. Here's a before of something that a developer might design, and here's an after of how you can improve it. It's like, take it, instant improvement, instant gratification, and they've evolved over time. Steve Schoger: The first tips, I was working on a project for you guys, let's say, and I'd take a screenshot of that project I was working on and post it and that was it. Immediately, they started doing well. People started seeing them and they were like, wow, these are pretty useful. Then they just grow and grow and grow. Steve Schoger: The tip idea, by the way, I stole the hot tip idea from Adam, 'cause he was doing hot code tips, and he stole it from Wes Bos, 'cause Wes Bos has been doing it for years. I talked to Wes Bos about that recently, and he said he stole that idea of a tip from someone else. Matt Stauffer: Really? Steve Schoger: Yeah. But he made it his own by adding the fire emoji. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. Steve Schoger: But now people think I created the fire tip and there's people copying me. It's all great. It all grows from there. Steve Schoger: Then, like I said, I was working on these projects, and I'd maybe work on something and I'd see, well, that's an interesting insight, and I'd take a screenshot of it. But then they became a higher quality thing. Well, in order to communicate this idea, I need to make this own little thing specific for this. Matt Stauffer: Compose the tweet with all the ... You made a little graphic side-by-side with all the bullet points and everything, right? Steve Schoger: Yeah, exactly. So the very first tips that I was doing, I'm just doing them and not thinking of it, and then Adam would bring in a lot of ideas. He'd share his ... This would be a cool tip for you. Matt Stauffer: Sure. Steve Schoger: Then we'd work on it together, and then they became ... with both of us working on them together, the quality went up and up and up. We'd try to make each tip better than the last, so they eventually just did really well. I think the biggest tip I posted got 13,000 likes and 3,000 retweets. Matt Stauffer: Holy crap. I knew they had gotten big but I didn't realize they'd gotten that big. Steve Schoger: That's by far the biggest one. At the beginning, they were getting ... The very first one I ever did, 40 likes. Then from there, it got 100 likes. Then it was 300 likes. I'm like, whoa. That's so big. Now today, it's like I can't post one without getting at least 2,000 likes and 300 retweets. Matt Stauffer: Geez. Go ahead. Steve Schoger: Yeah. They just spread so far. Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. Steve Schoger: The last tip I tweeted, people are hijacking the first comment, 'cause they know ... They see a little fire emoji in the tip, and they're like, first comment. Matt Stauffer: At least it's first comment, and not, do you see this? You should go to my course, blah blah blah. Steve Schoger: No, it was a friend of mine who's just joking, 'cause on the Kanye posts, people try to hijack it with their art. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. That's awesome. I wanted to point out something really quick here. I think one of the reasons that these spread so much is that, first of all, they're really high quality. You really know what you're doing. There's not a lot of people talking about it this way, and they're really easy to digest and apply. So there's one aspect. They're just really good tips, broadly, this is a really good idea. Matt Stauffer: But I think the other piece about this is that your tips ... You mentioned the fact that [inaudible 00:07:38], there was a lot of dev and not a lot of design. We have talked about this for a long time, about the Laravel community and other programming, especially back in programming communities. I have clients all the time that say, yeah, you can tell this was made by a developer, referring to something that they have that they're asking us to fix up. That means something. "You can tell this was made by a developer" means it doesn't look good, it's hard to understand. The information density is bad, the flow is not good. Matt Stauffer: There's this very big issue, with us as developers, knowing how to put stuff on the page, but not really knowing how to make it and such so that it's going to be ... not even just enjoyable, but understandable for the end user to really get the information out in a reasonable, pleasant way. Matt Stauffer: One of the things I love about your tips and a lot of your teaching is I think it reflects the fact that you do understand developers, and you do understand development, and you do know code, and you know enough developers and work with enough developers to know where our shortcomings are. You're not just putting out generic design tweets, but many of these tweets ... not all, but many of them ... are explicitly useful for people without a design background who are put in context, that because we're application developers, we need to build user interfaces. We don't know what you're doing. Matt Stauffer: I feel like a lot of basic design tips people give tend to be relatively useless to developers 'cause it's the same three things you've heard over and over again, but you really narrow in on practical design tips that help application developers. I wanted to point out that that is something I think probably comes intentionally, but also probably comes a little bit because of the specific background you do as a tech-adjacent designer, right? Steve Schoger: Yeah, and I think also, Adam's involvement too is a huge, huge- Matt Stauffer: Sure. Steve Schoger: I'm more or less the face of Refactoring UI, but it's honestly ... Adam and I are doing it ... Basically, the tips are ... From the birth of a tip idea, me and Adam will be ... Adam might point something out to me and say, this is an interesting little insight, and I'll have a sketch file of all my tips. I'll be able to either take a screenshot of something and I'll passively work on it until it best communicates the idea, and me and Adam are going back and forth at this point. Steve Schoger: Then there's the tip launch day, that we decide we're going to post ... That's a two-week process before we get ready to post it. Then me and Adam jump on a call and spend some time figuring out, how do we want to work this? How do we frame it in a way that communicates it? A lot of time gets put into these. Steve Schoger: But, yeah. Certainly, I have that kind of background that helps communicate to developers. But I don't want to discredit Adam whatsoever. Matt Stauffer: I love that. Steve Schoger: He's equally involved in that process, and he's coming with his developer point of view. Like I said, he's got a really good sense of design as well. And to be fair, some of the tips we've posted, I never even thought of them as tips, 'cause I'm so ... I have a designer mindset. Matt Stauffer: Sure, sure. But Adam was able to help you see- Steve Schoger: Yeah, exactly. Some of them ... It's like, one of the tips, for example, is offsetting a box shadow to make it appear like a light's coming from above to make it look more natural, right? Matt Stauffer: Right. Steve Schoger: And he suggested that tip, that was his idea, 'cause I never even thought of it as a tip. I'm like, I just do that. It's just second nature. I don't even think about it when I do it. Doesn't everyone do that? There's quite a few tips like that, where it's like, I never even thought of it as a tip before, as something insightful. Matt Stauffer: That's cool. One of the things that I pointed out to Adam that he does intentionally, but I don't know if everybody recognizes, is that he has a talent for ... We haven't actually said it. This is Adam Wathan, in case anybody happens to listen to this podcast and doesn't know who Adam is, which I kind of doubt. It's Adam Wathan. Matt Stauffer: He has a knack for recognizing what everybody in a particular community doesn't know, and everybody in another community might know, and then bringing the stuff that the other people know into the community where they don't know it. Refactoring to Collections, if you were to sell that book to someone in a community where they use collections pipelines for everything, they'd be like, why would I spend money for this book? But Adam understands how to bridge that information, so part of his talent, I think, is helping bridge the knowledge that you have as a talented designer and a tech-adjacent talented designer who does have a lot to offer. But he's also able to help you bridge that gap into developer mindset. So I love that you brought that point up. Steve Schoger: Yeah, I think that's very accurate. Adam's probably the best teacher I know. Him and Jeffrey Way are the really good teachers. Adam's probably one of the smartest people I know, and him and my other friend are the smartest people, I know, but the other guy that I'm speaking of is ... He was almost an astronaut. So that's who I compare Adam to. They're both completely different. He couldn't do what Adam does and Adam couldn't do what he does. Matt Stauffer: Well, you mentioned Refactoring UI. That's a perfect segue. So, hot tips was a big thing, and then you and Adam decided you guys were going to make Refactoring UI together. A lot of people have questions about that, you did just launch it. Before we talk about how it started, what did it end up being? If somebody's never gone, what is Refactoring UI right now that they can go purchase? Steve Schoger: Yeah. Refactoring UI is sort of a package. It was pitched as a book, but that takes all of the ... pitched it as a book to help developers get good at design. But we made this whole package, this whole resource for developers to help them make their designs better. So there's the book aspect, and that's probably the main component that everyone's familiar with. But then with that, we provide color palettes. So a big problem with developers is they don't know how to choose colors, so we just provide a bunch of color palettes for them. We provide a bunch of font recommendations, and there's an icon set. So it's this big package that you can go pick up. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. That totally makes sense, and it's good to know it's not just a book, 'cause I think that you guys said, what's the best way we can teach this? It's not just book, it's also resources that help you do the thing. And there's videos too, right? I think you mentioned that. Steve Schoger: Yeah, I didn't mention that. There's videos in the package. The videos are taking the ideas that are introduced in the book and applying them to a real-world example. Matt Stauffer: You tweeted out a couple of those, so if somebody wants to get a sample, they can see what that's like. I think you tweeted some. Steve Schoger: Yeah, there is a one video available you can watch. We emailed it out to the mailing list, so you can sign up and you can get that. You can also check out, if you're interested in that kind of thing, I also have a YouTube channel where I do UI breakdowns, and that's all part of it. Matt Stauffer: Okay. So we now know what it ended up being. And it just launched ... Right now, it's January 11, and it just launched a couple weeks ago- Steve Schoger: A month ago, December 11. Matt Stauffer: Okay, there you go. Steve Schoger: There you go. Matt Stauffer: When did it start, if you remember, and what were you originally thinking? Steve Schoger: Yeah. Like I said, I saw Adam get successful with all his courses and stuff, and I'm thinking, well, I could maybe do that with design for developers. So the original idea was, I was going to write a book. But I was bouncing my ideas back and forth with Adam, and it just made sense to get him involved in the project. And I think this was even before I started doing tips, I thought I was going to write a book. It only made sense to get him involved and make it a 50/50 partnership, 'cause he can bring his developer frame of mind to it, and to articulate the ideas that have much better than I could. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. At that point it was still a book. What thinking process did you guys go to when you were starting to write this book that made you realize it needed to be more than just that? Steve Schoger: Right. I think when we started working on the book, there was a few ideas in the book that ... It was too difficult to communicate in the way we were writing it, the style of writing it was. And there was a few ideas we wanted to communicate that just couldn't be communicated that way. That's when we realized we needed to make some videos attached to it. There's a few insights in the videos that you can't necessarily find in the book, 'cause maybe it's a little more hand-wavy. We like to make the book very- Matt Stauffer: Very concrete? Steve Schoger: Yeah, very concrete, where in the video, there's a few more ideas that are a little more hand-wavy. Matt Stauffer: What was the hardest part about writing this book, about this whole process for you? Steve Schoger: Making the book was a roller coaster of emotions. Matt Stauffer: Oh, yeah? Steve Schoger: Well, you've been through this, right? I think early on, we had all these ideas of what the book was going to be. We spent so much time planning, and not enough just doing it. What we realized is that we should've just started doing it and let it just unfold, right? Matt Stauffer: Right. Steve Schoger: What was the hardest part? The book is more or less a picture book. There's more pictures than there are words. I made about 300 images for the book. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Steve Schoger: And they're not just ... A lot of books will just take a real-world example, take a screenshot of it, and put it in their book. We had really specific points we wanted to communicate, so we thought the best way to do it is design a little UI for it. One of my goals with the images was to make it so ... First of all, I might design an entire UI just to communicate how to do a drop shadow. I thought it'd be cool if every image in the book is something you can go ahead and create yourself, challenge yourself to create that image in the book. And I wanted there to be a little bit of hidden gems within all the images. Steve Schoger: So it's like, oh, we're teaching you how to do a drop shadow here, or a box shadow, but I noticed in this little UI example, you had this, and I never would've thought to do that on my own. So there's a whole bunch of little hidden gems like that in images. That took a long time. Steve Schoger: The way we delegated work with the book was Adam wrote all the words. We worked on all the concepts together to figure out how we communicate these ideas, and Adam wrote all the words, and I did all the images. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Steve Schoger: Some chapters will be like ... There's 200 words, but then nine complex images. So I just couldn't do any of the writing with the amount of time I was spending on the images. Matt Stauffer: For sure. What you're saying is you did all the work and Adam just mailed it in, right? Steve Schoger: Yeah, exactly. Matt Stauffer: I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. Steve Schoger: No, no. I couldn't have done it without ... Like I said, Adam is far better at articulating these concepts than I could've ever done. If I wrote the book myself, it would've been ... I don't want to say a failure, but it wouldn't be near as good. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. And I want to attest to the fact that I know both of these guys relatively well at this point, and they basically disappeared off the face of the planet for weeks at the end there, because they were both putting in such long days. Tell me a little bit about that time for you. Steve Schoger: Yeah. Just for the listeners, I had my thing, gig with you and Taylor, and I think I sent you guys a note at the end of September, maybe? Matt Stauffer: I think so, yeah. Steve Schoger: Is that about right? And Adam and I were passively working on the book at this point, but we realized it needed a full-time commitment. So I sent you guys a note saying, hey, I know you guys knew we were working on this book. We were getting towards ... gearing up launching this. So I sent you guys a note saying, hey, do you mind if I go on a leave, and you guys were fully understanding about it, and that was awesome. I feel like I'm in debt to you guys for that. Matt Stauffer: No, dude. Not at all. Steve Schoger: Then that was in September, and we already had a launch date in our head. We wanted to get it done before the new year. We already announced that we were going to get it launched by fall 2018, right? Matt Stauffer: Right. Steve Schoger: And then I just worked on ... We worked on the book for three months there. There was a break in between where we were both ... And you were there too ... invited to speak at Laracon Australia. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Steve Schoger: Both Adam and I made a bit of a family vacation out of that too. We spoke at the conference, but it's like, well, going to Australia is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and our wives want to come, so we brought our whole family along. Matt Stauffer: I got to meet your families and I loved it. Steve Schoger: Yeah. That was a two-week break we had in there. Then when we got home, we realized ... We wanted to launch it at the end of November. That was the original goal. But we got back from Australia, we were like, that is impossible. There's no way to get this amount of work done in that amount of time, so we pushed it back a bit. We didn't actually have a date in mind, but we were thinking, we've gotta get it done before the new year, because if we don't get it done by ... If we didn't get it done in the week we got it done, then we probably would've postponed it to the new year. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, 'cause it was just too close to Christmas and everything's too crazy around then. Steve Schoger: Exactly, exactly. Even at the time we launched, it was a little bit ... I don't know. Yeah. And we were just ... Like you were saying, we disappeared, especially in the last week. That was ... I didn't sleep for three nights, the last three days before the launch. I was up for 72 hours. I got maybe two hours of sleep in that period. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I saw you at the end of that period. Steve Schoger: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: [crosstalk 00:21:09] Steve Schoger: No, and I was just neglecting my family. My wife was incredible about it. She even said, hey. Would it be helpful if I go sleep at my parents' for the next few nights, just to get out of the house, and you have time to yourself? Matt Stauffer: Wow. Steve Schoger: She was incredible for that. Yeah. That was just ... I was trying to stay active on Twitter, 'cause I needed to keep promoting the book and make it look like I was still alive. But, yeah. Matt Stauffer: Because we're pretty short on time, I try to keep these under an hour and we're going to go a little bit over, I want to ask you a lot more questions, but I want to at least push on this one thing. What did it feel like to put out your first big product, and what were you doing after the launch? Now that it's been a couple weeks, how do you reflect on that experience about having done it, about the launch day ... Does this make you want to go do something like this again, or do you say never again? How do you feel about it right now? Steve Schoger: I don't think I'll ever work on a book again, for sure. But I'm all down for working on projects like this again, big product launches. They're fun. Steve Schoger: I know when Adam did his Refactoring to Collections book, it was like, he was working on that in the evenings and stuff while he was working for you guys, then he had this unexpected huge

In this episode, I discuss why I still use XHR instead of the Fetch API. Links The original article: https://gomakethings.com/why-i-still-use-xhr-instead-of-the-fetch-api/ Promise-based XHR: https://gomakethings.com/promise-based-xhr/ CSS-Tricks primer on Fetch: https://css-tricks.com/using-fetch/ MDN on Fetch: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/Using_Fetch Atomic Promisified XHR Plugin: https://github.com/cferdinandi/atomic

If you've done any kind of front-end design or development in the past ten years, there's a good chance you ran across a blog article by Chris Coyier. Amongst other things, we talk about his relationship with CrossFit, how CSS Tricks got started, how CodePen got started, the power of blogging, how almost all his work is public, and things that have helped him along the way in his professional career. We cover: CrossFit as a community How Chris started CSS Tricks How Chris got his start with Wufoo How Chris got funding for CodePen The idea behind CodePen How CodePen changed their homepage and went social Why Chris left WuFoo How Kickstarter was a mixed blessing for CSS Tricks How CSS Tricks has evolved CSS Trick's analytics Chris' speaking schedule Books that have changed Chris' mindset Being Nice to the Machines A few links to Chris's sites: CSS Tricks CodePen ShopTalk Show

Sarah Drasner is an award-winning speaker, consultant, and staff writer at CSS-Tricks. Sarah is also the co-founder of Web Animation Workshops, with Val Head. She's given a Frontend Masters Workshop on Advanced SVG Animations and is the author of SVG Animations. She's formerly Manager of UX Design & Engineering at Trulia (Zillow). Last year Sarah won CSS Dev Conf's “Best of Best of Award” as well as “Best Code Wrangler” from CSS Design Awards.

In this episode, Christopher Schmitt is joined again by Chris Coyier. Publisher of the CSS Tricks community site, Coyier recently authored Practical SVG from A Book Apart.

The Round Table from the SVG Summit has hosted by CSS Tricks' Chris Coyier. It's both a recap of the SVG Summit talks that happened before it and a Q+A panel with some special guests from the SVG community.

Sarah Drasner is an award-winning Senior UX Engineer at Trulia and a staff writer at CSS Tricks. Recently, she won Best Presentation at CSS Dev Conf 2015 aboard The Queen Mary.