All the Things, Episode 122

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Hey guys! Today I am chatting with Chris Coyier. I don’t even know where to say you’re from. You’ve got your fingers in so many pies over the web. Suffice to say, if you’re a front-end developer, you’re likely know who Chris is or have encountered at least one of his tutorials or podcasts along the way. Chris? It is awesome to have you on today!

Chris: It is absolutely my pleasure Carrie. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: You betcha. Today we’re going to get to the hard-hitting questions about CSS and front-end dev. I hope I don’t embarrass you at some point with some of the really difficult questions I’m going to ask today.

Chris: Yeah. Hit me!

Carrie: I first encountered you (I didn’t even realize it was you) but on your website CSS-Tricks. It’s been around forever. When I Google how to do something with CSS, inevitably one of your articles would come up. From there somewhere along the way, I was introduced to the Shop Talk show. I love  your podcast. So forgive me for a moment Chris while I fangirl just a little bit. You have tremendous resources that you just give away. Can you share about your start into the blogging arena? What made you start CSS tricks? Take it from there.

Chris: Ok sure. It’s coming up on its 10th birthday I suppose. It was like the 4th of July 2007. When the 4th of July rolls around next year it will be 10 years. It’s kind of a long time and kind of not. It’s middle-aged I suppose. There are certainly people who have been blogging twice as long.

Carrie: In dog years that’s like an old man.

Chris: Yeah. Dog years would be getting up there. Like I said, it’s kind of middle-aged but I have fairly consistently been blogging since then. You know I would guess it’s about a post a day since then. I don’t have exact numbers on that. If that is the percentage, it’s close to that if it’s not that. It’s like 365 × 10. That’s like 3600 blog posts right there. But it’s not just blog posts on CodePen. It’s screen casts and there is this area called the Lodge, which is more organized videos. There’s forums on there (there’s just so many threads that eclipses the blog). There is this section called almanac on CSS-Tricks which is selectors. You know the properties of CSS. It’s kind of like the nth child as well as the background property is documented there. They’re kind of split up between selectors and properties. There’s a whole bunch of those posts as well. There’s a section called snippets that’s just a little bit like…I don’t want to explain every detail of how this bit of code works. It is more like here’s just a chunk of code and it’s fairly self-explanatory. So here you go. So between all of those things, there’s a ton of URLs and CSS tricks you know? I’ve been through 10 years of maintaining the site and attempting to make it SEO friendly, attempting to make it honest and good content and follow general SEO strategies and stuff. I am no genius at it. Keeping a site online for that long, Google tends to be good for you. I don’t think it’s any backdoor deals or Google being exceptionally good to me in a way that they wouldn’t be to anybody else. That’s is just a long time and that’s a lot of URLs. So anybody would get that kind of thing.

Carrie: Yeah. The Google’s are showing lots of love. I was recently reading Authority by Nathan Barry from ConvertKit.  He used you as an example in his book. He was talking about how originally you started blogging and started CSS-Tricks. The intent was not necessarily to grow an audience. It was just you were putting out content as you were learning and growing. Is that accurate?

Chris: Yeah in a way. I think Nathan makes some good points. It’s been a while since I read exactly what he said about me. He has used me as an example a couple times, which I highly appreciate of course. Thank you Nathan. It is that the audience that I’ve built (if I have one) is from sharing. Share an unbridled attitude. What’s maybe not true about that is I’m like Mother Teresa or something. It’s not like that at all. There’s a business behind it. There always has been. There’s advertising that happens on CSS-Tricks. I’m a fan of advertising. I think it’s a part of what makes the web spin and turn. In the early days of CSS-Tricks was I love to have a successful blog because if I can get there that means that I have a pretty cool life. It means that people are reading what I write (which is awesome to begin with). I can ebb and flow with work. I can work from anywhere, you know? I can and have written a blog post from a beach chair in Hawaii. I’ve lived that a little bit. It’s not all perfect. My life is not amazing. I am absolutely not rich but I have a rich life. I have all this possibility that’s come from it. CSS-Tricks is only a part of what I do these days. But the idea was in a sense a get rich quick scheme. It didn’t happen quickly and didn’t really happen at all. The idea was to make money just like any other business in the world.

Carrie: Yes.

Chris: So when people are like “thanks so much. You really got me out of a bind. I appreciate all the resources.” I love that! I’m like thank you so much. I’m like thank your mechanic too…whatever. I’m the same.

Carrie: Yeah I hear you. Altruism is great. I put out a lot of content for the community but there is absolutely a business behind it.

Chris: You know that as good as anyone. You have a book. Money talk or own your own business. You’re very clear about wanting to make money out of this world. Right?

Carrie: I want to squeeze every penny out of it Chris.

Chris: We are all were in the business of extracting money from the Internet. I don’t have a problem with that.

Carrie: You know? I tried to write a blog post on the beach one time but the sun glare on my laptop was…it looks so sexy to write a blog post on the beach. But the reality of the sand and then the sun glare. Yeah. It didn’t happen for me. So let’s talk business then. Over time you’ve grown that CSS-Tricks property. The podcast has been going on for how many years?

Chris:  About 5 because it is coming up on about 250 episodes. 240 went out today. It’s about once a week. So when we hit 260 or so, that will be about 5 years. It’s one a week. I remember hitting 100. It was like wow! I can’t believe we made it. Now 200 blasted right by.

Carrie: (sings) Looks like we made it.

Chris: Laughs. Yeah only through trying to keep it really simple. Every time we have an idea for something big and complicated we are usually like nah. We’ve tried to outsource as much as we can. We tried to keep the website as simple as we can and the scheduling simple. With the most recent 20 or so episodes we even regressed into most of them just being Dave and I. Dave Rupert is my cohost. If we can just keep this as simple as hit the record button, talk to each other for a while and hit the stop button. Send it through light editing and ship it that’s great. That enables us to keep going. If it turned into something that took 15 hours a week, I couldn’t do it, you know? I’d rather do it than not do it. That’s just our thing. Then that is coupled with the guilt of there’s so many really great podcasts out there that do more than that. I wish we could get 15 interviews and spend six months of reporting on one episode. Oh God! How cool would that be?

Carrie: Well we do what we can with what we have. You put out a great show. So anyone that is listening right now, if you have not checked out the ShopTalk podcast, go do that. You will be rewarded my friend.

Chris:  We are a niche podcast for those people that listen to this because we are some of the only ones out there talking about the kind of things that they’re into.

Carrie: So this may sound like a silly question. I don’t know but when it comes to front-end web (who can even define what all falls under that umbrella) how do you stay on top of things? How do you stay educated about the tech coming out but at the same time not having shiny object syndrome?

Chris: I haven’t heard that one! I like it though. I think I can take many shiny objects SOS. I like that one! You know that’s another one that you get somewhat commonly. How do you stay on top of the world thing? I absolutely sympathize with people because no matter where you are (in front-end or back-end) in technology everybody has a little overwhelming feeling. This moves so fast. How can you possibly stay on top of it all? It’s possibly more so now than the past. I think that when CSS-Tricks first started around 10 years ago, that I was finding this all very interesting and new. It was a weird time to start a blog about CSS because the vibe in the industry at that time was that browsers move incredibly slowly. All the interesting things that could be written about CSS have already been written…just boring CSS. It just didn’t change very often. It was very stagnate and then all of a sudden the rate of change of what browsers are pushing out and how the language is evolving and stuff, it’s kind of a record pace at the moment. It’s freaking people out a little bit. I think the standard refrain around that is starting to be like don’t worry about it. Focus on the fundamentals. Focus on what’s right in front of your face. Focus on what’s going on with you and what it takes to build the thing that you need to be building and not worry about it too much. I don’t know if that’s very satisfying to a lot of people because they’re still like you know that can’t go on forever. What if I ignore the newness of the world? I am going to be obsolete. How am I going to get my next job after this one? I don’t know if I have perfect answers for anybody out there. I did do a talk on it one time that I could link up where I sat down and tried to think as hard as I could about this. I began to dig into what I think is going on with that question and how to answer it. It’s been awhile since I read through that talk. I don’t have it loaded in my brain right now. But some of it was that sometimes people are asking that question from different places in their life. Sometimes a manager is asking me that question because they’re like I am out of touch but it’s also my job to make technology choices for this project that I’m working on. How can I make good ones if I don’t know what’s going on? What if I make a bad one and then I have trouble hiring or have trouble maintaining it? What if all the sudden my team is not stoked about my choices but I didn’t even know any better? I’m in this position of power and I want to make sure that I’m making the right choices. That’s a different question than just being ho-hum and being like I never heard of that library. I probably should know it. Or a student is asking the question like I need to get a job when I leave this institution.  I want to make sure that I’ve learned something that is hirable. And then there are just people like, what do you read man? What blogs do you subscribe to? That’s all they want to know. That question can take a lot of different forms. If it’s as simple as that, then I’ll publish a blog post that says what I’m reading. I think one of the hot trends these days is to have a newsletter. I get so many newsletters that do a great job. They come once a week. They are packed with links. I’d say on average there is one or two links per newsletter that’s of interest to me. I just scan it. I’m like that one looks interesting. I’ll click the tab open. Maybe I’ll read it or maybe just get the vibe of what they’re saying. Maybe I’ll bookmark it. If that’s all you want to know, I could link one up on CSS-Tricks on what I’m reading right now. That keeps me up-to-date. Just two newsletters and you can pretty much stay up-to-date with our industry. I don’t think it’s so fast-moving if that would not help.

Carrie: There you go. I have just keeping my ears open. That is sort of the best way I’m hearing about things. Hearing about what other developer friends are using on projects and then just kind of learning things on a need to know basis. As something comes up where I need to adopt something new into my workflow then learn it at that point in time versus trying to learn the whole world and think maybe I’ll use this on a project someday.

Chris: I would think that all the best people I know, the people I think that are so good that they are going to be employed forever are the people who are good communicators, they can write good sentences that are understandable and they are just generally likable people. They are good connectors of people, they could have an understanding of things they know what they don’t know and can ask good questions about it (all those kind of skills that are like “soft skills”). The people that really excel at those are the ones that can do anything. Who cares about technology? In fact, they generally aren’t super up-to-date on technology because it doesn’t matter. They know that it doesn’t matter because they can be effective in any environment.

Carrie: There you go. Work on your soft skills people. That sounded so weird. I kind of wish I could take that back maybe I’ll edit it out, maybe I won’t, we’ll see. I like to create awkward moments. Apparently that’s it’s something my soft skill. So let’s talk about Codepen. This has also been around four or five years?

Chris: Yeah. In fact tomorrow evening I’m speaking on an unusual thing for me outside of my zone. It’s kind what I’ve of doing lately. I keep getting myself into these weird speaking gig situations. This one is different. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee Startup week is happening this week. They asked me to do a quick talk. I’m not a keynote. I don’t know how they found me but they’re like oh you have a startup that’s in Milwaukee. You should talk about it at this thing. Moments like that force you into a some retrospective things. I have explain to a full room of people who’ve definitely never heard of Codepen what it is, really quickly. So I’m writing a sentence like we’ve been around five years. Five years really? Oh my God! It feels like forever. It seems brand-new. It’s funny to think that it’s been around half of the time as CSS-Tricks. That blows my mind. It does feel very new to me. In the early days within the first year of Codepen had that many people heard of it? Not really. The reason it feels so new is that it was only a year ago at Codepen when we took money and hired people. Within the last year of growth, Codepen has gotten a lot bigger and a lot faster moving and stuff. I guess that’s that the new part. I know I jumped pretty far into that. If anyone that is listening was never heard of it, Codepen is a front end-coding environment in the browser. It’s popular for different people for different reasons. Imagine this one scenario. You are an educator. You have a classroom of kids that you’re teaching like HTML 101 where you are making your first website. It’s pretty compelling to use Codepen because of it’s interface. The editor of Codepen is split up into four parts. It’s like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then half the screen is pretty much dedicated to showing you the results of what you’ve written. So if you write like an H1 tag and say this is my first website, enclose that tag in the preview area and you’ll see a big bold my first website text because it’s rendering that HTML right there. It renders as you type pretty much. So if you
type H1 color red you’ll see that text below turn. So it this helps people connect the code that they’re writing to what that code is doing in a real-time way. That connects with a lot of people and it’s a good teaching environment. People use it for lots of different things. People make crazy experiments on it and show off. They use it as their resume or their portfolio. People use it to make bugs. People use it to work together and figure things out. People make little components and show their clients. It’s for anything that you could do with a chunk of front-end code, you can do on Codepen.

Carrie: That’s awesome. I’ll link up to Codepen in the show notes.  It’s Codepen.io.

Did you create Codepen with a couple of other fellows? Was that one of those scratching an itch thing? What was the story behind that?

Chris: Yeah, it was. I think that’s a requirement of startups. I’ve just been around enough startups where that’s just they’re opening line when they’re pitching it or when they’re explaining to somebody. It’s like I’ve got this startup idea where I was just scratching my own itch. You’re like yeah I hope it was! I hope you wouldn’t be like I decided to build this thing because market pressure indicated that it should exist. Or no, that’s not a good thing. Anything that you build should be trying to solve some problem of your own in some kind of way, especially with a startup. The scratching, itching part of Codepen was that there were already things that are like Codepen. There still is. In fact, I don’t think any of them have gone out of business or anything since Codepen started. There is JS Bin which is still around. That’s Remy Sharp’s thing.  There’s JS fiddle for example. They are similar setups. You write code in a panel and you see the output of them in another panel. I was like this is so cool! You know I should do this on CSS-Tricks? This is definitely the most compelling way to look at a piece of front-end code. It’s great in a tutorial environment. You write this as step one and here’s the code for that. On CSS-Tricks in the past, you would have to click this link and go to some other website to see the results of that. If you want to see the code at the same time, well just view source or something. It’s not a very nice way to present code. I was like with these other websites; this is the way you show code. This is so great. It’s so perfect. Maybe what I’ll do is go and take every single one of the examples I’ve ever built on CSS-Tricks and move them over to one of these other services. It’s just better. It will make CSS-Tricks as a blog better. Then I was like should I do that though? Maybe I’ll build one of my own. I think I could do it especially if I get some help. Then I’m not at the mercy of them. If one of those shut down, what would I do? I’d be screwed then. What if I want to (because the business of CSS-Tricks is essentially advertising) maybe there’s some kind of way that I could build my own and have it be a sub business of some kind. So that was the itch/scratching part. I’m just going to copy one of these other things. I think I can do just as good or better job, have the features I want and have my own control over it. It just grew from there. It was like yes we can do that. Yes I do think we can make it better. I do think we can make it more fun. I think we can have our own community around it. I think we can ultimately offer more features and do a bigger better job. It just grew from there. It certainly was a need of mine.

Carrie: You did a really good impersonation of a startup founder. You almost sounded a little bit like Alec Baldwin.

Chris: Laughs…imagine you’re walking down the street and you need to find a Ramen place. Well you can’t unless you download Ramen finder app…whatever.

Carrie: Now available 99 cents in the iTunes Store. So let’s talk business models a little bit. I guess with Codepen, you would call it the freemium model where anybody can go and use it, but then you also have various tiered pro-plans. Was the evolution of that like ok. We need to monetize Codepen in another way to make this sustainable? What was the business thought process there?

Chris: I love thinking about this stuff. It’s some of the most difficult nuts to crack you know? Like programming is lots of fun and there’s problem-solving to be had there. There’s usually kind of a right and wrong answer, or metrics that you can solve. Business is the same way. It’s very tricky. In some cases this market already existed a bit. So a lot of the big choices were already made for us unfortunately. One of them is that these other apps that are in the sphere of Codepen are free already. They don’t have a paid plan. So how weird would it be if we rolled in and had the same kind of thing only with ours you had to pay for it? That’s not going to do very well. The freemium thing was pre decided for us. There has to be some version of Codepen that’s just as good that’s free.  We were kind of strong-armed into that in a way, which is fine. Freemium kind of works anyway. I don’t know what the thinking is about that is these days. The deal with freemium is you’re going to get a ton more eyeballs on it. There are going to be a lot more people using you because they can do it for free. So we’re like great you know? We were looking at Dribble which is in a similar category but it is more for design. It’s a social network like Codepen is where you follow people and search around for inspiration and stuff. They had this (and still do to this day) have this invite system. We’re like that so cool but I don’t think we have the cache that Dribble had. I don’t think we could pull that off. In fact if anybody uses our thing, I’m happy about that and still feel that way to this day. Like oh my God! You signed up for Codepen? Thank you! That’s awesome. Using us at all I think is a compliment. Some of the beauty of that is the more people that use Codepen, get behind it and share the things they build with it becomes free marketing for us. People do great stuff on Codepen. They are excited about it and share it on Twitter and it’s free marketing for us. Now you just shared Codepen with your audience and that’s awesome. We’ve never really had a marketing budget. Maybe we could use one or maybe we been screwing up or whatever, but there’s enough people that know about Codepen for us having spent zero dollars. That is pretty cool. We have paid plans though. We can’t completely be a free product because (here’s another thing about the competitors of Codepen) they don’t have any ads on them. Why would you use the one that has ads on it if you find one that doesn’t have it? That’s not entirely true because some of the other apps are just like an editor only. That’s it. You go and you make your thing. You have a link. You don’t have a bunch of views. You don’t really have a profile. There’s no commenting screen, there’s no tags and categories or blog posts. With Codepen these days, there’s just a lot more going on than is on JSFiddle. There are more things you can do. There’s more screens and stuff. That gives us more screen real estate, so we do actually have some advertising on Codepen. It’s in different spots. It’s generally not right in the editor. That would be a little obnoxious. Why would you use us when you could use one that doesn’t have advertising in it? To be perfectly honest, we’ve never really cracked the nut of advertising. CSS-Tricks survives on advertising. It does ok. It’s not amazing but it’s enough to sustain, run and pay guest writers. Codepen has more traffic than CSS-Tricks. It has absolutely not cracked the code of advertising. We’ve never done particularly well in advertising. I don’t mind leaving it there to maintain expectations that it would be there. It’s never fun to have a site that doesn’t have any ads on it and then one day wake up and then there is. You would rather just have it there to keep people knowing that it is a site that’s in part supported by advertising. It’s a very small percentage of the business that we do at Codepen. The majority of it is Pro Plans. What’s freemium if there’s not pro? Our Pro Plans unlock more features. We try to make that as absolutely juicy as we can. Of course you have to balance features. You have to be like ok, is this new feature that we’re working on going to be all Pro or are all free or some kind of taste of it for free? Those decisions are quite hard to make but you’ve got to make them. You try to lean as heavily towards pro as you can without making sure that there’s nothing there to entice people. That’s tricky. Honestly that’s another thing that I’m going to be talking about tomorrow. I’m a little jealous sometimes (where I’m going to be speaking tomorrow night is a local distillery) what a clear value proposition of a business they have. Do you want to own a delicious bottle of booze? Yes? Give us some money and they hand it to you. You have a book. Do you want to buy the book? Ok. Give me some money. Yours is kind of a sign up for the newsletter. Normally how it works is…give us some money and you get a book. I used to work at a company called WuFoo. It has web forms. Do you want to a form on your website that can take hundreds of submissions? Give us the money and now you have a form on your website. The value proposition of a lot of startups is really clear. I’ve been kind of envious of that because as juicy as the pro plans of Codepen are (and believe me there getting a lot juicier soon) they’re not as juicy as I’d like them to be. The value proposition is a little less clear on Codepen than I wish it was. That’s going to be getting better. That’s the tricky part of the business plan at Codepen. We’ve built some things that are pretty cool but they are hard to replicate. I don’t think somebody could step in tomorrow and build the same kind of community around a similar app as we have. That’s a too difficult a thing to replicate quickly. I am jealous of those really clear value propositions.

Carrie: Do you think that’s a function of the product or a function of how you’re positioning the product?

Chris: It’s probably some of both. If we could go back in time…maybe. I’m not sure I would change anything. Some things have worked out pretty good. For example, we could’ve made a product that had education and a product that is built, designed and marketed towards people teaching front-end web development from day one. That could’ve been a choice that we made. I think that it would have been a little bit clearer. We would build a product that supported classrooms, with some kind of idea of submitting work or grading work or something like that. It might not be 100 miles different from the Codepen that is there is now. It would have had some slightly different features that are more education targeted. That would be interesting you know? I don’t know what would have happened. We didn’t go that route. I still would like to travel that road at some point.

Carrie: If you could look into your crystal ball…I know right now you’re throwing a lot of your energies into Codepen…is that entrepreneurial drive leading you to perhaps try out some other things in the future? Other projects?

Chris: Yeah. I wish I had a crystal ball.

Carrie: You could tell me but you’d have to kill me situation?

Chris: Certainly some education stuff is in there or where we’re going. We have a big new feature that I wish was out right now. We’re kind of at the point where we’re inviting in the next couple days some alpha users. It isn’t particularly hard to guess, especially if you listen to Codepen radio. We also have a podcast that’s just for Codepen that we do. It’s kind of like a natural evolution of what’s possible on Codepen. Hopefully it will be kind of a big deal. Hopefully people will enjoy and use it.  It’s a mixture of free and pro. Hopefully, just along the right lines to serve everybody.

Carrie: I look forward to seeing what unfolds there. Let’s move on. We’ve got a handful of minutes left here together. On a personal note, you have so places that your writing, development, podcasting and you just had a book come out not too long ago. From a time management perspective what’s a day in the life of Chris look like? Are you time blocking like a maniac?

Chris: Yeah not really. The book was a big cool moment but that was over the course of like two years that it took to write and get that locked in. It came from having done a whole bunch of different talks about SVG and having a stable of blog posts that I had already written about. In that sense, it was piecing together (I recommend this to anybody) things that already existed into a final product. I think that’s common especially in the tech world a little bit. Do not just sit down at a typewriter and do something. I think a lot of the good books are where you’re knowledgeable about this. You wrote a blog post and it resonated with people. That’s the idea that you’re going to expand a little bit more. Then you decided to make a talk out of it and you were able to get a chance to give that talk a few times. After you’ve done that, it’s not only just your mind that’s solidifying these ideas but other people are resonating with them and having feedback on them which helps solidify your own thoughts. That’s certainly what happened to me and then I turned it into a book. I’ve heard that same experience from other people too. It is very rare that people just sit down front of a typewriter, bang out an idea and publish it. It’s more of an evolution of that. Because that took so long, it wasn’t like it took big blocks of my day regularly for a short period of time and everything else had to suffer kind of thing. Or I had to step away from my duties. I’m able to balance it all.  CSS-Tricks takes some time but it’s just a blog. We’ve been doing it for a long time. I have a format that I publish posts in. We look them over. There’s other people that work there and share the load and you hit publish. I don’t think publishing is a most tremendously difficult time consuming thing that I do.  The hardest stuff is creating, writing new code, managing teams and stuff. So a day in the life is a lot where I think I’m more fragmented possibly than anybody else on Codepen at least when comes to the career stuff. People are more fragmented when it comes to complicated lives in the entirety of who they are as a person. Work wise, I’m helping out on support. I am doing social media stuff and talking to people because that’s very much a part of this. I’m taking meetings and talking with people. I’m talking with people on our team and connecting people on our team to make sure that the vision is being adhered to. People need to know what they’re doing and why it’s important and that type of thing. With writing code myself, first I’m still a designer and developer on all of these projects, keeping that together and then podcasting. So any given day is a mismatch of all those things. It’s very easy to stay busy.

Carrie: Yeah. I have no doubt that you don’t have trouble staying busy. You’re busy putting out amazing things.

Chris: I also track my time closely only in retrospect. I have a calendar. I’m looking at my calendar right now. It’s a half full-ish kind of day with a variety of different things. Anytime in between those hours I’ll be poking around at any one of my 80 open browser tabs, which represent to do items. Then at the end of the week I always get an email. I use a menu bar app called a rescue time that tracks  when your computer is open and when you’re doing stuff and what app you are using and that kind of thing. I get a report. I am almost always right around 40 hours. 39 hours, 42 hours, 46 hours, or 37 hours you know how it fluctuates from week to week. I don’t work 80 hours. I don’t even work 60 hours. I don’t even work 50 hours. It’s usually 40 hours. I have the data now. I don’t work any harder than anybody else. In fact I work less hard because I not only work those hours but I don’t commute either. I walk upstairs.

Carrie: I love it. I loved it when you said earlier I’m not rich, but you live a rich life. I think you just summed that up beautifully. It’s being able to work a flexible work schedule, being able to work from home and not working killing yourself by working 80 hours a week. That’s awesome.

Chris: We’re about a week away from voting. I think I’m going to vote ahead of time. I think I’m going to go tomorrow and just figure it out. I’m going to go in the middle of the day and see if I can’t vote early. I know where to vote on November 8th. So I’m going to go there and vote. I don’t have to worry about it. I don’t have to ask permission. I’m just going to say in slack, “Hey! I’m going to go vote. I’ll be back in like an hour. Bye.”

Carrie: That is a thing of beauty.

Chris: It is a thing of beauty. It’s easy to take that too easily and undervalue that. It’s not every career for sure that you get to do stuff like that.

Carrie: Well I’ll take it. I’ll keep it. Chris? It was awesome chatting with you today. My screensaver just decided to kick in. That was weird. Before we say sayonara, do you have a favorite front-end conference that you recommend?

Chris: Oh wow. Well there’s so many of them. Some of them have a different vibe and a different spirit. I don’t think that any of them are that far different from each other. A lot of them have a very similar format. You show up, they’re at at a venue, you sit in a chair you listen to speakers say brilliant interesting things, there’s some kind of party at the end and then you go home. You know? I would hate to play favorites with one of them and say that this one is so far and above better than these other ones that it’s the one that you have to go to. I go to a lot of them. It wouldn’t be advantageous for me to play favorites anyway. I don’t think you can go tremendously wrong. Just go to one that works with your schedule.  I have Chriscoyier.net/speaking. These are the events where I’ll be coming up. I have been taking the last few years not doing that many of them. I am going to pick it up next year and do more of them, I think I’m going to be at most if not all of the An Event Apart series. So if I’m going to name one of them, I am going to be at most if not all of those. That’s one to check out for sure if you want to see me say dumb stuff.

Carrie: Awesome. I’ll definitely link up to that in the show notes. So Chris? We’ve mentioned a number of links but where’s the best place to offer somebody just to say hello and give you thanks and shout out on the web?

Chris: I’m at @ChrisCoyier on GitHub, Twitter, Codepen, and Dribble in all the social networks. Or I use my full name which is Chris Coyier. That’s my website too. Chriscoyier.net. There’s not a ton there but it does link out to the other things that I do. So that’s not the worst place to send people to.

Carrie: Awesome. Chris? It was fantastic talking to you today. I know the listeners are loving this episode. Thank you so very much and I hope to chat with you again soon.

Chris: Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.