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Paul Irish is a web developer and a member of the Google Chrome Developer Relations team. He's been a part of many noteworthy projects including jQuery, HTML5 Boilerplate, HTML5 Please, and more. In this interview, Nick Pettit talks to Paul about the increasing complexity of front-end development, career paths, HTML5 Boilerplate, and several other topics.
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[Nick Pettit]: Paul, Thanks so much for being here.
0:01
I really appreciate you coming out. >>[Paul Irish]: No problem.
0:03
[Nick Pettit]: So, for people who don't know who you are,
0:05
how would you describe yourself?
0:07
Who are you, and what do you do?
0:10
[Paul Irish]: I am a developer advocate
0:12
on the Chrome team right now,
0:14
and so I kind of focus on--that encompasses a lot,
0:16
but I focus on everything I can do
0:20
to make it better to create compelling content for the web.
0:23
We've got a lot of great content inside of Chrome.
0:28
I wanted to help educate people about that,
0:30
help people understand how to use things like
0:32
the Chrome DevTools better.
0:34
I also come with a big history of front-end development
0:36
and open-source projects that I work on
0:40
to help developers
0:43
learn what they need to know
0:45
to do better front-end development,
0:47
make better websites and web apps.
0:49
[Nick Pettit]: That's awesome.
0:51
You're involved in a million different projects.
0:53
You're doing Modernizr, HTML5 Boilerplate,
0:57
which I use all the time by the way.
1:01
You've been on the jQuery team,
1:03
and you've made all these really handy tools for
1:06
front-end devs.
1:09
This might seem obvious, but
1:11
what's the motivation for working on all these different things?
1:13
[Paul Irish]: I think part of it
1:16
is basically that I feel a lot of satisfaction
1:18
helping other people, and so part of it is just that.
1:22
Also, the other thing--I think this is actually another part that's happened--
1:26
is that I have a really bad memory,
1:29
and what that translates into is
1:31
if I don't write something down, I'll forget it.
1:33
So, this happened in front-end development where you learn this technique
1:36
of using media queries or the viewport meta,
1:38
and you need to keep track of this
1:42
because this is the right way to do it
1:45
in this situation.
1:47
So, that eventually translated into what became
1:49
the HTML5 Boilerplate project,
1:51
where a lot of best practices were distributed
1:53
all over on blogs and books and things like that,
1:56
and I was just like we need to get this together
1:58
just to keep track of it;
2:01
so I can keep track of it and remember to use it on the next project.
2:03
So, that's helped me a lot and has helped other people.
2:08
The other thing for me that really drives me
2:11
is that I want the web to be
2:14
where people build great things.
2:17
I'm just really excited about anything that I can do
2:19
to help make the web be a stronger platform
2:23
for making great, really cool stuff.
2:26
[Nick Pettit]: So, you're very diligent
2:29
in tracking all of these different things?
2:31
[Paul Irish]: Because I can.
2:33
[Nick Pettit]: How do you balance your time working on all those different projects?
2:35
[Paul Irish]: I don't have a good mechanism
2:38
for time management right now.
2:40
I use a really cool tool called, 'WorkFlowy,'
2:43
which is like a super-enhanced
2:47
to-do method list app. It's really cool.
2:51
I set up priorities for myself
2:54
on a quarterly basis
2:57
and try and get them.
3:00
I think that's actually quite important,
3:02
which is to have a longer-term view of what you want
3:04
to attack, because it's so easy on a daily basis
3:07
to be totally distracted and
3:11
just be like, "I want to play with this new thing
3:14
and get it done. Oh, wow, something,"
3:17
and then you totally forget that you have this much larger,
3:19
higher-impact thing that you should be doing.
3:22
So, it's hard, and I'm still really bad at time management,
3:24
but I'm working on it.
3:29
[Nick Pettit]: I know what you mean.
3:31
With being involved with so many different projects,
3:33
I guess you kind of have to keep a big-picture view
3:35
as to what all those things are working towards.
3:37
[Paul Irish]: Yep, and what the priorities are. Yeah.
3:39
[Nick Pettit]: Cool. So, before we continue, I want to back way up
3:41
and just get some of your history.
3:45
Where did you grow up and what were you into?
3:47
[Paul Irish]: Sure. I'm from Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
3:50
So, I'm from New England where we say,
3:54
'wicked,' 'It's wicked cool.'
3:58
[Nick Pettit]: Wicked.
4:00
[Paul Irish]: I was into music.
4:02
I was in the marching band; I played the tuba.
4:04
I was into drama. So, I was a band and drama kid in high school.
4:08
I was really into music and, in fact,
4:11
the first time that I really got going online was
4:13
I created a music blog.
4:16
This was in--I put it out in 2004,
4:20
and I thought I was so late to the music blog scene,
4:24
but it turned out that I was one of the first 50 or so.
4:27
Having that environment where I had a website that had a lot of traffic,
4:31
and I could play with the design and experiment
4:34
and get a lot of feedback
4:38
on how people liked it,
4:40
that was one of the first times when I was really like,
4:42
This front-end development thing is a lot of fun.
4:45
[Nick Pettit]: That's when you first became interested in the web and technology?
4:48
[Paul Irish]: That was when I was like,
4:52
this could definitely be full time.
4:54
I'd been playing with websites.
4:56
Back when IE4 came out
4:59
they did this really cool marketing campaign.
5:01
This was when the DHTML term arrived,
5:04
and so they had this marketing campaign
5:07
where they rented out all these movie theaters across the U.S.
5:09
and invited a bunch of developers,
5:12
and I went and I got free popcorn and a free t-shirt
5:15
and a free Windows 95 install CD,
5:17
and they showed about what you could do in IE4,
5:20
and it was amazing.
5:22
So many great features came out then,
5:24
and so that was when I was like,
5:26
this interest of mine, there's cool stuff in here.
5:28
Eventually, it quieted down.
5:32
I went to college, but after that everything picked back up again.
5:35
[Nick Pettit]: So, did you go to school for this stuff?
5:39
[Paul Irish]: I went to school for--
5:41
I got a degree in technical communications.
5:43
I don't actually know--
5:46
I really do wish that there was more university-level coverage
5:48
for web development.
5:51
Front-end development is hard, and it's a pain,
5:54
and I wish that there was a more sophisticated education
5:57
program for this.
6:01
I got education in computer science and mathematics,
6:03
and management and communication.
6:06
[Nick Pettit]: With us being an education company,
6:09
I'm interested to know if
6:11
you feel like your degree really helped you
6:14
in your career, or--?
6:17
[Paul Irish]: Mine did,
6:19
and I think these days having a computer science background
6:21
has a very direct effect.
6:24
I wouldn't say 5 years ago that computer science would help in web development,
6:27
but nowadays, especially on the client side,
6:30
there's so much logic there.
6:33
You're writing jQuery, things are going good,
6:36
you're translating, you're writing larger applications.
6:38
[Nick Pettit]: It's getting complicated. >>[Paul Irish]: It's getting real complicated.
6:40
A background in computer science lays a lot of the groundwork
6:42
so that you're not making stupid mistakes
6:45
and taking 4 months to learn how you should have done things.
6:47
So, yeah, computer science has a big influence
6:51
on where the trajectory
6:54
of front-end development is going for sure.
6:56
[Nick Pettit]: Cool. Well, I think a big challenge
6:59
that's facing people coming out of college today
7:01
is how to make the transition to
7:04
a career and not just kind of hopping from job to job
7:07
or being unemployed.
7:11
How did you make that transition?
7:13
Were you just kind of in an internship,
7:15
and it was a really natural progression
7:17
or did you--?
7:19
[Paul Irish]: Yeah. I started out I was doing
7:21
some marketing for
7:23
a stationary company
7:27
that made wedding invitations and birth announcements,
7:29
and I wasn't even starting out with web stuff.
7:31
I was creating
7:35
a mail-merge Word document,
7:38
and then we were using that to fax blast all of our customers,
7:40
and I was customizing the mail merge to be
7:43
depending on the customer, and it was all this logic inside Word.
7:46
It was awesome.
7:49
That transitioned, within that job,
7:51
into working on their e-commerce presence,
7:55
and so that was good.
7:57
I think for most people
7:59
having something you can develop on your own--
8:01
In my case I had my music blog,
8:03
but I think having your own web presence,
8:06
whether it's a blog; I think blogging is really good.
8:10
Blogging what you're learning is extremely smart
8:13
and having that place where you can iterate and play around.
8:16
So, when you see a new feature come out,
8:20
like you're reading a site and they talk about some new CSS3 feature
8:22
or something, make a demo with it.
8:26
Kind of explore it.
8:28
Put it up on CodePen.
8:30
There's a lot of communities now that are encouraging
8:32
and let you explore things, get feedback.
8:34
Having a social community
8:36
that you can talk to and explore
8:38
your own professional development with.
8:40
I had one, and it's just been very--
8:43
It's a very smart way to go about things.
8:49
[Nick Pettit]: So what first attracted you to
8:51
front-end development, specifically?
8:53
Because you were making a blog, did you do that in WordPress or something?
8:56
[Paul Irish]: Yeah, it was WordPress. >>[Nick Pettit]: Okay.
8:59
Why aren't you, say,
9:01
like a Ruby or a PHP developer, for example?
9:03
[Paul Irish]: For me, the thing that really rocks about front end
9:06
is that you're building the interface,
9:10
and not only are you building the interface,
9:13
and you can make decisions around
9:16
how the interactions are,
9:18
but you're also getting feedback from its users
9:20
and from the customers.
9:22
The thing that they're touching, their cursor is going over
9:24
what you've created, and you're in a position
9:26
to where you can define the style of interaction
9:30
and the quality of the user experience.
9:32
Other people can work on how fast it responds
9:35
and a really strong infrastructure,
9:37
but the UI is just very sexy to me.
9:40
[Nick Pettit]: So it's kind of about that instant gratification then?
9:45
[Paul Irish]: The instant gratification and the feedback cycle of
9:47
I'm creating the interface, they're using it,
9:49
they can love it, they can be delighted by it.
9:52
Or they can hate it when I apply
9:57
a lot of text shadow to it and make it hard to read or something.
10:00
[Nick Pettit]: Sure, sure.
10:03
So, I want to talk about HTML5 Boilerplate for a little bit,
10:06
because I'm personally interested in it.
10:09
I think it's a really amazing project
10:11
for people that are just starting out
10:14
in web design and web development,
10:16
and I think there's a lot more that goes into it
10:18
than people might realize. >>[Paul Irish]: Yeah.
10:20
[Nick Pettit]: So, first, how did that project start?
10:23
[Paul Irish]: Before working for Google,
10:25
I was at an agency in Boston making websites, web apps.
10:27
We had a big team of front-end developers there,
10:29
and when I was going from project to project,
10:32
I was noticing that I was pulling lines of code
10:36
from my markup and from my CSS
10:39
from my last one into my new one,
10:42
and then I was like, well, I should probably make a template
10:44
just to keep track of this, and so I could start off with that template each time.
10:47
That's the original genesis, was just
10:50
that I needed to keep track of all this stuff
10:53
and move it forward from project to project.
10:55
Soon after, I got Divya Manian involved.
10:58
We put out a 1.0 just to see what everyone else thought.
11:02
Immediately it was really great
11:06
because inside HTML5 Boilerplate
11:09
is a bunch of techniques, right?
11:11
One of the things that has continued up until a little bit ago
11:14
is having inline documentation.
11:18
You see a technique, and you can instantly see
11:21
the website where that was birthed,
11:23
and someone can justify exactly why this is important.
11:25
So, it's kind of serving as an education tool.
11:29
You've kind of got to understand why everything is in here.
11:33
So, what happened is we put this out there,
11:36
and immediately we got a lot of feedback
11:38
over on GitHub where we open-sourced.
11:42
A lot of people coming in and being like,
11:44
Actually, I see what you're doing here,
11:46
but if you tweak it, this is a much stronger position.
11:48
It accounts for this edge-case bug in Opera 9.6 or something like that.
11:51
Every character inside HTML5 Boilerplate
11:56
has had a lot of discussion around it,
11:59
and so everything that you see is the result
12:02
of extensive conversations that have included
12:04
some of the best front-end developers in the industry.
12:07
You can go and look back at all those past conversations
12:10
in the old issues on GitHub.
12:13
The commits in the project,
12:15
the log messages have very desciptive
12:18
explanations of why we're doing this.
12:21
It's very well-justified in why all these decisions
12:24
are very strong as a baseline for starting your web project.
12:28
[Nick Pettit]: Cool. I think when beginning developers
12:31
look at HTML5 Boilerplate for the first time-- >>[Paul Irish]: We've got a lot.
12:36
[Nick Pettit]: --they're just like, "Wow."
12:38
"What's all this weird code?"
12:40
Let's talk about that a little bit.
12:42
From the top, what are all those IE conditional comments,
12:44
because that's the first thing people see?
12:48
[Paul Irish]: Yeah, so the IE conditional comments,
12:50
they don't look great.
12:52
They look kind of nasty.
12:54
It's like sometimes you want your mark-up to look
12:56
svelt and sexy and minimal,
12:59
and I love doing that as well.
13:01
Inevitably when you're developing--
13:04
So, this is not a problem for IE6 and IE7,
13:06
which have no market share anymore.
13:09
IE8's definitely still around,
13:11
but it's been a case where
13:13
they have actual CSS bugs in their implementation,
13:16
and you can use CSS hacks,
13:20
like syntax hacks, to target them and change the width or something,
13:23
and change the padding
13:27
to make your layout work and to fix those bugs.
13:29
But using undocumented CSS hacks,
13:31
it doesn't allow you to communicate well with your team,
13:36
and when you're working in a group
13:40
you want everyone to read the code and understand.
13:42
So, the conditional comments
13:44
provide a first-class way,
13:47
that was provided by IE luckily,
13:49
to specifically target these browsers
13:52
with CSS styles that affect just IE7 and just IE8,
13:54
or a combination thereof.
14:00
It's tricky because that's provided for you for free
14:02
in the Boilerplate,
14:06
but I do think that you do want
14:08
to try as hard as you can to avoid vendor-specific styles.
14:10
A lot of times just setting explicit dimensions,
14:16
width and height, on an element will let you avoid
14:19
doing that, and so you should try and go as long as you can
14:23
without specifying specific browsers.
14:26
But it is there when you need it, and it helps a lot.
14:29
[Nick Pettit]: There's plenty more in Boilerplate
14:31
that we could talk about.
14:34
There's--I've heard you talk about
14:36
all the weirdness with carsets. >>[Paul Irish]: Yes.
14:38
[Nick Pettit]: There's Chrome Frame, Modernizr, setting the viewport, and so on.
14:40
What's your favorite feature,
14:45
and what do you think is the most interesting thing that's there?
14:47
[Paul Irish]: I found this on Ajaxian a long time ago,
14:50
and now on Stack Overflow there's a great question called,
14:54
'The Hidden Features of HTML.'
14:57
I submitted it a long time ago, and it's the highest voted, and it's in HTML Boilerplate,
15:00
and this is the protocol-relative URLs.
15:02
So, down at the bottom when we include jQuery,
15:05
we pull it in from the Google CDN,
15:07
but the script source is equal to
15:09
//ajaxgoogleapis.com stuff stuff,
15:12
and you're like, "I think you're--"
15:15
We get pull requests and bug reports on a monthly basis.
15:18
Like, "You got a typo, you missed the http:."
15:22
And we're like, "Actually, we didn't."
15:25
So, the protocol-relevant URL
15:28
provides an ability to--
15:31
the browser will grab the HTTP version
15:33
when the page is in HTTP
15:37
and HTTPS when you're hosted in SSL.
15:39
This is cool because it guarantees
15:41
that the assets are requested securely
15:43
only when it's required.
15:46
There is a small overhead in requesting a secure asset
15:48
when you're in regular HTTP.
15:50
So, this is really cool
15:53
and helps, although it is a little tricky on Windows
15:55
when you're just developing, when you've loaded it up
15:59
from the file system and then in your browser it says, "file:,"
16:02
it can be really slow.
16:05
If you use a local development server
16:07
however, you don't have that problem.
16:09
So, I think the feature is really awesome,
16:12
and that's probably one of my more favorite things.
16:14
[Nick Pettit]: It's crazy you brought that up
16:16
because I was just looking at that the other day
16:18
trying to figure out what happened here.
16:20
It's kind of amazing to me just how much
16:23
goes into a, supposedly, vanilla webpage.
16:26
I mean, it's called 'Boilerplate,' right?
16:30
So, it seems like it should only be the most basic things that you need,
16:32
but there's a lot there.
16:37
Do you think the job of a front-end developer has become
16:39
a lot more complicated in recent years?
16:41
And is that a good or a bad thing?
16:44
[Paul Irish]: Well, there's 2 things happening at the same time.
16:47
One of which is that age-old legacy browsers
16:50
are on the decline. IE6 is dead.
16:55
If you look at market share numbers, IE6 is dead.
16:58
IE7 has under--actually just about 1%.
17:01
IE is really strong but still
17:04
that's improving.
17:06
A lot of front-end developers' pain has been
17:08
the old browsers that haven't kept up
17:10
with not only fixes, but features that we want to use.
17:13
So, that part is getting easier.
17:17
By the same point, the last 3 years
17:19
have brought an enormous amount of features
17:21
to browsers that we now get to incorporate
17:24
and figure out the best way to incorporate.
17:26
So, for instance, if you're using a CSS transition,
17:29
do you use that CSS transition
17:33
and just let it fall back
17:36
if it's not supported by the browser?
17:38
I recommend you do.
17:42
But you could choose to feature detect it with Modernizr
17:44
and then use jQuery to animate
17:48
the same general transition.
17:51
So, figuring out your fallback scenario
17:54
is a little tough.
17:57
A little bit ago, a few of us put out a site called,
17:59
'HTML5 Please,' which aims to provide
18:01
a bit more guidance for all this stuff.
18:04
So, basically, you get to look up
18:06
for every feature, all the new stuff,
18:08
you get to look up exactly
18:11
what is probably the best way to handle this
18:13
for a cross-browser scenario,
18:15
where you might not have support everywhere.
18:17
Should you use a polyfill script to enable that feature in an old browser
18:19
or should you just let it fall back
18:23
or is there some in-between state that is probably the best way?
18:25
Finding that is tricky, but I think there's more and more resources out there that help.
18:29
[Nick Pettit]: It seems like this is something
18:33
that's unique to the nature of web development
18:35
where you have to come up with these fallbacks
18:38
for all of these different browsers coming out.
18:40
Do you think it'll always be that way,
18:43
or do you think we'll hit some point
18:45
where things are pretty stable,
18:48
and web development is just kind of a little bit more static?
18:50
[Paul Irish]: Well, so if we got there,
18:56
if we got to that point, that would essentially indicate
18:58
that there's not any
19:00
groundbreaking new features being added.
19:03
I kind of don't want to be there. Right?
19:07
At the same time, I don't like
19:09
having to send a bunch of polyfills
19:12
at older browsers
19:16
and just testing and worrying about that.
19:19
So,yeah, that's getting really complicated and messy,
19:22
and managing the various states,
19:24
like if you think about the old state of
19:27
all browsers must look--the experience must look the same in all browsers
19:31
to the new one which is we feature detect, we find out what we can provide,
19:34
and there's a lot of combinations of how your site looks.
19:39
Then you're like bringing responsive design, and it's changing.
19:42
So, from a capability and future perspective, it's different
19:45
from a viewport size; it's a different experience,
19:48
and when you've built a site,
19:52
and you're testing it to make sure that everything is right,
19:55
there's a lot of combinations to look through.
19:57
Here, the most important things are
19:59
choosing features to use where the fallback scenario
20:01
is you kind of forget about it.
20:05
If a browser doesn't have border radius CSS transitions,
20:07
that's probably okay.
20:10
A lot of these just kind of enhance.
20:12
The other part is
20:14
that I think we could actually, as a community,
20:16
do better to help encourage our users
20:19
to be using browsers that we specifically want
20:23
to support, and that helps our job,
20:26
and it helps them.
20:28
I know conversion rates improve significantly
20:30
when the experience is faster.
20:33
Helping your users be on the kind of browsers
20:35
that you yourself enjoy
20:39
actually has a good business support,
20:41
and is a lot more fun for users and developers, of course.
20:45
[Nick Pettit]: There's so many steps
20:49
that are involved in front-end development at this point.
20:51
This is something you were blogging about recently
20:54
where you said the tool chain is a little bit overwhelming.
20:57
There are so many steps and there are so many different
21:01
tools and techniques to deal with each one of them.
21:03
Do you think there's a need to simplify that
21:06
and try to bundle all of that together?
21:09
What are your thoughts on that?
21:12
Because I feel like the barrier to entry
21:14
is really high for somebody that's new to it.
21:16
[Paul Irish]: Yeah, so, it's tricky.
21:19
There's a lot going on,
21:21
and, yeah, it's a lot to absorb.
21:24
I've recently been working
21:26
with Addy Osmani
21:29
and some other people inside the web development community
21:32
to put out a project called, 'Yeoman,'
21:34
and this project is about putting together a lot of tools
21:36
that help you build better web apps.
21:39
Now, there's a lot going on in there,
21:42
but it's using things like CSS pre-processors,
21:44
live reload,
21:47
even shipping a plug-in for Sublime text.
21:50
So, there is like a baseline of features
21:53
that most front-end developers use,
21:56
and I don't think this is really listed anywhere.
21:58
Maybe I should make a blog post out of this,
22:00
but there's a few things that these days are pretty well accepted
22:02
as these are fundamental to development.
22:07
People don't talk enough to their colleagues, coworkers
22:10
about what is their process for developing.
22:14
How are they interacting
22:18
with their text editor, their source control?
22:23
I think there could be a bit more of a conversation
22:25
around what we can do to make sure that
22:28
when we're coming back to work on our projects
22:33
it's not frustrating and instead it's fun,
22:36
and I'm getting work done quickly.
22:38
Every time I watch someone else do their work
22:40
and I sit next to them and I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa,"
22:44
"What did you just do? What was that keyboard shortcut?"
22:46
[Nick Pettit]: Right.
22:48
{Paul Irish]: I think we should do a lot more of that.
22:50
[Nick Pettit]: Do you think it's okay for people to just use the stuff
22:52
and maybe not totally understand it but just know that,
22:55
"I need to do this thing for it to work?"
22:59
At what point does it just become an abstraction?
23:03
[Paul Irish]: I think it's--that's a great question.
23:06
So, right now--
23:09
Nicolas Gallagher is the new project lead
23:12
on HTML5 Boilerplate.
23:16
He's kind of taken over, and he's doing a fantastic job.
23:18
So, his perspective is that
23:20
the Boilerplate project is aimed specifically
23:23
as a baseline--this is a baseline for web apps,
23:28
and it can be used for web apps and websites,
23:30
and there's not really much to take away,
23:32
and there's probably not much to add.
23:36
In fact, it's a very stable project
23:38
at this point because it's not trying to solve
23:40
other problems.
23:42
Now, let's say in jQuery, for instance,
23:44
this has been a longtime question
23:46
which is, "Should I learn JavaScript at the same time as I learn jQuery?"
23:48
"Should I learn it first?"
23:52
My answer to that has always been
23:54
you learn them at the same time,
23:56
especially things like math and strings and array methods.
23:58
You want to learn those JavaScript methods fairly quickly,
24:02
because there are not good answers for them in jQuery.
24:06
At the same time, you don't want to have to learn
24:08
how a lot of the intricacies of the DOM work
24:11
very early on.
24:14
So, I think it's a matter of
24:16
learning the techniques as you're using the tools.
24:19
So, in HTML5 Boilerplate,
24:21
you kind of dig into some of the documentation,
24:23
and at some point you'll just be like,
24:25
"Why?" And you should be asking that question.
24:27
That shouldn't preclude you from using the tool.
24:30
At the end of the day, you want to enjoy what you're doing,
24:33
and you want to do it fairly quickly,
24:36
and you don't want to be frustrated.
24:38
So, you use the tools that are available.
24:40
I think it's important to understand how they work,
24:42
and right now I'm trying to get a better understanding
24:45
how browsers work, and those are really complicated.
24:48
But I'm not going to tell everyone that every web developer
24:50
needs to understand how all of the web browsers work.
24:54
I think we're okay with that kind of working as a tool.
24:57
It's a balance.
25:01
Understanding the internals of any tool
25:03
will help you be much stronger at using it,
25:06
but you don't need to understand it
25:10
to use it.
25:13
[Nick Pettit]: So, wrapping up, what advice would you give
25:15
to web designers and developers out there,
25:17
just as a very general question?
25:20
[Paul Irish]: Sure.
25:23
[Nick Pettit]: What can they do to better themselves?
25:25
[Paul Irish]: One of the things that happened to me
25:27
a while ago was,
25:29
I had joined the jQuery IRC channel.
25:31
So, IRC is kind of, it seems nerdy.
25:35
Yeah. Nick's like, "Yeah, definitely nerdy."
25:38
But I joined that a long time ago,
25:41
and I was just super active in it, and that's how I got involved
25:43
in jQuery projects, started doing developer relations for jQuery,
25:45
joined the jQuery team, was involved in the project for a long time,
25:49
and it was all because I joined the IRC channel
25:52
and just started talking to people and helping people.
25:55
So, helping other people with
25:57
front-end development
26:00
you learn a lot, and I would recommend that.
26:03
The same time that that happened,
26:06
I found a group of people that were
26:08
doing a bunch of jQuery, doing a bunch of JavaScript,
26:11
and we just formed this kind of social group
26:14
of 20 of us.
26:18
It was also on IRC, and we would just talk all the time
26:20
about what we were doing,
26:24
and this led to--there was a little bit of competitiveness,
26:26
but a lot of cooperation.
26:30
We would work on projects together,
26:32
things like MovetheWebForward.org
26:34
and HTML5 Please, have come out of this group.
26:36
So, having--
26:41
So you're not alone without a mentor.
26:43
It's great to have a social group
26:47
where you don't feel like completely inferior to everyone around you
26:49
and can kind of support each other.
26:52
The last part of this is really just to
26:54
be able to have fun while you're learning.
26:56
I think part of that is
26:58
creating little demos and experiments for yourself.
27:00
Doing that will give you more experience with cool features
27:03
and things that you want to explore
27:06
and help you feel more confident when you
27:08
propose to your boss, "Really we should do it this way,"
27:10
"Why? Why?"
27:12
And you'll be like, "Well, I've actually done some work with this,
27:14
and it's not as bad or as scary as you think,
27:16
and, I don't know, it'll all work out."
27:21
[Nick Pettit]: That's the advice that I always give to people
27:23
is just, "Do cool stuff and share it with other people."
27:25
[Paul Irish]: Yeah, absolutely.
27:28
[Nick Pettit]: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it.
27:30
[Paul Irish]: Cool, thanks.
27:32
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