I really appreciate you coming out. >>[Paul Irish]: No problem.

[Nick Pettit]: So, for people who don't know who you are,

how would you describe yourself?

Who are you, and what do you do?

[Paul Irish]: I am a developer advocate

on the Chrome team right now,

and so I kind of focus on--that encompasses a lot,

but I focus on everything I can do

to make it better to create compelling content for the web.

We've got a lot of great content inside of Chrome.

I wanted to help educate people about that,

help people understand how to use things like

the Chrome DevTools better.

I also come with a big history of front-end development

and open-source projects that I work on

to help developers

learn what they need to know

to do better front-end development,

make better websites and web apps.

[Nick Pettit]: That's awesome.

You're involved in a million different projects.

You're doing Modernizr, HTML5 Boilerplate,

which I use all the time by the way.

You've been on the jQuery team,

and you've made all these really handy tools for

front-end devs.

This might seem obvious, but

what's the motivation for working on all these different things?

[Paul Irish]: I think part of it

is basically that I feel a lot of satisfaction

helping other people, and so part of it is just that.

Also, the other thing--I think this is actually another part that's happened--

is that I have a really bad memory,

and what that translates into is

if I don't write something down, I'll forget it.

So, this happened in front-end development where you learn this technique

of using media queries or the viewport meta,

and you need to keep track of this

because this is the right way to do it

in this situation.

So, that eventually translated into what became

the HTML5 Boilerplate project,

where a lot of best practices were distributed

all over on blogs and books and things like that,

and I was just like we need to get this together

just to keep track of it;

so I can keep track of it and remember to use it on the next project.

So, that's helped me a lot and has helped other people.

The other thing for me that really drives me

is that I want the web to be

where people build great things.

I'm just really excited about anything that I can do

to help make the web be a stronger platform

for making great, really cool stuff.

[Nick Pettit]: So, you're very diligent

in tracking all of these different things?

[Paul Irish]: Because I can.

[Nick Pettit]: How do you balance your time working on all those different projects?

[Paul Irish]: I don't have a good mechanism

for time management right now.

I use a really cool tool called, 'WorkFlowy,'

which is like a super-enhanced

to-do method list app. It's really cool.

I set up priorities for myself

on a quarterly basis

and try and get them.

I think that's actually quite important,

which is to have a longer-term view of what you want

to attack, because it's so easy on a daily basis

to be totally distracted and

just be like, "I want to play with this new thing

and get it done. Oh, wow, something,"

and then you totally forget that you have this much larger,

higher-impact thing that you should be doing.

So, it's hard, and I'm still really bad at time management,

but I'm working on it.

[Nick Pettit]: I know what you mean.

With being involved with so many different projects,

I guess you kind of have to keep a big-picture view

as to what all those things are working towards.

[Paul Irish]: Yep, and what the priorities are. Yeah.

[Nick Pettit]: Cool. So, before we continue, I want to back way up

and just get some of your history.

Where did you grow up and what were you into?

[Paul Irish]: Sure. I'm from Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

So, I'm from New England where we say,

'wicked,' 'It's wicked cool.'

[Nick Pettit]: Wicked.

[Paul Irish]: I was into music.

I was in the marching band; I played the tuba.

I was into drama. So, I was a band and drama kid in high school.

I was really into music and, in fact,

the first time that I really got going online was

I created a music blog.

This was in--I put it out in 2004,

and I thought I was so late to the music blog scene,

but it turned out that I was one of the first 50 or so.

Having that environment where I had a website that had a lot of traffic,

and I could play with the design and experiment

and get a lot of feedback

on how people liked it,

that was one of the first times when I was really like,

This front-end development thing is a lot of fun.

[Nick Pettit]: That's when you first became interested in the web and technology?

[Paul Irish]: That was when I was like,

this could definitely be full time.

I'd been playing with websites.

Back when IE4 came out

they did this really cool marketing campaign.

This was when the DHTML term arrived,

and so they had this marketing campaign

where they rented out all these movie theaters across the U.S.

and invited a bunch of developers,

and I went and I got free popcorn and a free t-shirt

and a free Windows 95 install CD,

and they showed about what you could do in IE4,

and it was amazing.

So many great features came out then,

and so that was when I was like,

this interest of mine, there's cool stuff in here.

Eventually, it quieted down.

I went to college, but after that everything picked back up again.

[Nick Pettit]: So, did you go to school for this stuff?

[Paul Irish]: I went to school for--

I got a degree in technical communications.

I don't actually know--

I really do wish that there was more university-level coverage

for web development.

Front-end development is hard, and it's a pain,

and I wish that there was a more sophisticated education

program for this.

I got education in computer science and mathematics,

and management and communication.

[Nick Pettit]: With us being an education company,

I'm interested to know if

you feel like your degree really helped you

in your career, or--?

[Paul Irish]: Mine did,

and I think these days having a computer science background

has a very direct effect.

I wouldn't say 5 years ago that computer science would help in web development,

but nowadays, especially on the client side,

there's so much logic there.

You're writing jQuery, things are going good,

you're translating, you're writing larger applications.

[Nick Pettit]: It's getting complicated. >>[Paul Irish]: It's getting real complicated.

A background in computer science lays a lot of the groundwork

so that you're not making stupid mistakes

and taking 4 months to learn how you should have done things.

So, yeah, computer science has a big influence

on where the trajectory

of front-end development is going for sure.

[Nick Pettit]: Cool. Well, I think a big challenge

that's facing people coming out of college today

is how to make the transition to

a career and not just kind of hopping from job to job

or being unemployed.

How did you make that transition?

Were you just kind of in an internship,

and it was a really natural progression

or did you--?

[Paul Irish]: Yeah. I started out I was doing

some marketing for

a stationary company

that made wedding invitations and birth announcements,

and I wasn't even starting out with web stuff.

I was creating

a mail-merge Word document,

and then we were using that to fax blast all of our customers,

and I was customizing the mail merge to be

depending on the customer, and it was all this logic inside Word.

It was awesome.

That transitioned, within that job,

into working on their e-commerce presence,

and so that was good.

I think for most people

having something you can develop on your own--

In my case I had my music blog,

but I think having your own web presence,

whether it's a blog; I think blogging is really good.

Blogging what you're learning is extremely smart

and having that place where you can iterate and play around.

So, when you see a new feature come out,

like you're reading a site and they talk about some new CSS3 feature

or something, make a demo with it.

Kind of explore it.

Put it up on CodePen.

There's a lot of communities now that are encouraging

and let you explore things, get feedback.

Having a social community

that you can talk to and explore

your own professional development with.

I had one, and it's just been very--

It's a very smart way to go about things.

[Nick Pettit]: So what first attracted you to

front-end development, specifically?

Because you were making a blog, did you do that in WordPress or something?

[Paul Irish]: Yeah, it was WordPress. >>[Nick Pettit]: Okay.

Why aren't you, say,

like a Ruby or a PHP developer, for example?

[Paul Irish]: For me, the thing that really rocks about front end

is that you're building the interface,

and not only are you building the interface,

and you can make decisions around

how the interactions are,

but you're also getting feedback from its users

and from the customers.

The thing that they're touching, their cursor is going over

what you've created, and you're in a position

to where you can define the style of interaction

and the quality of the user experience.

Other people can work on how fast it responds

and a really strong infrastructure,

but the UI is just very sexy to me.

[Nick Pettit]: So it's kind of about that instant gratification then?

[Paul Irish]: The instant gratification and the feedback cycle of

I'm creating the interface, they're using it,

they can love it, they can be delighted by it.

Or they can hate it when I apply

a lot of text shadow to it and make it hard to read or something.

[Nick Pettit]: Sure, sure.

So, I want to talk about HTML5 Boilerplate for a little bit,

because I'm personally interested in it.

I think it's a really amazing project

for people that are just starting out

in web design and web development,

and I think there's a lot more that goes into it

than people might realize. >>[Paul Irish]: Yeah.

[Nick Pettit]: So, first, how did that project start?

[Paul Irish]: Before working for Google,

I was at an agency in Boston making websites, web apps.

We had a big team of front-end developers there,

and when I was going from project to project,

I was noticing that I was pulling lines of code

from my markup and from my CSS

from my last one into my new one,

and then I was like, well, I should probably make a template

just to keep track of this, and so I could start off with that template each time.

That's the original genesis, was just

that I needed to keep track of all this stuff

and move it forward from project to project.

Soon after, I got Divya Manian involved.

We put out a 1.0 just to see what everyone else thought.