Hello! Like the title says, I am the co-founder of CodePen (I have two fellow co-founders: Tim and Alex), I am the (owner? creator? CEO? lol it's just a blog ok) of CSS-Tricks, and co-host of ShopTalk Show with Dave.
I think websites are great. I have a personal one in addition to the other sites I help run. I probably like yours.
Nothing has been more fun and helpful over the years than writing stuff publicly. It helps me think. It starts conversations. It gets me invited to stuff. Heck, a sizeable chunk of my income comes from sponsorship and advertising which is largely in and around that writing.
Every time I tweet I think, aw snap, that would have been more useful as a blog post.
I think of myself as a front-end developer because I mostly write code that is meant for the browser. I feel like I have a decent perspective on the trade, as I work on (and have worked on) lots of projects across lots of different stacks and at lots of different scales. There are good and bad ideas everywhere.
Ask me anything!
Latest comments (56)
I have created a few interesting and complex animations in my codepen account. How do I show them on codepen's homepage so that people can see them? Here's my codepen link.
codepen.io/kh-mamun/pens/popular
Thanks for CodePen and CSS Tricks. You're awesome! I'm a big fan of yours. I've always wondered how you do it all - from the picture - looks like you don't sleep much ;)
My question:
I've been doing back end / full stack for the past "who knows how long" - even though I really love the front end and pretty much spend most of my "personal project" time doing stuff with JavaScript, React CSS, SVGs etc. I do this for fear that I'll be stuck being the "designer" and then take a pay cut. I feel like for interesting front end work maybe you need to actually be in San Francisco or New York or the like.
For example: my team has many who sometimes work on back end and sometimes on the front end - but I think there's only one person works solely front end (I have no idea how much she's making - but she does good work - and a lot of it - so she's probably underpaid).
Am I crazy? Am I wrong? Am I just a masochist?
Please advise.
Thanks.
Also Chris your my first follow! I think your pretty nice.
Hey Do you know how to grow on Dev?
Hi Chris, what you do think about the comeback (have they ever gone?) of the personal websites? This owning-your-content 'thing'?
Sorry if it's a too broad question.
I don't have any data on if having a personal site have rollercoastered in popularity or usage. But I do feel pretty strongly that it's a good idea.
I think it's a mistake to not have a personal site and a mistake to not own your own content. There are a lot of people on Earth, and having a personal site for yourself is probably the best way there is to make yourself known and stake a little claim for yourself. That's where content you create should be put, even if it also goes elsewhere.
I'm not particularly worried about this comment I'm writing right now (as far as "content creation" goes), but anything that's a complete thought of mine I like to make sure I have published somewhere that I own. I feel like living breathing proof it's a good idea.
If there's any Remote job, I can work. I have good knowledge in Dotnet and SQL dev.
It's fairly common for dogs to have Instagram accounts. How would you feel about a trend towards the open web, and for more dogs to have websites instead?
Could they ever have an impact on IG's Dog market share?
I like how you think Mike. I enjoy Instagram, but I like the open web more. Let's zero-sum this thing. If Instagram has to die for open web dog websites to live, I'm OK with this.
Thank you for the implicit support of the Dog focused GraphQL CMS startup I have just decided to do
Sanity and ghost are nice and all, but they don't have passion like your product. Consider me an angel investor.
If you never thought about CodePen, probably my friends and my boss wouldn't understand what I was talking about.
The second thing I have to say about CSS-Tricks. Since university, you helped me a lot. I didn't count how many times I used CSS-Tricks for my tons of research.
There are many types of achievements, but I care about these kinds of achievements.
I hope people inspired by you.
*as irrelevant
I love these kinds of productive people. They are the Tesla of our era :)
I hope you forgive my grammar mistakes :P
Cris, are you enjoying tinkering with css/html?
ya
But what do you enjoy more, css/html or js coding?
Hey Chris, thank you so much for doing this AMA. Just wanna start off by saying that I admire your work a lot and thank you for your part in CodePen and CSS-Tricks. I feel that being a part of both of these platforms is what got me into learning front-end development in the first place so thank you so much.
My question is what is something that you wish we could add in CSS? and what has been inspiring you these days?
I feel like we all should take every opportunity someone asks this and scream Container Queries! until we get them.
The idea is that we should be able to write CSS that says "When this element is this wide, this CSS should take effect" (and not just width, but whatever media queries we have at the page level already).
The best use-case demo out there is Philip Walton's page.
I want to write a card component that shuffles itself around based on how wide it is, not how wide the page is, because there isn't always a direct connection between those two things (e.g. a card component can show up in a narrow sidebar on a large screen, but be full-width on a tablet or something).
EVERY component can be in a situation like that, so for the love of CSS, let me write media queries scoped to those components. I echo a lot of other people when I saw that if we had this, the vast majority of media queries we write would be these, not page-level.
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