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 (55)
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.
Chris, thanks so much for doing this AMA. You have been doing CSS-Tricks for a while now and the consistency of growth and expansion of the project and business is awesome.
Can you describe a few of the big "inflection points" you've gone through in building the business?
Hiring is always a big one. I remember so clearly that feeling of what it's like to hire someone for the first time. The feeling you take them on and start paying them, you're earning exactly that much less money, which is a scary feeling. I've still not really taken the full plunge on CSS-Tricks, where everyone that works there is part-time only, partially due to me needing to baby-step outgoing money to make sure the value from having people working is high enough to offset the cost. Typically, it is, but you still gotta be smart about it.
Hey Chris!
What is your favorite thing about working at CodePen and/or CSS-Tricks?
What keeps you going?
You know what I really like? I like getting into the office every day and having a pretty decent amount of freedom of what I'm going to do that day. I'll probably have meetings. I'll probably have some stuff on the ol' calendar. I'll probably have some team expectations I'm trying to meet. But I also usually have plenty of time to pursue things that are interesting to me at the moment.
Sometimes I'm in the moment to drill through some emails. Sometimes I want to tinker building some demo that sounds like fun. Sometimes I want to write up a thought or record a video. Sometimes I want to plan something out or document something. Sometimes I want to talk something out with other people or do some pair programming.
I'm fortunate that I'm the boss (lol) and I put myself in that position on purpose so I had that freedom.
"I'm fortunate that I'm the boss (lol) and I put myself in that position on purpose so I had that freedom."
Love that. Thanks for taking the time to answer.
Hello Chris, thanks for doing this AMA!
what are some of the things of the CodePen community has done that surprised you?
I love it when we get bug reports... along with the exact code we can copy and paste to fix the problem haha.
Love it when people to weirdly creative things like use their 6-up grids in their profile to make the previews all go together in some cohesive way.
I love it when people make things on CodePen that are so mind-blowingly creative that I would have never thought of it in a million years.
I love it when the community takes things into their own hands, like online meetups and creative online get-togethers that we had no hand in at all other than being a fun place to build.
How do you juggle so many projects? What's your advice for new founders?
I feel like I don't, actually! Quite a long time ago I scoped what I work on to just the three projects I mentioned at the top of the article. It was for the exact reason of NOT juggling too much. I still work hard, but I don't work crazy hours. I track my time with RescueTime and it's ~40hrs a week.
I'm not sure I have great startup advice. Build something people want, listen to your customers, all that. I wish I was better at it. My favorite advice is to be persistent. Any success I've had is because I kept doing the thing for years upon years upon years.
Codepen and Css-tricks are both amazing tools/ resources, with large audiences. Curious about how you got started and the highs and lows (esp the lows). How did you stay motivated and keep going all these years? How did you find an initial team, and how did you incentivize them (money, equity, both?)
What were your biggest business challenges and learnings?
I cheated really. My co-founders on CodePen were just friends in real life I already had, and they became friends because we already worked together at two different companies. It was a very natural transition and they needed very little incentive. We've done everything 33 / 33 / 33 since day one.
I'm a pretty even keel guy, so not a lot of highs and lows emotionally for me. But the lowest always seems to come from threat of failure. Even when failure isn't around the corner, when you're running a business, you need to be looking and projecting pretty far out. You can't get to the point where you try to run payroll one day and realize you're out of money, you need to see that coming years away and be steering away from it. That's active planning and decision making you have to do, and it's the least fun kind of planning you can do. What changes do we have to make to not fail in 18 months? Disaster planning. Way way less fun than how can we spend all these piles of money we're making?, which is a position I've never been in.
Great advice!
where is the fold?
you think it's worth suggesting a {
position: above-fold;}?I'm not sure I've ever made a big fold-based decision once in my career. Not a big fan of that thinking. THERE IS A LINE IN WHICH THIS IMPORTANT MODULE MUST NOT CROSS haha. Prioritizing the most important stuff to be higher up the page, sure, websites don't fold like newspapers.
Plus, we've got viewport units now, so if you absolutely need to position something in the top visible viewport area, you can.
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