Finding Meaning in Your Web Career, with Mat Marquis

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Mat Marquis

In this episode of the Versioning Show, Tim and David speak with Mat Marquis, a web designer well known for his work on responsive images, the Boston Globe redesign, and CSS container queries. In this hitchhiker’s guide to starting a web career, Mat talks about web standards, making a name for yourself on the web, and finding meaning in your web career.


Show Notes


The Versioning Show with Mat Marquis

Transcript

Tim:

Hey, what’s up everybody, this is Tim Evko …

David:

… and this is M. David Green …

Tim:

… and you’re listening to episode number two of the Versioning Podcast. This is a place where we sit down every two weeks to discuss the industry of the web from development to design — with some of the people making it happen today and planning where it’s headed in the next version.

David:

So, let’s go ahead and get this version started.

Tim:

Today, we have a special guest, Mat Marquis. Mat, how’s it going?

Mat:

Good, good, glad to be here.

Tim:

So, for any of our listeners who do not know who you are, would you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself?

Mat:

Sure, I am an Open Web Engineer at Bocoup. I’m the chief noisemaker for the Responsive Issues Community Group — by which I mean, I’m not terribly bright or terribly talented, but I am very loud, and that is largely my role in that group. I’ve done a couple of An Event Aparts, I have a book coming up that I definitely didn’t mention just now … but be on the lookout for that thing I never brought up! Yeah, I keep busy.

David:

Well, you didn’t mention your book, but I think we’re going to be asking you some more about it. But before we get to that, one question that we like to ask every one of our guests, since this is the Versioning Show: in your current career, what version are you, and why?

Mat:

O boy, o man, that’s a loaded question.

I think the start of the career was at least version two of me, personally. Career-wise, I’ve got to be four or five — I mean, it’s like a Gmail perpetual beta thing, I think. But, at least the version’s ticking up over time.

David:

I like that — the Gmail perpetual beta. I think in some senses we’re all in that Gmail perpetual beta.

Mat:

I’m a living bug-fix release: precious few features; a lot of stuff broken that’s less broken over time.

Tim [1:55]:

So that’s very interesting. Do you want to speak a little bit about how you came into web development as a career?

Mat:

Yeah, I followed a pretty traditional route, which was web development by way of hitchhiking, following a failed career in professional carpentry — which I think is a pretty typical story for most of us. Yeah, I was in my early 20s … ish. It’s so long ago I’ve almost forgotten now.

I started off in carpentry. Bottom kind of fell out from under that, so I ended up in retail for a couple years, which was just tops! [wry tone] I was a line cook a couple times; I was a bouncer for one ill-fated shift. At the end of my career (in retail), I was working in one of those cell-phone booths in a mall, where they yell at you as you walk by — Hey, we have free Razr phones!

Yeah, so it was that era. And I gave up one day. Like, I was living in an illegal, two-bedroom apartment with five of us total, and I was scraping by paycheck to paycheck, and I just quit. I just threw my hands up, and I was, like — I’ve got nothing lined up, I don’t know where I’m going, but it’s not here. I’m out, I’m done, I’ll figure out the rest later.

So I bail, and at the end of my two weeks, I bought a big green backpack and I just started walking south. There’s a buddy of mine lives down at the time in Cape Coral-ish, Florida. And that was the furthest away of anyone I knew, so I just started walking.

And I hitchhiked around the east coast for about two months. I get down there, and I end up making a website for a woman he was dating at the time, because she was like — You know computers and stuff, right?

And I was like, well, I worked at CompUSA doing sales for a little while, so I can type, yeah. And, Could you make me a website?

I was like, there’s only one way to find out. So I made this hot pink, table-based nightmare of a website. Bunch of people from back home pooled their money to fly me back, because they were like — You’re definitely going to be stabbed to death on your way back … and that was not strictly false.

And yeah, I got back and I was like, I can’t do carpentry. I can’t just pick it up and restart a carpentry business. I’m not going back to retail, full stop. But I made a website that one time, so maybe I could do that.

Clunked around with some websites off craigslist for a while. I didn’t contact them, I just read the description, built it and threw it away. Just living off a little bit of money I was making from the website I built in Florida.

David [4:28]:

That’s interesting. So, in terms of your technical skills, you’re largely or completely self taught?

Mat:

Completely, yeah, no degree, no nothing. Couple of O’Reilly books.

David:

It’s proof that you can learn a lot from from the public media and from what’s available out there — just from books and from self teaching. But I’m curious how you pushed yourself through to get to the point where you actually had the kind of skills that you could sell them to somebody.

Mat:

That’s also unconventional, in my case. After a handful of craigslist pretend gigs, I started taking a couple for money, and they were like — install this PHP script, etc.

One of those was one of that same kind of set up; it was like a couple hours of work, and they contacted me after the fact and said — You seem like you’re kind of junior level, are you looking for an internship for school credit?

And I said, absolutely, yes, my school would love for you to give me an internship for credit for that school that I do not attend.

[Laughter]

So yeah, I was there for like three months, and at the end of it they’re like — Weren’t we supposed to sign something — isn’t there some paperwork?

And I said, Yeah, no — about that, that was all a lie. Would you like to hire me for something?

And they said, Yeah, okay, sure. This worked out all right, so why not?

Tim:

Bold strategy.

Mat:

Yeah, it’s a lot of dumb luck. So, I was there for a couple of years. Freelanced for a couple of years. Filament group for a couple years. And now Beaucoup for — I don’t know — a year a half.

Tim [6:00]:

It seems from your origin story — for me at least — it’s very motivating to go out and just do good stuff for the web in general. It helps people start careers and things like that — so that people can use it as a tool to just do good things in general. And I’ve noticed in your career, you’ve done a lot of good for the web, whether it be with responsive images or just performance or accessibility.

Do you want to talk a little bit about that, and what keeps you going in that respect?

Mat:

I’m going to be honest — this may sound a little mercenary from the get go, and it’s taken a lot of explaining at work to kind of get around this philosophy toward the web — but I grew up blue collar. I grew up after that bouncing from job to job and getting whatever paychecks I could get. I very much approach this as a job. I’m not super passionate about typing in the startupy, passionate sense. And it kind of took a while for me to get right with that idea. Like I show up and it was like, all right, I can type for eight hours a day and then go home and have that be the end of it, and just do that, day in, day out once the novelty wears off. I’m getting paychecks and everything’s mediocre. But all this stuff is new enough that it’s not easy in any industry to build up a name — to get your name out there and gain a little bit of influence in this, that, and the other way.

But this stuff is all pretty new, and everybody still just kind of figuring all of it out. And nobody was from what felt like a conventional background. This mainly kicked in when I was freelancing. I grew up with the sense of, whenever I would talk to somebody doing investment banking or something, that’s a planet I was not allowed to go to. That’s a life I didn’t make sense in.

This stuff is all so new, and everybody was from everywhere, and it was like, you know what, maybe this is it. Maybe I can get myself a job with a desk doing this. Maybe I can make a name out of this, and looking back I way overdid it. I was doing 14-hour days, and I was breaking my back, and a ton of it was privilege and a ton of it was luck, but I ended up in a pretty decent place. So, the first meaning I took from any of this was, I’m going to make it somewhere, I’m going to prove my upbringing wrong in some way.

But once you start doing okay, that fades right out, and you’ve got nothing, you’re just typing eight hours a day. So at that point, it became — What am I going to do with this? What’s worth doing with this? Now that I have a little bit of a platform, now that I can make a little bit of noise and people will listen to me every once so often, what’s worth doing here?

That’s kind of where I ended up: web standards for developers, performance, accessibility for users. That’s kind of the meaning I’ve decided on for this. Because otherwise I’m making a div show in the right place, and that’s not terribly fulfilling work. Hitting borders on stuff — not the most meaningful thing you can do day in, day out, but the idea that I can make something that literally anybody on the planet — people picking up their feature phones, just connecting to the web for the first time — I can make something they can read. That’s pretty big.

David [9:21]:

Well, it sounds to me like you’ve moved past a mercenary stage in your career and into more of a tech philanthropy mode, in which you’re actually trying to help people. I’m not sure people are as familiar — they know the general term accessibility — but can you describe a little bit more what you were working on?

Mat:

Around that time I became increasingly interested in that stuff. Like this feels like the direction I want things to go in, this feels like the direction I want to go in personally, career-wise. But I learned most of it at Filament Group. So, I showed up there, and it was great.

I went into the interview, and John Resig was sitting two feet away from me, eating a meatball sub, so I’m mortified, and I’m like, [whispering] I also do jQuery!

[Laughter]

Yeah, I go in there and I say I’m really into accessibility, and I’m really into progressive enhancement. Performance wasn’t a huge issue at the time — the way it has become now — but I wouldn’t have put it past me to have an interest in it, and so when I went on board there, it was great — everybody speaking the same language.

We’re all focused on accessibility, we’re all focused on progressive enhancement, and then, a little later on into it, responsive stuff. So that’s when I did a little bit of work for the jQuery UI team, early on. I did a lot more work for the jQuery Mobile team, and then, eventually, we ended up in The Boston Globe site, which was the big — Hey, we’re proving responsive can work on a large-scale site. Which led to — in a roundabout way — the whole responsive images effort, because that was when we just started thinking about smarter asset delivery.

We figured out how to make it stretchy, but how do we make the assets context appropriate?

David [11:02]:

Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Because a lot of people have heard about responsive web development, responsive web design in general. Responsive images might be a term some people aren’t as familiar with.

Mat:

Yeah, it’s pretty new stuff. Back over working on the Globe, in terms of making an image stretchy — very easy. You know, max-width: 100%, and then it goes from whatever size it needs to go to whatever other size and needs to go.

But even as far back as the Globe, that one-size-fits-all approach didn’t really cut it.

David:

Well, they had to support Internet Explorer 6, I believe, so that wouldn’t have worked.

Mat:

Yeah, we supported a crazy amount of stuff on that project — mostly by accident, which is always nice.

But yeah, not only in terms of the performance drawbacks — sending a massive image down the wire to everybody, whether or not they see any real benefit — but there wasn’t enough control for the Globe staff, who sometimes wanted to crop out images that better suited the smaller layout instead of just scaling one massive one down.

So, we came up with — I’ll call it a hack, over calling it a script — that used spacer GIFs and a cookie (no lie!) to swap out images depending on their context. It started with the smaller image, and on larger displays would swap it for a larger one, then set a cookie saying, Always give this the larger images.

And it completely fell apart — like right after the Globe launch — just because of super-aggressive prefetching in the browsers. It was like, there’s no way we can apply any logic before it fetches the images.

We ended up sitting down in a group, and we got a handful of people like Paul Irish, Jason Grigsby — a bunch of smart folks. And we started thinking, if we had a standards-based solution for this, what could that look like? And after a week or two of going back and forth, we were like, Hey, I think we have a pretty solid idea here. It was Bruce Lawson’s, originally — the one who proposed it.

And the plan was, We now take this to the standards bodies, and they are going to be delighted with us!

David [13:09]:

Of course! Their doors are open — they’re just waiting for somebody to come in and give them standards!

Mat:

Absolutely! Their motto is invented elsewhere, I believe — their main impetus.

So yeah, we go in all smiles — Hey, we came up with this thing!

And they immediately shut us down with, It is not your place to bring us solutions. It is your place to bring us problems that we may deign to serve them for you.

[Ironically] I’m not still bitter about it or anything.

[Laughter]

But fast forward, after two years of mailing list arguments and hashing out, I think we ended up on version three of the original responsive images proposal, which became itself a spec that we weren’t technically allowed to publish as a community group, but did anyway, as pirate radio.

We ended up with responsive images in the browser. So we have solutions to all the problems we were trying to solve, as far back as the Globe project, and ongoing. What this means — I think it was Tim Kadlec who did the research across a whole bunch of sites — implementing some of these things meant about a 72% savings in transfer, across the Alexa top one hundred sites, or something like that.

And that’s a pretty big dent to be able to put in the web itself. Images are still trending upwards in terms of transfer size, but it’s slowing down. And to be able to be part of a group that had that kind of influence over the fabric of the way the web is built — that’s a pretty big deal.

David:

So is this something that still exist outside of standards, or is this something that’s finally starting to work its way into standards?

Mat:

100% standardized now. It’s merged with the HTML5 spec — I think both versions. It is fully supported in every browser at present except for, I think, Microsoft Edge, which has most of the features.

And, you know, the rest are coming soon. You can use a Polyfill. You don’t have to use a polyfill, which is a good position to be in, because it has a native fallback pattern.

Tim [15:20]:

So, Mat, speaking to the struggle that you had to go through to get this thing out the door. Do you have any advice for people who feel like they might be up against some sort of similar challenge, wherein they’re trying to propose something they feel is better for either their job or the web in general, or a project they’re working on, but seem to be up against this massive amount of pushback?

Mat:

Sure. Standards-wise, I have a hard time saying, Sure, get involved in standards, it’s great fun, because it’s not all that fun. But, almost more than us having stretchy images, we’ve now kind of set a precedent. There wasn’t a lot of precedent outside of the WHAT Working Group itself for a group of like-minded developers to come together and pick a fight and actually gain some traction in web standards.

The Community Group’s model isn’t perfect, but we made something out of it. You know what I mean? So if you were a standards-minded developer, you could start up a community group, you can join an existing related community group, you can go out you can actually pitch stuff and have yourself be heard.

The WICG — Web Incubator Community Group — is now a community group that’s dedicated to getting developers’ voices heard. And they have a Discourse forum. So you’re not locked into a mailing list from 1985, trying to get work done. You can actually join on this website, and you get email notifications and stuff, and it’s just a forum.

You don’t need a thousand-dollar subscription to, or a membership to, the W3C. You can just say Hey, I have an idea, I have a good idea. Who thinks this is a good idea too?

I had a soapbox — a lot of this is privilege. I could ask people via DM, Hey, help me get the word out about this thing. But things have improved some there. And, worst-case scenario, let me be the person you DM to help get the word out there — if you’re a developer, and you need to make some noise about a potential standard.

David [17:32]:

That’s very nice. And you still have a big soapbox, and I’m curious what you see as the next challenge that you want to be taking on.

Mat:

O — heel turn, 100%! I am going to turn super evil.

[Laughter]

Just go full corruption, and just wreck web standards altogether, and then some enterprising young developer will have to unseat me — I think that’s probably the plan.

David:

It’s all going to be Java applets for hover effects, right?

Mat:

Mission critical Flash intros, as far as the eye can see — that’s my plan.

Tim:

And that’s just step one, right?

Mat:

Yeah, it’s World War domination. It starts with Flash intros, and then I’ll figure out the rest.

Well, no, I mean I’ve been talking. As much as I’m loath to keep saying it, I feel like there is a new fight to be picked in container queries. And we started it a little bit, with the Responsive Issues Community Group (which was formally the Responsive Images Community Group). And exactly like you said, now we have a soapbox — now that we have a little bit of skin in the game — it wouldn’t make sense to just pack up and go home. We have stretching images, let’s abandon web standards now, now that we’ve gained some power.

So the plan instead — we became the Responsive Issues Community Group. And so we kind of put it out there — Hey, what’s bugging you? What can we do now? Now that we’re here, now that we’re allowed to sit at the same table, what do we do?

And it was like, almost unanimously, We need a smarter way of handling media queries, so that we can style modules based on their containing element, not based on the viewport size as a proxy for how something fits in a layout.

So that’s container queries. And I wrote an article for A List Apart about it, which was just following the template we did with responsive images — where it’s like, write a couple of blog posts, write an article for a big publication, start making a little bit of noise, see what developer interest is.

And developer interest is very, very active for this, I would say. A quick Twitter search for container queries — you’re going to turn up a ton of people like Why don’t we have this yet?

But Google’s official word on it was, “We’re going to give you access to a bunch of low-level CSS APIs, so you can build your own stuff to do this. So it was almost a wait-and-see thing. That does sound pretty good. I have some issues with the idea of needing JavaScript to handle CSS stuff, but I don’t not want access to those APIs, so let’s see where this goes.

Tim [20:04]:

So, just to clarify real quick, you’re talking about the Houdini project?

Mat:

Yes. But the more I think about it, and the more I hear No, we really need container queries, it really feels like something that needs to be done at the browser level. And I’m not arguing with access with those APIs, because I want any browser API access I can get. But I don’t think that’s the end all, be all.

So things have been a little quiet while we waited to see how the Houdini stuff played out. But I think it’s probably time to start shopping container queries at the browser level around again.

David:

So, what level of technical sophistication do you think people should have before they get at this stage? You’re self taught, and you know that these things were happening, and you had to learn what you needed to know.

How comfortable should people be getting involved in this?

Mat:

Ideally, we have an accurate cross-section of all skill levels represented here. You know what I mean?

Putting together the responsive images markup, there were a bunch of syntaxes that appealed to me, but I’d been doing strictly responsive work for years at that point. They might not’ve been very friendly to somebody just joining for the first time — somebody just learning to write markup in the first place. They might not’ve made a lot of sense.

We need those voices represented way more than mine. So, for the container query stuff, it’s the same thing. Any level of familiarity with CSS, no required familiarity with the standards process. That needs to be fixed to accommodate us, not the other way around.

David:

I’m really glad you clarified that, because I think that this could be a wonderful learning opportunity for people at all stages in their careers.

Mat:

Yeah, for sure, and that’s something I was immensely proud of with the RICG. Every single member’s name went on that spec. We had people submitting their first ever pull requests to change text that went into the HTML5 specification, and that’s huge. How many opportunities do you get to do that?

So, ideally, I’d like to follow the same path with the container queries thing. I’d like everybody involved — as many people as we can get. Unless — and this is important — you disagree with me.

[Laughter]

Because, again, I am gonna turn full evil at some point, and I’m gonna be a ruthless dictator of the RICG.

But you’ve probably got a couple months yet before that happens.

Tim [22:18]:

You have some time.

So, Mat, speaking to container queries, real quick. Have you heard anything about — I guess it’s a trick at this point — using the CSS calc property and min-width/max-width values to sort of fake container queries with CSS?

Mat:

I have not.

Tim:

So there’s an interesting technique going around. I think you can find a few CodePen demos, one of which I’m going to find and post into the show notes. But from what I’ve heard — and I’m not sure if it’s an actual container query — but I’ve heard that you can use a combination of the CSS calc property and min-width/max-width values to basically say — I’m not going be able to explain this, because it’s way too complicated for me, but it is something I’ve heard about. I was wondering if you’ve heard of it, but I’m definitely going to post a link in to the show notes. And yeah, that’s really all I got — not very constructive, but that’s that.

Mat:

See, the more of that stuff I have at my disposal, the better, I think.

It’s especially good when — like responsive images — some of the solutions people come up with are buck-wild ridiculous. Because that’s fodder, where we can go to standards bodies and be like, Look what we’re trying to do. Look at the hoops we have to jump through to make this happen. This just needs to be solved.

And the other thing is, people need stopgaps. So for responsive images, that’s how picturefill came about — where it was like, We know you need this now; here, use this in the mean time. We’ll also use this to prove that we need this in a larger sense.

So solutions like that — the more of those we can shop around, and get people’s opinions on, and get people using — I think that goes a long the way toward furthering this stuff.

Tim:

So, how can people find you, and help out with stuff, and follow you on Twitter?

Mat:

I’m going to be honest, I’m the worst. The best way to get ahold of me in any possible respect is on Twitter at this point — that’s that’s who I’ve become in my adult life. And that’s @wilto — W-I-L-T-O, based on an old high school nickname that stuck for reasons I never understand.

That’s a funny story. Hit me up on Twitter, and I’ll tell you. Other than that, I’m Wilto on GitHub, Wilto pretty much everywhere. It’s not even a word, so it’s easy to find. But yeah, I’d say if anybody want to get’s ahold of me to talk any standard stuff — anything we’ve brought up here today — @wilto on Twitter.

David [24:49]:

Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us, and for sharing all of this with our listeners. I think that we all learned a lot today.

Mat:

I appreciate you having me.


David:

So, Tim, that was a really amazing interview. And I think you have an advantage over me, because I think you’ve actually worked with Mat before, right?

Tim:

Yes, actually. So, it’s funny that Mat spoke a lot about how you can contact him on Twitter, because that’s exactly how we started working together.

So what happened was, Mat was working on the responsive image specification. And around the same time that started to get really big, I was doing some work in WordPress, and I found that if I wrote some bad PHP in a specific way, I could actually get a full picture tag from a WordPress image call, basically. Because WordPress returns all the versions of the image that you upload.

So, in the background, when you upload an image on WordPress, it uses a library called ImageMagick to make several different sizes of the image that you’ve uploaded. And you can actually get that back. So I made a little bit of a PHP script to do that, and then I was like, Man, I’ve got this thing. Let me contact Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks, who writes a lot of WordPress articles, and see if he’s interested in maybe writing about how this is a possibility.

And so he was — and he was actually interested in me writing for him about it as a possibility. So him and I worked together to make it an actual plugin — available on GitHub, not on WordPress — and we co-authored an article for CSS-Tricks about it. And, eventually, we had this small following, and one day Mat Marquis tweeted about how they had just integrated responsive images as a core feature on Drupal, and he’s like, Let’s do it on WordPress.

And I tweeted back, because I had known about him, and I was like, Yeah, I have this thing, I’d love to help. And he was like, Okay.

And then, a few weeks later, I was a member of the RICG GitHub organization, and I had a meeting scheduled with all of the founders of WordPress, and I was in way over my head, just working on making this a thing.

And then, from there, it was about a year-long process — maybe a year to six months (timeline’s a little bit fuzzy) — and eventually we got responsive images into WordPress Core.

David [27:19]:

That is amazing. It’s like a fairytale story, because you went from just I’ve heard of something, I’ve got an idea to This is reality, and I’m working with the people who are building it for the world.

Tim:

Yeah, it was it was pretty amazing. I most of the time felt like the mouse in the room, listening to these people who have built these amazing things talk about how we can get my code into WordPress Core. Which is funny, because I don’t think any of the original code that I wrote actually landed in. But I did get to write a little bit of it, and see it progress and turn into this really amazing sort of thing. So that was an exciting experience.

David:

That is amazing. And sometimes I think it’s easy to forget that these standards and these things — they’re just people, and people with ideas, making projects and putting them out there. And if it’s really good, it sticks, and that’s what happens — that’s how these people get to that level.

Tim:

Yeah, definitely. And speaking of that, it seems like Mat has a really good way of remembering that. Because his story of how he came to work on the web is probably one of the more astounding that I’ve heard. It always reminds me — what I’m doing with my career and with my life: maybe I can get some good out of it to help other people.

But I feel like Mat’s story is a very good reminder for me that it’s about people. It’s important to help others in that respect to get things out there and make a name for themselves in their career. And it’s very refreshing to hear someone that is not just thinking about the next IPO.

David [29:07]:

He also brought a very important point, which is how really new everything that we’re doing is. It’s not like there’s a path in front of us and it’s very clear what direction we’re going to go in. People can come up with a completely off-the-wall idea that solves their problem — that scratches their itch — and maybe there’s somebody else out there can help. And you can follow that altruistic spirit to put something out there, and stand behind it, and support it, and follow other people who are doing the same thing and gain followers who are working with you. It’s amazing that we’re living and working in a field and at a time when so much is changing so quickly.

Tim:

Yeah, definitely. And to all the web developers out there, and designers, and UX individuals — who are just getting started — it’s important to remember something I often forget. Like you said, David, it is so new, and regardless of how you feel, if you ever feel like everything’s been done, it hasn’t. There’s still so much more to do and further to go, and there’s so many boundaries to push and break forward, that it’s just a good thing to remember that there is still a crazy amount of good things and new and creative things left to be done on the web.

And because of the nature of the web, I’m not so sure that there will ever not be endless amount of new things and new projects and just exciting web features to come out in the future.

David:

Absolutely. At the very least, we’re going to have to respond when Mat turns evil.

Tim:

Yeah, we could form a giant coalition.

[Laughter]

David:

One of the things you mentioned — and it ties back into what Mat mentioned — was this feeling of being the tiny little fly on the wall in this room full of giants. But one of the things I really like that Mat said was how important it is, in the type of work that he’s doing, to get people from all skill levels — from the most sophisticated, experienced engineers, to the person who’s trying to cobble together little pieces of scripts from other websites and stick them together and make what is going to work, work for the users.

Because, that perspective — I don’t think that we realize it. I think we all we all might have a tendency to have impostor syndrome about whether we can be involved in these efforts, but I think every voice needs to be heard.

Tim:

Yeah, definitely. And as someone who also came from a non-traditional background, where I didn’t go to school for computer science or anything, it’s a good reminder that I also came from that environment where I had no idea what I was doing. And just remembering that reminds me to go out of my way to ensure that anybody else in that position gets their voice heard and has an opportunity to learn more about the field.

David [32:06]:

We should do a survey of our listeners and find out. You and I are both non-computer-science majors working in tech. We were talking with Mat, who’s also a non-computer-science guy also working in tech. He’s putting out standards.

I’m curious about the listeners for the show, because I know a lot of people learn what they need to know from places like SitePoint, and just pick up the tools that they need and go out there and do things. And it’s lovely to be living in a time when that’s possible.

Tim:

Yeah, I’d definitely be interested in seeing what that data looks like.

David:

Well, I think this was a really interesting interview, and I’m looking forward to hearing the feedback from listeners. I really hope that you folks get in touch with Mat and follow up, because it sounds like he really is looking for people to help with what he’s doing.

Tim:

Yeah, definitely.


Well, thank you so much for listening, everybody. We always enjoy getting to talk technology with all of you.

David:

We would also like to thank SitePoint.com, and our producers, Adam Roberts and Ophelie Lechat. Please feel free to send us your comments on Twitter — @versioningshow — and give us a rating on iTunes.

Let us know how we’re doing.

Tim:

We’ll see you next time, and we hope you enjoyed this version.

M. David GreenM. David Green
View Author

I've worked as a Web Engineer, Writer, Communications Manager, and Marketing Director at companies such as Apple, Salon.com, StumbleUpon, and Moovweb. My research into the Social Science of Telecommunications at UC Berkeley, and while earning MBA in Organizational Behavior, showed me that the human instinct to network is vital enough to thrive in any medium that allows one person to connect to another.

Tim EvkoTim Evko
View Author

Tim Evko is a front end web developer from New York, with a passion for responsive web development, Sass, and JavaScript. He lives on coffee, CodePen demos and flannel shirts.

PodcastsitepointversioningVersioning Show Episodesweb
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