The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The legacy of CSS-Tricks (Interview)

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we've officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And...not only has it been a journey for us, but it's also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.

well we're here we made it this is episode 500 and it has been a journey a long journey nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today as of this very episode we have officially shipped our 500th episode and as a companion to this episode jared and i also shipped a special episode of backstage where he and i reflect on these 500 episodes a link is in the show notes so make sure you listen thank you so much for joining us on this journey and not only has it been a journey for us but it's also been a journey for a good friend chris collier and css tricks so chris joined us today talking about his personal blog he grew to a massively popular contributor-driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way.

The news, of course, is that CSS Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. And we get into all the details with Chris on this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS Tricks. Big thanks to our friends and partners at Fastly and Fly.io. Our pods are fast to download globally because Fastly is fast globally. Check them out at Fastly.com. And Fly helps us deploy our app servers closer to our users, and you can too. Learn more at fly.io. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Square.

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You get it all. Learn more and get started at changelog.com. Again, changelog.com slash square. Chris, welcome to the Change Log, man. Hey, thanks for having me. This is huge. I feel like a massive congratulations is due for y'all. 500! Wow!

500 is a big number. I really, that's a, it is a big number because you're weekly, right? Which means it's like 10 years-ish, you know, with 52 weeks in the year. Right. It's actually more than 10 years because we're weekly, but we're not consistently weekly. We are now, but we weren't early. Yeah, earlier. Yeah.

For a while. Well, as you know, I do a show, Chop Talk, with Dave Rupert, and we just crossed that milestone ourselves. So we were on 525 or something. you know, I do a show, Chub Talk, with Dave Rupert, and we just crossed that milestone ourselves. So we're on 525 or something. And similarly, we are not perfectly consistently weekly over those 10 years, but pretty close, you know? And so, yeah, we're both celebrating. Over a decade of speaking into little microphones for both of us. That's crazy, right? Right? It is crazy. I didn't turn it into a freaking empire like y'all did. Well, we're trying.

You have an empire of your own. I think you did in other ways, though. So when did you guys begin ShopTalk, though? We started November 2009, and I think it was around the same time frame. I can't remember the first one, but thanks to the power of URLs, I could probably figure it out. Because it would just be ShopTalkShow slash 001, I guess. Well, it's got to be 2012 if you just hit a decade. Yeah, 2012, but January 12th.

Pretty good. What was the plan then? Was the plan to podcast for a decade, or were you guys just like, let's hop on the mics and talk? I don't know. I've never planned the demise of my company on day one, although maybe we should. Well, you've got to have some sort of goal, right?

Yeah, but there's no shame in it. People quit doing crap all the time, you know? Yeah. You just let it flitter away. But I tend not to, you know? Maybe that's some part of my DNA. You tend to keep things going. Yeah, I do.

I do. For better or worse, you know? But I feel like people, like this is an abstract thought. Please do. I can't get deep on you right away. But I feel like people give up a little too early. Right. Generally.

They're like, oh, this startup isn't working. Meh. I'll throw it into the dumpster and do another one. Which can be smart because I think there is probably a point at which that you're like, you realize you haven't hit product market fit and need to do a thing. And that's smart. Like, why would you, you know, grind and hustle away on something that you have some evidence isn't working,

but like, do you? Yeah. You didn't work on it hard enough, you know? Whereas I'm the opposite. I'm like, I will never throw this away. I will grind on this thing forever until everybody knows it. I think that's especially true with podcasts

because they're slow burns. The growth of a podcast, I tell people who are getting started, don't compare your podcast to a YouTube channel because the growth is going to be slow and consistent. People will do better than others, but don't look at your download numbers

and just immediately give up because you're only reaching 100 people because a lot of people never reach 100 people in an episode. But you just keep doing it, keep showing up. And as long as you're enjoying it and you get the process, you get better, better, better, it grows and it just snowballs over time. Yeah, hopefully you don't care that much, you know. I feel like I've seen some success in that regard of like,

I'm doing it because I want to be doing it, because I'd like to be doing it, not because I'm obsessed with some metric. Totally. I talked to a guy yesterday that wanted'd like to be doing it, not because I'm obsessed with symmetric. Totally. I talked to a guy yesterday that wanted to start one for our town in Bend. We're like 100,000 people-ish in Bend. And I don't think there's one in any niche for our whole city, you know? And I was like, oh, that's an awesome idea, actually, because there's enough, you know, Bend pride and stuff that if you did it and, like, made a food one or anything,

that you'd get a bunch of people listening to it just for the, but you'll never get the numbers because you're automatically geographically niched so small. So you better love doing it because you got to do it for the love of the community. Really at that point, the payoff is the community building and then the, you know, the small business uplifting. Like what if you helped a small business not quit because you brought a little bit more joy to their business and a little bit more business to their business? You know what I mean?

And they saw the hope, I suppose, of their possible future where they may have quit or did it worse. I don't know, but you need a curator. Well, okay. So two questions here for y'all because you're podcast heroes too. So number one, like the interview you're having me on, it's an interview show.

Sure. A lot of your podcasts I've got. Is interview just the way to go, or is it played out? I think conversation, really. I think it always has been interview, but I feel like it's never like let's ask a question, and it's never really been a volley kind of interview scenario for us. It's been more of very conversational. And in a lot of cases, we'll meander through certain topics and whatnot.

So I think... We often tell our guests, we didn't tell you this during the pre-show, but we often tell our guests, we don't have a set of index cards with questions written on them. We don't prepare an interview like you might if you're working for 60 Minutes or 2020 or whatever they do in the professional interview world. Or who's that guy for the actors studio where he asks the same questions at the end?

Like if you showed up at heaven and what would you say to God? What's that guy's name? James. Gosh. I know what you're talking about, but it's not in there anywhere. He gets spoofed on Saturday Night Live and stuff.

Famous interviewer. We don't do it like that. So I guess we don't really think but it's not in there anywhere. He gets spoofed on Saturday Night Live and stuff. Famous interviewer. We don't do it like that. So I guess we don't really think of it much like an interview show. It's more like, hey, let's find interesting people and talk to them. I don't think that ever gets old. So has it played out? I mean, it is kind of a standardized format, but it's good. It can be good.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think that off-the-cuff thing is fun because then it gives you this vibe that you're driving around in your car and you're a part of the conversation too almost because it's so off-the-cuff. So much feels like you're just sitting. You're all on freaking bar stools or whatever. That's pleasant. It's heartwarming. Okay, so 500 then. Is that social proof, you know?

Are there people finding this show on their podcatcher of choice? And they're like, look at this show, clearly knows what they're doing. I'm going to actually subscribe to it because they're at show 500. Or are you like, are they, you know, because I'm sure there's a mixture of both, but what's the bigger percentage here? Are they like, I've missed the boat. Like they, they're going to have too many inside jokes. They're going to, it's going to be too, they're too deep into their thing that I, I'm not, I'm not going to subscribe to that. They're too far. I don't know the answer

to that. I think the second one makes less sense because it's an interview show. Like we don't have, I guess Silicon Valley is the only running theme at this point, Adam. We don't really have inside jokes. We don't have, there isn't much back and forth between Adam and I. There's always a guest. There's always somebody else we're talking to.

And we're so curious and interested in them that of course, eventually like our personalities show up and are there through our questioning and through our conversation. But I think if they thought that it would be incorrect, but maybe for a show more like shop talk where it is you and Dave talking, you guys have guests as well, but not all the time, where it's like you guys have just been talking for 10 years, the two of you. And like that is the show, right? It is, yeah. We probably have more of that kind of repeated, you know, like, we're not going to talk about X because we talk about it all the time kind of thing, which makes it not a good entry point show probably, which is a little unfortunate. So what I think about it is because

are you missing out then on some level of excitement? You'll never get to benefit from that hot, new, fresh, exciting spirit that you can when you launch something. Right. I don't know. I don't know that number. I just feel like it's a badge of pride and it's a badge of like, are we just dinosaurs? Yeah. Well, that was funny because in the pre-show before you joined, uh, we were just talking about a thousand, you know, like a 500. I said, if we're going to like celebrate anything, it's gotta be 500. Cause there's no more bigger numbers, but until a thousand, like who's going to celebrate 750. So like a a thousand that's a decade from now and by then we're like in our 50s like are we even still can we podcast podcasting still exist i would assume

that you're going to be are we so dinosaurs that can we talk can we still write software and i'm just being tongue-in-cheek a little but yeah no audio will never die just like a paragraph will never die i mean it's like come on yeah You might be listening to it in different, you might be listening to it on your space flight. I'm heading to Mars, listen to the changelog. We're going to have to flesh out our neck beards, you know? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Anyway, I just think

it's kind of interesting. And if you're, so if you're new listener friendly, always, every episode is like as good as the last as a place to start. It's like, you have to educate people then. To that point, so in the intro, we do say for new listeners, go here to subscribe. For long-time listeners, we have a membership.

So if you want to level up and get closer to the metal, there's an ad-free version. There's some stickers that are yours just waiting to be had. We're going to throw some other bonuses in there in the future and stuff like that. But we do. just waiting to be had. We're going to throw some other bonuses in there in the future and stuff like that, but, you know, we do. On the same token,

if there's like three episodes of some podcast, I probably also won't subscribe to it because I'll be like, that's going to be a little rough. I never thought about us

having such a deep well though, scaring people away, being episode 500. I just wish I could tap into some excitement. I wish that we could do a show on Chop Talk

and have it benefit from that launch kind of feel. And I just don't see a way to do it. Are you guys getting bored? No! I just want, you know, you can't help but think about, like a product really, a product has a release.

You do a new feature, and then you go, I'm going to market the new feature. Well, we just added something new. I mean, we added a Monday news brief, which is like four to eight minutes. It's just me. It's scripted. It's got like audio stuff coming in and we're just like talking about the news, what's going on. And we just get in, get out. So you're a network. So you get to benefit from that. Like we have a new show on the network, which is, that's pretty cool. Yeah. And we get to pull in stuff from around our other shows as well from time to time, which

helps things kind of cross-pollinate and be interesting, hopefully. That's the trick, you know. Because I know you asked me on to talk about CSS tricks generally. Yeah, let's stop talking about us, man. No, but I mean, but I think that was interesting. I never had like a network really, but in effect I sort of did because I had CSS tricks and Shop Talk Show, which were not, they're not related super directly, you know. It wasn't Shop Talk Show by CSS Tricks or anything. It felt like its own enterprise, you know. We did the accounting separately, you know.

Yeah. And then CodePen, which is very different from both of them. But I was, I could sell across them. They were mine still effectively. And that was cool for advertising because I could, I could put it together and make it look like a network buy essentially. And that was highly, highly effective. Yeah. Yeah. We have that across our own shows. We don't have different properties. Like ours are, I guess, more tightly aligned in brand than yours are, even though you are kind of the brand that

ties all three of those together. Yeah. Still, you get to say, I buy, more tightly aligned in brand than yours are, even though you are kind of the brand that ties all three of those together. Yeah, still you get to say I buy across multiple shows. I'm sure it doesn't hurt. Well, I wanted to go way back because I discovered you as just a guy on the internet a long, long time ago. So long ago. And I'm wondering when Adam discovered you. I'll tell you when I did, because I don't even remember what you were doing. Was it a video podcast? Was it on YouTube? I don't know. I didn't discover your website. I first discovered you in a video. You're basically like doing a Twitch stream, but this is like way, way, way before Twitch existed. And you were just like building a sidebar. And you were, I remember you were like, you had a drink there, maybe it was water or something, but you were just hanging out on a video, building a sidebar for a website. And I remember it was kind of the first time I saw somebody who just shared their whole screen and did stuff. And the one thing that struck me, I'm like, this guy has so many things in his dock.

I just couldn't believe your dock was just... You should see it now. And you had the cool, all the Adobe apps icons icons, you know, and I was like, this is very interesting. I've never seen something like this. And I don't, I think it might've been, did you ever do like a video podcast of you like coding back before YouTube? Or maybe this was just like very early.

Oh yeah. Well, for sure. CSS tricks has a, you know, you can go there still. CSS tricks slash screencasts. I think that's the URL or at least it'll redirect you to where it needs to go. CSS Tricks has a, you know, you can go there still. CSS Tricks slash screencasts. I think that's the URL, or at least it'll redirect you to where it needs to go. And did you syndicate those via, like, they would be in the iTunes podcast store? They were and still are.

Are they? Yeah, like if I were to, you know, I mean, CSS Tricks is sold to DigitalOcean. So there's new people at the helm running it. Although Jeff Graham is there, went to DigitalOcean at the time of the sale. He was the lead editor for me, and he's the lead editor now. Right. So it has some of the same lineage and stuff, which is pretty cool. But it's a WordPress website, right? If I were to go in there and say, new screencast, you know, and put all the little data in and stuff this is so old like that time that you're talking about like when

i first started it i can youtube probably existed but it for whatever reason didn't seem like like i would just go all in on youtube it just didn't feel like that was what people did so i'd shoot the video and get some like mp4 or something and then find somewhere to host it, which unbelievably to me, I was able to figure out S3, you know, get the freaking video on S3. And so when I post it from WordPress, there's like custom fields in WordPress and not like cool advanced custom fields. I just use the old school, like built into WordPress, like little dropdown menu thing and made one of them for that S3 URL. It was just like i named it like you know url to video or something then i pasted that in there and then when you visit a screencast pay

in there's other metadata too like how long is it and blah blah blah then i made a custom another custom post type of thing in css tricks that would create an rSS feed just from screencasts, and then it would grab all that extra metadata stuff that was basically defined by whatever iTunes wanted. When you craft a feed for Apple, it has to have all that extra crap in the XML. I just put it all in there and then submitted it to Apple, and they took it, and it's still on there to this day. So if I publish a new screencast, it's, you know, it updates that RSS feed and it goes to it goes to Apple. People don't really it's just not a thing anymore. Like how did video video podcasts just died?

It's interesting because they launched right alongside audio podcasts, like for the very beginning. Apple's like, yeah, to this this day you can still do it i didn't realize that because it's crazy how audio took off inside of itunes back then video really didn't no and now we're kind of in a sense coming full circle because now we have like spotify adding video podcasts back in apple starting to talk about them again of course there's a proprietary spotify is proprietary you have to like upload the video into spotify i believe yeah so it's lame so it's lame and everybody's like why because youtube exists you're like if i feel like watching videos i'll go to the ultimate home of all video on the web youtube and it's just a damn masterpiece over there you know i hate to admit it's a lot of control for them but like there's great i like watch a lot of youtube i'm not afraid to admit yeah i do too

i got many a playlist many of subscriptions many of hobbies are in not just like like i mean if if you wanted to know who i am probably watch my youtube history more than any other search right yeah there you go because it shows my little don't you go on little benders like i'll get excited about some channel or something and watch like a lot of it and then and then i'm off it i'm like oh that was a weird phase yeah i'm like get out of my feed come on i mean because then the algorithm gets you well the thing is it like it feeds you like once you go down this rabbit hole it just keeps feeding you that eventually i guess i'm like no i don't want i just was curious i'm not interested but it just keeps feeding you that thing then i start to get mad yeah and then, and then you dip your toes again, and then you're locked in forever.

Like, for a minute, I got into these, like, watching, like, really, people that are really into Lord of the Rings, like, explain some intricate detail of, like, what would the show have been like from the Dark Lord's perspective or whatever. And I watched one, and now it's just endless. I'm on a real bender right now watching guys solve Sudokus and like think through their process and that

because it's like their brain is like on display. They're like this, this, this. I'm just into it for a minute. I know it's a fad and I'm going to stop watching it. But then the algorithm will show it to me

for the next couple of years, I'm sure. Anyway, it got off the rails there. But yeah, yeah. The CSS tricks had screencasts. I'm hesitant. Anyway, it got off the rails there, but yeah, yeah, CSS had screencasts. I'm hesitant to say pre-YouTube, because I don't know the date that YouTube launched,

but I hosted them myself. Pre-YouTube would have been at least before 2007, right? Because YouTube was around 2007. I remember listening to Leo Laporte on a podcast talking about the internet pipes. Like, literally, that was the ongoing meme at that. I think it's like the origins around talking about the internet pipes. Like literally, that was the ongoing meme at that. I think it's like the origins around thereof

of the internet pipes being... Well, that one politician called it a series of tubes, didn't he? Exactly, like a series of tubes. Yeah, that's what I'm referencing, sorry. I think of Leo Laporte too, because he did video way back. He did. In a nice studio. Very committed to quality.

And he later admitted like that whole deal was probably not worth it like but now he's probably happy he did because it's kind of gone full circle and video is like important again for me though chris i think i don't know if this goes back before your screencast days or right around the same time or when jared caught up with you but i remember you before you worked at wooufoo with kevin hale and them and this is like less comp days so this is like 2009 2008 2007 time frames i don't know when you began css tricks but i recall you being in the footer i believe like you were in the footer like a picture of you of wufoo i believe was in the foot of css tricks down oh css tricks not in the foot of wufoo? I believe it was in the foot of CSS Tricks. Oh, of CSS Tricks, sure.

Not in the foot of Wufoo. Yeah, if you really care to look at that, you can go to csstricks.com slash design dash history, and it'll show you all the different versions of it. And there's definitely more than one version where I put my own face in the footer. Yeah, I'm still not above that. I think that's kind of cool to see whose website it is.

Let's see which one I remember most, because that would at least go back to the legacy. Yeah, it feels like there's almost most of them, I'm afraid to say, have me down there somewhere. So V18, you had 18 different major redesigns throughout, huh? Yeah, I think it's technically 19 now, so I would only put it in the history once 20 came out. But it is in new hands now.

Well, for me, it goes way back to even, I can't see version one. Version two seems a little foreign to me. So I want to say it was version three, but maybe version two. That was that era for sure. That was really early days. days yeah this looks familiar yeah i mean you had the full-on tabs were you doing like sliding windows with the tabs and stuff like that with like an image you know what i mean you know all that stuff

gosh tabs back in those days was a challenge like visuals like that may have been why i went to your website freaking everything was. Because you were probably explaining sliding Windows tabs or something like that with CSS. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know how I fell into that Leskov crowd. I think it was probably through just being in the southeast in Florida. And then Woofoo was part of the, you know, they had this magazine treehouse, but not the treehouse you think of.

They had this other web design magazine treehouse that they did that was full of that, like, how to do stuff on the web. And then they stopped doing it for whatever reason. But so they were part of, you know, that was our overlap and probably how we knew each other or something. But me joining them was fun because they were a bigger part of the entrepreneurial crowd. They were a Y Combinator, so it was that type of thing. That's where Kevin's at now. He's a partner, I believe, at Y Combinator. Yeah, he was for a while. I don't know if that was or still is.

He could be. I don't know what Kevin's doing. I haven't talked to him in a long time. I don't know what partner designates necessarily, but he's in there. He's in the mix. I see him on their YouTube channel. I see him advising startups and entrepreneurs and founders, et cetera. So I still pay attention to Kevin. Yeah, he was always good at that stuff. Yeah, that's how far back it goes for me. So basically the beginning, roughly the beginning-ish. Roughly, but I got my job at Wufoo because of CSS Tricks. Is that right?

Like I would not have gotten it if CSS Tricks didn't exist because I used CSS Tricks to talk about Wufoo sometimes. Because especially in those really early days of CSS Tricks, I didn't really have a big plan. I was just writing crap that, because I was a professional web designer. I had clients and I would do professional work. I wasn't just, I never really did freelance.

I was just in the thick of... This begins a personal blog, right? It was a personal blog. It was never like a network of many authors. No, and it kind of stayed that way. I would always write very personally, you know, even in the later years when I, when there was other authors and stuff, but I write whatever the hell I want on there. You know, I wanted to keep that spirit. I wanted to do that on purpose. So it felt like a blog, you know. That I believe is the beauty of it though, was that you could explore. And I would,

so I couldn't say, I don't know you that well. I know of you. We've met in person one time. I've never seen you on video or done a podcast with you. So my knowledge of Chris Coyier really is mostly through just knowing of you, really. But I would always say that you're an explorer. You're a curious explorer willing to go to the ends to eke out the finite things of beauty in web design and web development. And then CSS Tricks is a manifestation of you sharing that.

That's how I would describe you and what you've done with it. Seems fair to me. And then it just turns out that when you post like, this is how you do X, Y, and Z with like code snippets and examples that it

just so happens that that stuff is like pretty juicy SEO-y stuff right you know and builds over time like pays dividends

years later yeah and I was never never anti-advertising to this day I'm if anything I'm pro-advertising. I like that companies get to use content sites to reach customers because they're too busy building their product.

So use me. I'll be there. I'll, you know, I'll get the people and I'll show you, you know, I'll tell them to use FreshBooks or whatever crap. Yeah. And that felt good to me. And that was from early on on CSS Tricks. I was making money on the side doing it. And that seemed to be going up and up and up.

The growth of the money grew with everything else that was growing, the audience and traffic and such. That's awesome. So you said Wufoo probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for CSS Tricks. How many different things can you substitute said Wufoo probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for CSS Tricks like how many different things can you substitute for Wufoo like how much has happened in your life because of this website I mean probably all of it for real life what do you mean all of it

well my professional life for sure yeah because then it was so I had CSS Tricks and people were reading it and then they'd know me because my mug's in the footer and the web was smaller back then you kind of got to remember. There's just not as many people. There's a lot of, like, knowing who each other were.

Like, if I got two comments from the same person, I'd be like, oh, there's Jared again, you know, for sure. Like, you just thought of, it just felt smaller. And it felt like, I hate to say it, but a little more positive, too. Like, these days you really got to be, like, almost, like, careful and protective about how you engage with the wider Internet because there's just, it's, you know, toxic or whatever the right way to talk about that is. There's not just, like, overwhelming positivity. There kind of was in the early days of the niche web design world. It was just all fun all the time. Maybe I'm glossing over or seeing rose-colored glasses, but it was a small

community of people having fun writing about the web and stuff. And then as it grows and gets as big as it is today, there's less consequence for being a jerk. Right. It took really good intention to crap on somebody's website. To go to a blog post and crap on your blog post would take a lot of intention. Whereas like in a hacker news post or something like that, it's pretty easy or even a Twitter thread. Yeah, you can just run your mouth off and there'll be no consequence for doing it. Whereas if you were to do that in the early days, it'd be like, well, bye. You're just like not invited to our cool club anymore.

Well, I think we're all trying to grow our networks then too. You know, like why would I destroy my own personal future possibilities by crapping on your blog posts? Like that was the early blogosphere, the blogosphere we talk about, you know, like that's what it was. It was. Yeah. You would just be out. I don't care what you do after that. After I already know you're a jerk, and I hold spite like that. I still do. If you said something jerky to me, you are off the list. It is interesting to think, though, that as you had said in your own

words, all of it can be pinned back to the road you took, the journey you took with CSS Tricks. Congratulations for putting in all the work. I mean, we talked about quitting early. You'd said that.

And the grind, like, I mean, this is, how many years of CSS Tricks was the addition? Like, when did you begin it? What year? What's the culmination of years? How much dedication did it take? It was 07 was the first. So five years older than, you know,

it's 15 years instead of 10, you know, just a little bit of extra there. And those first five years were so small though, that by the time 2012 runs around, CSS Tricks was already not big, but like big enough to matter. I was already definitely getting invited to speak at conferences quite a bit and stuff, which would definitely never happened without CSS tricks. And then conferences have their own kind of little snowball effect to them, or at least they did. Things are different.

Yeah. Things are weird now. Who knows what's, yeah. But then it was kind of like, wow, you're a conference guy, you know, that opens doors of itself. There was less conferences then though. Yeah. Right?

Like you had a list apart. That was like the premier place to be. I'm sure you spoke there. There's just a lot of conferences now, right? Yeah, and that one was a milestone for me because you don't just get invited to that without having done anything else. By the time you're at Event Apart, you've already done a bunch of – you've done something to, I don't know, earn your spot there in a way. So that one still feels special to me. I'll be at that one this year for one of my shows,

and it still feels cool. Yeah, yeah. But that opens other doors. Like if you were to do consulting or whatever, I didn't, but I could have, you know, like that, because people know who you are then and all that. So I've never had a professional door open to me that wasn't opened essentially by CSS Tricks. This episode is brought to you by our friends at FireHydrant.

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we're talking about jason cocky just took a extended hiatus recently from cocky.org and he's been doing it for like 20 plus years. And I was curious, like, I would love to hear the motivation, but also. I wonder how he did it. He never had ads or nothing. How do you make that work? Yeah, he went with the support me style. Yeah, but how does that work?

That never works. That never works. It's true. It's always a bonus. It's for, it's always a bonus. It's for, it's really to give your most little fans a way to be a little closer. Yeah. Make it beneficial for them.

Give them something special. And, you know, pay for the paid for Slack or the paid for Discord or whatever it might be that costs money to make it happen. It's usually a break-even scenario. It's never like, oh, we're getting rich from this thing. Yeah. I'm a fan of the model. I just mean like dude had a family and lived in New York City. Which has the highest rents ever in the world right now.

Manhattan is like $5,000 plus for any given rent. Yeah, that's whack. Right. So, right, that's a lot of members, you know, despite him being like the world's best blogger, which, you know, you can have that crown, Jason. Here you go. Still, it's a lot of money for just membership only. So I don't know, maybe. So did you face a burnout moment or a, I'm ready to, you were just steadfast, like a robot, like a machine. Generally had some perspective, you know, like it really wasn't, it was mostly fun. And I think,

I feel like people have written a lot of good stuff about burnout. You know, like Sophie Shepard's The Road to Burnout is paved by context switching and stuff like that. That would sometimes get on me like I'm doing too many different things. But I've always kind of thrived on that. That one doesn't bug me that much. I'm kind of a multitasker because I want to be. But the burnout, I think more comes from working super hard and not affecting any change, like not shipping or not having any control or feeling like you're

spinning your wheels on stuff. And since I've always been the guy steering the ship, I just didn't, it didn't, never felt that way. If I want something to change, I change it, you know, and I kind of embraced that. So I never really did feel burnout, although I was, I think I was getting tired. In the end, I mean if we're driving to the point of like then why did you sell it? It was just the offer was negotiated well. I thought the buying company was going to do a good job with it and they seemed to be doing fine with it. And so it just was kind of like, eh, it's not like I'm committed to everything for life.

Well, something you had said in your post was that it had gotten to the point where it was more than one person's job to run it, basically. Like it became more than you were actually thought you would ever have to do to maintain it, was the sentiment I gathered from that paraphrase of what you said. I think that's true because it already had Jeff running lead editor who was – that was dang near a full-time job. He did other things too just because the – you know, like the CSS tricks made money, but it didn't make so much money that it could support a large full-time staff. That just wasn't on the – in the cards at the – at its scale. So – Yeah. But yeah, you know, the bottom line though is, is CodePen.

Like that's a bigger company that I am a co-founder of. So I have a real responsibility to the other guy who's Alex Vasquez, who's my good friend and co-founder of that company, which I see bigger potential in and is already a much bigger product and all that. So to have this like, you know, thing that's ostensibly a side project that's as big as

CSS Tricks got started to like weigh on me and almost like this isn't fair to the other company kind of emotion. Focus. Yeah. Because I, you know, CSS Tricks wasn't, I wasn't just some silent owner. I wasn't just, you know, I didn't just have a property manager. You were the main voice. Yeah, I wrote for it. I approved everything. I ran all the advertising. I mean, I did a lot,

you know. In the end, the thing that got outsourced the most to Jeff was just like, what's going to run and when? And make sure like the posts are all polished on the way out and stuff, which is a ton of work. But that I was able to outsource, thank God. Otherwise, it really would have been too much. But then in the end, it just felt like too much because even stuff like advertising, you all know what it, work and advertisers, all these back and forth emails and approvals. A lot of details.

Yeah. And then I'd have to come into this booth where I'm sitting right now and just be like, blah, blah, blah. It's the best thing out there for memberships or whatever. And I was happy to do it because I like everything. But I had to research who they were. I didn't even always know who the advertiser even was necessarily. You had to care, Chris.

You had to care. Yeah. And it's hard to do when you're so busy, right? I mean, because you do care and you want to care, but you can't care about all the details when you have a multi-faceted you know responsibility tree like you do like with copen if you if they needed you more and you were you had to care for these details and css tricks and you just couldn't show up or as well as you wanted to at some point you like you had said you kind of do it as a service it's different too if CSS Tricks has a longer life possibility

than what you can give it currently, right? Because, like, if you didn't do this acquisition, you know, you would kind of keep going down that road. But, like, if you gave it more room to grow outside of what you can give it, you actually allow it to do more because it actually can do more, right? Absolutely. I think that would be kind of cool. You know, another version of it is, let because it actually can do more, right? Absolutely.

I think that would be kind of cool. You know, another version of it is let's say I'm just like, you know what, I'm going to effectively sell it. I want to step away all the way where I literally like basically don't even have say anymore. What you need then is just like a product owner or something that you really, really, really trust. And I would totally have trusted Jeff to do it, but I just didn't come to that point where I had to have that conversation with him. Like, do you want this? And then what can I offer you to make it

worth it? You know? And then still, you still own it. So like, if something were to happen to Jeff or whatever, guess who's right back at the helm, you know? It's a burden. So it's kind of like, I don't know. It felt a little better to walk away a little bit. And the buying company was DigitalOcean, known for, obviously they're a web host, but they have made their business model content. So it's like, oh, they want to buy more content. Doesn't that make sense? It seems like a super smart buy from them.

Did they approach you or how did that go down? Yeah, they did. They emailed me and because they, you know, it was kind of a two-pronged thing where they signaled some interest early on. And then I don't know, I can't remember exactly how that first conversation went down, but it fizzled out pretty quickly. And that's not terribly rare. I've had plenty of those throughout my career. It's like a little bit of interest and a little bit of

chatter, and then it goes away, and then you just kind of shrug and move on because you're like, whatever. They obviously weren't that serious. But the second time around, I think they had some almost like level of guilt or something about that because it was kind of like, oh, sorry about that last time. We were in, this is where we were as a company then let's contrast that to where we are as a company now and they painted this picture of like we just took this huge round of funding and this is our you know new state of business model we have such and such people in charge that believe x y and z and so they're trying to sell the like the second time is different so give it more attention

and I was like that's cool it seemed almost more important to them than it did to me they thought maybe you were scorned yeah yeah perhaps well you've already admitted here Adam do you admit that often that you're pretty spiteful long term to people yeah he's got a hold of the garage

I'm never crossing your line ever again I mean I will never do it I'm just saying get line ever again. I mean, I will never do it. I'm just saying. Get crossed off, Adam. You're out. There's only so much time on this world. I ain't got time for second chances.

Just kidding. I don't know. Just whatever. I don't even know how I feel half the time. Yeah. Anyway, then we did back and forth. There's a lot of due diligence stuff. what's the answer to all these things? What are these metrics?

How does this part of the business work? Blah, blah, blah. Eventually would lead to offers because they did this thing which I think is smart and probably pretty commonplace, but I don't sell that many businesses. So I don't have a lot to reference of the like let's do the throw numbers out early to make sure that we're, you know, quote unquote, in the ballpark. Because if you don't want to do three weeks of work to get that first number and have it be like, ha ha ha, no buy. Like that would be the worst. So at least throw me a range or something. But the funny part about that is the range then becomes reality, you know,

because you can't throw out numbers without them essentially being pretty real. Right. So there's just a little bit of back and forth. And eventually I got to the place where I was, I was happy with it and it was like, all right, let's do it. It really wasn't that hard. As far as business sale goes, you know, a laundromat would be more complicated because a laundromat will have a lease. It has a bunch of equipment. It has employees. It has all these things that are actually kind of hard to deal with in an acquisition scenario.

And I was just like, oh, no, it's just me. No equipment. No lease. Just some IP. Sign this document. Okay, here you go. Bye. You know, I don't want to underplay it because it was plenty of work.

Right. Accounts, DNS stuff. Yeah, we did all that. And first you formulate a plan, you know, you have to have it all really spelled out because there's the moment where in which you literally get a wire transfer, you know, and then as soon as you, cause I'm not going to, I'm not going to transfer no DNS without the money first, you know. Totally. So you get the wire transfer, but then you own their property. So you have to like go into rapid fire mode and start clicking all those buttons and doing all the transfers.

Like that hour, like it has to happen right now, you know. So that was kind of fun, you know. More than happy to do that once it goes down. Did you seek any counsel, not legal counsel? I'm sure you've had some legal counsel, but like advice was, I mean, this is a big decision for you. Did you have like, Hey, I'm going to bounce this off some people who are, who've done this before. Cause like, if you haven't done it, maybe you're like, I'm getting, I could be getting taken. I don't know. You know, do you have any of those thoughts? Yeah. Yeah. I reached out to

all kinds of people and talked to them about it and tried to, I don't know, just spelled it out, see what they thought, see if they had, you know. And then even more so when the numbers started coming around, being like, does that, like, how would you value it and stuff? And I never did get like a valuation of the company done, which probably a lot of people gave that advice. You can pay for that. It just was a little, it's such a weird company. It's a little hard to do, and it's a little hard to find somebody that's particularly qualified to do it. So I ended up not doing that. But what you know, you kind of know what your company is worth because you have your own accounting to go on.

You can be like, this is what the company earns per year. It has this kind of trajectory. And then you just have a multiplier like am i selling this thing at a 4x 6x 10x what's going on here what are we talking about but at least you have a have kind of a range yeah yeah anyway pretty cool everybody involved was so nice and helpful and it didn't seem like nobody was playing super serious business trickery stuff. Nobody was trying to pull any fast ones or at least it didn't seem like to

me. It was just like people talking about it and they wanted to make it work and we made it work pretty cool. That is cool. Then you have the big announcement which also I think can be intimidating or scary because you have your audience, you have your loyal peeps who love CSS Tricks. Of course, a lot of the traffic you get is probably the people searching for answers.

So they're just like, it's a website they like. They don't really care necessarily who writes for it. Then you have the people that read it like a blog who've like, I've been a CSS Tricks reader, just in my RSS reader for years. And it's like, I'm happy for you, but I'm kind of sad for me. I'm like, oh, Chris won't be there anymore. Like I loved your, especially the post that you would do. I really appreciate your posts where you're like, here's a topic. It's usually a, either a current event or a theme or a trend. And like, here's a roundup of what people are

saying about it. And you kind of do some quotes, but you're always, you're kind of giving your take on their takes. I don't know if you have a name for that style, but you're always, you're kind of giving your take on their takes. I don't know if you have a name for that style, but I appreciate that style. No, but I appreciate you saying that. I think that's cool. Yeah, even Jeff did one of those recently that I think he did a good job of picking up that torch a little bit,

talking about some changes to the HTML document algorithm that have been going around. So I hope he keeps up with that. But yeah, that was kind of my favorite stuff to write too, because like y'all I've been around a while. So when I see stuff go down, I'm like, right. I don't automatically know what's going on, but I feel like I, I, I, just with a little research and talking and stuff, I can kind of figure out the vibe, you know, which is, I guess, kind of a, for like a little homegrown journalism, you know. I always hesitated to call anything I did actual journalism

because I think there's some pretty strict rules to what you do and requirements to kind of get the official journalism badge. Yeah, the people with degrees that probably prefer you don't call yourself their degrees as they are one or something. Yeah, and I know I made some mistakes, You know, like you should at a bare minimum, if you're going to publish some like industry event news kind of thing, you should reach out to the major parties who are involved for comment and talk to them and get the thing. And then I think that's kind of like a bare minimum journalism requirement.

And then and possibly like lighten up on the opinion, you know, whereas I didn't want to. I didn't want to lighten up on the opinion. Whereas I didn't want to. I didn't want to lighten up on the opinion. No, you're just writing. I wanted to weigh in. So I thought the announcement was very well handled. I wonder if there was any trepidation on how it would land. You don't want your people to turn on you because it's literally a sellout, right? I mean, we talk about bands selling out and all this kind of stuff. This is literally like, yeah, I sold the site. I don't own it anymore. It wasn't so bad.

There's a PR team that got involved with it. They asked me to write it. Of course I did. They wrote their own and I wrote my own. To this day, you go to the site there's a link to an announcement that the ownership has changed hands. The blog post is not long.

I did not stay up all night writing that. I just wrote the very basic, like, what would I think if I saw this go down and format it like a fake FAQ kind of thing and write it. And it just, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone that helped. And this is the deal now. And if you have any questions, let us know. And then just let the comments fly. They were, you know, 90% positive. And the ones that were really jerky, guess what we did with those comments?

I hit the trash button on them because that's what I've always done on this site. I don't have time for your negative ass crap. It's still, still my website, you know, at least it's my post on this website. And I don't, I don't, I don't really, I felt I didn't, I've been more nervous about giving a talk than I was about this. Cause I'm like, this is mine. Like I'd this. Nobody else has any right to say what I can and can't do with it. Like maybe that's just like a weird libertarian or something. But I'm like I was like not ready to hear people's opinion whether I had the right or what I should do with the site. I just wasn't sure. I didn't even have to put on a bulletproof vest for that.

I just was ready. I think the design of the post was very well done. I think how you kept it short and sweet was nice. I think the format was nice. You essentially answered what would possibly be the most asked questions for the most part. And you turned it around. You said, hey, in typical blog form, share your thoughts in the comments. And obviously if they're negative, they're going to get trashed. You didn't say that in the blog form, share your thoughts in the comments and obviously if they're negative,

they're going to get trashed. You didn't say that in the post, but that is the truth behind the scenes. And honestly, with DigitalOcean, they've had their history and they've always been even good with us. Back in the beginning of our relationship with them, it was about the community. I learned how

to build a Linux server, an Ubuntu server that's still running today because of a DigitalOcean documentation. And I became comfortable with Linux and comfortable with running Ubuntu and comfortable with standing up various things

just because of their... That's what everybody told me about backend posts is that they're almost even a little dry they're always like how to you know yeah

how to stand up Ubuntu on this type of server or whatever they do a great job an amazing job taking care of that and just knowing

that investment into that side to me I would say like when you have somebody acquire something as beloved

as CSS Tricks has been and is you want to make sure you know sure you can do whatever you want Chris or something as beloved as CSS Tricks has been and is. You want to make sure, you know, sure, you can do whatever you want, Chris. It is yours for sure. We would love it if you give it to somebody who's going to nurture it the same way you have, right? And I think DigitalOcean is the closest you can get to that.

So when you say this is a sellout, Jared, or whatever, like I know literally it is, this is the closest you can get to making it not, you know, the negative side of sellout. You know what I mean? Where it has a good suitor to take care of it. And as you had mentioned, Jeff went with the team and is carrying the torch still yet.

And there's lots of plans and it's got new opportunities. Like this is the best way you could have done it. Yeah, yeah. I hope that plays out. It's still relatively new. Right. You know? And I hope that plays out. It's still relatively new. Right. You know, and I, you know, I don't really know. I have no inside information about what they're going to do.

They've been publishing content. Jeff's at the helm. I'm, you know, I'm even still on the repo. I can see commits to the site and stuff like that. So I'm sure they have plans for it and whatnot, but I just am not privy to it anymore. Because that was a big question is like, well, are you still like around? Are you still like running it? Because that can happen to an acquisition in which that you just now you work there, but you know, you're still involved. And this was not that I haven't written for it since the day yet. I may still because they've I far as I mean, I know for a fact, Jeff's been asking me to write something here and there. And it's, it's just tricky. Cause I'm like, well, part of the feel of it was to let go of that. Right. So like, it's not like I don't want to forever, but something about

it hasn't felt super right to just, you know, just be a writer on this thing I don't own anymore. And to be perfectly frank about it, like I own other businesses. I don't have that many skills and assets in the world, but writing technical content is like a kind of one of them. Right. So like I might want to use that skill and ability somewhere else for stuff I own. That's what I was going to ask is like, it was an outlet, you know, and so you still have probably at ask. It was an outlet. And so you still have probably, at some point, a desire to write. And so I was like, well, where are you going to write now? Are you going to just tweet everything?

Are you going to do 100 thread tweets now? Or are you going to actually write other places? It could have been, but that always was nervous to me. I thought it was like, don't put too much of your time and effort on somebody else's platform. I have blogged a lot more on my personal site, and I've managed to, I just write a lot less than I was before,

but every week at CodePen, we send out a newsletter called the CodePen Spark, and I decided to, like, just because I can do this, because I own that too, I put a new section in it called Chris's Corner. Nice. And I write every week about whatever I want to web platform style. Dang it. Now I got to go subscribe to that sucker so I can hear what Chris thinks about stuff. Yeah, you do.

You do. It's just my own little editorial every week in that newsletter, which almost for, in a way, it's almost like my nicotine patch for tech writing almost. You can't go totally cold turkey. That'd be crazy. Right. nicotine patch for tech writing almost because you can't go totally cold turkey that'd be crazy right so thinking about the things you were talking about transferring stuff and how it's easier than a laundromat and i was thinking about the accounts you'd have to transfer one of the things i'm sure they acquired was twitter.com slash css they did indeed yeah and so i was wondering like when and how because i don't think you had that the whole time i remember there's an

announcement like how did you get the css handle on twitter or have you had that the whole time. I remember there was an announcement. How did you get the CSS handle on Twitter? Or have you had it all the way back? No, a guy wrote to me one time and said, I own this thing, but I don't make use of it. Do you want to buy it? That was a whole negotiation, too. I ended up buying it off of him for a combination deal of promoting his SaaS product and money.

And it wasn't that much money. And to me, it was like almost a vanity. Like, wouldn't that be so rad to have this? Right. And DigitalOcean made it pretty clear that they would want it. Yeah. I assumed they would want it. And I left it pretty automated.

So that doesn't have as much like personal stuff on it as even the website did, really. It was mostly just a system we set up to automatically post new content. And that felt fine to go in the sale. So would that be the kind of thing that would be a line item on a sale to DigitalOcean? Was that, they valued that separately or it was just like, yeah, we're going to want that.

And you're like, okay, because the price is already good. good i don't know was that a conversation that had to be had when they said we want it like well it's gonna cost me this much let's increase the price by that much you remember yeah no i mean all right fair enough throw it in yeah we didn't really piecemeal it out. You know, it was early enough that it was just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It almost, giving away those things is a reduction in my mental technical debt anyway, you know? Right, one less thing to worry about.

Yeah, you know, let them do it. It was kind of fun. Mostly they've just kept up with automatically posting stuff, but that was an interesting thing. After it happened, there was a couple of tweets that had a little bit of that, like, this is obviously for engagement kind of feel, which usually kind of works on social media. You know, everybody's lately in the past week, there's been a lot of like making fun of that. Like, you know, Microsoft Word is used by 10 million people, but not everybody knows all these tips and tricks to make the most of it.

Here's a thread. Yes, gosh. There's a lot of like making fun of that happening this week on Twitter. That's the kind of, that's the main character of Twitter, at least in my feeds this week. Yeah, I've seen it. They didn't quite do that, but that is just one of, you know, an ever-changing spirit of, like, engagement-style tweeting. And I think they toyed around with that a little bit, and it was so...

The people didn't like it. The people didn't like it. That they got... They got lambasted a little bit. Yeah, which was too bad, because it really wasn't that bad when I looked at it. I was like, whatever, they're just making some point about some historical CSS content. They weren't even wrong is the funny part, but people were like, this is old and blah, blah, blah.

And so I felt bad about it because it was kind of like there's obviously somebody who was put in charge of this who has expectations at work. And for them to be like, let's do nothing. Let's have it be exactly the same as it was before. Doesn't really seem like they're doing their job. So what do you do? You know, well, I don't know. It depends on if that person is a social media person or the, unfortunately this is so niche. I mean, it's called at CSS, right? So the person who's charging it probably should probably know more than a little bit about CSS. It should probably be a socially media-inclined developer, and I don't think that's who it was.

So I think they were between a rock and a hard place. So that's kind of where I was driving with the trepidation around maybe betraying audience to a certain degree. And I wonder if we hypothetically said, what if D.O. has new management? And all of a sudden, they just turn CSS tricks into just a terrible website somehow. At that point, gosh, do you start to second-guess things?

Or do you just like, well, it was mine. I sold it. It's no longer mine. I mean, there's a legacy there. Of course, you don't want that to happen. And it doesn't seem like that would happen. But what would you do? I mean, what can you do? That's just the risk, you know?

I would say, that's unfortunate. And then I would take a nap or something, you know? I have literally no control after it at that point. Right. There's nothing you can do about it. You have to know that there is a chance that that could have happened, and it did happen, and I can no longer affect it.

So, bummer. I definitely wouldn't go to Twitter and be like, look at what they did to my baby. I was like, you sold it, bro. Yeah. Well, that's good for you because that shows the emotional intelligence

that you have. Abilities that you attach. that he's hatched yep right because like sometimes you can be like i mean if ever we had changed i'll be acquired it'd be i don't think i would probably have the same sentiment but it you know publicly i would have that sentiment but inside i might be like man that really sucks you know i might i might be a little emotional about it because it's just challenging, really, because you put so much. It's also a little bit relative. Do they definitely ruin it or are they just doing it differently than how you would have done it?

Right, right, right. This was a small microcosm. Of course, I'm imagining the worst, but that's a stupid hypothetical that probably will never happen, so don't worry about it. Well, and here's the other thing that happened when they tweeted this. It was something about how you set font size or something and related to REMS or something. And it got hundreds of comments. It worked. So, you know, mission accomplished, I'd say.

Oh, yeah. So, no seller's remorse yet or probably ever at this point. I mean, you're a few months away, so it's pretty recent. It's March, right? At least announcement-wise. Yep, yep, yep. And like I said in the post, I had a contracting agreement with them

to stick around, tie up loose ends, make sure that the flow worked or whatever, and that has just concluded. So you're officially free. You're footloose and fancy free. I'm not even in the Slack anymore. What are you going to do all your spare time? I'm going to work on CodePen.

That's what I have been doing. You know what's interesting, though? I've been so stuck on front-end for so long, partially because I like it. That's where my skill set is. But I also felt like, well, that's what I write about. That's what I have an audience around. And now I have, in a way, it doesn't matter as much.

I don't have to be as up-to-date on front-end stuff. And I've kind of been like, you know what? I don't know that I have the ability to do this, but I'm going to try the best I can to just switch to back-end. I'm literally just going to spend all my time thinking about and trying to be more useful on that, especially because that aligns with kind of what we need at CodePen. We've always been stacked on the front end side with lots of skills,

and we've always been just needing it on the back end. We have great back end developers, but just traditionally over the course of it, the back end has always run behind. And I've been like, I should have these skills. It's almost embarrassing that I don't, I'm working on the web that long, that I don't know as much about back end development. And we've been undertaking this big transition to just get everything on Go. And there's a whole million reasons for that that we don't have to

get all into. But it's been pretty positive for us to embrace that language and move a lot of stuff to it. I see that you have a Go podcast over there. New subscriber. It's been very good. and I've been like, well, then Go it is for me. So I've been on a many months long journey now to level up in it. And in the early days, it was funny.

I was like, I'll just be a baby. I'll just pair with people. And lately, all my PRs are a bunch of Go code. Nice. Definitely not high level in it yet, but I'm certainly effective at it. In the end, it's just a language, right? It's not like a...

So I can imagine like a go-tricks.com upcoming soon or a backendtricks.com. Yeah, I don't think I have the confidence that I did then. Part of being able to write about CSS early on was like not knowing how dumb you are. Right. In a way. Yeah. That I almost feel like too knowing how dumb you are. Right. In a way. Yeah.

That I would almost be like too scared to do it now. I'd be like, oh my God, I can't publish. You got a reputation to uphold. Dumb, trite stuff, like I was happy to do it at CSS Tricks, you know. Those early posts, I wasn't saying anything of interest and I was probably wrong on half of them. I can't start a new blog now and be wrong

about half of what I write about. I don't think that's going to fly. Well, GoTrix does have a ring to it. Yeah. I mean, I do really like the language. I've been convinced by my co-founder Alex that we're going to write our APIs in this. We're going to write all our services in this. We're going to port our web servers to this.

And every time we've done it, it's worked out great. Because the speed difference between what we're doing in Ruby and Go is so extreme that it's almost just silly. It opens doors that you just couldn't do before. Like, if we did this in Ruby, we'd spend this much money or spend this much time or something. And Go is just sometimes many orders of magnitude cheaper and faster. And still pretty productive. It's not like you're

spending that on the front end. It's not like, well, in Ruby it would take us 40 hours, and in Go it's going to take us 3x hours. It's like, well, maybe 1.5x, maybe about the same amount of time. Who knows? In the beginning time, yeah, it's something like maybe like 1.5x maybe maybe about the same amount of time who knows in the beginning time yeah it's something like that it's it might even maybe it even is 3x in the very early days well when you're learning anything new it's gonna be it's yeah then it smooths out you know

yeah and there's something about the language of how it's typed that and you know like the chances of you shipping some shipping something that's broken in a really small, nuanced way is not, it either works or it doesn't for the most part. I'm sure there's little bugs you could write, but it feels less, it feels more sturdy in a way. There's less magic that can go wrong. There's a lot of typing.

My PR today is like, I'm'm like what is that 1500 lines what it's just very typey language i feel like anyway that was a that was a side quest huh well i'm happy to have a new go time listener maybe at some phase you will you'll face that imposter syndrome come on go time and yeah talk about that code pen transition. It might be a cool show. Yeah, it's a lot. We are, you know, like everything we do, we choose to transition to something and that becomes a multi-year process that's never even, you know. I remember a long time ago, we were like, we're going to switch to React because it's just the nature of state and such on the web is like,

it's a perfect match for what we're trying to do. And that transition isn't 100% done still, you know, like six years later or whatever. And it's not because we should just stop and focus on that. There's all, you know, there's like any business, there's just reasons for things. You know, it's not like things are in shambles. But big transitions on big old apps are tricky. You mentioned that you have responsibilities at CodePen, and you've talked about your new, I guess, direction into backend, some exploration, more curiosity, more exploration. What's happening at CodePen? What's the next big thing for you guys there? Yeah, it's a little too early

to talk about, but it's like CodePen has been the same for a hot minute. And it's not because there isn't little features that we could knock out. We could, it's just

we spent a long time doing that to turn CodePen into what it is today. So the spirit has been like, let's slow down, have a little bit bigger of a vision, embrace some of this new tech,

and then embrace what's happening in the expectations of developers and try to make a next-generation CodePen that's more capable and more aligned with what developers want out of an app. And then also, crucially, that's designed for change better than we are now. Because if there's one thing that is just so obviously true to developers that have been developing for any length of time,

is that the stuff that you use to do development just changes. Like, React at some point will just not be big anymore. People just won't use it because they'll use some other new fancy thing. So, like, you can't go all in on that. You know, processors kind of come and go. And there's no reason not to support the smaller ones too and the more niche kind of things, you know. Because they all have some commonalities in that they expect like text files on a file system. And then you run stuff on them and it produces more text files. You know,

if you like think about it that abstractly, you can kind of like architect a system that's like ready to, for whatever's next, you know, that's kind of the plan. I mean, it is the plan. I just hesitated to tell you exactly every detail of what that means exactly. But we're just working on like a next generation code, but it's just working on a next generation code pen, and it's just been so monumentally huge of a project that it's almost been a challenge is the way to put it, to even plan

it and break it into pieces and stuff. What phase are you in? Are you percentage complete? Do you feel 80, 90? Do you feel like you're 40%? We're 90% done,, we're 90% done and there's only, there's 90% left.

Right. What I would like you to do is pin you on ETA. Come on, give us a release date and then we can make fun of you later. No, I absolutely can't

because we can't even do it internally. Like, even a sprint we're not very good at at time estimating. Hey friends, We'll see you next time. chaotic, and it's maddening. If you know the feeling, then Dex by Sentry might just be for you. This is a free conference by developers for developers. We'll sort through the madness and look for ways to improve workflow productivity. Join Sentry for this event in San Francisco or virtually on September 28th and discover

new ways to make your life a little easier. Save your seat now for this event at bit.ly slash Dex 2022. Again, bit.ly slash Dex 2022. This link is in the show notes. And by our friends at Retool. Retool helps teams focus on product development and customer value, not building and maintaining internal tools. It's a low-code platform built specifically for developers. No more UI libraries, no more hacking together data sources, and no more worrying about access controls. Start shipping internal apps that move your business forward in minutes with basically zero uptime, reliability,

or maintenance burden on your team. Some of the best teams out there, Trust Retool, Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, DoorDash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more. The developers at these teams trust Retool as their platform to build their internal tools, and that means you can too. It's free to try, so head to retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog. What exactly is CodePen? Like for those who don't know, which probably a lot do,

like how do you describe CodePen? What is CodePen? It's like a code editor in the browser. So you don't have to install anything. And it's mainly meant to show off front-end related things, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or transpiled or pre-processed or post-processed CSS of some sort. Right, and some processors that support those largely front-end languages. You can't write PHP on CodePen, you can't write Go on CodePen. Those are back-end languages. You can't write PHP on CodePen, can't write Go on CodePen. Those are back-end languages that we don't support. You're only writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

with the exception of stuff that pretty simply compiles into those like Sass does and like Babel does and the like. Yeah, that's pretty much all. Is it mainly for demonstration of these things? Is it ever a production thing, the artifact? I mean, production-ish, like if it's... Only very rarely.

Because we have a product called CodePen Projects, which is different than pens on CodePen, although pens are much more heavily used. Projects looks a little bit more like VS Code. You go to that and you actually see a sidebar with files and folders in it. Pens were limited to like, you see these three panels, you write HTML and CSS JavaScript in those panels. You cannot add an additional HTML file. You cannot add an additional CSS file.

You can link them up and point to them, but you can't like in this, in the same way that you're used to local development having, or, or like run a processor over the whole file system like you'd expect or like npm installs whatever you want that kind of thing but the project manager did have a more proper file system and one of the features then we built into it is the ability to deploy it just deploy it very simply on codepen itself meaning you hit a deploy button and we you know put the stuff in a bucket and point a URL at the bucket for you and you have a static website.

It wouldn't even run a static site generator. I mean, we're talking about using just HTML files and then like a little bit of, we support a language called Pug, for example, and you could have multiple Pug files that import each other. So you could kind of hack together your own little pretty basic static site generator

just from the nature of having includes in languages like that and nunjucks. And then you could like cname DNS at that deployed website. So there's some people that in some cases use CodePen for their production website because they just manage it on CodePen and cname to the deployed site. And you had to click deploy CNAME to the deployed site. And it was, you know, you had to click deploy to send up the new files. So that means CodePen itself was kind of like your dev environment. You could play with it,

change stuff, and not worry about it being on the production site. And then when you're ready, hit deploy and it would go out. So that means you version stuff too in there I guess to some degree? Nope. So they threw versioning out the window then basically to use CodePen. They did. But you also didn't have to learn Git or Nope. So they threw versioning out the window then, basically, to use CodePen.

They did. But you also didn't have to learn Git or anything. You had to learn nothing. You just came to the website, you type some stuff, and you hit the Save button. And you want somebody else to look at the code, just send them the URL of the project, and they could look at the code.

So there's some stuff that made it so easy that it's used. It's used to this day. People pay to use it in that way. And because we've been at it so long and we've been so freaking dedicated to fixing absolutely anything that went wrong with it, you know, just using Sentry and bug reports and anything to just make sure it's just so, so, so solid. Because we were sick. At one point, we were just getting sick of bugs.

We're like, why don't we just fix them all? Let's just fix every bug that's possible. It's kind of like Inbox Zero, but, so solid. At one point, we were just getting sick of bugs. We were like, why don't we just fix them all? Let's just fix every bug that's possible. It's kind of like Inbox Zero, but it's bugs and zero. And it's not, you know, obviously that's not entirely true. It's not like there's zero bugs in the software, but really, we support, there's

millions and millions and millions of CodePen users. It's just been around so long and it's so everywhere on the web. There's just a lot of usage of the app. And we have like one person on support who does it like a third of her day. When I take support for a day, it's like trivially easy. Because there's just not a lot broken on CodePen. It just does what it does.

It's simple, but it's really solid. What that's done, though, is given us this. It's like the web's version of a boring business, right? You say you want to own a laundromat, potentially, or a car wash because it's a pretty boring business. It's like the internet version of boring business at this point because you have no bugs. Yeah, it just happens to be a really weird niche one.

Boring because they spent so much time to get all the bugs squished out. It probably wasn't boring before that. Yeah, and it gives us time and a foundation to mean that, like, why don't we just take our time on this next generation of it so that when we release it, it also hopefully has that same kind of strength and, you know, robustness and such. But it supports it. You know, I think it's fairly obvious that you're like, well, how come you can't even run a Leventy or some basic thing like that? Of course, we would like to support that. I'm not promising that you're going to get that on day one, or maybe you'll get that in 10 more. I don't know. But that kind of ability of like, why can't I use the stuff that people use to build websites now? That's obvious, right?

Like, obviously, we need to support those things. But I'd like to support those things and not just like look at what's popular now, and then just build a system that just does those. Because in the early days of talking about this, I think we were headed that way. Like, let's make an X specific editor. And then we kind of felt like, well, because we have a little more time and runway here, why don't we build one that is ready for the thing that we don't even know about yet? The classic mistake, man. The classic mistake. The super generic one that can handle any circumstance that ever comes. And maybe we're idiots. Maybe we'll look back on this podcast and be like, remember that thing you never

shipped? If you pull it off, it's great. But then you're like, maybe we should have just done the one that does 11D and then done this one. That's the hardest decision in software. Maybe. And I can't promise, but I think we're on the right track. And it's just been a really long haul. And the people that are working on it have been really dedicated to it and loyal. And I appreciate that.

And they seem to think it's a good idea, too. How big is the company? It's a business play. We're only nine, eight people because our designer, Claire, went to GitHub, which was awesome for her. And then we haven't replaced the design role yet. I'm not sure if we're going to jump on that yet. But yeah, eight people and everybody gets paid and we're a very happily healthy company. So we're just going to freaking take our time on this feature and cross our fingers.

It's awesome. But I feel like, again, like y'all, you know, like just there's certain truths, I think, like there's lots of gambles

you could take in business. But I look at this and I'm like, yeah, that's great. That's like obviously a nice product. It's obviously a nice evolution of what you have now.

That looks like a strong idea. Like I don't have a lot. I mean, I'm incentivized to think so, but I don't have any doubt that it's a pretty good idea. It doesn't actually feel like a gamble to me because it's just better.

I have two unrelated questions. I'm not sure if you have anything else left, Adam, and then we'll let Chris go. Do you have anything else on the CodePen side, maybe, Adam? I was just going to observe on what seems to be the revenue drivers for CodePen. That was really it. And that was mostly curious because it seems like an interesting revenue model

where you have a pro membership, so some sort of paid tier, and then also advertising. So you accept advertising as a company, which is sort of strange because you're not really a SaaS, right? But it's kind of a SaaS because you have monthly... Advertising, well, because they have so many pens all over the place, right? Is that what the advertising model is? That's the thing is because it's freemium,

it's always kind of felt like, man, a lot of people use this site for free. Well, I mean, even in your challenges, those are sponsored by folks. They're brought to you by X people. So you've got this advertising... Chris is a salesman. That's what he knows. He's good at it. It's good, but it's foreign for a SaaS business or in quotes a SaaS business to be also in advertising.

It's like, well, isn't SaaS bigger? Like if you could get more subscribers, wouldn't that trump advertisements? I don't know. Do you guys consider yourself SaaS? I guess a pro thing is kind of a, I mean, you are a service. And monthly. I mean, that's you are a service. And monthly. I mean, that's software as a service. It's all SaaS.

I mean, that's the vast bulk of our revenue is pro plans. And then we do the ads because, probably because like Jaren and I just happen to know that world and always felt like there's so much traffic. The traffic is stupid. You know, it's just crushed CSS tricks. The partnership ability of advertising is what I really like.

It's less about the money that ads bring, which is obviously a benefit, but it's the ability to cross-pollinate ideas and also inspire. We work with a lot of similar brands that are in your repertoire of brands you work with. And it's like, I love working with them because I get to share ideas back with them. There's a give and take. There's very much a partnership. It's not like, hey, tell us what to say because I get to share ideas back with them and we get to, there's a give and take. There's very much a partnership. It's not like, hey, tell us what to say about your business and then we say it. It's very much like, what do developers really care about?

About Sourcegraph, for example. I see there's one of them. It's a sponsor of ours as well. How do they cross over? How can we really help them? Like you said before, connect with our audience. That's better than what we do, frankly. Like I think that's cool

and I wish we did more of that. And I hate to say this because I love all those companies too because they hand come through me. Like, I approve these companies, right? So, like, I like what they're doing. But I'm not giving them a lot back other than just clicks and stuff. And very honestly, if we did markedly better

on pro plans, I would very much want to, and this is not my decision alone, so I would have to, you know, this would be a company decision that we would talk about. I'd just get rid of them, you know? It's like, GitHub don't have ads, you know? Like, I'd rather be like GitHub than... That's why I think it's strange, for those reasons. Like, it seems like there's... It is a bit strange.

The larger upside is on scaling SaaS, not scaling advertisements or partnerships even. It absolutely is. But I just can't just, the choice then is like, do you just throw it in the trash tomorrow? You're like, oh, but that's money. And I like money, you know? Well, it gives you more runway

on the other stuff you want to build. I mean, it's like what? It does. And does it really diminish the brand at this point? I don't think it necessarily does. I think not knowing what's behind the scenes involved in it, I would say there is dividends worth investing into for it that may not necessarily be strictly monetary.

It's more like because there's lots of brands who you really can't help reach developers through these mechanisms and it's relevant. That would be an interesting play, wouldn't it? It would be way, I'll tell you right now, it would be way more risky to like, maybe we just give away the product and instead of doubling down on the SaaS,

double down on the branding and advertising and stuff, it would be harder to earn exactly what we earn now and grow it. You could do both. Don't do it in or, do both. That's my suggestion, is do both. Don't do it and or. Do both. That's my suggestion. Let's do both. Yeah, yeah, maybe.

Why not both? Yeah, that's why I'm hesitant to throw it away too soon because I do think there's some potential in like. Well, let's talk behind the scenes or something. I'm happy to like dig in further

if you want more advice or some unsolicited advice, at least. I love. Adam always is there for unsolicited advice. I have to be protective at the moment. It's not that I don't want to talk about it, but I'm like, we got to finish the damn thing. You know what I mean?

Yeah, totally. That's very much my emotional level at the moment is like, I'm working on the biggest project I've ever worked on in my life. And I, you know, through every fiber in my being, I need to finish it. It's not that it's dragging out. It's just that it has to get done. And it's hard to see when you have this many tickets and this many things to do. It's hard to even see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's there.

It's there. I just have to be protective over my time and choices to get there. All right, two real quick ones, and we'll let you get back to your go code. So the first one is, as you move to the back end, like before you become front end irrelevant, while you're still tapped in, sort of tongue in cheek, I'm sure you're going to keep your eye on the scene, but like what's in the front end space,

what's interesting, what's burgeoning, what do you have your eye on? Things are like tickling your curiosity at this point. Yeah, it's so interesting right now because it's almost a silly time to not be writing

about CSS because there's maybe never been like a hotter time and like what's how fast CSS is dropping new stuff

and stuff that there is to talk about and explore. Like if I if I was only working on CSS tricks it'd be a freaking

heyday for content, you know? Right. Because there's, you know, this container query stuff is very hot and it's just, it's about to drop across both Safari, you know, meaning every browser on Mac is on iOS,

you know, and Chrome, which is just so crazy dominant on the, you know, it's the only thing that's unknown is when Firefox is going to drop it. And I bet they will. So it's like, all of a sudden, we're gonna have container queries, which is like opens up some insane doors. It's not just like, oh, now there's a little thing, it needs to be explored and figured out and talked about and see how companies are going to use it and talk about that. There's almost like unlimited stories just with container queries. And it's only a third of the kind of ball

that it exists within, which is container units too, which are a way to size things based on the size of the container that it's in, which are also very untapped territory of what that's going to unlock in the world. And then there's this thing called style queries, which very few people are talking about,

but it's lumped right in with container queries. But it's a way to say like, hey, is the parent of the thing that I'm in have background pink? Oh, well, then the text color should be black. Oh, wow. It's a way to express something in CSS about like what's happening style-wise in my container. And I think that might really change how CSS is approached because in a way it's almost like antithetical to how you should write CSS because you should just be very emphatic about what you're setting and not leave it up to rendered chance.

But now that that's happening, I wonder if that will end up being rethought. And then there's scoping that's dropping and cascade layers, which are ways to affect the strength of CSS that you're applying in a way that they're kind of an answer plus to what happened with CSS and JS for so long. That's going to change everything. It's just the nature of CSS is getting wild. I mean, all of a sudden, has just dropped. Has is like a parent query.

You can say div has p, and you'd be like, oh, does this div contain elements that have P's in them? Forever that was just assumed absolutely impossible in CSS. It was like, no, not only can you not do it, you'll never be able to do it. So get over it. And all of a sudden you're like, just kidding. We have that now. That's nuts.

What that unlocks in CSS is like, oh, it's almost like unknown because there's all these simple use cases kind of like, oh, this is a card component. Does it have a button in it? Because if it does, it's kind of like a call to action card. If it doesn't, it's kind of like a content card. And I can style the whole card from the top on down with that information now that I can know it. That's the obvious use case. But as I've known through writing about CSS for so long, what actually happens, how it actually transforms how people do and write CSS is a little

unknown right when stuff drops. It takes a minute to suss out all the like what's actually going to go down with this. And what has does is unlocks like because you can go back up the tree in CSS, it changes a lot because you write on the body you can write like body has and then like an elaborate

selector that figures out kind of like the state of the page and then you're back up at the body so you can not only style the body but then go back down the tree again and style whatever you want. It unlocks this tornado of styling possibilities essentially based on the state of the DOM that's just weird. Provided it's fast, right? If it's slow, though. They wouldn't have shipped it. I asked that same

question to the powers that be just the other week. So it's fast. Yeah, it's acceptably fast. There's ways to screw it up and stuff, but there's safeguards in place. Just like with container queries, there's some things you in place. Just like with container queries, there's some things you have to set up on the page first that make sure that they're fast.

Because that was the problem before is that it had too many weird infinite loop potential and look back potential in the parser. There's like, we can't do it. It's too weird. It's not how browsers work. It's too slow. But now they're saying like,

well, in order to use the container query, you have to say that it's like contained on its inline size, which is a little like weird to explain and talk about. But it has some like limitations of what that element can do then. And because that exists, then container queries exists. Has is a little similar. There's some limitations to what it can do. Does has, you know, its presence being available now, does it make you rethink everything basically? Well, yeah, but like it takes a minute to rethink everything.

You're not just like, oh, because that new pathway unlocked, you know, a flood of thoughts happen that immediately fill in in my brain. It's almost like you just have to recognize that it's there now, go about your day-to-day work and hope that your brain thinks about it when you need it. And then those turn into blog posts and that the industry kind

of slowly changes based on what gets talked about. Different people discover different uses, right? And so it's that, that's why we're CSS Tricks, the epicenter of like, well, here's Chris. Now it's Jeff. Jeff is going to then say like, this person's using it this way and that person's using it that way. And like, right. And we start to realize, oh, this is actually the best of those ways. So let's do that.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's awesome. Great stuff. Last one. We'll let you go. Going all the way back to your design history, csstrix.com slash design dash history.

Pick your favorite. You look them back, they got like 18 designs. Surely some of these, you don't have to pick just one. Surely some of these you still love. Other ones you're like, that was more of a dud. What do you think? Just name the number. Oh, yeah, they're all emotionally complex.

Oh, yeah, I know. You just want a number. And I'm going to give that to you, I think, if I can choose one. Oh, my gosh, that's very—I almost regret telling you that. And what is the selection criteria? The one that evokes the most joy. You know, I'll pick 17, even though it's fairly recent history, but it's because I got to work with Kylie on it, an Australian designer.

I think she's here at Apple now in the U.S. But it was so just a joy to work with and so clever. And it changed how I had to, you know, it forced me to do stuff that I would have never done before on it. And in a way that the other ones were just me for the most part. It was just like my own design sensibilities. So when I see that one i'm like oh that was so cool to collaborate in a way that i never got the chance to do otherwise on it but another one i'd point to is i look at it and i don't even it's not like i love it now but 13 was so white it was one where i like i felt like the design was getting too complicated or something

and i just wanted to like see what it would feel like to just tear it all down, you know, and just like let the type speak for itself stronger and stuff like that. So that, I don't know how long it lasted, but I was so pleased to have like been able to like really tear things down. And I think that it set up a bunch of future designs

because things were so torn down. It was like easier to easier to do more later. To do stuff, yeah. Yeah. So it's almost begging for it now, you know, like this current design

has been iterated on enough times that it would be tempting to do a tear down design again. That's one of the, I was pleased, it's not like there's no ads

on CSS Tricks now but that helped me make the decision to sell it because I always, I pined for the day where I could design CSS Tricks without ads on CSS Tricks now, but that helped me make the decision to sell because I pined for the day where I could design CSS Tricks without ads on it. Despite being an ad lover,

I always thought, wouldn't that be fun to design a site with this much content on it and devote almost none of the screen real estate to ads? Just as an experiment, you know? Maybe a tangent to Jared's question is, what is your process? Like when you say tear down,

for each new iteration, do you start with site.css and it's completely blank? Yeah, pretty much. It's a WordPress website, though, so what I wouldn't throw away is all the templates, because it's just too much to think about. It's only a CSS reset, essentially. Yeah, I'd throw away all the CSS for sure. And then I would go to, I would go to like Figma or something and try not to think about the templates and stuff. Think about like what a cool design would be

without thinking about the code at all. And then make the templates match that design and then write the CSS on top of that. But knowing that you're not going to think of everything in the design process, so when you have to go back into code, because you can't throw away any template, because they all have to do something important.

So if I forgot to design that, hopefully the new design kind of suits it and it's a little bit obvious what to do. But if not, then go back to design and get ready for that template. But yeah, there's certain things that kind of the skeleton of the site just are their choices

that would be hard to undo. So I just won't. But now it's not my problem at all. So we'll see what they do. I'm sure that they will morph it to look more DigitalOcean-y over time. I guess the question, would it remain WordPress?

Would it make sense to not be WordPress? Oh gosh, there's probably so much there. Why replace it? That gives me extreme anxiety and I almost want to not think about it because I was like, whoever makes this decision, I really want it to be well considered, but I can't make it because I'm too emotionally attached to what, but I, at the same time, nobody knows better than me what WordPress is offering. What is it doing for this site? Right. And it's a lot. And if you were to just tear out WordPress just because you don't like it or something, or you don't have expertise in it or something, those would be okay reasons. I mean, I've done less for less, you know. But just be

really careful, I guess. There's some... There'll be dragons, you know. There'll be dragons for sure. Careful out there. Choice beware. I guess one more side tangent question to the whole entire conversation, I guess, considering DigitalOcean.

Where did you host CSS Tricks? Was it on DigitalOcean, where did you host CSS Tricks? Was it on DigitalOcean or was it somewhere else? No, it wasn't. It could be. There's no reason it can't be. It's so out of the box WordPress. It's so boring.

Yeah. It was for a long time, it was Media Temple because we had a deal. And then when that deal went away, I was interested in finding another hosting deal because WordPress hosts are always looking for that kind of thing. And so I picked what I thought would be where I wanted to host it. And then I reached out to them with a proposal, you know, like, how about CSS Tricks is on you? And that was Flywheel. And they're still around.

They were snatched up by WP Engine. It's pretty big. They're both good. That's an Omaha company, WP Engine. It's pretty big. They're both good. That's an Omaha company, Flywheel, from my hometown. Yeah, indeed. I've been there. Oh, have you? I hung out with them at one point.

Yeah, they have a really cool office. It's a real success story from that town. Yep, I know all those guys. Yeah, they did a great job with it and still do, and they're still kind of independent, and they made a really cool local hosting product for WordPress that I thought was like just such a strong move for a hosting company and stuff and

yeah so that was a long partnership at the end and then it just as far as I know it still is on Flywheel it's just we don't. It'd be interesting to see how long it is because DigitalOcean I mean like. Yeah I mean it's a question of resources I'm sure like if I was in charge of it at DigitalOcean,

I would just pluck it over. It would take one day. It's not a trivial change, really. It's just more like hosting rights is more what it's about, right? Yeah, I mean, then you can put this site is hosted by DigitalOcean, the bottom, and mean it.

Not only is it owned by us, but we host it too. Okay, we can host WordPress here. Yeah, and you'd think, because there's obviously so much money in WordPress. I mean, not to WordPress here. Yeah, and you'd think, because there's obviously so much money in WordPress. I mean, not to drag this out as I really got to go, but like when it's freaking half the internet or whatever it is,

why wouldn't you say WordPress works great on DigitalOcean or whatever hosting company is trying to, and many of them do. Well, Chris, thank you for the journey, man. Thank you for sharing, you know, episode 500 with us and congratulations to thank you for the journey, man. Thank you for sharing, you know, episode 500 with us and congratulations to you on selling your baby, man. Milestones all around 500 at the change line, baby. Oh yeah. Appreciate you coming on the show, man. Thank you. It's been a blast

catching up and going through all the details, man. Appreciate it. Yeah. Take care of fellas. We'll talk soon. See ya. All right. Episode 500 is in the can. Thank you so much for tuning in and thank you so much for Chris Coyier to join us and share in this moment, the legacy of CSS tricks and Hey, episode 500 of the changelog, a big, big thanks once again to our friends and our partners at Fastly and also Fly.io. Fastly makes our pods faster to download globally because, hey, Fastly is fast globally. Check them out at Fastly.com.

And Fly helps us deploy our app servers close to our users, and you can too. Learn more at Fly.io. For the close ear and the long-time listener, you may have noticed some new Breakmaster beats on this episode. Hey, they're banging. Thank you so much, Breakmaster. You are awesome. And, of course, last but not least, thank you to you for listening to the show again. Hey, all the way to the very end, I appreciate everyone around the world who listens to our show.

And if you haven't subscribed yet, head to changelog.fm for all the ways. That's it for this week. We're done. We'll see you next week. Game on.