HTML5 Boilerplate and Front-End Development - with Paul Irish

[Nick Pettit]: Paul, Thanks so much for being here. 0:01 I really appreciate you coming out. >>[Paul Irish]: No problem. 0:03 [Nick Pettit]: So, for people who don't know who you are, 0:05 how would you describe yourself? 0:07 Who are you, and what do you do? 0:10 [Paul Irish]: I am a developer advocate 0:12 on the Chrome team right now, 0:14 and so I kind of focus on--that encompasses a lot, 0:16 but I focus on everything I can do 0:20 to make it better to create compelling content for the web. 0:23 We've got a lot of great content inside of Chrome. 0:28 I wanted to help educate people about that, 0:30 help people understand how to use things like 0:32 the Chrome DevTools better. 0:34 I also come with a big history of front-end development 0:36 and open-source projects that I work on 0:40 to help developers 0:43 learn what they need to know 0:45 to do better front-end development, 0:47 make better websites and web apps. 0:49 [Nick Pettit]: That's awesome. 0:51 You're involved in a million different projects. 0:53 You're doing Modernizr, HTML5 Boilerplate, 0:57 which I use all the time by the way. 1:01 You've been on the jQuery team, 1:03 and you've made all these really handy tools for 1:06 front-end devs. 1:09 This might seem obvious, but 1:11 what's the motivation for working on all these different things? 1:13 [Paul Irish]: I think part of it 1:16 is basically that I feel a lot of satisfaction 1:18 helping other people, and so part of it is just that. 1:22 Also, the other thing--I think this is actually another part that's happened-- 1:26 is that I have a really bad memory, 1:29 and what that translates into is 1:31 if I don't write something down, I'll forget it. 1:33 So, this happened in front-end development where you learn this technique 1:36 of using media queries or the viewport meta, 1:38 and you need to keep track of this 1:42 because this is the right way to do it 1:45 in this situation. 1:47 So, that eventually translated into what became 1:49 the HTML5 Boilerplate project, 1:51 where a lot of best practices were distributed 1:53 all over on blogs and books and things like that, 1:56 and I was just like we need to get this together 1:58 just to keep track of it; 2:01 so I can keep track of it and remember to use it on the next project. 2:03 So, that's helped me a lot and has helped other people. 2:08 The other thing for me that really drives me 2:11 is that I want the web to be 2:14 where people build great things. 2:17 I'm just really excited about anything that I can do 2:19 to help make the web be a stronger platform 2:23 for making great, really cool stuff. 2:26 [Nick Pettit]: So, you're very diligent 2:29 in tracking all of these different things? 2:31 [Paul Irish]: Because I can. 2:33 [Nick Pettit]: How do you balance your time working on all those different projects? 2:35 [Paul Irish]: I don't have a good mechanism 2:38 for time management right now. 2:40 I use a really cool tool called, 'WorkFlowy,' 2:43 which is like a super-enhanced 2:47 to-do method list app. It's really cool. 2:51 I set up priorities for myself 2:54 on a quarterly basis 2:57 and try and get them. 3:00 I think that's actually quite important, 3:02 which is to have a longer-term view of what you want 3:04 to attack, because it's so easy on a daily basis 3:07 to be totally distracted and 3:11 just be like, "I want to play with this new thing 3:14 and get it done. Oh, wow, something," 3:17 and then you totally forget that you have this much larger, 3:19 higher-impact thing that you should be doing. 3:22 So, it's hard, and I'm still really bad at time management, 3:24 but I'm working on it. 3:29 [Nick Pettit]: I know what you mean. 3:31 With being involved with so many different projects, 3:33 I guess you kind of have to keep a big-picture view 3:35 as to what all those things are working towards. 3:37 [Paul Irish]: Yep, and what the priorities are. Yeah. 3:39 [Nick Pettit]: Cool. So, before we continue, I want to back way up 3:41 and just get some of your history. 3:45 Where did you grow up and what were you into? 3:47 [Paul Irish]: Sure. I'm from Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. 3:50 So, I'm from New England where we say, 3:54 'wicked,' 'It's wicked cool.' 3:58 [Nick Pettit]: Wicked. 4:00 [Paul Irish]: I was into music. 4:02 I was in the marching band; I played the tuba. 4:04 I was into drama. So, I was a band and drama kid in high school. 4:08 I was really into music and, in fact, 4:11 the first time that I really got going online was 4:13 I created a music blog. 4:16 This was in--I put it out in 2004, 4:20 and I thought I was so late to the music blog scene, 4:24 but it turned out that I was one of the first 50 or so. 4:27 Having that environment where I had a website that had a lot of traffic, 4:31 and I could play with the design and experiment 4:34 and get a lot of feedback 4:38 on how people liked it, 4:40 that was one of the first times when I was really like, 4:42 This front-end development thing is a lot of fun. 4:45 [Nick Pettit]: That's when you first became interested in the web and technology? 4:48 [Paul Irish]: That was when I was like, 4:52 this could definitely be full time. 4:54 I'd been playing with websites. 4:56 Back when IE4 came out 4:59 they did this really cool marketing campaign. 5:01 This was when the DHTML term arrived, 5:04 and so they had this marketing campaign 5:07 where they rented out all these movie theaters across the U.S. 5:09 and invited a bunch of developers, 5:12 and I went and I got free popcorn and a free t-shirt 5:15 and a free Windows 95 install CD, 5:17 and they showed about what you could do in IE4, 5:20 and it was amazing. 5:22 So many great features came out then, 5:24 and so that was when I was like, 5:26 this interest of mine, there's cool stuff in here. 5:28 Eventually, it quieted down. 5:32 I went to college, but after that everything picked back up again. 5:35 [Nick Pettit]: So, did you go to school for this stuff? 5:39 [Paul Irish]: I went to school for-- 5:41 I got a degree in technical communications. 5:43 I don't actually know-- 5:46 I really do wish that there was more university-level coverage 5:48 for web development. 5:51 Front-end development is hard, and it's a pain, 5:54 and I wish that there was a more sophisticated education 5:57 program for this. 6:01 I got education in computer science and mathematics, 6:03 and management and communication. 6:06 [Nick Pettit]: With us being an education company, 6:09 I'm interested to know if 6:11 you feel like your degree really helped you 6:14 in your career, or--? 6:17 [Paul Irish]: Mine did, 6:19 and I think these days having a computer science background 6:21 has a very direct effect. 6:24 I wouldn't say 5 years ago that computer science would help in web development, 6:27 but nowadays, especially on the client side, 6:30 there's so much logic there. 6:33 You're writing jQuery, things are going good, 6:36 you're translating, you're writing larger applications. 6:38 [Nick Pettit]: It's getting complicated. >>[Paul Irish]: It's getting real complicated. 6:40 A background in computer science lays a lot of the groundwork 6:42 so that you're not making stupid mistakes 6:45 and taking 4 months to learn how you should have done things. 6:47 So, yeah, computer science has a big influence 6:51 on where the trajectory 6:54 of front-end development is going for sure. 6:56 [Nick Pettit]: Cool. Well, I think a big challenge 6:59 that's facing people coming out of college today 7:01 is how to make the transition to 7:04 a career and not just kind of hopping from job to job 7:07 or being unemployed. 7:11 How did you make that transition? 7:13 Were you just kind of in an internship, 7:15 and it was a really natural progression 7:17 or did you--? 7:19 [Paul Irish]: Yeah. I started out I was doing 7:21 some marketing for 7:23 a stationary company 7:27 that made wedding invitations and birth announcements, 7:29 and I wasn't even starting out with web stuff. 7:31 I was creating 7:35 a mail-merge Word document, 7:38 and then we were using that to fax blast all of our customers, 7:40 and I was customizing the mail merge to be 7:43 depending on the customer, and it was all this logic inside Word. 7:46 It was awesome. 7:49 That transitioned, within that job, 7:51 into working on their e-commerce presence, 7:55 and so that was good. 7:57 I think for most people 7:59 having something you can develop on your own-- 8:01 In my case I had my music blog, 8:03 but I think having your own web presence, 8:06 whether it's a blog; I think blogging is really good. 8:10 Blogging what you're learning is extremely smart 8:13 and having that place where you can iterate and play around. 8:16 So, when you see a new feature come out, 8:20 like you're reading a site and they talk about some new CSS3 feature 8:22 or something, make a demo with it. 8:26 Kind of explore it. 8:28 Put it up on CodePen. 8:30 There's a lot of communities now that are encouraging 8:32 and let you explore things, get feedback. 8:34 Having a social community 8:36 that you can talk to and explore 8:38 your own professional development with. 8:40 I had one, and it's just been very-- 8:43 It's a very smart way to go about things. 8:49 [Nick Pettit]: So what first attracted you to 8:51 front-end development, specifically? 8:53 Because you were making a blog, did you do that in WordPress or something? 8:56 [Paul Irish]: Yeah, it was WordPress. >>[Nick Pettit]: Okay. 8:59 Why aren't you, say, 9:01 like a Ruby or a PHP developer, for example? 9:03 [Paul Irish]: For me, the thing that really rocks about front end 9:06 is that you're building the interface, 9:10 and not only are you building the interface, 9:13 and you can make decisions around 9:16 how the interactions are, 9:18 but you're also getting feedback from its users 9:20 and from the customers. 9:22 The thing that they're touching, their cursor is going over 9:24 what you've created, and you're in a position 9:26 to where you can define the style of interaction 9:30 and the quality of the user experience. 9:32 Other people can work on how fast it responds 9:35 and a really strong infrastructure, 9:37 but the UI is just very sexy to me. 9:40 [Nick Pettit]: So it's kind of about that instant gratification then? 9:45 [Paul Irish]: The instant gratification and the feedback cycle of 9:47 I'm creating the interface, they're using it, 9:49 they can love it, they can be delighted by it. 9:52 Or they can hate it when I apply 9:57 a lot of text shadow to it and make it hard to read or something. 10:00 [Nick Pettit]: Sure, sure. 10:03 So, I want to talk about HTML5 Boilerplate for a little bit, 10:06 because I'm personally interested in it. 10:09 I think it's a really amazing project 10:11 for people that are just starting out 10:14 in web design and web development, 10:16 and I think there's a lot more that goes into it 10:18 than people might realize. >>[Paul Irish]: Yeah. 10:20 [Nick Pettit]: So, first, how did that project start? 10:23 [Paul Irish]: Before working for Google, 10:25 I was at an agency in Boston making websites, web apps. 10:27 We had a big team of front-end developers there, 10:29 and when I was going from project to project, 10:32 I was noticing that I was pulling lines of code 10:36 from my markup and from my CSS 10:39 from my last one into my new one, 10:42 and then I was like, well, I should probably make a template 10:44 just to keep track of this, and so I could start off with that template each time. 10:47 That's the original genesis, was just 10:50 that I needed to keep track of all this stuff 10:53 and move it forward from project to project. 10:55 Soon after, I got Divya Manian involved. 10:58 We put out a 1.0 just to see what everyone else thought. 11:02 Immediately it was really great 11:06 because inside HTML5 Boilerplate 11:09 is a bunch of techniques, right? 11:11 One of the things that has continued up until a little bit ago 11:14 is having inline documentation. 11:18 You see a technique, and you can instantly see 11:21 the website where that was birthed, 11:23 and someone can justify exactly why this is important. 11:25 So, it's kind of serving as an education tool. 11:29 You've kind of got to understand why everything is in here. 11:33 So, what happened is we put this out there, 11:36 and immediately we got a lot of feedback 11:38 over on GitHub where we open-sourced. 11:42 A lot of people coming in and being like, 11:44 Actually, I see what you're doing here, 11:46 but if you tweak it, this is a much stronger position. 11:48 It accounts for this edge-case bug in Opera 9.6 or something like that. 11:51 Every character inside HTML5 Boilerplate 11:56 has had a lot of discussion around it, 11:59 and so everything that you see is the result 12:02 of extensive conversations that have included 12:04 some of the best front-end developers in the industry. 12:07 You can go and look back at all those past conversations 12:10 in the old issues on GitHub. 12:13 The commits in the project, 12:15 the log messages have very desciptive 12:18 explanations of why we're doing this. 12:21 It's very well-justified in why all these decisions 12:24 are very strong as a baseline for starting your web project. 12:28 [Nick Pettit]: Cool. I think when beginning developers 12:31 look at HTML5 Boilerplate for the first time-- >>[Paul Irish]: We've got a lot. 12:36 [Nick Pettit]: --they're just like, "Wow." 12:38 "What's all this weird code?" 12:40 Let's talk about that a little bit. 12:42 From the top, what are all those IE conditional comments, 12:44 because that's the first thing people see? 12:48 [Paul Irish]: Yeah, so the IE conditional comments, 12:50 they don't look great. 12:52 They look kind of nasty. 12:54 It's like sometimes you want your mark-up to look 12:56 svelt and sexy and minimal, 12:59 and I love doing that as well. 13:01 Inevitably when you're developing-- 13:04 So, this is not a problem for IE6 and IE7, 13:06 which have no market share anymore. 13:09 IE8's definitely still around, 13:11 but it's been a case where 13:13 they have actual CSS bugs in their implementation, 13:16 and you can use CSS hacks, 13:20 like syntax hacks, to target them and change the width or something, 13:23 and change the padding 13:27 to make your layout work and to fix those bugs. 13:29 But using undocumented CSS hacks, 13:31 it doesn't allow you to communicate well with your team, 13:36 and when you're working in a group 13:40 you want everyone to read the code and understand. 13:42 So, the conditional comments 13:44 provide a first-class way, 13:47 that was provided by IE luckily, 13:49 to specifically target these browsers 13:52 with CSS styles that affect just IE7 and just IE8, 13:54 or a combination thereof. 14:00 It's tricky because that's provided for you for free 14:02 in the Boilerplate, 14:06 but I do think that you do want 14:08 to try as hard as you can to avoid vendor-specific styles. 14:10 A lot of times just setting explicit dimensions, 14:16 width and height, on an element will let you avoid 14:19 doing that, and so you should try and go as long as you can 14:23 without specifying specific browsers. 14:26 But it is there when you need it, and it helps a lot. 14:29 [Nick Pettit]: There's plenty more in Boilerplate 14:31 that we could talk about. 14:34 There's--I've heard you talk about 14:36 all the weirdness with carsets. >>[Paul Irish]: Yes. 14:38 [Nick Pettit]: There's Chrome Frame, Modernizr, setting the viewport, and so on. 14:40 What's your favorite feature, 14:45 and what do you think is the most interesting thing that's there? 14:47 [Paul Irish]: I found this on Ajaxian a long time ago, 14:50 and now on Stack Overflow there's a great question called, 14:54 'The Hidden Features of HTML.' 14:57 I submitted it a long time ago, and it's the highest voted, and it's in HTML Boilerplate, 15:00 and this is the protocol-relative URLs. 15:02 So, down at the bottom when we include jQuery, 15:05 we pull it in from the Google CDN, 15:07 but the script source is equal to 15:09 //ajaxgoogleapis.com stuff stuff, 15:12 and you're like, "I think you're--" 15:15 We get pull requests and bug reports on a monthly basis. 15:18 Like, "You got a typo, you missed the http:." 15:22 And we're like, "Actually, we didn't." 15:25 So, the protocol-relevant URL 15:28 provides an ability to-- 15:31 the browser will grab the HTTP version 15:33 when the page is in HTTP 15:37 and HTTPS when you're hosted in SSL. 15:39 This is cool because it guarantees 15:41 that the assets are requested securely 15:43 only when it's required. 15:46 There is a small overhead in requesting a secure asset 15:48 when you're in regular HTTP. 15:50 So, this is really cool 15:53 and helps, although it is a little tricky on Windows 15:55 when you're just developing, when you've loaded it up 15:59 from the file system and then in your browser it says, "file:," 16:02 it can be really slow. 16:05 If you use a local development server 16:07 however, you don't have that problem. 16:09 So, I think the feature is really awesome, 16:12 and that's probably one of my more favorite things. 16:14 [Nick Pettit]: It's crazy you brought that up 16:16 because I was just looking at that the other day 16:18 trying to figure out what happened here. 16:20 It's kind of amazing to me just how much 16:23 goes into a, supposedly, vanilla webpage. 16:26 I mean, it's called 'Boilerplate,' right? 16:30 So, it seems like it should only be the most basic things that you need, 16:32 but there's a lot there. 16:37 Do you think the job of a front-end developer has become 16:39 a lot more complicated in recent years? 16:41 And is that a good or a bad thing? 16:44 [Paul Irish]: Well, there's 2 things happening at the same time. 16:47 One of which is that age-old legacy browsers 16:50 are on the decline. IE6 is dead. 16:55 If you look at market share numbers, IE6 is dead. 16:58 IE7 has under--actually just about 1%. 17:01 IE is really strong but still 17:04 that's improving. 17:06 A lot of front-end developers' pain has been 17:08 the old browsers that haven't kept up 17:10 with not only fixes, but features that we want to use. 17:13 So, that part is getting easier. 17:17 By the same point, the last 3 years 17:19 have brought an enormous amount of features 17:21 to browsers that we now get to incorporate 17:24 and figure out the best way to incorporate. 17:26 So, for instance, if you're using a CSS transition, 17:29 do you use that CSS transition 17:33 and just let it fall back 17:36 if it's not supported by the browser? 17:38 I recommend you do. 17:42 But you could choose to feature detect it with Modernizr 17:44 and then use jQuery to animate 17:48 the same general transition. 17:51 So, figuring out your fallback scenario 17:54 is a little tough. 17:57 A little bit ago, a few of us put out a site called, 17:59 'HTML5 Please,' which aims to provide 18:01 a bit more guidance for all this stuff. 18:04 So, basically, you get to look up 18:06 for every feature, all the new stuff, 18:08 you get to look up exactly 18:11 what is probably the best way to handle this 18:13 for a cross-browser scenario, 18:15 where you might not have support everywhere. 18:17 Should you use a polyfill script to enable that feature in an old browser 18:19 or should you just let it fall back 18:23 or is there some in-between state that is probably the best way? 18:25 Finding that is tricky, but I think there's more and more resources out there that help. 18:29 [Nick Pettit]: It seems like this is something 18:33 that's unique to the nature of web development 18:35 where you have to come up with these fallbacks 18:38 for all of these different browsers coming out. 18:40 Do you think it'll always be that way, 18:43 or do you think we'll hit some point 18:45 where things are pretty stable, 18:48 and web development is just kind of a little bit more static? 18:50 [Paul Irish]: Well, so if we got there, 18:56 if we got to that point, that would essentially indicate 18:58 that there's not any 19:00 groundbreaking new features being added. 19:03 I kind of don't want to be there. Right? 19:07 At the same time, I don't like 19:09 having to send a bunch of polyfills 19:12 at older browsers 19:16 and just testing and worrying about that. 19:19 So,yeah, that's getting really complicated and messy, 19:22 and managing the various states, 19:24 like if you think about the old state of 19:27 all browsers must look--the experience must look the same in all browsers 19:31 to the new one which is we feature detect, we find out what we can provide, 19:34 and there's a lot of combinations of how your site looks. 19:39 Then you're like bringing responsive design, and it's changing. 19:42 So, from a capability and future perspective, it's different 19:45 from a viewport size; it's a different experience, 19:48 and when you've built a site, 19:52 and you're testing it to make sure that everything is right, 19:55 there's a lot of combinations to look through. 19:57 Here, the most important things are 19:59 choosing features to use where the fallback scenario 20:01 is you kind of forget about it. 20:05 If a browser doesn't have border radius CSS transitions, 20:07 that's probably okay. 20:10 A lot of these just kind of enhance. 20:12 The other part is 20:14 that I think we could actually, as a community, 20:16 do better to help encourage our users 20:19 to be using browsers that we specifically want 20:23 to support, and that helps our job, 20:26 and it helps them. 20:28 I know conversion rates improve significantly 20:30 when the experience is faster. 20:33 Helping your users be on the kind of browsers 20:35 that you yourself enjoy 20:39 actually has a good business support, 20:41 and is a lot more fun for users and developers, of course. 20:45 [Nick Pettit]: There's so many steps 20:49 that are involved in front-end development at this point. 20:51 This is something you were blogging about recently 20:54 where you said the tool chain is a little bit overwhelming. 20:57 There are so many steps and there are so many different 21:01 tools and techniques to deal with each one of them. 21:03 Do you think there's a need to simplify that 21:06 and try to bundle all of that together? 21:09 What are your thoughts on that? 21:12 Because I feel like the barrier to entry 21:14 is really high for somebody that's new to it. 21:16 [Paul Irish]: Yeah, so, it's tricky. 21:19 There's a lot going on, 21:21 and, yeah, it's a lot to absorb. 21:24 I've recently been working 21:26 with Addy Osmani 21:29 and some other people inside the web development community 21:32 to put out a project called, 'Yeoman,' 21:34 and this project is about putting together a lot of tools 21:36 that help you build better web apps. 21:39 Now, there's a lot going on in there, 21:42 but it's using things like CSS pre-processors, 21:44 live reload, 21:47 even shipping a plug-in for Sublime text. 21:50 So, there is like a baseline of features 21:53 that most front-end developers use, 21:56 and I don't think this is really listed anywhere. 21:58 Maybe I should make a blog post out of this, 22:00 but there's a few things that these days are pretty well accepted 22:02 as these are fundamental to development. 22:07 People don't talk enough to their colleagues, coworkers 22:10 about what is their process for developing. 22:14 How are they interacting 22:18 with their text editor, their source control? 22:23 I think there could be a bit more of a conversation 22:25 around what we can do to make sure that 22:28 when we're coming back to work on our projects 22:33 it's not frustrating and instead it's fun, 22:36 and I'm getting work done quickly. 22:38 Every time I watch someone else do their work 22:40 and I sit next to them and I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa," 22:44 "What did you just do? What was that keyboard shortcut?" 22:46 [Nick Pettit]: Right. 22:48 {Paul Irish]: I think we should do a lot more of that. 22:50 [Nick Pettit]: Do you think it's okay for people to just use the stuff 22:52 and maybe not totally understand it but just know that, 22:55 "I need to do this thing for it to work?" 22:59 At what point does it just become an abstraction? 23:03 [Paul Irish]: I think it's--that's a great question. 23:06 So, right now-- 23:09 Nicolas Gallagher is the new project lead 23:12 on HTML5 Boilerplate. 23:16 He's kind of taken over, and he's doing a fantastic job. 23:18 So, his perspective is that 23:20 the Boilerplate project is aimed specifically 23:23 as a baseline--this is a baseline for web apps, 23:28 and it can be used for web apps and websites, 23:30 and there's not really much to take away, 23:32 and there's probably not much to add. 23:36 In fact, it's a very stable project 23:38 at this point because it's not trying to solve 23:40 other problems. 23:42 Now, let's say in jQuery, for instance, 23:44 this has been a longtime question 23:46 which is, "Should I learn JavaScript at the same time as I learn jQuery?" 23:48 "Should I learn it first?" 23:52 My answer to that has always been 23:54 you learn them at the same time, 23:56 especially things like math and strings and array methods. 23:58 You want to learn those JavaScript methods fairly quickly, 24:02 because there are not good answers for them in jQuery. 24:06 At the same time, you don't want to have to learn 24:08 how a lot of the intricacies of the DOM work 24:11 very early on. 24:14 So, I think it's a matter of 24:16 learning the techniques as you're using the tools. 24:19 So, in HTML5 Boilerplate, 24:21 you kind of dig into some of the documentation, 24:23 and at some point you'll just be like, 24:25 "Why?" And you should be asking that question. 24:27 That shouldn't preclude you from using the tool. 24:30 At the end of the day, you want to enjoy what you're doing, 24:33 and you want to do it fairly quickly, 24:36 and you don't want to be frustrated. 24:38 So, you use the tools that are available. 24:40 I think it's important to understand how they work, 24:42 and right now I'm trying to get a better understanding 24:45 how browsers work, and those are really complicated. 24:48 But I'm not going to tell everyone that every web developer 24:50 needs to understand how all of the web browsers work. 24:54 I think we're okay with that kind of working as a tool. 24:57 It's a balance. 25:01 Understanding the internals of any tool 25:03 will help you be much stronger at using it, 25:06 but you don't need to understand it 25:10 to use it. 25:13 [Nick Pettit]: So, wrapping up, what advice would you give 25:15 to web designers and developers out there, 25:17 just as a very general question? 25:20 [Paul Irish]: Sure. 25:23 [Nick Pettit]: What can they do to better themselves? 25:25 [Paul Irish]: One of the things that happened to me 25:27 a while ago was, 25:29 I had joined the jQuery IRC channel. 25:31 So, IRC is kind of, it seems nerdy. 25:35 Yeah. Nick's like, "Yeah, definitely nerdy." 25:38 But I joined that a long time ago, 25:41 and I was just super active in it, and that's how I got involved 25:43 in jQuery projects, started doing developer relations for jQuery, 25:45 joined the jQuery team, was involved in the project for a long time, 25:49 and it was all because I joined the IRC channel 25:52 and just started talking to people and helping people. 25:55 So, helping other people with 25:57 front-end development 26:00 you learn a lot, and I would recommend that. 26:03 The same time that that happened, 26:06 I found a group of people that were 26:08 doing a bunch of jQuery, doing a bunch of JavaScript, 26:11 and we just formed this kind of social group 26:14 of 20 of us. 26:18 It was also on IRC, and we would just talk all the time 26:20 about what we were doing, 26:24 and this led to--there was a little bit of competitiveness, 26:26 but a lot of cooperation. 26:30 We would work on projects together, 26:32 things like MovetheWebForward.org 26:34 and HTML5 Please, have come out of this group. 26:36 So, having-- 26:41 So you're not alone without a mentor. 26:43 It's great to have a social group 26:47 where you don't feel like completely inferior to everyone around you 26:49 and can kind of support each other. 26:52 The last part of this is really just to 26:54 be able to have fun while you're learning. 26:56 I think part of that is 26:58 creating little demos and experiments for yourself. 27:00 Doing that will give you more experience with cool features 27:03 and things that you want to explore 27:06 and help you feel more confident when you 27:08 propose to your boss, "Really we should do it this way," 27:10 "Why? Why?" 27:12 And you'll be like, "Well, I've actually done some work with this, 27:14 and it's not as bad or as scary as you think, 27:16 and, I don't know, it'll all work out." 27:21 [Nick Pettit]: That's the advice that I always give to people 27:23 is just, "Do cool stuff and share it with other people." 27:25 [Paul Irish]: Yeah, absolutely. 27:28 [Nick Pettit]: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. 27:30 [Paul Irish]: Cool, thanks. 27:32 [Treehouse FRIENDS] 27:34 [?music playing?] 27:36

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