Hey, everyone, and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and in today's episode, I speak with Christopher Schmidt. I met Chris as a part of CSS DevConf. Chris is one half of Environments for Humans. They put on conferences for developers. You may also know Chris from some of his publications, CSS Cookbook, Adapting to Web Standards, or Professional CSS. Chris is such an inviting person. He's such an important part of especially the CSS community, but also the web development community in general. So I was excited to sit down and talk with Chris, and we'll get into that interview in just a minute. I want to thank today's sponsor, DigitalOcean. If you are looking for a cloud hosting solution that you can get up and running with in under a minute and that costs you $5 a month, then DigitalOcean is a perfect opportunity for you. We'll talk more about what DigitalOcean has to offer you later on in the episode, but first, I want to jump straight into the interview with Christopher Schmidt. Thanks so much for being on the show today, Chris. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I'm really excited to talk to you. You have a lot of interesting things on your resume, but most people know you because they've seen you, they've met you at conferences around the United States. I suppose you've been around the world to conferences. Is that true? Yeah. I've been around the world. I go to conferences, I speak at conferences, and with my partner, Ari Stiles, I produce a lot of conferences too. And we will talk about environments for humans in just a little bit for sure. Some people may also know you from the CSS Cookbook, and some people may know you from Non-Breaking Space. There are a ton of things, actually, that you may know Chris from. Chris, I'd like to go back to the beginning and ask you, how did you get into web development from the start? Oh, well, it goes back in time a little bit, or a lot. It was the early 90s. It was a baby, Pearl Jam, if you will. And I was in college, in design school, learning graphic design, print design, and learning everything you need to know, and that goes through graphic design school. And I was really... I love design. I love being able to do things. I love being able to formulate and bring content, imagery, editing, all the design techniques that you need to put together a presentation in a fixed medium. But I was really interested in... I think one way to describe it is getting the most bang for your buck in terms of, if you give a print designer X amount of money, how many people will be able to see a pamphlet, or a business card. Right. Or a business annual, or a commercial on TV, or what have you, if they do video, whatever. So then I found this web. Well, actually, before that, I was finding what's called Microsoft Help files, which I don't think they use anymore. And it was like this... You could write your own help files, and that was kind of ubiquitous. It doesn't matter. And Windows kind of ruled the world by that time. I was like, wow, this is a great way to disseminate information. And it was kind of limited in terms of the amount of time you spend on it. And I was like, well, I'm going to do this. And it was kind of limited in terms of the design of typography and all that stuff. So it was really terrible. And then almost on the same weekend or month, I discovered the web. I was like, oh, wow, this is great. And the web back then was just really cheesy bullets with links to the few hundred websites that were on the web that were popular, like the Netscape aquarium cam, fish cam. That was back when AOL had the keywords that would take you directly to a website? Yeah, exactly. And then you actually... You could send you CD-ROMs in the mail. Oh, yeah. You could get the internet as a program. Install the internet, really. Pay by the hour kind of stuff. Oh, man, that was terrible. And the modem noise when you logged in. Yeah, so... But I was at the university, so I didn't have to worry about that much. So it was pretty good. So I made a couple of custom web pages, and I showed my design mentor at the time what the web was. We always had discussions about stuff that I was looking into and what she was bringing into class and all that stuff. And so one of these moments, I was just like, hey, this is the web, this is what it does. And she saw the pages, saw what's out there, and saw what I was doing. And she looked at me and said, like, Chris, what you should be doing, web design. And I looked at her and I said, well, what is web design? And then shortly after that, I looked more into it. Because I love the idea of being... Yeah. Being able to design on the web with the same amount of money that you would get for a project for a brochure like I was talking about before. But the potential to reach more people over vast distances really appealed to me. So I went to the bookstore, which is crazy for a web. Got David Siegel's Creating Killer Websites and Linda Wyman's Creating Web Graphics... Designing Web Graphics? I forget what it's called. We'll include it in the show notes. We'll include it in the show notes either way. But Linda's book was the first web book that was in color and then that told you the basics of how to build web pages. And then David Siegel's book taught you design techniques, designing for the web in terms of a more traditional designer's approach. And of course, they were all a bunch of hacks. It was like HTML table layouts. Yep. Pixel GIFs and whatnot. Yeah. You know, what have you. But they made kind of visual sense of the web back then. That's those tools that we had. Either that or everything was going to be a line center, which is something we have now with responsive design, a little bit of things like design. But yeah, so that was pretty much it. And I got rolling on that. And David Siegel had his studio in San Francisco called Studio Verso. And he ran a little what we call blog, I guess now. Yeah. Called High Five. And every week he would write about this great looking website and talk to designers and talk about how they made it. And it grew into this kind of like almost daily publication, but not really daily. They had new stuff every day, but not really. Probably like every other day. And I got hired right out of college to help produce it. And that's when I started myself in San Francisco and doing the dot com rush and started producing. And I was just talking to all these cool people, building cool sites. And everyone at Studio Verso, I worked at Studio Verso's office and everyone there was so amazingly talented and smart, smarter than I was. So it was a very humbling, but really cool experience. That's really cool. Yeah. That's sort of how I got started, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So there's some... I was reminiscing back to my early days. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.ension Yeah. set of colors we could use in not not even that long ago when there was a limited number of fonts really that we could use reliably and uh and that was it you know you had your your basic font stack and everybody used those fonts and you know using something beyond that typically we used like flash replacement do you remember uh what was the name of the tool something called swiffer or something that or yeah there was there was a swiffer which which uh replaced like uh you could embed a swift thing but then there was this other tool kufon it was if i remember correctly it was actually a canvas that that it would replace the font with rather than rather than flash yeah and then and that was supposed to help solve the problem because we would always make our headings out of uh gifs yeah adobe came out with a tool a service side tool that would take your html headings oh yeah i remember that replace them automatically and you know i remember like jeff bean uh video promotion like talking about how awesome it is and everything like that you know it's like yeah that's pretty cool but uh i just don't know if i'm going to install a server just so i can have a cool a cool header yeah but yeah the funny thing is that i actually made and designed a mouse pad uh that had the website colors in a color wheel arrangement so it was this it was a circular mouse pad because the safety palette for web safe color palette was uh was you know it's based off a cube so it's mathematical cube and so uh it was it's programmed or engineered very well but as a designer it doesn't really talk about you know uh palettes of color how to like you know complementary colors you know whatever so uh so i actually took the website colors in the website palette and put them into a color wheel and then i put that in a color wheel and i put that onto a really uh i think a really nice mouse pad and that's like my first thing i sold actually i made and sold was uh i think we sold like over 25 000 oh that's great mouse pad it's about that so i still use it it's on my desk so it's it's nice just to have like i need a color for this okay perfect color that's great uh really really fun time in the early days of the internet that was uh that was also back when i was doing uh interactive flash ads like banner ads oh nice yeah the good guy kind you know not the not the pop-up kind but you know for for bands and things like that not like the click which state you're on to refire house exactly yeah oh yeah so then you you know you practiced web development presumably for a few years and and what ultimately inspired you to write the css cookbook um well i love css it's it's a mixture of design skills uh you know i've been doing a lot of design skills for a long time and i've been doing a lot of you know the artistic side and then also mathematical side and um and just to produce something of a visual you know aesthetic which is you know which as a designer which i totally love so and i think it's still true for print design as it is for design and so i just i love css i love what it could do but at the time when the css cookbook first edition came out there was you know it like browsers today have you know robust css support it's almost like a given that browser comes out and has like robust css support but there was a time when that wasn't the case we were all just doing font tags in line uh we were like uh spacer gifs like we were talking about like there's like center tags that we had to deal with uh multiple nested tables and so css came out mostly from ie i'm gonna probably tell you this didn't want to happen whatever but uh yeah netscape came out uh with their version of css but it was kind of javascript powered css and then ie realized that oh snap we really need a browser yeah because everyone's gonna love this internet thing and that's cape is is owning the market so they came out with a browser and so version two to three they started like bringing in kind of native nested native css support without uh so if you turn off javascript and netscape you wouldn't get any css support and in your web pages so ie came out with a browser that like the css support and then i had native css support it was still very limited and ie3 but that was kind of like the turning point of css and so i'm not sure really where it happened but um you know there were certain kind of hacks or techniques that we're looking at that were kind of coming in place and practical and maybe a little too much for our bookmarks you know to me unwieldy so i was like you know we should really you know someone should write a book this is kind of like catalogs not everything that you could do with css because that's you know that's kind of what the spec is about but kind of like just focus on what's practical in the browsers today so the first version of the book was like about close to 100 recipes of um of css tricks they never very practical so um so you could do some things but if i couldn't do it cross browser uh at the time i didn't put it in the book because it just you know it's like i would i really wanted to be a practical book and not talk about like things that might happen so so that's kind of how that book gets started it is uh at the third edition is it locked at that do you think or uh no so the third edition is kind of old it was like uh i actually will be probably running that next year fourth edition and that and that will um been a while but uh it came out right before css 3d became white hot so i sort of missed the whole like web font you know blow up with a tech kit and how easy it is to embed fonts now so um and there's a lot more to put into it so so the first edition was like second edition was 250 the third edition was 800 pages if you got the ebook version so the fourth edition is actually talking to um my editor that we're probably just do it in um like mini books if you will but so we'll be focusing on and i don't know if anyone knows what cookbook is but cookbook is you know a set of recipes or like we'll call recipes like you have a problem statement uh and then you write a solution and then you kind of have a discussion as why the solution is better you can go about solving a problem and each chapter it deals with a separate issue so you may have a chapter deals with uh images for the web uh web topography uh typical data representation we know the chapter and so on and so we're probably gonna there's so much stuff i think there's gonna go in there like uh like you know the animations chapter alone would probably be astounding yeah uh so we're probably just gonna tackle it as a mini book and then uh when it gets down to the road to end the road we'll probably just make this uber book that you can buy as an uber book there's gonna be an entire chapter on centering things hopefully yeah there's so many ways to center things now but uh yeah i was uh yeah actually like learning more about flexbox yeah last week and so i'm like really ecstatic about flexbox and and really uh happy with the support it has in modern browsers i think you picked a good year to update it because i believe ie support for ie9 and well i know ie8 for sure and i think it's ie8 and 9 uh microsoft is dropping support for those browsers and presumably you know i would assume that a lot of the content that you're going to write about in these upcoming individual chapter books uh will will end up ignoring a lot of that older tech that was you know those hacks and those things that otherwise are no longer really useful well back in the day right like a browser would take a year to release a new update and just like said like let's just you know we're not gonna play without those rules anymore and so they just update like every two weeks i don't know how often they do they do release their canary update you know every every so often and so um so we used to say like netscape 4.5 you know or like you know ie3 you know this works in ie3 and so now it's just totally like you know just as a book author now it's just like just wash your hands of it and just say it's supported yes or no type of thing so it's pretty nice but uh but i am happy by all like that we don't have to do that we don't have to deal with ie8 or 9 anymore in the near future so that's pretty good i mean it's you know i remember like going around to speaking at places and seeing people solve this sport ie6 and 7 and you know it's like oh man sorry that's rough that's rough yeah and the amazing thing is you know we have level 4 selectors i talked about this on your show and i talked about it at one of the conferences that environments for humans put on actually um but level 4 selectors are coming out and some of the uh the uh the uh the uh the uh the uh the uh the uh the uh the uh the uh the uh the are already available on safari and that's i mean that's going to change the landscape of css again and it's all moving so quickly uh if you are using or if you are creating a browser that doesn't automatically update the spec is going to start moving faster than your browser does and in fact i would say it already does move faster than the browsers typically do well yeah we run the issue of like the spec uh falling behind a little bit but it's but it's okay with that i think uh the more i'm concerned about is this if the browsers start dictating what the spec should be but it's always been like a give and take it's been all like a big uh tug of war if you will like you know the i mean you need to have browsers to innovate and find new things and and try things out and then you always have the spec writers saying like well we need you know these these uh certain uh features into a browser but you know at the end of the day it's the browser that implements you know the spec so yeah they kind of hold the keys there yeah so so you know that's you know they're as they say the rubber hits the road with you know with the browser so we just you know whatever you know we're at their mercy a little bit but at the same time it would you know i think it's it's been a great uh renaissance i think with just having the spec writers and the browser vendors working together and also i feel like it's a you know that you can look at that with the responsive images uh community group which is you know this kind of like thing i felt like it was kind of like this w3c had like oh community group you really really want to talk to us a little bit more for me i think it's been a great renaissance i think it's been a great renaissance community group and then uh i don't think they were expecting this uh this big group come together over responsive images and trying to solve this problem and it was a you know multi-year you know it took a while and a lot of solutions came up there but it was it's nice for you to be able to come to the browser and and and to the spec writers and say like hey here are some solutions or test cases uh you know we we actually need this and you know and at first spec writers were like no you don't need this and then and then i was like oh then they kind of like looked at it and said like looked at it some more and then you know then we talked to the browser vendors and you know the engineers and told them what could and can happen and so it was like so the solution that we have now is not the one that we would have i think um everyone in the group i don't want to speak for everyone but i just feel like it's definitely not the solution that we would have started out with but it's a solution that you know works and it's great but and that's only because if people coming together and talking about it and talking what they need to actually you know build great web pages uh on the device and and and and and and and and and and and so it's it's it's really just an interesting dynamic of specs versus browsers yeah it's like practical versus ideal right like you have the the the actual practicing developer and then you have the person who's developing the spec that may or may not be you know in an agency environment and when they get in a room together they may have competing opinions but they come out on the other side hopefully and again ideally with something that is both that that works you know that it that keeps in mind for example accessibility but also is is easy enough to use that it's adopt it's easily adopted by people who are already using css in their everyday jobs well great i think we're going to take a quick sponsor break and then i want to come back and talk with you specifically about conferences uh and talk about environments for humans your experiences with environments for humans uh and then we will we will end out this part of the view uh and and then in the next episode of developer t if you're listening to this right now you're listening to part one of a two-part interview with chris in the next part we're going to talk about a bunch of other things that i'm not going to give them away uh so come back and make sure you listen to that second episode the second part of the interview but first let's talk about today's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by one of my very favorite services on the planet that's digital ocean if you are looking for an ssd cloud hosting solution that's super fast and incredibly affordable and incredibly easy to use digital ocean is a perfect opportunity for you go and check it out digitalocean.com the entry-level plan for digital ocean is only five dollars a month that gets you 20 gigabytes of ssd super fast space a terabyte of bandwidth transfer and 512 megabytes of ram on that machine and you can put anything you want to on this machine get root access and you can get this thing set up in less than a minute so if you are looking for a hosting provider try out digital ocean now if that wasn't already enough digital ocean is providing a 10 credit if you use the code developer t at checkout so that's basically like two months completely for free on digitalocean.com on their entry-level droplet so go and check it out digitalocean.com make sure you do not forget that code developer t at checkout to get the 10 credit just for being a listener of the show and of course that helps out developer t as well thank you so much to digital ocean for being a longtime sponsor of developer t in 2015 and of course as always those links will be in the show notes at spec.fm so chris we've been talking about css primarily you wrote the css cookbook for o'reilly and that's going to be updated you said hopefully next year yeah so right now i'm working on a book called uh responsively retrofitting cool and it's a responsive web design makeovers and so i just did a kickstarter for that and so um is that one through or for o'reilly is it uh published yeah it's gonna be through o'reilly and so um kick starter to help me free up some of my time so i can actually focus on it great and um and so that one's focused more on um it's rich it's niche but it's to help people who can't invest either time or money to start from scratch to build a responsive website and uh just to help them their websites get more mobile friendly with uh to be as not as invasive as possible like i mean just put in one extra script tag or one extra style tag sure into their site and to make it work uh it'd be more uh be more multi-device friendly yeah i do that so uh so this is that we have a few uh demos in there and just and you know it's it's gonna be teaching responsible design by way of this kind of like really neat interesting so i feel like there's a really big focus on on that especially when you know so many sites out there that that are updated content wise but you know their their shell there is still trapped in you know legacy websites at the ultimate table layouts or old fixed width layouts and so you want to i just want to and with google kind of penalizing them for not being mobile friendly i just want to so there's like i think it's a big big cry out for that yeah so it makes the web better it brings up kind of the bottom end of the floor i guess the minimum quality of the web and i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point of a given website hopefully this is this is one of those injections of quality into the atmosphere right well i hope so i hope it's quality so but the css cookbook like you mentioned is right after that one i get to dive into working with css cookbook yeah well other than writing though you you run uh at least you are part uh owner of environments for humans for developers who are currently listening what do they miss out on by not going to a conference you know when i first started out um i felt like there's the major ways of learning or of course like online there's one thing i love about our community i think and i love about like this podcast is that we actually share what we learn uh very easily uh unlike other industries uh however things just change really fast right yeah things just you know technologies change fast what we're what we're building up with today is different than it was yesterday like you know like this past uh week or so we're trying to do a lot of things that we're not used to doing and uh now that they would shy away from php that just kind of shows me that they're going to more javascript solution in the future and so you wouldn't think about that like one year ago or five years ago um and since things change so fast and we're so busy you know with our with our their jobs and you know our families or our lives you know things that you know that other things that matter to us uh it's it's kind of easy to fall out of rhythm of what's going on and what's the latest and greatest and so i find conferences are a great way to uh either um underscore or let you know that you are on the right path of what you're doing or that you are doing the right thing as well as learning and opening up your mind to new ideas and new approaches uh to new technologies and seeing what's on the horizon like you know uh we we do the css dev conf conference and one of the things that people always love is seeing the stuff that's like almost here so they can prepare and learn more about it so when they when it comes they're not too surprised like last year we had css dev conf the best presentation was uh jen simmons and she did a great presentation with a new layout uh technologies that are available through css that are coming like css shades and grids and so on that's so cool um so really cool stuff but it's not here here but it's it's almost here so uh so so that's some stuff you can find out about it but also uh meeting colleagues and like and having what's uh what we call like hallway discussions and so first time i came associated like i knew about them was uh through south by southwest uh when it was more like you know web focused if you will and it was on this you know interactive southwest was like just probably about 10 rooms in the top floor of the austin convention center and uh the best things were having meeting all these cool people who i knew via their websites and just and getting to know what they're up to and what challenges they were having um you know not just with web but you know with the web and you know what's going on and you know what's going on and with everything else that was going on and get to know my friends uh those are the best part of uh you know south by southwest so it's uh and you know just kind of miss those days because south by is uh kind of a different beast but so is our industry is kind of different than it was then but uh but yes but you know there's other conferences out there where you can meet colleagues and find out what they're doing and what kind of solutions uh what problems that they're tackling and what solutions they're looking forward to so i found that that's probably the most interesting um part of conferences as well as learning new things and like i said like with csf devconf which is our like our most um famous i guess or like our in-person conference that we do uh we spent a lot of time trying to find ways not just to make sure we have great speakers and all that sort of it but for the entertainment and trying to find ways for people to talk and get to know each other because uh you know we we find that that um you know there's lots of introverts in it yeah which is true i'm totally introvert so but uh it's uh you just yeah and to get people to talk to each other and find them uh you know kind of find those icebreakers and do do new cool things and so like one of the things that we've done the last couple of years is be able to do tours whichever locale so like one of the things we we see as a devconf is that we actually try to find and inject some of the flavor of where we are so we were able to do like ghost tours at the uh at the stanley hotel because that's where we had the devconf a couple years ago and then we did like a uh you can do history or uh you know if we do tour in new orleans where we were last year and you do a tour of the queen mary this past year uh so and that was great and so you go tours on groups and get to know each other um on that way as well as uh you know other activities and so on yeah i i think that's something that a lot of people kind of take for granted in the web development community and that is you know the importance of actually talking to people and i do want to talk about your remote conferences but uh but these these on location conferences i actually did an episode just like it was last week i believe about taking advantage of conferences and uh or it may have been a few weeks ago but in any case it was talking about taking advantage of conferences and um being certain that you're that you're intentional about the people that are there because if you're just there for the content if you're just there for the sessions it quite honestly you could probably get a good amount of that content online already right like and that's you know that's not to say that there's no value if you're just there for the sessions you can definitely get extra value by being there because you can walk up and talk to the person about that session or you can raise your hand and ask a question which you can't really do effectively if you're you know watching this on youtube after the fact right there's two totally different situations but actually sitting at lunch with another developer who lives on the other side of the country from you and faces similar problems to what you face that's that's actually really valuable and ask yourself you know how often do you get to talk to other developers face to face who are in similar situations to you particularly other developers who are not on your team that's that's a really important thing in my opinion at least that's a really important piece of the conference puzzle yeah i definitely agree i think it's just you know just to find people who have that have common problems or and might have a you know a solution that you would never thought of or or expound on some you know technique or whatnot is that a speaker was talking about is just pretty pretty awesome it's you know there's there's learning by like looking on the web or a book but then like when you're actually there and you actually like you know a really great presentation is something that we you know is someone who could tell us a story and even you know tells a technology problem tells a really great way of solving the problem and then also you know talks about different ways they can solve it you know just uh is a way better and almost priceless uh in comparison to a blog post yeah about it because you're able to remember uh the presentation so much uh more vividly than you would like a blog post so not to say a blog post can't be great and well designed well it's just a different medium with different values and it's just a different medium with different values and it's just a different medium with different values and it's just a different medium with different values uh it's like saying you can't equalize a tweet and a blog post either right they they both have certain amount of value but honestly it's much much more likely that you're getting more value out of a blog post than you do out of a tweet because they're different formats right um yeah so one thing i remember from css devconf this year somebody asked about you know they were asking about the people on the stage and they said yeah you all have uh you found a way basically to make a blog post and you know you're not going to be able to make a blog post without a blog post on the stage and yeah uh how do we as the people who are not on the stage you know get to the place where we are you know building content like you are and they were they were asking specifically they said you know i go to write something and then either somebody else has already written it or it's just not interesting enough for me to write and i think the element that you just pointed out chris is kind of the magic element and that is story and the individuals experience you know there's there's so many different ways of doing uh certain things but eventually you kind of hit a threshold there's only so many ways that you can change a font on a page right however there are an nearly infinite i won't say infinite because that's probably not true but there are a lot of situations where typography is really particular to that story to that use case to that uh particular project and if you tell your story and you do it in a entertaining or compelling way people can learn from you even if it's something they already technically know right that's that is uh probably the most insightful thing that's actually the reason this podcast exists i'm not saying anything that nobody else has you know uncovered in some way or another i learned it from other people i'm not you know unearthing uh some hidden secrets deep in a cave and i'm not saying anything that nobody else has you know uncovered in some way or another i'm just i'm talking with you chris and we're talking about our experiences yeah i totally agree i mean like um you know one of my heroes is like you know chris coyier and um and i think everyone knows about css tricks right and the way he blogs is who he is right and so like i've met chris you know he's speaking on our stuff he's uh um he's just a great guy down the earth guy but um i i because i've gone to conferences and i've met him i hear him when i read his books and his blog posts and i know his and that was before i met him you know i you know i could spot a chris coyier uh blog post just because the way he writes it right and um and so it's very authentic to who he is and how he writes and and so i could go to him because i know what i'm reading is his point of view and and how he approaches the problem and he he also like finds he almost writes a css good book he's like he always he always has other alternative ways to solve a problem but but that doesn't mean that you know just because you know someone else has already solved the problem uh for or has an issue with the web or whatnot and has already posted it on a blog doesn't mean that you don't need to push it up there as well it's sort of like saying like you know chevrolet already made a car why do i need to you know why do i make you know why does honda need to make a car you know you know as long as it's authentic and you're publishing something from a true source or true point of view i think people will resonate with that yeah i totally agree so in in the that spirit of telling stories i want to round out this part of the interview by asking you if you have any to share some stories from this year's conference or conferences rather that stuck out to you maybe it was just a presentation or maybe it was somebody who came up and talked to you specifically can you share a story about this year's conferences that kind of sticks out to you uh and is a good memory maybe well i think as a conference organizer um one thing that we do differently and it was it was from kind of like day one is that we do a double blind voting yeah yeah um for our people who submit uh a conference and spend our talk to the conference and so one of the reasons why we do that is that we want to make it uh don't give any bias so we and by double blind if no one is listening doesn't know that is that we strip out a person's name and their kind of bio um from their submission and then have the community at like a conference and then we do a double blind voting and then we do a double large vote on it uh and so that way we can you know figure out what content people really want to see versus uh people they want to see uh and you referenced the wrap-up panel earlier and so in the rebel panel is kind of a tradition as dev conf is that every available speaker you know some people have to catch flights or whatnot but so they all can't be there but everyone who can be there uh we invite them onto the stage and the idea is sort of uh just see if there's any questions you wanted to ask about any topic that was presented and then we can do a double blind vote um during before that that before the end of the conference pretty much uh this is your time this is your chance and the idea is not to like you know put you and your speakers on a pedestal but mostly to say like you know we're all colleagues and we're all the same there's one thing that i think molly hoslag actually told me is that uh is that he's all saying is that uh there's more knowledge in the audience than on the speaker on the stage yeah we really want to get a dialogue going between the speaker and the audience and i think that's a really good idea i think that's a really good idea i think that's a really good idea i think that's a really good idea and the attendees and you know and one of the things that you mentioned the question is like uh how can i be a speaker at the event uh one of the questions asked was i think this is what it was i think it was the question was asked from the audience was like when you submitted your talk to dev to the dev comp did you already have it written out or like you already did you already know what the topic was and just raise your hand if you did not i think most people on the stage raise your hand they didn't have it so it was just like i think it was a really good idea to have a talk so between the time they said that they want to talk about this and the time they actually showed up they actually worked hard on um producing a like a new new presentation and so i think that kind of like well that shocked me one as a as a conference organizer is like oh my gosh these people just signed up and they weren't really like but at the same time i like you know i you know we're really professional we really trust everyone to uh to show up and do uh do a great job but i hope that inspired people to like when it comes time when someone does a call for speakers for a conference just to think about what they would want to see and it doesn't mean that you've done a talk before but think about what you really want to see on stage and have that authentic voice in there it's like well you know what'd be really cool if we had to talk about this and then flush that idea a little bit and then submit that and and see how that goes because i feel like uh i mean this you know the industry needs new voices all the time and yeah it needs your voice whoever i'm talking to you right now you need your voice and i just don't don't keep it quiet yeah i would say that uh more than any other industry more voices doesn't necessarily mean competition like we're fighting right like that's the that's the one of the most amazing things about this industry to me i could talk about this all the time but it's that uniquely from most other industries we are mostly non cannibalistic in other words my business getting better typically doesn't hurt your business because everybody needs the wet like there is a a massive hole i guess you could say a massive need that the demand is much larger than the supply right now and presumably will be for the the foreseeable future for development of some sort right whether it's web development or other types of software development demand for this is is not going anywhere except for the internet and i think that's a big part of the problem and so uh because of that when we have more people taking uh taking leadership stepping up and inserting their voice into this discussion well i mean it just makes the industry better more knowledgeable people step into the gaps and the new technologies are unearthed new ways of using old technologies are unearthed and new stories ultimately they inform us and they teach us new things uh that we otherwise never would have known and that's the thing that's so important and so uh if you feel like there's a gap between if you're listening to this episode now and you feel like there's a gap between you and publishing and becoming i don't know the next chris coyer or whatever there's not there's not a gap there it is just about you know taking those steps now am i saying it's easy absolutely not like nothing worth doing and to quote whoever it was that said this i couldn't tell you but nothing nothing really worth doing is all that you can do and easy, right? But is it worth it? I would say yes. I totally think that getting involved in these kinds of things, publishing your opinions, publishing your stories, and stepping up and taking leadership in the industry, there's space for you. Totally agree. Well, that wraps up the first part of the interview. Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. And we will continue this interview in the next episode of Developer Tea. Well, thanks for having me. This is awesome. And thank you for listening to Developer Tea today. Thank you so much to Christopher for joining me on this episode and the next episode of Developer Tea. If you don't want to miss out on that episode, make sure you subscribe to the show and whatever podcasting app you use. You can always find the show notes for this episode and every other episode at spec.fm. Thank you again to today's sponsor, DigitalOcean.com. If you are looking for a SSD cloud hosting solution, DigitalOcean.com is a fantastic place to start. 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