Why me?
I have a unique combination of skills that make me a great fit for this kind of work: a solid connection to web designers & developers fostered over 16 years of developer advocacy, and personal experience as a web developer and designer.
- I have been funded by Google to run several major web development surveys, such as State of CSS and the inaugural State of HTML (which also resulted in novel survey UI), both taken by tens of thousands of developers every year and breaking participation records for the years I was involved.
- I have led research efforts into web development practices via scraping.
- I have given over 100 conference talks on web development topics
- I have written a bestselling CSS book that was translated into 8 languages and dubbed “Best CSS book” by the Chicago Tribune.
- I have worked at W3C as a Developer Advocate, their first ever devrel hire.
Developer-focused Research
It is widely known that poor user experience directly translates to lost revenue. However, improving UX on a product that targets web developers and designers is a unique challenge, as it requires both usability and domain expertise, and very few UX researchers have both. It’s also a myth that UX research is only for visual UIs: you can absolutely do usability studies for syntax, and I have done it many times. It’s also a myth that usability testing is a big undertaking: low-fi usability testing can be done in a few hours, and even as few as five users uncover > 80% of usability issues.
I can help you design and run surveys, interviews, and user studies to improve developer experience, distill the findings into actionable insights, and design and implement changes needed to improve it. I can also train your team on how to do this themselves in the future.
Creating dev tools
While we do not typically undertake freelance web design & development or graphic design projects (e.g. “I need a website for my business”), there are a few cases where we’re open to doing hands-on implementation work, especially in conjunction with other types of consulting. Some examples of such projects include developing…
- Prototypes and proofs-of-concept
- Polyfills
- Web components
- Flexible, maintainable CSS solutions to specific problems
- Adding a new feature to any of my open source projects
- Web Platform Tests
- Tooling to facilitate all of the above
Solutions to hard CSS problems
Your engineers have tried everything they can think of, but they can’t find a solution to a certain CSS problem that is sufficiently flexible? This can be particularly true for products that ship CSS to their customers, so flexibility becomes a requirement, not just a nice-to-have. This is my bread and butter!
You will communicate your requirements and constraints to me, and I will come up with a solution that meets as many of them as possible. If I cannot meet all of them, I will explain the tradeoffs and help you decide. I will also provide a detailed explanation of how the solution works, so that your engineers can understand it and maintain it in the future. These tend to be shorter engagements, usually a few hours to a few days.