Paul Irish

Making the www great

About

Hi. I’m Paul, a developer passionate about building great tooling for the web.

I work on developer tooling within Google Chrome.

🛠 The past few years, I’ve been heads-down in Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, PageSpeed Insights, CrUX.

💻 I made lite-youtube-embed and command-line tools like diff-so-fancy, git open, and git recent. And more soon-to-be-released in early2025. :)

🧱 A decade+ ago, I co-founded and led projects like; HTML5 Boilerplate, Modernizr, Yeoman.

Back then I also co-created projects like mothereffingtextshadow, mothereffinghsl, Mothereffing Animated GIF, Move the Web Forward, W3Fools, CSS3 Please, HTML5 Please, HTML5 Readiness, chromestatus.com. We had fun.

I’ve long loved music and had one of the first music blogs: Aurgasm. And back in the jQuery era, I co-hosted amazing yayQuery Podcast.

My Passion

Crafting a UI holds a lot of responsibility. For more niche topics, the UI may influence, or become (!), the mental model that people retain for these concepts and systems. At the same time, a UI can delight the user in a way that backend never can… (one of my favorite examples).

I’ve been fortunate to work with incredibly talented people from the web community. The projects listed here are their achievements as much as mine. The web can be a wild place, but we often find our tribe – those who share our passions. It’s crucial that these groups welcome everyone who wants to contribute, including those who aren’t as vocal online. Also keep an eye out for the quiet people at conferences, pull them into your conversations; I guarantee they work on interesting problems.

Vignettes from my web journey

Web things I named or popularized

Some history from 2008-2013

(I mostly update this because my memory is abysmal, so I need to overdocument things sometimes. :)

  • mothereffinganimatedgif.com conceived of, developed and launched in 24 hours with an ad-hoc (and awesome) lazyweb-requests team.
  • : HTML5 Boilerplate 3.0, Modernizr 2.5, html5shiv 3.0. Managed all these releases.
  • : HTML5 Please launched.
  • : Launched movethewebforward.org
  • Won Developer of the Year and Modernizr won Open Source App of the Year at the .net awards
  • : Presented to the W3C TPAC with Yehuda Katz on what javascript libraries want from browsers and standards. Helped launch the W3C ScriptLib Community Group.
  • : Launched the jQuery Standards team to liason a better discussion between JavaScript libraries and Web Standards folks.
  • : Published the comprehensive guide to How Browsers Work written by Tali Garsiel.
  • : Shipped HTML5 Boilerplate 2.0
  • : Contributed an IndexedDB adapter (primarily written by Vivian Li) to Lawnchair
  • : Released matchMedia.js polyfill for media query testing.
  • : Launched Mobile Boilerplate 1.0, a trusted template for building mobile Web applications. Lead Developer: Shi Chuan. (Press: RWW)
  • : Launched HTML5 Boilerplate 1.0, with support for six web servers, beautiful and comprehensive documentation, and a site optimizing build script.
  • : Yepnope went 1.0. I worked with Alex Sexton and Ralph Holzmann on code, marketing, and developer relations. It’s all theirs, though. :)
  • : WHATWG HTML5 Spec of developers launched. I worked on the search and consulted on the design with Ben Schwarz.
  • : JSHint launched. I sorta project managed it, though Anton Kovalyov is the lead. (Press: RWW, BadassJS)
  • : Launched Spoon.net IE browsers on iecss.com with Jonathan Neal and some w3fools
  • : Led and launched W3Fools, a campaign for better web developer documentation. Afterwards, we discussed changes with both Mozilla and W3Schools and expect both to improve. (Press: RWW, RWW(2))
  • : Launched Mothereffinghsl.com, to promote color choosing with HSL instead of RGB.
  • : Launched the #html5 freenode IRC channel with involvement from Mozilla & Opera.
  • : Launched enable-javascript.com, a collaboration with Toni Podmanicki & Jeremy Hill, to promote a singular and internationalized way to enable javascript in your browser.
  • : Launched mothereffingtextshadow.com. (Press: dropshado.ws)
  • : Popularized the term ”polyfill” with presentations and resources.
  • : Launched the HTML5 Boilerplate with Divya Manian, a set of templates for web developers collecting best practices and making an ideal project starting point. Very actively maintaning.
  • : Started as a Developer Programs Engineer at Google on the Chrome team.
  • : Proposed Webfont Obfuscation: An interim solution? to the webfont community with Ethan Dunham, to shortcut waiting for WOFF adoption by adding similar protective measures to TTF.
  • : Launched HTML5 Readiness with Divya Manian to evangelize the idea that HTML5 is not a massive thing we’re waiting for but rather features that mature differently. (Press: Lifehacker, Mashable, DF)
  • : Launched css3please, to make writing css3 easier. Initial prototype by Jonathan Neal, design by Boaz Sender, code from community. Maintained regularly.
  • : Produced six jQuery 1.4 Hawtness videos for the 1.4 launch event.
  • : Initialized the Type Rendering Project, to promote better education around webfont rendering quality.
  • Coined the term ”FOUT”.
  • : Joined the Modernizr project team after rewriting the library. Now Lead Developer; actively developing.
  • : Presented two talks at jQuery Boston Conference, on webfonts and jquery performance.
  • : Unicorns all over ESPN.com due to a konami code easter egg I wrote with a Cornify payload. (Details: espn.com unicorns, Press: Q13 Fox News (video))
  • : Made JSONP-DB with Adam Ribaudo, out of a need for a 100% client-side, cross-domain datastore API.
  • : My first mention on Ajaxian. \o/

Other assorted stuff I think is rad

  • Wrote the forewords of Pro HTML5 Programming, HTML5 & CSS3 in The Real World, and HTML5 - De la page web à l’application web .. and soon Third Party Javascript
  • Technical Reviewer for a chapter in Smashing Book #3 and also jQuery Enlightenment
  • I was the 3rd most popular GitHub profile for a bit. (Behind defunkt and Linus Torvalds.) Probably ~2012.
  • Proposed, defended and saw the inclusion of HTML5 data-* attribute support in jQuery. Older Paul: Was it really the best idea, though? Probably not!
  • Helped get the Google Chrome Frame/IE=Edge header into Rails core.
  • Somewhat project managed the IEPP (HTML5 Shiv) v2 release and distribution . Alexander Farkas was lead dev.

Interviews

… a work in progress / everything is a draft …

Social: @paul.irish | Mastodon: @paul_irish@toot.cafe | paulirish.com.