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Smashing Podcast Episode 60 With Mei Zhang: What Is Design Storytelling?

We’re talking about the process of design. How do you build a process to enable your best work? Vitaly Friedman talks to designer Mei Zhang to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s a senior UX designer and a UX consultant with a strong product and strategy background. As a kid, she was busy creating arts and fell in love with UX while studying industrial design in college. She has spent her career developing design systems and solving problems for e-commerce products that are loved by millions of people around the world. Now, she also loves helping designers uncover root causes, explore multiple directions, and identify sweet spots between user and business.

Vitaly: She’s currently working with Booking.com and resides in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Of course, she is a cat person, as it often is in the Smashing Podcast. And in her spare time, she can be found painting, skiing, serving her cats — there are a couple — writing on her design blog and learning about design, business, leadership and management. We know she’s a wonderful UX designer, but did you know that she used to swim in order to participate in the Olympics? That was one of her dreams, which unfortunately didn’t come true. However, help her have a lung capacity of over 5,000, which is a big deal. My Smashing friends, please welcome Mei Zhang. Hello, Mei. How are you feeling today?

Mei Zhang: Hello. Hi, everyone. I’m smashing.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s wonderful to hear. How are you? Is it cold out there in Amsterdam these days or is it sunny?

Mei: Luckily, it was sunny in the couple of days. In the past couple of days.

Vitaly: So, it’s better. I have to ask this story. Swimming in the Olympics. Why did you decide to do this? Because I guess you were playing with design and UX already at this point. Or was it before or prior to design?

Mei: Oh.

Vitaly: Why did you decide to take on this challenge?

Mei: It was definitely before the design career. I was in my elementary school and I fall in love with swimming. And as a ambitious little girl who want to have some targets. So I need to compete for the Olympics because this is something very challenging. But unfortunately, I didn’t go through the competition. But I think it definitely gave me something, make me a stronger person. Not only physically, but also mentally. So I really appreciated that.

Vitaly: I have no doubt at all. We’ll probably bring up — I’ll probably bring up this question about how it in the end influenced your UX and design career. But maybe before we dive into that. And maybe you could share a story about how did you even end up in this design and UX world? Maybe you could share a bit about your journey and what brought you where you are today.

Mei: I think what brought me where I am today is the iPhone 4. I got iPhone 4 as a gift at the first year of my college and then I get to learn about human-computer interaction which published by Apple. And another fun fact, the human-computer interaction guidelines are already there in 1987. That is what I remember. Whoa, it’s a long history of something that I have never heard about. I start studying basically X design by myself. I just genuinely really interested in the fancy interactions at that time. What CSS can do for you.

Mei: I was also a Smashing Magazine fan. I follow all your articles and try to do something with CSS and JavaScript. And I think also during my study, people start discussing about what you want as a career after graduation, what industry you would like to join. I was lost at that time, but I know I love UX design and I’m good at it because all my school project was related somehow to human-computer interaction. And, I think, at that time, the IT industry also was booming because people started having Facebook. I think that somehow made me feel like maybe that is something that has a future. So, that is basically my journey into UX design.

Vitaly: But then, you ended up where you are here today. And you have all this. I always reminded of all this UX methodologists and methods and all the ways. And you have created these incredible mind maps as well. But all the things that you potentially need to keep in mind as a UX designer when you are working on a product or on a project. And maybe before we dive there, maybe we could speak a bit more particularly about breaking complexity into something that’s more manageable.

Vitaly: I know that you’ve been working or you are working on relatively or quite complex products. And again, just given this huge amount of all the different methods and options available to you as a UX designer, how do you choose your path? Or specifically, maybe, how do you start when you have a really complex. Maybe an enterprise product or maybe B2B or maybe anything that’s complicated and you need to break it down. How do you do that? What would be your process? And maybe also, your methods to make sense of it all?

Mei: Such a great question. I would guess the first step is always find what is the real problem. What we are designing for. To deep dive into the problems and find the root cause. That is definitely the first step I would choose because the problems also help the designers or people around you to define the process because with different problems you might need different methodologies. And also, the second step will also be identifying the stakeholders. As you mentioned, you have people around you who are genuinely interested or who are in charge of the project. Identify the people around you and what they need.

Mei: The outcome is not only the end product that deliver to the users, but also to. Let’s say it in the simple way. Make your stakeholders happy. I think those are the two basic principles for navigating through what methodologies that I pick. And also, you need to look at availabilities as well. That is, usually happens in the real life work. Maybe for example, you don’t have data for some project. But also, it’s impossible to collect that. Maybe you need to find another method that could answer the same questions that is available.

Vitaly: But then I’m also wondering: you also mentioned data. I’m actually quite wondering because I feel like very often, I end up in this dilemma with teams I’m working with. Where there is a person or there is a team, they have a very strong design vision. This is how it should be. It’s usually based on research and usually going to be very much focused on user needs or customer needs. A very customer-centric view. But then sometimes, it clashes against the business idea of how things should be and the business direction of where the company wants to go. And sometimes, I feel that there is this really strong tension between where the designer wants to go and what the, let’s say, A/B testing tells.

Vitaly: And maybe, testing is such a short-term thing. Where you test if it works now and then. It might be a good thing, of course, to improve things and that will drive conversion, though. But where do you see? How do you see this resolving? How do you get to this balance between doing something? Because again, we run A/B tests and this performs better than this. Against the big design, the grandiose, so to say, design vision that exists in designers’ heads based on user needs and based on business needs.

Mei: First of all, I don’t think those two A/B tests. Let’s say A/B testing and a great vision in the designer’s head is something that cannot exist together. I think they can co-exist because A/B testing is just one of methodologies to validate the concept. It’s the small steps to take you towards a big vision. It’s not a easy task, but it’s the designers who need to guide the product managers or guide your team towards the vision. That is actually sometimes underestimated by the outside because we have a lot of things showed to us designers because we are visionaries.

Mei: We have a vision, so we need to take that through. What I usually do is first, definitely have a great relationship with your product managers because you are actually working together as a whole to reach the vision. They are more business of course, and they are more data-driven or metrics-driven. But on the other hand, you are the user advocate. Build a good relationship and trust with your product managers and work together on a daily basis. It shouldn’t be like, "Ah, I don’t agree with you". Or something like this. But more be like, "Let’s sit together and make a great thing or make a great product."

Mei: And I think sometimes, I also feel like it’s really important to have a businessman side as a designer. Especially if you are working for an organization that’s aimed for profit, your responsibility is also to keep the business running. The business goal is also your goal as a designer, as well. Your responsibility is to craft a great user experience that will improve the business or make the business stronger. For example, learn about business metrics, understand the view from the product side. And also, sometimes I find what is helpful for me is to define user behavior metrics because for A/B testing.

Mei: Sometimes you, say that, maybe some business metrics doesn’t increase but the user behavior metrics were improving. You can also use this as a argument to get things through. It’s not only about A/B testing. It has to be improving business. But if you can prove that it’s going to improve the user experience and the user experience can lead into long-term business growth, then that will happen. And also, I think what I’m doing very often in the past is also to break the vision into smaller pieces that is experimentable.

Mei: In this case, it’s also help as a designer to validate your ideas. I know we are all, as a designer, we’re all proud of our ideas and we believe that’s going to work. And most of the time, of course it’s going to work, but we also need to use data and argument to support our ideas. I would say it is something. It definitely bring a lot of positive side from A/B testing to build a vision.

Vitaly: The reason why I brought this up actually because I’m just coming from a project where this has become a big issue. Where essentially, it seems like there is this very strong tension between, again, the ideas of we need to do something now and drive conversion up now. But again, we also need to think about the long-term goals. And very often, what happens is you might be improving things by showing a new set of popup very prominent and then a bit more prominent, then a bit more flashy and then even more flashy. But then it’s actually going to hurt your long-term goals. I actually want to maybe dig a little bit deeper. When you speak about user behavior metrics or any ways to capture the quality of the design work basically done. Could you maybe share a few of them that would be most important in your work?

Mei: I’m thinking about something related to the example you just gave about the flashing popup. One example I can think of right now is that, in the past, I also had experience where the product was pushing for metrics. They’re making things rainbowy or flashy. I think definitely what helped was to conduct user interviews to understand what is user’s point of view of that. They’ll be like, "Oh, I think this brand was just to trick me." They also understand the black UX part or the bad. Sorry. The bad UX pattern that try to trick them into something.

Mei: And also, something help me as well is to look into the long-term user flow because they tend to only focus on one metrics and improve that. But have you looked through the whole flow? Maybe the click rate went up, but in the end, less people are converting. Then you cannot say that this is a good solution. You just. Try to find different metrics that can, to build your argument with the product. And also, try to, in your daily basis, try to make your product manager or your product colleagues to more understand what is a good user experience.

Mei: Because I work with all kinds of product managers and some are like you mentioned in that case. Really focusing on one metrics and don’t care the UI. And there are also product managers who really understand what is UX experience. I want to do something good for the long run. Try to also influence your product managers to understand what is good for the long run. Because in the end, someone has to clean up the bad UX in the end because that will lead into something in the future.

Vitaly: Absolutely. I think it also heavily depends on the culture that the company has, the organization has and how the teams are organized. And sometimes, you see that there are. Whenever everything is siloed, you will end up in the situation where a silo would have very specific goals and they don’t even know what the other teams are doing. Or how their things that they may be performing or they’re working on in the vertical effect everyone else. This is more probably a slightly broader question in there, as well.

Vitaly: Maybe you could also share a bit of insight about some of the really complex challenges that you are facing at this moment. And something that you’re working on that, I would say, keep you awake at night. Hopefully not, but maybe there are some things. Just get sense about what you’re working on as well at the moment.

Mei: I couldn’t share details of product strategy with you inside.

Vitaly: Sure.

Mei: Because of the NDA stuff with my current employer, but I will say, the current challenge definitely about how to level up your people skills and communications as a designer through your career. Because I’m running a very big project right now. Basically, more than 30 stakeholders on the play. I really need to learn connecting people. How I can connect with people first by establishing yourself with your activities in your field. And also, to connect people and find the right person for the right question.

Mei: And also, at this point, you need to try to work through other people. I don’t know how to put it in the beautiful way, but more enable others to contribute to the project. In this sense, you need to really articulate the project and the impact of this project. So you can onboard people and to create a win-win situation where they can learn something from the project or they can do product improvement in their services, project as well — so if they would like to be onboarded and work with you.

Mei: Think that was about communication, connecting the people. But the most challenging part is leading the whole project. You need to be super organized, which I was not that great before. You need to have a roadmap of this project and keep updating this every day. So you can visualize what is going on. What are the updates, and also identify the key stakeholder for each phase of the project, of the activities. And how to communicate with them. And you need to visualize them, document them to help you organize the whole project. I guess that was the most challenging part for me.

Vitaly: That doesn’t sound like a lot of moving pixels around in Figma, though.

Mei: Which, I actually missed that part as well. I’m not sure if this is a common case, but I guess so. When you are running a big project where we are not in the phase of creating new ideas and Figma files. It’s more communicating, documenting, pitching or about the project.

Vitaly: This is just a normal state of things, I guess, all the time. Guess I become this person who would move away from, well, sketch at the time and Figma to spreadsheets. I don’t know. Much of my life these days is basically organizing things and also documents in Dropbox Paper or Google Doc. Just organizing things in a way that’s available, accessible to everyone else. It also goes, for example, for organizing meetings. I actually decided to take a design approach to design the best meetings experience. And this is really difficult, I think.

Vitaly: In general, processes which involve people be hard, of course. I’m also just curious about your take on the process because I know that you. Meetings including, for example. Because I know that you often say that you need to design your design process. And this is, very much plays. It’s a melody, beautiful melody to my ears because this is what I’ve been doing to some degree, I guess, for the last couple of years. I’m wondering though, how do you mean that? We’re designing the process. We need to figure out the right way of working for us, for the team, as well.

Vitaly: How do we design meetings? How do we? Do we do stand-ups? Do we do written stand-ups? When do we do retros? How often do we do this and that? Maybe you could share a few things that tend to work better for you that you learned working well. And something that you definitely advise as a consultant, as well, companies do really stay away from when it comes to design process.

Mei: I can quickly tell what companies should stay away for, in terms of a design process.

Vitaly: Sure.

Mei: Is to, for the sake of having a design process, to have a design process. Regardless of what problem you are trying to solve. I still remember in my career there was a company who really want to have a persona. I’m like, "Why we are going to create the personas?" They were like, "Oh, because everybody’s having a personas for this project and it’s a key important deliverable for understanding our customers. So we need this persona." So I’m like, "But do you have any?" I trying to explain persona is more you need to conduct interviews.

Mei: You need to gather datas and then you come up with someone that represents the key problems or key pain point of your customers. It’s not like you just create a persona out of a workshop with some people, internal colleagues of your company. So they’re like, "Oh, okay. Then we need to gather data or we need to have a lot of insight of the persona." But we couldn’t because they don’t have infrastructure to try user behavior. So I’m like, "No worries, just interview eight customers. It’s a good number. And try to find what are the common pain point or what’s a common desire or need they have? And then you have a persona."

Mei: That is something I learned through my career. Oh, you shouldn’t just say, "Oh, this thing looks fancy, the personas or something else. Oh, customer journey map, we need that." It’s not what you’re trying to understand and what do you have. And based on those two aspect, to try to find a methodology that really serve your needs or can help you move forward. This is definitely not advised for people or company. I think what I definitely enjoyed is to design, as you mentioned, design your own design process. Because when I was studying UX design, we have this design thinking process and everyone tried to follow.

Mei: Define a problem and try to understand and create something, iterate. I was also one of them trying, really into that. But then, when I start working I found, this is not always the case. You need to find what is the most important phase of the project. For example, if you are tackling a very complex problem and you don’t even understand what exact problem it is, then you need to spend a lot of effort in defining the problem phase. Or if it is a project really focused on deliverables, we need to shape a marketing video or we need to shape the design within two weeks. Then, maybe you need to spend more energy in the executing phase of the design.

Mei: While we are working, it’s very hard to have everything. To have a very complete design process where you have a solid deliverables for every phases. But you need to figure out which phase is the most important based on the needs and the problem and try to shift your energy there. But that doesn’t mean that you should skip some process. You can still have them, but it’s more trying to say what you have already have and not create new words on there. I think that’s what I learned from design your own design process.

Vitaly: That’s fine. You also, I always keep coming back to this. I don’t even know why. But I always feel that many of the colleagues I’m speaking to, they’re always just don’t even know how to navigate that space of UX methods and models and process. And sometimes, it feels like there is this huge amount of all these different things that very different companies are doing. And they’re inventing for themselves or using some of their other established, already established methods. Luckily, and fortunately for all of us, you have created two mind maps. Which I found really useful to be able to navigate the space in a bit more predictable way. Maybe you could tell a bit more about this and how it helps you in your work.

Mei: A very good question. At the beginning, I was just writing them down for myself. It’s more like library where what is available there and you can grab them as a building block to build up your own design process. But it’s not like something can mapped out the how of those design process and those methodologies and what it can bring. What I’m trying to say is to be flexible about your design process. To not just see the articles and I need this and this in exploration phase. But maybe you don’t need it based on your problem or what you are trying to design. Try to be flexible.

Mei: And also, I will say sometimes it’s more of the experience you get. When you are first time. For example, if you are conducting a user interview at first time or maybe you are doing a survey first time. It’s more you start learning how this methodology work and how you can improve based on the methodology. But then, as you try multiple methodologies in your career, you can reflect on. Well, this can help and what do I need to conduct this methodology? And then if you keep reflecting on them, it will help you in the future to decide, do I need this methodology in my design process? Will this fit the timeline? Will this fit the requirements? Will this be the best methodology to answer the business questions?

Mei: Then you start reflecting and then you can say, "Then, I don’t need this. Oh, I really need this methodology." It’s more, if you haven’t had a lot of experience, try to try them out. Even if you are not working or you are just doing an internship. But try things out to understand how those methodology work. And then, later on, you can. You get a next experience, then you can decide when to use what. So that would be my take.

Vitaly: That’s interesting because I think that to many of us, it’s... I don’t know... Many companies have the process. This is the process that they’re following through. It doesn’t matter what department. Doesn’t matter what their designers are working on. There is the process. This is how we work here kind of thing. And what I’m hearing from you is that basically you might need to be adaptive there. So if you are, say, switching from one design team that you’re working with or another team that maybe have different experience.

Vitaly: Maybe have different preferences. Maybe most of them are working remote. Maybe most of them are hybrid in one way or the other. So adjusting the methodology and the process based on the team that you have. The only thing that’s required there to get it right and to do it well is to know and be comfortable with the different techniques and different methods that are out there. Does that make sense? Is that pretty much what you do?

Mei: Yes, thanks. Yeah, definitely. That is a very great summary of what I just said.

Vitaly: But I think it is also very interesting because it can be quite challenging. Do you find yourself sometimes maybe stuck because you have a particular way of approaching a particular problem with the design team? But then you might have very different levels of experience on the team? You might feel like we need to do something because we might not be able to get things done in time. Or we are not moving along fast enough and I need to switch gears and move something to another methods.

Vitaly: The reason why I’m asking or what I’m asking here is that not only do we need to be able to switch and be adaptive moving from one team to another in your process. But also, as the process is in place, do you feel like sometimes you need to shift gears and change things and plug in something else because what you have is not working?

Mei: Yeah, definitely. I think a very great question. This is a daily life of designer, I guess.

Vitaly: The sad life of a designer, isn’t it?

Mei: Yeah, the sad. We have a dream design process defined before project or before we start working on something and maybe one month later something changed. Then you need to be flexible and adapt to it. We decided to collect user data because the PM was super into quantitative data and we need that. But our source was not available at that time. So we need to really think about, what can we do? Because we are not going to run the survey anymore as a design team or. What I did, I think it’s a really good step. I was also not super experienced at time. I’m the newbie in the company.

Mei: I bring this to the design team. So I never feel shy that if I couldn’t solve them myself, I should consult with other colleague. Then we start doing some root analysis. Why we need this survey? Because we want to discover problems. We don’t have a clear problem. We want to discover the problem. Then do something to also discover the problems without the researcher that can help us send the survey. Then we said, "Maybe we can do a diary study with UserTesting.com. We can set this up together."

Mei: So we did, in the end, a diary study. Those two methodologies actually serve the same purpose in the end. I guess you need to shift when you can, I think, maybe try to have another methodology that can give you the same insight or maybe. Also sometimes, just trust your gut feelings.

Vitaly: Sure.

Mei: If some data is not available, you can validate them later.

Vitaly: That’s right. But Mei, I have to ask a very provoking question at this point. And I’m sure that some of the listeners listening here will be, "What is this? What is he asking?" I do have to ask, do you think that chaos could also be a process? The reason why I’m asking is if you have a relatively small team. Imagine you have maybe two, three designers. You do not have this. And surely, we need to have research. We need to use some methods to make things work. Sometimes, you see companies trying to over organize things.

Vitaly: If you have a team of two or three, do you need daily stand-ups? Doesn’t seem necessary because people are there in the room talking all the time, anyway. It’s not like you have this big organization where you have five departments all doing different pieces and all that. Sometimes, I see companies feeling very comfortable in being extremely unorganized. Being chaotic. Not even having proper documentation and nothing. Obviously, the problem is that you actually end up with the knowledge being stuck with these people. If somebody leaves, that’s obviously an issue. Onboarding is a problem. But they feel like you can be very productive and very successful without having a proper process and pretty much a chaotic environment.

Mei: To be honest, I have to say that I agree with you.

Vitaly: Oh.

Mei: I think to not have a well established progress or being chaotic may be the norm for designers. Because we are creative beings. Sometimes, you get ideas or you discover something just randomly while understanding your customers, users. But I would say totally agree with you. If you have a small team and you are working very closely on a daily basis, you might not need to follow a design process super strictly. It’s more like, "we are in the understanding phase, then what can we do?" And we discuss together. It’s more like you just need the rough framework to guide you through. And the iteration will also be very fast-paced. You don’t need to go through everything then iterate again. Totally agree with. Another point, I feel like the design process is sometimes also more for the non-designers. Your product stakeholders in the organization or people who are not in your project or another designer who don’t have any background knowledge. It’s more for them to help to organize your self-process or just it’s for your own deliverable. Your ideas that work. To have it to communicate to the outside. That is what I have to say.

Vitaly: That makes perfect sense. Well, as we’re wrapping up here, I do have to ask you of course. But this is a question that I’m asking everyone and I’m really curious about your answer as well. Do you have a particular dream project? A really complicated challenge? A really complicated UX? I don’t know. Monolithic challenge that is probably so hard that it’s pretty, almost impossible to think about it? Just to give you an idea, some of my colleagues when trying to answer this question, they start thinking about, "Oh, I would love to design some, I don’t know. A deck or I don’t know. A control center for Rocket Science Center or anything like that."

Vitaly: Some other would say, "I just want to be able to work with United Nations." It goes really different ways. I’m just curious, do you have a particular dream project or dream task maybe or dream challenge that you would love to tackle one day?

Mei: I will say, I will go for the second direction. I really want to work for the sustainability topic or some project for NGOs because I have been spending my career working for E-commerce company. I really want to contribute to some non-profit organizations that, for example, sustainability or a turtles saving organization. I think what I can help them is my experience in E-commerce to convert people. Maybe I can convert more people doing the good stuff. That would be something I’d definitely love to work on in the future.

Vitaly: Maybe just totally ruining the arc, the story arc of the podcast. I do have to hook onto the thing that you mentioned about E-commerce because I’m just really curious. I spent quite a bit of time around E-commerce as well. Maybe you could share a few stories about things that you learned by working in E-commerce. Thing that’s how customers think or some important things to keep in mind when it comes to E-commerce UX in general.

Mei: I think what I have learned is your customers are smarter than you thought. That is what I have learned. Sometimes, you try to trick them. Sorry. Another dark part in UX I’m talking about. You think you can convert them somehow, but actually they know. They know what you are doing. It’s not the customer of 10 years ago on the E-commerce platform compared to right now. They’re very press sensitive. They compare with multiple competitors. They compare and they make the right decision for them. And that is also related to what we talk in the beginning of the podcast.

Mei: You have to focus on the long run to create a great experience for the long run. To bring them benefit in the long run because they understand everything. And you cannot. If you got them converted once, you might not get them converted the second time and they might leave you if they have really bad experience. I think right now the E-commerce world is really competitive, but also that is good for the customers because they have multiple choices and then they have learned everything. I think that is what I have learned from the E-commerce experience. The customers, they also grow as you grow.

Vitaly: We’ve been learning about UX and design today, but if there is one thing that I do have to ask, Mei because I know that Mei is very much interested in the something that maybe bothers or excites or inspires all of us. Who knows? I know that you’ve been playing with ChatGPT and AI in general, Mei. Do you see? I don’t know. Do you see this wonderful tool, AI as an opponent to us? Something that we need to fight or something that we’re going to embed in our daily workflow and just make the best use of it? How do you use AI today?

Mei: Very good questions. I think, we should see AI as our friends. We’re holding hands together.

Vitaly: Good friends.

Mei: And help us.

Vitaly: The best friends or?

Mei: Good friend.

Vitaly: Good friends.

Mei: Good friends for now before they replace our job, which will happen, I guess. Recently, I started using ChatGPT to write write documentations or write presentations for me. It’s still, you need to write down, get the key point and then ChatGPT will help you generate a good sentence. It saves your time as a designer. You could spend more time in Figma or creating new ideas or creating something or dreaming vision for your company for the coming three years. I think definitely AI saves our time and make sure we can concentrate on works that requires more creativity.

Vitaly: But I do have to ask a follow-up question. Do you think, Mei, that AI is creative?

Mei: I think, to some extent. They are creative based on basically data and stuff that already exist or they could find on the internet. But they might not be able to dream further. Maybe predict human in 10 years. But I’m not sure. I’m not a expert in AI. I would say they are creative to some extent, but it’s also up to us to think about, do we want them to be creative or not?

Vitaly: That’s a good question. Maybe, we can resolve this issue once and for good once we ask ChatGPT if it thinks it is creative. And if so, then it should better prove it to us. Well, if you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Mei, you can find her LinkedIn where she’s at, Mei Zhang, and also Medium. Medium.com/ThisisMei, if I’m not mistaken. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Mei. Do you have any parting words of wisdom to the future generations who are going to listen to this very podcast 25 years from now thinking, "What are they talking about? Everything is AI anyway now."

Mei: What I want to share is definitely know AI is something not new, but something innovative in our generation right now. Designers are using ChatGPT to create their daily slides. But I would like to talk to the future generations to maybe being creative or follow your intuitations is something that cannot be replaced by AI. I think I really treasure. I think designers should be really treasured because we have the power that might not be able to replace by any machines and stuff because we are human. We are caring and we are always creative and we can connect the dots. That is something you should develop or treasure as a skill. I think that is something I would like to tell to the future generations.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 55 With Tejas Kumar: Is Technology Making Us Redundant?

In this episode, we ask whether technology is making us redundant; will we all soon be replaced with AI? Vitaly Friedman talks to Tejas Kumar to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: He has been writing code since the age of eight and still continues to do so today. He’s a DevRel leader, YouTuber, advisor, mentor, influencer, and has very, very strong opinions about pretty much everything. Previously, he’s worked with G2L, Vercel, Spotify etc picking up things along the way, sometimes as a developer and sometimes as a manager.

Vitaly: Now he lives in Berlin, Germany, but most of the time travels the world equipping and encouraging developers to do their best work, aiming to make the world a better place for quality software. Beyond that, he’s extremely kind, passionate, friendly, and smart. And not that a passes by that him sharing his opinions again on everything Tailwind, JavaScript and people on Twitter.

Vitaly: Now we know he’s a great product engineer and a kind human being, but did you know that he can easily type faster than 100 words per minute when writing code without a single mistake, especially if it’s a life coding session in front of thousands of developers? My smashing friends, please welcome Tejas Kumar. Hello, Tejas. How are you doing today?

Tejas: What’s up? I’m doing good. I’m smashing. I’m smashing things as we speak. I’m also doing smashing.

Vitaly: Oh, well—

Tejas: Smashing enough.

Vitaly: You always look smashing. Always. I always feel smashing when I see you being smashing in some way or the other.

Tejas: Yes, that’s what my grandpa always used to say. Smash them with kindness.

Vitaly: Oh, really? Wow. This is just the perfect beginning of the interview. Now it’s so nice to have you here. I remember everything from our strange bus trips to our walks in somewhere between Croatia and Germany, and what not, it’s always so, I don’t know. It’s so much fun to be around because you always have, again, opinions about things.

Tejas: Yes.

Vitaly: You always express them with a very strong kindness. Why is that, Tejas? Where is it coming from?

Tejas: Yeah, it comes from a lot. So when I do talks and things at conferences, a lot of people tell me... they come to me after and they’re like, "Hey, that was so genuine. I felt like that was very genuine." And it comes from that. I’m a strong believer in speaking truth in love or kindly, and I guess that’s where it comes from. I do have strong opinions about things, right, but I feel like they have to come under an umbrella of kindness and respect. Otherwise, nobody wants to listen to some angry person with strong opinions who’s not friendly.

Vitaly: Well, you don’t know. I mean, I’m very happy to hear maybe not angry people, but like whenever someone has a very strong opinion, I’m totally fine with that. Actually, there is Lex Friedman, who is a podcaster. He’s doing all these videos with people on YouTube like you do as well. We’ll talk about it in a moment. But he had just posted recently one thing. He applauded to all the people who are attentive enough to listen to other people’s opinions and their arguments and be willing to change their minds.

Tejas: Yeah.

Vitaly: So I think that if you have a very strong opinion about things, as long as you are willing and open minded to change your mind based on the arguments that come your way, right? I think this is fine for me. This is actually a very important skill to have.

Tejas: Yes. Yes. I think the underlying skill there is critical thinking and being open and receptive. 100%. I was just watching the Welcome to Chippendales. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this show, right?

Vitaly: Not yet, no.

Tejas: It’s a great show. I can recommend it. And in that show you watch the founder of Chippendales repeatedly screw up his company and go into bankruptcy. And the common thread in his mistakes is that he just has a lot of this entrenched, close minded pridefulness where he refuses to have his mind changed despite his strong opinions. So I agree with you. I think that’s something I try. I work hard at and try to maintain, and so I appreciate that you called it out here on this conversation.

Vitaly: Yeah, sure. Well, the reason why I wanted to have you on the show as well, because you have all these incredible experiences and stories you can share, right? And you also are very public about things that are important to you and you’re not afraid of strong words as well by doing so. And so maybe just for everybody to be kind of following your story to know who you are and what you’re coming from and so on, maybe you could just share a little bit of insight about how did you end up in this front end madness? Where is it coming from? Did you wake up one day when you were eight and thought, "This is it. I went to write HTML, CSS, JavaScript for living now for the rest of my life."

Tejas: When I was eight years old, react was actually a thing. I’m joking. It wasn't.

Vitaly: Oh, who knows? Who knows?

Tejas: Yeah. No, but yeah, no, I was born with a disease that was really limiting and there’s a lot of things I couldn’t do. I had a ton of physical limitations. I made a whole 48 minute YouTube video about it, which you can watch if you’re more just interested or we could talk about it here. I don’t really care. But with the limitations I had, I couldn’t go to school every day. I couldn’t carry a backpack. I couldn’t open doors. I couldn’t walk upstairs. I couldn’t do a lot of things. The only thing I could do was take my fingers and type on keyboards with them. And thankfully my family was relatively low income at the time. I grew up quite poor, but we had just enough privilege to where we had a computer and a keyboard. And since this was the only thing I could do in many ways I feel like coding found me. And I was drawn to, I have a YouTube video coming about this coming out about this on Thursday, I was drawn to the quick feedback loop of JavaScript where you just write a little bit of code in your browsers console and it executes. And I was like, whoa. And it’s that kind of whoa, that kind of I found when I was eight just kind of playing with browsers and code. And it’s the same whoa that I chased today.

Vitaly: That’s interesting. So would you say that this was specifically then JavaScript that kind of spoke to you, or would you say that this just, if Flash was still a thing it’d still be running around building Flash websites?

Tejas: That’s an excellent question. No, it’s definitely not JavaScript at all. It was, well, it started with Photoshop, so I was-

Vitaly: Photoshop. What is Photoshop, Tejas?

Tejas: Yeah, I know, right? Nowadays with Figma and stuff, Photoshop’s a bit lost, but when I was young, Photoshop was the design tool. It wasn’t just for photo editing and manipulation, it was for at least I used it for creating stuff because Vector wasn’t so recommended at the time. And so when I was younger, Vitaly, we had Macro S Factor.

Vitaly: Even younger.

Tejas: Yeah?

Vitaly: Even younger.

Tejas: No, no, not even younger. When I was younger than I am now. When I was kind of just getting into it, Mac OS Aqua, the design principle aqua thing, was very in vogue and everybody was trying to design these shiny balls.

Vitaly: I remember them vividly, yeah, yeah. I remember.

Tejas: Yeah. The shiny balls. And so I did tutorials on Photoshop. I was like, I want to make a really shiny ball. And then from there I moved to Tux. They made these penguins with gloss effects, and that’s where I started and I was like, wow, this is so beautiful. And then I found the slicing tool where I could design something and make it html, and I was like, whoa. And then I was like, okay, this is cool, but how do I make it interactive? And then I found JavaScript. So the draw was really creating stuff without any physical damage to myself and without any financial requirement. I was able to create stuff without any barriers to entry other than the crappy old keyboard and computer we had. So that was it.

Vitaly: Yeah, the magic thing for me was really this moment when I realized that I can actually make it available to everybody else. That was that magic thing. I mean, I remember FTPing all the way, and—

Tejas: Yes.

Vitaly: I mean there were plenty of free servers out there with all the kind of advertising and all of that. And I was just, wow, there are 12 people who visited my website in the last three months. It was incredible. That was just really mind changing, like mind blowing, life changing for me. Yeah, that’s really incredible. And if I look at the industry now, the industry is so mature. There are so many incredible things. Like the thing that we’re building on the internet, on the web, it’s just unbelievable. It’s just the level of software engineering and all.

Tejas: Yeah but you know, Vitaly, I feel a bit sad that it’s so mature now that it’s ... when I was younger, not younger than when I started ...

Vitaly: I assumed that, yeah.

Tejas: As I was growing, I’ll put it this way, I was often terrified of being a mature adult because when I was younger and rebellious, being mature was being boring for me. I was like, oh, I have to put on a suit and tie and kind of be bored. Like my childlike wonder was lost in my definition of maturity many years ago. And I liken that to today. You say the web is mature and I agree with you. It kind of makes me sad because I feel like in this maturity we’ve lost a lot of the awesome whimsy that we used to have. I don’t know if you remember these Geo cities, angel fire type of websites with under construction banner and like all of, you know?

Vitaly: I mean, you can still have them on the web. It’s just not many people do.

Tejas: Right. But it’s because it’s not cool anymore. And I want to bring that back. I remember the dancing baby for no ... like every website just had a dancing baby and a cursor that was a clock that would follow your cursor. Anyways, so all of this I feel like we’ve lost, and I’d like to see more of that. Anyway, sorry. Just a little rant.

Vitaly: No, I think that’s actually, in many ways, it’s like we’re always moving in circles. I have a very strong feeling that in many ways when I look at e-commerce websites, you probably don’t want to have it there necessarily unless it's, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a brand with a personality and things like that. That might be okay. But I do feel like we are a little bit too used to getting things done in a certain way. And I mean, very often we think about we have to be conventional. We need to follow particular guidelines and rules. And we probably should if you want to be conventional and we want to follow the rules and want things to be familiar to everyone. But I mean, there’s also this notion of surprising people, and I’m not talking about delight necessarily, but just surprising them. Just making them think a little bit about where they are and what they’re doing. I mean, if I look at your website, well every time I come to the site for some reason I see a slightly different and sometimes slightly strange photo of yourself. Sometimes in very different outfits.

Tejas: Yes.

Vitaly: So is that the whimsical that you are kind of mentioning there? Speaking about?

Tejas: Yeah, yeah. If you drag your cursor, if you move your cursor around, you just cycle through a bunch of random photos of me. It’s open source. So I’ve lost control of ... so people will add pictures of me dressed as a flower, pictures of some muscular guy.

Vitaly: Look fantastic as a flower, if I may say.

Tejas: So. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, they’ll do some muscular guy shirtless with just my face photoshopped on him. They’ll do all kinds of weird things. This is not me, this is the community who feel the need to add weird pictures of me on my website. But it’s exactly the whimsy I’m talking about. And as you drag your cursor across, you’ll see some of these. And I like that. And I feel like, to your point, smashing does the perfect balance of this with the cats. The cats are not ... like if you’re talking about content and great content, great tips, great, whatever smashing does, the cats are really non-essential. But I feel like they are essential because they bring that awesome whimsy. So I like that y'all do that as well. I think it’s much needed.

Vitaly: Yeah. So I think we do like cats. I mean it’s been quite a journey with all the cats. I mean, I don’t even know where they have been and have not been at this point, right?

Tejas: Yeah.

Vitaly: But also speaking about you, where you have been and where you have not been yet. I mean you’ve been working on so many different really cool companies. I mean, I look at Vercel, Spotify, Xata recently, right? Maybe, I don’t know if you could share some insights about what did you learn from each of those things? Maybe there was some really interesting insights that you wish you’d known earlier in your career.

Tejas: Yeah, definitely. I was just talking to my good friend Fabian. I just had lunch with him and he mentioned he’s reading this book by an ex-Google engineer called Solve for Happy. Great book. And in that book he talks about how really nothing is really good or bad or happy or sad. It’s just what’s our perception of it. And I feel this way about the jobs that I’ve left because there’s lessons in there from each of them. Most recently from Zeta, I learned the, actually from Zeta and G2I, both of these companies combined, I’ve learned the value and importance of urgency, ownership and autonomy. I think that’s really important.

Tejas: In fact, there’s an old Steve Jobs interview when he was much younger. He had hair and was alive, but he said people tend to leave when they feel like they can’t have ideas. And I saw that, I saw it executed very, very well at G2I where I was reporting to the CTO. And he was just like, he would talk to me on Monday and ask me what my plan is. We’d align and he’d be like, "Awesome, make it happen. Goodbye. Come to me if you need anything, but I trust you." And this phrase, "I trust you." I learned how powerful that can be in a position of leadership. And then I would continue to have multiple management leadership roles there, even as director of developer relations at Zeta. And that’s something I carried with me from G2I was this, “I trust you. Make it happen.” So I would talk to my team on Monday. We’d kind of plan for the week and then by Friday, well on Monday I would tell them, I would say, "See you Friday. Come to me if you need anything, but I trust you." And then we’d go to Friday where we would have just an end of week, what did we do, how do we feel check in. And this was excellent. We came up with this really nice rhythm that facilitated this kind of urgency and ownership without stress, urgency without stress. It was really, really nice.

Vitaly: I mean, one thing that I noticed recently is that many companies try to be very careful about how, on the one hand, to give people this sort of autonomy to just trust them and do the work. Because again, when you think about micromanagement, it’s such a bad kind of really bad pattern to use. And I mean there are probably plenty of companies that are still my micromanaging on some level. But I think there is this way of crystallizing, I guess in some way, those things that really work and things that do not work. One thing that I saw companies were using, and it works seems to be working really well. This idea of, maybe you’ve heard about this as well, is the idea as a manual for me.

Vitaly: That means, for example, where you say, okay, every single individual contributor or anybody, manager. It doesn’t matter really. Every single person who is working in the company, you better go ahead and try to prepare a little Google Doc on Notion document or anything like that where you describe how do you work comfortably, what is important to you, like your calendar, your preferences, when do you work best? So is it okay to disturb you in the morning? Is it better to disturb you slightly later when it comes to an urgent meeting or things like that. And so everybody’s encouraged to create this as long as it can be a mural board or mural board or anything like that. And so everybody’s encouraged then to put the link to it in their Slack profile. And so everybody knows, okay, I don’t know who that person is. And especially in a big corporation, a big company, we have maybe tens of thousands of people working.

Vitaly: It might be very, very comfortable to be able to say, okay, I need to reach out to that person, that position from the team, but I don’t want to come across as in kind of pushing my ideas or whatever I want through their agenda in some way the other disrupting them. But I wanted to be more respectful. So that was really magical when I saw that and I thought, wow, I really appreciate it, especially in the remote first environment that where we are working.

Tejas: We did that at G2I as well. We had social contracts, they were called. These documents. And I remember them working really, really well.

Vitaly: Would you say that for your perspective would you... now I assume that you are looking, I don’t know, either maybe building something on your own, maybe kind looking what’s around and all. Is it important for you that you’re working remote first, remote only, or would you say that’s not a problem for me to go to the office every day?

Tejas: Yeah, it depends. It really depends on a number of factors. I could honestly make the office thing work if the other factors were appropriate. But, yeah, no, I don’t think remote’s a hard line for me. I was, again, to cite my friend Fabian. I asked him the same question. I said, "Do you prefer remote or onsite?" And his response was a third option, which he tends to think outside the box. He is like, well, honestly, I prefer a choice. Being able to do a remote for a season and then onsite for a season. Like the choice is the magic to him. And I kind of agree with that. But I could do office if it’s required for sure.

Vitaly: But also looking in general at the IT industry, I know with a big eye and a big T, I guess at this point there is a lot of stuff going on and many people are concerned layoffs, and there isn’t a sense of uncertainty about where we’re going with ... Is it still a thing to be a project engineer? Is it a good thing to be a project engineer? I’m pretty sure it is, right? But where do you see all of this kind of being today? Is it just a natural way of the economy is not in a good shape, so sure there are layoffs after a season of hiring, or do you see this kind of becoming a trend where we have to be careful and cautious about not losing our jobs for AI by any means? What’s the take on this?

Tejas: Yeah, my take on this is it’s normal. I feel like look at the GDP curve of any country of any year and you’ll see is dips recessions are normal and predictable and they happen. And when recessions happen, layoffs happen. I feel like a recession is a sign of economic normalcy. If it lasts very long, then it’s a depression. That’s a huge problem. But I feel like it’s expected. I feel like layoffs unfortunately have their time and place. They’re not good. They affect families. I mean, I had the privilege of quitting, but I also feel the squeeze of unemployment. So I don’t think they’re good. But I think it happens. I don’t think the jobs will be taken by machines yet because machines and AI is being designed now to kind of be a helper.

Tejas: So I feel like it’ll help us. But I do think you give chat GPT, access to the internet, which it doesn’t have, and then it gets extra superpowers and gets more threatening. But I feel like there’s human beings with a vested interest in preserving human beings with jobs. So I’m not so sure the AI will take our jobs, but the state of the industry now I think is actually pretty cool, Vitaly, because when you and I started and I mean you probably started way before me, so I’ll just say when I started. I’m not calling you old. I’m just calling you experience.

Vitaly: That’s okay. That’s okay. We’re all friends here.

Tejas: No, but when I started, there was no front end and backend. There was webmaster. There was a web dev and it was the one guy or girl who would design, develop, and then drag things over to the FTP thing to upload to some shared hosts. Some of this is quite common. But then over time you and I have had the privilege of watching higher specializations develop. So we went from webmaster to now front end and backend to DevOps. And then from that to now machine learning engineers, data scientists, and then an emerging part of this is DevRel, is developer relations, I feel like is still pretty young, but I think the industry has kind of a tree root with branches, has kind of branched off into specializations and I see more of them occurring.

Tejas: And I think it’s pretty great because that means more options for people to get jobs to maybe start at an abstract level, but I think it’s better for humanity. One fear of mine is that the world is becoming, the tech industry is taking over the world, right? We used to have clothing stores, now we have online companies that sell clothes. We used to have travel agents, now we have websites that sell tickets. Like everything’s becoming tech. And this is part of the reason why I used to have strong opinions. This is part of the reason why I campaign really hard for diversity, equality and inclusion because Plan A was heavily unequal of the world, so to speak.

Tejas: I watched a documentary on Columbus yesterday and made me hate the world a little bit more, right? And so I feel like if we’re undergoing some type of tech revolution where more companies are tech companies advocating for fairness, equality, diversity and inclusion is massively important so that people don’t get left out and equality doesn’t get as skew as it has been historically.

Vitaly: I think it’s also this notion in general of I think us focusing a bit too much on speed. I remember vividly having this conversation a while back about, "Oh wow, the technology is moving fast, so fast and we’re going to do less, which is going to do less because the technology is going to take over." It’s the same way we see AI now like oh ChatGPT can do so much. It can be giving us answers, better answers, faster answers, and—

Tejas: Can write code.

Vitaly: You can actually quote ... yeah, you can write code, it can debug and everything. So we are going to do less. But I think that reality, I mean at least in my life so far it has been very different. It becomes faster, but then we tend to do much more. We always find a way to fill in not necessarily the gaps, because these gaps don’t even have a chance to appear, right? We are just moving. It’s like it’s everything. I have the strong feeling in the past. Maybe it’s kind of similar to you as well, maybe not. I have a feeling that I was doing one thing and I was doing it interruptedly, and then I would spend two, three hours on that and I would be kind of done more or less. Now it seems like, well, maybe 23 things. And yeah, we don’t do them in peril. I don’t really believe in multitasking or maybe I’m just really bad at multitasking while other people are much better. But I do have a strong feeling that it’s all so fragmented and we do so many different things at the same time. And so I don’t believe that technology is making us redundant in any way. It’s just we are doing certain different things, right?

Tejas: Exactly.

Vitaly: But talking about that, one thing I do have to ask because we probably, I expect probably can hear the voices in the back asking, "Tejas, what about those frameworks and front? Let’s talk about phone time landscape in 2023." And one question that people ask me, and I want you to answer it is, we came from times when Jake worry was a big thing and it still is a big thing on many websites and legacy website and many websites in general. Do you expect this world of frameworks to change or are we at some level of maturity where a react is going to stay, view is going to stay, angle is going to stay? I mean, it’s impossible to answer that. That’s why I’m asking you now. What’s your take on this in general? Should we be talking ... like imagine 20 years from now we’re sitting in a podcast like this thinking, "Remember when React was a thing and look now?"

Tejas: Yeah, you say 20 years, I feel like one year from now someone’s going to listen to this and be like, "Oh my gosh, this stage Tejas was so wrong about his answer."

Tejas: No. So I think first of all, I think the web is held up by giants who are underappreciated. And by that I mean specifically jQuery and WordPress power more of the internet than React period. So a lot of them people talk about, "Oh, they’re not cool." No, no, they power most of the internet and I think they should be acknowledged. But there was a time in the React story where React had enough momentum and critical mass to look cooler than jQuery. It’s the new thing, it’s the new industry standard. And then jQuery kind of got diminished even though it’s usage didn’t, but it’s I guess perceived value got diminished and reacted over. And I think in 2023 we’re starting to see some of that as well with React. Where React is used a lot. I mean I just put out a YouTube video about why React is unbeatable. And I do think it is unbeatable because here’s the deal: jQuery and WordPress have not been beaten.

Tejas: They’re also unbeatable to some degree. And now especially you have teams at Google investing in React, investing in how React works in Chrome, et cetera. So I think React is here to stay, but I think it’s perceived value is diminishing in 2023. And I feel like it will diminish further with the advent of awesome tools like Quick and solid specifically.

Vitaly: Right, right.

Tejas: And, of course, View and Svelt and Angular are around, so I think they’ll all stay. It’s always looking for this newer shinier thing. The big appeal, right, with the newer stuff with Solid and Quick is that they don’t ship a whole virtual dom implementation to the browser, which is heavy and slow. So React is objectively slower and heavier than Solid and Quick. And so there’s two sides, now it’s divided. Some would say, okay, but it’s just milliseconds. They don’t matter that much. It’s not true. It’s been proven by Google, by Chrome, that milliseconds make millions. And so I do think React is seeing its decline, maybe not in usage but in the popular vote in 2023.

Vitaly: But at the same time also see that there are all this kind of fine tuning almost coming in where, I don’t know when was that? I can’t track drug time anymore. But five, 10 years ago, oh, we have React and we have this full client side thing and off we go. But then now when we can run React on the server, we can now be a bit more clever I guess, about what is going to happen on the server, how much of it do we need to ship to the client and when and when not, and all those things.

Vitaly: I think this is, in many ways we moved away from this notion of let’s have one single React application to let’s have, I don’t know, hundreds. Every single component we have might be a single standalone React application with its own life cycle and all that. And it kind of really changes it. But I also think that, I don’t know, I learned that’s probably, there is no way to know for sure. So maybe just tomorrow there will be somebody coming up with a chat GPT query and this is going to take over both J query and also React. I don’t know.

Tejas: Yeah.

Vitaly: Do you feel like something like ChatGPTQuery it could exist or help us in some way? Like bending in body and making, I don’t know what can I do everything.

Tejas: I would be interested to ask chat GPT to write code for the best fastest UI library on earth. See what it comes up with. But on a more serious note, I feel like a big contributor to this shift from we’re doing things on the client to we’re doing things on the server that then influences the development of React and Solid and all the others to be more server oriented is these serverless platforms - Versa, Netlify, CloudFlare. These platforms have led to what I’m calling server liberation. Like nobody server rendered before, Veril, Netlify, CloudFlare, et cetera. Because servers were inaccessible. They were hard to configure for client side apps. You would need to do a rewrite on a 404 to go to your index or HTML so you can download the client.

Tejas: It was very complicated. And then these companies stepped in there like, “Hey wait, we’ll make servers easy.” And then if deploying a node server is easy, now you’re like, “Oh, now I can render on the server.” And so they kind of unlocked this. So I feel like if we want to predict where the libraries and frameworks will go next, we can kind of look at what is the adjacent surrounding supporting tech that would lead them. And I think that’s kind of a good indicator. But I’m not in a position to make such predictions accurately.

Vitaly: Well of course you are. Of course you are. You’re here on a podcast. You can predict anything, you can see the future. I’m sure you’ve seen it. So here we go. You can definitely report on that. But also moving maybe to slightly different topic, just to explore the landscape. I always fascinated by this feeling of community and by this feeling of bringing people together, the conferences, and we’ve been running conferences for many years now. And you’ve been to so many conferences as well, and I heard rumors, and maybe they’re not true, but I don’t know. I heard rumors that you might even be thinking about setting up a conference one day?

Tejas: Yeah, I’m actually starting ContagiousCon. It’s where everybody comes together and tells me how much they like me.

Vitaly: It’s like a contaga of the SmashingConfs. Thank you for that. But, dude, I’ve been to so many conferences, experienced so many things that I’ve kind of developed an intuition for what attendees want, what speakers want, and the pains that organizer. I’ve spoken to Charis also the pains that organizers have to deal with.

Vitaly: And so bringing this triquetra of experiences, kind of working in coordination with the organizers to provide something very rich for people. I think that’s something that I’m very excited for. Also connecting organizers to sponsors. A lot of conferences don’t have the privilege of money and with the amount of companies I talk to and et cetera, it looks like connecting the right sponsors to the right conferences for the best experience for attendees really. Right. But do you feel like we are at this point where in-person conferences are back for good?

Tejas: Yes, 100%.

Vitaly: Yeah. It feels like different parts of the world maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Things a little bit slower. But I do know for sure is that there is this sense of enough of online stuff. We do so much stuff online anyway. If we do something then we do it in person. Now you having attended so many conferences last year, I think both virtually and in person, would you say that kind of online conferences are here to stay? There are still plenty of them around. We had to do it for a while and now we’re probably going to keep it as a live livestream in addition to an in-person? Or is it a good replacement still?

Tejas: I don’t think it’s a good replacement. Nothing will ever replace face-to-face interactions. I said, I’m not in a position to make predictions about front end stuff. I can make 100% an accurate prediction about this. Nothing will ever replace an in-person interaction face-to-face. No screen can substitute a warm flesh and blood person in front of you. And so I think in-person is here to stay, but a lot of companies and organization teams have invested time and money into getting the online part, right? That why should we throw it away? We have it now.

Tejas: So I feel like it will be a fallback and a second track, as it were. And it’s not bad for business. You can sell a lot of tickets by volume for just some livestream and people will join. And I think it’s good because there’s people who can’t travel that you get to include now, right? So it’s good. So yeah, I think that’s the future is in person, but also virtual.

Vitaly: What is your future though? So I mean, I’m very curious. You always have these ideas of things you want to do in general. I mean, again, having learned so much from all the different companies. There must have been some things that where you said to yourself, "Okay, I would’ve done it differently."

Tejas: Oh man, you can’t imagine.

Vitaly: Oh, yeah, please go ahead. I’m very curious to hear that.

Tejas: I’ve been in positions where I’ve been micromanaged to death, right, and I’m very, I look back at those and go like, oh my gosh, I would do this so differently the way I’ve done it by not micromanaging people. I think that’s probably the strongest one. But also conferences. I’ve seen conferences do things wrong. I think the biggest mistake I’ve seen there is overselling. They’ll show you a venue that’s packed full of sunlight and everything and you get there and it’s just someone’s dark basement.

Vitaly: There is no sunlight.

Tejas: No, yeah, they turn off the sun for this one conference. So I’ve seen conferences that will just not record talks and they won’t tell you ahead of time. So I think the biggest mistake conference organizers have made is a lack of communication about important things. I want to know if I’m not going to be recorded, so then I don’t make the effort of going there. Because a big draw is this thing’s going to be recorded and visible for everybody after. And some conferences have made it known not at all that your thing’s not recorded and then months go by and you’re like, where’s that video? Oh, they didn’t record it. Oh no.

Tejas: So I would do those things differently, but what’s next for me? It’s funny you ask literally, because it’s a new year and I’ve dedicated this week, so I’m unemployed in case listeners are unaware. And I’ve started to feel the squeeze of being unemployed, put it that way. And I don’t know what’s next. I’ve decided to take this week and figure it out. I think I do want to spend time creating YouTube content because I like communicating with people and reaching people and really, yeah, this will sound a bit narcissistic, but blessing them with whatever I can bless them with. So I think YouTube is one thing I want to keep. But really, I don’t know, man, do I join a company as an employee? Do I start my own company? Do I just remain a freelancer? I don’t know. So I’m taking this week to talk to good friends and have them speak into my life and give me the best advice, who know me well. I’m currently leaning more towards starting a... I can’t say a company for legal reasons, but starting a type of company.

Vitaly: And enterprise.

Tejas: Sure, yes. Start starting an enterprises. Starting an enterprise somewhere around DevRel. That seems really attractive to me. And really you are an inspiration for that. Watching you lead smashing, right? I want to be able to do that. To give people a place where they can be creative and do their best work, et cetera, while also earning a good amount of money. I want to create something like that. So I’m kind of leaning towards that. I don’t know if it’s sustainable or if I’m skilled enough to do that, but that’s kind of ... Plan B, listen to this privilege. Vitaly, listen to how ridiculous this sounds.

Tejas: My worst case scenario, my like fallback is I get a job at some tech company and earn a decent salary. That’s unbelievable. But that’s kind of plan B is just take a job somewhere. Of course, it would have to be in a field I’m passionate about, that I care about, et cetera. But yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at.

Vitaly: Where would you see yourself in general? I mean there are many companies, many people who are trying to get to the fan club, the big ones, the Facebook, the Apple, the Google, the Amazon and so on so forth. Did you ever think about, okay, I’m going to do whatever is needed? And I know that, again, looking that you started coding back when you were eight, right? And you’re a software engineer. I assume that that might be on your agenda to get to this top five, top 10 other companies on the world. Is it interesting to you or would you rather work in a smaller company?

Tejas: That’s a great question. Yeah, so it was interesting. I feel like the closest I’ve got to big company energy is Spotify. And just by virtue of working at Spotify with 4,000 employees, I learned very quickly that this isn’t for me. So maybe, but I’m leaning more towards, no, with the larger tech empire-type companies. I feel like it would be great if I had three children in a very busy personal life to go to work and kind of have that much structure and rigidity. But at this point in life it’s a no for me.

Vitaly: I think it’s interesting because I’m being asked that as well. And actually I was under a very strong impression at some point in my life when I was thinking that if I want to make a good career, I have to work in one of the big ones. I have to do whatever it takes. But you know me a little bit. I like my freedom and I don’t want to be sitting day and night working or anything. I mean the work-life balance and I mean everybody’s talking more or less about work-life balance. But I mean it in a very ... it’s been hard to explain in a very personal way. Meaning I want to be able to say to myself, and this is kind of the ultimate test that I put for myself.

Vitaly: Never want to be in a position where at 2:00 PM on any given day, I have to tell me myself, "Okay, I don’t want to do this and I have to, no matter what it takes, I have to do it for the next four hours, whatever it takes." And I kind of always wanted to be in a position to say, okay, you know what? I’m going to go to cinema at 10:00 AM on Monday morning. Frankly, if I’m being very honest, it really never happened to me that I actually wanted that. And it never really happened to me that I made it or I did it. But I mean, this kind of sense of freedom is very important here, but not everybody can afford that. And it’s a lot of risk too.

Tejas: Yeah, it’s also an emerging trend in the industry. Zeta works this way when I was there at least. It’s more results-based than time-based. So on paper you have a 40 hour kind of work week, but you distribute those 40 hours. However, you could do two days straight and then the next day go to a movie theater in the morning. So they don’t care about when you work, it’s just that stuff gets done. I see that. That happens with full-time employment too. I feel like with the fan club, everyone I talked to at fan companies. My own experience at Spotify was, and this is not to speak ill of these companies, there are big companies with lots of things happening. There’s a lot of meetings, a lot of meetings to where you will have a meeting blocked-

Vitaly: And you don’t like meetings.

Tejas: Me? I like meetings, but I feel like look, too much of any good thing becomes a bad thing. And I feel like, respectfully, Spotify when I was there, had too many meetings. It did. And it’s not their fault. There was a pandemic and they’re used to working in office. They were not remote ever. So the pandemic made them go remote. But then there was a lot of learning to do about how to be remote. And I joined just in the middle of that where async meetings were not really a thing and it was very complicated. And so I was just at my laptop all day in video calls because it’s kind of being in an office.

Tejas: So no, I didn’t enjoy the meetings. And I found not just me, but I have friends at Google, at Meta, they’ll accidentally around me be like, “Hey, look at my phone.” And they’ll show me a photo from their vacation, and I see notifications pop up, “Oh, you have meeting at 10 minutes?” And they tap on the notification, go to the calendar app and “Oh my God, the carnage in this calendar app.” You look at that once you’re like, okay, I do not envy you. So—

Vitaly: Yeah, I mean surely meetings are necessary, but it’s also a matter of how to organize it because for me, or for us and at Smashing for example, we don’t have many meetings. But also, most importantly, everybody can set boundaries in a way. So I like to have, for example, like for this call, right? I like to have two or three days blocked out when there are no meetings.

Tejas: Yes.

Vitaly: No meetings. Just almost, I mean, something must happen, something bad, or too good must happen for the day to have a meeting, right? And it’s also really just about having proper boundaries in place of this is when we work, and this is when we have meetings. Although of course meetings also work.

Tejas: Yeah. One lesson I learned working at so many different places is people. I say people because I know people, but even just speaking of myself, people suck at creating good and healthy boundaries in the workplace. I do. I did more when I was more inexperienced, but still it’s a struggle to have good, strong boundaries. I feel like it could work better if the employer enforced and enabled people to think more about boundaries and even suggested, “Hey, maybe you should do a no meeting day.”

Tejas: If managers push, not push boundaries, but how do you say? Establish boundaries on behalf of their people. Yeah, and that’s something I’d like to see more of. I haven’t seen the opposite. I’ve seen the lack of people’s ability to set boundaries be exploited far more often than I’ve seen healthy boundary setting from the top.

Vitaly: Right. Well, now I do have to ask though, I’m just curious at this point, do you then have a dream project that you’d like to work on one day, maybe, I don’t know, be building a, I don’t know, some sort of software for rocket ship or anything? Do you have any particular ambitions in that regard?

Tejas: I’m really thankful, Vitaly, to say that this year I’m actually spending all of my unemployed time working on three dream projects of my own. One of them is a secret. I can’t tell you about that.

Vitaly: Oh, come on. Just give us a little of a spoiler then.

Tejas: It’s a very social thing. There is the spoiler. But the other one is working on this DevRel startup co consultancy thing. I’m thinking of starting is the second one. And that’s really excited about that. Worst case, it fails and then I join a company as it were. But that’s something I’m excited about. And the third dream project is my YouTube channel, which I’ve wanted to be a YouTuber for years, mainly honestly, because I like reaching people, but also I’ve speaking about this Mac OS 10 Aqua Ball thing. I get to do that with video, create beautiful videos, and I’m really into cameras and making nice shots and everything. And that’s a cool project. It’s a dream project actually to be a good YouTuber, emphasis on the good because I don’t want to be an average YouTuber. And also to be able to turn it into a living. I feel like my dream would be to just kind of be a full-time YouTuber. Yeah.

Vitaly: But what about TikTok? We don’t see you on TikTok yet.

Tejas: Yeah, sadly. I’m not so good at dances.

Vitaly: Well, maybe that should be the next skill to learn.

Tejas: That could be my New Year’s resolution. Get good at shuffling. Every day I’m shuffling.

Vitaly: So we’ve been learning a little bit about front end and JavaScript and AI and the other companies and so on, but what have you been learning about lately, Tejas? What have you been reading or kind of the skill that you’ve been trying to get acquainted with recently?

Tejas: That’s a good question. For me, communication is probably the thing that I enjoy the most based on conference speaking and stuff. And one thing I’ve been learning is the difference in mode of communication. What I mean by that is like what makes a great in-person conference talk does not actually make a great YouTube video. And I find this fascinating that when it’s a different modality of communication, people have different preferences. So like what I mean by that is if I come out at Smashing Conf New York or Freiburg, and I’m on stage and I’m like, "What’s up everybody?" High energy. People are like, wow, that’s awesome. But if I do the same thing on YouTube, they’re like, dude, what are you on? And that’s something I’ve been learning how to communicate effectively on different platforms. I’ve yet to learn the TikTok one, but I think it’s mostly through dance.

Vitaly: You’ll get there. I have no doubt about that. All right. Well if you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Tejas you can find him on Twitter where he’s at Tejas Kumar underscore. We’ll probably have to have another call about why underscore. By the way, why underscore?

Tejas: Because the other one was taken. You know what—

Vitaly: That’s reasonable.

Tejas: If that Tejas could delete their handle and then email me I’d appreciate it.

Vitaly: Excellent. So that would be Tejas Kuma underscore. On YouTube where he’s just at Contagious K and potentially on TikTok, where he’s going to show his best dance moves and tips around Svelt and React eventually. But also on his website, Teg.as Where-

Tejas: T E J

Vitaly: T E J. Yes, indeed. T E J dot, yes. You can also find plenty of photos of Tejas as well. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Tejas. Do you have any parting words of wisdom you’d like to send to the universe for people who are going to watch us 20 years from now?

Tejas: Yes. I would say this: kindness and compassion is the most important.

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How many CSS properties are there?

Tomasz Łakomy posted a joke tweet about naming all the CSS attributes and Tejas Kumar replied with a joke answer, going as far as making an npm module. You can even run a terminal command to see them:

npx get-all-css-properties

You'll get 259 of them. The source code uses the website quackit.com for the data, which I'd never heard of. 🤷‍♂️

I would have probably looked at MDN, where some quick querySelectorAll handiwork in the console yields a different number: 584. But ooops, that's full of selectors, at-rules, and other stuff. Their reference only lists 72, but says it's incomplete.

W3Schools lists 228 of them. HTML Dog lists 125. Our almanac has 176, and I know we omit stuff on purpose (e.g. we file margin-left under margin instead of making its own entry).

The horse's mouth?

520 distinct property names from 66 technical reports and 66 editors' drafts.

The post How many CSS properties are there? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.