• Brian Kardell
• Nicole Sullivan

Transcription

• Brian Kardell: All right. Hi, I'm Brian Kardell, and welcome to this recurring series of chats that we've been doing for a few years now at various BlinkOns. We hope that it's not just fun and interesting, but hopefully we're helping to build a shared people's history of the web that people can watch for long into the future, to learn about the folks that helped build and shape the web. So, I'm here today with Nicole Sullivan.

• Nicole Sullivan: Hi. Thanks for having me.

• Brian Kardell: And, Nicole, you're at Google now?

• Nicole Sullivan: Yeah, I'm a product manager for UI capabilities at Google, which includes all different things like rendering, and layout and style, and animations, and scrolling, and input, and a ton of different areas. It actually also includes UI dev tools, which is all the stuff for editing and debugging your HTML and CSS.

• Brian Kardell: Okay. So let's talk about history. I always ask about backgrounds, because it's hard to imagine today where we all walk around with the whole internet in our pocket, or on our wrist, all the time. But, before the web was so pervasive, which was not really that long ago, it wasn't really straightforward how somebody would come to learn about the web, or get involved with it, or why you would even want to. So I like hearing everybody's interesting stories about that. So, can you tell me your story? Where do you come from? How did we get here?

• Nicole Sullivan: Well, I came from a little island off the coast of Maine. We didn't get cable TV even until I think I was a teenager. They didn't get internet, even any access to internet, until after I left for college. I don't think I was aware that the internet existed, or even email, until I went to a party at college and I met this wonderful, nerdy man, or I guess more of a boy, but he gave me his email address and I was like, 'Oh, shoot. I better learn how to use email.'

• Brian Kardell: So for context, though, what year was that, probably-ish?

• Nicole Sullivan: That would've been like '96, '95.

• Brian Kardell: So it was pretty early.

• Nicole Sullivan: It was pretty early. You still went to a computer lab to use a computer that was there.

• Brian Kardell: I feel like I've said this on every single one of these, but just for context, I learned about the web in a bookstore, a physical bookstore, which they're hard to even find anymore, but...

• Nicole Sullivan: Oh, they're having a comeback, though.

• Brian Kardell: So you grew up in this small town, you got an email address, but that's still a long way toward where I know you from, which is actually speaking. I learned about you in my own career. Saw you speak online, well recorded online, anyway. So how do we get from there to there, and to where you are now?

• Nicole Sullivan: So by way of being a carpenter?

• Brian Kardell: Exactly. It's totally straightforward way.

• Nicole Sullivan: I finished school. I got a degree in economics, and I didn't know what to do with myself, and my dad and my grandfather had been carpenters, and it's something I had always wanted to do, but my family was very education oriented. 'You're going to go to school, you're going to get a good job.' Even if they weren't really quite sure what that good job was, they wanted me to go to school so I could go and get it. And so now, free of their expectations, having completed school, I went and joined a carpentry crew and started building houses frame to finish. And I know this is something that you and I share in common as a background, as a laborer before jumping into tech.

• Brian Kardell: And also my dad and my grandfather, my other grandfather... I always joke this like My Cousin Vinny, do you remember that? This is how I know about it, because literally every relative I have, that's what they did. I also swung a hammer.

• Nicole Sullivan: I did for about three years. I built a bunch of houses, I built kitchens, I built roofs and all kinds of other stuff, and I was so strong. I could lift like 240 pounds back then, and I only weighed like 110.

• Brian Kardell: Wow.

• Nicole Sullivan: But I hurt myself, unsurprisingly, lifting that kind of weight as a tiny person, and my doctors basically said, 'You've got to stopping a carpenter or you're going to really struggle when you're older. Your body's going to be unwell.' And so...

• Brian Kardell: Lot of my family did actually struggle later in life a lot with that. So I'm glad that we were able to move on.

• Nicole Sullivan: It's funny, because at the time I took it as their pointing out something about me, about my body, but then looking at the folks that I worked with then, and I'm still in touch with a bunch of them now, they all have body pain, and injuries that don't heal, and things like that. So I feel like I was lucky to find a different path that didn't lead to that.

• Brian Kardell: So you get injured and you know about email.

• Nicole Sullivan: I knew a little more at that point.

• Brian Kardell: How did we get to the web? Just emailed Tim Berners-Lee and said, 'Hey, I heard about this web thing. How do I get involved?'

• Nicole Sullivan: I had moved into this... While I was a carpenter I had moved into this communal house in Cambridge, Massachusetts where it just so happened that the group that hung out there was one half artists, and makers, and builders, and folks like that, and the other half was nerds and tech people. In fact, a bunch of people who worked at the W3C hung out there, including Philippe le Hegaret and a few other people that would come to be lifelong friends. And I was hearing from them about specifications and all this stuff, and didn't really know what it meant. But when I had to stop being a carpenter, I was like, 'What do I do with myself? Oh, well, I've been hearing about this nerd stuff. Why don't I check it out?' And so I read the XML schema specification and my brain was just melting. I don't think... I was like, 'I don't want to do this, whatever this is.' And so then I read the CSS specification and I thought, 'Oh, this is great. This is really interesting. I could do this.' I didn't understand that it meant that... I thought a spec meant that's how things worked, not it's how things will work. So when I got started trying things in browsers around 2001, 2002, I was like, 'This just doesn't work how they said it would, something's wrong here.'

• Brian Kardell: I think everybody had that experience. I don't know, I've written before about my own experience with standards being that... I just heard they were a standards organization, and that just sounds like a magical thing. It just sounds like it's important, big, important. It's like government or something, and they're the ones that write the law. And you think that's the best and brightest, and they all get together and then they just hand down the tablets from on high, and then that's how it is. And it's not really like that at all.

• Nicole Sullivan: And for me, it was just this place that a bunch of my friends worked so, long before I was in tech, when I was still a carpenter, I went to a W3C event in the south of France, and I met Tim Berners-Lee there, and I was just like, 'Oh, cool nerd. No big deal.' And I met... Actually, I was more impressed with, I don't remember his last name. I think his first name was Allen, and he invented the joystick, and I was just like, 'Whoa, super, super cool.' So for me, all these people were just extensions of my friend group, which was really lucky because it made tech, which otherwise could have been really out of reach, seem accessible.

• Brian Kardell: Cool. So you wound up in France, and you wound up working for a French agency?

• Nicole Sullivan: Oh, there were some steps between.

• Brian Kardell: Oh, tell me, please tell me.

• Nicole Sullivan: I moved to France and I started doing some accessibility work, taking huge, hundred-page word docs and converting them to accessible HTML, because software needed to have accessible documentation if they wanted to sell it to education, and to government, and things like that. And then I was like, 'Hey, I think I like this tech stuff. I think I'll take a night class in Java and see if I like it.' So I signed up for something, and when I got there, it was an enormous hall with maybe, I don't know, 300 or 500 students in it. And I was like, 'This is strange.' But I didn't speak French yet, so I'm just desperately trying to understand literally anything that's happening. And about three months in, I realized I've actually signed up for a degree program in engineering.

• Brian Kardell: Oh, wait, can we back up for a minute? So you moved to France, you didn't know the language, you thought, 'I'll take a night class to learn a computer language that I also don't know yet that's being taught in the language I don't know yet.' Do I have that right?

• Nicole Sullivan: It's funny when you say it back to me. It sounds ridiculous. But you know what? I was like 20.

• Brian Kardell: You're inspiring, Nicole. That is an amazing amount of... I don't want to underscore it because so much of where we wind up is good luck. It's fortunate. It's the connections we make, but that took some chutzpah.

• Nicole Sullivan: That's one way to put it.

• Brian Kardell: That's inspiring to me that you were...

• Nicole Sullivan: I was like 20 something and I had no fear. It didn't occur to me that it was crazy to move to a foreign country where I didn't speak the language and didn't have a visa yet to be there. It didn't occur to me that that was a crazy thing to do. I guess my frontal lobe hadn't developed yet.

• Brian Kardell: It's admirable because that's also a way that good things get accomplished is that people take risks like that and move way out of their comfort level. So it's great that you did that. And you did learn. You signed up for a degree program and you learn things and you learn French, I assume.

• Nicole Sullivan: Eventually I started understanding things. There was one whole lecture where I thought the teacher kept saying, for example, she was saying, [inaudible 00:11:48] and I thought she was saying, 'For example, continuing on...' But maybe three weeks later I would learn that [inaudible 00:11:54] means, actually, 'on the other hand.' And so she was actually giving contrary information and so I had to go back and restructure all the things I thought I had understood because of language problem. But I got really lucky. My TAs let me write my code in English so I didn't have to use French function names and things like that, and that was a huge break.

• Brian Kardell: Interesting. So how did you wind up then at an agency, and what were you doing at this French agency? We've known each other for a while, and somehow that's the beginning of... I lacked that whole thing about going to school there.

• Nicole Sullivan: Oh, really?

• Brian Kardell: How do we get to the agency?

• Nicole Sullivan: So I was taking that class. I had done, maybe... I'm terrible with times, so I'm not sure, but a year and a half of classes or something. And I'd learned databases, and graphs, and optimization graph theory, I think it's called in English, and a few classes of Java, and algorithms, and things like that. And I had just enough experience that this web agency was willing to take a risk on me. But again, I will say they knew people through my W3C folks. And so I got really lucky again that maybe they wouldn't have taken a risk on my fairly faulty resume if I hadn't had that connection. But because I did, they were willing to give me a chance. France has a three-month trial period and they were willing to let me have a try.

• Brian Kardell: Nice.

• Nicole Sullivan: And then when I got in there, it was actually really interesting. That's how I got into performance. They were working on a site that was for one of the biggest cell phone providers in Europe, and it was crashing every single time that you would try to do anything in Internet Explorer. So you'd move the mouse and it would crash. You would click on a [inaudible 00:14:01] control and it would crash, and no one could figure out what was going on. But in part because of my inexperience, I was able to figure out what had gone wrong.

• Brian Kardell: Excellent. And then from there...

• Nicole Sullivan: They were putting JavaScript in their CSS, for what it's worth.

• Brian Kardell: I was going to ask about that, actually. I was going to ask about that. So for anybody who might not know, Internet Explorer used to support... It was behaviors, like the HTC, that's what you're talking about? So they have made a number of comeback attempts almost, because it is very logical the separation of concerns in CSS is quite nice, and it feels like you would want to do that with JavaScript, too. And behaviors was an attempt to just put that right into your CSS. And sometimes it was neat, but a lot of times it was pretty fatal.

• Nicole Sullivan: So the way that we were doing it as well-meant that it was executing basically every time anything relay outed or painted, which I didn't know those words back then, so I couldn't have described it. But what I knew is when I put counters inside of these functions, they were executing hundreds of thousands of times and crashing the browser. But that's where my love of performance was born, was solving that problem. I was like, 'Oh, this is a new interesting problem.'

• Brian Kardell: So from there, you went to Yahoo, is that right?

• Nicole Sullivan: I did, I moved back to California, not back to, I moved to California for the first time in the middle of the tech world and got a job at Yahoo working on their performance team.

• Brian Kardell: And Yahoo back then was like, a...

• Nicole Sullivan: Big deal.

• Brian Kardell: They were a huge deal. They were Google, basically.

• Nicole Sullivan: Plus there was YUI there.

• Brian Kardell: I'm saying they were basically Google, all the things that you associate with Google today, like innovation, and front-end frameworks, and pattern libraries like material. They had those things developing at Yahoo. So, what did you work on there? Because I always thought that that was when I learned about you. So what did you work on there? You worked on performance stuff?

• Nicole Sullivan: I worked on performance stuff. So, some of it was figuring out what impacts UI performance or there selector patterns that make performance harder, was working on YSlow, which was the Yahoo earliest performance, debugging tooling. There was just so much we didn't know back then. Another thing I worked on was deploying the performance measurement system worldwide. We needed to know how performance was going in order to get teams to improve it. And so I worked with all the different locales to get this deployed.

• Brian Kardell: Cool.

• Nicole Sullivan: Random.

• Brian Kardell: At some point though, you went and started your own company, and I think that that's where I came to know about you was when you were at your own company.

• Nicole Sullivan: It's when I had my own company that I did my first speaking engagement where I actually talked about my own work. So while I was at Yahoo, I was meant to be helping teams and folks outside the company figure out performance, but it was very much like me sharing a team message about performance. When I left Yahoo, I went to a conference called Web Directions North, which was put on by John, and...

• Brian Kardell: John Allsopp?

• Nicole Sullivan: Yes, sorry. Yes, John Allsopp. And there was the night before I was supposed to speak, and I was hanging out with some other speakers, and I was like, 'I really wish I got to talk about my own stuff.' And they were like, 'Well, you got laid off from Yahoo, right? You're here. It was planned ahead, but you were laid off. You don't have to talk about any of that anymore.' And I was like, 'Oh, I don't.' They're like, 'Go ahead, give your stuff a try. Go speak about it.' And so I went and over that night wrote up my first talk and slides about object-oriented CSS and what that meant to me to build CSS systems, which are now called design systems, but talking through why I did the things I did, and why they mattered, and what was missing from CSS to make it work better.

• Brian Kardell: And that is where I first saw you. Definitely. It was that talk. We don't have to talk about this a lot, but I know that there are a lot of things that people are familiar with in CSS. Like now everybody's like a Tailwind or you hate Tailwind, or you love Tailwind. And there was BEM and Smacks. But really OOCSS was the first thing that thought about, in a big, coherent way, all of those things that those other things came along and built off of.

• Nicole Sullivan: And by a lot of years. I published most utility classes or modifier classes, the stuff that Tailwind is based on. I published most of that in, I don't know, 2009 on GitHub. And SMACSS was a variation on what I had suggested, basically, adding naming convention. BEM, again adds naming conventions, which I was not particularly interested in that space, however important it is, that's not something I'd spent a lot of time thinking about.

• Brian Kardell: I remember thinking it was a good talk and reading a bunch of stuff on your blog, which you have running again, I think.

• Nicole Sullivan: Got it running again.

• Brian Kardell: Stubbornella.org, right?

• Nicole Sullivan: Stubbornella.org. It was broken for like a decade, and then I finally got it running again, with the demise of the site formerly known as Twitter I decided I needed to have my own space on the web that wasn't controlled by a corporation.

• Brian Kardell: I think I'm going to keep calling it Twitter. You can call it whatever.

• Nicole Sullivan: Me, too. I just need that in addition.

• Brian Kardell: I know. I don't know how it is that I have never asked you this, but why stubbornella?

• Nicole Sullivan: Oh, God. It's funny because I get the ask that in professional context all the time, which I never intended for it to be a name that I used professionally at all. I opened my Twitter account before I even did anything outward facing in that particular way. It was actually a gift from a really good friend of mine named Danbri, and he got it for my birthday, the domain. Again, I didn't even really know about tech, I was still a carpenter. He gets me the domain name stubbornella.org for my birthday as a present, and the rest is history. I take it to mean 'persistent.'

• Brian Kardell: That's great. I didn't know that you knew Dan that long. That's cool.

• Nicole Sullivan: Dan was another one of the W3C folks hanging out at that communal house.

• Brian Kardell: I think that's a good name. It's catchy and you can remember it. And the fact that you do wonder, 'Oh, why did they choose that name?' Makes you remember it. So I always thought it was a really good name anyway.

• Nicole Sullivan: Thanks.

• Brian Kardell: So can we share, I think would be really interesting, like a little random factoid, who is your first client at your own agency that you created, your own company?

• Nicole Sullivan: So I started my company in December of 2008, which, if anyone recalls, was an enormous crash. Everyone was getting laid off. Everyone was freaking out, not unlike the last year. And I happened to start my company right in the midst of that, and I had just enough savings that I was like, 'Okay, if I have to go and live in my sister's garage, this is the date that I have to do that on.' And that was somewhere midsummer. And about a month before that I landed Facebook as my first client working with them to improve their UI and their performance.

• Brian Kardell: Not too shabby I would say.

• Nicole Sullivan: I just want to say I realize how lucky and privileged I am, and that something really bugs me about rags to riches stories. I grew up in a trailer with no indoor plumbing with an outhouse that we had to go out to even in the winter. And so I know that makes it very tempting to give me this rags to riches story, because almost nobody makes it from there to working at Google. But I reject that a bit, because I think that I got really lucky. I happened to know people who were already involved in early tech and were willing to be supportive of me. I happened to be born smart, which I just don't think that people should have to have a list of lucky and different characteristics in order to have good outcomes. And I want to say, there were a lot of places where I could have gone in a different direction for me. I could have given up after I got laid off at Yahoo, or I could have moved back home right away with my sister, where there would've been a lot less opportunity for me. And so there are cases where I was willing to take a risk, but I also don't think that people should have to be perfect in order to have a good life where they're paid enough and...

• Brian Kardell: Well said and important.

• Nicole Sullivan: I think it's too easy for people to take your story and mine and think that people who come from working-class families should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, when you and I did that to some extent, but to a large degree, we also just had a ton of support in the exact right moments from people who helped us not have to do that. When I was a kid, I got free and reduced lunch at school. Would I be smart if I hadn't had free or reduced lunch? Probably not, because they would not have had enough to eat. And I think... I'm glad that society decided to invest in me enough to make it possible for me to be where I am. Super grateful and aware of that privilege.

• Brian Kardell: Definitely. And I'm glad that they invested in both of us and that we're here because I like talking to you.

• Nicole Sullivan: Thanks.

• Brian Kardell: I think it's, regardless of how you got here, there are amazing things that you have helped contribute to the web, and I think that the web is really lucky that that happened. So you wound up, after you gave your OOCSS talk, you got pulled into South by Southwest, is that right?

• Nicole Sullivan: So again, I spoke at John Alsup's conference Web Directions North, and there I met a bunch of amazing designers like Cindy Lee, who has passed away since. And she was incredibly inspiring, and took care of me, and basically told me, 'You should go to South by Southwest, you're going to meet people there who will be important for your career.' And she took me under her wing at South by Southwest and introduced me to a ton of people. I was able to meet Jeremy Keith, and I think Eric Meyer may have been there, too. And then those folks actually introduced me to folks at A List Apart and Event Apart who then pulled me in to speak there. And so there were just all these kind people along the way who made a huge difference. And I don't know if they knew they were, but they were just saying to someone else, 'Hey, have you met her? You should have her speak or you should listen to her ideas.' And that slide deck, that presentation, went from no views to 500,000 views in a couple of months. And I was so shy, and so introverted, and so uncomfortable with that amount of attention. It took me a long time to come to terms with it.

• Brian Kardell: You also developed some tools at your agency. Tell us about what your tools... Did you sell them?

• Nicole Sullivan: I at least had the idea that maybe we eventually would, but also much more interested in the technology than in building a business. So it's, I guess, unsurprising that didn't happen.

• Brian Kardell: It probably would've been more ripe for people to buy at that point because open source was a lot newer. It hadn't taken over everything, but also there weren't any dev tools in the browser for the most part.

• Nicole Sullivan: Firebug, building on top of Firebug was possible for me to create tools just because that actually finally existed. And honestly, I never could have open sourced my stuff if GitHub hadn't come to be. So that in 2008 or nine, whenever I initially published my stuff, if there hadn't been a tool like GitHub, I wouldn't have been able to do it. It would've been out of my reach otherwise.

• Brian Kardell: So what did your tools help you do?

• Nicole Sullivan: So one of them helped you find all of the topography that you'd created on a site. And so people would have hundreds of shades of blue type on their site, and they would think they only had one, or maybe two, because they didn't realize they'd use slightly different colors for each example, and similar for size of type and other things like that. So this tool would, you'd turn it on and it would profile however many pages you went to, and then save up all those combinations of size and color of font, and then give you histograms to understand. I just found that performance arguments with designers were tough, because if it was just, 'Should it be design or should it be performance?' They're always going to say UX, that they're giving up too much on the UX side in terms of getting this performance. But if instead, you change the argument to, 'Hey, you use this blue 1600 times and used this one 23 times. Can we make it consistent?' Consistent is also performant, and designers really care about consistency from a UX perspective. And so it eliminated some of the arguments that...

• Brian Kardell: Have we built that into tools today? Because that sounds really useful.

• Nicole Sullivan: It's in so many tools now.

• Brian Kardell: I don't know about this. Teach me. Where is this? Is it in SaaS?

• Nicole Sullivan: What was it called? I had a website for it, but I'm not sure I've even renewed the domain. Anyway, there are tools that do this, maybe not the exact same way, but there's actually a pain called CSS Overview in the Chrome dev tools that is not on by default, but if you turn it on, it will give you an overview of the different styles that you've used.

• Brian Kardell: Oh my goodness, I had no idea.

• Nicole Sullivan: It doesn't do exactly what I'm talking about here, but it's useful. And then I also created Smush It, which was an image optimization tool.

• Brian Kardell: I remember Smush it.

• Nicole Sullivan: And then I did that with Stoyan Stefanov, and then with Nicholas [inaudible 00:30:52] I made CSS Lint, which there was no linting tool at that time for CSS. So it was a first stab at helping people find bugs and figure out where they'd used Styles incorrectly.

• Brian Kardell: So how did you wind up at Google from that point?

• Nicole Sullivan: Well, I had my own company for a while. With Facebook as an initial client, I think you can imagine getting more clients was not as hard as it would've been had I gone a different route. So I was really lucky and got to work with Box, and folks at Williams Sonoma, and Salesforce, and especially Trulia, the developers and designers there were amazing. So I got to work with all these big companies figuring out how to get them unblocked and get them shipping UI. And the systems that I was creating, I always wondered, are they working out? And I bumped into a developer at Box at a coffee shop once, and I was like, 'So, how's it going?' Really nervous, like I'm going to hear that it isn't working. And he was like, 'It's great. We've only written a hundred lines of CSS since you left.'

• Brian Kardell: Wow.

• Nicole Sullivan: And I bumped into a developer from Facebook later, who didn't work on the work with me, and I asked him, 'How is it creating UI on Facebook?' And this is a backend developer, and he's like, 'Oh, it's great. I don't have to think about it at all.' And I was like, 'Oh, good, this is working.' So I continued my company for a while and then I got invited by Chrome Engineering to go and spend a couple of days with their team figuring out what a new feature should look like, and that feature would become Web Components. And so there I was able to do things like say, 'Hey, you're not going to have a component or two in a page, you're going to have hundreds or thousands because it's going to be all these smaller pieces that are nested and combined to make UX.' And letting them know how scoping needed to work, that you needed to have an end to your scope as well. At that moment, I was like, 'I want that job. That's the job for me.' And that was the beginning of getting to Google.

• Brian Kardell: So you applied to Google?

• Nicole Sullivan: I did. I applied to Google and I got rejected, totally turned down.

• Brian Kardell: I also have been rejected by more than one company.

• Nicole Sullivan: Big tech hiring, it's a whole thing. But I would say don't give up if you didn't get it the first time. I did get it the second time, but I will say the feedback I got was that I needed to be stronger at programming. And so as a result, I actually gave up my company knowing that I wouldn't get to do significant backend programming, or even middle-layer programming in my company. And so I gave that up in order to work at Pivotal Labs. I was often getting a bunch of their old clients that then needed their front end, their CSS and HTML cleaned up. At some point I was like, 'Hey, you could teach me to code and I could come and I could do this, the front end bits, and teach your folks to write really great CSS.' And they were like, 'Deal, we'll do that.' So I went and worked there for a while, and that's where I learned Ruby and Rails and started understanding more about servers and backend and things like that, getting myself ready for a second try at an interview at Google.

• Brian Kardell: Cool. And you did, and I would say that since you've been there, a lot of good things happened.

• Nicole Sullivan: I think so. I'm really excited about everything we've been able to do.

• Brian Kardell: What year did you start at Google? Was it 2018? 2019? Something like that?

• Nicole Sullivan: 2018.

• Brian Kardell: Because I also started at Igalia near-ish the same time.

• Nicole Sullivan: Oh, really?

• Brian Kardell: And my first... Not Blink On, but just before Blink On, was the Chrome Developer Summit. And you spoke at that event that I was at. I think actually we sat together in the front row for another thing and took pictures of Jake Archibald's blue socks.

• Nicole Sullivan: I don't remember...

• Brian Kardell: They're pretty neat. I should share them again. But you gave this talk with Greg Woolworth that was introducing Open UI and it was called 'HTML Isn't Done Yet.' And I've written about it and pointed to it a whole bunch of times. I think it's a great talk, and you're absolutely right, and I think thanks for promoting that.

• Nicole Sullivan: I think we had the idea that HTML is complete or something, and we've got all the elements we need, and then we'll just do everything else with classes. And that doesn't add up for me. I think that we missed the mark with the extensible web manifesto. There was a lot of good in it about building solid foundations that could then be extended to pave cow paths, but I think we stayed in the part where we were building low-level APIs for too long, and we didn't pave cow paths. So every site ever practically has tabs, or accordions, or carousels, or other of these clear UI patterns. A cow path could not be more trodden down than those UI patterns. We didn't move from low-level APIs into declarative APIs.

• Brian Kardell: So, I totally agree with you on that. And I've also spent a lot of effort writing blog posts. I wrote one that was the Tao of the Extensive Web Manifesto that tried to explain what it meant. So it's been fun and interesting to work on things in open UI. It's definitely a learning process, how we integrate that and how we get it moving, but I think accordion is going really well.

• Nicole Sullivan: Really well.

• Brian Kardell: And I think that's going to probably chip everywhere pretty quickly, I would imagine.

• Nicole Sullivan: It's already in Safari's tech preview, I think.

• Brian Kardell: There needs to be a few updates based on the spec changes, but I think it's going to do really well. And since then, also we've got, let's see, just a few small things. Container queries...

• Nicole Sullivan: Has.

• Brian Kardell: Has.

• Nicole Sullivan: [inaudible 00:38:05] Selector, which comes from paths.

• Brian Kardell: CSS layers and anchor positioning is coming, and I don't know, just a lot of really good things. So I attribute a lot of the success of that to the fact that you were in there as well. I'm not trying to lay that all at you. It took a lot of people. I'm just saying that I think having you in there was really helpful for getting all those things, so thanks for that.

• Nicole Sullivan: I'm grateful to have been able to be a part of it. I think that developers shouted loud and clear about what they needed, and what they were doing, and that was also really helpful. We were able to bring it back again and again to what are the use cases? What are developers trying to do? How are they doing it now? That was a big shift from how should they be doing it, to how are they doing it now, and how do we enable them in the systems that they're already choosing? And so I would turn that thanks back toward developers and the ways that they were able to guide the Chrome team, and Open UI, and the overall web platform.

• Brian Kardell: Another thing that has been done since you've been there, which I think is really, really positive, is the creation of the UI Fund. Can you describe what the UI Fund is?

• Nicole Sullivan: Sure. It actually started with the Framework Fund was the first one that I created. That was with Malta [inaudible 00:39:41] and [inaudible 00:39:42], and [inaudible 00:39:45]. And then after running the Framework Fund for a couple of years, we realized, 'Hey, we also need a UI fund, something that would focus specifically on CSS and HTML.' And the idea was, 'Hey, we have all these engineers that are working on features and we're going from conception, to research, to prototyping along with standardization, and then to actually shipping it. But then we're starting over again and starting research.' And what we realized was that research phase, and that's standardization phase, is hard and long, and it needs people who can really focus in on it and can really figure out the hard questions that we need answered in an area. And in that way, we were able to shift things back so that we're doing the research from one, and then we're doing the prototyping of that one while we're starting the research from another. And the UI Fund was a big part of that because it allowed us to work with a whole bunch of web developers to figure out if they had skills or desire to become spec writers or researchers. And it's gone really, really well. It's sped up the engineering team an enormous amount. We have folks like Anna Tudor, who did a ton of research into input-type range and just told us everything that's broken about it, which is fantastic. We have folks like Miriam Suzanne, she's written specs and done research and really guided the engineering teams through the UI fund.

• Brian Kardell: Super great. We should have had something like that in the web platform a long time ago. I think it's just super that you've helped set that up.

• Nicole Sullivan: Thanks. I like seeing that the CSS working group is actually really good at taking in newcomers, and there are a large number of people who've contributed more than 10 thanks to a spec, whereas in a lot of groups those numbers are far lower. And so I think there's a real opportunity there to find developers who have that capacity for research and spec writing and get them making initial proposals.

• Brian Kardell: So this was super fun. Every time we talk, I just have a great time talking and reminiscing about these things. So, thanks so much for coming on with me and hopefully people found it interesting.

• Nicole Sullivan: I really enjoyed it. I always like talking to you.