Paul Irish

Making the www great

About

Hi folks. I’m Paul. I’m a front-end developer who loves the web. I’m always thinking a lot about how to make you more productive with tools that improve your workflow help you make slicker, sexier, mobile web sites and webapps.

I work on the Google Chrome team focused on Developer Tooling. Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools, PageSpeed Insights, CrUX and everything else Chrome can do to make you a productive web developer.

I’ve developed tools like Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, Modernizr, Yeoman, CSS3 Please and HTML5 Boilerplate, curated HTML5 Rocks, and co-created projects like HTML5 Please, mothereffingtextshadow, mothereffinghsl, Move the Web Forward, Mothereffing Animated GIF, W3Fools, chromestatus.com, HTML5 Readiness, Front-end Coding Standards, Type Rendering Project. Oh and I used to host the amazing yayQuery Podcast. I’ve long loved music and kept the Aurgasm music blog up for 10+ years.

Social: Mastodon: @paul_irish@toot.cafeTwitter | paulirish.com.

I am not looking for a new position, but if you’re aching to read more.. here’s my 10+-year-stale resumé.

Interviews:

A very-formally-written timeline of shit I’ve done

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

(2023 Jan update: Co-created Lighthouse, led project from launch to present day. Led PageSpeed Insights & Chrome UX Report for the past several years. Lots of web performance things.)

(2015 update: Also I should add Yeoman debut and launch, RoboHornet, Web Platform Docs, Bower)

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

Other assorted stuff I think is rad

  • Wrote the forewords of Pro HTML5 Programming, HTML5 & CSS3 in The Real World, and HTML5 - De la page web à l’application web .. and soon Third Party Javascript
  • Technical Reviewer for a chapter in Smashing Book #3 and also jQuery Enlightenment
  • Proposed, defended and saw the inclusion of HTML5 data-* attribute support in jQuery.
  • Helped get the Google Chrome Frame/IE=Edge header into Rails core.
  • Somewhat project managed the IEPP (HTML5 Shiv) v2 release and distribution . Alexander Farkas was lead dev.

… a work in progress / everything is a draft …