We are all working together on Frontend Masters, where 50+ teachers share their experiences and knowledge with tens of thousands of software developers, making an impact on their careers and their life’s path.

We Moved to Downtown Minneapolis!

A post shared by Marc Grabanski (@1marc) on Mar 18, 2017 at 7:42pm PDT

We moved towards the top of one the the most beautiful buildings in downtown Minneapolis in RBC Plaza. We signed a 6 year lease. We moved downtown to open up our workshops to everyone in Minnesota (not just the south suburbs) and have an inspiring space for both teachers and students to learn and grow.

Thinking Daily on Building a Team

Last year (2016) I had a team of 15-20+ contractors doing a variety of tasks. Everyone was great, but I realized that in order to go to the next level, I needed to find a few all-star people to take a holistic view of the company and make fundamental changes to the business every day. I needed to put 100% of my focus and money on building a team.

Focusing daily on building the team and learning what makes a great team is where most of my brain cycles have gone this year. Very happy about the results so far — time well spent!

The Magic of a Team

It feels magical to have all of us using the fresh parts of our day working together innovating and pushing the product forward. Everyone now is on vesting schedules owning part of the business and sharing in the vision of the company. I no longer have to repeat myself getting contractors onboard and the team is full of energy and excitement towards moving everything forward. We’ve been at this for over a year together now and doubled the revenue of the company putting us in a stable financial position to launch off of in 2018.

Looking Back: Hiring Contractors in the Early Days

Our needs were seasonal — we recorded workshops only 3 months for the first few years and didn’t need ongoing help. Hiring contractors, even if they were expensive, cut costs and helped me retain equity over the first few years while I proved out the product.

Over time though as the business was proven out, contractors became much more expensive to hire ongoing than having a tight, focused team working together day after day.

Starting a Business: Choosing Contractors or Employees

To start, you choose:
– hire employees and give them quite a lot of equity to join you to de-risk the business in the early-days.
– OR pay contractors a premium. Contractors just have to trust that you’ll pay your bills in order to work with you.

Your job, in the early days, is to de-risk the business and prove that your product works in the market. You either have to give employees a lot of equity, or pay contractors a premium.

I chose to work two contract jobs in order to afford to pay the contractors and retain equity in the business.

Transitioning Away from Contractors to Vested Full Time Employees

In 2016, the business really started to take shape. I was able to afford running workshops for most of the year. But there was this sinking feeling when I was paying top dollar for multiple years hiring a team of contractors but wasn’t seeing any big changes happening in the business to move us forward.

Contractors were good, but also were happy to do “the same old thing” for years and get paid a premium without actually changing anything in the business underneath the hood. There were no fundamental shifts or innovations coming from a team of contractors, so I needed to transition to vested employees.

Overview of the New Team! (Hired Late 2016/Early 2017)

– We hired a CTO who has replaced most of our old broken systems that were hacked together in the beginning of the company to figure out the core product. We have a really clean foundation now to build and innovate on top of. There is one main system left to replace, and once done will open up tons of new doors for us for innovating on the new system.

– We hired a Chief Product Offer who has completely revamped our production process and rebranded the entire product.

– We hired a VP of Publishing who has been pushing forward on marketing campaigns and social media, getting us up to speed on production, planning out the new season of workshops, bringing in new teachers …and more!

– We hired a VP of Video Production to make our awesome story videos, promo videos and course video production. He’s been able to shoot high quality shorts and process a ton of video with an awesome look and feel.

– Our Lead Front-End Engineer (working on contract nearly full time) who has actually been with us for over 5 years. He built the new video player UI experience from scratch.

– We have a Lead of Customer Success (working on contract nearly full time) who onboards new customers helping them chose the right courses for them and taking care of any support questions.

– I have been learning my job as the CEO. In the early days of a company it means “Chief Execution Offer” meaning you pretty much have to do everything. As we’ve been hiring people who can cover areas better than I can, I get to defer decisions to them and discover my new role. I view my primary objective as making sure the team, customers and teachers are all happy. That takes a variety of shapes throughout the days, but as long as those three parties are continually happy, the business continues to grow.

That’s our entire team! 7 people running a multi-million dollar company. Well, it’s us and our network of 50+ amazing teachers.

Improving My Health

In 2015 my metabolism started to drop and I went in to measure my body composition. 28% body fat! Embarrassing to me since I was skinny all of my life. I tried running a lot but it didn’t seem to help.

Eventually I got a trainer and started lifting weights twice per week. In less than 6-12 months I got down to 17% body fat and was able to deadlift 375 lb and squat 285 multiple times. Pretty happy with that. Overall I’ve shed around 30 pounds of fat and put on like 40 pounds of muscle. Pretty dramatic change in body composition.

All I’m doing is lifting weights twice per week for about 30-45 minutes, but it’s made all the difference in the world health-wise.

Crypto Currency

I got super fascinated with crypto currencies this year and started investing about mid-way through the year. It’s something I’ve been on the sidelines about for 5 years but decided to finally dive in head-first. I’m now considering building a mining cluster, but nothing set in stone yet for that.

I’m excited that you have a trust-system built on mathematics, and how that can change the fundamentals of how we exchange money and code applications.

Onward!

In 2018 I’d like to:

– Business: Grow at least 2x again= by trying out marketing experiments and making major innovations / breakthroughs on the core product. We need to focus a lot this year on growth and innovation. Ideally growing out the team by at least 2-4 more people.
– Fun: Plan out some group activities for my extended friend network to meet each other. In 2017 I setup a 15 person paintball outing that was a ton of fun. I need to do more of this type of thing!
– Family: Plan out more vacations and key fun things I want to do with my family. I haven’t been great at planning in advance for family stuff. I’d also like to re-connect with some of my extended family.
– Health: I’d like to get back down to 15% body fat and continue to grow lean muscle mass in a sustainable way where I can keep in shape for the longterm.

Cheers and thank you all so much for the support and love! I really feel like a lot of people are cheering us on to continue to improve how we can better learn professional skills.

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JavaScript Jabber: Tech Education and the Business of Frontend Masters — answering a lot of questions about e-learning and telling the history of Frontend Masters.

Know Priorities: Marc Grabanski – I spill lots of solid business tools and tactics. This is the deepest I’ve ever gotten into the business side.

ShopTalk Show: Marc Grabanski – mostly about the Q&A. Discussing markdown, JSON and WordPress script loading.

Online Course Coach: How to create video courses from LIVE online and in-person workshops with Marc Grabanski – centered around the video production side and how to produce and promote online courses.

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You aren’t secure, but can work towards being less at risk.

I was listening to an episode of the Timothy Ferris podcast with Marc Goodman discussing high-tech crime and it jogged my mind about “threat profiles”. Everyone has threats and should take stock of where you’re likely volnerable, what would be lost and how to recover.

You should just start by knowing that living in a digital world you can’t be 100% secure 100% of the time.

Even our beloved Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks was hacked and he interviews the hacker here. Incredibly compelling interview — you should listen to it.

Building secure software is tough

For the last 10+ years I’ve been the knowingly or unknowingly building software with security holes…sometimes even conciously in order to meet deadlines or maybe just because the perceived threat is so limited at the time. Or maybe even I didn’t know I produced a bug.

All this is to say that you are at risk of losing your information and probably have already lost it many times over without knowing about it. And it’s not just been sniped by the NSA but by the bugs in the software you use and by the websites you use that don’t update their systems and get hacked every day.

How can you secure yourself?

So what tools can you use to “stay secure” (I use air quotes because this is rediculous, I’m not secure and never will be).

Two-factor auth all the things!

The number one thing you can do right now is go in and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on every important website you use. This usually involves the application sending you a text message before logging in or you open Google Authenticator to get a code and enter that to login. It’s another layer of security and a bit of a hassle if you lose your device, but it’s worth it.

Backups and file sharing

Primarily I use Dropbox for sharing files with others, working on my work, and backing up my files. Now I know what you’re going to say. “This guy is writing on security and uses Dropbox! HAHA”. Yeah, it’s ok to laugh it’s fine — you probably use it too. The main thing you need to do at the very least is check the sharing tab and links in Dropbox and unlink anything that shouldn’t be accessible to the public anymore.

“What’s so bad about Dropbox?”

It’s quite rediculous to think anything you have in Dropbox is secure. Snowden revealed that Dropbox basically just hands over your data to any entity that asks for it… so I’m considering the fact that it’s basically public if it’s in Dropbox. I still keep my files in there because one thing I’ve realized when it comes to security (myself included) is that humans will always comprimise security for convinience. It’s all quite rediculous the length of our laziness. People link stuff in Dropbox like their tax returns and it shows up in search engines all the time.

Also if you enabled any apps to have access to your Dropbox — well, they have wholesale access to all of your files too. It’s easy to accidentally overshare even if you’re concious of it! 

Alternatives to Dropbox?

On the file sharing and backup route I’ve tried CrashPlan, but that is just backup and doesn’t allow for easily sharing files with coworkers. I’ve tried various P2P tools like AeroFS but they require the files to be accessible on your own computers and I realized there’s just a huge beauty to having a web interface you can access from anywhere to grab from a central server. Some of these P2P solutions would work if I had a ~4TB server sitting somewhere…but alas, I don’t. :-/

I’m now experimenting with MEGA Upload, but it has miles to go before it acheives feature parity with Dropbox. There just doesn’t seem to be a good enough solution out there yet to replace the convinience of Dropbox. Let me know in the comments if you know one.

I would put Dropbox up as my #1 list of threat profile. It’s basically all my files (and my life) accessible within one website.

Daily internet usage

Block 3rd party scripts

Use a 3rd party blocking browser extension like ghostery to block 3rd party scripts loading on websites. You can always enable them again on a per website basis. Advertising is basically the antithesis of security and is everywhere tracking everything — ghostery gives you a bit of control what scripts actually load.

Not only does blocking 3rd party scripts help security…but suddenly the internet gets a LOT faster! 

Private VPN

If you want a log of everything you’ve ever visited it’s probably on some server somewhere. You probably have Comcast and they log everything. I’ve been aware of this literally for like 15 years and have done nothing really, but recently my wife wasn’t able to login to her school’s network because Comcast was blocking it — or they were blocking Comcast on accident. So I decided to try out a VPN and found this lifehacker post: Why should you use a private VPN?

Using a VPN allows you another layer of anonymity. I started using VyprVPN and for like $10/mo my wife can get access to her school’s website and I can browse without giving all of my usage data to Comcast. Win!

Use SSL always, by default

This is now an obvious one I think but when you’re either building websites or using them always opt to using https instead of http in your web browser. It encrypts the traffic between you and the website you are visiting and keep others from snooping on your usage in the same network.

I saw someone demo Firesheep years back and it slurped up all the sessions of tons of people using HTTP instead of HTTPS / SSL and allowed you to login to other peoples’ accounts — essentially easily hacking anyone on the same network. This happens regularly.

Password management

Recently tools like 1Password and Lastpass have been gaining a lot of steam because you can enter one password and access them all. I use this and store my passwords in Dropbox — a big LOL to security but a huge win for convinience. I enter one password and access all 500 passwords to all the sites I use, plus secure notes. It’s a major win for my life but introduces yet another single point of failure.

This article now seems like I’m dogging on myself, but at least it’s a concious choice. I don’t pretend it’s a secure approach, but the one benefit I will say is I can generate passwords like “vLi=G+sv9&Eom7tvVG3b” with ease and use them to login to sites.

Remember some unique passwords and don’t store in password managers

I don’t store everything in password managers because it’s a single point of failure likely to be comprimised at some point. xkcd has an article on password strength which is how you should generate great password which are more secure than the average Joe.

Use a longer phrase (series of words) that’s easy to remember and throw in some weird characters to boot.

I have various levels of passwords where I throw in my junk / simple password into sites I don’t care about or are likely to get comprimised. Then my computer has a unique password, Dropbox, and essentially anything I really care about.

Plan for theft of your computers, tablets and phones

I was out speaking at a conference in California and got my laptop stolen out of a rental car. I didn’t have a password on it at the time — DOH!! — which means the theif not only had access to my computer, but all my files. I’m glad that theif wasn’t malicious (or smart?) enough to dog on me but he had access to everything. Here’s what I do now and what I should have done then…

Encryption

Ideally when you get your computer you encrypt the hard drive. OSX has something called Filevault you can enable which encrypts the hard drive. Otherwise if someone gets access to your computer it’s wide open and any files are accessible. Another layer of security you can add is to set a password on the actual firmware.

Setup different user accounts on your computer

Ideally you aren’t ever using your computer as an administrator. You should be only using an administrator account if you are…wait for it…doing things that require changing settings on your computer. You should also install an anti-theft tracker like Prey and open up a guest account open with Prey running so that if anyone steals your computer you know where your computer is and you have a lot more tools available than just “find my mac/iphone” which comes with your device. Prey is way more powerful when finding a theif.

Protect your credit

What if a theif applies for a consumer loan using your information and screws up your credit? You should use credit monitoring services like Lifelock and TransUnion that allow you to check up on things and even get alerts when someone applies for a loan.

I always feel more secure when I got to apply for a car loan and I get a text message and email about it.

Website backups

Plan for complete destruction of your websites and all data. Make sure your web host or you have a cron job in place that pushes your data off the server onto somewhere else at least nightly. Part of what I like about WordPress and so many WordPress hosts is that they do this for you.

Also putting stuff in git/GitHub private repos really helps to never lose code.

Email and IM

People email their personal files around like crazy using Google’s servers which gets replicated to the cloud and is never going away. This includes me. I like the convinience of having the ability to search across all my communications history. Again, I’m sacrificing security for convinience but I see no alternative.

I do the same thing with IM — using Skype, Google chat and AIM which are all logged without my concent. I wish we had private default options for email and IM, but with private / open source solutions UX never seems to be the priority…

TL;DR — you’re DOOMED!

So now that you know you absolutely will get hacked at some level…it’s time to take action.

What steps are you taking to assess risks and take action?

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This talk is chock full of advice to freelancers / consultants and startups.

Quick note: It is my first public talk on business, so it takes a bit for me to get into the talk and find myself in it. Please forgive me for starting slow, but I do find my groove and give tons of advice and tips. I’m excited about this talk. Enjoy!

Some of the topics covered:

1. How to market yourself and why that matters
2. Benefits and pitfalls of consulting
3. Biggest mistakes creating startups (and how to avoid them)

I think it’s one of my best unknown talks. It was given to a very small group of entrepreneurs — no one but the ~10 people there have seen this talk before posting today! (I even debated releasing it because it contains many personal details).

Please let me know what you think about the video in the comments or on Twitter!

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Front-End Web Development Career

From 15-18 I was in IT. I saw a huge opportunity in writing and creating software that goes out to many. That’s what I ended up doing web development and writing. I started web development full time around age 20.

I felt as though I was doing the most important job I could. I was looked down upon, but knew what I was doing was important and I wanted to learn the most I could despite that fact. – My response on Quora

If you want a longer answer why I got into front-end I wrote this Quora answer last year.

Blogging

My blog reached millions of visitors. 2010 (age 26) was the height of my blogging career with 1.5M unique visitors that year.

I quit blogging around that year (re-birthed this year ’14) in favor of creating a company. Writing became my life for a few years and it was hard to do anything else. In retrospect since I had built up a huge following I should have created info products, but that wasn’t cool in ’08-10. Info products have only become a trend in recent years.

I stopped having things to write about in ’10 favor of going out and having more life experiences. Now I feel like I have more to share (if I only took the time to write). So hopefully I’ll share more on this blog next year.

Speaking

I spoke at around 60 conferences in my 20s. I learned a lot from that. Basically it comes down to doing a ton of research and distilling potent points into an interesting to watch, 30-50 minute presentation.

I feel like I’ve done well honing in on this skill — even though I’m not the best / most interesting speaker, I got in the top 10 rated talks of one of the more important industry conferences. So that says something. I’ve come a long ways from 2007 when I started speaking. I distilled my knowledge in this top 10 speaking tips article.

Family

I now have a wife and two kids!

Honestly my kids are a huge part of my life now. Having kids changes you. I no longer can dink around with projects that don’t have to lead anywhere. Throwing away work now feels irresponsible. Either I should contribute something important or go home to my wife and kids who want me in their life.

Business

I’ve been an entrepreneur for about 15 years now. I’ve only had one full time job and that was for less than two years. I even wrote a guide on self-employed software development.

In my mid to late twenties I had a dream of recurring revenue solving a lot of my cashflow problems. I’ve done that now. I don’t think about money day to day even though I probably should since the business still has it’s rough parts, but instead I consider the future and what’s best for the structure of the business. I now think about what’s best for my customers and improving the core product.

Recurring Revenue is King

Honestly having customers paying you every month for something has been the most liberating thing ever. I’ve done a lot of things. Consulted and made several companies millions of dollars, but the cash was fleeting.

Now as I contribute to something it just provides more and more value for my customers. Building up something big has become an obsession and I’m finally feeling like I’m running instead of running in circles.

Business has growth over 400% last year and I hope to do at least 200% increase next year. It’s now bigger than even my biggest months running my consulting business.

VC and Acquisitions

I’ve been distracted by several companies asking to buy my business. Actually, three offers at this point now… but in the end investment and acquisition discussions has just been days and weeks of unproductive distraction. I just need to focus on building a better business.

The Future

Now let’s look at what’s on my mind right now and into the future.

Health

I’m still reasonably healthy when it comes down to it, but I’ve definitely gained a good 15 pounds over the years. If there’s something I think about daily now it’s that I want to be healthy and live a healthy lifestyle. Especially for my kids to have a role model and a healthy father.

Unfortunately I feel like I’m far from my health goals. I need to find something that works for me. I did Jiu Jitsu for a while but fell off of it. I’m really bad with committing to things and being consistent.

Spirituality

My early 20s were pretty much filled with spiritual experiences. Prayer, active in the church, bible and hitting the streets sharing my faith and experiencing what God has to offer. I wish I could do more of this today. Maybe someday I’ll get back to it, but for now it still shapes my thoughts tons and I do take time to pray and meditate daily.

Moving?

I’m still renting here in Minnesota and I feel like I’m stuck here. I’ve built a business here and I’m afraid to pick up and move it even though I do consider it a fairly mobile-friendly business. We checked out some other states, but I just don’t want to move too early and take risks when things are working pretty well now.

We’ll see where I end up. I want to move but I think we’ll stay here for at least another 6-12 months while my wife finishes her degree.

My Kids

Ultimately I think the majority of my future will be centered around what’s best for my kids. I still haven’t fully realized the impact this will have on my life since my kids are only 2 and 3 months…but I can already see it impacting my future decisions.

Business

I’d like to grow a very large business in the next 20-30 years. Even if it’s not at scale in 5-10 years I’m not too worried about it. I’m honestly not even sure why I want to create such a big business. I kind of hate money but I just feel like it’s my duty to bring the best education to the world in a scalable fashion and money is a measure of the scale of it.

So far my business is off to a strong start. Showing numbers and growth I’ve impressed potential investors, mentor networks and etc…but I haven’t felt compelled to take investment or move forward with changes like that yet.

Excited

Overall I’m super excited about the future! In five years I hope to be in a different location that inspires me and my wife, be healthier, have awesome kids who are in an education program they love and be taking plenty of vacations amongst building the business bigger and bigger.

Cheers! And here’s to 30!!

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Momentum is precious. It’s the life force. Learn to manage momentum and harness it. By doing so you will drink of it’s sweet nectar of glorious fuel for your project to grow. Momentum is the most precious ingredient that keeps moving projects, companies, weight-loss, or whatever your goal is forward.

Look for the Little, Daily Wins

The best advice I have to build momentum and do great things is to look for the little successes and build on them. If you see a little success, keep it going!…for god’s sake, keep doing more of that thing and keep those little successes growing!

Little, no scratch that, even tiny itty bitty successes build up into BIG things. String together those tiny wins and you’ll see something big starting to grow.

Don’t Switch

In my life I’ve had so many things I started. Some of them started to see success. Even with success piling up… as soon as I switched — it died (even if slowly).

Moving away for large periods of time to focus on other things absolutely kills momentum. By switching focus, you pretty much killed the previous project with a horrible death. You’ll notice when you come back to it the wind is gone, or the wind is dying out.

The myth I used to keep telling myself when switching projects is that I’ll, “get back to later”. It never happens…once you quit, you quit! Then you’ll be staring back at that thing in a “what if” scenario.

Learn to Bury Your Old Projects

Once you lose momentum from switching, it’s hard if not impossible to get it back. That old fire is hard to rekindle. If the fire is out, you might as well bury that old project.

Even if you spent years of your life on the project like I have on some projects. Sometimes I look back on them today and say, “well, what if I just went back to that thing?!” Well, there was a reason I stopped…right? And if it was my best idea ever, I probably wouldn’t have stopped.

On shark tank when people get up on stage with an old idea they haven’t touched in years they don’t get funding. Rarely, if ever, will a shark ever do anything but a licensing deal with someone who pulls out something old. They’ll take the technology and license it to a bigger player rather than trying to build a business with it. The momentum is gone, so they view it as something dead they might be able to squeeze money from through licensing.

Learn to just kill those old projects and don’t play mind games with yourself that you’ll get back to them someday. Trust me, it’ll relieve so much stress in your life if you stop having so many thing you think you should focus on (including old projects).

Learn to just focus on the project at hand.

Snowball Momentum

So what’s the reason I like focusing on one project at a time now as opposed to 3-5 at a time like I used to? Working on one project/mission is all about snowballing momentum.

What do I mean by that? Well, once you get a small snowball moving forward it picks up other snow and becomes a bigger snowball…and if you keep it going…well, it could could become an avalanche!

The bigger project starts rolling up things underneath it and the whole thing continues to grow bigger on that combined momentum.

Momentum is King

Managing momentum is probably one of the biggest tricks to keeping things going and something you need to learn to harness to fuel you to achieve your dreams.

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Before you go and put me on a stake, let me explain. Through this article I will make the case of why what we currently have in the browser for animation is limited, and try to clearly point out limitations and how JavaScript animation engines are leading us towards a better world that I hope gets built into the core browser UI rendering engine API.

The Problem with CSS Animation Easing

CSS Animations are getting faster, but they are very limited in nature. CSS Animations are linear in nature. Adding a easing between two linear points is like putting makeup on a pig.

Applying easing in and of itself doesn’t make something fluid.

Easing Isn’t Good Enough

Easing doesn’t compose. You can’t take the current velocity and direction and then compose that with easing to a resulting position. Instead, CSS Animations feel totally robotic in practice, even after adding easing. The result is that everything we currently have on the web is robotic boxes moving around. Ick!

Physics-Based Rendering Engine

Famo.us is the latest entry to the scene to give us a complete, physics-based rendering engine in the browser. The demos are incredibly impressive! Go check out the demos if you haven’t already. They are able to do incredible organic-feeling, fluid, composable animations in HTML5 that no one else can do. This is because animations and layout composes to a resulting frame rendered in a targeted 60fps.

Check out this Pen!

Let’s go under the hood…

Matrix Transforms

The matrix transform API is the lowest-level, cheapest way to move things in DOM — matrix3d is the CSS style property for it. It is a 4×4 matrix that tells the browser where to move, rotate and scale something in X, Y and Z space. It’s basic linear algebra. You did pay attention in grade school…right? wink wink

Side note: I have a slide deck here that goes more into matrix3d and other related stuff:

You can also play with matrix3d.

Famo.us + Matrix Transforms

Famo.us uses the concept of a render tree which outputs the resulting matrix3d to a DOM node. Composing matrices is fairly cheap… and output the resulting matrix is fairly cheap as well.

People think Famo.us is canvas or WebGL…WRONG. It’s just plain DOM. You aren’t writing DOM…you’re writing to their rendering tree which outputs DOM and then modifies the DOM position using matrices. The rendering tree composes a resulting matrix and spits it out into the DOM on each frame.

Side note: I think Green Sock can do this as well. That guy was the king of Flash animation and moved his library over to JavaScript. As far as I know, Green Sock and Famo.us are the only libraries that can compose tweens togehter with added directional physics and spit out a resulting matrix in each frame using the lowest-level API for moving things…matrix transforms.

Famo.us Physics Engine + Matrix Transform

Famo.us also lets you take the directional velocity of a mouse flick and allows you to compose that velocity into an animation which ends up at a certain point. It makes a fluid animation by composing on easing, velocity and direction and outputs the result of where that thing should be at each frame in the 60fps. If each frame takes X milliseconds, it would know how many milliseconds has passed between frames and then calculates the resulting matrix for each frame and spit it out into the DOM node’s matrix3d style property. Simple…right?

Here’s a demo that when you click on the disc it adds velocity in that direction. Try clicking on the top right and then the bottom left. HTML5 itself just can’t do that. You need an engine that can take the current state and then apply a force to it to change the current velocity.

Check out this Pen!

This post isn’t about Famo.us though — it’s a call to arms for real animation engine. Not some tween-between-two-linear-points crap like we have today.

Transform API

Let me get into the next thing you need to understand before my proposal, which is transforms themselves. The way the transform API works in CSS (and SVG), is it composes a resulting matrix under the hood (sound familiar?). So in CSS if you say. transform: rotate(45) scale(1.25) under the hood of the browser it’s going to make the resulting matrix3d and move the element in a cheap way through applying the resulting matrix3d frame-by-frame.

That’s why Famo.us isn’t some wizardry-warlock-magic-dragon-vomit, it’s just manual-mode matrix transforms under the hood. Famo.us is just re-implementing the same matrix transform API under the hood as the browser does itself!

Do you get my point here folks? It’s matrices all the way down! Transforms compose into a resulting matrix. Linear algebra baby.

Composable Transform API

One of the main issues with the transform API is it’s singular way of composing them together. You can, as I showed before, compose rotate(45) scale(1.25) translateX(50) into one resulting transform. But that way compose is kind of weird. Every time you add a rotate before a translate, the rotate modifies the original axis origin. So if you rotate(45), then translateX(50), instead of it going 50px to the right, it goes down and to the right.

See my little graphic here:

Demo of Composing / Stacking Transforms

In this next demo, I show you how you can compose transforms so you can play around yourself. This is a basic demo of how transforms “stack” on top of each other and modify the original origin of the transform. For instance, if you add a rotation transform and then try to add a translate transform on top of that, “x” may not take you left and right anymore, but in a different direction based on the axis of the rotation origin.

Check out this Pen!

This isn’t ideal because you have no idea what the results of this transform is. You can stack eight different transforms together, but if you try to move it right…well, it won’t go right unless your axis has never been modified!

Stacking Transforms with RaphaelJS

With RaphaelJS, you can do the same transforms as before, but you can make “absolute” or “relative” transforms. So using absolute transforms makes it explicit what you are doing to modify your object instead of it stacking on top of the prior transform.

If you want that damn thing to move right after a rotate, you’ll be able to do it with Raphael’s absolute transform. Again…the power of matrix math!

Check out this Pen!

Also, not shown in the demo, RaphaelJS  has convenience methods like “element.matrix.split()” to get the current resulting transform stack and “getBBox()” to know where your object is now. Current transform API has nothing like this other than getComputedStyle. Which if you’ve ever used getComputedStyle… you know it’s not enough. You’d have to getComputedStyle, break the matrix apart with matrix math and then modify it. Ouch.

Tweening

The concept of tweening I first learned back in the Flash days. You could “tween” between two sets of properties and add easing to move about between animation states. Flash had some of the same issues I illustrated above, but then tweening animation libraries came along like GreenSock.

The browser tweens between two points natively with CSS transitions. You specify a transition duration, change the properties and BAM a tween happens over that given duration between the two properties. The problem with this is there’s no way to change the animation mid-stream. If you set a new animation it’s not going to fluidly transition, it’s going to restart. Again…ick. That’s where GreenSock steps in. You can know where the object is at all times because you set it manually through the tween library.

Browser Tweening with CSS Matrix Transforms

Once you have a matrix transform, you can use the transition property to animate the transform matrix with CSS.

Check out this Pen!

Tweening with RaphaelJS Transforms

You can use the .animate() method built into RaphaelJS to tween between transforms. We’re also using the built in “elastic” easing method when we clear the transform. I like it because you can use absolute or relative transforms and Raphael interpolates between states for you.

Check out this Pen!

Using the XCSSMatrix Library to Modify a Matrix Transform

John Schulz has made the XCSSMatrix library which lets you take an existing matrix and modify it with various transform methods (sort of like RaphaelJS does). You can then use the native CSS transition property to animate the matrix like we did in a previous demo.

Check out this Pen!

This is a lot closer to Famo.us in that we are modifying the matrix3d in JavaScript and then outputting the new result in every animation frame. Ideally we would be calculating timestamp between frames and using that as a key in our timeline, but here I did it the naive way just to illustrate the concept.

What We Need

So far we’ve covered CSS Animations, easing, matrix transforms, composing transforms, tweening, manually tweening matrix transforms with JavaScript and requestAnimationFrame. phew — still with me?

What we need is a new animation API:

– it can tween between two matrices
– it will allow you to compose transforms in an absolute or relative way
– it will let you compose tweens — modify where it’s going and transition between them with physics
– it will allow you to compose tweens mid-animation with physics
– it will take direction into account and allow you to apply force to the animation with physics properties
– it will allow you to query the current properties of an existing tween (or set of tweens)

There is a new initiative to create a Web Animations API, but I’m not sure it covers all the cases in this article. Though, it looks like it’s a step in the right direction.

So for instance. If you’re going right at a velocity of 30px per second, and you add a downward force, it should arc downward…not just go straight down and then lose that velocity over a given time reduced by friction (or decay). All of this is explained in exquisite detail in Animate Your Way to Glory by Steven Wittens.

I’ll add that Facebook paper uses its pop animation framework which has spring, decay and custom easing which accept velocity as input. It is a basic physics animation engine for animation. We need something like that on the web built into the web browser.

GreenSock Thoughts

GreenSock I think does some of the above… but I haven’t looked into it too much. I need to look into it more.

Here’s a shiny demo of GreenSock in action with some pretty nice animations. The thing that’s missing from it is physics. We have the problem in this animation of it looking pretty linear and robotic.

Check out this Pen!

Here’s a demo site of using 2d physics in GreenSock …so I think it has to be possible to do some of this physics-tween stuff with GreenSock.

Famo.us Thoughts

I like the results of the Famo.us rendering tree approach! It’s amazing what the engine can do…but on the downside it doesn’t feel at all like web development. It’s kind of like Sencha in that it takes over the entire UI layer and says “give all the things to me” and doesn’t let you feel like you’re the one controlling the engine at all times. I think the fake scrolling (which Famo.us has to do) stutters on retina on my iPhone on their current homepage. It’s not ideal, but I’m sure they’ll fix stuff like that in the future.

Here’s a good video diving into the scene graph / physics and how they work in Famo.us (first 10-15 minutes):

Parting Thoughts

What I’m really asking for is a physics-based tweening library built into the browser. Not just putting lipstick on a pig by tossing in easing to linear CSS animations and calling it quits. GreenSock and Famo.us offer a glimmer hope for the future of web development and I’m sure we’ll see many more to come.

The post HTML5 Needs a New Animation API to Compete with Native appeared first on Marc Grabanski.

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Here’s some reviews of my latest talk…

Well presented, tight focus and good examples. A+ presentation!

This was a really good introduction into the potential SVGs can offer. Having just started using SVGs myself, this session was very informative.

Excellent overview of SVG with some great demos illustrating its power as a format.

Whirlwind,yes. Awesome? Absolutely! Great samples, demos, and emphasis of why you want to use it.

Plus many more reviews, personal emails and love on Twitter! But it wasn’t always this way.

Here’s what someone said of me in 2009…

Marc wasn’t very engaging and really looked like he didn’t want to be there.

Wow…that’s really bad! So how did I go from getting a terrible review like that in 2009 to be in the top 5 out of 70 talks?

Here’s my top 10 tips I wish I would have known…

1. Motivation — Why Speak at All?

The first decision you have to make is whether you want to speak at all. Speaking isn’t something you decide to do because you want to become famous. Maybe that’s some peoples’ motivations and fine, good for them. But for me, it was deeper… I felt responsible and that it was my duty to start talking because the topics that were important to me were mis-represented or under-represented.

The purest form of speaking is a fire that wells up inside you that you must share because you feel people need to hear it. Those are the kind of talks I like to hear…ones of personal importance. But whatever your motivation is, you need to have some motivation that carries you through the times you trip up.

You will have times that you get scared and start looking down at your feet, but once you overcome it you may get to speak a message strongly that people need to hear and kill it on stage and do lots of good for humanity.

2. Choosing a Topic — Popular or Important?

Some topics that are popular aren’t important to you. And some topics that are important to you aren’t popular. It’s a vicious cycle that you’ll experience as a speaker. The talks that draw big crowds and get great reviews are in the intersection of popular topics that the speaker is deeply interested in (and likely known for).

Speaking on Popular Topics

There is a million talks on a particular insert framework/library right now…if you want to speak on that framework/library you might get a packed crowd because of the topic and that’s fine, but are you giving them something new or different or are you just echoing what everyone else is saying?

It’s fine to be part of the echo chamber but I don’t feel like it’s what we really need right now. Try to speak on something that’s important to you that you feel is under-represented. Your talk could very well be that popular framework/library, but try to pick some angle that is important to you that you feel is under-represented.

Speaking on Important Topics (That Aren’t Overly Popular)

That’s ok to speak on not-so-popular topics! As long as you’re very passionate about the topic.

My SVG talk at Fluent was super highly rated but was not overly popular in terms of attendees. Maybe 100 people showed up, but other talks had 150+ or more. The tradeoff of having less attendees was ok with me since this was a super important topic to me personally.

I’ve been building web interfaces on top of SVG for most of my time for almost 2 years now! It was a topic I felt passionately about and a technology that I felt that was under evangelized. This made me poised to bring a new perspective and deliver it boldly which I personally think is what people need at tech conferences.

3. Attendee Mindset — People Aren’t at Conferences Just to Hear Talks

People are at conferences to: hang out with industry friends, meet new people, take paid time off work, etc…and there’s multiple tracks, sponsor booths, free snacks, twitter, facebook, etc. There’s plenty to distract people away from the actual talks themselves. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that people are going to listen to everything you say.

You should embrace the mindset of people attending your talk and respect it. They will only have enough focus to listen to a few main points and you must deliver these few points strongly and clearly (maybe even a few times) or else your message will get lost in the ether of distraction.

4. Breaking Distraction — Pull Them in By Starting with a Bang

As I mentioned above, people are in a default state of distraction. You have to pull your audience in in the first 2 minutes. I didn’t realize this at first…but the first 2-5 minutes can be the most important part of your talk. It sets the pace for the audience and sets up expectations of what your talk is about for the rest of the time.

My personal opinion is that in about 2-5 minutes people determine whether or not they are going to listen to you or just read Twitter and email the rest of the time.

So here’s the things you MUST do in the first 2-5 minutes.

• Greet them warmly with a loud, bold voice…for introverts like me this is hard.
• Tell them why you are amazed by your topic or why it’s important to you. Because if it’s not important to you…why should they listen?
• Show them what’s possible with a quick flashy demo or screenshot which adds to why they should care.
• Finally…DO NOT shrink up…tell them what you’re going to cover with your head tilted up and your arms open.

Body language matters more than you think when speaking. Although it might seem more humble to look at your feet and talk in a normal voice, no one wants to listen to that. People want you to make your points while they can hear you clearly and see your face and feel invited to the conversation by seeing your arms open and palms up. There is research behind this hands open and palms up stance, but I’ll let you do that research on your own.

This first 5 minutes must be a very polished part of your talk. Read it out loud through 5-10 times… shift your slides around until that intro flows out like butter.

5. Inspire and Introduce — Don’t Teach Too Much

I wish this wasn’t true, but your job at a conference is to introduce and inspire, not (primarily) to teach.

Don’t believe me? Look at this keynote by Scott Hanselman. I don’t even know what he’s saying, I didn’t learn anything and didn’t know what his point was, but he entertained every step of the way and people loved it!

Most people would rather be wow’d, entertained, made laugh, etc than taught (especially during keynotes). I really, really wish learning was the primary objective at technical conferences, but it’s not. It’s entertainment!

But what if you aren’t entertaining? I’ll always lose this battle… because I’m not very entertaining, but I can teach in a way where people enjoy listening. Just make a few key points about why the technology is important and how to get started learning it. Let me say that again. Make a few key, important points. You can’t go into painfully deep implementation details unless you can wrap it in an entertaining way for those not able to follow along with you.

6. Practice Out Loud

I wish you could just wing it, but that couldn’t be further from the case. You need to run through your presentation out loud more than once. You’d be surprised how many times that slide is in a weird position or you meant to say something but you forgot to…or any number of things.

7. Engage, Engage…for God’s Sake…Engage!

Look at the audience, smile and speak louder! Know your points by heart and make them boldly. No matter how enthusiastic I think I’m being. When I watch the videos later it looks like I’m about 3 notches lower key on the video. I keep telling myself…“DUDE, wake up!” But while I’m speaking I don’t feel that way at all. I forget which actor said it, but he said “people want 3x of you on camera, not your normal self.”

Also, make sure to look at and embrace the people who are giving you their full attention. For some reason playing off them and looking at them draws me deeper into my own talk. It’s a bit weird of a tip maybe…but it works. If you see that people are paying attention to what you’re saying, it’s easier to feel more comfortable about delivering the points you are making.

8. End 5 Minutes Early

If you have a 30 minute talk, end in 25 minutes. 40 minute talk? End in 35 minutes. MINUS setup time. A lot of talks start late, so beware that you may lose as much as 5 minutes in the beginning of the talk for setup and waiting for people to filter in. Don’t push up against the timelines of the talk. Make sure to end about 5 minutes early to respect peoples’ time. The moderator may extend your talk for questions but that’s up to them. People appreciate talks that end 5 minutes early, but hate talks that go 5 minutes late. Don’t be that guy or gal!

9. Treat Every Talk Like Your First Talk

So let’s say you’ve given about 5 or more talks. Starting to feel comfortable? …don’t! You can’t just “wing it” because you’ve given the same talk before. It takes practice and focus to knock it out of the park again and again. Every speaker I know has given the same talk at two different conferences and one went great and one didn’t. Usually the one that didn’t the speaker was feeling confident and like it was going to be a breeze. Speaking never is..

10. Have Fun!

Finally, have fun. This is your time to shine and speak what’s on your heart, whether it’s a crowd of 10, 100 or 1000+! It’s a big responsibility and can be really scary, but it’s important you get out there speak what’s important to you!

Finally…My Talk

The post 10 Things I Wish I’d Known About Giving Good Tech Talks appeared first on Marc Grabanski.

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