Blog

Interview with Liam Nugent

Job Title:  Product Manager Industry or specialization:  I work at a global retail bank and I specialise in the things people need to do to service their accounts online or on a mobile app, like viewing statements or getting reminded to pay their credit card bill! I love it because while loads of my colleagues... Read More

Terrible Zombie Jokes

Why did the zombie wonder around the bow of the ship?

It was looking for the head.

How do you know if an emo band has become zombies?

Both the band and the audience are moaning.

How do you get a zombie to leave you alone?

Show it your test scores. 

What does your Aunt call your zombie Uncle’s evening out on the town?

Night of the Living Fred

What does a zombie call a delicious meal?

Braaainy

See More Jokes

8 Word Stories

The human plague dispatched half of the horde.

She shoved figs and <figcaption>s down zombie throats.

The four horsemen succumbed to the zombie contagion.

“<rip> zombies!”
“It’s <rp>. There’s no <rip> element.”

One day he’d leave the zombie for dead…

See More 8 Word Stories

Tips, Tricks, & Zombie Hits

Pricing Like Zombie Punching is Hard

In creating a price a good place to start is to estimate how many hours it will take you to complete (including how many hours a month you plan to work in provided support). Once you have a number you should probably double it as you have to account for overhead (meetings, trading emails etc.) and for a lack of experience in making these estimates.

The Zombie Isn’t Always Right

While the “customer is always right” is said a lot, even if you believe that, they’re not hiring you to be a yes man or yes woman. Bring your expertise and tell them if a way they want to go is a bad idea. If they insist and it turns out disastrously, you’re on record as opposing the idea. If you don’t protest, they’ll blame you, anyway.

Blog Articles, Interviews and More

Zombie HTML Spacing

The Zombie: Using <br> or &nbsp; for spacing (instead of CSS) Always a Zombie? Pretty Much Severity: Medium to Low, while it can make your site look terrible, the content is accessible and available.  Why is it a Zombie: Particularly with so many different screen sizes, it’s unlikely that many, if any, users will look... Read More

Interview with Lee Meyer

Job Title:  Software Engineer Place of Work:   ROLLER software, which is used to manage attraction venues.  Industry or specialization: I tend to choose family-friendly problem domains, like an afterschool care provider in the past, or now ROLLER which is software for running attraction venues. These are easy for me to get excited about, since my... Read More

Interview with Daniel Schwarz

Job Title: Editor/writer Place of Work: Contractor (currently LogRocket & CSS-Tricks) Industry or specialization: I specialize in producing content for UX designers, software developers, and product managers What got you into Web Design/Development/working on the web? I needed a website for my first business, and enjoyed the process of building it so much that I... Read More

The Functional Shape of Undead Things: CSS Shape Functions

I recently wrote a series of articles for CSS Trick’s almanac on how to use all of the CSS shape functions. There’s basically three uses for each of them: clip-path (cutting one shape out of another), offset-path (animating an element along a path), and shape-outside (letting text flow around an element in a non-rectangular way).... Read More

Interview with Ana Rodrigues

Job Title: Front-end developer Place of Work: Hactar.is Industry or specialization: Tech for good websites, quite often charities What got you into Web Design/Development/working on the web? I first exchanged code for money in late 2012. I had just finished my bachelor’s degree in multimedia. However, throughout all my teenage years I was already making... Read More

Interview with Tejas Kumar

Job Title: Developer Relations Engineer Place of Work: DataStax Industry or specialization: I specialize in building with AI. What got you into Web Design/Development/working on the web? Glass balls, glossy Tux penguins, and creating great UX. What does a typical day or week look like for you? What sort of things do you do? I... Read More

Interview with Stéphanie Walter

Editor’s Note: This interview is a transcript of the conversation Stéphanie and John had over Zoom at the end of March 2025. It’s lightly edited for clarity and to remove all the stupid things John said. Job Title: Haha! It’s a good question. So my job title is officially UX Researcher and I’m doing a... Read More

Interview with Christine Vallaure

Job Title:  Founder of moonlearning.io, theSolo.io and prettycheaphouses.com (in the making) Place of Work:  At my tiny desk at home Industry or specialization:  I like making stuff—digital products that I enjoy and find helpful, a lot around learning and teaching. Ranging from online courses (moonlearning.io), ebooks, or any other digital products—whatever sparks my curiosity and feels worth building. What got... Read More

Interview with Chris Coyier

Job Title: Co-founder Place of Work: CodePen Industry or specialization:  I’m a web developer and designer who likes to build stuff that helps other web developers and designers be better at those things. What got you into Web Design/Development/working on the web? It’s fun! Looking back, I think it was the combination of whatever weird... Read More

Avoiding Undead Browsers & Not Yet Alive Code

There are a lot of difficult things in web development, but one of the toughest is keeping up with the insane level of progress that’s happening, particularly in the last few years. I often joke that I’m in an industry that reinvents itself every six months, but that may be too long a time scale.... Read More

Interview with Josh Bryant

Job Title: Application Studio Director, Web Developer Place of Work: Journey Group Industry or specialization: Journey Group is an independent design company in Charlottesville, Virginia. I lead our application studio, which specializes in web applications that empower small teams to accomplish their day-to-day work. What got you into Web Design/Development/working on the web? As I... Read More

Why I Use Zombies To Teach Web Development

Seen the Why Zombies? page, but want a little more meat and back story? Here you go: It’s not just a gimmick.  The origins of my apocalyptic turn towards teaching web development came, like the zombie contagion, out of the blue while I was working on a conference proposal. I had submitted and gotten approved... Read More

Spelling, Grammar, and Zombie Errors

I came across two interesting pseudo-element selectors: ::spelling-error and ::grammar-error. Both select exactly what they say, a spelling or grammar error that has been flagged by the browser. They also have pretty good browser support working virtually everywhere except in Firefox. Like ::selection (and a Monopoly game a Zombie partially masticated) the exact properties you... Read More

Head vs. Header vs. Headings

 It’s fairly common for people new to HTML to confuse the <head>, <header> and headings (<h1> through <h6>) elements. Within the same html document you may (and probably will have) all three and the schema used for why each goes where may not be readily apparent. Also with the human body analogy being present both... Read More

(W)rapping like a Zombie

The Zombie: Using <br> or &nbsp; for spacing (instead of CSS) Always a Zombie? Pretty Much Severity: Medium to Low, while it can make your site look terrible, the content is accessible and available.  Why is it a Zombie: Particularly with so many different screen sizes, it’s unlikely that many, if any, users will look... Read More

Nested Zombie Rules

A new weapon has arrived in our zombie-smacking CSS arsenal: Nested selectors. (True, it’s been available with SASS and other pre processors for a long time, but it’s now available natively in all modern browsers.) Instead of writing: You can now write While not saving much space, it more importantly shows a clear relationship between... Read More