Simple Tech Stacks and the Future of Tech Education with Marc Grabanski

Marc (Frontend Masters) (00:00) People constantly write in like how is Frontend Masters so fast? How is Frontend Masters so fast? Because, you know, they’re just used to using the status quo stack, which is, you know, a lot of libraries both on the backend and the front end. so it’s, you know, is it, is performance just a front end problem? No, a lot of it can be, it depends on the app or it can be a server side problem. But if you have the

Same philosophy on the backend and the front end of just writing the code for the job. just, you know, everything just flies.

Maxi Ferreira (00:36) Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Frontend FM. My name is Maxi Ferreira and my guest today is the one and only Marc Grabanski. Marc is the CEO and UI developer of Frontend Masters, which is a learning platform with over 200 courses taught by some of the top minds in our industry. Marc is also a speaker, a writer, and the host of the Frontend Masters podcast where you can learn all about your favorite Frontend Masters instructors.

Marc, it is a pleasure to have you here. How are you?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (01:08) Great. Thanks for having me, Maxi

Maxi Ferreira (01:10) joining me today. Yeah, there are a ton of things that I would like to chat with you about, but I would love to start with sort of your origin story in tech. I know a lot about your work, or not a lot, but I know a few things about your work right now as the CEO of Friend Masters. But I don’t know too much about sort of your career before that. Can you give us an overview of how you got started in tech and what are the things that led you to Friend Masters?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (01:37) Yeah, getting started in tech, was from a really small town. So just tiny town in Minnesota. And it was like the early BBS kind of like forum days and like people kind of shared and like taught me how to build a website, build my first website. There was hardware hacking forums on, you know, building computers and that kind of thing. So I kind of got my start building computers, like gaming computers.

and networking computers for small companies and that kind of thing. And that ended up being super lucrative for me as a young, you know, between like 14 and 20 basically. then, yeah, I saw the internet and the power of like people mentoring each other. And I was like, wow, I want to be the best at that. Like you can put code out there and it’s like a one to many relationship. Whereas hardware was like, I’d build a computer, give it to this person. It was awesome. They could play games, but

In the case of software, I could build something, put out the code, and then tons of people could get value from it. So it’s like, that’s what I want to do. I want to become the best that I possibly can be at that. So that was kind of like the early impetus of becoming like a web programmer. And yeah, I did like various consulting, you know, worked at a big agency that I eventually, cause I

kind of just lived and breathe this type of work. gave me all sorts of really cool projects working at big, uh, you know, big companies like Ford and, uh, just all sorts of, you know, healthcare and, uh, marketing campaigns for Motts Climato and like all sorts of different brands. So they would throw all these projects on my desk. Cause someone was flashed. Someone’s like, you know, vanilla JavaScript at the time. And, uh, so I got it.

exposure to a lot of different brands and a lot of different tech stacks. was .NET on the backend, Java on the backend, all sorts of things. So being a consultant and just throwing myself into the work was really, really fun. I, out of that kind of like built reusable components so that my team could like, eventually, you know, it was like 21, 22, like leading pretty big projects. so I put, you know, make like, corners were difficult. So I’d make like these kind of rounded corner.

unbreakable, you know, kind of components. and, out of that came, a calendar component as well. And that became the foundation of jQuery UI date picker. So that was, you know, a big open source project. was before Git. So there’s SVN diffs passing around. And so out of that, I was like, Hey, I really like this kind of mindset of like teaching people learning how to code like

Maxi Ferreira (04:17) Hehehehe

Marc (Frontend Masters) (04:27) leading projects, all that kind of stuff. So was like, I want to share this knowledge. And that’s where I spoke at a lot of different conferences and got to know a lot of people in the industry. that was like 60 conferences later. I was like, I want to teach workshops. and so then, you know, that’s kind of like the early, how, you know, Front of Masters really came to be was speaking at conferences, learning from all these great people and then seeing, man, some of these people just know.

specific topics so much better than I do and why don’t they teach and Yeah, it’s kind of how it worked

Maxi Ferreira (05:02) Amazing, amazing. yeah, remember using your plug. I didn’t know it was your plug in the jQuery date picker or jQuery UI date picker. that right? That was right. It’s before Git. So I downloaded a file from the jQuery UI website or whatever it was hosted, and I started using it. yeah, thank you. That was awesome. Thank you.

What topics were you speaking about when you started speaking at conferences?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (05:31) Yeah, at the time jQuery had just basically come out because I was writing open source components before jQuery came out. that jQuery UI date picker was actually just a pure vanilla JavaScript component. So it was like speaking on the quirks between IE 6 and all the different browsers and like, you know, utility functions, that, you know, kind of smoothed over browser differences. But once jQuery came out, I was like, wow, this shaved like 30, 40 % of my code off just by adopting this.

Maxi Ferreira (05:43) Mmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (06:00) one library. was very much like a jQuery evangelist in the early days, like giving talks on jQuery, creating plugins, patterns, that kind of thing. And then I got really into SVG at the time as well. So one of my bigger consulting projects was building a kind of like a furniture CAD builder in SVG. So it was like actually exporting the

raw vectors from InDesign. And I built it in such a flexible way that these, could take the factory CAD designs, export them to SVG and then everything kind of just worked like the builder. Like you just basically put in the grid system. And so it was, was a really cool, very, very complicated SVG project. And so I taught a lot about SVG as well, cause I think still to this day, I could probably still give that talk.

from over 10 years ago because I think SVG is amazingly powerful and way underutilized.

Maxi Ferreira (06:58) Ha ha ha.

Hmm, I agree, agree. Super powerful, super performant as well. I’m not an expert on SVG, but sometimes I find a use case where I say, this would have taken me many lines of JavaScript to do this animation with an SVG. it’s just, with an SVG, it’s just SVG code and a little bit of CSS, and you got it.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (07:28) Yeah.

And you can just have like one, one format and it just scales everywhere. And with math you can, and you can target even like parts of the SVG with CSS if you want to. And, yeah, it’s just, it’s a, it’s a powerful image format for sure.

Maxi Ferreira (07:39) Right.

Absolutely. things that I love and Masters is the format is very unique. Like the workshop, you have these live workshops, like in-person workshops, and then you also have the option to watch them on demand. You live stream them as well. So it’s a very unique format. And I don’t think

I can think of any other platform that has that same format. Was it always like when it started Frontend the Masters, was it always, what was this format defined? What was the sort of the motivation for doing this in-person workshops versus like an online course, for example?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (08:21) Yeah. I mean, I experimented a lot of different, formats. I actually taught screencast courses. I ran conferences and then, you know, workshops are kind of attached to conferences. And I noticed when I gave them, I was just like, so excited. I was so excited that when I taught something, like people were asking questions and like really getting a lot out of it. And, that, that was exciting to me. So it’s like, I need to.

do more of this. And so I created my own series called, well, at the time it was just like a six day series teaching everything, kind of everything I knew to build like a web app, right? A website and a web app, you know, kind of like all of the knowledge of UI development. could pack into six days and, then yeah, like I said, I invited folks to teach with me and they, so I taught the six, the first six workshops and folks.

did two hours in the afternoon on a specific topic. so that’s kind of like the deep dive into the specific topic came from that. the emphasis was, we’ve kind of learned over history as a small group. If you think about like, there’s always like an expert or somebody who’s done the thing, who’s made money doing the thing. Like if you want to make the best sword in the world, you want to find the master craftsman of swordsmen.

and like work for him and be around him or whatever, or her or whatever. And you want to learn in a small group. And that’s kind of how humans have around the campfire, they tell stories and it’s kind of how we’ve always, I feel like evolved as a species or whatever is in this kind of small group setting. And that’s really where I felt alive as a teacher and also as a student learning from these folks. And so when I ran these workshops here, they were actually

Like sold out and people online were like, wow, I’d love to attend that. You know, can you guys do video? And I was like, I think we could maybe do video. And it, you know, it was like mildly successful, but then people kept asking. Every time we ran a workshop series, for another thing. then it was like live streaming. They’re like, can we participate live? And so we just were like, I think, I think I can add live streaming. And then, we, we sold the.

You know, the videos as a package, as one single unit, as a series, and it was like a thousand dollar product. And people are like, I want to pay for this just like I pay for Pluralsight or whatever else. I think Team Treehouse at the time. And so was like, well, we’re not here to innovate on pricing. Let’s just match everybody else’s prices. And so, um, I think like each step, like, uh, doing the video, then adding the live streaming, then making the subscription service, then.

you know, all of the different player features that we’ve added and platform features. Now we have pretty much rebuilt everything that Netflix has from like the mobile apps. The fact that you can take the videos offline. we have a desktop player that we’re working on right now. So just, you know, iteratively kind of building this over time with customers, whatever they’re asking for, you know, I want this particular topic or I want this particular feature, but we just keep.

building it around customer feedback. And that’s kind of how we’ve gotten to this unique format of the blend of, you know, being able to do a workshop in person, but then live stream it out, but then turn it into 4k video, but then have all these player features and, you know, mobile apps and all that stuff. Right. It’s just, it’s like iterative over now, 10 years.

Maxi Ferreira (12:03) Yeah, yeah.

You also have

Discord community as well, right? And yeah, you have the podcast, the blog. I’ve been a front master subscriber for a number of years, but now you have a lot of things that, yeah, I’ve seen some of this evolution and progression over time, which is always, yeah, it’s great to see how the offering is growing as well.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (12:32) Yeah, now people are asking for like short form tutorials and that kind of thing. So we’re just about to launch like a brand new platform with, you know, kind of like partnering with some of the big YouTubers in the industry to kind of, syndicate their content, but also make exclusive content. So it’ll be, you know, just another, you know, iteration of the platform. So it’s, yeah, it’s pretty fun to just listen to customers and build the next thing.

Maxi Ferreira (12:56) Absolutely. speaking of evolution of the platform, how do you, do you see AI having an impact on like tech education in general, but also in like specifically in front end masters? How do you feel about that?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (13:11) Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s one of those weird things. It’s either going to change everything or some people are like, I’m a maximalist that AI is going to change absolutely everything. And some people are like, well, you know, it’s, it’s overhyped and, know, I definitely fall somewhere in the middle where I’m just like, and that’s like the common, it depends, you know, senior engineer question or answer. It’s like, I do think.

Maxi Ferreira (13:35) Mm-hmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (13:40) You know, it’s changing how people teach, right? Whether, you know, coming up with curriculum, you know, ideating, like it’s, it’s got that, you know, elements of like assisting. If you already have knowledge, you can, you know, put that knowledge in and, and get like summaries back or like outlines that kind of thing. That’s from a teacher’s perspective. You know, I think it’s, it’s in that positive, but obviously folks are, you know, using it more to, you know, actually write code.

And so, I think it can be, it’s definitely a balance. The teachers are like sometimes using it too much where it’s almost like, you know, just a bunch of code is showing up on the screen, but it’s not the right code, all that kind of stuff. so I think from a teacher’s perspective, like people are trying to still figure out where it’s helpful, where it’s not. And I think we all as an industry are at that stage, right? It’s like, you know, you, I’ve.

Maxi Ferreira (14:24) Mm-hmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (14:40) built some side projects, just loading up every AI tool that I possibly could and I’m throwing it and it’s getting into loops where it can’t fix its own problems. And it’s like, well, at this point I should have just written the code. You know, this is annoying. I just wasted a lot of my time, but other times it’s like you’re surprised at how helpful it can be. I think, you know, we’ve got experiments on.

recommendation engine. I think it’s, great for saying like, okay, here’s my existing knowledge. Like where are other areas and gaps that I could feel like we have some internal experiments around that. think it’s really interesting. Also taking a particular instructor and like their set of opinions and ways of doing things and kind of like training a model and being able to interact and ask questions. you know, how would.

this teacher do this thing or whatever, like, you know, what’s their opinion on things. So there’s, we have, we have a lot of experiments, but I think, at this point, I feel like with AI is you just have to like, use it, find its limitations, find what it’s good at. And I think we’re all doing that as a teacher, or from the teacher’s perspective, from the learner’s perspective, just on our day-to-day work, we’re all, we’re all figuring it out, like where, you know, where this, has its place.

Maxi Ferreira (16:03) Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, yeah, I also, I was talking about this with a teammate a few days ago about what you were mentioning when building something with AI that sometimes it takes you way longer than actually writing the code because you can’t find the right prompts or because it keeps undoing what you did. I think part of that is discovering part of the experience of getting familiar with these tools is figuring out when.

it can help and when you probably just better to stay away from it.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (16:36) Yeah, I think

at least in the current state, what I’ve seen is like more abstract thinking. It’s maybe can help you like be a sounding board, but when it comes to like, actually writing code, like it should be like something very, a small unit, a very small unit, like the more you can restrict, its scope and what you’re trying to do, seems like the better the output is. you know, either following conventions or code pay code base, kinds of things. But yeah, when it comes to.

just freeform, like add this feature. It’s like, starts pulling in random libraries and you’re like, what’s going on here?

Maxi Ferreira (17:12) Ha

Marc (Frontend Masters) (17:13) So yeah, I don’t know. We’re all figuring it out, I think.

Maxi Ferreira (17:15) Yeah.

No, absolutely. Absolutely. all right. So switching gears a little bit to, talking about your tech, the tech stack of front end masters. You talk a little bit about the sort of the evolution of all of these different features you were adding to your, to the platform and the mobile app and so on. And I know that you are a big proponent for like vanilla JavaScript and simplicity and using as few dependencies as possible.

is that still the way that you’re building front-end masters with a simplicity sort of standard mindset? And as you evolve the platform and you add in, keep you out of features, have you felt the need for a more sophisticated tool or do you think that the simple stack has been an advantage here?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (18:04) Yeah, absolutely. I think the simple stack like, uh, has worked beautifully for us. Uh, we picked in 2017, we moved on to go as a backend. And so on the front end, we’re vanilla JavaScript and, uh, you know, vanilla CSS and everything. Um, but on the, uh, the backend we’re go. So it’s, it’s very, um, go has a philosophy of minimal dependencies and kind of just write the code that you need for the job.

And so we have the same thing on the front end and the back end. It’s very much, we use Hugo, which is, we use it very lightly. Honestly, we could probably implement the functions that we use ourselves, but it’s pretty much just, yeah, server rendered for all the super fast page loads and caching everything is just great. And then,

For the player itself, that’s a lot more dynamic. And so that’s, you know, basically, um, you know, a full spa, but it’s just, you know, uh, vanilla C or JavaScript and, CSS. So I think what’s nice about it is I can open up code that I wrote in 2017 or 2018 and it’s, if it worked, it worked, you know, there’s no, like we haven’t had to like,

sit there and like, okay, there’s a new library update. Now we’re going to go through and update all of this because, you know, hooks is going to change everything or like, you know, now react server components is going to change everything. it’s, it’s just, we wrote it in such a simple way that, you know, as we add it, add functionality, the plumbing still works. Like the, the initial router of how we, we, we checked to see if somebody has a

cookie and if they have a cookie, actually inject the user data into the template. Um, when, you know, it, they don’t have a cookie, we just give them the cashed HTML that simple line of code, you know, that was written in, or that simple bit of code was written in 2017 and you know, it still works today and it’s still as fast or performant or even more performant today. So I think if you write the right solution.

without unnecessary overhead or unnecessary libraries, it just continues to work. And if it scales to your use case, all of the use cases that you add on top, then that code doesn’t need to be changed. There’s no dependencies to update. You don’t have to re-jigger everything about it. think there’s just so much elegance and…

And like advantages, mean, when people, People constantly write in like how is Frontend Masters so fast? How is Frontend Masters so fast? Because, you know, they’re just used to using the status quo stack, which is, you know, a lot of libraries both on the backend and the front end. so it’s, you know, is it, is performance just a front end problem? No, a lot of it can be, it depends on the app or it can be a server side problem. But if you have the

Same philosophy on the backend and the front end of just writing the code for the job. just, you know, everything just flies.

Maxi Ferreira (21:36) Right. Yeah. Makes sense. And how do you, how do you maintain the simplicity over time? the codebase is a number of years old. Do you have any guardrails in place to, to prevent, it from getting bloated? Do you have any, I don’t know, a bot that throws a warning when someone installs a, an NPM dependency, or is it just like a, a manual sort of

having just the discipline of always defaulting to vanilla.js.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (22:07) Yeah, it’s a discipline of defaulting to simplicity, like our engineering culture, like on the backend and front end, everybody, everybody on the team is bought into this philosophy because it’s just paid off over and over and over again. So yeah, I mean, we have some basic ESLint rules and that kind of thing to, to prevent like unused variables or whatever we, certain large components, we converted those over to TypeScript.

which some of our engineers really enjoy. I don’t, I don’t particularly care either way. I’m fine with without TypeScript or with TypeScript. don’t, I don’t, I don’t necessarily, have any strong opinions there, but some people on our engineering team do. And so, I’m all for it. Like if it makes them feel like they’re writing better code and, gives them so much assurances, then absolutely go for it. So yeah, good testing strategy.

Maxi Ferreira (22:40) Mm-hmm.

Ha

Marc (Frontend Masters) (23:07) and then we have a design system. So various components, you know, pagination components and, you know, data grid component, these kinds of components were built from scratch and they can be used in multiple places, in, know, the account management or wherever, they need to be put into multiple places. we have reusable components.

Maxi Ferreira (23:23) Mm-hmm.

These are web components or, okay.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (23:37) They’re not web components. They’re

just JavaScript modules.

Maxi Ferreira (23:41) Okay, I see. a, you have a markup on the one end and then they, these components, they add the JavaScript, they inject the JavaScript necessary to make them work. Is that how, how they work?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (23:53) Yeah, it depends on the component. yeah, the data grid component is fully, the template actually has to be inside the component for the actual grid component. yeah, we use template literals and we use a very small, like four kilobit library called the HTML so that we don’t…

Maxi Ferreira (23:57) Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (24:22) Yeah. So it does some intelligent rendering, that kind of thing. So you can just basically throw templates, certain literals at it, and it will only update the piece that it needs to.

Maxi Ferreira (24:32) Nice. Very cool.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (24:33) So yeah, that’s

the only like dependency I think we really have is, is, lit HTML.

Maxi Ferreira (24:40) Right.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (24:40) Yeah, I wrote, uh, it was funny. one point we had a debate. we like add something like react or preact into a particular case? Cause it was like a, a spa, like, you know, kind of a data grid. think it was this case with the data grid, right? And it was like, well, do we, do we, uh, you know, there’s, there’s routes and the routes have to load data. There’s lazy loading and pagination, these kinds of things. And.

Maxi Ferreira (24:59) Mm-hmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (25:09) And I was like, well, I don’t think we need to. think here’s a good pattern that we could go by. And so we, we, I did like a to do MVC vanilla JavaScript, implementation. So you can go onto my GitHub if you want to check it out, but it served as kind of like the base of how we built a data grid component. And, we have one base class, which handles a lot of the different, you know,

abstract things. And then we have a, extend just one level inheritance. We’re not fans of like multiple levels of inheritance, but one level of inheritance for the initial class as the contract, you basically the next one is, so you inherit from it and then you can, you know, render the specific part of the template, like the header or the, you know, the, the body of the table and that kind of thing. I think

Maxi Ferreira (26:02) Mm-hmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (26:09) This data grid component would be interesting to open source because it is extremely powerful and it’s worked in lots of different scenarios in the administration dashboard and other parts of the web app. But yeah, it’s just like a simple implementation. There’s a store and the route comes in, you listen to it and

Maxi Ferreira (26:29) Nice. Yeah.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (26:36) hydrates the store. And then if there is lazy loaded stuff, it just adds to the store and you’re just rendering, you know, the template, with the data. So I don’t know those kinds of like simple patterns, no libraries. It’s just, it becomes honestly, really, really powerful and super fast.

Maxi Ferreira (26:59) Yeah, that’s a great example because one of the reasons I think people like to use React or these popular libraries is because of the ecosystem. It’s so large and there are plugins or there are components already built for all use cases. There are probably 1,000 React data grid components out there. But yeah, the problem is that it’s not just bringing React

for the data grade and this component, but it’s all the other components that come with it. I’m sure that component has a ton of other dependencies and yeah, once you start bringing these things in, I can imagine how hard to stop. but.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (27:39) Yeah. I

mean, it’s, it’s, you know, the age old question. mean, like I said, I’ve created the jQuery UI day picker and so I’m very familiar with jQuery UI and it’s just how it worked. It’s like, if you add one component, then you have to add the other and they have to interact. And then what if you pick a library? Like at one point we picked, we, we do have a react kind of like administration dashboard. We used a semantic UI and semantic UI is no longer maintained. So now it’s like a.

Maxi Ferreira (28:04) Mm-hmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (28:09) A big, if we wanted to move to like Shad Sien or something like that, it would be a big, um, you know, complete rearchitect, you know, now we have to adopt Tailwind and like move everything over. So I think these kind of like built component libraries are great for getting started or, you know, building things quickly. like when you’re talking about software that was built in 2017 and needs to continue to evolve to all of these.

use cases now are 20, 25 and still that code works. Right. And there’s, it’s just so much less maintenance nightmare and package, Jason updating and all this kind of stuff. yeah, I mean, if you, if you pick a Shad Cian and Tailwind and you know, load up whatever your, you know, Radix, whatever for components that Shad Cian doesn’t have. you know, you’d go that route.

Great. I have no problem with that. But the question is, is that going to be the libraries that we use in five years? Is that going to be the best? Is it going to be the state of art? You know, you have no idea when you pick these libraries that they’re going to, you know, continue to be maintained and have all of the use cases that you need. I mean, at the end of the day, if you just write the code that you need, awesome. You know, that’s, you know, paid off for us, but again, you know.

Maxi Ferreira (29:30) Yeah.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (29:36) We’ve existed for a decade or more than a decade. It’s paid off for us, but if you’re building a startup that you don’t know if it’s going to succeed or fail in the next six months, maybe that’s not the right approach.

Maxi Ferreira (29:38) Hahaha.

you build on the web platform, you can always trust that you’re building on a solid foundation and there are not going to be any breaking changes probably. So you’re safe.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (30:00) Yeah, I can still

pull up projects from, you know, 20 or 2008 and they run faster than ever. Right. Like you’re never going to build anything that ran, you know, as fast as that code that I wrote. you know, I wrote Forex trading widgets and components for Dow Jones. Like that had to work across browsers and, you know, fulfill performance criteria. Like it’s just, you know, those components today are going to be faster than ever.

Maxi Ferreira (30:09) You

Marc (Frontend Masters) (30:30) so I think, yeah, that philosophy of just writing what you need is going to be obviously the fastest, but it, know, you have to learn real engineering. You have to go deep and really kind of understand, like you said, the web platform, like, you know, the ins and outs of it for sure.

Maxi Ferreira (30:41) Yes.

Absolutely.

Marc, you have a very unique job title of CEO and UI developer, which is something you don’t see very often. And this is a topic that comes up on Twitter or blog posts from time to time about how front-end developers or UI developers may have like a lower career ceiling than backend developers, perhaps because there are more backend.

oriented CTOs out there or CEOs that there are front developer ones. have thoughts. I don’t agree with that point. I mean, I agree with the data. I know what the data shows, but I don’t believe with the claim that this is due to front developers being necessarily less technical than backend developers. And I think you’re a good example of how someone can be both.

great software or front end developer with a C level title as well. And I want to ask you, what do you think about this front end versus back end being, know, front end being less technical debate? Do you have, do you have any advice for people who are perhaps on a front end career, on a front end path, but they feel like stuck in their careers. They feel maybe that there is actually a lower

Marc (Frontend Masters) (31:44) So

Maxi Ferreira (32:04) career ceiling for them.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (32:07) Yeah, it’s tough to, tough to say. So like, would say that here’s my path, right? My path was I got a job as a consultant or at this big consultancy and I was, I became the UI development expert. And at some point I got to the point where I was leading projects. And even so, I remember the Java guy, right? That was kind of my mentor, my tech lead or whatever.

came up to me and said, you’re so great at this front end stuff. If you would just learn Java and whatever you would, you would triple your salary, triple at the time, you know, your salary. so I spent like three, five months, something like that, building, working with him, mentoring with him, building Java apps. And I remember one day he, wrote on the board. said, okay, what is this DAO and like what?

Why do we have to have 15 layers of abstraction in order to return one JSON endpoint? And he’s like, well, this is just how it’s done. he wrote, I remember he wrote all of these boxes, and they’re all connecting the data access layer to this and that whatever, and then the whatever connector and all these different layers of abstraction just to return JSON. And I was like, if this is.

Maxi Ferreira (33:12) Ha

Marc (Frontend Masters) (33:34) If this is what I have to do to return Jason 15 layers of abstraction, just, I can’t, I can’t do that even for three times the money. Like you just can’t pay me enough to like make unnecessary layers of abstraction. And so I just remember telling him like, no, I’d rather get paid less and just be really, really good at, something that I see as a need. And I think it’ll pay off over time. So I was right.

Eventually the consultancy was paying $325 an hour or they were charging $325 an hour for my time. is back in like 2005, 2006. And so because I became just, I went so deep on the web platform, so deep in JavaScript and flash at the time and CSS, and I became the expert and they gave me all of the really, really cool projects.

I got to do animation. got to do, you know, marketing stuff. got to do big websites and it was, it was super fun, but like, that’s, know, that’s, that’s a path. Like I could have just chosen the Java engineering route. And I remember too, like, he’s like, I’m like, how do you know what this is doing? He’s like, well, I don’t really know. Like I just wrap it and then I add my code and then I pass it back. And it was just like,

It was just, it was such a nightmare, in the Java consulting world. And it was just like, I wanted to write. You know, UI, I wanted to feel, you know, like I was making an impact and, none of these guys knew anything to do with UI coding. So I think from that perspective, I went to the need rather than what they were telling me, what I was going to get paid more for. Right. So I think, I think,

Maxi Ferreira (35:28) Hmm

Marc (Frontend Masters) (35:31) there’s this dance in like learning or knowing what to do with your career, where there’s a dance of what the market’s telling you and where you see the need. And I think like if you are able to see the need and go deep into an area that you see that people really need, I think at the end of the day, maybe that’s like where the puck is going. You know, there’s this stupid.

quote everybody uses with Wayne Gretzky of like knowing where the puck is going. think like, that’s, that’s my perspective is like at the time there was just nobody who really knew what they were doing, going deep in JavaScript. And, and then all of a Google started hiring all of these, you know, high level JavaScript engineers. And because I had open source work, they were tapping at my door and eventually Netflix was tapping on my door and all these different.

big companies were trying to recruit me because I got to be well known for this area that became a, you know, a deep need, is, you know, rich, you know, users wanted rich web applications. So I don’t know if that’s like the perfect answer or whatever, but I think like as an industry, I think backend developers definitely get paid more. Like if you zoom out, but like specialists.

Maxi Ferreira (36:40) Right.

Mm-hmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (36:55) And people who are really well known for crafting great solutions, whether that’s on the backend or the front end, think they always get paid more than the general, you know, you know, whatever you say, like the average backend developer gets paid this, the average front end developer gets paid this, but like the specialist in any area, if you’re like the C person, you’re, you know, you know, like

Maxi Ferreira (37:08) Yeah, absolutely.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (37:23) the web stack really, really well, you know, whatever, go really, really well and you find a company that needs that. Like they’re gonna, they’re gonna want the person that goes deep and, and, is known for creating great solutions in whatever stack that is.

Maxi Ferreira (37:39) Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great answer. Thank you. This is a bit off topic, but one of the reasons admire you so much is that you seem to have achieved a really, I don’t want to say perfect, but a really good balance, a work-life balance between business and family time and health and fitness and so on.

which is very hard. And as someone who struggles with this so much, wanted to ask you, first of all, how do you do it all? How do you find this balance? And do you have any tips for people who are feeling like they’re missing this balance, that they’re lacking some part of their lives? Yeah.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (38:19) Yeah, I think I have amazing balance right now. And that’s a lot due to like, you know, the success of building deep tech, technical expertise, as well as like business acumen when I was younger. So I did not have balance in my twenties, right? I did not have balance from, I mean, really I started businesses when I was 14. And that’s all I’ve done is like, you know, I, even before that 10 to 14, I was doing

lawn mowing and working out in the fields. And then from 14 to 21 building computers and doing hardware and then on and on and on. I just, think like going really, really deep technical, technically when you’re super excited about it, especially when you’re young, I think like we end up having a lot less responsibilities in that time. Right. and so I was jealous of my other friend.

or like one of my best friends that he went out to Yosemite and he like became a, you know, a tour guide or whatever. And he was backpacking and he was climbing and he was doing all these things. You know, he had like an amazing, like eight years and he was in super great shape and all that kind of stuff. And meanwhile, I was just like, really focusing on my technical expertise and develop, you know, building these web apps for all these companies and, and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my career.

And it was like, you know, I pretty much that’s, don’t necessarily give the advice to other people, but I pretty much just, you know, a lot of ways through in my twenties, you know, I just going so deep into coding and like publishing all my research and speaking and teaching. And, know, I did, I did manage to meet my wife and eventually have our first kid. And that’s when I got really serious about like, okay, now I have to make a business that.

you know, works for the family. instead of like, you know, I was, I was, you know, I just had all the irons in the fire and, know, so I guess that’s my perspective is, yeah, I do have balance now. I’ve learned to put really amazing people ahead of large parts of my company. So the CTO and the chief, or the VP of learning, like

you know, the product UX designer, now we’re hiring customer success. So like each area, I hire amazing people to put them over each, you know, system. And I’m really good at system design. like thinking about the big picture of like, how is this going to be sustainable over five years, over 10 years? Like just for instance, I had some downtime or whatever over the winter and I built like a

a social network around goals. And I was just like using all the AI tools and learning Go and all that kind of stuff. And so I built this, but it’s like, I’m afraid to launch it because I don’t see a path to sustainability. Like even though I built it, I’ve got the domain name. It’s fully like, it was a really, really fun project to build because you can post your goals and you can post like updates on how you’re doing on your goals and everybody can kind of thumbs up and cheer you on and that kind of thing. So.

It’s something I wish to exist in the world, but I don’t really see a path to sustainability. so that’s when I think about things now, it’s like, okay, who is in charge of it? You know, how is this going to be sustainable? And even my health journey, like I do running a certain times a week and tennis a certain times a week and gymnastics. And I’m trying to like vary my activities so that I don’t like put too much stress on one part of the body.

And I think that’s how I think about things, which is like scheduling your week of like, this is how much time I want to spend with my kids. you know, or this is where I can spend time with my kids. This is where, you know, we’re doing date nights with my wife once a week. And you know, there’s certain other times where we take walks together and it’s kind of like building your life in like a sustainable way. So it’s like, I think I can get this much work in each day and.

sketch this and this much health stuff and this much family time. so and then you just, know, it’s like, projects kind of projects tend to expand to their allotted time, right? Where it’s like, if you have a certain less amount of time, you can, you know, basically use it as effectively as you can. And as a CEO, that looks much different today. But like, yeah, back in my 20s, it was just like,

I would sometimes work like three consulting jobs at a time and I would do okay, 20 hours a week on each, which means I can make X amount of dollars that I can invest into my other ideas. So I was just going crazy in my twenties, you know, just trying to build and learn as much as possible and invest in myself. And I always prioritize things that I was, you know, I would learn roles where I would learn. So.

Maxi Ferreira (43:35) Yeah, yeah, I know that.

Yeah. Thank you for, for sharing that. think that’s a, yeah, that that’s great advice thinking about when you’re about to launch something or embark on a new project, how, how can, how, how can I make this sustainable? And if there is no way, maybe just experience of building it or whatever it is, learning it, it’s enough. Yeah.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (43:56) Yep.

Yeah, I think people, there’s different reasons of doing things. If you do a side project, it’s like, okay, I’m doing this side projects explicitly to learn. That’s fine. But if it’s like, I want to build something sustainable, like you do have to think about who you’re serving and who’s actually going to spend money for it. you know, so it can be sustainable. So.

Maxi Ferreira (44:14) Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And if you’re going to maintain it in the learn run, it helps to think about where are you going to say no to be able to maintain this new thing. Yeah.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (44:31) Absolutely.

Maxi Ferreira (44:33) Marc, before I let you go, I like to do picks this can be anything that you found interesting in the last week or the last month. It could be books or TV shows, movies, YouTube videos. Do you have any picks to share with us today?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (44:51) My pick would be personal training. think everybody should lift weights and if you don’t know how to lift weights, it seems expensive to spend $70 an hour. But I remember when I didn’t have much money and I was living in a Craigslist basement for $200 a month. It was like the biggest expense was the $70 per week that I went in and did a personal training session. But I remember

Like I learned how to lift weights and now if I want to independently, I can, but I think getting a trainer and like learning good form and just like learning from them. so you don’t hurt yourself and you can do it. I think the theme being sustainability. and, also like putting some money on the line means that you’re going to actually show up. Like I never missed a session ever. If I’m paying $70, like you better believe I’m going to show up.

Maxi Ferreira (45:45) Yeah.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (45:50) So I would say personal training is my pick because I think it’s just, any type of group class where you’re like, okay, I’m going to go, I’m paying for this. So I’m going to show up. Cause I think we get so busy in our careers that like we don’t do anything for our health at some points. And I know I I’m guilty of this, but like, if I had a group class or in this case, a personal training session, I at least showed up to that. And so even

Maxi Ferreira (45:57) Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (46:18) Even if I didn’t invest in my health beyond that, at least I had a once or twice a week where I was getting in and moving my body. And I think it just, does so much for our capacity, like a brain capacity and, you know, just our mood and everything.

Maxi Ferreira (46:33) Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That’s great pick. I’ve started to fall off on my gym workout. I’m going to try at least once a week. Or how many times you do personal training for a week? Just once per week. Yeah.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (46:53) I just do once. And

yeah, I work out on my own a lot beyond that, but just once per week, Fridays at three o’clock, I show up and I, what’s nice is I don’t have to think. He just tells me lift this, do this, do this, you know, and it’s just like, I don’t have to like think about, okay, now I’m going to do this exercise. And at this weight, he’s got the clipboard. He’s already written down what I’ve done in the past and knows exactly where to go and what to do.

Maxi Ferreira (46:58) Yes.

Nice.

Nice, nice, awesome. All right, I have two picks. One is a TV show on Hulu. It’s called Paradise. It’s very cool. only watch, I’m on the second episode right now, but yeah, it’s a very nice thriller, mysterious kind of show if you’re into that kind of stuff. And I have a board game. I was gonna pick a book, but I changed it at the last minute. And I’m gonna say a board game that I played last night called

Cthulhu Death May Die, believe is the name. It’s a cooperative game. Very cool. It’s very interesting. It looks intimidating when you look at it on the board, you think, oh, this has like a million rules, but the rules are quite simple actually. So yeah, highly recommend if you like that type of thing.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (48:09) Well, since you did two, I’ll say physical 100 on Netflix is super cool. Like, especially the first season was insane. It’s just like all the best athletes from all sorts of different disciplines and they go head to head. And eventually you find out like, you know, it’s like the rock climbers get really, really far and you’re like, wow, I didn’t know that they were that strong, but it’s, it’s fun to see that. And then as far as co-op game,

You threw out one. So I’ve been doing Marvel, the new Marvel Alliance co-op game with my son. that’s Marvel Champions, I think it’s called.

Maxi Ferreira (48:44) Okay. nice.

Is that the car game? I know there is a car game. perfect. Nice. Awesome. Awesome. Never played that one, but I have to check it out. I played the Marvel Zombies board game, which is like a version of Zombies side, but with Marvel that it’s very, very cool as well recently. But I have to check that one out.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (48:51) Yeah, it’s card. Yeah, card, card game.

Maxi Ferreira (49:08) All right, Marc, it’s been a pleasure having you here. Thank you so much for joining me. Where can people find you online?

Marc (Frontend Masters) (49:16) Uh, so the number one, M A R C on Twitter, that’s or X whatever you want to call it. And, uh, Marc, Urbanski.com. I’ve got my personal health checklist. I think is the best thing on my site right now. So check that out.

Maxi Ferreira (49:31) Yes.

Love that. Yeah. Love your checklists. right, Marc. Thank you so much.

Marc (Frontend Masters) (49:37) Thanks for having me, Maxi. Cheers.

Maxi Ferreira (49:39) Bye.