John Polacek

Chicago Web Developer

Engineering manager and frontend lead at Howl

My product recommendations at shop.howl.me

Shipping open source on Github

Follow me at @johnpolacek

CSS-in-JS or CSS-and-JS

CSS-in-JS or CSS-and-JS Project Page

I built this new school/old school CSS/JS thing. It is awesome and it sucks. Maybe you can learn something from it? That would be great. That’s why I did it. You can do something better probably. Please do.

Notes from AWS Summit

I attended the AWS Summit in Chicago this week. Like many other tech companies, we at Gesture use various AWS products so it was a nice opportunity to get exposed to what is becoming possible with their platform.

Speaking at Front End Camp Chicago and Introducing TweenDeck

John Polacek speaking at Front End Camp Chicago

Over the weekend, I gave a talk titled Rethinking CSS - Go Functional for Scaling, Performance & Simplicity at Front End Camp Chicago. The event was organized by the folks at Chicago Camps who do a fantastic job of putting on conferences for a great price.

The Atomic/Functional CSS Movement

When I published Expressive CSS a few months ago, I knew it would be controversial, and it was (as evidenced in the comments on my Content & Display Patterns with Expressive CSS post). In the time since, there have been many articles and projects published by others that also advocate lightweight, scalable CSS using utility classes that are easy to write and understand....

I Wrote Our Developer Job Description

We’re hiring a new developer, and I tried to capture a little of the flavor of what it is I love about working at Gesture, and do it in a hopefully entertaining way.