CSSconf EU Blog

Meet Tim Holman

Monday, September 14th, 2015

Portrait of Tim Holman

Tim is an Australian developer who has both a love and a flair for all things quirky and strange online. When he’s not working on Tumblr, you’ll find him building something bizarre which, in his own words, the world definitely does not need.

On a mission to take seriousness away from the world of web development Tim’s talk, Fun.css, will delve into some of the strangest areas of the internet. Tim will introduce us to unusual and bizarre techniques and ways of thinking that we can use to create friendlier and, at the very least, more interesting experiences.

We approached Tim to talk to him about CSS, having fun with the web, and more!

Hi Tim! Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions for us. Besides being busy speaking at conferences, what are you working on at the moment? Ooh! I really love building small joke-ish products that poke a little fun at our industry! Elevator.js was a popular one this year, so was Giflinks and DomAnimator. Never a dull moment! These are great little filler projects between some of the larger, more serious work.

Do you have a favorite CSS property, and if so, what is it? Nothing special here for me! Amazingly enough, the CSS property that I appreciate and love the most is border-radius. Remember the days when you had to put images on every corner, of everything you wanted rounded… That was the worst.

What CSS quirk has cost you the most nerves so far? Haha, this is an easy one. Fixed position elements inside a transformed element. Urgh, the pain! The ticket’s been around since 2009… and is marked as “won’t fix“. But really, I feel like everyone’s run into this at some stage.

At one point in my life, I enjoyed giving multi-line text ellipsis as an interview question… that was pretty evil, and is always full of nerves!

Can you think of a demo that recently blew your mind? Something on codepen, or github perhaps? At this point, Tiffany Rayside is more or less blowing my mind once a day with her awesome demos and conceptual work on Codepen. Really, she’s one to watch!

What do you enjoy most about giving talks at conferences? Laughs and people! My talks are always light-hearted, and easygoing. And I’m myself light-hearted and easygoing. It makes me feel so great talking to people during the conference, finding out what they liked and didn’t like and just generally talking shop with someone new, from somewhere new. Never a dull moment!

We don’t want to spoil it, but… what is the one thing that you wish everyone in the audience takes away from your talk? Again, my talk is pretty light-hearted. Ideally, by the end of it everyone feels a little bit better about getting stuck into their work and creating something new! At the very least, I’d love to break down a few of the barriers we have when we get into development: we can all be a little less serious and have more fun with the web!

If you could make one wish, what would you like to change in our industry?

Portrait of Tim Holman
Education is really important to me. I think we have a lot of barriers when it comes to introducing people to web development. At this point, more or less nobody knows how you would teach a 10-year-old to code. Younger people learn faster and are more accepting (sponge-y, I like to say), but it’s just not an area we’ve explored as much as we could. Imagine talking to a 25-year-old who’s been learning and evolving under guidance for the last 15 years. The ideas and things that those minds could come up with would blow us all away! This is me as a kid. I didn’t really learn programming or anything when I was younger, but I did love computers!


We’re really excited about Fun.css and we look forward to seeing Tim on stage! In the meantime, you can follow Tim on Twitter and explore his creations on GitHub.

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