Havoc Inspired

Eric Meyer is Principal Consultant at Complex Spiral and co-founder of An Event Apart with Jeffery Zeldman. He has written numerous books on CSS and web standards and is recognised the world over for his work. On this weeks episode Eric takes be through his career in the web, what he’s doing now and his plans for the future.

Eric Meyer – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

*laughs* I don’t have a job title. I guess the name I devised for myself as a consultant is principle as in the principle person because calling yourself CEO when you’re the only person is just so awful, it’s so awful to do that, you may as well call yourself janitor because you have to clean up the office too. So I’m a co-founder of An Event Apart and Principle Consultant for Complex Spiral. When you work for yourself you have to make it up…

So what to you get up to day to day?

Well a lot of what I do is working on An Event Apart as conferences take up a lot of time even when you’ve done a lot of them and you have a lot of things that are the same thing ever time you still have to do them every time like pick a menu for what people are going to eat and decide who’s going to speak and keep the website up to date and all that kind of fun stuff. I also try to keep up a lot, obviously like everyone else through email and RSS feeds and there’s always the Twitter and then also a little bit of consulting, in fact generally what I do as consulting is customised training so a client will say, we know these things and we don’t know these things and we’d like to get from A to B, please help us and I also do writing from time to time in fact I’m working on a book now and will be working on a new addition of an existing book probably starting after the beginning of the year and that’s what I do professionally.

What are you most proud of in you career?

Well I used to say it was whatever I did most recently and in a way that’s still true, the thing I’m proudest of has generally been whatever project I finished last. I suppose it’s still true for An Event Apart because it’s on-going but in a lot of ways I’m the proudest of that because of what we’ve accomplished and it brings together hundreds of people of a like mind, people who are really web craftsman and who care passionately about the web in the same way the Jeffery Zeldman and I do but as speakers and the audience members, I mean the people in the audience I consider them colleagues more than anything else, they’re people who feel the same way about the web as we do and that I can talk too as peers. I know there are some conferences and maybe conferences in some other fields where the speakers are considered to be above the attendees and that the attendees don’t know nearly as much as the speakers but sometimes I feel that the attendees know even more that the speakers do and so we try to have great authors and people who have contributed to the industry come speak which is always great to listen too, but the conversations in the hallways between attendees and speakers and attendees, there’s no difference really it’s sort of a bunch of colleagues together right and talking in a common language about the thing they all care about so much and I love that. It gets me every time and I feel really proud that Jeffery and I have been able to facilitate that and beyond that in project terms I guess the other thing I would say is the web design survey that we do through A List Apart which has been routinely year after year getting 30,000+ responses, people say what their titles are and where they are and how they feel about the feel and I’m really, really proud of what we’ve done with that because I think it’s the first wide scale look at who we are as an industry. There have been other surveys that have looked at aspects of the industry but 30,000 people, that tells you right there that there are at least 30,000 people out there that are professional web designers and developer, that do it for a living and really care about it and certainly we’ve not surveyed everyone who’s out there so every year we try and spread the word and get people involved.

So where do you see yourself in the future?

Doing more of this stuff, same as what I’ve been doing for the last 16 years, but talking about different things. The web has proven to be very resistant to being replaced, obviously some day it will be, we won’t be writing HTML in the 31st century but I think it’s going to be around for a long time and so talking about how it works and how we can make it work better and I think that’s going to keep me occupied for a number of years from here on out just because I still love it, I still think it’s one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and as much as we’ve done with it it has order of magnitude more potential so if nothing else I need to hang around and see what happens right.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.