Meeting Lea & Chris

Reporting From Boston

Suppose you love Batman. One day, you find out you are gonna be travelling to Gotham and suddenly an idea pops up in your head... wouldn't it be awesome if you get to meet the Batman? That would be freaking cool!

That's exactly what happened when few weeks ago I got to know that I would be travelling to Boston. I knew Lea is in MIT and was almost sure that she would be in Boston too while I am there. So, I drafted, contemplated and finally sent an email to her seeking for a meetup. I literally wrote this in my email -

Fingers Crossed! ( shit scared before I click the 'Send' button )

I didn't expect a reply but when I did get one and it was a positive one, I jumped on bed. I was frustrated with all the moving and packing stuff but that email made my day. This image from Tim Urban's Wait But Why totally fits in.

Quite a few emails back and forth and we were set on date, time and venue. It was funny though because we ended up waiting for each other in same cafe on different streets. Get it? A little late, but I finally met them. You know, Batman and Jesus together ;)

If you don't know, Lea( Lea Verou ) is a CSS Ninja and author of many amazing projects. She recenly published her book CSS Secrets. Chris( Chris Lilley ) is the father of SVG. Imagine that!

I was anxious, nervous, happy and feeling amazed all at once. Before meeting, I had thought of many questions that I would ask but totally forgot them. And that was probably a good thing because we ended up talking about variety of stuff.

We talked about her MIT Experience, her project WYSIE which is set to release soon. An uber cool demo of a functional Color Picker using nothing but HTML and CSS( freaked me out! ).

We also talked about Bliss - her latest project making Vanilla JavaScript sweeter to work with, the CSS Working Group and how it works. I came to know that the working group needs more tests for future features. That also brought up the fact that Microsoft Edge is doing real good in terms of implementing new recommendations.

Chris told me about the SVG fonts, which now drives the Open Type fonts and showed me handpaintedtype.com. We spend good time talking about the new color function coming up with CSS Color Module Level 4.

Aside from the technical topics, it was fun to talk about marriages in India, Indian festivals, little bit of politics and how she loved Ras Malai in India :D

Last but not the least, I got a copy of CSS Secrets autographed! Yay!

I definitely look forward to another opportunity like this. Meeting them made my year and has inspired me to do more. A wonderful day! :)