Yesterday was my last day at Happy Cog. Today, I’ve started my own practice again.

...so, yeah. That paragraph doesn’t do much for, you know, context, does it? Consider that the TL;DR version, and let’s try again:

If you ever talk to me on the phone, you should probably know that I’m a bit of a pacer. I guess I should blame it on the nanosecond-long attention span, but I can’t really sit at my computer when talking to someone at length. More often than not, I’ll simply pace back and forth in the kitchen. Our pearlish-gray kitchen tiles form some rather, well, comforting diagonals, and I’ll just walk along them from one corner of the room to the next. Still not sure why I do it, to be honest. I suppose tracing those pixellated little laps frees my mind a bit, a mundane, repetitive little charm that helps me better focus on the discussion at hand.

Having that routine provides not a little symmetry when a major life change happens. I was walking those elliptical loops when I agreed to join Airbag Industries. And I was making my kitchen laps yesterday when Greg and I had my last phone call as an employee of Happy Cog.

I could say that the decision to leave has been difficult, sure—but that’s one of the most understate-y understatements ever if not, perhaps, the understatiest. I joined a little studio called Airbag Industries over three years ago, and it’s been a wonderful, insane, fantastic ride. After a few years of running a mini-studio of my own, I leapt at the chance to work with Greg and Ryan, two of my favorite (if personal space-challenged) people. From there, we took on incredible projects, watched the team more than triple in size, and eventually officially joined forces with Happy Cog, a studio I’ve admired since first picking up my now dog-eared copy of the orange book.

Throughout my tenure, I’ve been fortunate to work with people who are consistently at the top of their game. And I can’t stress that enough: everyone at Happy Cog is eminently professional, impossibly fun to hang out with, and just stupidly talented. It’s one of the first times that I’ve worked alongside so many craftsmen, if you’ll pardon the lack of an appropriately gender neutral term. Each project was an opportunity to ask ourselves how we could work a little bit better than last time, how to learn from emerging technologies and ideas, and build something truly great. Plus, you know, there was the occasional karaoke bout thrown in for good measure.

Re-reading that last paragraph just underscored how hard it is to leave. But in the past year or so, I’ve been feeling more and more excited about some of the opportunities that have been coming my way. I’ll be rounding out this year’s simply fantastic An Event Apart roadshow with appearances in DC and San Diego, and speaking at Future of Web Design NYC in November. And I’m unbelievably excited to be writing for A Book Apart on responsive web design, working with Jeffrey, Jason, and Mandy to produce a great little book.

So that’s why I’ve decided to leave Happy Cog, and go independent again. As hard as it is to move on, I’m positively exhilarated by the prospect of focusing on writing, speaking, and creating, hopefully with the occasional awesome client project thrown in. If that sounds interesting to you, or even if you’d like to chat a bit about how much Photoshop crashes or your favorite animated GIF, I hope you’ll get in touch.

Over the past few weeks, as my last day at Happy Cog loomed closer, I’ve been thinking about how most of our language around transitions has gotten wrapped up in books. You know: “turning a page,” “the next chapter,” and so forth. And there’s something comfortingly sequential about those phrases: we turn one page, and the next one gains focus. Thing is, the transition isn’t quite as forward-looking as the rhetoric implies: the previous experience shapes us, educates us. We’re always flipping back to a lesson we’ve learned before.

So that’s where I am now. I’ve just turned a page over, and it’s one I’ll sorely miss—but I know I’ll be referring back to it, and often. And in the months ahead, I’m excited to draw from those experiences as I do some writing of my own.

If you haven’t, you should immediately read Jeremy’s post titled A responsive mind. Not because he says some incredibly kind things about yours truly, but, well, of bits like this:

That’s the thing about responsive web design: you can’t just think of it as a sprinkle of pixie dust that can be applied to any site. It requires the right mindset. It requires that sites be built on solid foundations of best practice. If those foundations are in place—a flexible layout, flexible images, optimised performance—then responsive web design can work its magic.

There are so many wonderful, quotable points that I’m doing Jeremy a disservice by even excerpting that one. If you’d like to understand why a responsive approach would be right for your project (or, perhaps as importantly, why it might not), I urge you to read the whole thing.

Words to tattoo on your knuckles:

Over the past couple of years, my blog hasn’t felt my own, to a degree. It’s felt like I’ve been writ­ing for an audi­ence, post­ing stuff for oth­ers rather than myself. That’s arse-backwards. A blog should be about per­sonal expres­sion. The moment you start think­ing, and writ­ing, to please oth­ers then it’s a bind; it feels less like a per­sonal exer­cise and more of a job.

A beautiful, thoughtful redesign from Mark Boulton (and a responsive one at that). Go go, read read.

Front-end developer Steffan Williams of Gridinator fame digs into some of the rendering inconsistencies across various browsers when dealing with percentage-based widths. Now, I don’t think this is a real problem for flexible, grid-based layouts or properly responsive designs. Some of these rounding issues won’t necessarily manifest themselves in your work, or at least not quite as noticeably.

I was, however, emphatically raising my fist in the air when I read this:

While I’m well aware that things don’t have to look the same in every browser, it just seems to strike me as odd that CSS3 features keep getting touted on the front of browser homepages, and yet something as fundamental as a percentage would be rendered incorrectly (or, rather, not as well as would be expected).

Emphasis mine. Much of the behavior Steffan notes was outlined by John Resig in 2008, nearly three years ago. There are some incredible inconsistencies at play here, and designers really shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of working around them.

In short, some broad consensus between the different rendering engines needs to be reached—and if it comes at the expense of pushing the Next Hot Bleeding-Edge Experimental Sexy CSS3 Feature™ to market, I’m all for it.

Since striking out on my own, much of my time’s been dedicated to, well, the book. But I’ve also been fortunate enough to collaborate a bit with Filament Group on one of their projects: namely, a large-scale engagement that requires a responsive approach.

Needless to say, I am having the time of my life.

We’re also learning a lot, too. A lot of discussions about approach and execution have come up, largely because processes for a lot of this stuff don’t exist yet. That will, with a bit of hard work and community discussion, change over time. Still, there has been a lot of brilliant stuff created so far.

Here’s just one example:

The goal of this technique is to deliver optimized, contextual image sizes for responsive layouts that utilize dramatically different image sizes at different resolutions. Ideally, this approach will allow developers to start with mobile-optimized images in their HTML and specify a larger size to be used for users with larger screen resolutions — without requesting both image sizes, and without UA sniffing.

Check out the script, download it, and kick the tires a bit—feedback and tweaks are most welcome.

I realize that there are always going to be philosophical differences around responsive web design. But for me, the solutions-driven discussions are always going to be infinitely more interesting to me than the alternative.

I won’t lie to you: I might’ve pounded the table emphatically a few times while reading Mark Boulton’s latest entry:

We can now design effective adaptive layouts that respond to their environment. If these layouts are based on a system that defines its ratios from the content, then there is connectedness on two levels: connectedness to the device, and connectedness to the content.

Mark’s thinking about flexible, content-driven grids has me damned excited about his upcoming talk at AEA Boston, and you know I’ll be flinging fistfuls of lucre at my laptop screen whenever his new book’s available to preorder.

The web really feels fun again.

I’m doing a disservice to this lovely interview with Shaun Inman—one of my favorite designers and people—by quoting it, but, well:

How do you stay focused?

I’m not sure that I do. I’m kind of all over the place, with my attention split between web apps, iOS games and apps, and Safari extensions…. If I feel my focus waning, I let it wane. Curiosity or that unpleasant feeling of leaving something unfinished usually draws me back to a problem or task before too long.

“5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman”

This. Oh, so very this.

I’m sad to say that due to a personal matter, I’ve had to bow out of speaking at this year’s Mobilism conference. You might have seen PPK’s announcement to that effect, and I’m definitely disappointed I’ll miss the event.

Because let’s be honest: my absence isn’t going to do a damned thing to diminish how amazing this conference is going to be. Seriously, look at this lineup. Look at it. Learning from the likes of Scott Jenson, Stephen Hay, Jake Archibald, Lyza Gardner, and Jason Grigsby is too good to be true, and in Amsterdam? And if you haven’t already, watch Jeremy Keith’s epic mobile browser panel from last year, a performance he’s repeating again in May.

Yeah okay I’m officially depressed all over again about missing it.

Seriously though: while I won’t be there, you can be. If you haven’t already, go register for Mobilism 2012 in May. You’ll have one hell of a time.

Musician Megan Thee Stallion visits WIRED to answer her most searched for questions on Google. Where did Megan Thee Stallion get her name? What's her favorite anime? What is Megan Thee Stallion's typical workout routine? What does Megan Thee Stallion call her fans? Answers to these questions and many more await on the WIRED Autocomplete Interview. 'Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words' is now streaming on Prime Video. Megan Thee Stallion's deluxe album 'Megan: Act II" is now available to stream. Director: Justin Wolfson Director of Photography: Kevin Dynia Editor: Daniel Poler Talent: Megan Thee Stallion Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi Associate Producer: Brandon White; Paul Gulyas Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Talent Booker: Jenna Caldwell Camera Operator: Caleb Weiss Sound Mixer: Michael Guggino Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen Additional Editor: Jason Malizia Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds