In this episode, I'm chatting with Rachel Andrew - an authority on CSS Grid Layout, the new specification that is redefining how we approach layout for the web. We'll cover what you need to know to get started with CSS Grid and how this will change the way you think about the web design grid.

Meet Rachel Andrew
Rachel Andrew is a front and back-end web developer, author and speaker. Her books include the recent Get Ready for CSS Grid Layout and she is a regular contributor to a number of publications both on and offline. Rachel is co-founder of the CMS Perch, a Google Developer Expert and an Invited Expert to the CSS Working Group. She writes about business and technology on her own site at rachelandrew.co.uk.

Show Notes
Rachel's website:  https://rachelandrew.co.uk/
Grid by Example:  http://gridbyexample.com/
The CSS Layout Workshop:  https://thecssworkshop.com/
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/rachelandrew
Codepen:  http://codepen.io/rachelandrew/
Perch CMS:  https://grabaperch.com/

Transcript
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JackieHey everybody. This is Jackie with another episode of Rethink.fm for you. Today, I have a very special guest, Rachel Andrew, who many of you may have heard is an expert in the new CSS Grid and is also a co-founder of Perch, which is a simple CMS application. Hi Rachel.

RachelHi, good to be here.

JackieThanks for joining me. If I've left anything out and for anybody who doesn't know you, if you want to introduce yourself that would be awesome.

RachelSure. Yes, I'm Rachel. I've been a web developer for, well, a very long time. I've been running my own business since 2001 as a developer and now, as mentioned, what we mainly do is Perch CMS. That's our product. I'm an Invited Expert to the W3C CSS Working Group, so my interest in CSS and the open web goes back a long way. I'm just back from Tokyo where I was at the CSS Working Group meeting talking about all things CSS. That's really what I do. It's mainly Perch, and then quite a bit of speaking and writing about CSS.

JackieStarting off with the CSS Grid, how did you get involved with that and what role have you played?

RachelI just spotted it really. In fact, it all started, I was speaking at a conference and I can't remember what about. There was workshops as part of the conference. Bert Bos, from the W3C, was doing a workshop in French, my French isn't great, but he was doing a workshop in French and showing some kind of experimental layout stuff. One of those things was a forerunner to CSS Grid. I saw this and thought, this is something we want. Then I realized that actually there was a spec had come through from Microsoft, and there was this early version of the Grid spec was developed by a team at Microsoft. It was implemented into IE10. I got my hands on that and I started building things and saying, "Yeah. This is a really good thing. This is something we want."

Really it just started from there, that I was very keen to promote it and to write about it and to get people talking about it, to make sure that it was something that got implemented into other browsers and didn't just end up being something that ... Some sort of IE experiment. That's really where it all came from is I was just very keen ... I'm very aware of the fact that web developers have got quite a lot of power in terms of what ends up in browsers, if we talk and write about it and make some noise. I just wanted to start doing that, to champion this spec that I thought really was interesting and was going to solve a lot of problems.

JackieCSS Grid had its beginnings with Internet Explorer?