John Polacek

The latest [Animaxxing](https://github.com/johnpolacek/animaxxing-skills) skills update adds Flip transitions, proximity effects, cleaner interruptions, and one phrase to animate a whole page.

My son Jack just started college, so I built Da Game, a weekly Bears pick sheet for him and the rest of the family.

I made [animaxxing.com](https://animaxxing.com), a crazy demo to show off the GSAP agent skills I've been iterating on.

Streaming services keep recommending the same things, so I built ShowReco to learn what makes your taste different.

In my spare time I've been working on [D20Adventures.com](https://d20adventures.com), training an AI to be an RPG GameMaster, starting with a short basic single character adventure.

Introduction **[< AnimateIn />](https://animate-in.vercel.app/)** a re-usable React component that I’ve made to drop in whenever I want to quickly add some animation effects to my projects

I built [Not Yet News](https://notyetnews.vercel.app) to experiment with creating a website that generates its own content.

I built a [DateRangePicker component](https://date-range-picker-for-shadcn-demo.vercel.app/) for shadcn and open sourced it [on Github](https://github.com/johnpolacek/date-range-picker-for-shadcn).

I built a travel app called [Route Chat](https://routechat-site.vercel.app/) for a fun weekend project

Hey, I won an Internal Hackathon competition at my company, my first ever!

I used the ChatGPT API to create [BotLuck](https://botluck.vercel.app/), a fun themed recipe generator.

Introduction [Hot Sauce](https://hotsauce-starter.netlify.app/), the fresh hot recipe for building better web apps with Remix, Tailwind UI, Firebase, Stripe, Netlify, Sendgrid, and more

I'm new to cooking with cast iron, but excited to try.

My new project [TweenPages](https://tweenpages.vercel.app/) brings the power of the [Greensock Animation Platform](https://greensock.com/) to deliver complex, performant animations to [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/) page transitions.

As a big fan of Next.js, I have created some starters to quickly get new projects up and running with the “React Framework for Production”.

On a [side project](https://colortocolor.com/) that I've been working on awhile back, I added an animated gradient background.

This past Friday was Bolivian Independence Day.

We’ve been growing hot chili peppers in our backyard, picked them, dried them out in our air fryer, turned them into flakes and bottled them up into our own homemade Pola-Pepper Hot Olive Oil.

Was working a bit with setting up some web scraping using [Next.js API routes](https://nextjs.org/docs/api-routes/introduction), so I made a tool for experimenting with web scraping on different urls and parsing the markup with [cheerio](https://cheerio.j…

A bit over 10 years ago, I was a Flash developer.

Halloween is tricky this year so we are doing something different this year.

I’ve been interested in using Next.js and MDX to take a README markdown file in a Github project and transforming it into something interesting.

I used to be a 4-space tabber.

You have a project.

A quick look at how I add dark mode to a Next.js site with code examples.

I’ve re-done my website with content authoring in [MDX](https://mdxjs.com/), powered by [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/).

I like to wear dress shirts with matching socks.

I finished a rebuild of my [Design Systems Playground](https://design-system-playground.netlify.app/) project.

I combined my favorite new React presentation deck awesome sauce ([MDX Deck](https://github.com/jxnblk/mdx-deck)) with my favorite old do-anything-you-can-imagine animation platform ([Greensock](https://greensock.com)) to make an animated version of the M…

The [chicagotechevents.com](https://chicagotechevents.com) website is getting a new design and being rebuilt as a Gatsby site and hosted on Netlify.

I made a basic events list Gatsby Starter, forked from the [Gatsby blog starter](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog).

As one does, I have re-done my Wordpress blog with Gatsby.

I built [this new school/old school CSS/JS thing](https://johnpolacek.github.io/css-in-js-or-css-and-js/).

I attended the [AWS Summit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Over the weekend, I gave a talk titled [Rethinking CSS - Go Functional for Scaling, Performance & Simplicity](https://johnpolacek.github.io/rethinking-css/) at Front End Camp Chicago.

Just published a couple articles, Kiss My Classname, A Counterpoint on Medium, and [Build a Custom CMS for a Serverless Static Site Generator](https://css-tricks.com/build-custom-cms-serverless-static-site-generator/) on CSS Tricks.

When I published [Expressive CSS](https://johnpolacek.github.io/expressive-css/) a few months ago, I knew it would be controversial, and it was (as evidenced in the comments on my [Content & Display Patterns with Expressive CSS](https://johnpolacek.github…

We’re hiring a new developer, and I tried to capture a little of the flavor of what it is I love about working at [Gesture](http://gesture.com), and do it in a hopefully entertaining way.

It was a rainy day in Chicago yesterday, so it was a perfect time to spend inside at Columbia College for UX Camp Chicago.

See my writeup at [johnpolacek.github.io/expressive-css-content-display-patterns](https://johnpolacek.github.io/expressive-css-content-display-patterns/)

If you publish projects to Github, then you may be using a [gh-pages branch](https://help.github.com/articles/creating-project-pages-manually/) to create a nice home for your project with a demo and some documentation.

Expressive CSS follows the atomic approach to writing lightweight, scalable CSS with utility classes that are easy to write and understand.

Had some fun making this [Emoji Bank Robbery Animation](codepen.io/johnpolacek/pen/zvVxWx/) with the [GreenSock Animation Platform](http://greensock.com/) on CodePen.

Simple Grid is my new responsive grid system I am using on all of my websites these days.

Over the last month, I’ve been working on a secret project, to help rebrand my company and launch our new website.

Github projects aren’t just frameworks, libs and plugins.

I just open sourced a game I’ve been working on with my 6-year-old son Jack over Thanksgiving weekend.

Git aliases have been around for a long time, but in case you don’t know about them, they allow you to create shortcuts for just about any git command or sequence of commands that you can think of.

It has now been a full year since I left the agency and client services world to join a startup.

A common question people ask me is how I come up with open source project ideas.