My name is Mat Marquis, and I believe in the web.
If it can be done on the web, it can be made fast, accessible, flexible, resilient, and maintainable — it can work for everyone.
My goal is to ensure that your content can reach any user in any browsing context, regardless of the size of their screen, the speed of their internet connection, the age of their device, or the combination of browsers and assistive technologies they use to experience the web.
If you have the same goal, you and I should chat.
For twenty years I’ve helped organizations reach more users than they ever thought possible.
I make websites fast.
I’ve worked with organizations large and small to not just to find and fix their front-end performance pain points, but to help establish workflows, development skills, and support systems that allow those improvements to persist long after I’m gone.
I make websites resilient.
Working with the medium — designing in the browser, rapid prototyping, and building with progressive enhancement in mind every step of the way — is the surest way to build a flexible, durable, and maintainable website.
I make websites accessible.
I’ve helped clients track down and remediate their trickiest accessibility issues and build internal teams that prioritize accessibility both technically and culturally — and in the process helped them develop more parsable, findable websites.
I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m here to share what I’ve learned. I'm a frequent contributor to publications like Smashing Magazine, Piccali.li, and CSS-Tricks, a two-time A Book Apart author, I’ve spoken at conferences like Smashing, Beyond Tellerand, and An Event Apart, and I've written multiple courses for the Google Chrome team’s web.dev learning platform.
Most recently I wrote JavaScript for Everyone, a course for anyone that wants to really understand JavaScript’s inner workings — to learn why it works the way it does, why sometimes things that feel like they should work don’t, and why things that feel like they shouldn’t work sometimes do.
I’m really proud of it, I don’t mind saying.
A JavaScript course paced for both aspiring and adept developers, and in-depth enough for anyone looking to dig deeper into JavaScript’s most arcane inner workings. Head over to Piccalil.li to learn more — or take a behind-the-scenes look at how it all came together in the JavaScript for Everyone newsletter archive.
Check out the courseI’ve helped build the platform.
I’m incredibly fortunate to have played a small part in the history of Responsive Web Design, having been involved in the earliest discussions of the responsive Boston Globe project, and going on to chair the web standards group responsible for adding “responsive image” features to the web platform.
I’ve been a member of the jQuery Team, editor of the HTML Specification, two-time A Book Apart author, speaker at conferences like An Event Apart, Smashing Conference, and Beyond Tellerand, and authored the Google Chrome team’s official guidance on how JavaScript should be written and images should be handled on the web.
I’ve even been in a movie — What Comes Next is the Future (2016) — to discuss the role I played in web standards and how I hoped to change them. I’ve got an IMDB page and everything!
Just—… just ignore the other thing on there.
Long story.