117: Mitchell Hamilton - Writing CSS-in-JS with Emotion

In this episode of Fullstack Radio, I talked to Mitchell Hamilton about writing CSS in JS with emotion. This is Fullstack Radio episode one seventeen. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Fullstack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wadden. And today, it is my pleasure to be speaking with Mitchell Hamilton who is one of the core maintainers of the emotion CSS in JS library. How's it going, Mitchell? It's going pretty good. Thanks. So I guess for anyone who's, not familiar with you, do you mind just kind of introducing yourself and talking a little bit about, what you do and kind of what your story is? I think, what a lot of people don't realize, which is pretty incredible, is that, you're still in high school, and you're, like, the core maintainer of this incredibly popular CSS and JS library. Yeah. So, I I kind of just started doing some programming stuff, and then I ended up contributing to this library just kind of because oh, I thought this is cool. I didn't start contributing to emotion. I started contributing to this library called Glam, which is by this person named Snelle Pye, who's amazing, seriously awesome. He's on the React core team now, just really great person, to, like, fix a little bug. And then eventually, that got merged into emotion, which happened, and then I started computing a bunch. And yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. So so what kinda, like, drew you to those technologies in in the first place? I know, like, a lot of people, have never used CSS in JS before. Did you just kinda get into React and, like, other people were doing CSS in JS, and it just seemed like stuff worth playing with? Yeah. I, like, kind of started in React, and I, like you know, I tried, like, Sass and, like, a couple different things, but I was like, all of it just seemed really difficult and hard to do. And, you know, at that point, I was, like, still, like, quite new to all this stuff, and I, like, this just seems really difficult, and I want there to be an easier way to do this. Interesting. It's interesting to get that perspective, I guess, from someone who kind of started when some of this technology existed that didn't exist at a time where a lot of people, like, got comfortable with just, like, using Sass and CSS. Because I think there's, like, a lot of controversy around CSS and JS, and people say, oh, you shouldn't be mixing your styles with your components. Everything should be separate. So it's it's always interesting to hear from someone who comes in unbiased, like, what felt more natural. You know? Yeah. Like, a lot of the stuff I do now is just kind of, like, this thing seems confusing and difficult, and I wanna make it easier. And I think that's the perspective that makes the best stuff. Yeah. …