What happens when one developer’s tools account for 0.7% of all NPM downloads? In this episode, Andrey Sitnik, creator of PostCSS, Autoprefixer, and Browserlist, and lead engineer at Evil Martians, shares the full story behind the CSS tools that millions of developers depend on every day.
From writing PostCSS in CoffeeScript to architecting its event-based plugin system in version 8, Andrey walks us through the technical decisions, ecosystem politics, and open source philosophy that shaped modern CSS tooling. We also dig into why he intentionally designed Browserlist’s query language to fight browser discrimination, how Tailwind’s donation accidentally forced the PostCSS 8 release, and why he believes the tech industry’s biggest problems aren’t technical at all.
Key Topics:
- The origin story of PostCSS and why Autoprefixer was the gateway
- Plugin architecture from day one: designing for ecosystem growth
- Managing painful major releases across a massive plugin ecosystem
- Why rewriting tools in Rust isn’t always the performance win you think
- Browserlist’s hidden philosophy: shaping developer behavior through language design
- The Tailwind donation that triggered the PostCSS 8 release
- Why the hardest problems in open source are political, not technical
- CSS tooling in the age of LLMs: complexity control over automation
- Social media, values, and what the tech industry lost in the 2010s
- Dark transhumanism: sci-fi book recommendations from a systems thinker
