Masonry/Identity

It’s October. I am standing in the beer line at Brooklyn Beta. Around my neck hangs my conference badge. Under my name, my description explains the reasoning why I belong there, and why my acquaintance is possibly worth making. Along with boastful exaggerations of my coding prowess, it details that I developed Masonry. I recognize this snippet as my go-to factoid when introducing myself.

“Ever heard of jQuery Masonry? Yeah, I made that.”

True to the badge description, it honestly is the reason why I am there. Brooklyn Beta Conference co-organizer Cameron Koczon runs Gimme Bar. As Gimme Bar makes use of Masonry, Cameron was kind enough to invite me to the conference.

Gimme Bar uses Masonry. Pinterest uses (their own version of) Masonry. Delicious uses Masonry.

With these high-visibility web properties making use of my work, it’s now a part of my identity that I can share with people outside of the web profession. To my wife, Masonry was long regarded as the mysterious ‘boxes” project that her beau was constantly tinkering with. No longer. Now that she’s a Pinterest user, Masonry layouts are a familiar concept to her.


It is at this time in Brooklyn, I realize that Masonry has out-grown my authorship. It shares a place among other simple JavaScript resources now commonplace across the web, like Lightbox or FancyZoom. It’s another tool web developers have at the ready. Masonry belongs to everyone.


In the spirit of democratizing Masonry, I have developed Vanilla Masonry. Vanilla Masonry is the pure-JavaScript flavor of Masonry. It shares the majority of features with it’s jQuery counterpart, all without the filesize bloat of a full-scale library. From it’s foundation-level base, you can develop a custom fork to suit your own motives, as some have considered. Now Masonry can go anywhere.


I've been working on Masonry for about as long as I've known I wanted to be working in the web, nearly three years now. Today marks two years since the version 1.0 release of jQuery Masonry. I'd like to think that after all this time, all the hours spent coding, across three versions, I can dust off my hands and close the book on Masonry. But as I consider it's place, I see it's an integral part of who I am as a developer. As I grow in my profession, so does the project. So in a way, I hope Masonry never is completed.