I initially came to the jQuery project while searching for a good solution to power the web applications of a big german client. As I was specifically responsible for building out a lot of the frontend logic and interaction, I quickly found out about Interface, a collection of interface plugins developed by Stefan Petre. I soon realized there was a lot of work involved to make it stable for our environment, so I invested a lot of time into bugfixes and feature stabilization, and later even planned the next generation of Interface, Interface 2 with Stefan. However, it was then that Stefan moved on with founding his own business and ran out of time, so Interface was discontinued.

I would build the first version of an official jQuery interface addition, since I already had quite some experience from working on Interface. He and the jQuery community wanted to have it done in three months for the Ajax Experience conference in Boston, which was nearly impossible after a quick analysis of my workload. I had a day job, and I estimated I would need to work on it 3-4 hours everyday. After some days of consideration, I finally said ‘yes’, and for a three month period woke up every day at 6am to work for 3 hours on jQuery UI and then go to my day job. Now I can say that it was worth it