Marc Grabanski

Marc Grabanski is a Minneapolis-based developer and entrepreneur best known as the founder and CEO of Frontend Masters, the bootstrapped developer-training platform that rebranded as Master.dev in June 2026. Before that he created the jQuery UI Datepicker, one of the most widely used UI widgets of the jQuery era.

Grabanski spent his twenties as a front-end developer, writing more than 200 blog posts, speaking at over 60 conferences and consulting for large companies. He has said that four skills from that decade (deep technical ability, community building, writing and an early grasp of recurring revenue) became the foundation of the business he built in his thirties. His own site gives 2014 as Frontend Masters' founding year, and it started as a largely solo operation with contractors, recording in-depth workshops taught by well-known instructors from companies like Google, Netflix and Microsoft.

Frontend Masters stayed fully bootstrapped. Grabanski has said on podcasts that venture money was never a realistic fit for an intermediate-to-advanced developer audience, so the company grew on subscriptions instead. It moved from a suburban strip-mall office to downtown Minneapolis, built a full team and, by his account, reached more than 10,000 paying customers and a newsletter audience of over 500,000 developers. In 2024 it rebuilt its course player, added enterprise SSO and launched the Frontend to Fullstack newsletter.

On June 16, 2026, Grabanski announced that Frontend Masters had become Master.dev, explaining that members kept telling the company its name no longer matched a catalog that now spanned backend languages, databases, cloud infrastructure and AI coding courses. He still writes the site's copy and newsletters himself.

Outside work Grabanski writes publicly about health and fitness, documenting the routines that took him to the best shape of his life around 40. He is a strong example of a developer who turned an audience and teaching network into a durable, profitable education company without outside investors.