Goodbye, CSS-Tricks
geoffgraham.me
geoffgraham.me
[0]: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/
The diagrams made it extra useful.
Yes, absolutely.
Really sad to see this, hoping all the best for OP
I'll just put it out there that web.dev is becoming a more and more awesome resource to learn web technologies. Their page on flexbox is very detailed:
They do, which I think is totally fine: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
There are entire articles about Chrome-only "standards" with barely a footnote about how controversial the standards are and that e.g. Mozilla considers them harmful on their standards positions site: https://web.dev/signed-exchanges/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ha00dSGKmjoEh2mRiG8FIA5s...
web.dev itself should be considered harmful. It is not impartial, and does not equip web developers with a good understanding of what is currently supported in a range of modern rendering/JS engines in 2023. A rendering engine monoculture is a bad thing for everyone and that's what resources like this one are encouraging.
Unfortunately there is too much meat on the bone and commercial interests would never cede that power to a community effort like Linux.
Browsers could still be dime a dozen but with a shared engine core we could have results instead of bickering over standards and implementation differences.
Linux pretty much never breaks userspace.
Instead what you are seeing is the exact problem of overriding commercial interests and no restraint on individual parties because they all have their own little fiefdom to rule over.
A single browser engine wouldn't be the problem, it would be a great boon in many ways. The problem has been and remains that there is too much commercial bullshit getting pushed down into the browser engine rather than being matters of porcelain exactly because there is so much resistance to a fully FLOSS core.
Apple and Google are both to blame here for different reasons. Apple wants browser engines to mostly suck, especially on iOS. Google wants browser engines to be good but not be capable of restricting telemetry or blocking adverts.
However neither of those concerns require having their own engine, proof being that they were both able to share Webkit for a period of time.
Mozilla isn't blameless in this. They push the whole standardisation angle in a desperate plea for relevance while wasting resources on non-browser projects. Their efforts to "protect standardisation" cost us things like WebSQL, created a massive rift during the HTML5 and XHTML years and resulted in relentless addition of complexity.
I'm not saying they haven't done good, if anything I think Mozilla generally speaking has done the most good but they too have contributed to the clusterfuck.
Ironically MS has done very little wrong since the IE10 days, they basically threw in the towel and just use Blink now which is good (minus Google doing shitty things with it).
If we could end up in a place where Blink is developed in a similar way to Linux that -would- be good. It's generally the most advanced engine would be easiest to adapt the Webkit improvements that Safari has made and is already used in many other browser porcelains.
I don't see a way there yet but my point isn't that a path exists but that an end point potentially exists.
Google Bad, etc is true but if that could be fixed a mono-engine situation would be drastically better overall. Waste less time, less incompatibility problems, better web for everyone. (which is why Apple would never be on board but whatever).
With only a single implementation there are risks, like everyone gets owned by the same bug or oversight. In nature mono crops can be devastated by a single virus or invasive species.
I prefer a world where we can have WebSQL over a world where it's killed because Mozilla says that we need to build a new implementation of SQLite just because standardisation.
Obviously lots of people feel differently but my opinion is that standards don't really matter that much when every browser chooses to implement each standard slightly differently.
There's room for disagreement about what the future of the web should look like. A ton of people are incredibly loud about not wanting the web to grow, have opinions that the existing organic growth is all bad and horrible & the worst thig that's happened to computing. I happen to disagree, but I recognize that desire, and I think factoring in the tension here is important.
What's immensely important to me in talking about a site like web.dev is recognizing what is represented now. If there were other progressive browsers that were interested in trying & expanding, your caution would perhaps be deserved. Web.dev could be an unfair mono-culture. But right now there's no second peer that actually wants to expand the web. So web.dev is fine, represents the only voice of hope and possibility the world wide web has. No one else is playing that game, alas.
There are definitely WebExtensions that give you what you want. The extensibility of the user agent is a supreme superpower that is almost entirely absent in the rest of computing.
They do exist for Firefox.
It is something that only Google could love because they can hire 1000 people to build a Rube Goldberg machine to do the most trivial things.
Push notifications? No thanks. We all get too much spam. It’s bad enough that it spams you with a spamification popup even if you say ‘Spam? No thanks!’
That whole service worker thing is insane, particularly considering there is no completely reliable storage service for the front end. The more you know about http the more you know there are edge cases that can and will bite you. Back in the late 1990s there were systems like Netscape Netcaster that worked with the caching mechanism built into the browser and despite having complete access to the browser code, Google went ahead anyway and built a Rube Goldberg machine that makes you build a Rube Goldberg machine if you want to try to build an application that tries to work offline.
Then when users say ‘No Thanks!’ and the industry says ‘No Thanks!’ the monopolist Google says they are being oppressed.
I spent most of the past decade producing (as a writer, editor, and community manager) tutorial and other technical content for a large software company. Because the company I worked for values open source principles, every single article I ever wrote for them was licensed under CC BY-SA or a similar license. If the sites I worked on disappeared tomorrow, I would be free to republish them on a new home on the web, and more importantly, to continue to keep them up to date. I don't work there any more, and it's such a relief not to have to worry about a lawsuit from a former employer just to be able to reuse my own work.
For the record, their code on CodePen looks to be MIT licensed (though CodePen requires a login). For example, Infinite Burger is MIT licensed [0].
Yes. And it's also why any resource you use more than once should be submitted to archive.org — just in case!
https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://css-tric...
Also, in their Q4 Report [0] they are using this wording,
"Added thousands of tutorials, guides and educational content through the acquisition of CSS-Tricks and JournalDev."
Back when DO acquired Scotch.io, they only migrated the best / most popular tutorials, and I wouldn't be surprised this is the fate for CSS-Tricks also. I think there are thousands of published pages on CSS-Tricks, many of which already overlap with what DO has written over the years, and on top of that - it would involve some serious work to migrate everything.
Again, these are just my thoughts on it, but why else would they just kick Geoff off the team like that?
[0]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230215005423/en/Dig...
You might be right, but I'd hope they weren't looking at it that way. Content sites like that are a long play. I've encountered lots of people who seem to have extra trust for DigitalOcean because of their (admittedly good) content and while they might not have directly "converted" from a specific article, it has hugely helped DO's brand. A site like CSS Tricks is so valuable in the long term rather than for short term conversions.
Umm, I am a customer of DigitalOcean, have several production workloads with them, yet until reading this article today I had no idea they had "content" of this type.
That said, DO is pretty well known in developer circles for its thousands of tutorials (less so for its ownership of CSS Tricks which is very recent) but that is certainly not universal.
I sent them emails asking for updates 4days ago and yesterday, no response.
I've mostly given up now, but I still kind of hold out hope, that $300 payout would've changed this Nigerian's life...even if only for just a while
https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/ https://lwn.net/op/AuthorGuide.lwn
The FOSSjobs site has a category for editors/writers too, not all of them seem to be related to the category though.
There is good evidence that layoffs conform to social contagion.[1] In other words, layoffs are trendy right now.
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la...
Yes, Chris leaving caused more damage to CSS Tricks than Geoff being laid off. But Geoff being laid off is the killing blow to what CSS Tricks used to be. I'm not the first person to say this: https://zellwk.com/blog/spirit-of-css-tricks/
> Channel Futures reached out to DigitalOcean for insight into any changes on the channel side but the company only pointed us to its Securities and Exchange Filing[2] announcing the restructuring. [3]
Like the McSweeney's satire [4] but without even a blog post.
[1] https://investors.digitalocean.com/news/news-details/2023/Di...
[2] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001582961/1cb092a...
[3] https://www.channelfutures.com/cloud-2/cloud-layoffs-job-cut...
[4] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
Before we grab the pitchforks and guillotines, exactly how "rich" are DigitalOcean's executives?
They're often not saying who is being laid off. A bunch of engineers? Sales & marketing? I doubt that any of these companies (besides Amazon) even employ significant amount of low-wage staff, they get those via a staffing agency to avoid benefits and public responsibility for mistreatment.
I can guarantee you no tech writer has made $1 million in salary or compensation in two years.
I assume DO didn't have 11% technical writers. These numbers are hard to judge if you don't know who got laid off.
DO had invested a lot over the last few years into expanding its technical content library as a SEO strategy. They seem to have completely backed out of that investment.
Coyier's $4M exit was nice, sure. Built on 15 years of work, though, alongside his primary job being a developer/designer and CodePen founder who also wrote, not as a full-time writer.
Still standing by my guarantee that no technical writer here got north of $1M of salary or compensation for two years of work. Not even close. If any got north of $500k they're both role models and were probably overpaid for the market.
1: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bphogan_hey-all-a-whole-bunch...
[1] https://s27.q4cdn.com/619704647/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
Jokes aside, I was surprised to learn that there are 24 million millionaires in the U.S. that's more than 10% the working-age population. It's still a minority of course, and probably most of them are people who saved enough throughout their whole career (while here we were talking about people who made multiple millions every year), but still I found it interesting
If you own your house, you can easily be a "millionaire" based on the total cost of ownership but that doesn't mean you have anywhere near the disposable income or institutional power as an exec making upwards of 5 million dollars per year.
Net worth is assets minus liabilities.
If you had no savings or investments and a $100,000 house with a $99,000 mortgage your net worth would be $1,000, not a million dollars.
Do they count stocks which are held but not cashed out and do they count houses which are subject to mortgages?
If no, then that is a truly impressive number, I think even Switzerland does not come close by percentage.
Even the median wealth in the USA is 94k per adult, vs 26k for China and Europe.
Not only is the USA ahead of the game by a ridiculous amount, they’re making progress faster.
And when I travelled there and to other rich countries, all this was confirmed again; in the material weatlh, but also culturally.
The numbers are in, and I think we can call a winner in the economic systems contest.
As far as I remember, the American median salary was closer to 50k, Germany close to 45, France close to 40k. Don't have the numbers on hand, but off the top of my head.
There are no salary numbers in your report about wealth, which is why I cited those from memory. If you want a source you can look it up, it'll change slightly depending on how you measure them (for example adjusting for PPP). Either way the broad point is that the salary numbers paint the same picture as the wealth numbers you omitted: People aren't dirt poor in Europe and walking on streets of gold in the U.S.
You can compare Spain and Germany to NY and CA, and Mississippi to Romania, and the same pattern holds true.
This is all borne out if you actually go and live in these places for a month or so. Life in the States is hugely comfortable and luxurious compared to everywhere else.
Your thesis is that there is a gigantic gulf between the U.S and the next closest country and that no one else on earth comes even close, I can give you entire countries which are of similar levels of wealth, and many countries with less inequality and higher median wealth (20 in fact).
I've lived and worked all over Europe and in the states, for years, it never struck me that life in the U.S was any more luxurious than in a lot of other European countries.
Your second point does not reflect my experience. The average American simply has more and better stuff and a nicer house.
Edit: my point is not that Europe is some sort of hellhole and that the States have no problems. I’m saying this: the common focus is on GDP per capita or even salaries, but more significant than that is wealth per capita, and the US has the most by a very large margin
To get a better feeling for how things look in terms of the actual humans involved, a median isn't bad, or a percentile based distribution, or you can e.g. cut off the top and bottom 10 or 20% and then do some sort of analysis based on that.
'Mean net worth' is only useful for a very specific set of situations - it's also why you often get charities talking about 'look how tiny the net worth here is' but that includes people with debt having negative net worth, which drags the numbers downwards in just as distortionary a way as the richest people in the US are dragging the numbers you're using upwards.
Of course, it makes great propaganda for the charities, and they're not -strictly- lying - and Credit Suisse aren't lying at all, they're presenting total wealth by country and providing the 'per person' number to help gauge that information, not for use as remotely representitive.
However if you keep scrolling down the document, you'll find Table 2 provides the median - and lo and behold because the mean for the US is skewed by the small (compared to total population) number of extremely rich people, the US in No. 18 by median wealth as opposed to No. 2 by mean.
Statistics are great fun but you do have to be careful to apply the right -sort- of statistics for the purpose you have in mind.
“It’s one new job your concierge has to find you. What could it cost, two millions?”
One penalty involved is personal criminal liability for executives - for certain executive roles, if they unknowingly make a serious mistake, they face a $1 million dollar fine and up to 10 years in prison, and if they knowingly make a serious mistake, it's $5 million and 20 years. [2]
Hence, executives have a strong motivation to ensure nothing is misrepresented, left out, or wrong in their investor relations documents.
It varies from company to company, and often based on your relationship with your boss and coworkers, or just how the higher managers want to handle things.
In my country
There are 200+ countries, and 200+ ways of doing things. Not everywhere is like home.
For people working from home, depends on the company - most will send a message to the laid off person's personal email and immediately lock the person out. If they don't have a personal email on record they'll just lock them out and send a letter in the mail or something.
Yep, pretty shitty behavior. They do it to keep people from retaliating or organizing a protest or starting drama or whatever.
To me the really weird thing is the way people talk so positively about getting fired on linkedin.
If the license at https://css-tricks.com/license/ is valid, anyone can scrape and rebuild a FOSS version of CSS-Tricks, ideally with a sustainable funding model to support its ongoing development. However, without an editor like Geoff, I am unsure whether it would maintain the same level of quality as CSS-Tricks.
That said, what worked for DO in the early days may not be what will work for it in the future. The main thing we banked on in the early days of DigitalOcean was the explosion of web SWE as a relatively new concentration, remember, we hit our stride in the angular vs ember days, docker was still getting it's footing, coding bootcamps where the hottest new thing. Tutorials, hackathons, OSS made a lot of sense as a go to market for hyper growth. We often talked about the business as b2c not b2b. That's the DO that grew up on HN (something I was personally eternally grateful for). The market has shifted a lot over the past 10 years, the abstractions are way more defined, and web engineering just isn't what it was. It's been a long long long time since I've talked to anyone at DO, but I can can guess that market conditions have changed drastically and continuing a growth push just looks very different from the DigitalOcean we knew when I was selling it. I think Yancey is a smart guy though, and I think he cares about developers, so I still believe in them figuring it out.
Still sad to see a move like this, it feels disrespectful, not just to Geoff, but to the community he and Chris built.
Last year I made the pitch at my previous employer to migrate to DO. It made sense, the company was almost entirely on VMs and DO has much better support and offerings for VMs. I was the manager of Operations. I only needed my CIO to approve. The response was "they're amateur, we need Azure of AWS."
I could see a bigger DO changing their image as their main customer goes from in the trenches to in the boardroom.
Bad on DO for going through with this acquisition and then lopping off its head: it's a net negative contribution to the web.
Geoff, thank you for your contributions.
"DigitalOcean acquires CSS-Tricks", March 2022 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30684594
So long and thanks for all the fish.
The CSS Tricks post is excellent to learn flexbox. If you instead want a quick overview about all the properties, you can check out my (printable) flexbox cheat sheet [1]. Someone even built a VSCode extension around it [2].
[1] https://darekkay.com/flexbox-cheatsheet/
[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dzhavat....
Business minded person like Chris Coyier dropped the thing long ago, made $4million of a blog and left.
Chris was never passionate about coding. It was all setup to make money.