Goodbye, CSS-Tricks

https://geoffgraham.me/goodbye-css-tricks/

by tagawa • 3 years ago

497 135 3 years ago

blamazon4• 3 years ago

Layperson here and I didn't look exhaustively but DigitalOcean seems to only be announcing 11% layoff publicly through investor relations documents[1], IE the legal minimum requirement (sarbanes-oxley etc) which seems a bit cold:

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...

jacobsenscott3• 3 years ago

They probably learned from all the awful tone deaf "we fired a bunch of human resources" blog posts that it is best to just say nothing at all. There's no good way for a bunch of rich executives who are literally incapable of understanding the lives of non-rich people to pretend they care.

DaiPlusPlus• 3 years ago

a bunch of rich executives

Before we grab the pitchforks and guillotines, exactly how "rich" are DigitalOcean's executives?

Hackbraten• 3 years ago

There's no good way for a bunch of rich executives who are literally incapable of understanding the lives of non-rich people to pretend they care.

“It’s one new job your concierge has to find you. What could it cost, two millions?”

exizt88• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate on the minimum legal requirement that you mentioned?

blamazon4• 3 years ago

Sure - again I'm a layperson so take this with a grain of salt but in USA the Sarbanes-Oxley act[1], one of the pieces of fallout from Enron and other corporate scandals, has various requirements for accurate and fulsome reporting of information to investors in mandated financial documents, earnings reports and SEC filings and whatnot, for publicly traded companies. Basically don't do Enron.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes–Oxley_Act

[2] https://www.diligent.com/insights/grc/sox-penalties/

WWLink2• 3 years ago

I think I might have to pursue laying off digital ocean lol. I only pay them $6/mo for my container but they sound like a shitty company now.

Semaphor2• 3 years ago

That’s sad. CSS Tricks has always been an amazing resource, "A Complete Guide to Flexbox" [0] is probably my most referenced article. I really hope a new steward appears.

[0] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

camillomiller• 3 years ago

Just saved it offline.

jamesfinlayson• 3 years ago

Me too! I remember looking at that page endlessly in around 2014 when my then boss decided that flexbox was in wide enough use that we could use it.

The diagrams made it extra useful.

k3liutZu• 3 years ago

I'm still opening this up whenever I have to do anything with flex.

hnbad3• 3 years ago

CSS Tricks was mostly defined by Chris. When he sold it off to Digital Ocean and left, there was a noticeable change in quality. I'm surprised they didn't either shelve it soon after or turn it into a pure marketing vehicle.

azangru3• 3 years ago

When he sold it off to Digital Ocean and left, there was a noticeable change in quality.

Yes, absolutely.

robertwt7• 3 years ago

omg same!! i have visited this page soo many times the first 6 months of my first web dev job.

Really sad to see this, hoping all the best for OP

azangru3• 3 years ago

"A Complete Guide to Flexbox" is probably my most referenced article.

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:

https://web.dev/learn/css/flexbox/

codetrotter2• 3 years ago

But that site is owned by Google :(

Semaphor2• 3 years ago

I find the CSS-Tricks page clearer and more concise. Maybe it’s because I want a reference and not a tutorial.

lol768• 3 years ago

web.dev is a resource for learning how to write code for Chrome.

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.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

That page is much worse than the one from CSS tricks. That Google site is a real site for sore eyes.

toastal• 3 years ago

One of my go-to links has always been “When to use target="_blank"” https://css-tricks.com/use-target_blank/ I'd recently gotten a feed reader set up and CSS-Tricks was one of the first things added as I trust the writers and insights over the years.

cantSpellSober• 3 years ago

The advice about adding a `rel` attr is outdated, modern browsers will do this by default with `_blank`

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4078

GSimon• 3 years ago

CSS-Tricks was and likely still is a great resource for web developers, congrats on your time working there! I once reached out for a position and heard back from Chris Coyier, ultimately I wasn’t quite motivated enough to start but in hindsight sounded like a great opportunity and appreciated the tentative offer

darkhorse13• 3 years ago

Damn, this is pretty sad news. Geoff gave me my first opportunity to write for CSS Tricks back when I was starting out, and he was always a wonderful person to collaborate with.

parasti• 3 years ago

CSS Tricks is my second go-to after MDN for web development knowledge. This is quite sad.

pknerd• 3 years ago

Anyone who have done even a bit of web development have come across CSS Tricks. Wish you good luck!

leeoniya• 3 years ago

hopefully the existing content will remain online/preserved?

superjan• 3 years ago

And he’s been there since CSS-tricks was bought in april ‘22 if I read the blogposts correctly?

eCa• 3 years ago

for eight years!

rav• 3 years ago

It was announced in March 2022, so under a year ago.

"DigitalOcean acquires CSS-Tricks", March 2022 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30684594

kyleyeats• 3 years ago

Sad to see this happen. Geoff, if you're reading this, please let me glom on to your next thing.

skilled• 3 years ago

It's very plausible that this is the first step of migrating CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean Tutorials. They've had enough time to see how well CSS-Tricks traffic is converting into customers, and perhaps there is a strong decline for the past couple of months, but this is entirely my own speculation.

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...

petercooper3• 3 years ago

They've had enough time to see how well CSS-Tricks traffic is converting into customers, and perhaps there is a strong decline for the past couple of months, but this is entirely my own speculation.

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.

logifail• 3 years ago

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

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.

mmegger• 3 years ago

This is not the case here. The teams responsible for DigitalOcean’s tutorials were completely removed in this round of layoffs. Not only is is unlikely CSS Tricks won’t be migrated, there may never be another new tutorial again.

duckmysick• 3 years ago

Does that mean their Write for DOnations program is canned?

justeleblanc2• 3 years ago

The headline makes it sound like the website is shutting down. It's just one guy leaving the staff and saying "goodbye".

sofixa• 3 years ago

Not one guy, the guy who run it and was acquired with it, therefore a shutdown lurks in the future.

bdlowery• 3 years ago

Chris Coyier built css tricks, ran css tricks, and sold css tricks to digital ocean. Geoff was an employee.

justeleblanc2• 3 years ago

I can't predict the future like you seem to be able to, so I'll stand by my assessment of a misleading headline. I can count at least two comments in here that were written under the impression that the website is shutting down for good.

SavageBeast• 3 years ago

This site was always a handy goto for the tricky stuff I don't do every day. It was a really great resource and I'm sad to see it go. Time keeps marching on I suppose.

polytely• 3 years ago

is css-tricks completely archived on the iternet archive? it would be a shame to lose all the knowledge that is contained in there, I'm specifically thinking about the comments under posts because I doubt they would survive any migration to digital oceans tutorial site.

irrational• 3 years ago

Which articles are the most important or influential to save offline before (or, in case) the site disappears?

esskay• 3 years ago

Pretty sure the whole site is already on archive.org

noduerme2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty baffled by this layoff wave. I assumed sites like CSS-Tricks never turned a profit, but were a loss-leader (marketing expenditure) for a company like DigitalOcean. I still have to assume that's some of the best marketing they have. Cutting your marketing's golden goose is less strategic retrenchment, more battlefield amputation.

whstl• 3 years ago

Yeah, I also wonder this is a sign of a change in strategy. DigitalOcean was always developer friendly. Maybe they want to double down and start selling direct to enterprises. (I'm out of the loop, maybe that's already happening)

noduerme2• 3 years ago

It's pretty hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone running a company that's steadily losing relevance, but personally I'd double down on the esoteric shit like CSS-Tricks, and then rebrand, as opposed to chopping off limbs and becoming even more B2B-ish and inaccessible to the next startup looking for a cloud service. What is their moat? Widen whatever they have. Jettisoning the most popular property sure seems like a preliminary to the executives cashing out.

suddenclarity• 3 years ago

I've used their flexbox guide for years and had no idea DigitalOcean was involved. Not sure how good marketing that is. The

petercooper3• 3 years ago

DO only acquired CSS Tricks very recently and have been quite gentle in terms of the branding there (other than in the emails where a lot of DO links have appeared in my experience).

DamnInteresting• 3 years ago

I'm pretty baffled by this layoff wave.

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...

orwin• 3 years ago

I'm new to webdev (literally started learning some front-end two month ago), and this was probably the website who taught me the most, as I kinda knew xml and was already proficient in language ES6-adjascent.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

neom• 3 years ago

Somewhat surprised to see this. When Yancey took over from Mark, he seemed like someone who really understood the developer focus of DO was not only what brought the company to the door of the public markets, but would probably be what kept it growing once it was out there. With Gabe coming in having built Deis, it felt double good.

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.

pard68• 3 years ago

what worked for DO in the early days may not be what will work for it in the future

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.

golol• 3 years ago

Every time I use flexbox I google flexbox and click on the top result.

darekkay• 3 years ago

Every time I use flexbox I google flexbox

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....

BaudouinVH• 3 years ago

who owns the content ? can it be saved/moved/transferred ? how much does it cost per year ? can that amount be crowdfunded ?

nailer• 3 years ago

I think CSS tricks makes money for DO as content marketing. So it will continue to exist.

berkle4455• 3 years ago

Hell of a flip for him. He sold on March 15th, 2022 and was laid-off on Feb 15th, 2023. I sure hope he negotiated his exit payout optimally.

arusahni• 3 years ago

He was an employee of CSS Tricks. The founder did not stay on.

jehb2• 3 years ago

For all of the folks worried about the future of CSS Tricks, this is why licensing matters!

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.

abetusk• 3 years ago

Are the articles on CSS Tricks under a libre license? I can't find any mention of it, though I haven't searched in depth, so it's proprietary?

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].

[0] https://codepen.io/team/css-tricks/pen/mNBrNG#_=_

johannesch• 3 years ago

Seems, the license allows for copying [1]. Maybe worth rescuing them.

[1] https://css-tricks.com/license/

reaperducer2• 3 years ago

this is why licensing matters!

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...

xyzal• 3 years ago

Excuse me, is it really the norm to just cut off people who are being let go, without the opportunity to say goodbye to their former colleagues? In my country it is 2 months notice by law...

reaperducer2• 3 years ago

is it really the norm to just cut off people who are being let go, without the opportunity to say goodbye to their former colleagues?

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.

joshmanders• 3 years ago

Majority of the US is at-will employment, meaning you can be let go or quit at any time with no need to give notice. The only difference is we were conditioned to believe that we as employees to "not burn bridges" must give at least 2 weeks notice, but companies never give notice to you, just wake up one day and you're no longer employed.

WWLink2• 3 years ago

Yes, it's the norm. Typically they'll call a mandatory all-hands meeting (or a mandatory meeting with the laid off people with HR or something), and then when that meeting begins they deactivate those people's access to everything. They announce the layoffs and hand out final paychecks, and have security guards escort people out of the building.

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.

datavirtue• 3 years ago

I just said goodbye to CSS. Long live tailwindcss. I'm done fiddling with the assembly language of markup styling. My revulsion to new UI stuff only prolonged the pain.

sixQuarks• 3 years ago

According to SEMRush, CSS-Tricks has close to 4 million unique visitors per month. DigitalOcean gets 11.5 million unique visitors per month. CSS-Tricks gets almost 40% of the traffic, I doubt they will be shutting it down entirely.

barnitim• 3 years ago

Sad to see folks who were still holding fort for a lost cause.

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.

bigwheeler• 3 years ago

No matter what batshit crazy things I stumble upon while running around the internet today, none of them will be as insane as “Chris Coyier was never passionate about coding”. Being “business minded” and “having passion for coding” is not exclusive. Chris is a living breathing coding resource, and that definitely came before he realized that the blogging and conferences and book writing was going to lead to a multimillion dollar payout. He was in the right place at the right time, and willing to put in an overwhelming amount of effort. But it all started with the passion.

zeptonaut22• 3 years ago

Man, this sucks. CSS-Tricks has long been one of the best resources on the web for doing CSS right and the quality of their writing and research is outstanding.

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.

trynewideas3• 3 years ago

I got recruited for DO's technical writing team a few years back but passed because I was happy in the role I had at the time. Feels like a dodged bullet.

butz• 3 years ago

Everyone from original CSS-Tricks team should get back together and build a new website. "Tricky-CSS" maybe? Green-fielding a new site is so much more interesting then trying to keep legacy site and its content working. Sad, that we still do not have any decent method to support such sites, that saves from many headaches in daily job.

itsuka• 3 years ago

Over the past couple of years, I have come across numerous articles on CSS-Tricks that discuss other related technologies such as (semantic) HTML, SVG, Canvas, WebGL, UI libraries (e.g. Tailwind), and tools like Saas and PostCSS. So I think when starting a green-field project, it may be more appropriate to use a broader term like "style" or "look", than specifically using the keyword "CSS" (just an idea).

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.

KomoD• 3 years ago

Ok so... it's not shutdown?

cdman• 3 years ago

Who knows what the future holds, so I archived css-tricks.com and uploaded it to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/misc-crawls-warc-0002

Goodbye, CSS-Tricks

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