alt Hacker NewsI didn't expect this.
While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately, I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development.
Don't get me wrong, I think CSS-Tricks is a great resource and it has helped me over the years, but if I was in Geoff's shoes right now I'd be pretty scared.
Look at TailwindCSS for example, they had to reduce the size of their team and ended up joining Shopify to continue surviving. It is hard out here these days.
I don't want to sound too doom and gloom, so I wish Geoff the best of luck and I hope he succeeds.
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The tailwind ones slightly misleading. They laid off their staff, posted on twitter about it, opened a sponsorship program, made approximately $2 million, and THEN joined shopify.
Agree the market is weird right now, but on that specific example - TailwindCSS was built around the notion of reducing keystrokes per style (basically). That's not as useful in the age of AI, of course. CSS-Tricks is about learning what modern CSS can do, which is arguably still useful. An uphill battle, for sure, but I think there's still a place for hand written human content on the web, so I plan to support it even if it's just with my clicks.
>While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately
using the word "ultimately" makes this "Monday night quarterbacking"
It's not a mistake to plan a picnic for a day that turns out to be rainy, even if you got paid to plan the picnic.
It would be a mistake to sell if the seller should have known at the time of the sale that the seller's goals would not be met, but something turning out badly doesn't retroactively make it having been a mistake, it just means it came out badly.
The guys made some money, it's not bad idea, specially knowing nobody cares now tutorials on internet with the era of agentic development. See StackOverflow, it's dead. They did the right thing when selling this.
Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come. It is art, I dont care what people say, and as we all know machines mostly suck at creating art. Anthropic claims to have started training in "taste", but im sure they've realized that cannot be distilled into vector embeddings. Taste is somewhat empheral and is dictated by society and culture that machines can't experience.
In fact, I think it will have more staying power than most, if not all of web dev domains of expertise.
Theres simply no "soul" behind llm crafted websites. There are companies out there, like lovable et al who sell the idea that web design is solved but are still hiring six figure retainer design firms to do their frontend.
I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten.
>"I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development."
I owe Coyier and CSS Tricks a huge debt to getting my career started in the 2000s. It's loss will be tragic. But web development (as we knew it) has gone the way of elevator operators. Dead and gone. Good on the guys for getting their bag while it still had some value.
> I'd be pretty scared.
Scared of what, exactly? It looks to me like the site is primarily static content, so operational costs should be reasonable. He could scale down to just static content, and even if traffic decrease, it is not an existential crisis. Or am I missing something?