Latest Posts (4 found)
Andy Bell 3 weeks ago

Wrapping up 2025 (sort of)

I’m doing my annual wrap up post early this year because I’m really tired and want to completely switch off for a couple of weeks. It’s time to spend some quality time with my lovely family. This isn’t my usual style of wrap-up. Consider this wrap up more of a call to action than a retrospective. Let’s get stuck in. We’ve watched our western legacy media and politicians alike say, “nothing to see here” while Palestinians have been massacred by Israel. In fact, our government in the UK has persecuted supporters of Palestinian rights, some of which are still on hunger strike while they are held on remand, awaiting trial. This is on top of the government’s complicity in genocide of course. We’ve also seen (only if you look) a horrifying genocide in Sudan that continues to decimate the population. We’ve watched our pathetic politicians and again, legacy media give ground to the far right and thin-skinned Billionaires . There’s been ample opportunities to change that direction and it’s not been taken. Personal, party affiliation and corporate interests are prioritised, as always. The mainstream political parties will not get us out of this. Give money and support to actual progressive parties. In the UK, the only valid choice is the Green Party as I see it. If we don’t fight back in 2026 — regardless of your political party affiliation — we’re fucked. Sports team politics helps only the rich and there are more of us than them. Never forget that and stop being comfortable with the status quo. There are more of us than them. AI — more accurately Large Language Models (LLMs) — are a disaster. Don’t come at me with your mealy-mouthed “but I really enjoy it.” Grow up and start being serious. Over a trillion USD has been pumped into this technology that works only some of the time and literally drives people to the point of suicide . Here, I collected some awful things throughout the year . Sorry in advance for making you furious. You’d think that people in the tech industry are smart and can see these problems and I wish I could agree. Instead we see sycophantic celebrations of this technology and continuing false claims that “this is the future” and “this is a game changer”. I agree in part about the future — you can’t put the LLM toothpaste back in the tube — but the bubble is not going to stay inflated. It can’t possibly do that, and you’ll see that fact if you just listen to people who know what they are talking about . We have to act against this technology to reduce the damage in the long term. It is our responsibility . It’s easy to call yourself an engineer but now, it’s time to actually be an engineer and act on your ethical responsibilities. Here’s what I’m asking people to do to take the “shine” off LLMs in the tech industry: Right now, it’s not a fair fight, especially as the vast majority of tech media appears to be “on side” with these AI companies. We have to change that as a collective unit. Support smaller, independent tech media and above all else, let’s organise . There’s been a bit of a culture of “I don’t need to bother doing that because of AI” and let me tell you — from someone who has been doing this stuff for nearly 20 years — that is a dangerous position to put yourself in. No single technology has surpassed the need for personal development and genuine human intelligence. You should always be getting incrementally better at what you do. Now, what I am not saying is that you should be doing work work out of hours. You are not paid enough and frankly, the industry does not value you enough. Value yourself by investing your time in skills that make you happy and fulfilled . Here’s some ideas: I must be clear here too. When I say improve your skills, I’m not saying you have to be designing and coding. We are humans and we have vast levels of intelligence and creativity. Our purpose is much more than coding. Embrace that in whatever form you want . Embrace art . By doing this, you’re bringing back your ability to be curious, your ability to be creative and your ability to improve. It’ll do wonders for the understandable feeling of helpfulness too. Don’t fall into the trap of chasing metrics. Write because you want to write. Paint because you want to paint. Create because you want to create. Let the art fulfil you . Don’t let likes, follows and page views ruin that for you. Fight the urge to turn personal projects into a money making and/or clout chasing venture. You should definitely do more designing, coding and learning to improve your professional skills, but it is your boss’s responsibility to give you the time and resources to improve those. If you are a boss reading this who doesn’t do that: you are wrong and your staff will leave unless you change that. “AI” won’t save you here. I hope you have a restful holiday period. I want to thank everyone who has supported Piccalilli , Set Studio and my work this year. It means everything to me and next year, expect to see a lot more. I’ve written more about that in the Piccalilli year in review . It’s rosier, I promise. Thank you to everyone that responded to my post on how hard this year has been too. I’m delighted to say that our Black Friday sales shot up and we’ve got some really good client work to get stuck into next year. To everyone I spoke to who’s also had a really hard year, I truly hope things have picked up for you too. Let’s all help and support each other in 2026, onwards. Please make sure you rest up and spend time with the people you love and the people that make you happy. I know that’s what I’m going to be doing. I’ve got a couple of Professional Obligations™ to do, then clocking off now for the year to enjoy the holidays with my family. Although I’m angry at the industry and the global situation, I feel like I’m in a much better headspace than I thought I would be in at this point. There have been lots of positives throughout the year, especially with Piccalilli . Next year will be very different for me. I want to do more making . I design so little and write so little code now and I’m starting to feel really rusty. That changes in 2026. Less spreadsheets and more CSS. I’m also going on a speaking hiatus with minimal conference attendance. The conference circuit won’t miss yet another white guy. I’ve done way too much this year, so a year off will do me good. Anyway, let’s all come back in 2026 refreshed and take these motherfuckers down . Constantly and consistently post when it goes wrong. This could be on your blog or social media. Post anyway . When people (especially people who are paid to peddle this technology) post claims: challenge them to provide evidence and prove their claims. It might sound harsh, but it’s long overdue that “thought leaders” in our industry are held to account for the effects of their influence. Create a culture of shame for AI boosting. Never forgive and especially never forget those who have boosted and vocally supported this technology . Unless there are consequences, we’ll continue to have hype cycles like crypto, NFTs and now, LLMs. We have the power to break the cycle of cycles in our vast numbers. Stop paying for AI services. Make yourself, and maintain a personal website Make random stuff that makes you happy Find a creative outlet that you really enjoy Find other people’s creative outlets then celebrate and enjoy with them Spend less time scrolling timelines and chasing metrics. Spend more time embracing the things that you love Participate in smaller communities that bring you joy and support. Delete your Twitter account while you’re at it

ai AI Politics media Media css CSS
0 views
Andy Bell 1 months ago

It’s been a very hard year

Unlike a lot of places in tech, my company, Set Studio / Piccalilli has no outside funding. Bootstrapped is what the LinkedIn people say, I think. It’s been a hard year this year. A very hard year. I think a naive person would blame it all on the seemingly industry-wide attitude of “AI can just do this for us”. While that certainly hasn’t helped — as I see it — it’s been a hard year because of a combination of limping economies, tariffs, even more political instability and a severe cost of living crisis. It’s been a very similar year to 2020, in my opinion. Why am I writing this? All of the above has had a really negative effect on us this year. Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that. Our reputation is everything, so being associated with that technology as it increasingly shows us what it really is, would be a terrible move for the long term. I wouldn’t personally be able to sleep knowing I’ve contributed to all of that, too. What we do really well is produce websites and design systems that actually work for and with people. We also share our knowledge and experience via tonnes of free content on Piccalilli , funded by premium courses to keep the lights on. We don’t pepper our content with annoying adverts for companies you have no interest in. I’ve spoken about my dream for us to run Piccalilli full time and heck, that may still happen. For that to happen though, we really needed this Black Friday period to do as well, if not better, as it did last year. So far, that’s not happening unfortunately, but there’s still time. I get it, money is so tight this year and companies are seemingly not investing in staff with training budgets quite like they did. We actually tried to stem that a bit by trialing a community funding model earlier in the year that I outlined in ‌I’m getting fed up of making the rich, richer and we even started publishing some stuff . It went down incredibly well, but when push came to shove, we fell way short in terms of funding support. Like I say, we’re not swimming in investor money, so without the support on Open Collective , as much as it hurt, we had to pull the plug. It’s a real shame — that would have been incredible — but again, I get it , money is tight . This isn’t a woe is me post; that’s not how I roll. This is a post to give some context for what I’m going to ask next and how I’m trying to navigate the tough times. I’m asking folks to help us so we can try to help everyone, whether that’s with web projects that actually work for people or continuing to produce extremely high quality education material. Here’s some ways you can do it. You’ll see messaging like “this is the most important time of year for us” and it’s extremely true. To break the fourth wall slightly, people buying courses at full price is a lot rarer than you might think. So often, discount events are what keeps the lights on. We’ve launched two courses this year — JavaScript for Everyone and Mindful Design — that sit alongside my course, Complete CSS , which we launched last year. I know you’ve probably been burned by shit courses in the past, but these three courses are far from that. I promise. I can’t stress enough how much Mat (JavaScript for Everyone) and Scott (Mindful Design) have put in to these courses this year. These two are elite level individuals with incredible reputations and they’ve shared a seemingly impossible amount of extremely high quality knowledge in their courses. I would definitely recommend giving them your time and support because they really will transform you for the better. For bosses reading this, all three courses will pay themselves back ten-fold — especially when you take advantage of bulk discounts — trust me. So many of you have purchased courses already and I’m forever thankful for that. I can’t stand the term “social proof” but it works. People might be on the fence about grabbing a course, and seeing one of their peers talk about how good it was can be the difference. You might think it’s not worth posting about the courses on social media but people do see it , especially on platforms like Bluesky with their custom feeds. We see it too! Testimonials are always welcome because we can pop those on the course marketing pages, just like on mine . In terms of sharing the studio, if you think we’re cool, post about it! It’s all about eyes and nice words. We’ll do the rest. We’re really good at what we do ! I know every studio/agency says this, but we’re different. We’re actually different. We’re not going to charge you through the nose for substandard work — only deploying a fraction of our team, like a lot of agencies do. I set this studio up to be the antithesis of the way these — and I’ll say it out loud — charlatans operate. Our whole focus is becoming your partners so you can do the — y’know — running of your business/organisation and we take the load off your shoulders. We’re hyper efficient and we fully own projects because they’re way above your normal duties. We get that. In fact, the most efficient way to get the most out of a studio like ours is to do exactly that. I know “numbers goes up” is really important and yes, numbers definitely go up when we work with you. We do that without exploiting your users and customers too. There’s no deceptive patterns coming from us. We instead put everything into branding, messaging, content architecture and making everything extremely fast and accessible. That’s what makes the numbers go up for you. We’re incredibly fairly priced too. We’re not in the business of charging ridiculous fees for our work. We’re only a small team, so our overheads are nothing compared to a lot of agencies. We carry your budgets a long way for you and genuinely give you more bang for your buck with an equitable pricing model. We’ve got availability starting from the new year because starting projects in December is never the ideal way to do things. Getting those projects planned and ready to go is a good idea in December though, so get in touch ! I’m also slowly getting back into CSS and front-end consulting. I’ve helped some of the largest organisations and the smallest organisations, such as Harley-Davidson, the NHS and Google write better code and work better together. Again, starting in the new year I’ll have availability for consulting and engineering support. It might just be a touch more palatable than hiring the whole studio for you. Again, get in touch . I’m always transparent — maybe too transparent at times — but it’s really important for me to be honest. Man, we need more honesty. It’s taken a lot of pride-swallowing to write this but I think it’s more important to be honest than to be unnecessarily proud. I know this will be read by someone else who’s finding the year hard, so if anything, I’m really glad they’ll feel seen at least. Getting good leads is harder than ever, so I’d really appreciate people sharing this with their network . You’ll never regret recommending Piccalilli courses or Set Studio . In fact, you’ll look really good at what you do when we absolutely smash it out of the park. Thanks for reading and if you’re also struggling, I’m sending as much strength your way as I can.

career Career business Business javascript JavaScript css CSS web-development Web Development
2 views
Andy Bell 1 months ago

Happy one year anniversary to Complete CSS!

It was one year to the day that Complete CSS went live. It was Piccalilli’s debut course at the time. Now we have three courses . Anyway, I just wanted to mark this moment and take another opportunity to thank everyone who has purchased Complete CSS. It’s changed everything for us and your continued support of Piccalilli unlocks even more good stuff in the future. I got this feedback today and it sums up exactly what I’m trying to do with how I teach CSS. Maybe you can see yourself in it? I would like to thank you for your work. I have been working with CSS for 20 years, but I never managed to put it together properly. I used Tailwind, but also other approaches when I was frustrated with CSS. Your course helped me a lot. Thank you very much for CUBE CSS, I am enjoying CSS again. I’m so proud of how much the course, that I put so much into, has helped so many people. It makes it all worth doing. I speak so often about the core skills (often called soft skills) that you learn in Complete CSS, but I thought I’d record a video on how quick it is to compose the homepage after we’ve built the whole CSS system. Enjoy!

web-development Web Development css CSS
0 views
Andy Bell 2 months ago

Get the core right and the resilient code will follow

I delivered my talk for the last time at beyond tellerrand last week, so I thought I’d just mark it on my blog. I did it first at ffconf in response to a chat Remy and I had, so it’s only right that the video comes from there. Here’s my favourite image captured, from beyond tellerrand . Photo by  Florian Ziegler . It’s been an absolute pleasure to tour this talk. Thanks so all the conferences and meet-ups who invited me to share it with their audiences. You’re the best. A special thanks to Remy for encouraging me to write it in the first place and deliver it at their legendary event . The talk is based on three lessons of Complete CSS (which you can enjoy for free): I was writing all of this material at the same time last year because I was truly obsessed . I’ve been doing this CSS thing for a long time now — nearly 20 years — and getting good at core skills far exceeds everything else. Let me show you how with this material. Hope you enjoy the talk! The art of concise, effective communication Giving and receiving feedback Move slowly and methodically to go fast

career Career css CSS web-development Web Development
0 views