CSS-Tricks has a new owner

I run a similar-in-spirit site about starting from scratch on a project and getting to something functional. I tried both ads and courses, in my case neither were very successful. The most success I had was in offering to do the things the site tells you how to do in exchange for money. That's been my full time job for the last 6 years. I don't know if that's workable in the UI/UX world. I've done only a small amount of web-design work over the years, but I can imagine that, if I landed on CSS-tricks trying to work out a tricky (to me) CSS or usability problem where LLMs had been failing me, and I had a quick and easy option to pay a few hundred dollars and meet with the guy who wrote the book, I might do that. That's also how I got a lot of my first customers in my current business; I offered paid phone calls where a user could pay a nominal rate and ask some upfront questions about a project they were working on. Many of those calls turned in to longer contracts, and the fee kept out the folks who were just looking to sell me something. A lot of my customers have been organizations whose focus is not my industry, but, for one reason or another, they needed something done that fits in my wheelhouse. This means they don't (yet) want to hire this expertise and build processes internally, so they're willing to pay my premium rates. Perhaps there is a way to target these types of companies with custom services in the space.

I 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.

One of my favorite sites to visit, was CSSPlay, run by Stu Nicholls[0]. The demos have always been awesome. Personally, I never found opportunity to implement any of his demos, but I really enjoyed looking at them. I wish Mr. Graham luck. I feel as if LLMs are turning this type of business on its head. It's a new world. [0] https://cssplay.co.uk/

As an eng who spent over a decade on frontend and hasn’t touched CSS since last November, I’m ecstatic for this news. Nothing a frontier LLM has built me in the last year has been satisfactory to me. Every detail was shipped after millions of tokens stripping back and optimizing what Fable/Opus started doing. The process is leaner and faster, but frontend isn’t “solved” just because LLMs exist.

Did DigitalOcean forget they owned CSS-Tricks? Because that's what seemed to have happened based on the limited notes on the subject I've read in the past few weeks.