You’ll miss publishers when they’re gone

18 September 2026

Ever since Piccalilli started to get traction, I’ve always seen CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine and A List Apart (among others) as peers. We all help each other behind the scenes and importantly, back each other.

When CSS-Tricks was initially acquired by DigitalOcean, I was really happy for Chris. The work that he’d put into that publication was unreal with thousands of articles published along with elevating writers (including me) to building audiences of their own. It’s certainly something I try to emulate on Piccalilli, inspired by CSS-Tricks and Chris.

I was happy for DigitalOcean too because they genuinely invested in education at the time, with great success prior to their takeover of CSS-Tricks. So much so, that SaaS companies like LogRocket emulated that approach with their own success. Investing in giving back actually works!

What we didn’t foresee at the time of CSS-Tricks’ acquisition was that DigitalOcean would treat the publication with such disdain…twice. I think Eric has the right idea of the why:

The corporate model of ownership can be a risk. If infrastructure is not part of a corporation’s core strategy, it is not a priority. And if it is not a priority it is effectively dead. You learn this lesson repeatedly working in accessibility.

You could argue “well, Andy, Piccalilli serves to promote Set Studio” and you’re sort of right there. It no doubt brings eyes over to Set Studio, but the intrinsic link is there to verify that we know what we’re talking about, so people can trust what they read. The only goal of Piccalilli, now and forever, is to bring the workers of our industry up together.

The problem with that and I guess, CSS-Tricks’ offering (which is very much a similar attitude) is that doesn’t make numbers go up. The parasite class of tech leaders need the numbers to go up, always, remember. Saying that, I’m not sure which numbers go up when you invest $3 million in a disgusting racist’s linux project 🤷‍♂️

It all comes down to funding, I’m afraid

Long time readers of Piccalilli will notice we’ve slowed down a lot this year. Unfortunately, I had to make a rapid change to our strategy and focus on Set Studio as our industry’s priorities changed, seemingly overnight. It’s a shame because I really did want Piccalilli to be our (mostly) sole focus here.

When you (rightly) pay writers fairly for their work, the costs build up really quickly. To their credit, CSS-Tricks were publishing multiple guest authored articles a week, which will have been costly! Not to mention paying the core CSS-Tricks team, like my very good pal, Geoff, to keep the wheels turning.

With financial backing of companies like DigitalOcean or in the past, advertisers, this is all possible. This already feels like a distant past though, but it doesn’t have to be.

Let me make it clear: without people at the top of their game sharing their experience and knowledge — regardless of whatever “game changing” technology is in place — we are pulling up the ladders and committing our industry to stagnation and death. We’ve already fucked it up over the last few years for junior developers by instead of investing in them, playing the slot machines (also known as LLMs) to — you guessed it — make the money number go up, but there’s still hope for recovery.

The message I want to get out is there are good organisations out there who are still willing to invest in people and their education. We need them now to show everyone how it’s done. It certainly looks better on your company than investing in Linux, racist edition.

If you’re running an organisation that wants to help but doesn’t know how, give me shout. I can advise and link you up with the right people. I really want CSS-Tricks and the development publishing world to not just survive, but thrive. We have to all do so much more to make that happen, so let’s do exactly that.