Time flies huh? Five years ago, I started this blog hoping one or two developers might learn something from it. What happened next was not expected, I never planned to speak at conferences or give presentations, let alone that more than 20 people would actually read my blog. Here is a bit of its history, the doors it opened, the money I lost, and what comes next.
Start a blog! It’s great! You’ll learn more than you think!
As I am traveling on my way to NDC Oslo, I started to write this post… tomorrow, my blog turns 5 years old.
I recently posted two articles in a short amount of time, and for this article, it was hard to find words. What happened in 5 years? Well, maybe a bit of history of the blog to begin with, following up with the doors it opened, the money (I lost), and the future. I’ll keep it short (hopefully).
History
I started this blog shortly after having a burn-out, you would think that is sort of counter intuitive, and it is! But I always felt like I needed a personal project of my own. If I were to keep going in this “CSS game” I wanted to do more than just creating websites the whole time. I wanted to share what I love. I attended CSS Day a few times by then and I always loved how these development communities feel. The people I look up to are mostly the people who just have a sheer passion for sharing. I felt as I’m early in my 30’s and been coding for so long, I should at least try to write down some of the things I do. Who knows, maybe one or two people will find one of my articles to help them out while they’re working on a project. And OMG, that moment I had 20 people reading my blog, I was flabbergasted.
Even passed the point of 20 people reading this, not that much has changed. I might’ve become a bit better by doing it (sometimes), I might be a bit more careful choosing my words (sometimes), but at the end of the day, I’m still the same person, just 5 years older (and that, I feel sometimes).
The experiment and where the name came from
The blog started as an experiment. Believe it or not, my first version was actually written in Tailwind. I never really liked the design too much and always wanted to change it to more of a purple tone (first version was orange), and after a half year or so, I already started on a re-design, which is also the reason I have a love/hate relationship with tailwind, not real hate, just not for me… (Redesigning is a real pain)
But that is the thing, right? This whole blog was an experiment because I wanted to learn utility based CSS, personal blogs are great for these kinds of things. When I started this, we sort of went from “pixel benders” to people just pushing out utility classes moving from Bootstrap to Tailwind. Maybe I should say that instead of “pixel benders”, we were becoming “utility benders”, see, it’s in the name.
My blog didn’t carry my name (Brecht), because it’s hard to pronounce in most parts of the world which made me quickly decide to use an alias. Had I known that this blog would lift off like it did, I might’ve changed that, but it did grow on me.
The “utility” part in the name stayed, but the utility-first CSS was removed. The experimentation did continue, my blog is full of progressive enhancements.
And then came the presentations
I vividly remember the first time I went on a stage. I did do a play when I was a kid, but to stand on a stage all by myself terrified me. I wanted to get over that feeling, so I gave it a shot at a local meetup called “full-stack Ghent”. I also just took my babysteps into the W3C community group Open UI so the presentations were about the things I was looking forward to the most: popovers, scroll driven animations and yes, you guessed it, a very early sneak peek in the customisable select (<selectmenu> at that time). It was for a room of 50 people (give or take), not many people heard of scroll driven animations at the time, and here I was explaining the early specification with Bramus right in front of me (who was working closely on this in the CSSWG). Yep… not scary at all for a first-timer…
All went well, not any huge mistakes, Bramus was really nice to me, other meetups followed and at a Fronteers meetup I gave my first talk dedicated to Open UI explainers. My first “bigger” conference was Middlesbrough front-end, which is unfortunately discontinued. You never forget these things, those few days in Middlesbrough are still really close to my heart, even today. The line-up was full of people I look up to, and all of them were just the sweetest human beings.
And then it sorta exploded
Things really skyrocketed after that. I had to find a way to combine this. Luckily, one of my bosses Frederik Claerhout saw value in this, and combined with a new company that came to exist with a merger (iO) it opened opportunities.
- Make the local community get to know iO: I went to every meetup (on my own time) with an iO shirt and organised some of them internally
- You can go to conferences, where it is interesting for us: Stayed in Europe and tried to focus on countries or neighbouring countries where we have business.
- Always mention iO: which is perfectly normal
- Try to keep a nice billable rate
It was and still is a game of give and take, the creation of demo’s, blogposts, the money I spend on CodePen Pro, my blog hosting, Open UI meetings, writing explainers, etc… that’s all just on me in my free time. The internal knowledge sharing I bring because of that is a thing I’m happy to do and I try to bring in as much as I can for those willing. But I get a lot in return, they allow me to do the conferences, to speak at them (within limits) and I am grateful. The balance isn’t always easy, I’m not going to lie, but it is there, somewhere. It has become a part of my job.
This brings me to
If one thing, I lost money on this
This is not a solid business plan at all.
If you look at the complete picture I’m not gaining any money on this. Hosting is currently still in a free tier (hope to keep it that way), but other things to create demo’s properly cost money: Some cloud backups, domain name, some image and text editing software, etc… But it’s not just software, there is also the cost of traveling. Not everything is reimbursed by some conferences (I want at least a flight and hotel). Don’t get me wrong, it’s worth it. I might be losing some money, but the value I get in life makes up for that completely. I do have a ko-fi account, but let’s be honest, that doesn’t get clicked and it’s probably going to get worse with my content just being scraped by AI agents.
The future
Not going to repeat myself in this blogpost, but in general: I think I’ll still keep going for a while. There might be a bit more AI fused in the topics, but I always want it to reflect my values that started this journey: It should help people and preferably be related to webstandards, UX or accessibility. If you see my early articles you notice that I used a lot of emphasis dashes. That was at a time before AI became huge and now I try to avoid them, maybe I should care less about that as well.
And let’s not forget the rangegroup element! Much exciting stuff to blog about soon!
The little thumbs up help
It’s not purely about the dopamine hit, it never was. Some of my best articles - at least according to me - were barely read, and some of my shitty ones exploded (weird how that goes).
But it helps… the thumbs up, the sharing, the replying. It’s nice to know the content gets appreciated, and that’s just the thing. It’s about the content! Me, I’m not special, I’m not a rockstar, comedian, etc… I’m a middle aged dad slowly getting in a midlife crisis who happens to share some stuff about tech. Not a lot has changed except that I’m 5 years older and for some reason decided I like hitting little balls with sticks while hating all the elitist pricks that claim hitting balls with a stick is for the privileged (yes, I’m talking golf).
It’s about a love for the community, I love getting to know people, the laughs and shares, I try to be a good teacher! But, that might just be an age thing. I love reading! Being a GDE helps with connecting to like-minded people, that certainly helped.
When I go on stages, I try to do my ultimate best… always, I mean, people pay money for it, or offer their evening for it. You gotta bring it, knowing stuff is not enough. Make it at least a bit entertaining, with respect for the content. If you ask me which people I look up to in the “speaker world”, there are many, and each of them have their own style.
Keep tinkering
Yes! Like hell yes! And I’m not going to be black and white on this. If you tinker using AI, that’s ok, but stay curious! Be a critic of the output. I’ve seen too many people taking way too much praise for something they just prompted in 5 minutes. Be better, be a teacher, not only a slave to praising dopamine hits.
Speaking of tinkering, about a week ago, I saw this post by Mozilla adding sibling-index() inside of a custom property. They used @property for this to make sure it returns an integer. I never thought of that before and was already making a cake for my 5 years of blogging. So I thought to take the code to the next step by stealing that awesome idea.
And with that. Up to the next 5 years!
