Some information about my upcoming workshop and course

Published on by Andy Bell

I’m doing a lot of content this year, but the stuff I’m most excited about is a brand new workshop and a brand new course. They follow a similar theme to each other: helping you to become a better CSS developer who writes more scalable, maintainable CSS.

Workshop

In May, I’ll be running a workshop for my extremely good friends over at SmashingConf. The title of the workshop is “Scalable CSS Masterclass”.

The aim of the game in this workshop is not just to teach you how to write better CSS, but also to teach you all the lesser-covered skills that a really good CSS developer needs to possess to build stuff to an exceptional standard.

Code skills only get you so far with this. Organisational, planning and communication skills get you the rest of the way, along with an iron-clad understanding of how the heck CSS actually works in the browser.

All of the above helps you to make much better decisions, become a better team member, deal with clients better and most importantly, makes you more likely to produce more scalable and maintainable code that powers user interfaces that genuinely work for everyone, regardless of their device type, capabilities and connection speed.

I recorded a video for Smashing too:

Check it out

Course

The course follows a very similar theme to the workshop, but because I’ve got no time limit, it teaches in a lot more depth and detail. There’s only so much you can do in 5 2.5 hour sessions at the end of the day.

The course will feature lots of interactive elements to both enhance your learning and test your knowledge as you go. I’m lucky that I’ve got an outrageously talented team behind me this time at Set Studio who will super-charge the content I write into something truly special and hopefully, extremely valuable to everyone, regardless of their current skill level.

I’ll go into more depth in what it takes to build a front-end that has that truly polished, pro finish to it during the course. There’ll also be lots of content to help developers who haven’t come from a design background understand what makes a UI look and feel superb. With this, you’ll learn important vocabulary to help you articulate feedback more effectively with designers and understand their needs and requirements.

Just like Learn Eleventy From Scratch, the context of the course (and workshop) will be building a realistic project. This linear flow really helps people to lock down the skills they’re learning, because it’s more applicable than random tutorials. You get something tangible at the end too.

There will be lots of twists and turns along the way — again — to make this as realistic as possible. I want you to feel like you could take on any project after you’ve done this course or workshop because you’ve learned core skills to help you navigate anything that’s thrown at you.

Shall I attend the workshop or do the course?

A little girl says 'why not both'

For real though, it depends on how you like to learn. Doing both might well be useful if you’re really serious about skilling up as a front-end developer, but either will be really helpful too.

I’d say if you like to take things slow and steady, the course is for you and if you like to be able to interact with your tutor and ask questions, the workshop is for you.

It’s also worth noting that the course won’t go live until late-2024, whereas the workshop is in May 2024.

A conference talk too?

With all the work I’m doing for the workshop and course, I’m feel like a decent talk can be constructed out of this. Something that follows a similar, linear structure to the “Be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager” talk I did back in 2022.

In 2023 I had a low-key break from conferences, but I’d quite like to get back into speaking this year, so if you’re looking for a CSS talk, give me a shout!

Wrapping up

The over-arching theme is that skilling up to be a top-level front-end developer is not just a getting better at coding thing. It’s equally as important to develop so-called “soft skills”, which I prefer to call core skills.

If you get both that and code skills up to a really high level, the quality of your work will be unrecognisable and I hope, will get you a pay rise too!

As stuff starts heating up with the course I’ll put together something so you can get updates via email, but for now, stick your email in the box below to get updates 👇

I’ll definitely be writing about the process more too because this being my second workshop and [checks notes] third course, I’ve got this stuff super organised, so it’ll be worth signing up to read some behind the scenes stuff, if that’s the sort of thing you’re in to.