Wrapping up 2025

We don’t normally do one of these, but I think 2025 has been a stellar year for Piccalilli, so we wanted to get into what we’ve done and what we’re planning for next year.

We’ve written a lot of words this year

In total, we’ve published 261,006 words across articles, links, The Index newsletter and courses. That’s over 700 words a day! It breaks down as:

50 articles
33 links
129 lessons over 2 courses
95 newsletter issues

Not bad!

Our 10 most popular articles

We had a lot of readers this year. Thank you for that. The top 10 articles, published this year, are:

We’re very heavily associated with CSS, but it’s good to see some JavaScript and design content showing up in the top 10.

Stuff we launched this year

It’s been a very busy year in the studio and we’ve invested very heavily in Piccalilli.

We launched two courses

JavaScript for Everyone, by Mat Marquis, launched in October. It was a humongous undertaking and content I very much wanted to see on Piccalilli.

I’m a firm believer that learning JavaScript the language — away from frameworks — is what sets you up for genuine long term success. It doesn’t matter what frameworks come and go if you have a deep understanding of the language and with Mat’s teaching, you’ll go above and beyond that.

Mindful Design, by Scott Riley, launched in November and it’s our first ever video course. Again, I really wanted proper design education on Piccalilli.

The hours that went into this course was actually mind-blowing. There were technical problems and rendering problems but even with those, Scott has produced genuine canonical design education. He’s managed to produce a course that will make you a better designer, regardless of whether you’re a beginner, a senior or even a developer.

I’m really proud of both authors. We learned a lot, publishing other people’s courses. Sure, that learning created a lot of stress (sorry, gang) but we go into 2026 in a really strong position to produce even more extremely high quality education.

We completely redesigned The Index and introduced advertising

I won’t repeat what I already wrote in the announcement post but we completely changed everything about how emails work on Piccalilli.

The Index is a web first newsletter — as it always has been — but we relied on third party solutions that worked OK for us. We really wanted to push the newsletter this year so we brought in our long-trusted collaborator, Robb Owen to develop us a completely bespoke solution where we manage our own data, our own publishing schedule and importantly, make every single email that comes from us Markdown powered.

Robb had already developed an unbelievably powerful API to manage courses and billing in 2024, so this system was an extension of that. We’re now using Postmark to send all emails too, which has been a massive improvement for us as we have full control of the templates.

I’d say this might well be the best feature we’ve introduced to the platform this year and it’s only going to get better, thanks to Robb’s amazing work.

We redesigned our most important view: the article view

Again, I wrote about this change back in the summer, so I won’t repeat that.

We were happy with how articles looked and importantly, read, but we knew we could do better. We also knew we had lots of new capabilities for courses coming up so a big re-work was needed.

Instead of a left aligned, sidebar layout, we brought everything into the center with “blow-out” elements, all thanks to CSS grid.

In my opinion, we’ve got the best article view out there. We care so much about typography, readability and flow. I think we nailed all of that.

We set out our position as true AI haters

We’re not giving this technology a belly tickle like other publishers are. We codified our principles to be absolutely clear that we do not like this technology and will not support it.

Expect us to come out really swinging against it in 2026. It’s high time we started fighting back as an industry and here at Piccalilli, we want to be on the front line. It’s really important to me especially, that we create an environment where people can feel confident talking honestly about it.

We feel like it’s our ethical duty to do this and to help protect the humans in our industry from a handful of billionaires with nothing but bad intentions.

What’s coming up in 2026

Lots more content! We’ve introduced a record number of guest authors — 19! — and that will continue. Our guest author content has been by far the most popular too.

We’re releasing at least two more courses next year. One of those will be from me, but I’ll talk about that in the new year 🤫

There’s lots of conversations happening behind the scenes though, so don’t be surprised if you see at least three or four new courses in 2026.

Other than that, we’re going to carry on doing what we do best: providing real world education that helps you be the best that you possibly can be.

Thank you

To everyone that’s read an article, read a newsletter issue, read a link post, supported us on Open Collective and purchased one of our courses: thank you so much for your support. It means everything to us.

Thank you to everyone for the amazing feedback this year too. We’ve run a couple of surveys and conducted face-to-face interviews, all of which have us buzzing with ideas on how to improve things around here. Your time and effort is really appreciated.

Lastly, I want to thank the Piccalilli and Set Studio team. We’re all absolutely worn out after this year but I think we can look back on 2025 — even though it’s been a hard year — and be really proud of ourselves.

Leanne, Jason and Vicky, I don’t know what I’d do without you all. Thank you for everything. Let’s rest up and come out swinging in 2026.

I hope you all have a fantastic holiday period and new year. We’ll publish the last issue of The Index tomorrow and that’s us done for at least two weeks.

We’ll see you in 2026 💛

Enjoyed this article? You can support us by leaving a tip via Open Collective