Derek is writing (too) many blog posts a day in many different places. (not to mention the PE blog and the entire curriculum)
Probably 10 Quora answers a day, StackOverflow answers, helping people in the various dev discords, writing on dev.to, and codementor, and codenewbie, and we can’t even name them all… - but that’s mostly just to help people learn - and it’s good practice. It’s very “small” though.
Sometimes - you want to formally offer your thoughts up to a larger audience.
You want a bigger conversations and maybe even add something to the lexicon.
“Well, why don’t you
have an article on CSS-tricks
and A List Apart?”
You can totally pitch articles to the most respected web publications out there. They are looking for writers and ideas! They need you. A List Apart and CSS-tricks are some of the most well-known and well-liked.
Derek SHOULD probably have been writing articles for CSS-tricks since 2014… but he’s been plenty busy?
Our students learn to write EARLY and OFTEN - so they can become thought-leaders in record time. 😉
It might have been Ivy saying - “Well, why don’t you have an article on CSS-tricks and A List Apart?” - but whatever it was, we just decided to make it happen.
Pitching ideas
Derek just wrote an email straight to Chris Coyier (Mr. CSS-tricks himself). After mulling over 4-6 topic ideas, Chris decided he liked this premise:
“I’ve been using what I call “type patterns” for the last 6 or so years, and they’ve worked out pretty well.”
With a bunch of editing and back and fourth and help from Chris and Geoff: Here it is! Right on the home page of CSS-tricks.
https://css-tricks.com/on-type-patterns-and-style-guides
So, that’s that.
It’s a little techinical - and if you haven’t been working with HTML and CSS (At scale) for years - it might not makes sense… but don’t worry! We teach all of this stuff in the course!
Either way, we’d love to hear what you think.
and pass it on, will yah?