Hello Reader,
First off, thanks to everyone who let me know my emails were being flagged as phishing. Apparently, Gmail (and maybe some others?) started flagging YouTube’s shortened links, which are the ones they give creators to copy/paste quickly… Gotta love big companies flagging their own shortened URLs, but whatever, hopefully this one gets through without any issue!
As for the topic of this email, it’s become a tradition for me to have a year-in-review newsletter as we head into a new calendar year, and wouldn’t you know, it’s 2025!
So first off, happy New Year!
If this is the first time you join me for a year in review, I check whether I met my goals for the previous year, and set goals and plans for the upcoming year.
A bit of a warning, this is a long email! I’ve tried to make each section easy to find, so you should be able to skim to the sections that interest you if you don’t want to read the entire thing 🙂.
Looking back on 2025
Last year, I set myself the following goals:
❌ Continue with one long-form and one short-form YouTube video per week
❌ Monthly live stream (YT/Twitch)
✅ Launch HTML & CSS Tip of the Week (luckily I didn’t say I’d keep it going the entire year!)
❌ Have a minimum of 10 guests on the podcast
❌ Release 4 courses
So umm, I didn’t do very well 😂.
Continue my regular posting schedule
I didn’t do this, so I’ve given myself an ❌, but really, I’m not upset about this at all. I took several breaks from Shorts, and had two breaks from long-form content as well, but I took them all on purpose in order to preserve my mental health… so yeah, not burning out is better than getting a checkmark on this one 😁.
Monthly live streams
I had good intentions here, but it just didn’t happen… Looking back at last year’s newsletter, I had said, “I’m not doing any hard commits here, but I’d like to stream at least monthly and have put a monthly recurring event on my calendar to remind me of that.”
Luckily, there were “no hard commits”, so maybe it’s only a semi-fail? 😅
I do really enjoy streaming, but I always have something else that is a higher priority, and so I keep pushing it aside. That was one reason I had planned for monthly, but being so irregular makes it easy to put aside as well.
I did one CSS Grid workshop over on the Discord channel, which I really enjoyed and wanted to start donig monthly workshops there, but once again other things ended up getting in the way and I let it slip.
HTML & CSS Tip of the Week
I get a pass here because I launched it… Let’s ignore that I then decided not to continue it!
This was simply a case of trying to commit to something that was stretching me too thin. I tried a few things that would have made it easier to maintain, but it was still too big of a time suck, so it’s been put aside for the time being.
10 podcast guests
This was a fail, but only by 1! I had nine guests in 2025. I started strong, with 4 by the end of April, but then didn’t have anyone else come until September.
Having guests on is easily one of my favourite things, so while I’m not committing to a number this year, I do plan to continue doing them.
I have them all in a playlist here if you’d like to check them out.
Release 4 courses
Looking at this, my initial reactions was “what were you thinking?!”, but thinking about it, I did come closer than it seems.
I created two courses, HTML & CSS for Absolute Beginners and Modern CSS Fundamentals. The latter of which was recorded a few months ago with Frontend Masters, and should be out relatively soon.
That might only seem like it’s 50% of the way to my goal, but I’m ~80% of the way done with the new version of CSS Demystified, which isn’t an update but a complete rewrite, and pretty far along the way with the new version of Conquering Responsive Layouts as well, which is also a complete rewrite.
But they didn’t get released, so it is still a fail!
I would have had them both out already if I hadn’t decided to create my own course platform as well. I’m super happy with how it’s come together, as it’s allowing me to make courses exactly how I want them to be and, hopefully, make them with more regularity going forward (or more importantly, update them quite easily!).
🎯Goals for 2026
The problem that happens most years when I set goals is that I’m overly ambitious. I sort of knew that going into it last year, as I’d set a theme for 2025 of ambition, but I want to change my approach to goals a little this year.
One change is that, for the first time in a long time, I’m not setting a theme for my year. I always forget what my theme is within a month anyway.
As for figuring out my goals for the year, I already have a few important events on the calendar:
- Smashing Conf Amsterdam - April 13th to 16th
- Another conference in June 👀
- Family trip to the UK - ~2.5 weeks in July
Talks are quite time-consuming to put together, and, of course, I’m giving a different talk for each conference 😅. On top of that, I’m also giving a full-day, in-person workshop with Smashing.
For each conference, aside from actually preparing for it, I'm also travelling for at least a week.
In a way, this makes things a little clearer, though, because if I’m going to get CSS Demystified V2 out, it needs to happen by sometime in February at the latest. So, goal number one is to launch CSS Demystified V2 by the end of February.
I’m not setting a fixed date for it because who knows what will happen, and as usual, quality wins out over rushing it. But given where it’s at now, February feels achievable (and for those of you who’ve enrolled in the current version, you will get access to the new one when it’s released).
Also, if you aren’t enrolled and want extra updates (and maybe early access), you can join the waitlist by clicking this link.
Getting that done will mean a pretty open March, when I can dedicate it to building a solid-sized backlog of videos before I head out for Smashing Conf, as well as preparing for it.
And then the end of April and most of May will be dedicated to making a lot of content, ideally enough to cover all of June, July, and August.
So, I guess that means that goal number two is to create all that content to cover the times I’m travelling.
As things stand, the second half of the year should be slightly more relaxing than the first, but who knows what might come up 😅.
Last year, I mentioned a collaborative course that might be in the works, and while that one has been sidelined for now, there is another one in the works… I don’t want to share any details about it yet, as it’s very early days, but goal number three is to make good progress on that course.
Our early plans are to release it in the fall, but even if it takes longer, as long as we make solid progress, I’ll be very happy.
I also have a few stretch goals:
- YouTube Shorts experiments. This one will most likely fall until after the summer travels, but I have something I want to try with them. I realize they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re quick and easy to make, so experimenting with them is a lot easier 🙂.
- Release Conquering Responsive Layouts V2. This shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve already done a lot of the work for it, but I don’t really know when I’ll be able to dedicate the time to finishing it, so I’m going to leave it as a stretch goal.
- Hit 1 million subscribers. I’m currently sitting less than 3,000 subscribers away from hitting 1 million, so if I don’t manage it sometime in the next 12 months, I’ll be a little bummed out 😅. I’ll also add something that might be a little harder to this one, which is to hit 10,000 subscribers on the podcast channel, because why not?
🙋♂️ What I’ve been up to
📺 How to keep CSS Grid incredibly simple
 People tell me one reason they use Flexbox instead of Grid is that Grid gets too complicated when managing layouts across both axes, so I wanted to take a look at how you can simplify things.
📺 This CSS feature changed how I work with colors
 Relative colours are one of my favourite new features in CSS, and in this video, I take a bit of time exploring why that is, with a bonus tip looking using oklch() over hsl() as well.
⚡ No more magic numbers with this modern CSS feature
 Modern CSS is so great, and anchor positioning is one of my favourite new features. It’s great for tooltips and popovers, but also for a lot of other things that used to be a lot more difficult, like positioning an element relative to a sibling or other ancestor that can’t be its containing block.
I also do realize the markup could be updated here to avoid relying on a new CSS feature, especially in a demo as I used here, but we don’t always have that option if you’re using a CMS, or have a specific structure you need for other reasons.
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🔗 Other awesome stuff from around the web
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Still ramping back up, so no podcast or quiz this week. They'll both probably be back next week.
Until then,
Kevin
