2025 Wrapped

Whilst it’s not technically the end of 2025 yet, I don’t plan on using my laptop much over the two-week Christmas break, so I figure what better time than now to reflect on this year.

In the studio

January 2025 started strong, wrapping up a client project for a local independent type designer, Jamie Clarke. This project is a combination of Astro, Sanity, and Fontdue, enabling both the content management of the pages and the selling of fonts via his own website. This was a huge step forward for Jamie and was really well received. I also got to work with the incredibly talented Nic Chan on the technical implementation for this site, which made the project an absolute breeze. Astro and Sanity is such a killer combination.

In between projects, we also squeezed in a rebuild of the Set Studio agency website. It was great to get stuck into a little bit of animation again. Originally, we built this on WordPress, but it was more than we needed, so we simplified it to an SSG build instead.

Next up was a project that is yet to launch, due to some of the client’s own internal restructuring, but I can’t wait for this to hopefully ship in 2026. For the design system build, I got to use Astro components and moved away from using React, which was a refreshing change. Historically, we have used Storybook to document all our components, but at the time of writing this I am not aware of official support for .astro files, so I built a small pattern library within our monorepo to handle this. The front-end build in this project is something I am really proud of.

Piccalilli

The remainder of the year has been focused solely on Piccalilli and its growth. It’s been one massive PR after another, but we have gotten a lot done. Having the opportunity to work on this as an internal project, both maintaining and building upon the design system in place, has been an invaluable learning experience.

Since the initial rebuild and redesign in August 2024, a lot has changed. Things have settled, a bunch of new components have been authored, and two new courses have been released.

I’ve realised many shortcomings in some of the approaches I took initially with the design system, and I’ve learnt a lot from that, which will help shape part of the roadmap for next year. Not just that — I’m not the same developer I was 12 months ago; with the industry ever changing, you’re always evolving and refining how you work.

Piccalilli has its own in-built theming system, which allows each course to have its own unique look and feel. This has been a massive task to implement, but it’s really been worth it. It’s fair to say I’ve written a lot of CSS custom properties this year — but I absolutely love them. Again, I’ve learnt a lot from this, and at the top of my hit list for next year is standardising much of the approach to improve how they are rolled out in the future.

Another big milestone for the future is some type of CMS. Not all areas of the site will warrant utilising this, but if we can get the content authoring experience right, it’s definitely something that will be a huge improvement. Alongside that, leaning more into the Astro content collections, which are powerful to leverage, is also high up on my roadmap wishlist.

Learning

  • Web Components Demystified, by Scott Jehl

    This course is highly recommended and really helped cement the knowledge I already had about Web Components, while also teaching me things I didn’t know. The course is well structured, and the practical prompts alongside the downloadable slides were genuinely helpful for my style of learning. Check it out here.

  • JavaScript for Everyone, by Mat Marquis

    I’ve been slowly working my way through this course, and it’s been excellent. The depth of knowledge is explained in a way that makes it easier to understand and digest. There are 53 lessons, broken down into modules, which makes it easy to pick up as and when I’ve had time. I am, of course, biased — but I genuinely believe in the quality of this course. Check it out here.

On my list for next year is Practical Accessibility by Sara Soueidan and Mindful Design by Scott Riley.

Conferences

  • Pixel Pioneers, June 2025

    I’ve been to this conference every year aside from one, ever since it has been held in Bristol. It’s such a welcoming and inclusive conference, and the new venue is great. The talks are consistently inspiring and thought-provoking. You can catch the talks from this year here and the wrap-up here.

  • WDC, October 2025

    I was due to attend WDC 2025, but unfortunately, due to health reasons, I couldn’t make it. The FOMO was real, but hopefully I’ll get to attend in the future.

Coding for fun

I’ve realised I’ve been missing creative coding, particularly SVG animation, and one thing I plan to change next year is creating for fun more regularly. The CodePen challenges seem like an obvious place to start.

I did manage to create a few Pens this year:

TL;DR

Overall, it’s been a really busy year, and I expect next year to be much the same. But for now, I’m looking forward to a proper break over the holidays.

See you in 2026.

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