The End of Friday Front-End

TL;DR: After over ten years of sharing front-end links every week, the time has come for me to shut down Friday Front-End. Thanks for subscribing!

I started Friday Front-End in August 2015, and after more than ten years, I’ve decided to shut it down. This wasn’t a decision I made lightly, but I think it’s the right one. Below, I explain the background and my motivation. Stick around to the end for some fun statistics and other newsletters I recommend. To anyone who subscribed over the years, I’m grateful to you for coming along on the ride!

Why I started Friday Front-End

I started the newsletter for purely selfish reasons. In 2015, I had started a new job, and I was buried in front-end articles. I’d find something interesting on social media or RSS, and I’d bookmark it to read later. Then, once every few months, when the backlog had grown so large I felt intimidated by it, I’d spend an entire weekend catching up. It was unsustainable. I needed a way to force myself to review my bookmarks once a week or so, to keep it from becoming overwhelming.

So I started a newsletter and twitter account, with a simple mission statement. “Front-end development links tweeted daily and emailed weekly. No color commentary, just the good stuff.” By forcing myself to share the five best links every week, I could trick myself into staying on top of my backlog.

And it worked! Along the way, I even spun out a second channel when I realized I was consistently finding great beginner-level content. It didn’t feel like a good fit for Friday Front-End, but would benefit newer devs. So in 2018, I set up the CSS Basics social media accounts and started sharing that content as well.

I never advertised, beyond promoting it on my own social accounts, and aside from a few unsuccessful attempts to attract sponsors, I’ve never tried to make money from it. When I started working at Cloud Four in 2019, they generously agreed to sponsor the newsletter, and have been the sole sponsor ever since.

Over the last decade, I’ve taken a lot of pride in Friday Front-End and CSS Basics. As I advanced in my career, I realized I love helping other devs level up, and Friday Front-End was just another manifestation of that drive. That said, over time, it started feeling unsustainable.

Why I’m ending Friday Front-End

In the last two years, I’ve really struggled with burnout. Like a good little nerd, I’ve turned all my hobbies into jobs. I work full-time as a front-end developer. I curate a weekly front-end newsletter. I run a fortnightly D&D game. I host a UFO podcast. And between all those, I have a family who’d appreciate it if I walked away from my desk now and then to spend some time with them.

As I started to examine my commitments with a more critical eye, Friday Front-End was high on the list of “things that take time but aren’t particularly rewarding.” I kept it going because I’d managed to streamline it down to only a couple of hours per week reviewing links and populating the backlog. However, that meant I wasn’t exactly spending quality time with these articles.

What had started as an effort to stay on top of the rapidly evolving front-end field became a weekly surface-level skim of headlines and summaries. I would see an exciting post detailing a new technique, but I didn’t have the time to dive in or experiment with it. Tag it, bag it, and move on, because there’s 30 more links to review.

On top of that, while Friday Front-End never had a lot of subscribers, for the first eight years, it at least showed slow but steady growth. The newsletter topped 1000 subscribers in 2023, then plateaued at 1400 subscribers the next year. The social media accounts have seen similar slow growth. I had to shut down the twitter accounts when Elon turned it into a nazi bar, and the new Mastodon and Bluesky accounts I created never managed to get past 2000 subscribers. The numbers don’t really matter, but it was even harder to keep my motivation up when I knew the audience was so small.

Then, last week, my email newsletter provider suffered a critical outage and randomly deleted half my subscribers. I was horrified. Switching email services is a huge pain. You need to port over your mailing list, configure all the security settings to allow them to send email from your domain, maybe need to ask subscribers to re-confirm their subscription, and a dozen other little tasks. Not to mention the impact it has on my workflow.

Friday Front-End is a link-based email, not prose-based, which is not what most providers are optimized for. My current provider was built around links, with a bookmarklet to save a page to the list of links for the next issue. Switching to a new email service meant trying them out, seeing how well their templates worked for links, and updating my workflow, or maybe trying to recreate the bookmarklet… It was exhausting even to think about.

In the middle of complaining about this to my wife, she asked the question I’d been avoiding: “Have you considered just shutting it down?”

The immediate sense of relief I felt gave me my answer. I love the front-end community. I love sharing what I learn. But it’s time to admit that what I get out of it is no longer worth the time and effort it takes.

So, now that you understand why I’m doing this, let's end on a more fun note with some statistics and newsletter recommendations!

Friday Front-End’s Most Popular Sites

Over ten years, between Friday Front-End and CSS Basics, I saved over 7000 links. Once I filtered out platforms like YouTube, Medium, and CodePen from the list, I was left with an interesting high-level summary of the domains I most frequently linked to. Here are some takeaways:

• CSS Tricks, at 950 total links, represents nearly 1 in 7 links! That’s effectively one CSS Tricks post per issue, which amounts to a recurring segment! It might have been easier in some issues to just say, “Here’s what’s hot on CSS-Tricks this week.” We all owe Chris Coyier a debt of gratitude for starting such a great resource, and I’m still salty at the way DigitalOcean squandered it.
• I shared 97 links from Cloud Four, which probably doesn’t surprise anyone who knows I’ve worked there since 2019, but ten of those links date from well before I was hired. They were already on my radar!
• As you might expect, there’s overlap between the most popular domains on Friday Front-End and CSS Basics, but it’s interesting to see how they diverge. CSS Basics skews towards more practical teaching sites like Go Make Things, HTMHell, Free Code Camp, and CSS In Real Life. Friday Front-End, with its broader focus on the bleeding edge, had a tendency to share posts from individual devs like Rachel Andrew, Josh Comeau, Eric Meyer, Harry Roberts, Adrian Roselli, Dave Rupert, Ahmad Shadeed, Sara Soueidan, and Lea Verou.

Recommended Newsletters

If you're looking for other ways to keep on track of front-end news, I’d like to share some love to some other newsletters that I enjoy. Of these, Front-End Front is probably the closest direct substitute for Friday Front-End. Like me, they share a curated list of five links every week, and over the years, we often had very similar picks. Beyond that, I can enthusiastically recommend all the following:

• A11y Weekly
• CSS Weekly
• Diversify Tech
• Frontend Focus
• Front-End Front
• JavaScript Weekly
• Piccalilli Index
• Sidebar Newsletter
• Smashing Newsletter
• Web Design Weekly
• Web Weekly

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

In all the talk about how running Friday Front-End became overwhelming, and why I’m shutting it down, I’d be remiss not to mention that I really have enjoyed it as well. It’s fun to share what excites me about front-end with the larger community. Ten years is a long time for any publication, and I’m proud to have kept it going for so long. So, if you ever subscribed to the newsletter or social media accounts I just want to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

To paraphrase my sign-off line from the podcast: Thanks for listening to me talk about front-end development so my wife doesn’t have to!