An Ode to Smashing Magazine

Published on December 6, 2017 (↻ February 5, 2024), filed under Development (RSS feed for all categories).

This post is outdated.

Time passes.

In the early 2000’s, when I was still starting off my career, the first article I wrote was for German web design online magazine Dr. Web. (You still find traces of this early work.)

With Dr. Web I was for a number of years, and I much enjoyed working with Dr. Web; and Dr. Web, that was Sven Lennartz to me.

After some time, in the mid-2000’s, Sven shared how he was leaving, and I believe selling, Dr. Web; and what at first seemed like bad news for the German tech community turned into great news for the English community—because Sven, together with Vitaly Friedman, then founded: Smashing Magazine.

Smashing Magazine (or SM), within only a short amount of time, became one of the greatest sources for web designers and developers to turn to. Within only a couple of years, SM built up a large corpus of well-researched and well-written articles, and soon, in 2009, even started publishing books as well.

Both were incredibly well received and therefore a few years later, in 2012 if I’m not mistaken, SM even began hosting their own conference series, Smashing Conference, and with that took another step to build their audience and reach and influence.

What Sven and Vitaly and the team have built, then, is nothing short of remarkable. Apart from The Huffington Post, which I don’t read, barely another publication seems to have had a comparable rise—especially not in a field that is as quickly changing as tech. (I may exaggerate, and yet only to emphasize the great accomplishments of SM, not to downplay others’.)

After even more services and products, just these days Smashing Magazine unveiled a membership and subscription model, accompanied by a redesign (or redo?), thus one-upping themselves to get to their own next level.

This next level, this new step for Smashing Magazine, but also for the wider community, I find exciting—and therefore want to call out some of the journey made so far, and congratulate the team for the amazing development and the accomplishments achieved and to be achieved. Well done—here’s to you, Smashing Magazine 🥂

Disclaimer: I’ve also been involved with Smashing Magazine over the years: I’m a Smashing Magazine author, though I’ve at some point stopped presenting more articles, and for more than eight years I’ve been a member of the Smashing Magazine Experts Panel, which means I sometimes more, sometimes less regularly review articles submitted to SM. As for learning and teaching web development—still keep an eye on the specs, please.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (Please be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)