We’re equal parts delighted and excited to share that Piccalilli will be working with Mat Marquis and Scott Riley to launch two premium courses this year: JavaScript for Everyone and Mindful Design.
As promised last year when we launched Complete CSS, that course was the start of our aim of bringing extremely high quality, affordable education to the front-end development and design communities.
Let’s take a look at each course.
JavaScript for Everyonepermalink
JavaScript is hard and it’s a major part of our jobs as front-end developers, whether we like it or not. The problem is, understanding the language is a lot of work with conflicting advice across the community.
Mat Marquis has stepped up and taken on the impossible: teaching people how JavaScript really works. He’s got a track record in producing extremely high quality education as the author of JavaScript for Web Designers and Image Performance from A Book Apart. He also wrote the Learn JavaScript and Learn Images courses for Google’s web.dev.
When you take the course, your overall skillset will be developed way beyond where it is now, even if you already hold a senior position. You’ll cover so much ground at a pace that works for you, you won’t recognise yourself — for the better — when you complete JavaScript for Everyone. The hope is that you can then push your career beyond a level you ever thought possible.
Enough from me, here’s Mat:
I like JavaScript. Well, mostly. I mostly like JavaScript.
I mean, is it a junk-drawer snarl of features and fixes piled atop a three decade old antique foundation? Absolutely — but there’s a method to that madness, pun intended. That snarl gives us countless ways to solve problems, and that foundation means you can make that solution work everywhere. And I do mean everywhere: dusty old Geocities-style popups, sure, but also running servers, on the command line, in native apps, driving robots, and powering user interfaces on everything from smart refrigerators to literal spaceships.
I do like JavaScript. I like it because I believe in the web. Like the web, JavaScript is flexible, resilient, open, and endlessly versatile. Is it also chaotic, a little unpredictable, and — for reasons we’ll get into — shockingly bad at basic arithmetic? Sure, but so am I, and that hasn’t stopped me yet.
JavaScript is undeniably weird — but you and me, we’re gonna make sense of it together.
Let’s get weird.
Mindful Designpermalink
One thing I keep muttering to myself is “Piccalilli needs more design content”. I’m a designer by trade — who stumbled into front-end development — so I understand how intertwined design and development are. I also understand that having a multi-faceted skill-set is crucial to career development.
Piccalilli is not just getting more design content, it’s getting a premium video course from one of the best designers in the business, Scott Riley. He’s also got an outstanding track record of producing extremely high quality education material by writing Mindful Design, first and second editions.
What makes Scott so good at what he does is that he understands, deeply, how the mind actually works. The magic though: Scott doesn’t use this knowledge to do bad. In fact, he does the exact opposite and uses that knowledge to produce design work that is a force for good.
In his Mindful Design video course he’s going to teach you to do exactly that. Starting with the knowledge of how the mind works, he’ll take you through a real design project, covering all of the steps including planning, research and finally, producing some beautiful design work.
This course is not just for designers either. It’ll skill you up as a front-end developer too and enable you to produce outstanding design work.
Here’s what he has to say:
I’m super excited to finally bring this course to life, and couldn’t think of a better team to work on this with than the lovely folks at Piccalilli!
One of the key goals for this course is to show just how impactful a deeper understanding of how the brain works can be to your design process. When we really understand people, and the systems they operate in, we’re so much more capable of empowering or helping them. For too long, tech has sought to exploit us, through deceptive patterns and by turning our heuristics against us. One of the best ways to fight back against that is to learn why we process the world the way we do, and how that understanding can translate into low-impact, intrinsically rewarding environments. But this isn’t just a design ethics course with a fancy title, we’ll be blowing the whole design process wide open, and taking folks along for the whole ride.
It’s gonna be in-depth, it’s gonna be fun, it’s a hell of a lot of work to put together, but I can’t bloody wait mates!
A new courses index and ways to stay up to datepermalink
Finally, we now have a home page for our courses, featuring JavaScript for Everyone, Mindful Design and of course, Complete CSS.
You can sign up to get updates about all courses on Piccalilli. That way, you’ll be in the know about discounts and pre-orders before anyone else. We’ll also keep you up to date with the work we do for these courses, including infrastructure and producing a top-class brand for them.
Sign up to get updatesWrapping uppermalink
I’m really proud to be publishing this announcement. When I originally set Piccalilli up, I never dreamed we would be producing courses at all, never mind for other authors! It feels good to evolve this publisher more and more, each year.
We’re going to be producing courses in the coming years too, so if you think that’s something you’d like to do, get in touch.
Right, we’d better get to work, hadn’t we?