Tech Advent Calendars For Web Designers And Developers In 2016

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Cosima has been an editor at SmashingMag since 2013. Whenever she’s not writing articles for the weekly Smashing Newsletter, she’s probably working on a … More about Cosima ↬

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The web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year, and to make the choice of which ones to follow a bit easier, Cosima Mielke collected a selection of advent calendars in this Quick Tip for you. No matter if you’re a front-end dev, UX designer, or content strategist, we’re certain you’ll find something to inspire you for the upcoming year. So prepare yourself a nice cup of coffee, cozy up in your favorite chair and, well, enjoy!

With the holidays almost here and the new year already in sight, December is a time to slow down, an occasion to reflect and plan ahead. To help us escape the everyday hectic for a bit and sweeten our days with a delightful little surprise each day up to Christmas, the web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year. They cater for a daily dose of web design and development goodness with stellar articles, inspiring experiments, and even puzzles to solve.

To make the choice of which ones to follow a bit easier, we collected a selection of advent calendars in this Quick Tip for you. No matter if you’re a front-end dev, UX designer, or content strategist, we’re certain you’ll find something to inspire you for the upcoming year. So prepare yourself a nice cup of coffee, cozy up in your favorite chair and, well, enjoy!

24 Ways

Already in its 12th year, 24 Ways is a real classic under the advent calendars for the web community. Each day up to Christmas, it caters for a daily dose of web design and development goodness by some of the most renown minds in the web industry.

Christmas Experiments

To cater for some magic moments this holiday season, Christmas Experiments delivers a new jaw-dropping digital experiment by top web creatives as well as promising newcomers each day.

12 Devs Of Christmas

You probably know the “12 Days Of Christmas” song. But do you also know 12 Devs Of Christmas? If not, make sure to check it out — there’s a new article with exciting new thoughts and ideas from the web dev world waiting each day.

Performance Calendar

To make the holiday season a favorite time for speed geeks, the Performance Calendar shares a piece of advice each day up to Christmas that is bound to improve the performance of your website.

24 Pull Requests

“Giving back little gifts of code for Christmas.” That’s the credo of 24 Pull Requests. The idea is to get involved and contribute to the open-source projects we have benefited from this year — by improving documentation, fixing issues, improving code quality, etc.

Jens Grochtdreis’ Advent Calendar 2016

For some UI inspiration, check out Jens Grochtdreis’ calendar: Each day up to the 24th, he shares a new and inspiring CodePen experiment.

UXmas

Aimed at UX folks, UXmas shares little treats from some of the world’s leading UX specialists to count down the days to the big festival.

Web Advent Calendar

What are other web designers and developers excited about these days? The collection of writings over on the Web Advent Calendar sheds some light into the dark.

Content Strategy Advent Calendar

Here’s one for the content strategists amongst you: The 2016 Content Strategy Advent Calendar by GatherContent publishes a video a day until Christmas, in which content strategy experts share their advice, talk about their hot content topics and reveal their focus for 2017.

Remy Sharp’s December Thoughts

Not an advent calendar in the traditional sense, but nevertheless a new smart read each day to shorten the wait: Remy Sharp shares a potpourri of writings on his blog.

24 Days In December

The PHP family shares their thoughts in a daily article over on 24 Days In December. The article covers a wide range of topics related to PHP: from security to performance to techniques to workflow to tooling!

Advent Of Code

If you’re looking for something to put your skills to the test, then Advent Of Code is for you. Each day up to the 25th, it holds a new small programming puzzle for you to master.

Perl 6 Advent Calendar

The Perl 6 Advent Calendar shares something cool about Perl 6 every day. And if that’s not enough Perl wisdom for you yet, also check out Perl Advent.

Qemu

The advent calendar of the open-source machine emulator and virtualizer Qemu hosts a collection of Qemu disk images — from operating systems (old and new) to custom demos and neat algorithms — that you can run in the emulator.

AWS Advent

AWS Advent explores all things related to Amazon Web Services. You’ll find a wide range of article about security, deployment strategy and general tips and techniques to be aware of when using Amazon Web Services.

Sysadvent

Last but not least, sys admins get their daily goodie, too, this year — on Sysadvent. In 25 articles, fellows sys admins share strategies, tips, and tricks about system administration topics.

Did We Forget Anything?

Do you follow along an advent calendar this year? Maybe it’s in French or Russian, rather than English? Let us know about your favorites in the comments below!

(Image credit front page: Tina D. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.)