1-Dec

Meta

Welcome to a brand new Bekk Christmas

Bekk Christmas is the culmination of decades of iterating on sharing culture. Let's dive into what this is, and how it came to be.

3 min read

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By Kristofer Selbekk

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December 1, 2021

Bekk Christmas is entering its fifth year, and with it, a fresh new take on how we share what we know.

What is Bekk Christmas?

Bekk Christmas is an annual tradition, where we share some of the favorite things we've learned the last year, through opinion pieces, tutorials, podcasts, deep dives and lots of other formats. We focus on what we know, which is typically something about technology, design or strategy – sometimes all at once.

Each day in December, we'll share a curated selection of articles, podcasts, talks and whatever other format we felt like. Pick the ones that seem interesting to you, and consume them while you're commuting, relaxing, working or pooping.

You'll also find hundreds of other articles, tutorials and podcasts on this site, available through either exploring our archives or using the nifty search feature.

Either way, we're sure you'll find something useful, interesting and fun here. We hope you enjoy.

What's the history behind Bekk Christmas?

Bekk Christmas didn't start out as Bekk Christmas - it started with going domain shopping over a few glasses of wine. Kristofer Giltvedt Selbekk started his React lead career by purchasing react.christmas, hacking together a solution in CodeSandbox, and publishing 24 short articles about React in 24 days.

A screenshot of react.christmas anno 2017, with bright red doors and a terrible design
The first version of our advent calendar didn't get a lot of design love

React Christmas picked up some traction, and when the next holiday season arrived, three other competency leads wanted to join in. A tradition was born.

The following couple of years, Bekk Christmas turned into a company-wide project, with 23 calendars and 552 pieces of content. Each with their own .christmas domain! At one point, the owner of the .christmas TLD even asked to sponsor us for bringing so much traffic to their fringe TLD.

A slightly better design, but still with red doors and numbers.
The 2018 version was slightly better looking, with 4 different calendars
A grid of articles, with beautiful generated artwork, full of colors and life
The 2019 and 2020 editions sported beautiful generated artwork from Kjetil Golid

To us, this is such a great symbol of our company culture. We love to share, love to learn and can't wait to share it with you.

What's different this year?

Previously, we had a ton of different domains, like react.christmas, ux.christmas and strategy.christmas. It was a fun approach to get started, but we soon noticed that it came with its own set of issues. We had to make sure we had 24 days worth of content for each topic, which made a lot of people stress out. In addition, we had to maintain ownership over tons of fringe domains forever. Not great.

To alleviate this, we've moved all content to a single platform, with a single domain – bekk.christmas. It's still the same concept, but you can find all our content in a single place.

We've also rewritten the website from scratch, and moved all of our content into Sanity's wonderful content platform. We're super excited to show it all off.

Who is Bekk?

If you don't live in Norway, you probably don't know who Bekk is. That's completely fine. Bekk is a 500+ people consultancy that specializes in technology, design, strategy and management consulting.

We've been around since 2000, and work with some of Norway's largest clients to help create solutions for millions of users. Without being too corporate-y, we think.

If you live in Oslo or Trondheim, and are looking for a job, please send us your resume!

A man looking at a miro board on his computer, with tons of ideas and people interacting
Some casual brainstorming for the calendar effort

Merry Christmas!

Finally, we just want to wish everyone a merry Christmas. Or happy holidays, if Santa isn't your jam. We hope you find some cool stuff, and share it with your network if you did.

👋

Kristofer, Vikki, Jørund, Kirstine, Ola, Beate and Anders
The Christmas Crew