The testimonial below was written by Greg J. Smith, an editor for HOLO and an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo and the University of Niagara Falls Canada. He was one of the first educators to try netnet.studio in the classroom during out public beta period and his students provided us with lots of helpful feedback along the way.
I first learned about netnet at the Open Source Arts Contributors' Conference in April 2023. I was in Denver to document the event for the Clinic for Open Source Art, not to take part in it, and when the symposium broke into working groups I found myself gravitating toward the people building the web design tool. I had little to offer the teams working on p5.js or openFrameworks, but I had been teaching web design in postsecondary contexts for more than a decade—maybe some of what I’d learned teaching HTML and CSS would be useful, I thought.
What I saw made an impression. Netnet collapsed the distance between the workspace and the Stack Overflow and W3Schools tabs every beginner keeps open: the required reference material lived inside the environment rather than beside it. That sounds minor. For anyone teaching first-timers it isn’t. It also had personality, which was not anything I had ever experienced with a coding environment. I left Denver thinking netnet might put a spark back into my web design teaching, and the hunch was on the money—the following September I onboarded 190 students into netnet in my second-year web design course at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, a University of Waterloo satellite campus.
September 2026 will mark my fourth year using netnet in my classroom. I've now overseen about 450 students learning HTML and CSS from zero experience to building their own sites in a 12-weeks. Many make the generic, corporate-friendly “Hi, I’m Jasmine, a UX designer” page to help them land co-op placements, but plenty make something fun and strange—K-pop fan sites, an insect bestiary, fashion lookbooks—and they do it with a real measure of confidence. Netnet isn’t the final destination. Most of these students will graduate into professional-grade editors, and that’s exactly the point: it’s the bridge that gets them there.
The tool matters to me for another reason, one I find myself explaining to students every year. Netnet isn’t made by Apple or Adobe. There's no product-manager-and-focus-group provenance, no features sanded down until all the personality is gone. It’s open source, built by a small team of educators and designers who care about the craft of web design and the pedagogy of teaching the internet as something that is open, free, and hands-on. Despite learning p5.js in a CS context before they get to web design, my students arrive with almost no exposure to what open source is. Netnet gives me a way into that conversation about how not all software is rent-seeking and that there are software relationships where the user is not a consumer.
That last point is key. Every year my students do a UX survey to measure what is working and not working. Beyond that, I push them further: is a feature convoluted? Is something obvious missing? Don’t whinge and complain—take 15 minutes to file a bug report. My students struggled with the GitHub workflow and the gap between what was onscreen in the preview window and what was pushed to the Git repo. And their feedback and anxieties informed the design of those aspects of the workflow. They helped make it better.
That responsiveness is why netnet feels more like a process than a thing. It keeps changing because the people using it push it to. Like many educators, right now I’m wrestling with generative AI in the classroom, a force reshaping coding practice and coding education faster than anything I've seen. Netnet, with its built-in plugins for various APIs, is positioned to meet that moment rather than be steamrolled by it. I’m looking forward to making room for open exploration with genAI as a counterpoint to the earnest, ‘handmade’ construction of websites.
For the decade I have taught this web design class I’ve told students they’re beholden to the tools they use. Netnet is the rare tool that's beholden right back. I’ll put it plainly: I’ll be first in line to support the project’s Patreon, and if you teach this stuff, or make things on the web, or just believe software should be built this way, you should support it too.
— Greg J. Smith
