Hated CSS frameworks until a buddy showed me his workflow

I was at a dev meetup last Tuesday and this guy named Jesse pulled up his laptop to show me how he uses Tailwind. He had this messy WordPress theme that was all over the place and he cleaned it up in like 20 minutes using utility classes. I always thought frameworks were bloated and overkill for simple sites, but seeing him fix that layout so fast made me reconsider. Now I'm wondering if I should give it a shot on my next project. Anyone else flip on something after seeing it work in a real scenario?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_anthony8d ago

Man I feel this so hard. I was the guy yelling "just write vanilla CSS you cowards" for years. Then I spent a weekend fighting with a legacy Bootstrap project that had custom overrides on top of custom overrides and it looked like a CSS crime scene. My buddy was like "dude just use Tailwind classes" and I felt like an idiot when I fixed a responsive layout issue in like two minutes. Still caught myself muttering "this feels wrong" as I typed it though.

craig.parker8d ago

Yeah the override nightmare is real. My rule now is if I'm adding more than two lines of custom CSS to override a framework class, I'm probably using the wrong tool for that job. Tailwind saves you from that whole "where did this style come from" mystery hunt cause everything is right there in the markup. The key is not fighting it. Just lean into the utility classes and treat your project like a giant lego set. Once I stopped trying to write "clean" CSS and started thinking in terms of reusable combinations, everything clicked.