diff --git a/website/source/_daily_emails/2022-09-07.md b/website/source/_daily_emails/2022-09-07.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fbdca355 --- /dev/null +++ b/website/source/_daily_emails/2022-09-07.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "My Tailwind CSS origin story" +date: "2022-09-07" +permalink: "/archive/2022/09/07/my-tailwind-css-origin-story" +tags: ["tailwind-css"] +--- + +Tomorrow night, I'm attending one of Simon Vrachliotis (simonswiss)'s Pro Tailwind workshops, so I thought that it would be a good time, as Simon has done himself recently on the Navbar podcast, to describe how I started using Tailwind CSS. + +I remember watching a lot of Adam Wathan's live streams on YouTube before Tailwind CSS, and I remember when he started a new project - a SaaS product called KiteTail. + +It was a Laravel and Vue.js project, and although I'm not a Laravel Developer primarily, I got a lot of other information from Adam's streams about automated testing, test-driven development, and Vue.js as I was learning Vue at the time. + +One of the episodes was about styling a card component using some styles that Adam was copying between projects - which would eventually be the starting point for Tailwind CSS. + +In fact, I think I watched some of the episode and stopped as I was happy with the Sass and BEM or SMACSS approach that I was using at the time, and didn't initially see the value of the utility CSS approach that I was seeing for the first time (everyone has a similar reaction initially). + +After a while, I did re-visit it but because Tailwind CSS wasn't released as it's own project yet, I (like Simon) started to experiment with Tachyons - another utility CSS library. + +I rebuilt a particularly tricky component that I'd just finished working on and had caused me some issues, and managed to re-do it in only a few minutes. + +I started to use Tachyons on some personal and client projects as a layer on other frameworks like Bootstrap and Bulma, and later moved on to Tailwind CSS once it has been released. + +I was working in this way on a project when I released that I could use Tailwind for all of the styling instead of just adding small sprinklings of utilities here and there. I refactored everything and removed the other framework that I'd been using - leaving just Tailwind CSS. + +With the exception of some legacy projects, now I use Tailwind CSS exclusively and have used it for a number of projects. I've given lunch and learn sessions to teams that I've worked on, [presented a Tailwind CSS talk]({{site.url}}/talks/taking-flight-tailwind-css) at a number of PHP, Drupal, WordPress, and JavaScript events, and maintain [a starter-kit theme](https://www.drupal.org/project/tailwindcss) for using Tailwind in custom Drupal themes. + +I've also rebuilt a [number of existing sites]({{site.url}}/blog/uis-ive-rebuilt-tailwind-css) as examples and written some [Tailwind CSS related blog posts]({{site.url}}/blog/tags/tailwind-css). + +I'm looking forward to attending Simon's workshop tomorrow and quickly putting that knowledge to use in the next phase of a project that I'm currently working on.