My Last Component Library

As I built my own lit­tle blog and its sib­ling online course site, I start­ed fresh with com­po­nents and set myself a goal: Nev­er again!

My jour­ney hasn’t just got me geek­ing out about the visu­al side of web design; I’ve also become fas­ci­nat­ed by its under­ly­ing struc­ture. My brief three-year stint study­ing engi­neer­ing clear­ly left a last­ing impression!

I believe beau­ti­ful design is about more than the sur­face (as mil­lions of Dribb­ble designs might have you believe). Good soft­ware feels good. And, just like kick­ing the floors in a new build can reas­sure you, a sol­id foun­da­tion encour­ages commitment.

Strik­ing out on my own felt like the ground had been tak­en away.

CSS Trends

At my old com­pa­ny (for which I’m still so grate­ful), we took pride in build­ing our own frame­works and CSS libraries. We dab­bled in Boot­strap and Tail­wind, but always came back to authored CSS.

They were gen­er­ous enough to let me pur­sue that approach. We went through many trends: SMAC­SS, BEM, SCSS mix­in libraries and name­spacing every­thing. We kept mov­ing for­ward as the tech­nol­o­gy pro­gressed — which, in the dark IE6 years, wasn’t very fast.