This is the best design app since 2016. Has Google Docs-alike multiplayer editing but in a design doc. Love Figma.

I'll try and clarify what I mean here. Tailwind seems to appeal to devs who feel they never fully grasped CSS + design.

Because it provides a copy-pastable subset of reliable classes where you end result will look good.

As a company we are often hired to fill a knowledge gap (exactly in design and front-end). The nature of agency work is to leave a deliverable for the client to work with.

My idea is that when the project is over and the design/front-end gap still exists in the team, perhaps it is better to leave something more manipulatable (I used the word malleable originally).

I think with the great docs that Tailwind has it might be easier for someone who is not a front-end dev to manipulate a `<div class="p-4">` to `<div class="p-3">` than to come across a BEM/ITCSS component, written in SCSS* where you have to understand much more concepts to manipulate it skillfully.

*(our preferred stack really)

Counter-example: I’ve been building with CSS for about 20 years, and am very competent with it, but I’m a fan of the paradigm of atomic styles and eschewing the cascade. I don’t particularly love Tailwind, but a lot of the ideas and reasoning behind it are rock solid.

We need to move past the rhetoric of “Tailwind is for people who don’t know CSS”, when it’s only true in a correlatory sense because the majority of tech is always going to be newcomers. People who are CSS experts are just as capable of concluding that these newer paradigms are worth investing their time in.

So are we supposed to unlearn CSS because we want to make sure that unskilled people can take over the project?

I believe that quick deliverable you mention, will become a big burden for that client in some future.

I saw already multiple projects where both Tailwind and regular CSS are used. This seems like unavoidable, since Tailwind looks like easy-peasy, but it actually can't be understood and without understanding CSS in the first place. Maintaining this kind of mix must be fun...

It's kind of sad that not-learning is hyped over mastering.

I was in no way talking about you, I was talking about backend devs in general who are thankful for something like Tailwind.

Just like I, a front-end dev + designer am thankful for something like Firebase, because my backend skills are fairly nonexistent.

That went bad quickly! You are putting words in the mouth of the original comments for no reason. "a dev who doesn't fully grasp CSS + design" does not mean a stupid dev; it can be a dev who decides that he doesn't need to fully grasp CSS + design to do a great job. Why is that weird that the owner of an App design service agency prefers pure CSS over a library?

yes this is all rooted/connected to the truth that the huge influx of dev/engineer-centric approach to everything web design has basically ruined/messed up front-end for the 5+ years

The context is that we're primarily a design company, the front-end is a way to express our designs.

A big reason for me is that I want the bigger group in our company to experiment with several CSS techniques to grow as front-end developers. If I (as a manager) set a constraint on one type of CSS it is difficult to learn more.

As an agency it makes sense to have broad capabilities. I think as a freelancer it's super fine to just constrain yourself to what you like, as you state there is huge demand out there.

It's wonderful to experiment. I wanna give Tailwind (and React) a second try if I find the time.

It's just that the post comes across as resignation, as if these techs are a fact of life.

Well, you mentioned being blocked, so I searched your name + tailwind.

Probably the company monitors the tailwind and tailwindcss keywords, saw those tweets, and decided that their signal-to-noise ratio for doing customer engagement would be better if they blocked you.

It's not a statement about your twitter account in general, or you as a person. It's just that their corporate objective wasn't served by your tweets. Now that your company is paying them, perhaps you can ask to be unblocked. Or perhaps not, as the support channels for Tailwind UI (the paid product) are GitHub, email and their private Discord.

It's simpler than this honestly — the Tailwind CSS Twitter account is managed entirely by me (I made Tailwind), and I'm the only one who tweets from it and checks the notifications to see if there are people doing interesting work I can help elevate or having problems I can help with.

Seeing a bunch of incessant vitriol in the mentions all the time about something I've worked really hard on for many years is very distracting and upsetting to put it mildly, and on days when my emotional reserves are already low from the stresses of figuring out how the hell to make money working on the project or having a young family it's really not a healthy thing to have to deal with.

Criticism being delivered in good faith is welcome and productive, but constant holier-than-thou "wow whoever created this is extremely stupid compared to me and clearly has no idea what they are doing" is not that.

I've only ever blocked two people for this sort of abusive crap since 2017, in case that provides some perspective.

Tailwind CSS is a "company" now in the sense that Steve and I built a commercial product to make the OSS stuff sustainable, and it turned out to be successful enough that we could hire handful of other people to help out, but I certainly don't think of us as some sort of faceless corporate entity. We don't plan to grow the team and I don't plan to become a full-time manager — I just want to keep working on interesting OSS projects and we decided to use the revenue from our commercial stuff to make that possible by hiring people to help with customer support, working full-time on existing OSS things from the ecosystem (we hired the person who built the OSS Tailwind IntelliSense extension for example), and to keep up with the barrage of GitHub issues we see as a popular project.

Tailwind CSS itself is very much a personal project of mine and a labor of love, and for better or for worse it's not as easy to detach yourself from projects you pour that much into as people (who have no perspective on the emotional challenges of being the face of a popular and polarizing project) make it sound.

There’s a difference between disagreeing and being an ass. If you wanted to engage with them then try to have a conversation. All you did was say how terrible it was and not to use it. Big difference.

Nobody owes you their attention.

I agree, but none of those tweets were directed at the authors. They were just talking about Tailwind in general. One was a poor joke.

My 3 blog posts were a genuine attempt at trying to dissect what I didn't like about the framework. Many people wrote in to thank me for that perspective.

I find it unfair to single out two historical tweets neither of which is directed at the authors.

You do not like their product. They do not care to engage you. Win-win! Except that you need their product and they still do not care about you as a customer.

If you are going to trash my product, I'm absolutely going to block you. If I have a say in what the company that sells that product does, I will absolutely have that company block you.

This kind of crap is the reason it's much easier to block people who can't contribute or formulate proper criticisms and focus on properly submitted GitHub issues. All this is just noise

Those tweets are not just disagreeing.

He just disagrees if using tailwind is a good idea.

Where is the problem that justifies blocking?

> Where is the problem that justifies blocking?

You can block anyone on social media for any reason or no reason at all and you don’t have to justify it to anyone.

You can, but should you? Doesn't that look unprofessional?

If they've decided to block someone, they've probably already decided that they don't care about looking professional to that person.

An individual, absolutely. But a company? The arguments in favour of “you can block anyone for any reason” don't really apply.

Sure, as long as it's not based on a protected characteristic or an interaction subject to a regulation. You have no right to interact with a company otherwise.

I'm not talking about legal rights; I'm talking about what is a sensible social convention. (Because really, you don't have the right to block anyone.)

You don't need a right to do it, because they have no right for it to not be done.

But social convention was my point - the social convention is it's always fine to block and you never need to explain, in my opinion.

We're trying to find the balance between semantic classes and utilities now with @apply. I've always found layout to be easier with utility classes (regardless of Tailwind, this counts for Bootstrap 4 too).

I like "atom"-like components better with semantic classes. In BEM/ITSS I'd make a component for -everything-. But in Tailwind we'd only make one for common "atoms" such as buttons, tags, inputs etc.

Code example: write ".t-button" and then use @apply to put the classes there. Keeping the design constrained to a set of tokens.

    .t-button {
        @apply border
               inline-flex
               items-center
               px-3
               leading-5
               font-medium
               rounded
               focus_outline-none
               focus_ring-2
               focus_ring-offset-2
               focus_ring-blue-500;
    }

So yeah, I agree with pre-processing utilities - but this is just the same problem as with CSS and I think the apply idea is actually pretty neat...

But... I need to know all those classes to know why the final rules are put in place, I need to know that they don't have conflicting properties, or if they have, their priorities. And when you add your own custom apply's in there, then it can also break just the same. And when you customise your tailwind classes it ends the same problem. So when you're trying to figure out why rows in a table with the same number of headers and same number of td's have different sizes because some no-breaking space class was applied, and why your a.btn isn't getting the same styling as your button.btn and etc, I always feel like I've wasted more time than I should (perhaps because I know css and used it extensively)

I might have been a bit harsh on saying "dementia" as it's disrespectful for those who've put the work in writing it and releasing. It's better than all previous frameworks - I just personally think that it's problem searching for a solution as you can't really win.

I have a hard time describing it. Probably because we're quite unique in how we work as a design company and we draw a line that other people don't.

Bedrock is a static site generator that defines clear boundaries where designers, developers and content creators can coexist.

Or something like that.

We should really change the name, there's too many projects called Bedrock.

If that's really their intent why not do a layoff round with a bigger severance package for 10-20 ppl to get back to 30 people, it would be less painful than this PR disaster?

Purging overly political employees is probably illegal, so they made a policy then offered $ to voluntarily self select themselves out.

All press is good press?

I think if 1/3 of your company leaves there is short-term morale loss for the ones that remain. But the loss of internal IP will be devastating. Especially if you are not big on docs and have that “just be smart and ship” approach that Basecamp has. Basecamp has a real problem hand here... they probably never expected this.

From what I’m seeing basically the entire iOS team is gone, and that app is nontrivial. It’s going to be a nightmare to get new developers up to speed without any of the existing expertise around.

Just because an employee leaves doesn’t mean you can’t hire them back as a consultant. Although that may not happen in this case.

Paying employees 3-6 month severance to hire them back as a consultant is perhaps the worst possible business decision I can imagine a leader making.

Perhaps in the short term it is, but in the long term I think you care about company culture more than spending the $$$.

Why hire employees at all then? Just outsource everything.

I'm not sure what you mean. I'm assuming that if they hire people as contractors they only do so until they've hired new people to fill the vacant positions.

There's only 58 employees there too

The founders went into a political discussion with someone on the other side of the political spectrum and got tired of it - then instituted a no-politics-and-society-discussion policy when the whole success of Basecamp is taking a societal , opionated view on software and what work should be.

This summary doesn't include the fact that it was trigged by a discovery of a decades-long of customers employees thought had "funny" names.