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Discussion on: Tailwind isn't the answer

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helmsb profile image
Blake Helms

There are some valid criticisms on Tailwind but for me at least it misses the true beauty of Tailwind, hyper-productivity.

I have been building web applications using CSS for over 20 years and I have used everything from hand-written bespoke CSS to every framework under the sun but Tailwind was an absolute game-changer for me. I immediatly had a huge gain in my productivity as making the classes utilities allowed me to quickly apply them without leaving the markup. I didn't have to jump from HTML to CSS then back again. Add a class and it just worked.

The classes are also predictable so when I learned the pattern I had an intuitve sense of what was possible. As I found gaps or areas that I wanted to customize I could easily extend them with my own classes.

This hyper-productivity also had the benefit of giving me more "courage" to expirement. I am much more comfortable trying things becuase I can apply a few classes and start getting a feel for how different styles might look.

Tailwind allows me to quickly build great looking applications with a fraction of the effort I've used with other tools and I did not need to learn any technologies that I wasn't already using.

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madeleineostoja profile image
Madi Ostoja

Yeah that’s a totally valid use-case for tailwind, and if I was building a quick prototype that didn’t need to scale I’d probably use it myself.

I more wanted to point out some issues that I have come across at scale with it, because it’s often presented as a flawless new way to do things, which isn’t the case

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Blake Helms

I guess I disagree with the premise that Tailwind only makes sense for prototypes and can’t scale. I’ve built/maintain a number of projects with some using Tailwind and others using various SASS/CSS frameworks and the Tailwind projects are an order of magnitude easier to maintain.

That is what attracted me to Tailwind. I find it easy to build projects AND easy to maintain.

I’m not saying it’s going to work for everyone but it’s certainly NOT only for PoCs.