A year ago we made our switch from Bootstrap to Tailwind CSS.
There is a large number of opinionated posts and tweets around this topic. This post series is a reflection on what problems Tailwind has solved for us, what challenges created and how our opinion has shaped after one year of usage.
This is the first part of a three posts series.
Some background
I have been following Tailwind CSS since its early days. I had the chance to try it in some small projects, mostly to experiment with the framework; but never got the chance to try it out in the battle field, until last year.
A new project was around the corner. The team had strong experience with Bootstrap 5, VueJS and Angular. We went with Angular and decided to give Tailwind CSS a try.
The idea was to experiment while building the application layout and a few screens. This should be sufficient to give us an idea what it was like working with Tailwind CSS. The plan was to spend two weeks to do the above and then reflect.
Initial reaction
The initial reaction was negative, like very negative. Here are a few comments that were brought up during the review.
- How is this different from inline styles?
- How can someone remember all these classes?
- Our templates are getting huge!
It was clear that no-one got excited. We briefly discussed that most likely it is another framework hype and decided to re-start using Bootstrap.
At this point the team had to re-create everything using Bootstrap for the next two weeks. And then something unexpected happened!
The unexpected
At the next scheduled demo (end of the first week), team started showcasing progress on some new screens. "Oh, you already re-did everything in Bootstrap?", I asked only to found out that this process didn't even last a few days.
So what happened behind the scenes? While switching to Bootstrap, some of the strong points of Tailwind started to shine. Hence, it felt more natural for the team to continue exploring Tailwind further.
Conclusion
Over the next posts, we will be analyzing why we eventually sticked with Tailwind and what challenges we faced along the way.
Make sure to follow me on dev.to, Medium or Twitter to read more about Angular, Tailwind and other dev topics.
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash
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