There’s a stage of investment in some specific skill mindset that results in being able to produce things that seem to be absurd or impossible or “I could never

There’s a stage of investment in some specific skill mindset that results in being able to produce things that seem to be absurd or impossible or “I could never do that”. There aren’t many real-life opportunities to productively exercise that degree of skill in obvious ways; if you cut down a tree perfectly, few will truly notice how perfect the stump is, even if they may appreciate the result unthinkingly. So crafting something maximum-insanity like this is a way to exercise all those hard-earned muscles of some random skills, in coordination, for the pure joy of being able to produce a pointless but awesome result. It isn’t so much about “a thousand hours” as it is about “learning how things work at the deepest level”, and sometimes to do that you have to learn something unrelated and cross-apply the skills. If you want to learn to paint-by-stylesheet, pick up a children’s paint by numbers coloring book and color it in however you like and then try to work out what the CSS for it would be. Whether you succeed or not, you’ll be forced to rethink CSS at a basic level, which will expand your mindset and eventually your skill set. Or study how GL shaders work, and try to comprehend what’s going on when people build cool GL demos like the fish benchmark. You may not ever end up using that GL knowledge, but you’ll be more prepared for SVG and canvas elements, which cross-applies to CSS gradients and layout skills. Or study how DOOM level maps (“wad files”) are built. There are stellar writeups of how ultra-basic technology and ridiculous hacks (“no bridges”) were used to make 3D perform brilliant things with the tiniest of CPU resources. There is zero practical value in this on the surface, but it carries some valuable lessons in how to make a great UI with careful selection of tradeoffs, and you’ll probably end up being better at time-design compromises as a result. One thousand of those later, you will be able to paint the Mona Lisa in CSS, and it’ll be enjoyable as an evening project over several weeks or months :)