In terms of skillset, I’m mostly a backend guy (of 20 years or so). I know my way around HTML and CSS, and I have a decent eye for design, but it’s not my prima

In terms of skillset, I’m mostly a backend guy (of 20 years or so). I know my way around HTML and CSS, and I have a decent eye for design, but it’s not my primary focus. I recently started a writing project, and found myself unhappy with choosing a standard blog theme, and decided to build my own. For this purpose, Tailwind has been incredible. I don’t have plans to become a front end dev, and investing significant time in improving my CSS skills is not a good use of time for what will be a fairly small project. It gives me more flexibility than frameworks like Bootstrap while still offering a lot of the productivity benefits. It lets me explore concepts and ideas that I otherwise wouldn’t have the skills to play around with. This thread reads like most $language/$framework/$os holy wars. There is an awful lot of hatred over a perceived lack of “purity”, or because of the perceived superiority of other approaches. Like most of these technology debates, the extreme binary positions really miss the value that can be found in the middle. Tailwind has been great for getting ideas out of my head to see how they look, and for staying focused on the content that I’m planning to write instead of getting stuck learning about browser edge cases. If I start focusing more of my time on building UIs, I’ll invest more deeply in CSS. I’m also fairly convinced that many of the negative comments filled with disgust at the resulting syntax have never tried it. After about 10 minutes, the conventions start to become obvious, and I can write visual elements mostly at the speed of thought. This is really quite enjoyable. I’m also not suggesting it’s the right tool for every job. But the lack of nuance in much of the discussion here is pretty disappointing for the HN community. I personally feel that the future of the (useful) web depends on more people choosing to do their own thing. Tools that lower the barrier to entry and simplify content creation will always be important.