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What I Learned Building Twitter Bootstrap
- NathanKP 14y agoInteresting... For some reason I had always assumed that Bootstrap was associated more closely with Twitter because it had the word "twitter" in the name. Now I understand why some business are so concerned with preventing other websites and people from using their name. I'm not saying that Twitter should have demanded that these guys change the name of their framework to something else, but this is a good object lesson of how using someone other company's name can cause confusion. In retrospect probably one of the biggest things that motivated me to investigate Bootstrap was because it had Twitter in the name, and I had the mindset "If Twitter uses it, then it must be good." So I'm surprised to find out that it wasn't actually that deeply tied to Twitter. Edit: I went back to the website for Bootstrap and the website clearly says: Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat, versus here @fat is saying: it isn’t actually maintained by a team at Twitter (nor was it ever). So now I'm actually more confused.
- fat 14y agoMark and I built bootstrap while we were employed at twitter on twitter hardware. Also, undeniably it was largely influenced by our work there (and later would largely influence a lot of the code at twitter as well as power lots of projects both internally and publicly) – but it was never a company mandated project. It was something that Mark and I came up with on our own and pursued outside of work hours.
- NathanKP 14y agoOkay thanks... I understand now. You started the project at Twitter, but it wasn't owned by Twitter. I'm glad that Twitter didn't claim Bootstrap as company owned code, because I and thousands of other people have really enjoyed using it in our projects.
- fizx 14y agoOne of the reasons I worked at twitter is that they want you to open-source virtually everything. They weren't likely to put up a fuss, and everyone was really proud of bootstrap.
- cpeterso 14y agoI think most people would imagine a project called "Twitter Bootstrap" that was developed by people "employed at twitter on twitter hardware" would be property of Twitter. Does Twitter own the copyright?
- fat 14y agoright now it's under the Apache License v2 – but we're working to move it to MIT for 3.0.0 I think of the community as owning bootstrap at this point… maybe that's cheesy? Or naive… I also think twitter played a larger roll than just hardware. Mark and I were both deeply embedded into the twitter culture (with access to great resources and really smart engineers to bounce ideas off of) and i think bootstrap has a very "twittery" feel as a result.
- sharkweek 14y ago(speaking of cheesy) Those who just create awesome tools and release them into the ecosystem free of charge add immeasurable value to the community. I really want to thank you for how much easier you two have made my life with bootstrap on numerous occasions.
- fat 14y agoaww <3
- Domenic_S 14y agoSame here. I'd offer to buy you a beer, but I imagine you've got plenty of those offers already ;)
- novamantis 14y agoI bet he's swimming in beer donations that have filled his pool. Also, thank you Fat for making my life so much easier.
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- tdrnd 14y agoI think the message the blog post is conveying is that Bootstrap grew out of two developers wanting to build something, not out of a manager wanting to setup an internal project and assemblying a team being instructed to work on the project.
- iamweswilson 14y agoSeems like the first ingredient in building successful start-ups and useful tools. Beings a passion project filling a need helps too.
- skeletonjelly 14y agoSounds like "sponsored" would be a good word to describe the relationship
- mylittlepony 14y agoOr "endorsed".
- mmahemoff 14y agoLike all major tech companies, Twitter is in a talent recruitment battle. Having their name associated with Bootstrap can only be a good thing for them.
- owenjones 14y agoMakes me sad that all my post-work hacking on things has been by myself. As a musician his description sounds similar to playing an instrument by myself; fun but not as great as with a group of friends.
- ctb9 14y agoSame here. Is there an app with traction that helps people like us find fellow hackers to collaborate with. If not, sounds like an idea right there. Want to help build it?
- crowdmatch2 14y agoThere's a lot of truth to the notion of 'building things with friends' is what fuels a lot of developers. I am the same way. I think the same thing can be said for building a startup. It just has a completely different feel and excitement when it's something mutually taken on with a friend. Also major props to Bootstrap for everything they have done for the web.
- totaljohn 14y agothis project makes building a project with friends even more fun. thank you for all your hard work on it.
- callmeed 14y agoI met a Twitter engineer at startup school who said any side projects had to be approved by Twitter's legal team. Was this the case with Bootstrap? Also, was it put on Twitter's GitHub account in order to increase visibility?
- fat 14y agoyep, lots of legal hurdles to go through – took us like 6 months – but now they have a full time opensource shepherd @cra which makes this much smoother
- caniszczyk 14y ago<3, thanks for the kudos
- codewright 14y ago>any side projects had to be approved by Twitter's legal team Welp, they're out of the running for any future work now.
- runn1ng 14y agoTechnical issue, but... is the "Recommend" button doing anything? (or supposed to be doing?) I push it and nothing happens.
- skeletonjelly 14y agoRedirects here for me: https://medium.com/m/signin?redirect=%2Fwhat-i-learned-building%2Fb95033c270af https://medium.com/m/signin?redirect=%2Fwhat-i-learned-build... Check your javascript console for errors
- phene 14y agoI see that "Javascript requires semi-colons" isn't anywhere to be seen.
- sgdesign 14y agoNot what I expected from the link-baity HN post title, that post does not actually tell us what he learned at all, if anything. Not complaining about the post itself, just thought it'd be very cool to have an actual "what I learned building bootstrap" post one day.
- dreamdu5t 14y agoI was thinking the same thing. All I've learned is how much power/draw the Twitter name has.
- jenius 14y agoDear fat, This post comes off to me as cocky and untrue. First, the general tone of this seems very pompous to me. To me, it reads: "I know so much that even building the most popular project on github and possibly of any library on the web can't teach me anything new." It might have been a little more gracious perhaps to thank people for using and contributing to the project...? Also, you definitely learned something building bootstrap. I'm willing to bet you learned a lot of things between the few major version updates and 2,500+ issues, most of which are closed. In fact, here's a presentation that you made detailing something you learned from bootstrap (accessibility, specifically): http://wordsbyf.at/2012/05/21/jsconf-argentina-2012/ http://wordsbyf.at/2012/05/21/jsconf-argentina-2012/ I'm really not trying to be that negative guy on hacker news, this was just my immediate reaction upon reading the post. That being said, congrats on building an immensely popular and important library, and here's to hoping that you learn and always continue learning.
- idointernet 14y agoConsider that what you are seeing in him is actually something about yourself that you can't be with.
- csjohnst 14y agoI think the point he was trying to get across was this: "Getting together and creating something with your friends is amazing"
- fat 14y agohm… sorry it came off that way. :( fwiw, the amount of technical things i've learned from working on bootstrap is not proportional to the amount of work i've put into this project… at all. But, i never expected it to be, and that's totally fine. Have I learned any technical things? lol sure, of course! Funnily, the accessibility thing you linked to wasn't really something I learned building bootstrap… the presentation was all about how accessibility is too hard to really learn… and you need to become a specialist, which is sad times. Paul Irish wrote a great post about it a while back: http://paulirish.com/2012/accessibility-and-developers/ http://paulirish.com/2012/accessibility-and-developers/ maybe i learned that i knew nothing, but that was about it :P My friend Dustin (who created this writing topic on medium) asked me to write about the single most important thing i learned from working on bootstrap. And for me, that single thing was that I love working with people and hate working alone. It took me a while to realize that what was bumming me out the most about running bootstrap (and other projects) was that as they became more successful, there was more of an expectation that i would be working on them all the time (which meant the expectation that i would be working on them independently/alone all the time). That's ok from time to time, but isn't why I get excited about free software and ultimately i became pretty depressed/negative about the whole thing. I'm just now starting to identify what makes we want to continue to dedicate all my free time to a project like bootstrap. And right now, the main motivation is to spend time creating stuff with my favorite people. I can assure you – it's definitely not to learn more about css/js !! :)
- jquery 14y agoWhat I Learned from reading "What I Learned Building Twitter Bootstrap.": Unironic "brogramming" is still alive and well. What a slap in the face of the community that made bootstrap successful.
- whattttttttt 14y agowhat
- prezjordan 14y agoI didn't get that out of this. @fat is a funny guy and likes to say funny things, but his message here applies to developers of all colors.
- bonzoesc 14y agoIf having fun making things with friends is "unironic brogramming," I'm proud to be an unironic brogrammer.
- jquery 14y agoNo, but extreme arrogance and braggadocio is. The only thing missing from that article was a keg stand in the top photo, to show just how little they need to try to be awesome.
- smegel 14y agoIs Bootstrap mainly for CSS? Or should it be viewed as a fully-blown alternative to HTML5BP? I would love to read a guide on how to incorporate Bootstrap with other tools like HTML5BP and the Javascript framework of my choice.
- joshuacc 14y agoBootstrap is primarily a CSS framework with some accompanying JavaScript (jQuery) plugins to provide things like tooltips and popovers. You can very easily use it with HTML5 Boilerplate. You incorporate it in exactly the same way you would any external CSS file. And if you want to use their JavaScript you add that the same way you add any other JavaScript.
- mikerg87 14y agoI am, for one, thankful you did this. I have been able to stand on your shoulders and see farther. certainly the front end work I have built with bootstrap and derivates has made the shallow end of the web I swim in better.
- JuDue 14y agoWhat I want to know is... Why LESS and not SASS? Seems to me, TBS is the only thing keeping LESS alive. SASS/Compass seems to be the better choice? http://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/ http://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/ (Logic and Loops are big ticket items).
- nicholassmith 14y agoWhy vim and not emacs? Why OS X and not Debian? We all have the tools that we end up using, when we end up using them. When I first came across Bootstrap it was at a time when there was plenty of people using LESS as well as SASS, it's only as time has gone on that people have started using SASS more, but there's still plenty of people I know that use LESS as well. There's plenty of SASS based forks now though, so the community uses the tools as it can.
- jayflux 14y agoFrom whispers I've heard within the TB community, is that it may at some point jump from LESS to SASS. But right now its not a priority. Someone tell me if im wrong here.
- fat 14y agoha, well that is definitely not happening anytime soon… but, here is a whole thing on "why less" I wrote up about it a long while back, and it still holds true today: http://wordsbyf.at/2012/03/08/why-less/ http://wordsbyf.at/2012/03/08/why-less/
- iguana 14y agoWhile this post is a bit on the brogramming side (I would actually love to read what you learned from the project technically, and why you made certain design decisions), I have to give you and @mdo props for building Bootstrap. I have to say that Bootstrap is the best thing that has happened to client side web development since jQuery, even if the web is doomed to drown in an ocean of Bootstrap-looking sites.
- trustfundbaby 14y agoWhat stuck out to me was how you pursued this on your own time ... does Twitter not give its engineers time on the clock to pursue things like this? How do you feel about that?
- littlespark 14y agoThanks for posting this Fat, much appreciated.
- alwaysright 14y agoI think we all should just say thanks for building this, and nothing more, well, perhaps thanks to Twitter for not claiming the code. We all should aspire to do what fat and mdo did, build something out of passion, in our spare time, that will be freely available for everyone. There is nothing that anyone can say, (including them) that will take it away from them. They belong in the hall of fame of FOSS and hacker spirit. This is true whether you like or don't like what they write in a blog post.
- DanBlake 14y agoIs twitter trying to claim ownership over bootstrap? I assume you 2 guys left twitter to do this as-a-living. The post reads like a "Twitter does not own this, we made it on our own time, Its just the two of us, etc. etc." Do you even need to worry about this? Pretty sure since its open source you guys are fine, unless something in your twitter employment contract says otherwise. That being said, Bootstrap is a valuable asset to the web and I think you would be not-paranoid in assuming that twitter might want to call it a asset it owns. Step 1 for you guys should really be moving from http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ to http://domainyouownpersonally.com http://domainyouownpersonally.com
- mark_h 14y agoMark Otto owns getbootstrap.com by the looks of it, which at the moment just redirects to the github site.
- caniszczyk 14y agoThe short answer is no, Twitter is not trying to overtake bootstrap. Although we have some ownership of the code base, the community has definitely let its mark on Bootstrap with Mark and Jacob's great leadership. In fact, we have been working closely with Mark and Jacob on the bootstrap transition. There are plans to migrate bootstrap into its own organization soon and kick off an effort to migrate it to the MIT license, all supported by Twitter. Stay tuned for details!
- fat 14y agoyep, twitter has been great. And mark and i didn't leave to start a bootstrap support company :P
- azio 14y agoSo, what did he learn exactly?
- veidr 14y agoFWIW, I learned this same thing working cashier at a dry cleaning shop in my teens. TL;DR Hooking up with people you like and making something cool is way better than doing something annoying and stressful that sucks.