Understanding the medium

Last week, I wrote about why I think Tailwind is bad. Part of what I talk about is that maintenance issues and tech debt that accrue from authoring code the way Tailwind wants you to write code.

One of the biggest pieces of push back I get from folks is that it prevents unintended side-effects from more junior developers updating component CSS or writing CSS poorly.

Frankly, that’s nonsense (respectfully).

I’m not denying that human errors happen. They obviously do, and tooling can help mitigate that! But the idea that the fix is to remove the need for front-end web professionals to write or understand CSS entirely is patently absurd.

We should understand the medium we work in.

Junior developers won’t know everything, and we can’t expect them to. But it’s the job of more senior developers on the team to review code, find issues like that, and coach, mentor, and educate junior developers so that they can get better.

Preventing them from writing CSS doesn’t make these problems go away. It just kicks the can down the road.

Tomorrow, I’m going to share my best practices for writing CSS and JavaScript on a team.