111: Jeffrey Way - Building the New Laracasts with Tailwind CSS

In this episode of Fullstack Radio, I talked to Jeffrey Way about building the new laracasts.com with Tailwind CSS. This is Fullstack Radio episode 111. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Full Stack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wadden, as usual. And today, I'm here with my good friend, Jeffrey Way. How's it going, Jeffrey? Good. Thanks for having me back. So, the reason I wanted to have you on the show today is, I don't know when it was, maybe towards the end of last year in November or something like that. You put out a new kind of big redesign of the Laracasts website and not even just like a redesign basically a whole front end rebuild as far as I understand and I think it's one of the bigger kind of fancier projects out there that's built with a Tailwind CSS. So I thought it'd be cool to talk about your experience doing that and sort of the decision making process that led to it. Maybe it's some of the pitfalls you've run into with previous approaches you've used to, you know, kinda architect things with CSS and and kinda learn about what that that process was like. So I don't know. What do you think? Yeah. Let's do it. So I guess, first of all, what has been your approach, like, historically to CSS in general and just kinda implementing a design that designers handed off to you? Okay. Historically, probably the the same path that everyone took. So in the past, I would have this would be, I don't know, 2007, something right around there. So in the past, you have that PSD. Right? And then you go and you chop up all of the images, and then you have a folder full of images. And then one by one, you go and you construct the HTML and the CSS. And what ends up happening, everyone does this, I think, especially back then. The CSS basically duplicates the structure of the HTML. Right? So you may have like an ID because back then you only used IDs. You have an ID and then you'd say like post h one or post p or post u l or post arrow u l arrow l I arrow, a. And so your CSS completely duplicates, your HTML structure. And my understanding was this was a best practice. It turns out that's not even close to a best practice, but but I think that's how most people, learned it back in the day. So it's been kind of fun to see over the last five years, everyone kind of zeroing in on how to write good CSS. Mhmm. It it's almost like, you know, where you're going back and forth. Like, okay, this sucks. So I'm gonna switch over here. We're gonna try out maybe this other approach where the CSS doesn't duplicate the HTML, and then you're using classes a little more than IDs. So that way you …