128: Alasdair Monk - Scaling CSS at Heroku with Utility Classes

In this episode of Fullstack Radio I talked to Alastair Monk about scaling CSS at Heroku using utility classes. This is Fullstack Radio episode one twenty eight. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Full Stack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wylen. And today it's my pleasure to be speaking with Alastair Monk. How's it going, man? Yeah. Really good. Thank you. Great to be here. So for anyone who's not familiar with you, do you mind, just briefly introducing yourself and talking a little bit about what you do? Yeah. Of course. So I'm a user experience architect here at Salesforce and what that means is because obviously it's a bit I think it's a title that people aren't super familiar with architects and UX more used to sort of hearing sort of product designer and stuff like that. So I kind of work across product design, product strategy and engineering to a certain degree, and sort of bridge I guess those sort of three disciplines. At Salesforce, I'm mostly focused on working on our hierarchy products and our our sort of developer experiences on the Salesforce platform. So anything that you're building on top of kind of Salesforce data, if you're a developer with us, that's my that's my world. Gotcha. Cool. Yeah. So the reason that I wanted to have you on the show is this was probably, like, maybe a year and a half ago or more. I had discovered that Heroku had switched from like a bootstrap based sort of CSS homegrown sort of like framework and system into something that was based on tachyons. And I was working early stages on Tailwind CSS at the time which was like a very similar framework to tachyons in terms of the approach. And I thought that was really interesting to see because Heroku is like a big well known name and I thought it'd be really interesting to learn more about, what motivated you to make that switch and what some of the benefits you've seen have been and what sort of some of the original problems that you want to solve were. So I think maybe a good place to start would just be talking a little bit about, like, what were you doing in terms of, like, CSS architecture and CSS approach at Heroku, before you started introducing any, like, tachyon stuff into the product. Wow. Yeah. And I think the answer is that we weren't really doing anything which is why we had to kind of, overhaul what we were doing with, the tachyon's approach. So I guess I'll set a little bit of context first. For anyone that's been a Heroku customer for I don't know a few, at least sort of five or six years, they'll remember I think famously that our, dashboard interface was like very dark, sort of very dark purples and, sort of shades of black. And just about when I joined the company which I …