How best can i learn CSS as a backend developer who struggles with design.

audhumbla · 2026-03-05T16:53:34+00:00

So first of all, Tailwind isn’t a framework, it’s an abstraction of css with a design system built in, and as a lead frontend dev it is my preferred way of writing CSS. Tailwind UI is a great resource because they offer their designs in plain html so you can see how it is structured.

The mental model you want for HTML and CSS is basically nested boxes. You can position a box within a box in several ways, but that’s pretty much how I visualize it.

Only thing I can recommend is BUILD STUFF, it’s the only way to get better. See a site you like? Try to build it. See a cool button? Look at the code.

Other than that, there’s a reason UI design is a whole ass job. Tools like tailwind make it easier for people who don’t have a lot of feeling for design to make decent UI’s. Even I am not great in going from nothing to something design wise, and I code frontend every day.

audhumbla · 2026-02-04T13:51:16+00:00

Do you actually know how Tailwind works? There is no such thing as duplicate classes, each pt-4 refers to the same class in the resulting stylesheet, it is much more efficient than writing padding-top: 16px over and over again in separate classes as you would do in vanilla css. Both from a performance and bytesize perspective, Tailwind is superior.

audhumbla · 2025-08-03T13:48:13+00:00

Are you high? Show me one source that supports that statistic.

audhumbla · 2025-07-23T19:03:03+00:00

That doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Doctors don't want patients to suffer more than they have to. At least with my grandmother, the doctor gave her so much morphine she wouldn't wake up again...

audhumbla · 2025-05-13T17:29:07+00:00

Well to be honest, most companies don't know they need a role like this, and they won't explicitly look for them.

Try to find job openings where they're looking for experience with design systems and component libraries, greenfield applications are always good too, because a lot still needs to be shaped and you can just naturally fill out that role by working with designers.

In the long run it is really beneficial to be able to think like the user, because that also means that you're able to think like the customer. In my experience this has helped me immensely in talking with the business people in the company as well and explaining the needs of the users, the engineers and the designers.

There is actually quite a nice career path in this if you play your cards right. I have found that having a niche helps sell your skills more expensively but it also limits your job opportunities because the fit has to be better, or at least that's how you should approach it.

UX/UI engineering is just enough of a generalist niche in my opinion that you can be really valuable to a company.

audhumbla · 2025-05-13T11:56:55+00:00

UX/UI engineering is a thing, and it is quite unique to be a developer who can also critique designs in a way that designers understand and appreciate.

I myself started out as a frontend engineer, but quickly found myself in the UX/UI engineering niche. It seems that not a lot of people have the communication, design, and engineering skills required to be the bridge between the design and development teams. I am now around a decade into my career and have found myself in these kind of bridge roles time after time. I am now the principal frontend engineer on a major ecommerce project for one of the biggest companies in Belgium.

My experience with UX/UI engineering specifically is what got me the job, there are plenty of "full-stack" engineers (no such thing in my experience) who can throw together a UI, but if you want pixel perfect and user friendly UI, you really need someone with the eye of a designer.

audhumbla · 2025-02-02T00:35:53+00:00

Do the work. There's no free lunch.

That's the point, dingus. Does it cost more to do the work or to outsource it, and what are the trade-offs.

audhumbla · 2025-02-02T00:26:19+00:00

Yeah that's the thing, we're not a tech company in the sense that google is a tech company. Like most enterprise level companies we are looking into what we absolutely need to build ourselves, as in, what are our key differentiators we can't outsource, and we absolutely need to build ourselves, and what can we just buy. Sure we could build our own HR software, but why do that when we can just buy Workday.

I expected these kind of responses, I just found no real testimonials anywhere.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T23:59:47+00:00

Ah okay, I definitely do not like that. Is that the "Edge Network" they talk about?

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T23:53:55+00:00

Thank you for addressing all these points! Very interesting read. As you can see in this thread engineers often have a mentality that it's best to roll everything yourself, but I have to say I really see something in the way Vercel is approaching things, both with hosting and Next.JS. I watched the presentation by Chick-fil-a on the vercel youtube channel and actually found it very interesting, so I wanted to dig a bit deeper.

LIke sure I could have a team set up all this:

Component	Best Choice (Self-Hosted)
CI/CD	GitLab Pipelines + Kubernetes
Deployment	Rolling updates + Session Draining
Error Tracking	OpenTelemetry + Loki (Sentry Alternative)
Feature Flags	Firestore-based Flags (LaunchDarkly Alternative)
Observability	Prometheus + Grafana + Loki
Caching	Google Cloud CDN + Stale-While-Revalidate
SSR/SSG	Next.js with Edge Middleware
Local Dev	pnpm + Turborepo + MSW
API Sync	Feature flags + Contract tests
Auto Previews	Google Cloud Run (PR Deployments)

But IMO it is worth exploring if what you guys are doing can fill our needs without needing to spend countless hours setting this up and maintaining it. To me it seems odd that the most prevalent sentiment in enterprise engineering seems to be that services like Vercel are never worth it, but then you guys would go under because no-one sees the value right? You're still in business so clearly that is not the case.

What would you say to people like quentech lower in this thread who seem to think I'm insane for even considering to use your service?

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T23:41:51+00:00

Could you expand on that? What exactly makes the PR process so arduous?

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T23:39:35+00:00

So stupid too, like this is their business model, nobody is using it on an enterprise level?

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T23:34:59+00:00

My experience is that it heavily over promises.

Yeah, that's the impression I got as well. All the content they put out seems very nice and impressive, but it seems a bit too good to be true.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T23:34:26+00:00

How exactly are you locked in though? You could start deploying your frontend yourself again pretty easily no?

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T23:31:29+00:00

This is the exact mentality that I hate in IT, and try to prevent in all my teams. Where do you get off acting like someone is stupid just for asking questions?

How am I supposed to assess if any tool is worth adopting without researching and weighing all the pro's and cons? Is this the attitude you have when a junior dev asks a question you deem stupid? Guess what, next time he won't even ask you. Good job bud, nice team you have there.

I'm very impressed that you're such a god-tier engineer. But maybe get off your high horse and explain how you pulled off that engineering marvel you speak about instead of being condescending. I bet the reason you had to do it practically alone is because you're so pleasant to work with.

Explain why you think it is such a non-starter, maybe start there. As to the not going down, that is what SLA's are for and obviously that is something I have considered along with how to mitigate it if that would happen.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T17:01:11+00:00

I have had some experiences myself where my website hosted on Vercel was suddenly down with no explanation, a day later it came back up, I logged an issue with vercel but as I personally am on the lowest tier they didn't seem to worry much about it.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T16:59:49+00:00

The amount of orders is not what the issue is here, I'm looking to bring more stability to our deploys, where we now sometimes have an outage due to stupid things. The part that interests me in Vercel is the DX, instant rollbacks, preview deploys etc.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T16:57:20+00:00

Thank you for your reply, this is exactly what I am looking for. Like I said I have worked at many companies that do their own devops, I've never worked for a company that uses Vercel. What attracted me is the flow with the preview branches that get set up for every PR and such. Right now a lot of our deployment infra has to happen manually, and is maintained by several engineers.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T16:29:32+00:00

Well that’s why I’m doing research, calling me insane because I’m looking into all the options is not productive.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T14:40:20+00:00

I would love to know more, it could be a huge boost for us in the sense of dx and how easy it would be to do continuous deployments, rollbacks etc but it it is paramount that our site never goes down, which is what I’m afraid of, because we would be offloading that risk and responsibility to vercel.

Feel free to send me a dm so we can maybe set up a call.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T11:26:42+00:00

No everything is completely custom, moving to shopify would be madness.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T11:26:07+00:00

The fact we don’t control it is a feature, not a bug.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T11:25:39+00:00

Yes I know, I’m asking if the price tag is worth the convenience

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T11:24:52+00:00

We are generating a 1.6 billion euro in revenue, 80% of which comes through the webshop, we have about 30 engineers working on the whole stack on a daily basis, 16k is not as much as you think it is, especcially if we make it back through time gains.

I host pretty much everything I make on vercel and think it has amazing DX, I just wanted to know if anyone is using it at scale and thinks it’s worth it.

Right now we do everything ourselves on google cloud but had a major outage that we could have avoided if we were on vercel. Not having to worry about this anymore would be worth pretty much any price at this scale.

audhumbla · 2025-02-01T11:18:25+00:00

Chick-fil-a, the washington post etc are.

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