Tailwind gives you a bunch of utility classNames to write CSS with. I've been loving prototyping with it, and I'm interested in why, because it's ideas often feel counterintuitive.

Benefits

Pragmatism

Something I think a lot about is what level of abstraction to attack a problem on. Here is a loose cataglog of where I've been thinking about it lately.

React libraries

Previously I've been reluctant to use libraries in my react code, generally preferring to roll my own solutions, believing that you tend to hit a wall with what you can do with libraries and working around their limitations becomes as much or more work than building your own. There are things I would use, like state management libraries, but I figured most of the interaction stuff I'd rather do myself.

Starting to figure out drop zones with dnd-kit.

Nice little boxes in a grid (the necessary foundation for something weirder).

Ink and Switch experiment with "bot cards" so that "computation follows the same rules as data".

From: https://www.inkandswitch.com/end-user-programming/

Rough draft of my current tools-for-thought thinking.

Trying out style paint for components, piggybacking off Tailwind.

I'm excited for all the energy around tools for thought. Some notes on my current thoughts (probably to be revised in future entries).

Blocks as the basic unit

Blocks as a basic, contained, and usually addressable unit feels to me "right". You can see it in Notion and Roam and many others.

brikfont - lego typeface experiments

From: https://www.instagram.com/brikfont/

I'm excited for all the energy around tools for thought. Some notes on my current thoughts (probably to be revised in future entries).

Blocks as the basic unit

Blocks as a basic, contained, and usually addressable unit feels to me "right". You can see it in Notion and Roam and many others.

CSS Paint - paint using brushes defined in CSS.

https://css-paint.constraint.systems

How do you change things?

I'm interested in users having the ability to personalize websites. I've mainly thought about it as a case for UI that lets you choose different options, probably powered by CSS (see components.ai's CSS.GUI).

My CSS Paint project lets you use a brush. It's interesting to use a brush. Should we let people style their website using a brush to paint styles on to divs?

CSS painting a dog

Getting closer on the CSS Paint design. Dropped the retro theme for now.

CSS paintings

More CSS paint work, with reordering support and some retro borders.

More CSS paint experiments.

CSS paint, maybe

Almost done with the bare-bones user account and place creation features for the div and CSS building blocks app.

More work on setting up a system of building blocks using divs, text fields, and CSS.