It doesn’t take long to fall behind as a web developer. Until a couple of years ago, my CSS framework of choice was Bootstrap 3. Eventually I replaced it with a much lighter set of custom utility classes based on Bootstrap that I would just copy across each of my projects.

As a solo founder and indie hacker, maintaining CSS isn’t a massive pain point for me, but all of the Tailwind hype caught my attention. Scratching my itch to learn a new technology with Tailwind seemed pretty harmless compared to trying to learn a new JS framework.

After a few hours of tinkering and reading the docs, I was sold on the concept. Django-tailwind made it super easy to get started, which was a huge help.

When I moved on from playing around with button styles and box-shadows, I realised it was time to finally face the truth. It’s 2021, I’m a full-stack developer, and I don’t know Flexbox. I don’t know CSS Grid. As the world of CSS moved on, I was clinging on to the old Bootstrap way of using floats for layout.

After my initial feeling of shame, I was quite excited. Learning new coding concepts is fun and it's been a while.

I remember a conversation from the Indie Hackers podcast about games that teach people how to code so I Googled "Flexbox game" and I was off to the races. Flexbox Froggy was my game of choice and it was a super fun way to learn.

Now that I have some understanding of Flexbox, I can get back to tinkering with Tailwind and will likely be using it on my next project.

It doesn't take long to fall behind as a web developer, but that's probably ok.