What’s one thing I learned about building websites this year? Not all that much.
This year, unlike most previous years, I didn’t explore a lot of new technologies. For obvious reasons, it’s been a difficult year to be as engaged in the hot new topics and to spend time playing around with new things. So, for the most part, I’ve tried to keep calm and carry on.
That said, I did try a couple of things that were new to me. I built my first React application (after stubbornly holding out for so long). This was a bit of a struggle for me, coming from using a fully fledged framework, like Angular, to a strictly UI library, like React, and I learned a lot about the difference between libraries and frameworks in the process.
I also trialled Tailwind to see what a radically different way of writing CSS (or in this case, not writing CSS) could be like. This was a really fun trial and although I’ve gone back to my good-ole-SCSS, I have taken with me the idea of utility CSS classes. For example, I now create utility classes for things like aligning text, so the line text-align: center; is only written once in my CSS file.
But ultimately, I’ve found that my way of building websites hasn’t changed all that much this year. And more importantly, it didn’t have to.
