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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#111

Post by sodapopcan »

stickfigure wrote: post #100
listless wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t agree. Building a date picker used to be next to impossible. Overnight it was trivial. That’s some serious disruption.

Nonsense. There have been perfectly good free date picker widgets available for every era of web development, going back to clunky server-rendered html templates.

Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#112

Post by wuhhh »

vazark wrote: post #88
fg137 wrote: post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS

[dead]

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#113

Post by cute_boi »

vazark wrote: post #88
fg137 wrote: post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS

I think it is mostly backend dev who don't want to spend time in frontend stuff.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#114

Post by grzes »

tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#116

Post by sodapopcan »

danvayn wrote: post #51
simonw wrote: post #6

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.…

There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to vi…

> the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything

I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#117

Post by dlisboa »

nightski wrote: post #103
dlisboa wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY? A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds…

So you enjoy reviewing your entire code base and relying on an extremely detailed regression suite just to make simple changes? I don't think AI changes good engineering at all, it just changes who or what is doing it.

It definitely changes some aspects of good engineering.

I'm not a huge AI person but it's obvious a host of great tools we've built to deal with our challenges would not have been significant if we had LLMs.

A very crude example: to translate code into a different language someone would need to write a tokenizer, a parser, an AST and finally a translator. All significant engineering challenges, taking days to finish. Nowadays you can tell an LLM to do that in minutes.

Staying on topic: we could easily argue that CSS wouldn't have existed if LLMs existed and could create table layouts from pasted images in a chat window.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#118

Post by tempfile »

simonw wrote: post #77
f311a wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got like 10 new sponsors, you can see it on their page. They are one of the top OSS projects in terms of revenue. I can't recall any other OSS project that makes so much money and has nothing to do with infra/cloud. They were making around $1M a year back when they complained about the revenue. A lot of Linux distros can only dream about such an amount of money.

$1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.

Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#120

Post by sparklingmango »

dlisboa wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #6

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.…

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency

Yeah, that's why most businesses form.

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