So I’ve assembled a list of coding challenges that I’ll be doing to firm up my design skills. I’ve also started learning bootstrap. Recently, I tried to get bootstrap to conform to a coding challenge.

It was not working.

This got me to thinking, “Should I just learn Vanilla CSS well, even if it’s hard and forget about these frameworks?

That led me to a reddit chat.

A redditter said he agreed with Jason Knight who had strong feelings about staying away from CSS Frameworks.

After some additional research on Jason Knight, I found out that Jason had recently died.

The cause of death was listed as a variety of health problems.

Surely it had nothing do with CSS.

But anyway, I kept pressing on. I thought. You know what? Maybe some of this css stuff you learned you just need to hear it a second time.

I enrolled in a Scrimba CSS course. It was great. It helped me to reproduce the awful grid I was trying to make in CSS, but not entirely. The grid looked great , but the text inside the grid wasn’t quite responsive.

So I pressed on.

Of course I made the requisite stop at ChatGPT. I was given garbage code and moved on.

However, in the middle of all this, I got a brilliant idea. “I’ll just create the thing in nicepage then go and look at the source code from nicepage and study that. What a great idea!”

I laid out a perfect replica of the page I was trying to recreate in nicepage then set about to study the code.

The media query was 95% of the page!

That is insane.

I’m not spending my day writing a media query when I made a completely responsive grid today in bootstrap in about 2 minutes. Why?

So here’s the tradeoff.

Here’s how I’m going to temporarily make peace with css.

I’m going to study a little css every day.

However, I will no longer try to recereate this page that I am trying to recreate because I checked it’s layout against the top websites in the world and it is a bit dated. It is also an awful looking page which I would never present to any client as finished work. Ever! So why learn how to code a page I hate and think looks horrible. Pointless.

It’s like saying, “This is a page I would know how to create if I was a horrible web developer who was designing pages that look like 2005. Nope. Done with that.

Side note: I am enjoying the new CSS course I’m taking on Scrimba.