Perhaps I didn’t go into enough detail about how awful the experience was doing my last assignment.

Now I will.

I got a kiddy coding book from the library which reminded me to check out bootstrap.

I think every developer secretly knows why bootstrap exists.

Bootstrap exists to provide an option when CSS just doesn’t work (in an intuitive way.)

When you’ve been trying to get something to work for 4 hour and it’s not working, I highly recommend bootstrap.

The fact that bootstrap is natively responsive is terrific.I’d rather take two hours and learn bootstrap knowing at least my work is going to be aligned than six weeks learning css and having hours and hours of frustration.

Note there is also another thing liked bootstrap called tailwinds which I haven’t looked into yet.

I will also make some time to check out https://mdbootstrap.com/.

The founder of mdbootstrap teaches a bootstrap course which is endorsed by FCC.

Obviously this doesn’t mean I will never use regular css again. I’m just saying as of right now, whenever I can avoid it with bootstrap, or anything else on the planet earth, I will.

It has not been a pleasant experience.

I think I liked css until we got to grid.

Up until that point I was creating things that I would feel comfortable showing to a client. Then we got to grid and all of a sudden, I felt like, “I wouldn’t share this with anybody.”

So that may be where massive amounts of frustration and a little disengagement began.

Right now I haven’t logged in to do the last grid quiz for about 4 days. I have been using that time to study because pretty much the last activity made me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.

So that may be the beginning of my frustration with CSS and my decision to now use bootstrap where possible.

So the new rule is.

I will use CSS when I need to. Otherwise, if there is a simpler way to do it, I will not.

An example of “needing to use CSS” would be for

1. Something that is not covered by bootstrap or another framework
2. A Css animation that I want to make from scratch

Otherwise, I will just put a cap on my frustration by avoiding when there is a simpler, more effective way.

I’m like the guy in the old dyson commercial.

I just like things that work.

UPDATE: A day or so after I wrote this, I made an interesting discovery. I clicked on the source code of one of my assignments and saw tailwinds in the source code. So tailwinds is being used to create content to teach us CSS.

More justification for not stressing too much about CSS.

UPDATE #2:

The plot thickens.

Just now I passed an assignment. The assignment involve getting the moon to orbit around the earth. My moon was orbiting far off to the side of the page in a completely different galaxy but I passed the assignment.

So I went looking for another course to take.

I found a school in Britain which teaches 75 coding languages. I couldn’t find HTML and CSS on the website.

I dug a little further. Here’s their explanation of why when they were teaching 75 coding languages, they didn’t include the coding language I may have just wasted 6 weeks learning. (CSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Here’s their explanation.

Let me just try to calm down. Let me just go to bed and try to calm down. I will be done with this and moving on to Java in about two days. Thankfully.

For years I’ve heard that every full stack developer knows html, css and Java. Never had it occured to me to google, Is studying CSS a waste of time?

I don’t know that it is for sure. But I’m not feeling so good about the time I just spent learning it.

Here is someone on Reddit asking the question. Thankfully, most of the people who answered said it’s not a waste of time.