SteelWo1f

Working on tools like these is always fun as a developer. And it helps speed the team up! Anybody have any good examples of ones they have made?

"If your cache system starts returning the wrong values that's very scary"

Very understated. The scariest part is that you really have no way of knowing if this is occurring other than to stumble upon it when it happens live.

Definitely. I love using BEM when you have to nest things. If you stick to strict BEM, you will generally avoid having nesting more than 1 or 2 levels deep.

There is no one silver bullet to clean up CSS. I think much of the problem is that many developers think of clean CSS as an afterthought. The same level of care and organization should be applied to CSS as you would apply to the rest of your code.

I have found that there are many tools out there:

- Design systems - Web components - Frameworks - Naming conventions - Higher level transpiled languages

Tools are meant to be used together, not in isolation. Any sufficiently complex app or page can benefit from mixing and matching these tools. At Aha! we have a design system, we use the BEM naming convention, we leverage web components, utility classes, and LESS.

With so many tools you can definitely get yourself into a mess unless you apply each one appropriately. That is where experience, discipline, and good old fashioned code reviews will help prevent a CSS nightmare file.

You are absolutely right here. This problem arose because the surrounding code was much older. I would have liked to reformat it, but that would have been a huge lift compared to what I was trying to achieve.

What tactics do employ when a CSS issue has stumped you?

Considering moving to a company operating with a hybrid approach? Maybe you should think twice.

I can see that happening. But those changes are probably going to be relatively small and easy to understand. I dislike looking at pull requests where it's just a wall of red/green in a single file. It makes it almost impossible to figure out what the person has done.

I wonder how many other frameworks often see this type of organization?

Rails is great and so are monoliths. Read about one of the methods we use to build our Rails monolith at Aha! while ensuring it does not grow out of control.

Now I really want to go build a chart extension.

Much more elegant solution than the mess I hacked together.

As a programmer it's definitely appealing to be able to create a theme mathematically by just inverting. But then design will get their hands on it and you really have to be prepared for that with something like a semantic layer. It will look much better in the end as well.