A Supermarket Bag and a Truckload of FOMO

Summary

A Supermarket Bag And a Truckload Of FOMO · 26 Mar 2025 The day was nearing to a close. The sun has already set, but that Friday evening in Amsterdam was still warm. Unusually warm, in fact, for those late days in March – as if spring decided to bless my piligrimage, for that piligrimage was not jovial. I was sitting at a ramen joint, sipping on the broth. To my left, a blue, crinkled supermarket shopping bag was sitting solemnly, inconspicuously. Inside that bag sat a slightly used Mac Studio, which I have just purchased to be able to edit CSS of my own application. By the time that evening descended upon the south of Amsterdam, I have lost 3 days of my life trying to figure out why I was unable to edit CSS. But let me rewind a bit. Act 1: It starts with an app I tend to listen to people. So when the time came to start a new app - which I haven’t done in quite some time - I knew that I would like it to be modern enough. Modern enough, even, for me to be able to delegate some work on it to others once the time comes. So, while traveling, I started coding on that app - on the MacBook I carry with me normally. And one of the technologies I figured I should use - because all the cool kids do it, right? - was Tailwind. At work most of our setup is already on Tailwind, with some bits and bobs still not ported - but every time I needed to edit something in the specifically CSS-heavy parts of our UI, it was a bit of a struggle. I do understand the value proposition of the library, but I have it rough with learning modern CSS “two ways” - once for what Tailwind uses for dialect, and once for what it actually does. To add insult to injury, one of my respected colleagues finally got enough of my lamentations (“why does it have to be so hard”) and – rightfully – told me, that if we are all working on a system which uses a certain piece of technology – I better get in line and learn it properly. Since Tailwind 4 recently came out, and we would be upgrading our work app to that,...