From Frameworks to Using the Platform with Elise Shaffer

When you've spent a good portion of your career as a web developer utilizing CSS processors & frameworks, what would lead you to embrace vanilla techniques and modern CSS features? This is the question in the air as we welcome our first ever guest to the show, Elise Shaffer. Elise walks us through her journey learning full-stack development via frameworks like Rails and Tailwind, and then more recently enjoying the freedom and simplicity of web platform features on the frontend. It's a celebration of doing more with less with Just a Spec.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web (vanilla CSS course) & That HTML Blog
• Elise Shaffer: Website  / Ruby on Rails Podcast
  • Episode 513: Modern Rails Apps with Ayush Newatia
• Open Props
• Tailwind v4's CSS-first config
• CUBE CSS
  • Video tutorial by Kevin Powell

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:29 Weather Report™
• 1:44 Hello Elise!
• 3:06 Fans of vanilla CSS
• 3:35 Elise's software developer journey
• 5:47 Taking frontend architecture seriously
• 10:05 Migrating off from CSS pre/post-processors & frameworks
• 16:51 Hearing more stories about rediscovering vanilla CSS
• 20:01 Page layout is so-o-o much easier in CSS now!
• 21:35 Packing light for success
• 23:46 Bringing new techniques learned in side-projects to jobby-jobs
• 29:17 Gradually transitioning to more vanilla techniques
• 31:39 CUBE CSS
• 36:25 Talk of custom HTML elements
• 40:06 Styling semantic builtin elements
• 40:58 What's still missing in CSS?
• 43:42 Favorite modern CSS features
• 46:38 Outro