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A podcast for developers interested in building great software products. Hosted by Adam Wathan.

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128: Alasdair Monk - Scaling CSS at Heroku with Utility Classes

In this episode, Adam talks to Alasdair Monk about how they approach CSS at Heroku, and how using a utility-based approach has kept their team happy for the last three years.

Topics include:

  • Why Heroku introduced BEM to try and solve their CSS issues and why it didn't work
  • How custom tooling and Ember's component system alleviated any maintainability concerns about littering the HTML with presentational classes
  • Why Heroku still uses some component classes like "btn" and "input" even though they could encapsulate those in an Ember component
  • Why simply introducing any sort of rigid CSS architecture wasn't enough and why switching to a utility CSS approach specifically was critical to making UI development at Heroku more maintainable
  • How with a non-utility CSS approach, every new feature always seemed to require writing new CSS, no matter how many "reusable" components existed in the system
  • Why the team at Heroku still loves working with this approach, even 3.5 years after introducing it
  • How a utility-based approach has worked just as well for Heroku's marketing properties as it has for their application UI
  • Pylon, Alasdair's experimental CSS library that provides declarative layout primitives in the form of custom HTML elements

Sponsors:

Links:

  • purple3, Heroku's utility CSS library for their product UIs
  • shibori3, Heroku's utility CSS library for their marketing properties
  • Pylon, Alasdair's declarative CSS layout library