argo-navis VS Tailwind CSS

argonavis.io | Lead Software Engineer | NYC | Full-time or Part-time

Do you like space exploration, modular SSTO spaceplanes and player-driven economies?

Argo Navis is an early stage, deep tech game project based in NYC.

We're looking for a part-time to full-time lead software engineer that can potentially continue as co-founder. Compensation is heavy on equity but we have funding for market rate cash pay. The role can be partially remote.

We're working on a new multiplayer space-based sandbox game. Our current focus is physics simulation, procedural generation and resource-based economics. Two major influences are Kerbal Space Program and Eve Online.

The game engine, server and client code are all in an embarrassingly early stage. The plan is to flesh these out with prototype implementations of spatial reference frames, Orbital / Newtonian mechanics and collision detection / resolution. All game states and state transitions will be wrapped in a cryptographic layer to support verification of the current game world, its history and replays of partial world states. Deterministic randomness (not a contradiction; see BLS crypto) will drive the procedural world generation. Players interact with the server exclusively through secure cryptographic signatures - enabling the game and all its interaction to form a secure protocol. But don't worry, we're not building a blockchain nor shilling any tokens :)

The project is radically open: all server and client code is open source and all digital / sound assets are open and free to use. Drafts of first principles, source code:

https://github.com/star-formation/argo-navis/blob/master/doc...

Finally, for our front end, we’re going to be pairing Next.js with the great combination of TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui so we can focus on building the functionality of the app and let them handle making it look awesome!

You can use any frontend framework you want — react-based tooling, however, has a natural advantage as it models everything as a function of state, which can map 1:1 with the concept in Burr. In the demo app we use react, react-query, and tailwind, but we’ll be skipping over this largely (it is not central to the purpose of the post).

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.

First, you need to make sure that you have a working Tailwind CSS project…

Tailwind CSS

With better CSS approaches like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract (which we're heavily using) it's much easier to maintain the UI and make sure it doesn't change unexpectedly. No more conflicting CSS classes, much less CSS specificity issues and much less CSS code in general.

This app was built with Svelte Kit, Tailwind CSS, and many other technologies. For a full rundown, please visit the GitHub repository

Unlike Tailwind, which has over 77,000 stars on GitHub, Mojo CSS has about 200 stars on GitHub. But the Mojo CSS documentation is fairly good and you can find most of the information you’ll need there.

JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite

- Performance is a feature.

Another common interpretation of brutalism is aesthetic, reacting to overly complicated user interfaces by creating simpler, more direct ones. Tailwind CSS (https://tailwindcss.com), one of today's most popular CSS libraries, promotes this approach in its component examples. There's also a neat library I've seen recently called "Neobrutalism Components" for React that I like (https://neobrutalism-components.vercel.app), providing components with a similar look and feel to Gumroad. This might more accurately be called 'Neo-Brutalism,' as noted in the comments.

A more engineering-centric interpretation of Brutalism focuses on form, structure, and efficiency, drawing significantly from brutalist architecture principles. Apart from the user interface itself, most mobile, desktop, and web applications are extremely bloated and often perform worse than sites from 10 years ago did. While one HTML file might be "less brutalist" than the original HN site, it is substantially more brutalist than any HN mobile app in existence, and offers nearly identical functionality.

A broader interpretation of brutalism, which could be termed 'Meta-Brutalism,' is embodied in the overall experience on this site through UX flows. Yes, in the strictest sense, the original HN site is more Brutalist in many ways, but it only shows 30 articles at a time and does not function as a PWA. For this site, the experience of reading 10 stories is arguably less brutalist, but for quickly browsing through several pages and skimming articles (which is how I read HN) it is a lot faster, and in my opinion, more Brutalist.

My primary inspiration was addressing software and tool bloat in UIs rather than strictly adhering to every principle set forth by David Bryant Copeland. I don't find it convincing that this site "isn't brutalist" compared to really any other experience apart from the Main HN site, and I would argue the overall experience is more brutalist in its performance and scrolling behavior.

As a side note: I generally don't like Brutalist architecture that much although I believe it is unfairly maligned. I visited the Salk Institute once and enjoyed it though (https://www.archdaily.com/61288/ad-classics-salk-institute-l...).