gatsby-starter-lumen VS Tailwind CSS

Until now, my personal website was using a Gatsby with a beautiful template named Lumen. Since I don't want to re-write my website every year to follow the latest trend in React world and since I couldn't change much without learning the framework, I've decided to switch to something else. Many static site generators needs several days or weeks to be mastered, so I went for the simpler solution to be able to build the first version of my website in a weekend: 11ty.

The blog is based on this theme: https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen

For my tailwind nextjs template, I did not want to restrict it to only Nextjs projects using Tailwind CSS but rather look at other blog templates. Other similar templates in my comparison list include Gatsby Starter Lumen or Hugo Coder which tells me that a realistic upper bound for a personal portfolio template project is about 1.5k stars.

Lastly, Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework packed with classes like flex, pt-4, text-center, and rotate-90 that can be composed to build any design, directly in your markup.

Tailwind CSS

Sidekiq is already configured along with assets, tailwindsCSS.

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.