hackclub VS Tailwind CSS

OMG I love this. Go get em! Also, this is perfect material for Hack Club. You should join! https://hackclub.com/

Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself.

I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Apparently everything online about how operating systems and CPUs work is terrible. There are, like, no resources. Everything sucks. So while I was teaching myself I realized, hey, I should make a really good resource myself. So I started taking notes on what I was learning, and ended up with a 60-page Google Doc. And then I started writing.

And while I was writing, it turned out that most of the stuff in that giant doc was wrong. And I had to do more research. And I iterated and iterated and iterated and the internet resources continued to be terrible so I needed to make the article better. Then I realized it needed diagrams and drawings, but I didn't know how to do art, so I just pulled out Figma and started experimenting. I had a Wacom tablet lying around that I won at some hackathon, so I used that to draw some things.

Now, about 3 months later, I have something I'm really proud of! I'm happy to finally share the final version of Putting the "You" in CPU. I built this as part of Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), which is a community of other high schoolers who love computers.

It was cool seeing some (accidental) reception on HN a couple weeks ago while this was still a WIP, I really appreciated the feedback I got. I took some time to substantially clean it up and I'm finally happy to share with the world myself.

The website is a static HTML/CSS project, I wrote everything from scratch (I'm especially proud of the navigation components).

I hope you enjoy and learn something!

Hi! I'm the person who made this thing!

Some backstory on me: I'm 17 and left high school a year ago to work full-time at Hack Club (https://hackclub.com/). I've been programming for as long as I can remember, and started homeschooling about 6 years ago to focus more on that (and my other interests).

Since I'm entirely self-taught, I haven't taken any college systems classes — and while I had picked up a lot, I wasn't happy with my answer to "what happens when you run a thing." So I let myself spend a shit ton of time actually learning as much as possible. What I found was that:

1. Operating systems and hardware are really fun to learn about!

In the face of the recent devastating floods in Vermont, Hack Club, a Vermont-based nonprofit, is offering free use of Hack Club Bank for any flood relief efforts in Vermont, New York State, and New Hampshire.

Facing recent floods, Hack Club is offering free use of Hack Club Bank for relief efforts in VT, NY, and NH. Collect tax-deductible donations easily through various platforms, including GoFundMe. Manage funds collaboratively on our easy-to-use online platform, and issue physical or virtual cards for your charitable expenses. As Vermonters, we’re eager to assist fellow Vermonters. Start within 24 hours by emailing [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) or filling out the form on https://hackclub.com/bank.

Something like https://hackclub.com/

FIRST alumni and founder of Hack Club here.

Hack Club is a nonprofit network of hackathons, student-led coding clubs, and open source projects. Our website is https://hackclub.com and our GitHub is https://github.com/hackclub.

We have been receiving free email hosting from Google Workspace and providing it to the Hack Club network, but we recently hit the domain limit (600 domains) on Google Workspace for Nonprofits. Each domain is typically a hackathon or a chapter at a high school.

Does anyone have any recommendations for email hosts that we could look into? As a mostly volunteer-driven nonprofit, we can't afford pay per-user pricing as there are thousands and thousands of accounts.

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...).