Case Studies Since its release in 2017 it’s become a favorite CSS framework among devs. And it’s currently used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify,

How Tailwind Makes Millions From Open Source

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Style Pass

2024-04-17 21:00:04

Since its release in 2017 it’s become a favorite CSS framework among devs. And it’s currently used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, Netflix, and basically every indie developer.

Tailwind is a CSS framework. At its core it’s just one big CSS file with pre-built classes. But it’s unique in that the classes are utility classes. Meaning each class does one thing.

In traditional CSS, you define classes that hold a bunch of attributes – like color, size, what happens on hover etc. And you assign a chunk of html to that class.

In utility classes, each class has a single job. For example the text-white class will turn the text color white. And then you string together these utility classes in HTML to get the look and behavior you want.

Adam Wathan, the guy behind Tailwind, was building other companies from 2015-2017. He built them in public, either through tweeting or live streaming.