2025 Is the Year of Polish

I have been programming since 2015/2016 and working professionally since 2017. I got into web development at a really interesting time in the space. Companies were just migrating off of task runners like gulp / grunt and starting to use Webpack, Bootstrap was starting to fade in popularity in favour of custom-frameworks and atomic css. The modern era of JavaScript frameworks was taking off as React and Vue were gaining popularity in the scene and ushered in a new era of modern frontend and for that matter full stack development too. MVC was fading out and SPAs were all the rage.

Loop back round to now where the server rendering and execution of code for your SPA is cool again, as it should be! In all that time between then and now I have kept very up to date with all the latest and greatest in the JS space and I have been honing my general programming and web skills across a variety of applications, primarily a cool SaaS product for the past 5 years.

In all this time however, I have been head down building, tinkering and learning about all the latest and greatest. I managed to put by the wayside something I have been wanting to improve on and mess around with for a while modern CSS and cool animations. I have been a Tailwind user quite heavily since about 2020 and I had been stuck using older CSS features because of browser support requirements at the day job. I had been doing the odd tinkering with new CSS features here and there but not really getting to use them in production. Also for a while there CSS was quite slow moving with not much exciting going on in the spec (at least to me) but it seems like in the past 5 years CSS has been flying and huge kudos to the people working on it! We have been getting really awesome long requested features like container queries, CSS variables nesting and much more.

I have missed out on an golden era of CSS crunching away with all my tailwind and legacy browser support and frankly some rather experimental UI's in some cases. I am now going to be re-focusing on the polish that modern CSS allows, I am going to bundle this in with a long standing goal of really having a good go at making animations first class in my applications, with many tools at there to allow that. motion and gsap (now free) to be a few I am going to be focusing on.