Blog

All about my newest tech, project and personal experience.

Christoph Griehl

Passionate Web-Developer looking forward to new interesting projects

Jan 8, 2022 - 2 min read

Taiwan Tapas has new clothes on

Our family restaurant were up for a new look

It has been two years since the restaurant opened its doors. Two years in which a lot has happened. After countless changes to our hygiene concept and lockdowns we can proudly say that the restaurant has been a success story. Taiwanese culture is accepted very will and a Google score of 4.7 lets us believe that quality and price are well accepted. Also the online representation of the business was a success. We managed to create a website and other important entries for Google and Tripadvisor with a very low effort. Our website has 200 visitors on an average day and is therefore, for a business of that size, very well established. Providing the website over Netlify went without problems. The only difficulty was to multiple host domains from a different provider on netlify. This brought some problems with the certificates in the begining which is of course inacceptable for a restaurant client facing website. Next time I would do it again and host over Netlify with Gatsby but only organize every aspect of the website over Netlify itself. If stakeholder whish to acctivly participate in the content I would think about switching back to wordpress but Gatsby allows for full flexibility while being less complex.

The technical side

While there are no mayor differences between https://taiwantapas.de and this blog here I have used another approach to styling this time. I have given Tailwind CSS a try to see what the fuzz is about at recent times. I have to say I first disagreed with the notion of having this abstraction in my code. But, as we often have to, changed my mind and here is why:

• Quicker styles: In recent projects I found that not everything has to be perfect but that speed sometimes is more important. Using Tailwind is like using inline styles but without taking so much space as well as the voice in the back of your head that tells you that you should not write inline styles.
• Easier than CSS modules: The idea of React (and Vue respectivly) is to have everything in one file. Many libraries encouraged this idea as of having CSS in JS in different forms. The idea with Tailwind is the same an has, again, the benfit of development speed over vanilla CSS.
• Logarithmic time comlexity: This became not important for me already but with tailwind you will have only logarithmic growth of time complexity of your code. This is because following tree shaking on build only the used CSS is kept and reused. In other CSS in JS solutions you will often find yourself writing the same styles. There composition is also possible but not simply build in to your CSS solution

Overall I still have get more proficient with Tailwind in a bigger project but the above mentioned benefits and the great dark mode implementation already changed my mind on Tailwind CSS which I first though to be unnecessary abstraction on CSS with terrible syntax. Now it might just be the next tool in my belt to write CSS quicker, more reuseable and a bit more performant than before.