Tailwind Connect
Planted 02023-06-24
Working at SkyCatchFire is a blast. Because of an expired passport (sorry, John), I had the opportunity to go to Tailwind Connect 2023 with Skylar.
Tailwind Connect 2023 is the first official Tailwind CSS event—an opportunity to hang out with over 150 fellow developers and designers to talk shop, enjoy a few drinks, and get a preview of all the new stuff the Tailwind CSS team has been working on.
The Tailwind team hosted the event from their hometown in Cambridge, Ontario, at Tapestry Hall.
I had never been to a developer conference before—I had no idea what to expect. I planned on wearing dress pants and a dress shirt to the conference until my uncle told me it was a t-shirt kind of event. It was indeed a t-shirt kinda event.
Jen scheduled an international flight from Cleveland (CLE) to Toronto (YYZ) and a driver to get us from Toronto to Cambridge. However…
Lukas Rex, flight AC8732/20 Jun from Cleveland to Toronto has been cancelled due to crew constraints.
We are actively looking to find an alternate flight and will update you shortly.
— 12:11 AM Air Canada
I woke up at 5 AM; drifted in and out of sleep to a slurry of messages, then fell asleep again at 8 AM before waking up after 9 to see…
Skylar & Lukas, I would plan to hit the road asap. Tailwind and Wes Bos are waiting for you! — 8:11 AM Ryan Schmidt
He did not to Lukcus now — 8:13 AM Skylar Wuebker
Headed to lukas now* — 8:22 AM Skylar Wuebker
14 minutes away — 9:26 AM Skylar Wuebker
I was ready. Our ETA: 2:26 PM.
We’ve reserved the whole patio at the Foundry Tavern which is a great restaurant right next to the event venue from 12pm – 3pm. Our whole team will be hanging out there during that time, so if you want to grab some food and meet some other people who have traveled in for the event that’s the place to be.
— June 15, 2023 Adam Wathan
We get to The Laundry Rooms a little after 3 PM. After oohing and awing at the hotel room, Skylar and I walk over to the Foundry Tavern and join the party at the patio.
Skylar and I sit down at an open table. We order some draft Beautiful Aurelia, Skylar gets some Beef Short Rib Bonbons, and I get The Tavern Burger.
I noticed who I thought might be Henri Helvetica across from us, but I wasn’t sure and was preoccupied with munching down the Tavern Burger. (It was Henri, now I know)
After returning to the hotel to get some work done, we head back to the event a little after 5. As we go down the elevator, we meet Matt Greer, who is also attending, and start chatting with him.
We meet Neil Chudleigh, cofounder at Partnerstack.
Wes Bos is part of the circle.
Then the keynote begins. Adam takes the stage and talks about how Tailwind CSS came to be, and how much it has grown—used by over 5 million GitHub projects, 3.3 million IntelliSense installs.
He hands the stage off to Sam Selikoff for some live demos.
Adam comes back on to introduce some of the new changes coming to Tailwind CSS.
Codename Oxide
Oxide is a rust-based parser.
- Use Lightning CSS for nesting and vendor prefixes in PostCSS plugin (#10399)
- Automatically detect content paths when no
contentconfiguration is provided (#11173, #11221) - Process and inline
@importat-rules natively (#11239) - Support
@import "tailwindcss"using top-levelindex.cssfile (#11205, (#11260))
Codename Catalyst
Catalyst is a React component library pre-styled with Tailwind CSS designed to be downloaded (not npm install) and dropped into your project to give you some more… tail… wind… *cough*
This was a preview of Catalyst and more to come in the future.
I don’t have any conferences to compare it to, but Tailwind Connect was incredible. As another attendee put it towards the end of the night (cannot remember his name)…
It’s wild to have such a large room full of my people.