This post comes off to me as cocky and untrue.
First, the general tone of this seems very pompous to me. To me, it reads: "I know so much that even building the most popular project on github and possibly of any library on the web can't teach me anything new." It might have been a little more gracious perhaps to thank people for using and contributing to the project...?
Also, you definitely learned something building bootstrap. I'm willing to bet you learned a lot of things between the few major version updates and 2,500+ issues, most of which are closed. In fact, here's a presentation that you made detailing something you learned from bootstrap (accessibility, specifically): http://wordsbyf.at/2012/05/21/jsconf-argentina-2012/
I'm really not trying to be that negative guy on hacker news, this was just my immediate reaction upon reading the post. That being said, congrats on building an immensely popular and important library, and here's to hoping that you learn and always continue learning.
fwiw, the amount of technical things i've learned from working on bootstrap is not proportional to the amount of work i've put into this project… at all. But, i never expected it to be, and that's totally fine.
Have I learned any technical things? lol sure, of course!
Funnily, the accessibility thing you linked to wasn't really something I learned building bootstrap… the presentation was all about how accessibility is too hard to really learn… and you need to become a specialist, which is sad times. Paul Irish wrote a great post about it a while back: http://paulirish.com/2012/accessibility-and-developers/
maybe i learned that i knew nothing, but that was about it :P
My friend Dustin (who created this writing topic on medium) asked me to write about the single most important thing i learned from working on bootstrap.
And for me, that single thing was that I love working with people and hate working alone.
It took me a while to realize that what was bumming me out the most about running bootstrap (and other projects) was that as they became more successful, there was more of an expectation that i would be working on them all the time (which meant the expectation that i would be working on them independently/alone all the time).
That's ok from time to time, but isn't why I get excited about free software and ultimately i became pretty depressed/negative about the whole thing.
I'm just now starting to identify what makes we want to continue to dedicate all my free time to a project like bootstrap. And right now, the main motivation is to spend time creating stuff with my favorite people.
I can assure you – it's definitely not to learn more about css/js !! :)
i really like what you've written here though, makes it a lot more clear. have you considered adding some pieces of this comment to the article?
While other framework's exist, bootstrap is packaged fantastically well, and provides excellent documentation
I just wanted to say thanks. I have been integrating bootstrap into my site for the passed few months and I am happy to know it will look better then otherwise ever would have. I still have some trouble figuring out why the hell some parts don't work (can you recommend a debugging tool?) but all in all I am pretty chuffed and can appreciate why it is popular.
Take it easy = )
PS - wtf was with the radioactive download bootstrap button on the download page of the last release? I don't think you were involved with it, but I was surprised to see it . EDIT> It has been removed and now is a normal download button again.
Key word here is "think". As in, before he started the project.
I think that's not cocky, and quite true. e.g. the reason they still do it, is because they enjoy the teamwork and community support, and that's the "lesson he learned" which is answering the question in the title of the post.
And besides, being the #1 project on GH and being used by any other startup out there gives him all the rights to be cocky if he wants to.
They are both deserving a BDFL title which gives you automatic immunity from being called cocky. Even if they are.
Now I understand why some business are so concerned with preventing other websites and people from using their name. I'm not saying that Twitter should have demanded that these guys change the name of their framework to something else, but this is a good object lesson of how using someone other company's name can cause confusion.
In retrospect probably one of the biggest things that motivated me to investigate Bootstrap was because it had Twitter in the name, and I had the mindset "If Twitter uses it, then it must be good."
So I'm surprised to find out that it wasn't actually that deeply tied to Twitter.
Edit: I went back to the website for Bootstrap and the website clearly says:
Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat,
versus here @fat is saying:
it isn’t actually maintained by a team at Twitter (nor was it ever).
So now I'm actually more confused.
Seems to me, TBS is the only thing keeping LESS alive.
SASS/Compass seems to be the better choice? http://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/
(Logic and Loops are big ticket items).
There's plenty of SASS based forks now though, so the community uses the tools as it can.
but, here is a whole thing on "why less" I wrote up about it a long while back, and it still holds true today: http://wordsbyf.at/2012/03/08/why-less/
Do you even need to worry about this? Pretty sure since its open source you guys are fine, unless something in your twitter employment contract says otherwise. That being said, Bootstrap is a valuable asset to the web and I think you would be not-paranoid in assuming that twitter might want to call it a asset it owns.
Step 1 for you guys should really be moving from http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ to http://domainyouownpersonally.com
In fact, we have been working closely with Mark and Jacob on the bootstrap transition. There are plans to migrate bootstrap into its own organization soon and kick off an effort to migrate it to the MIT license, all supported by Twitter.
Stay tuned for details!
Also, was it put on Twitter's GitHub account in order to increase visibility?
Welp, they're out of the running for any future work now.
Not complaining about the post itself, just thought it'd be very cool to have an actual "what I learned building bootstrap" post one day.
Is there an app with traction that helps people like us find fellow hackers to collaborate with. If not, sounds like an idea right there. Want to help build it?
You can very easily use it with HTML5 Boilerplate. You incorporate it in exactly the same way you would any external CSS file. And if you want to use their JavaScript you add that the same way you add any other JavaScript.
I push it and nothing happens.
Check your javascript console for errors
TL;DR Hooking up with people you like and making something cool is way better than doing something annoying and stressful that sucks.
Also major props to Bootstrap for everything they have done for the web.
I have to say that Bootstrap is the best thing that has happened to client side web development since jQuery, even if the web is doomed to drown in an ocean of Bootstrap-looking sites.
