Simon Vrachliotis is speaking at Epic Web Conf 2024

Hello, everybody. I'm so excited to be joined by my friend Simon. How are you doing, Simon?

I'm doing great.

How are you doing?

I'm awesome. And I am really excited to have you come to Utah in April for Epic Web Conf. So I want everybody to get to know you,

just to hype up the event and look forward to meeting you.

So can you give us an introduction to yourself?

All right, so I'm Simon. I used to be a school teacher and passionate about teaching, then I pivoted into web development. I thought I was starting from the ground up,

but pretty quickly realized that I can teach web developers just like I teach students. And long story short, I ended up going back to teaching as a DevRel advocate content creator. It led me to work for Tailwind Labs as the main video person making,

which let me achieve one of my dreams, which is teach the thing I like the most in CSS, Tailwind CSS, and teach it to a really large audience. And I'm really excited to be, like you said, coming to Utah and be able to talk about my passion about Tailwind CSS, which might be different

than some other people, the angle they attack it from. Yeah, one of the things that I really appreciate about what you teach with Tailwind, which by the way, anybody who has been using Tailwind in the last couple of years has definitely seen one of your videos. So thank you for all of those. But what I really like about your approach

for teaching CSS is that, first of all, you're not just teaching Tailwind, you're teaching CSS in the process. But you do a really good job of explaining why we're doing things a certain way. A lot of times it's easy to say, okay, and now we're gonna do display block, and we're gonna do gap or whatever.

But it's not just magical stuff that you're doing, you're first gonna explain, why are we doing display block instead of display inline or flex or whatever? And you actually show, this is what would happen if we did it this way that you might think we should do it that way, but this is why we're not gonna do it that way,

and now let's do it this other way. I guess that's maybe a natural thing that comes to you from your experience in education? It's probably some traits from my teaching background and just my own philosophy about how I learn things. I like to understand little concepts and why certain things work a certain way.

So I try to teach it the way I would understand it better. And I like that you noticed that, for me, Tailwind is just a tool to use CSS. It's not just, Tailwind is not a different thing. It's CSS, and then it has a certain subset of properties that you can use with quick access, and so when I teach Tailwind, I really teach CSS,

which is the thing that I love. Yeah, I think that Tailwind is, well, it's certainly my favorite way to use CSS. And as opposed to something like Bootstrap where it really abstracted CSS away from you, Tailwind really does a good job of embracing the CSS

and exposing that to you in a way that, for me, is more palatable. Like, I don't have to be jumping between these different files and between having to come up with a good name for this class and all of that stuff. So it is, yeah, definitely a breath of fresh air for the last couple of years.

So what are you planning on speaking about at Epic Web Comp? Can you give us just, no spoilers or anything, I guess, but your high-level idea of what you're planning on talking about? Yes, so it's a slightly different approach, not necessarily different, but I'm not going to dive into code too much,

but I want to talk about how I, myself, perceive Tailwind CSS as a design tool as much as a developer tool. And through my career working with designers and myself, I sort of sit in this straddle between design and front end. You know, there's people completely

at the back of the backend and then front of the backend, and I'm very close to the UI and design and dev. And I think Tailwind has that magical capabilities of bringing designers and developers to work in the same mental model, which is really incredible. And yeah, I want to demonstrate why that's the case,

what makes Tailwind unique in that aspect compared to other CSS methodologies, and show a few examples of designers I've worked with.

Simon Vrachliotis

Designer, Developer & Content Creator

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