What I Learned Building Twitter Bootstrap

Interesting... For some reason I had always assumed that Bootstrap was associated more closely with Twitter because it had the word "twitter" in the name.<p>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.<p>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."<p>So I'm surprised to find out that it wasn't actually that deeply tied to Twitter.<p>Edit: I went back to the website for Bootstrap and the website clearly says:<p><i>Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat,</i><p>versus here @fat is saying:<p><i>it isn’t actually maintained by a team at Twitter (nor was it ever).</i><p>So now I'm actually more confused.

Dear fat,<p>This post comes off to me as cocky and untrue.<p>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...?<p>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 <i>you made</i> detailing something you learned from bootstrap (accessibility, specifically): <a href="http://wordsbyf.at/2012/05/21/jsconf-argentina-2012/" rel="nofollow">http://wordsbyf.at/2012/05/21/jsconf-argentina-2012/</a><p>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.

What I want to know is... Why LESS and not SASS?<p>Seems to me, TBS is the only thing keeping LESS alive.<p>SASS/Compass seems to be the better choice? <a href="http://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/" rel="nofollow">http://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/</a><p>(Logic and Loops are big ticket items).

Not what I expected from the link-baity HN post title, that post does not actually tell us what he learned at all, if anything.<p>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.

Makes me sad that all my post-work hacking on things has been by myself. As a musician his description sounds similar to playing an instrument by myself; fun but not as great as with a group of friends.

What I Learned from reading "What I Learned Building Twitter Bootstrap.": Unironic "brogramming" is still alive and well. What a slap in the face of the community that made bootstrap successful.

FWIW, I learned this same thing working cashier at a dry cleaning shop in my teens.<p>TL;DR Hooking up with people you like and making something cool is way better than doing something annoying and stressful that sucks.

There's a lot of truth to the notion of 'building things with friends' is what fuels a lot of developers. I am the same way. I think the same thing can be said for building a startup. It just has a completely different feel and excitement when it's something mutually taken on with a friend.<p>Also major props to Bootstrap for everything they have done for the web.

Is twitter trying to claim ownership over bootstrap? I assume you 2 guys left twitter to do this as-a-living. The post reads like a "Twitter does not own this, we made it on our own time, Its just the two of us, etc. etc."<p>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.<p>Step 1 for you guys should really be moving from <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/</a> to <a href="http://domainyouownpersonally.com" rel="nofollow">http://domainyouownpersonally.com</a>

I met a Twitter engineer at startup school who said any side projects had to be approved by Twitter's legal team. Was this the case with Bootstrap?<p>Also, was it put on Twitter's GitHub account in order to increase visibility?

Is Bootstrap mainly for CSS? Or should it be viewed as a fully-blown alternative to HTML5BP? I would love to read a guide on how to incorporate Bootstrap with other tools like HTML5BP and the Javascript framework of my choice.

What stuck out to me was how you pursued this on <i>your own time</i> ... does Twitter not give its engineers time on the clock to pursue things like this? How do you feel about that?

While this post is a bit on the brogramming side (I would actually love to read what you learned from the project technically, and why you made certain design decisions), I have to give you and @mdo props for building Bootstrap.<p>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.

I am, for one, thankful you did this. I have been able to stand on your shoulders and see farther. certainly the front end work I have built with bootstrap and derivates has made the shallow end of the web I swim in better.

Technical issue, but... is the "Recommend" button doing anything? (or supposed to be doing?)<p>I push it and nothing happens.

this project makes building a project with friends even more fun. thank you for all your hard work on it.

I think we all should just say thanks for building this, and nothing more, well, perhaps thanks to Twitter for not claiming the code. We all should aspire to do what fat and mdo did, build something out of passion, in our spare time, that will be freely available for everyone. There is nothing that anyone can say, (including them) that will take it away from them. They belong in the hall of fame of FOSS and hacker spirit. This is true whether you like or don't like what they write in a blog post.

So, what did he learn exactly?