Saw a guy at the coffee shop build a whole landscape in CSS on his laptop and it hit me different

I was waiting for my order at Blue Bottle last Tuesday and this dude next to me had a CodePen open with mountains and a sunset made entirely of divs and gradients. He told me he spent 8 hours on it just for fun and didn't even save the file. Has anyone else found themselves overthinking a simple design when a basic box shadow would do the trick?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant5691d ago

The really wild thing nobody talks about is how these little creative detours actually rewire your brain for the boring stuff later. Spending 8 hours chasing a perfect CSS gradient might seem like a waste but it builds that muscle memory so hard that when you need a quick shadow or a decent layout for a client you just DO it without thinking. It's like free practice time that nobody pays for but your subconscious SAVES every trick you stumble across. Plus projects like that teach you the limits of your tools way faster than any tutorial ever could. So really that guy probably just leveled up his entire approach to CSS for the next six months without even trying.

phoenix8451d ago

Found myself building a 3D isometric workspace in Figma last week with shadows on every single element. The client just needed a flat social media graphic, but hey, sometimes you gotta chase that visual high even if nobody else sees it.