Siding with the winner

Today, someone asked me: why would you choose Tailwind over a framework such as Bootstrap?.

There are plenty of technical arguments that can be made, but after considering this, I think it basically comes down to choosing for the winning team.

You can create beautiful applications using Bootstrap, Foundation, Tailwind or whatever framework you choose. You don’t even need a framework. The main reason why my default choice would be Tailwind right now is that it’s the “winning team”. The framework has gotten an unbelievable amount of traction, resulting in a huge ecosystem of ready-made components, tutorials and smart developers that can work with it.

As more and more developers go remote-first, foosball tables and office snacks won’t really lure in more developers. Higher salaries and great technologies to work with, will, however. More than 6 years ago, I choose to go all-in on Laravel because I felt like it was going to be the “winning team” for PHP and I never looked back. JavaScript? Next.js or Remix. CSS? Tailwind.

Choosing your next framework can be hard, especially when you focus on the technical side alone. But things get a lot easier when you focus on traction.

In technology, there is no shame in siding with the winner. In fact, it’s a smart move.

Choose your framework not only based on how much you like it, but based on the chance of finding smart developers that will want to work with it as well. You won’t regret it.