The re-learning process
I’ve been brushing back up on Rails this week. It’s been a minute. I haven’t touched it full-time since 2016—Rails 4 era. A lot has changed. More importantly, I’ve forgotten even more.
What used to be muscle memory is now constant tab-switching. I’m looking stuff up more than I’m writing. It feels painfully slow, like walking through mud with weights on.
CSS Frameworks: What Even Are Those?
To make things worse (or more interesting?), I haven’t worked with a modern CSS framework in years. Not the utility-first stuff like Tailwind. The last few times I was deep in UI, it was with Vue or React component libraries such as mui, and before that bootstrap 3.
Before that, I helped build a custom UI framework—back when Angular 1.x was the hotness and React was still that weird Facebook thing.
Tailwind: Bring Your Own Everything
Now I’m back in the weeds, trying to get TailwindCSS to behave. And the thing about Tailwind? Out of the box, it gives you nothing. It’s a box of Lego bricks without a picture on the front. Powerful? Absolutely. Frustrating when you’re rusty? Also yes.
Luckily, I stumbled on HyperUI.dev. It’s got enough prebuilt components to get me rolling, and I can circle back to clean things up later. I just need the thing to function so I can focus on the actual logic.
Spiking Before Shaping
The core of this app is AI-driven meal plan generation. That’s the real meat of it (sorry). I didn’t want to get too deep into UX yet, because honestly, I didn’t know if any of this was even going to work.
I needed to spike the OpenAI integration first—get a feel for what’s possible before layering on design. Normally, I prefer a design-first approach, but pragmatism wins when you’re dealing with an unknown API.
Up Next: Making It Not Ugly
So now that it kinda runs, I can start making it not look like it was built in a cave. UX and polish are next on the list.
But hey, progress is progress. Baby steps.