So I am building a full stack app and all I am wondering what’s better when creating the front end? Would people prefer I style everything myself or go with a library like bootstrap with prebuild styles or a mix of moth? If you were the hiring manager which ones would you prefer?
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I think they’re both valid approaches. I think I’d rather use libraries and build a better app. I think most places end up using those libaries anyway. You can always build some smaller app to show off your CSS skills, but I wouldn’t want that to get in the way of your masterpiece.
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Yup they can both be valid approaches.
I’d personally suggest using a library for styling/design though. If your goal is to be a developer, stick to development. Companies will almost always hire for designers separately from developers, so I wouldn’t suggest spending much time on design.
Bootstrap doesn’t really have that many styles of its own though. Sure it’s a framework, but it still leaves a lot up to you in terms of actual design and putting things together. If you want to put even less work into style/design, I’d recommend something like Material UI, which does a lot more than Bootstrap. And you can use Material with Angular, React, or Vue now. Plus the nice thing about Material is how it actually looks - you can have a very modern- and professional-looking app with very little effort.
I’m a learner as well so take my advice for what is .
I would go for Vanilla JS all the time. Frameworks come and go, JS stays: think of JQuery. For me would be more important to show that you master the underlying layer (JS) than the abstraction of that layer (Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc…). You will be able also to understand better what problems a framework is solving in comparison to another framework. You should for sure make clear in the description of the project in your portfolio the reason of your decision. And I’m not saying of course that frameworks are not useful. Happy coding!
As in all things, it depends. If you’re working on a fairly small or straightforward page, then styling your own components can be good practice. But trust me, you don’t want to try to reinvent a date picker (for example). In reality, it will very rarely be one or the other. It will be both. Any application that has a lot of user interaction is probably going to use a UI component library or two, but you won’t end up wanting to use it for everything and odds are good that eventually you won’t want to use the out-of-the-box version. Figuring out how to customize library components is probably the bulk of the CSS work done by a lot of modern web developers (including myself).
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