UIs are the part of the product that people actually interact with. It's the part of the stack that companies are *most picky about*. Where you need the flexibility. Which is why it strikes me as strange that people assume the front-end will be no-coded away before the back-end.

I can *totally* imagine tools like Zapier making a lot of back-end tasks obsolete. Generic solutions are more acceptable in the back-end, since the user can't tell the difference. You don't want your website to look like a template. This concern doesn't exist on the back-end.

It also seems to me like the work orgs like Netlify/Vercel are doing, leveraging AWS/GCP, has the potential to make quite a few dev-ops tasks redundant. Again, though, it just means that back-end devs will get to move up the spectrum. It isn't the end of back-end development.

There's one more aspect I wanna touch on. Even if you use a no-code tool to build websites, the browser doesn't. The browser only understands HTML/CSS. No-code tools write this code for you, but they don't *run* it for you.

The browser devtools allow you to debug and fix issues, but only if you understand HTML/CSS! There will always be visual glitches and edge-cases and browser inconsistencies. Knowing how to fix these issues in code will always be a valuable skill.

Ultimately, CSS is here to stay. In a decade, we might be writing components in Rust and using a back-end language that doesn't even exist today, but the browser will keep relying on HTML and CSS. I can't think of a more future-proof skill to learn.

Also, you might be thinking: “Well of course you'd say that! You want people to buy your CSS course!” I'd ask you to consider *why* I decided to build a CSS course in the first place!

I have wayyy more experience teaching JS and React, but I chose to start with CSS for two reasons: 1. I genuinely believe it's the highest-impact thing I can teach. It's a ~40-hour course that can have a *huge* impact on your productivity and happiness as a developer.

2. I think CSS will outlive JS, and it'll certainly outlive React. I wanted to pick something with longevity, so that people would still be interested in it for years and years to come. Shameless plug — you can learn more about it here: css-for-js.dev/

Ack. Twitter decided to randomly hide some of the tweets in this thread. I had to delete and re-post most of it! 😬 Retweets appreciated, to hopefully encourage the algorithm to actually show it to people! 💖