334: Custom Properties

Chris & Shaw talk about a big ol' conversion to getting CodePen's color system to use --custom-properties all the way through, rather than Sass variables. Why? All sorts of reasons, kinda boiling down to the fact that they are just better. Here's a tiny one: you can use the Web Inspector and see what some other element is colored easily. Here's a huge one: ability to do theming way easier. But the refactoring isn't without some bumps in the road, like the fact that CSS doesn't have a way to alter colors (like lighten, darken, or add alpha) terribly easily yet, meaning we needed some work arounds. Time Jumps Sponsor: Retool for Startups After working with thousands of startups, we’ve noticed that technical founders spend a ton of time building internal tools—which means less time on their core product. So, we built Retool For Startups—a program that gives early-stage founders free access to a lot of the software you need for great internal tooling. The goal is to make it 10x faster to build the admin panels, CRUD apps, and dashboards that most early stage teams need. We’ve bundled together a year of free access to Retool with over $160,000 in discounts to save you money while building with software commonly connected to internal tools like AWS, MongoDB, Brex, and Segment. We give you a head start with pre-built UI components, integrations, and other advanced features that make building from scratch much faster. To learn more, check out our site, apply, join webinars and much more at retool.com/startups.