What I Learned Building Twitter Bootstrap | Hacker News Reader

What I Learned Building Twitter Bootstrap

medium.com

233 pointsdcope69 comments

Interesting... For some reason I had always assumed that Bootstrap was associated more closely with Twitter because it had the word "twitter" in the name.

Now I understand why some business are so concerned with preventing other websites and people from using their name. I'm not saying that Twitter should have demanded that these guys change the name of their framework to something else, but this is a good object lesson of how using someone other company's name can cause confusion.

In retrospect probably one of the biggest things that motivated me to investigate Bootstrap was because it had Twitter in the name, and I had the mindset "If Twitter uses it, then it must be good."

So I'm surprised to find out that it wasn't actually that deeply tied to Twitter.

Edit: I went back to the website for Bootstrap and the website clearly says:

Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat,

versus here @fat is saying:

it isn’t actually maintained by a team at Twitter (nor was it ever).

So now I'm actually more confused.

Mark and I built bootstrap while we were employed at twitter on twitter hardware. Also, undeniably it was largely influenced by our work there (and later would largely influence a lot of the code at twitter as well as power lots of projects both internally and publicly) – but it was never a company mandated project. It was something that Mark and I came up with on our own and pursued outside of work hours.

Okay thanks... I understand now. You started the project at Twitter, but it wasn't owned by Twitter. I'm glad that Twitter didn't claim Bootstrap as company owned code, because I and thousands of other people have really enjoyed using it in our projects.

One of the reasons I worked at twitter is that they want you to open-source virtually everything. They weren't likely to put up a fuss, and everyone was really proud of bootstrap.

I think most people would imagine a project called "Twitter Bootstrap" that was developed by people "employed at twitter on twitter hardware" would be property of Twitter. Does Twitter own the copyright?

right now it's under the Apache License v2 – but we're working to move it to MIT for 3.0.0

I think of the community as owning bootstrap at this point… maybe that's cheesy? Or naive…

I also think twitter played a larger roll than just hardware. Mark and I were both deeply embedded into the twitter culture (with access to great resources and really smart engineers to bounce ideas off of) and i think bootstrap has a very "twittery" feel as a result.

If you have no contributor agreements/licenses, how do you plan on moving it to MIT?

From what I see, the best you have is: "By contributing your code, you agree to license your contribution under the terms of the APLv2: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/LICENSE

(which isn't really that helpful)

Speaking as an corporate IP/open source lawyer, doing this wrong can hurt you very badly in the long run.

At a guess, the "working to move it" sentence probably implies that they are trying to get those agreements retrospectively, or re-writing any code that was contributed where they can't. As I understand it, the majority of code was written by themselves, so it shouldn't be too much of a task. Openstreetmap similarly moved licenses recently, they gained agreements where they could and dumped or re-mapped data where they couldn't.

If they aren't planning to do this, then I don't know what the "working to move it" means as it would simply be a 5 minute job to changing the license text.

The latter is what we are going with.

Follow this issue if you're interested in it: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/2054

(speaking of cheesy) Those who just create awesome tools and release them into the ecosystem free of charge add immeasurable value to the community. I really want to thank you for how much easier you two have made my life with bootstrap on numerous occasions.

aww <3

I have used Bootstrap on 4 or so sites by now and its amazing how divs just get the fuck out of my way now and I can get real work done. Thank you.

Yes. Bootstrap's grid system saves the day, everyday.

Same here. I'd offer to buy you a beer, but I imagine you've got plenty of those offers already ;)

I bet he's swimming in beer donations that have filled his pool.

Also, thank you Fat for making my life so much easier.

I too would like to jump on this bandwagon of thanking you for Bootstrap. Cheers fat.

  > right now it's under the Apache License v2 – but we're
  > working to move it to MIT for 3.0.0

What's the impetus for this? Losing patent protection and gaining strict GPL2 compatibility seems like a strange decision.

See this issue for more information:

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/2054

Interesting, thanks. It looks as though you rejected the idea of dual-licensing. It's totally understandable that you'd want to avoid the hassle, although a dual MIT/ASL2 really does give you the maximum protection and flexibility. There's at least one big open-source project that's recently taken this exact route:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.rust.devel/2593/matc...

...though in their case they were moving from MIT to a dual MIT/ASL2.

Like all major tech companies, Twitter is in a talent recruitment battle. Having their name associated with Bootstrap can only be a good thing for them.

I think the message the blog post is conveying is that Bootstrap grew out of two developers wanting to build something, not out of a manager wanting to setup an internal project and assemblying a team being instructed to work on the project.

Seems like the first ingredient in building successful start-ups and useful tools. Beings a passion project filling a need helps too.

Sounds like "sponsored" would be a good word to describe the relationship

Or "endorsed".

Dear fat,

This post comes off to me as cocky and untrue.

First, the general tone of this seems very pompous to me. To me, it reads: "I know so much that even building the most popular project on github and possibly of any library on the web can't teach me anything new." It might have been a little more gracious perhaps to thank people for using and contributing to the project...?

Also, you definitely learned something building bootstrap. I'm willing to bet you learned a lot of things between the few major version updates and 2,500+ issues, most of which are closed. In fact, here's a presentation that you made detailing something you learned from bootstrap (accessibility, specifically): http://wordsbyf.at/2012/05/21/jsconf-argentina-2012/

I'm really not trying to be that negative guy on hacker news, this was just my immediate reaction upon reading the post. That being said, congrats on building an immensely popular and important library, and here's to hoping that you learn and always continue learning.

hm… sorry it came off that way. :(

fwiw, the amount of technical things i've learned from working on bootstrap is not proportional to the amount of work i've put into this project… at all. But, i never expected it to be, and that's totally fine.

Have I learned any technical things? lol sure, of course!

Funnily, the accessibility thing you linked to wasn't really something I learned building bootstrap… the presentation was all about how accessibility is too hard to really learn… and you need to become a specialist, which is sad times. Paul Irish wrote a great post about it a while back: http://paulirish.com/2012/accessibility-and-developers/

maybe i learned that i knew nothing, but that was about it :P

My friend Dustin (who created this writing topic on medium) asked me to write about the single most important thing i learned from working on bootstrap.

And for me, that single thing was that I love working with people and hate working alone.

It took me a while to realize that what was bumming me out the most about running bootstrap (and other projects) was that as they became more successful, there was more of an expectation that i would be working on them all the time (which meant the expectation that i would be working on them independently/alone all the time).

That's ok from time to time, but isn't why I get excited about free software and ultimately i became pretty depressed/negative about the whole thing.

I'm just now starting to identify what makes we want to continue to dedicate all my free time to a project like bootstrap. And right now, the main motivation is to spend time creating stuff with my favorite people.

I can assure you – it's definitely not to learn more about css/js !! :)

great response. i see what you're getting at from this and other peoples' replies - that the most important thing you learned was that doing hoodrat stuff with your friends is awesome. The only reason i posted this was because it read to me like this was the only thing you learned rather than the most important thing.

i really like what you've written here though, makes it a lot more clear. have you considered adding some pieces of this comment to the article?

Personally I think you've made one of the most invaluable contributions to web development, and your article is very sincere and genuine, well done on taking the time to put together such a great project.

While other framework's exist, bootstrap is packaged fantastically well, and provides excellent documentation

Hi,

I just wanted to say thanks. I have been integrating bootstrap into my site for the passed few months and I am happy to know it will look better then otherwise ever would have. I still have some trouble figuring out why the hell some parts don't work (can you recommend a debugging tool?) but all in all I am pretty chuffed and can appreciate why it is popular.

Take it easy = )

PS - wtf was with the radioactive download bootstrap button on the download page of the last release? I don't think you were involved with it, but I was surprised to see it . EDIT> It has been removed and now is a normal download button again.

haha! mark loves these, i think he started doing them way back at zurb.

we took them away because they are hooorible for perf – and were exposing a memory leak bug in chrome i believe

> I didn’t think I’d learn anything building Bootstrap.

Key word here is "think". As in, before he started the project.

I think the point he was trying to get across was this: "Getting together and creating something with your friends is amazing"

I respect your honesty sharing what you really think, but I didn't read it this way, I read it as: "We spent so much time in it, and what I learned from it is how great it is to have friends do cool things together, and this is what keeps us going more than learning more CSS or JavaScript"

I think that's not cocky, and quite true. e.g. the reason they still do it, is because they enjoy the teamwork and community support, and that's the "lesson he learned" which is answering the question in the title of the post.

And besides, being the #1 project on GH and being used by any other startup out there gives him all the rights to be cocky if he wants to.

They are both deserving a BDFL title which gives you automatic immunity from being called cocky. Even if they are.

Consider that what you are seeing in him is actually something about yourself that you can't be with.

I love when hackers try to play psychiatrist.

haha yea wait i read this and was like what exactly... what?

What I want to know is... Why LESS and not SASS?

Seems to me, TBS is the only thing keeping LESS alive.

SASS/Compass seems to be the better choice? http://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/

(Logic and Loops are big ticket items).

Why vim and not emacs? Why OS X and not Debian? We all have the tools that we end up using, when we end up using them. When I first came across Bootstrap it was at a time when there was plenty of people using LESS as well as SASS, it's only as time has gone on that people have started using SASS more, but there's still plenty of people I know that use LESS as well.

There's plenty of SASS based forks now though, so the community uses the tools as it can.

From whispers I've heard within the TB community, is that it may at some point jump from LESS to SASS. But right now its not a priority. Someone tell me if im wrong here.

ha, well that is definitely not happening anytime soon…

but, here is a whole thing on "why less" I wrote up about it a long while back, and it still holds true today: http://wordsbyf.at/2012/03/08/why-less/

Not what I expected from the link-baity HN post title, that post does not actually tell us what he learned at all, if anything.

Not complaining about the post itself, just thought it'd be very cool to have an actual "what I learned building bootstrap" post one day.

I was thinking the same thing. All I've learned is how much power/draw the Twitter name has.

Makes me sad that all my post-work hacking on things has been by myself. As a musician his description sounds similar to playing an instrument by myself; fun but not as great as with a group of friends.

Same here.

Is there an app with traction that helps people like us find fellow hackers to collaborate with. If not, sounds like an idea right there. Want to help build it?

What I Learned from reading "What I Learned Building Twitter Bootstrap.": Unironic "brogramming" is still alive and well. What a slap in the face of the community that made bootstrap successful.

I didn't get that out of this. @fat is a funny guy and likes to say funny things, but his message here applies to developers of all colors.

If having fun making things with friends is "unironic brogramming," I'm proud to be an unironic brogrammer.

No, but extreme arrogance and braggadocio is. The only thing missing from that article was a keg stand in the top photo, to show just how little they need to try to be awesome.

what

FWIW, I learned this same thing working cashier at a dry cleaning shop in my teens.

TL;DR Hooking up with people you like and making something cool is way better than doing something annoying and stressful that sucks.

There's a lot of truth to the notion of 'building things with friends' is what fuels a lot of developers. I am the same way. I think the same thing can be said for building a startup. It just has a completely different feel and excitement when it's something mutually taken on with a friend.

Also major props to Bootstrap for everything they have done for the web.

Is twitter trying to claim ownership over bootstrap? I assume you 2 guys left twitter to do this as-a-living. The post reads like a "Twitter does not own this, we made it on our own time, Its just the two of us, etc. etc."

Do you even need to worry about this? Pretty sure since its open source you guys are fine, unless something in your twitter employment contract says otherwise. That being said, Bootstrap is a valuable asset to the web and I think you would be not-paranoid in assuming that twitter might want to call it a asset it owns.

Step 1 for you guys should really be moving from http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ to http://domainyouownpersonally.com

The short answer is no, Twitter is not trying to overtake bootstrap. Although we have some ownership of the code base, the community has definitely let its mark on Bootstrap with Mark and Jacob's great leadership.

In fact, we have been working closely with Mark and Jacob on the bootstrap transition. There are plans to migrate bootstrap into its own organization soon and kick off an effort to migrate it to the MIT license, all supported by Twitter.

Stay tuned for details!

yep, twitter has been great. And mark and i didn't leave to start a bootstrap support company :P

Mark Otto owns getbootstrap.com by the looks of it, which at the moment just redirects to the github site.

I met a Twitter engineer at startup school who said any side projects had to be approved by Twitter's legal team. Was this the case with Bootstrap?

Also, was it put on Twitter's GitHub account in order to increase visibility?

yep, lots of legal hurdles to go through – took us like 6 months – but now they have a full time opensource shepherd @cra which makes this much smoother

<3, thanks for the kudos

>any side projects had to be approved by Twitter's legal team

Welp, they're out of the running for any future work now.

Is Bootstrap mainly for CSS? Or should it be viewed as a fully-blown alternative to HTML5BP? I would love to read a guide on how to incorporate Bootstrap with other tools like HTML5BP and the Javascript framework of my choice.

Bootstrap is primarily a CSS framework with some accompanying JavaScript (jQuery) plugins to provide things like tooltips and popovers.

You can very easily use it with HTML5 Boilerplate. You incorporate it in exactly the same way you would any external CSS file. And if you want to use their JavaScript you add that the same way you add any other JavaScript.

What stuck out to me was how you pursued this on your own time ... does Twitter not give its engineers time on the clock to pursue things like this? How do you feel about that?

While this post is a bit on the brogramming side (I would actually love to read what you learned from the project technically, and why you made certain design decisions), I have to give you and @mdo props for building Bootstrap.

I have to say that Bootstrap is the best thing that has happened to client side web development since jQuery, even if the web is doomed to drown in an ocean of Bootstrap-looking sites.

I am, for one, thankful you did this. I have been able to stand on your shoulders and see farther. certainly the front end work I have built with bootstrap and derivates has made the shallow end of the web I swim in better.

Technical issue, but... is the "Recommend" button doing anything? (or supposed to be doing?)

I push it and nothing happens.

Redirects here for me: https://medium.com/m/signin?redirect=%2Fwhat-i-learned-build...

Check your javascript console for errors

this project makes building a project with friends even more fun. thank you for all your hard work on it.

I think we all should just say thanks for building this, and nothing more, well, perhaps thanks to Twitter for not claiming the code. We all should aspire to do what fat and mdo did, build something out of passion, in our spare time, that will be freely available for everyone. There is nothing that anyone can say, (including them) that will take it away from them. They belong in the hall of fame of FOSS and hacker spirit. This is true whether you like or don't like what they write in a blog post.

So, what did he learn exactly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com