Max Stoiber

An overview of the past, present and the future of CSS-in-JS.

2020

ReactConf AU

CSS-in-JS

2019

React Day Berlin

The Past, Present and Future of CSS-in-JS

Spectrum is an open source chat app for large online communities and was recently acquired by GitHub. We are a team of three with a predominantly frontend and design background and have worked on it for close to two years. With the benefit of hindsight, let's talk about the technology choices I regret and the lessons I have learned.

React Amsterdam

Tech Regrets at Spectrum

React popularized a new way of building user interfaces – components. By splitting our app into small, digestible parts the system as a whole becomes a lot easier to understand.

CSS was made in an era where documents were the height of the web. It doesn't fit easily into component-based systems, making styling one of the pain points of building React applications.

What if we took the best of JavaScript and the best of CSS, and combined them together to create the ultimate solution? Glen Maddern (CSS Modules co-creator) and I sat down and starting thinking about styling in this new paradigm. Let's talk about what we thought about and why we arrived where we did – 💅 styled-components.

2017

Styling React/ReactNative Applications

There's been a revolution; welcome the Component Age! Now what about styles? Max sat down with Glen Maddern (CSS modules) to think about how styles fit into our post-revolution world. They took the best of CSS and the web to create a fantastic new way to style component-based systems.

React London

The road to styled-components: CSS in component-based systems

React Conf

The Road to Styled Components

Building user interfaces on the web is hard, because the web, and thus CSS, was inherently made for documents. Because UIs fundamentally are not documents, we've seen a mindset shift towards building them as component-based system – we are now in the component age. The rise of JavaScript frameworks like React, Ember and recently Angular 2, the effort of the W3C to standardize a web-native component system, pattern libraries and styleguides being considered 'the right way to build web applications' and many other things have illuminated this revolution. With that, and a few more things, in mind, Glen Maddern (CSS Modules creator) and I sat down and started thinking about styling in this new era. We took the best of CSS and the web to build a new way to style react applications. Let's talk about what we thought about and why we arrived where we did – 💅 styled-components.