Expressing Yourself with CSS in 2026

I aim to challenge your norms in this talk. This was not recorded but I went down lots of hot takes with “Tailwind is not CSS”, and I stand by that. I feel that if you know CSS as a language, you would not reach for Tailwind, and I challenge you to learn it! CSS is very fun to author and create with on a granular level without AI.

Since CSS can be a human expression and visual fingerprint of a Frontend dev, this is where I draw some lines to what I let AI touch in my repos. CSS is one of those things that will remain in my hands for the foreseeable future. What about you?

Slides

These are the slides I presented at RVA.js Meetup in February 2026. This barely scratches the surface of what is possible with CSS.