Over the past 12 months, Twitter’s Bootstrap—a free, open-source web-development toolkit released last August with the slogan “By Nerds, For Nerds”—has become a phenomenon that is already changing the look of the web.
While Bootstrap is designed to be accessible to non-coders, it has become popular with hardcore nerds (as promised). It has been the number one project on GitHub, a web-hosting repository and hangout for developers and engineers, all year.
According to Bart Teeuwisse, an engineer/evangelist at Twitter (and TechRaising mentor), Bootstrap’s popularity can be explained simply: “It reduces the time and effort required to create a good-looking site that works across a variety of browsers.”
“With Bootstrap you don’t need a whole lot of technical know-how to start creating website mockups. It isn’t the end-all be-all, but it can be an important piece of the puzzle.”
At the next TechRaising Meetup on September 20, Teeuwisse will explain how Bootstrap works, and suggest some ways developers, designers and others might find it useful. He’ll also do some “live-coding” to demonstrate how easy it is to create a feature-rich functional mockup with the design consistency that is Bootstrap’s hallmark.
Teeuwisse explains that Bootstrap grew out of an internal Twitter tools group that was tasked with creating dashboards for internal analytics and all kinds of other uses. Each project required a user interface, and the group decided that, rather than “reinvent the wheel over and over,” they’d standardize their style.
In October 2010, Twitter staged its first “Hack Week,” inviting its employees to work on new projects outside their normal job duties. By the end of the week the Bootstrap team had built a stable platform incorporating some essential design standards. What they came up with is essentially a collection of CSS and HTML conventions, a library of JavaScript code for creating elements such as navigation, typography, buttons, tables, icons, etc., as well as a flexible grid system for creating page layouts.
Importantly, Teeuwisse says, Bootstrap allows users to customize their layout: “It doesn’t force you into using any default styles.” Perhaps even more importantly, it creates a “responsive” design that queries whatever device is calling for a page, and delivers an appropriate design to any screen on any device on any browser.
Last August, Twitter released Bootstrap—and its code—to the public and open-sourced the project. Teeuwisse says this has turned into a big win-win for Twitter and the development community.
Bart Teeuwisse will discuss Bootstrap on Thursday, September 20, at Cruzioworks, 877 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. Gather at 6:30, presentation begins at 7pm. RSVP here.