Software is complicated. Machine learning, microservice architectures, message queues… every few months there’s another revolutionary idea to consider, another framework to learn. And underneath so many of these amazing ideas and abstractions is text. When you work in software, you spend your life working with text. Some of those text files are source code, some are configuration files, some of them are documentation. Editors, revision control systems, programming languages - everything from C# and HTML to Git and VS Code is based on the idea of “plain text files”. But… what if I told you there’s no such thing?

Cascading Style Sheets. CSS. The language everybody loves to hate. Everything’s global, there’s no control flow, there’s no error messages… in fact, some people say it isn’t even a real programming language.

But CSS isn’t just about making websites look pretty. It’s one of the fundamental building blocks of the open web, and it’s continuously evolving. Modern CSS has variables, grids, flexboxes, animations, view transitions… when it comes to layout, accessibility, interaction and validation, CSS can do all kinds of things you thought you could only do with JavaScript.

Software and technology has changed every aspect of the world we live in. At one extreme are the ‘mission critical’ applications - the code that runs our banks, our hospitals, our airports and phone networks. Then there’s the code we all use every day to browse the web, watch movies, create spreadsheets… not quite so critical, but still code that solves problems and delivers services.

But what about the code that only exists because somebody wanted to write it? Code created just to make people smile, laugh, maybe even dance? Maybe even code that does nothing at all, created just to see if it was possible?