Now there are lots of options for CSS frameworks out there. The one that stuck with me the longest was Bootstrap.

When I started working on Bluebird Teaching, I did not use any CSS framework. I had used some in the past with older projects, but to be honest, I didn't really know what I was doing with them. I was about 19 or so years old, and still very fresh to development. I worked like this with vanilla CSS for about a year, and then I realized that my website looked horrible on mobile devices. That's when I started implementing Bootstrap in that project.

Below are some of my findings.

Pros for Using Bootstrap

• The grid system makes it very easy and logical in creating columns. Creating divs side by side is something commonly done in CSS, and it couldn't be done easier with Bootstrap.
• You can easily manage how you want columns to behave at different display sizes. If you want columns to stack; instead of being side by side on smaller screens, you can easily achieve that with Bootstrap.
• Very easy to set up with React.

Cons for Using Bootstrap

• There's a lot of magic happening behind the scenes. If you're understanding of CSS is already a bit shaky, you might have a hard time understanding why something columns, rows, text alignment, etc aren't working as expected when you think they should.
• If you want things to behave the way you want them to, you're going to end up doing a lot of changes to the default Bootstrap CSS classes; which will defeat the purpose of using Bootstrap in the first place.
• If you already understanding how to work with display: flex;, you might be better off not using Bootstrap, as you'll easily be able to achieve the same results as columns and rows without all the excess div elements you'll need for Bootstrap.

This is all just some input I thought to share as someone that used Bootstrap quite a bit, and then started just using a mixed approach like I did for this project.

In this project, I use Bootstrap in components that simple and quick. If I quickly want to set up two or more simple side by side columns, I still use Bootstrap. If it's a more complex column where I don't want to worry about Bootstrap's CSS classes getting in the way of what I'm trying to achieve, I don't really use it for that component.