Almost 6 years ago to the day, I received an email from YC about our application being rejected – I still remember that feeling of almost wanting to give up, but also weirdly motivated to keep going and try again. Despite the setback, my brother Sergie and close friend Bryant and I kept working on creating a prototype that people could actually play with – and a few months later we posted our first Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499).
What we showed was very limited and barely worked (you can still see it by following the link above), but thankfully the post took off and over 25,000 people signed up to see our beta in just a few days. We were in awe of the power of HN, and I can honestly say our company wouldn't be here today had it not been for the warm reception and encouragement of this community in that original Show HN post.
Today, we're releasing a brand new CSS playground similar to our first one, this time showing off the amazing power of CSS Grid, which brings a whole new level of power and creativity to the web – especially to those people who struggle with learning to code. It's one small step on our bigger vision to democratize software creation beyond the 0.25% of the world that knows how to code - by offering a visual abstraction over things like CSS Grid, we can actually get more people to understand the principles behind CSS, box model, responsive layout, inheritance, etc. We've also found that tools like this are super useful to backend-focused engineers that don't have much experience in frontend work, at least as a way to ease into frontend.
We'd love to hear any and all feedback! Support for grid autoflow as well as grid template areas is coming in the next few months, but currently manual placement, FR units, and minmax are all supported.
The CSS Grid playground currently works in desktop Chrome/Safari/Brave/Vivaldi, but we're still working on Firefox and tablet support – our apologies if you're seeing an unsupported browser message :\
