Gridly – a super light (~100 bytes) grid system for modern browsers

We like interesting projects crafted by talented developers and designers. Here is one: Ionică Bizău created a super light library (~100-170 bytes) that you can use to easily create simple grid systems. You don’t have to use heavy CSS frameworks to create simple grid systems, just ~100 bytes of CSS can save your life.

We got in touch with the author and he was happy to share us all the info related to this project and his activity. Here are his answers to our questions:

Tell us a few words about yourself?

I do different things: I am a full stack developer, piano player, Jesus follower, college dropout, Linux lover, minimalism fan, open-source evangelist etc. All these things put together make an interesting combination. My programming environment is a full-screen Chromium browser (in short: the open-source version of Google Chrome) and a Linux terminal (which in general is a web-term instance running the same browser as pinned browser tab).

What is the origin of Gridly project?

I build lots of projects which require nice example HTML pages (in general, they are client-side libraries). Sometimes I need to split the page into equal columns. In the past, I was importing Twitter Bootstrap just to use the Grid system (honestly, I really like that grid system). Obviously, that was a temporal solution because I wasn’t using all the Twitter Bootstrap power in my tiny example pages.

The spark that made me decide to build Gridly was building http://showalicense.com/

There I needed to split the page into 3 columns and wanted to work nicely with small devices: tablets and smartphones–I don’t have any of these, but since people are using these, why not to make their lives easier?

The existing grid libraries were offering too much and, therefore, they are bigger than I expected. I decided to build my own basic grid library on top of the flexbox (which has a pretty good support) and to offer only the basic functionality in the core (~100 bytes, minimized and gzipped) and optionally more features in custom builds. I coded it quickly and published it on GitHub.

I was surprised how tiny the result was!

What other cool projects are you working on?

I mostly code small libraries for Node.js and/or client-side. In fact, I modularize everything. These small modules are usable in bigger modules that can be used in fancy apps.

Related to Gridly, I coded bag.css – a CSS library for building responsive CSS containers: https://github.com/IonicaBizau/bag.css

Also, I have fun porting old stuff to modern technologies. One of my current projects is to port the first game I ever played on a PC (~13 years ago) to HTML, CSS & CSS. Earlier this year I created a COBOL bridge for Node.js: https://github.com/IonicaBizau/node-cobol

I have lots of ideas which I collect using a command line tool called idea (https://github.com/IonicaBizau/idea). It’s funny because while building a thing I have a lot of ideas regarding other projects I can build. So, I always have something to do.

What are your favorite libraries and why?

In general, those libraries I use every day.

– Browserify, by @substack: https://github.com/substack/node-browserify

I use it for building client-side bundles for my JS libraries. Basically, I use the same `require` function but Browserify creates a nice environment on the client side putting all the files together.

– Blah (https://github.com/IonicaBizau/blah): a command line tool I built to generate documentation for my projects (it does other nice things, but I use it mostly for documenting the things).

– Electorn, by @GitHub (https://github.com/atom/electron) – it allows you to build desktop apps using web technologies.

I don’t like frameworks (especially on the client side), so I will not spam you with Angular/React/etc stuff. Instead, I enjoy building and using small libraries in my projects.

Tell us 3 predictions for 2016 related to web development?

Oh, difficult question. There are lots of articles related to that. This is what I think:

– Not the end of JavaScript frameworks. Developers are still building JavaScript frameworks like crazy, so, probably that will not end in the next years. On the other side, we will have more small libraries and lot of people enjoying them.

– More open-source web stuff. As companies and developers continue to understand the power and importance of open-source philosophy, we will enjoy more goodies in web technologies.

– I have the feeling in 2016 we will meet a lot of interesting artificial intelligence libraries for the web (and not only) powering interesting stuff.

What keeps you motivated at work?

I think the most important things for me are the flexible schedule (~100 hours of work / month, the rest is “spare time”) and the open-source stuff.

Being Jesus follower is something I am proud of and makes me a happy programmer. All my thanks go to God for giving me power and wisdom for building open-source projects and helping people around the world.

In my breaks I play piano, enjoy making physics and chemistry experiments (especially making fire almost anywhere, anytime, and playing with high-voltage).

Anything else to add?

If you want to be notified when I build new stuff, follow me on GitHub and/or Twitter and you will be the first to hear about my new projects.

GitHub: https://github.com/IonicaBizau
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IonicaBizau
My website: http://ionicabizau.net

Thanks Ionica for your involvement, we’ll keep an eye on your progress and share your cool projects with our community.