I was working on this landing page hero section with a particle background and a floating 3D card reveal. After tweaking the clip-path and keyframes for like two hours, I checked the file size and realized I'd written exactly 1000 lines of CSS. No preprocessor, no JS hackery, just pure style rules and animations. It surprised me because when I started doing CSS battles years ago, I thought 200 lines was a lot. Has anyone else hit a weird milestone like that where you just stop and count?
I used to write separate box-shadow rules for every layer effect. Three shadows on a button meant three lines of duplicate code. Stumbled on a tweet from some CSS dev showing how you can chain them with commas in one declaration. Now I do hover states, inset glows, and drop shadows all in one property. Feels obvious now but I fought with messy code for months before seeing it. Anyone else have a "why didn't I think of that" moment with a simple CSS trick?