Large Scale CSS Refactoring
summary
Project Ironman describes migrating trivago’s hotel search CSS core into a mobile‑first, border‑box base using Normalize, postprocessing, BEM and ITCSS, and a pattern library to enforce atomic design. The refactor removes messy globals and about 2500 icon references, rewrites thousands of lines of CSS, runs in an 18‑day push with ~70 standups, and enables weekly releases, faster UI iterations and reduced mobile load while improving maintainability.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:13Legacy CSS problems
- 7:50CSS inconsistency
- 10:12Business impact
- 13:10Technical approach
- 15:02Convincing management
- 17:37Team collaboration
- 19:08Refactoring results
- 21:49Design system improvements
- 23:43Testing and performance
- 25:19Faster UI iterations
- 27:10Component improvement
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