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Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

977: We built a CSS Challenge platform

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Wes Bos

Tech News, Technology, News

4.91.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2026

⏱️ 41 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Scott and Wes break down how they built SynHax, the real-time CSS Battle app powering the upcoming Mad CSS tournament. From SvelteKit and Zero to diffing algorithms, sync conflicts, and a last-minute hackweek glow-up, this one’s a deep dive into shipping ambitious web apps fast. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:50 March Mad CSS Tournament. 03:19 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 03:59 What the heck is a CSS Battle? 05:34 The tech stack. 06:30 Svelte Kit. 06:44 Zero Sync. Zero Docs Zero Svelte. 07:32 Drizzle. 07:58 Supabase. 08:23 Graffiti. 10:45 Sync Server. 12:10 Cloudflare Workers. 12:23 Local File System. 13:26 How Zero Works. 13:48 Zero Sync Client. 15:39 API server. 19:34 Dealing with states and conflicts. 24:25 The Hackweek Project. 25:29 The Diffing Algorithm. 35:22 The bugs. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Transcript

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0:00.0

We decided to host a major CSS coding battle tournament here on Syntax with 14 of the greatest CSS engineers out there.

0:11.5

And then two other competitors in that competition, that being Wes and myself, competing in CSS battles.

0:20.2

And we've been doing a lot of CSS battles here on Fridays

0:23.7

and our three devs videos with CJ West and I,

0:28.0

but we wanted to take it one step further.

0:31.5

And so we built our own CSS coding battles platform.

0:35.7

So we're going to be talking all about how that works the stack,

0:39.7

how the stack works itself, what we're using for various components, why it's cool. And we're

0:46.8

going to be diving into some of the challenges that we had getting this thing up and running,

0:50.9

because let me tell you, this has been a massive sprint to build our own platform

0:55.4

from scratch just to use for this CSS coding tournament. My name is Scott Tolensky. I'm a developer

1:00.9

from Denver with me as always as West Boss. What's up Wes? Hey, excited to talk about this. This has been

1:06.9

very fun to work on the last, what, two weeks or so. I joined in about two weeks ago

1:12.1

and helped crank out issues, but it's a really cool platform. It's all local first, all

1:18.1

sinks. It's all fast as heck since felt really cool. Love it. Yeah, I will say it's not

1:24.4

local first. And I'm going to push back on that.

1:28.2

But I do think that's an important part of this distinction here because we'll talk about why it's not local first.

1:34.5

We'll talk about the tech.

1:35.7

It is using zero sync, which definitely was a platform that was initially described as being local first.

1:42.0

But they've really kind of shifted that message a little

1:45.4

bit because I don't think it really truly falls under that. But I think you saying at the local

1:51.2

first is not a bad thing, Wes. I think that is how most people might think about this and look

...

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