A year-and-a-half ago, a small group of Twitter employees set out to improve our team’s internal analytical and administrative tools. After some early meetings around this one product, we set out with a higher ambition to create a toolkit for anyone to use within Twitter, and beyond. Thus, we set out to build a system that would help folks like us build new projects on top of it, and Bootstrap was conceived.
Made by myself and Jacob Thornton, Bootstrap is an open-source front-end toolkit created to help designers and developers quickly and efficiently build awesome stuff online. Our goal is to provide a refined, well-documented, and extensive library of flexible design components built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for others to build and innovate on. Today, it has grown to include dozens of components and has become the most popular project on GitHub with more than 13,000 watchers and 2,000 forks.
Here we’ll shed some light on how and why Bootstrap was made, the processes used to create it, and how it has grown as a design system.