Sometimes I’ll be scrolling on a restaurant site or an artist’s portfolio and think, “wait… how’d they do that?” And next thing I know, I’ve got dev tools open and I’m digging through nested divs like I’m doing digital forensics.
Not because I need to. Not because I’m stealing anything. Just out of curiosity. Just for the weird little thrill of finding out how someone else solved something.
I’ll look at how they handle hover states. What fonts they picked. How many divs deep their nav is. Sometimes it’s super clean and I feel inspired. Other times it’s… not. But even that’s kind of fun.
Web dev can get so focused on output — the site, the result, the repo. But this is one of those inputs I quietly love. Just peeking behind the curtain of someone else’s logic and style choices.
If you’ve never done it, try it. Right click → inspect on a site that makes you pause, and just… poke around. You might find a weird hack, a smart pattern, or something beautifully dumb that still works.
It won’t teach you React or land you a job. But it might remind you that under all the tooling, the web is still just a bunch of boxes, arranged by humans.