A Clean Slate

Ananya Gupta -

You know those tasks that look so easy, you think, “I’ll wrap this up in an hour max.”
Yeah, that was me when I got asked to add a banner to our site.

Frontend, minimal, nothing too crazy. Just a banner. What could possibly go wrong?
Spoiler: everything.

I added the banner, refreshed the page, and something was wrong. The UI exploded into chaos.

  • The text inside the container floated around.
  • Sometimes it merged with the header.
  • Sometimes it overlapped with the banner itself.
  • Fixing one thing only broke another.

If I fixed the header, the spacing ballooned up. If I adjusted the spacing, the text alignment broke. If I fixed that, the banners started overlapping each other. It was like pulling one thread and watching the whole sweater unravel.

At first, I thought, “Okay, no big deal. Maybe the header just needs a small adjustment.” So I poked around and made changes there, no luck. The text was still colliding.

Then I thought, “Maybe the banner size is the problem.” I experimented with resizing it, but again, nothing changed. The layout just wouldn’t cooperate.

After a while, I brought in AI tools like Cursor and Claude to see if they could spot what I couldn’t. But their suggestions weren’t much help. The fixes made the page look worse.

I ended up sitting there for 3-4 hours, going in circles. And honestly? It was embarrassing. This wasn’t some complex system, it was just a banner. A simple thing I should have been able to handle easily.

The timing made this whole episode even heavier. The very next day was the Point Blank induction and Point Blank isn’t just any coding club.

We’re known for being one of the toughest, most competitive coding clubs out there. We call ourselves elitists, and we mean it. Getting in isn’t easy, and keeping up isn’t either. Delivering sloppy work was not an option.

So when this banner task started falling apart, it wasn’t just about fixing the UI, it was about not letting the club down.

After a while, I hit that moment we all dread: exhaustion. My brain simply stopped working. I wasn’t thinking clearly anymore; I was just making random changes and hoping something would fix itself.   It didn’t.

So, I was helpless and I deleted everything. I undid all the messy changes, scrapped the broken attempts, and went back to a clean slate.

And here’s the twist: within 30 minutes, I had the banner working perfectly.
No AI, no hours of frustration, no overcomplicated hacks—just fresh eyes, and a simple approach.

This experience taught me something:
Sometimes, you need to step back. When we get too tangled up in fixing problems, our brain stops seeing the obvious. Resetting and starting fresh is way more effective.

Also a few frontend lessons I picked up along the way

While this was frustrating, I also came out of it with some frontend takeaways:

  • Always check responsiveness. Don’t just test on your laptop screen, try different breakpoints and devices. What looks perfect on desktop can break completely on mobile or tablet.
  • Before dropping in a new component (like a banner), understand how the container, header, and existing flex/grid setup are structured.
  • Use dev tools. Inspect element → check box models, margins, paddings, and positioning. Half the bugs are just CSS stacking contexts or spacing issues.
  • Avoid stacking fixes. Don’t pile on random margins, paddings, or absolute positioning to force elements into place.
  • Don’t be afraid to start over. Sometimes rewriting a clean div with proper classes takes less time than fixing a mess.