These past two years mark a point in my growth where I become more pragmatic in my world view; Evolution and survival of the most pragmatic.

A focus on creating systems for people.

Automation🔗

I really dislike checklists... like... a lot.

So if I can turn a checklist into code, I will. I'm looking for more time to work with the team on interesting business logic.

Checklists as code are:

git hooks
linters
e2e tests
tools that generate things
deployment code

Somethings can't be automated (yet)🔗

I've discovered some checklists are too expensive as code.

visual regression testing

Here we found that a tool like wraith to publish incremental snapshots over the life of a project is great for quickly highlight changes. A designer or developer can then make the call if the change is acceptable.

Unused Code

Often styles and javascript are created for components that may only come to life when a CMS user enables a setting or adds certain types of content to the page.

In this case we've found that a simple component library gives quick indication about what css/js relates to what html mark-up.

Ideally a developer should not leave dead code in the project.

[!NOTE] This is one of those things that made the promise of web components so attractive.

Along with CSS-IN-JS, you can see why React is so popular now.

Webpack🔗

I've been using webpack for quite a few personal projects; what we discovered in a commercial setting:

speed differences with gulp + browserify vs webpack dev server are day and night. Gulp is 20secs per build run. Due to Hot Module Reloading, webpack is a game changer. It has an initial time cost, but each change thereafter cost an amount of time relative to the amount of code changed.
instead of scriptjs loading cdn libs, use system.import(/* webpackChunkName: 'vendor/jquery' */ @vendor/jquery')
- cdn might change over next 3years. Most commerical projects are legacy the moment they are deployed. No one likes working on them, so don't make them fragile. Slicing out own vendored libs like this means we're in more control. The edge effects of CDNs can be realised with something like Cloudfront.
- Assets can now easily be fingerprinted. yay [chunkhash].
- The magic comment means it's also lazy loaded.

Gulp🔗

Gulp is one of those things. It starts out small, quickly turns into a train wreck and your holding all the pieces.
Most seek to create a black box of tasks, reality is they end up with a mountain of unmaintainable code sparse of desired features... because streams.
For someone who spends their time looking at directory trees and file managers, It's a mental model that makes sense to the mind incrementally chipping away at a problem.
Errors are swallowed.
Most people don't even know how it really works, therefore most of the gulpfiles I've looked into are similar to what I imagine a forensics team encounters at mass murder scenes.
streams are awesome. when used for the right scenario.