Tinkering with Tools for Modern Front-End Development
Why tools? Well, in short, tools are awesome! They simplify our lives and make the overall development experience easier, quicker, and less prone to errors. The tools discussed this hour represent a set of great tools that on their own provide a huge amount of value, but when combined create a robust development experience to rival any other.
If you’re coming from the .NET world, many of these tools will seem familiar, and if you’re not, don’t worry. All of these tools are fairly simple to use, and once you get the hang of them, you won’t imagine web development without them.
The Tool Landscape
Before we dive into the tools, let’s briefly discuss the current tool landscape. The front-end community is thriving and growing, which has brought about tremendous evolution in the past few years: but this has created a bit of an issue. Because the community is innovating so quickly, keeping up with the latest tools is becoming difficult. Also, these tools and libraries seem to burst on to the scene with tremendous force, bringing with them new and exciting ideas that quickly catch on, only to have a new tool innovate on top of the innovation. You might hear talk of the package manager wars, or the task manager wars. These “wars” are a result of the rapid innovation that the community is currently undergoing. Don’t let this scare you, though; the results of these innovations are well worth the constant change.