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Friday, February 9th, 2018

I finally made sense of front end build tools. You can, too.

I still find the landscape of build tools completely overwhelming, but I found this distinction to be a useful way of categorising the different kinds of build tools:

Build tools do two things:

  1. Install things
  2. Do things

So bower, npm and yarn install things, whereas grunt, gulp, and webpack do things.

I think.

Monday, June 12th, 2017

An intro to web components with otters – Monica Dinculescu

A really great introduction to web components by Monica. But I couldn’t help but be disheartened by this:

Web components tend to have dependencies on other web components, so you need a package manager to herd all them cats.

For me, this kind of interdependence lessens the standalone nature of web components—it just doesn’t feel quite so encapsulated to me. I know that this can be solved with build tools, but now you’ve got two problems (and one more dependency).