Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

2010: PHP, CSS, Vanilla JS, and a LAMP Server.

Ah, the simple life.

2016: Node.js, React, Vue, Angular, AngularJS, Polymer, Sass, Less, Gulp, Bower, Grunt.

I can't handle this, I'm shifting domains to Machine Learning.

2017: Numpy, Scipy, TensorFlow, Theano, Keras, Torch, CNNs, RNNs, GANs and LOTS AND LOTS OF MATH!

Okay, okay. Calm down there fella.
JavaScript doesn't seem that complicated now, does it? 🙈

Doing a straight-forward "if" seems too complicated. Let's reverse the logic.

!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

I just hate npm dependencies.

If you want to write a small website with npm dependencies (some frontend deps like Bootstrap and some development deps like gulp or babel) you will have more npm dependencies in your project than own code. It is ridiculous, how some lazy developers just add dependencies to their projects, without evaluating their dependencies. The source code of one of my projects is around 4MB (without any dependencies). If you then run yarn as required, it grows to around 80MB (where 73MB are node_modules).

This is just terrible.

I rant about this, as I made the mistake to upload my node_modules directories when restoring a backup of my server. Worst idea one could ever have.

"I hate C# and Java because compiling takes forever. That's why I use JavaScript."

npm install && gulp

...9 years later...

Me in 1996:

<html>
<head>
<body>My first website! I'm gonna be a website developer!</body>
</head>
</html>

Me in 2021: I have no idea what all that stuff in Node is for. All I know is that my boss says I need Node and gulp to compile this website to add a comma to a paragraph on a page for this client.

gulp

*a metric ton of errors appears*

@%#$!

When you build a beautiful set of Sass files with grunt/gulp tasks, hand it off to another developer who makes all their changes in the compiled css.

It's Friday, and I'm working from home. What better way to start the day with gulp and coffee with icing on donuts... Happy Friday to all :)

So I spent 4-5 weeks explaining how shit the current code base was, implemented gulp tasks to lint js, CSS etc, written shed loads of coding standards and best practices to follow. At this point everyone was onboard with the changes and thought brilliant were going to start getting some good code coming out of this team.

I go on holiday for a week, come back and fucker has ignored the documentation disabled the linters in the gulp tasks and the code is back to square one SHIT!!

Plus everyone still committing to master!!!!

Why do I bother!!

The intern has directly editted the CSS file then push to the repo.
The senior optimized the old codebase and compiled the SCSS with gulp leading to the CSS file rebuild.

The vicious cycle continued until code review which was like 2 weeks later.

Grunt, gulp, bower, webpack, rollup, yarn, npm, requirejs, commonjs, browserify, brunch, rollup, parcel, fusebox, babel,
wrappers for bundlers, frameworks on frameworks, then for css, theres scss, sass, less, stylus, compass, and for templates, handlebars, mustache, nunjucks, underscore, ejs, pug, jade, and about five billion other word-salad tools, all with their own CLIs, each in some way building on npm, but with their own non-congruent little syntax, like no one realized they were reinventing the same problems introduced by domain specific languages, most happy to announce "configuration takes a little time, but it's worth it!"

No, it's not. Just stop people. Just stop. You're not doing anyone any favors by creating another lib, all you're doing is tooting your own horn and self promoting. Use what exists and stop creating more shit for new people to learn, to add to the giant clusterfuck that is the 2019 hotmess known as "web development."

You're not special. You're not important. You're lib or tool will be famous for 15 minutes and no one cares what you've made.

If you want to contribute to web development, do us all a favor and contribute to global sanity by kindly deleting your contribution and any plans to contribute new solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Note: our PM is new.
PM: can you help me?
Me: sure, what do you need?
PM: where do the folders with all the techie stuff come from?

I had no context and spent the next 20 minutes trying to work out what folders she was on about. Turned out she wanted to know where the client side folders on our development server come from, was going to explain 'Gulp' and 'Branch' to her but I think I'd be there for the rest of the day... Why do 'tech' companies hire non-tech-savie people.

I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉

Feeling like I've gone back in time about 15 years!

Just told my CTO about various improvements we could make to the development process. Things like git, continuous delivery, agile project management apps such as Jira, task management such as Gulp, etc.

His response - "never heard of them. I bet they'll pass in a few months. Just another round of fads".

"Install through npm"
"Install through gulp"
"Install through compiling"
"Install through x"
"Install through y"

WHY CAN'T I JUST SIMPLY INCLUDE THE MOTHERFUCKING THING IN THE HTML LIKE A FUCKING NORMAL PERSON?!

ALL I WANT IS TO INCLUDE A GODDAMN UI FRAMEWORK.

When I just started web development, this stuff was so fucking easy! Why did it become so motherfucking complicated to include simple shit like this?!

All I want is to start programing this motherfucker, not spend 3 hours on compiling CSS and whatnot (because I'd have to learn this bullshit first).

Mother of god, why did this become so fucking obnoxious?

I. JUST. WANT. TO. INCLUDE. TWO. FUCKING. FILES.

Just got given my own internal project at the company I work for! Basically I created a gulp task for one of our projects that allows us to use version control with Salesforce in a pretty easy way and deploy without a stupid IDE (like eclipse) getting in the way. Now they want me to turn that idea into a node module we can use company wide!

Last night I nearly finished my portfolio site. I was working on the perfect framework and workflow like forever. But in the end I accomplished a pretty pleasing solutions. For the back-end I choose Laravel with it's built in rest-api, the front-end is managed by Vue. I'm also proud of my assets-management which is handled by Gulp + Webpack (Laravel Mix). But here I decided to run Gulp on images, fonts and CSS and let Webpack bundle the JavaScript.

And what really crawls my balls is that I can write Sass and Jade, even use partials and organized the shit out of this website, and let Gulp just vomit some minified HTML and CSS on the other end.

Man that feels so good.

WTF

/Users/me/my_company/my_project/node_modules/gulp-sass/node_modules/node-sass/node_modules/pangyp/bin/node-gyp

this is getting ridiculous

It was when I ditched React. I replaced it with raw JavaScript, with frontend being built with Gulp and Twig (just because HTML has no includes). Here are the results:
1. Previously, a production frontend build took 1.5 minutes. Build time became so fast that after I push the code, the build was done before me going to Netlify to check build status. I go there, and it’s almost always already done.
2. In a gallery with a lot of cards, with every card opening a modal, the number of listeners was reduced from N to one. With React, I needed 1000 listeners for 1000 cards. With raw JavaScript, I needed just one click listener with checking event target to handle all of the cards.
3. Page load time and time-to-interactive was reduced from seconds to milliseconds.
4. Lighthouse rating became 100 for desktop and 93 for mobile.

But there is one more thing that is way better than all of the above: cognitive complexity.

Tasks that took days now take hours. Tasks that took hours now take minutes.
Tasks that took thousands of lines now take hundreds. Tasks that took hundreds of lines now take tens.

In real business apps, it is common to build features and then realize it’s not needed and should be discarded. Business is volatile, just because the real world is volatile too. With this kind of cost reduction per feature, it became way less painful to discard them. Throwing out something you spent time and emotional resource on doesn’t feel good. But with features taking minutes to build, it became easier.

Share your VS Code installed extensions here.
Mine is: Alignment, Better Comments, change-case, Colonize, CSS Peek, DotENV, File Utils, GitLens (my favorite!), Gulp Snippets, JS-CSS-HTML Formatter, Laravel 5 Snippets, Laravel Blade Snippets, Material Icon Theme, npm Intellisense, Numbered Bookmarks, Path Intellisense, PHP Debug, PHP DocBlocker, PHP Intelephense, PHP IntelliSense, Prettify JSON, Quokka.js, snippet-creator, Vetur.

Feels like there are redundant extensions here that I need to uninstall.
Happy Friday and Cheers! Excited for Infinity War movie! 😎

!rant
I recently moved all our tasks from grunt to gulp and integrated bower as the front end package manager. Also I wrote a lot of guides to set up standards and how-to for the team.
It's my 3rd month in my job and first major work. It took me more than a month to completely set it up and train everyone to use those new integrations.
Today all my seniors applauded my efforts. So much happiness 😀

As much as I love Microsoft, they're really getting on my nerves now.
I didn't fuckin spend 499usd on a new lumia just to reset it nearly every month coz it decides to fuck itself up out of the blue.
What does microsoft support say to its random breakdowns? Oh um hard reset it. HOW ABOUT FUCKIN NO.
My on the ventilator lumia 1520 didn't give me these many troubles in years as much as the 950xl did in mere months.
I'm this close. THIIIIS close to return my lumia for an *gulp* iPhone.
Last time I used that monstrosity was years ago, iPhone 4 if I remember correctly.

Current project:

A fairly simple and basic single page-ish project with no framework at all.
No backend or database.
No jQuery.
Plain old Gulp task, npm scripts and Webpack.
Some parallax and other scrolling effects.
Client is actually a pretty simple, cool and understanding guy.

This is too easy.

What is this madness??

<rant>The state of front end web development in 2016</rant>.

Me when I read about another JS framework, gulp module or workaround for using ES2016 features today.

Who would of thought, Gulp handles thirst running tasks too!

Getting ready for my new React project.

Vim: Check ☑
TernJS: Check ☑
Webpack: Check ☑
Gulp: Check ☑
Nodemon: Check ☑

Now I begin 😆

"Ok.js"

I'm surprised how after using gulp task with minify js, css, html, smoosh and compress to gz file the whole web size down from 200kb to 20kb.
That let me think what a shit web developer I'm and what cool are those things.

Earlier this day, I was about to start a new project. So I copied my favourite gulpfile.js into that projects root and installed all dependencies with npm. After running Gulp for the first time it threw an error.

Silly me tried to fix stuff and got googling the error and trying random things... After a break of a few hours I just fucking rerun Gulp and read the fucking error completely. It stood there. The fucking solution just stood there, run "npm blah --force" to reconfigure package blah....

Of course it worked right away and I finally could start working. But this shit took way too long. Why I just can't read the fucking error message. Damn

For the ultimate fuckit alias:
alias fuckit='git commit -am "$(curl -s whatthecommit.com/index.txt)"'

gulp && git add . && fuckit && git push && firebase deploy

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

Sick and fucking tired of this bullshit.
Previously worked with Laravel, used 'gulp watch' to watch for changes in assets and now they changed things for the better of Laravel Mix as a fucking wrapper for webpack. Now I have to do shit load more stuff to get gulp working, 'cause otherwise my 'npm run watch' shits itself every fucking time I run that shit, doesn't matter what fix is aplied. Battling that bullshit for 3 days now and shit's not working anyhow. Stupid fucking bullshit. Sorry, had to let it out from myself.

I hate Sass.

When installing all NPM dependencies with npm i, it's always quick, but not with sass. Ooooh myy goood. It starts compiling. It always misses something. Your node version is always not what sass needs. It pulls out gyp which requires some native shit. The build is never reproducible, it always fails with some horrible two mile long poorly-formatted stacktrace that is just gibberish.

More than that, sass is just poorly designed tool used by frontend fuckboys to write imperative, nonstandard, non-maintainable styles. If you know shit about css, you don't need sass.

I'm so happy it's going to die along with gulp. Webpack and css modules are here.

Yes, css-in-js that has a runtime penalty is also shit. If you like its syntax but dislike everything else, use Linaria. It has no runtime penalty and looks just like other css-in-js solutions.

so exited, my new blog is live after 4 months of work!

Before I realized what a Vagrant Box was, I thought everyone was talking about cardboard boxes for homeless people.

So there I am thinking everyone was talking about homeless people and I finally understand that it's a service for quickly deploying VMs for local development when I get invited to a party after a convention with my hosting company and I look over the rail and see a vagrant man asleep on a cardboard box.

I kinda like gulp.

I love how NPM packages explain their options.

Damn frontend crap.

The fact that you have to mask all of the disease with processable versions of css, html & js is bad enough, but there are like 6 dialects of each bandaid, and every project has traces of each.

The the design kid tells me to run this grunt script, frontender number two screams "no, dont use grunt, we use gulp! or was it bower? I guess just run it through yeoman, it's easy!", after which the third fucking shitty hipster yells "No that's outdated, just edit the webpack file, and then run yarn install... oh but run npm upgrade --global yarn first"

Did you just fucking tell me to upgrade a fucking package manager with another package manager?

Composer, gem or cargo are not always without problems. But at least us backenders have our fucking shit together. The worst we have to deal with is choosing Python 2 vs 3, or porting some old code so the server can migrate to PHP7.

The next person to tell me they found this awesome tool to manage his other tools... I'll fucking throw your latte all over your wacom tablet.

Was wondering why my script wasn't working. Added it to my node modules. Imported the style sheet with a require. Checked the gulp config file. Made sure it was in my pipeline. Checked my webpack settings and made sure jquery was loaded first. Checked my version on npm, crossed referenced with my package.json file. Why isn't it working....forgot to add the script tag in my html😤

Been hacking frontend for a while, know most of the perks and tricks of css and html, have implemented countless of projects with angularjs, have even created jquery plugins and gulp packages, have won hackatons in UX design.... Still, a SFO company turned me down for a front end dev position cause I could not find the K most frequent words in an array in O(n) time complexity...

Why aren't my js and CSS changes showing?!?!?!?!!!!??!!

F5, ctrl + F5, F5 and repeat

Oh yeah, gulp watch...

I love gulp
Gulp loves me, but it looks like in 50 shades of gray

Hi Everybody,
Here by I introduce you the new Java Script framework and package manager that is going to change your life forever. We have considered all the problems developers are facing during their everyday career. We use latest techniques used in configuration files (xml, yaml, json, etc.), package managers (npm, gulp, yawn, etc) and other frameworks (require-js, vuejs, reactjs, etc) into consideration to bring you a framework that has them all together in ONE BIG PACKAGE! HAHAHAHAAHAAA!
Nope. I'm just kidding :-D

If I had some reliable metric to measure bullshit per file, let's call it BPF, I believe the number would be highest on average for files named "gulpfile.js"

Building a new machine for NodeJS. Installing Gulp-sass has a dependency on node-sass - which has a dependency on node-gyp - which has a dependency ON PYTHON!!!

and.... python 2.7, as it doesn't support 3.0

Doomed - We're all doomed.

Just needed a good looking material os datepicker - ended up wrestling with react, webpack, npm and gulp. 3 hours later, ta-da, I have a datepicker! webdesign nowadays...

Been interested in trying Polymer for a while so gave it a try today, two hours later now and about to dropkick my laptop!

Followed the "this-looks-super-easy-guide" but that kinda turned into shit when it was time to run gulp!

How the f#*k can it be so hard to find information and get this to work!

Guess I'll just stick with my Android development and forget about this side project because it affects my mood in a bad f#*king way👹

Spent like 5 hours today installing, configuring, and playing with phpstorm. first time I've used a real ide type program and wow, I replaced 5 programs with this I would use at the same time.

filezilla (ftp), rapidphp (code), mysql workbench, cmd prompt (node, gulp, sass), and source tree (git)

ES6 + flex everywhere in app without webpack, gulp etc...
Now app needs to support IE11
FML

~rant

I started working for myself in January, and work has been few and far between.

I’ve always wanted to work for myself, and now I’m working on a product I’m actually going to sell *gulp*

It’s not ready yet, but I’ll definitely be posting here about it when it’s ready to go :D

It’s going to be a super simple (Windows to start) screenshotting tool (and relevant cloud services) primarily focussed on devs / IT professionals and their needs.

Sound off for feature requests 👍

Fuuuuuuuuuuccccccckk you gulp, you have one fucking job. Front-end web Devs this is a warning for all of you out there. Go with webpack always.

I have officially decided to use CI (Jenkins) at work because "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && composer self-update && composer update && npm update -g && npm update && bower install --allow-root && gulp" after a pull doesn't seem healthy 😂

Fuck ES/TS 😐

Been trying for hours now to get ionic 2 to work with either generators or async functions. Doesn't work because async for ES 5 is only supported with TS 2.1 which breaks the angular compiler. Also can't use generators (not supported for es5 at all by TS).

Also can't really change the ionic build process to just take es6 output instead of es5 and transpile because it's a convoluted mess in a separate node module instead of just a gulp file like with ionic 1.x.

Why is the JS ecosystem such a fucking mess?

when the setup of programming environment takes more effort than the code.
and you're like fuck it i'll do it online!

Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.

I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.

So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.

Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.

Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):

* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest

Any of you have further recommendations?

Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?

Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?

Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?

Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?

During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?

I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.

What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?

Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?

Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.

-$ gulp test

*30 seconds later*

SUCCESS

[oh wait, for got something... Typety type... Fixed. I don't need to rerun gulp test, right?]

-$ git push

*email from CircleCI: BUILD FAILED*

😊🔫

Hi friends and others. There is a task I want to automate. I want to convert .docx files to .pdf and then minify those. Are there JavaScript libraries or npm- packages which can do that? Because I would like to use Gulp or Webpack for this task. I would not mind if external APIs are involved, but I would rather not use those if not required.

Pls share your wisdom. Bye.

Lodash, Rimraf, Grunt, Gulp... I'm still not convinced that our frontend guy isn't just playing Pokémon Go all day

I’m on a laravel project which is going great, the ass rapping part of it is compiling this fucking sass with laravel fucking mix... fuck it I’m setting up gulp

How I imagine gulp failing because of a non-existent or renamed/moved file.

I currently use Github as my git server and have worked a little bit with Travis. Sadly Travis can't deploy to local network targets and that's why I had the idea to create my own basic CI for the local network: It will be a simple nodejs-app and listens to pushes via Github Webhooks. Then it fetches the code from Github and runs a task runner like Gulp over it and tests it with any nodejs testing framework. Then it deploys the compiled, tested and linted app to the local network. What do you think of this idea?

Just read a rant about webpack and suddenly the hate boiled up again ...
Why is it just so damn annoying to configure?

Just make it like gulp or so where you have an actual idea on the workflow, rather than just throwing in plugins at random and let magic happen without knowing wtf is going on.

Tried to update an ejected Angular4 project to angular 5 ... after 2h i gave up and dropped some stuff to use angular-cli again.

For the last time, ES5 DOESN'T support optional function parameters. gulp --production fails when running on testing when you do that.
*fixes gulp tasks to do gulp --production by default*
Next day : hey, why does gulp keep failing.

IT IS BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO ME THE LAST 100 TIMES WHEN I SAID OPTIONAL PARAMETERS DOESN'T WORK WHEN MINIFYING

Let's see how you do it now.

Gulp makes more sense to me than Webpack. I chose it. Please don't hate me.

I hate it when people name fancy new techniques but don't actually know what it is. Today I had the following conversation with some of my ClassMates:

Me: Whe should bundle the js and css files of our app
CM1: I used Gulp before, maybe we could use that
CM2: I used Grunt in the past, but thats kinda old-school webpack is what everybody uses now
CM3: I heard Docker is also a great tool for doing webstuff, let's use Docker

Had an idea for a Webb app tonight that I could use to test some new things out. Didn't get round to the new things but 3 hours later I do have my IDE set up, quarter of a billion npm modules and a gulp flow so complicated it feels like the file system is a rubicks cube...

So CRA(create-react-app) v2 rolled out.

> started new project with my own boilerplate
> little did I know, I am accidentally doing int CRA2
> gulp-sass fails.
> Internal screaming.
> Bulma React Components fails to compile due to one type, IDK how they missed in previous build.
> fixed by removind browserlist array from package.json
> Guess what, it comes back as you close it.
> So, now I've to keep it open while gulp-sass is running, which is almost always, in order to compile.

Thank you and Fuck you facebook

!rant

Is there somewhere an overview article/guide on the most popular software associated with web development? There are just so many technologies I know nothing about - Gulp, Grunt, Docker, Webpack, Bower and who knows what else..

Everyone seems to be using something else and it's just total chaos for me.

My favourite tool currently is Gulp, although that sentiment is slowly eroding as I integrate it into a project that is 10+ years old and follows few standards with regard to css and javascript files. At least it is a quiet period in my workplace at the moment and it will improve development workflow when I'm done

Having to do 10's of ElasticSearch v2 -> 6 client requests migration manual deploys of a 10-year old PHP/ Javascript codebase where the gulp build's plugins no longer work, the package dependencies have been .gitignore'd (who does that!), and dev cowboys have frequently bypassed version control by making changes directly in production.

Also, no one knows anything about it because the only dev who was supposed to maintain this app left 3 months ago due to unbearable management.

Damn I'm tired of js build tools. Having just converted my build scripts to make is really making my day. Damn it's fast.

Once upon a time I spent a week writing down a "Coding Conventions" document, setting up linters for JavaScript & CSS based on those rules and put the call to the linter in our gulp build task, only to figure out the next day it was commented out by some guy because "the build task was throwing errors" due to his shitty coding style...

*runs gulp test*

*twiddles thumbs*

*opens devrant*

A)
const gulp = require("gulp"),
sass = require("gulp-sass");
OR

B)
const gulp = require("gulp"),
const sass = require("gulp-sass");

I use A

Received my first recruitment message on LinkedIn today. Generic as fuck "hey your profile looks nice, we have dis thing for you, come take a looksie".

Went ahead and read the whole thing, started laughing while reading requirements:
- own a degree in CS or related field: re-starting college next week
- extensive experience with automation processes: uuuh... I can write bash scripts and gulp tasks, how's that?
- extensive experience with Java, Angular, Selenium and Protractor: sure. Spent two weeks tinkering with those tools. Pretty much an expert already
- two years of experience: not even 6 months into my first job
And some other nonsense

Job would be in a very nice city, extended family lives nearby, actually a nice position. Too bad I am not looking for a job and my classes start on Monday 😂
But hey, at least people are looking at my profile! Yay!

me:task assigned is a small fix.Gonna finish Early sit back relax this sprint.
mail(next day):we've moved to microservices.setup as easy as gulp landscape:start
me:cool!shinny new stuff!seems easy!!
project:npm failed..please check module xxx..
me:fine.....
after long mail chain
project:npm failed unknown file not found
me:fine.....
after hours of googling and little github issue browsing
project:server running @ portxxx
me:yay finally happy life!!makes chnages, sent for review.
reviewer:code needs refactoring!!
me:make all changes..waits for faceless reviewer from another timezone!
reviewer:thumbs up.
me:i will make it in time!!!yes!!
jenkins:buid:failure
me:no still i wont give up...
debug finds out new bugs caused by unrelated code...make new PR the end is near,one day more will definitely merge!!!
mail:jenkins down for maintenance!
me:nooooo....waits till last minute gets thumbs up for merge, finally merged in the last second!!

all for 12 lines of code change.
:/
sad life

I've just started freelancing on PeoplePerHour. I'm in talks to secure a job migrating a C# webapp to a desktop scenario using HTML5 embedded within WPF, but I've never done this as a solo project before. What sort of price is sensible to charge for this? I'm working in GBP

Looking at vacancies and the JS build tools asked (Babel, Gulp) and then visiting their websites I notice that I don't understand what they are going on about.

"Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines."

What the actual corpo fuck?

The "get started" page expects you already know npm, typescript, and when you look at their pages, well... Where does the circlejerk end and the actual Javascript start?

I've been out of the corporate loop for a few years, seems it's all about build tools these days. I need to get out of this industry pronto.

Taking quick naps between GULP compiles is a thing right?

Do people still use gulp as task runner in 2019 out of own will?

When gulp build (expressjs + browsersync + browserify + uglify + gzip + gulp-zip + gulp-tar) perfectly compiles your code, minify and concat all js, gzipped them, minify images, package the files into a .zip and .tar... and refresh your browser 😍

you begin to have faith that its gona be a nice day ahead

Account manager: could you amend these small, super tiny thing on *.*. Should only take you five mins.

Me: oh, the gulpfile is broken...

Me (5:30pm): oh, the gulpfile is broken...

When gulp takes 30 seconds to build... And you have to re-serve on every change.

Ready for webpack.

Webpack? More like Fudgepack 😡

OK sure, I know it's cool to rip on Webpack without taking 5 minutes to understand it, but I really have tried. Every time I want to do anything which used to be trivial with grunt, gulp or brunch, it requires a whole bunch of sorcery and every post I see online around the same topic inevitably ends with something like "that's not modular", "WebPack doesn't work like that", "you're holding your phone wrong" etc. And it's not like I'm someone who is afraid of new or uncomfortable things. I try new languages almost as often as there are new JavaScript fads (OK maybe not THAT often). I use "weird" keywords and experiment with different key maps all the time. I swap my daily window manager on an almost quarterly basis (and xmonad is no picnic as an introduction to Haskell). But what the fuck is it with so many people in positions of influence in the frontend world always taking one step forward, two steps back and an occasional hop sideways when it comes to tooling (and dragging everyone else along with them)?

How did such a turd of a tool become defacto for so many frontend frameworks? Do hard core JavaScripters just really really hate outsiders and want to deter others from their precious as much as possible? Fuck Webpack and fuck everyone responsible for helping it permeate so thoroughly through the software development industry.

Trying to create my own gulp build process since two days now...😖 Want to get the right folder structure and perfect build process on the first try, but that is exactly what is hindering me and I can't get any shit done...😟

Trying to run gulp tasks through msbuild on TFS. WTF.

I hate to work on old projects with gulp.

console.log('assigning obejct to customer', {custID, itemID});

events.js:174
throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
^
GulpUglifyError: unable to minify JavaScript

thanks.....

Gulp is fucking with my life... Please someone give me a good tutorial site.. 😞 😚

Spent 1 hour figuring out why an Exported Class ( Node.js) wasn't being picked up in a require statement by gulp. I have 2 clone software the same repo on my laptop. I put the new class on 1 repo and was running the gulp tasks from the other repo. Sigh.

That moment when gulp run is as long as one epoch when training my neural network. How did we arrive here?

I just had a ptsd (not real ptsd) attack cause I remembered in one of my first jobs we had gulp, grunt AND webpack to build our angularjs project.

Did I fix that mess? Sure!
Will the memory of it stalk me until new year? Absolutely.

Don't mind the hype. Whatever was good enough two years ago is still viable today.

I have these gulp tasks to preprocess my css and html. months ago it was all polished and working great.

I run the commands today, npm complains about deprecated something and doesn't let me run... I do updates, I try to run again: "Right now osX is not supported".

I literally did not change anything all these months.

Fuck you npm.

Depends.

Mainly Atom (with packages), Prepros/Codekit, Terminal, Gulp, Git.

git. You know.

Also: iTerm, neovim, gulp and Spotify

Since I started my routine of checking bug logs every morning, I've had 2 instances where a website vulnerability scanner was run against a production website and generated over 2,000 Coldfusion errors.

At the time, I was super nervous about the apparent hack attempt, and hyped that the attackers never actually got in. It's nice to know that despite the various errors indicating vulnerable / breakable code, they were ultimately unsuccessful. I know now that a determined attacker could probably have wrecked our production websites. Since then I've made a ton of security-related updates and I'm actually thankful for the script kiddie getting my attention with that scan.

PS. We're now building a website for a local security company who is going to work with us to pen test the site when it's finished! Gulp.

gulp started throwing premature close on useref:dist yesterday
said it was on a dependency
spent whole afternoon checking gulp issues and reviewing dependencies

as it turns out, it was nothing even remotely related to the error message
it was a spread operator used to merge objects

why must the Lord test me like that

Just set up gulp for the first time... Now I'm just making stupid changes to see everything compile and reload the browser. What an Easter treat :D

tl;dr: What's the best tuto/course for learning webpack ?

I'm mostly a PHP dev, working on my own framework, but I also use more and more JS, and recently some Typescript (and loved it).

But my usual gulp workflow starts to grow old and limited. ES6 modules seems a great improvement while every webpack user seems to say it gives headaches. So what's the best way to start ? ^^

My default response: Have you tried running gulp? ;)

God save me my company is using gulp during production .it is extremely hard to debug ...

Ain no missing semicolon like one in postcss w/gulp. HOW HARD IS IT TO SPECIFY WHERE THE UNEXPECTED SPACE IS?

Question for you web devs out there.
I'm curious as to what your workflow involves for building and multi device testing? Whether it be grunt/gulp / something else?

gulp make coffee

I'm in middle of fucking moronic, most incomprehensible situation.
So primarily I work for a project which requires Node 6.11.5 precisely and now I've been assigned another developer's half asses'd work without any documentation about how to set up gulp, long story it took me a week to figure out it's an ant build with node dependencies oh and I nearly forgot this developer is using node 0.12.1, Can you fucking believe that?

Now when I'll need to compile/build for primary project i'll need to reinstall 6.11.5 and god knows what will happen when and if that half asses'd project comes back

This idiot has style.css / style.ie.css / style.min.css in .gitignore so every time I pull I'll need to re-build oh and the worst part I spend my weekend fixing this shit then sass compiled and shit is still crazy, CSS is written from SASS but not reflecting on server ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While I'm writing this I'm waiting on my boss who is also trying to fix this.

gulp.pipe(notify("SASS compiled, motherfucker!"));

I hate working on tight deadlines when I have plans the entire week, so I add some random shit to my gulpfile once in a while to cheer myself up.. Did not work, but I'm not gonna remove it.

When the projects repository has node_modules/, and you need build styles:

rm -rf node_modules/*
npm install
gulp compile
rm -rf node_modules/*
git checkout node_module/

Jeej first project. Read: 101 FE bugs to fix. In code i've never seen before. With bare minimum support. Though day. First steps with Gulp are set. yay

i dont know npm

today i learned `npm install` in root project directory doesn't do what running `npm install` in a subdirectory that actually has a package.json

in this case there was no package.json at the root project directory if it matters

shoutout to fucking eslint not telling me to try installing the fucking packages it can't fucking find, as im a monkey who doesnt know what their doing

well i suppose this is irrelevant since there's yarn, gulp, webpack or whatever is the new hot front end package manager thing

Upon interview hiring i was given an excel sheet to fill how many years of experience i have working in X (X = technology). One of the things they asked was how many years of experience do i have working in npm, yarn, grunt, gulp, npm scripts... WTF?

I've just changed our style sheet generator to using gulp.
Took me 10 minutes to learn what to do (just css preprocessing with prefixes).
Grunt was horrid. We had it because the last guy thought "something new, I'll use this now", and it's never changed because no one understands it. Even after a few hours research.

Just closed VSCode running gulp, expecting it would terminate the session as well... it didn't.

Now I have no freaking idea how to shut the PowerShell running that shit.

Webpack gives a dirty bundled file. Why is it used over Gulp? Thanks for the explanation.

Real devs doesn't use Grunt or gulp.

Using gulp to make projects backups 🤠

Hi! I'm from Argentina, and on top of that from a relatively small city. Suffice it to say that there are next to none technology/programming/development events around. Do any of you know of a website where I can buy "stickers" ? I've seen some laptops full of grunt, gulp, GitHub, js, Python, etc etc stickers on top, and I wold really love to have some. Shipment is not an issue (as long as it ships within USA :P)
Thanks a lot !!!!

People! Do you know if there is something similar to gulp and modules like minify, uglify, smooth, etc (for HTML, CSS and JS) that runs in Python instead of nodejs? I can't install nodejs/npm in my job because "open source software is dangerous" :)

JS + Gulp + Browserify is the slowest build experience I've ever used.

Sophomore year starting soon so I'm looking for new project (s) to complete in parallel with the studies.
Some are more design-y and some more backend-y but I recently started getting better at designing so :)

1) Learn some fragment shader stuff. I've always been messing around with graphics and have a game on steam, so I think that's a good idea to be paired with signal processing.

2) Reactive web services. Preferably with spring-boot or vert.x but

3) I would also like to dive into golang (and make some reactive thing with it)

4) WebAssembly seems nice... But I got some concerns

5) exercise making wireframes -> CSS (with some js)

6) I've never really done any real backed work with nodejs, except serving and aot compiling js, or doing gulp tasks

7) Implementing a whole project, or a fraction of it as serverless on aws

* I'm definitely going to use a couple very simple services to make a docker swarm with load balancing, etc, just because I know how everything works but got no practical knowledge

8) Design an esports jersey for the university department I'm in (shouldn't take long)

So what do you guys think? Recommendations are welcome :)

P.S. last year in review:
> A webapp running on a raspberry pi powering a reflex testing game on gpio (java/spring-boot , codename: buttonmasher)
> small Elastic search cluster to monitor some random university servers through kibana dashboards
> laser tracking on wall of *any* colour and variable light conditions via a webcam (opencv) , controlling the mouse pointer, whether you run it against a projector or any wall
> jstrain.herokuapp.com => a small JavaScript powered tool with a DSL to help you train more efficiently without a coach
> Various random Photoshop stuff