CSS { In Real Life } | Building a dependency-free site in 2019
I think we’re often guilty of assuming that because our tools are great solutions for some things, they’re automatically the solution for everything.
Link tags: webpack
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What is tree shaking and how does it work?
The context here is JavaScript, not apples or olives.
This is yet another great explainer from Ire. Tree shaking is one of those things that I thought I understood, but always had the nagging doubt that I was missing something. This article really helped clear things up for me.
Angular, Autoprefixer, IE11, and CSS Grid Walk into a Bar… - daverupert.com
Dave on the opaqueness of toolchains:
As toolchains grow and become more complex, unless you are expertly familiar with them, it’s very unclear what transformations are happening in our code. Tracking the differences between the input and output and the processes that code underwent can be overwhelming. When there’s a problem, it’s increasingly difficult to hop into the assembly line and diagnose the issue.
There’s a connection here to one of the biggest issues with what’s currently being labelled “AI”:
In the same way AI needs some design to show its work in how it came to its final answer, I feel that our automated build tools could use some help as well.
I really like this suggestion for making the invisble visible:
I sometimes wonder if Webpack or Gulp or [Insert Your Build Tool Here] could benefit from a Scratch-like interface for buildchains.
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:
- Install things
- Do things
So bower, npm and yarn install things, whereas grunt, gulp, and webpack do things.
I think.