[roneesh]

Impressive and awesome. This is perfect to catch up on using build tools. I focus on core programming concepts in my own work, and at work most of that stuff is automated to just a few commands, so I appreciate the gulp.js part of your tutorial most. Thanks for the great work.

[TheAceOfHearts]

If you want to check out an alternative for building applications, go look up Webpack.

I strongly believe you can build web applications without having to pull in Gulp or Grunt. And to back up my claim I setup a project [0] that shows how to do it using webpack + npm run-scripts.

I'd argue it solves a large set of problems while maintaining a reasonable level of complexity.

[0] https://github.com/cesarandreu/web-app

[bmelton]

I can't claim to be a Gulp expert, but it's always shocking to me how tools like Gulp and Grunt become so pervasive without strong tutorials.

I ignored Grunt for years, always implementing my own hackneyed systems in Python, until I eventually discovered this tutorial[1], which at least got me a good introductory "this is how you use this thing that everybody else already knows how to use, dummy" lesson.

[1] - http://24ways.org/2013/grunt-is-not-weird-and-hard/

[roneesh]

Thanks for the resource!

Yeah they did kind of just sneak up about a year ago it seems. I remember getting into the field two years ago I didn't hear about them. I suspect the tipping point was the full migration to front-end frameworks instead of just plain JS/jQuery.

[bmelton]

I think Grunt had been around for awhile. That video is December 2013ish, and I remember trying and failing more than a couple of times to integrate it into my workflow. According to whois, gruntjs.com was first registered in April 2012.

Now, to be fair to Grunt, my workflow is usually Python or Go on the backend, and I just wanted something to manage my front-end assets, so it was never a necessity for me, but knowing there's something that does what I want it to do, while being unable to make it do the thing that it does is quite frustrating.

[justinsaccount]

Things like http://yeoman.io/ likely have something to do with it.