Build Processes, Totally Tooling Tips (S2, Ep 5)

[Music] so build processes are important um important because when you want to be fast you have to sort of give up the things that are slowing you down t-shirt t-shirt it's a t-shirt slogan love it he says wearing a yman t-shirt product placement but you are you completely right like things like minifying your CSS and your JavaScript um optimizing images like all of that stuff is really laborious if you have to do it manually so getting in your build process makes total sense because just whenever you do a build of your site it's just done taken care of yeah the sort of this sort of fits into um my three tiers of optimization tooling should I should I should make a pamphlet I feel like an advert is about to start playing that's what it feels like right now it's life advice the difference um okay so there's sort of a baseline of tools that everybody should be doing these days yeah like hash ihate you know data roaming charges I don't want anyone shipping a thousand images down the line so the Baseline is you should be at least minifying your Styles um in your JavaScript optimizing your images um using compression on the server side using like uh acing scripts leverage caching yep we' redirect so that's stuff that's the Baseline yeah then we've got stuff that you and I have been exploring a lot lately which is sort of get fast and stay fast tools like things that will help you inline your critical path CSS so you can improve first render yeah um things that will help you remove unus CSS like a ton of those those things what I I'm finding myself doing is I'm using the bill process like building out custom little things where basically I can still control what the critical path is and the build price is just helping me manage it like I know there are build pro steps where it's like it'll do everything for you and it's like magic and that scares me because I don't feel like I understand it enough to know whether those tools are doing the right thing or not yeah so I'm still in like a learning phase but I I'm using the build process just to make it easier for me to explore so there's web starter kit there's also polymer starter kit which is very similar to web starter kit except it's got extra plugins specific to POA like vulcanized and things like that but then yman is basically like you can just go in and it'll ask you what like generator you want to use is what they called where you can then just generate any style of project so if you wanted to use something like angular or react or whatever new hotness is out there there's chances are there's a generator that will give you a Bild process already for those things yeah exactly and like one thing I find so we've got all of the Baseline performance optimization is pretty much covered by web starter kit and if you're if you're like one thing I find a lot of uh agencies doing is that they'll they'll use yen to scaffold out their projects and they'll go into we and they take a look and say okay well we're interested in the image optimization parts or the script modification parts we're just going to steal like 70% of this file and just like Drop it into our project and that's that's perfectly fine you know you pick and choose what makes sense to you so the way that I've started doing this now and I know you kind of don't agree with this approach but I just going to walk out yeah you should but it so I have one gulp file that basically um you can do a thing like require directory and then any Javascript file within that directory it will basic basically take the gulp tasks from those each individual files and then you can basically use them as you would like in just one big long gulp file and the reason I'm doing that is you can split it out into like Styles and scripts and images like each section will deal with its own thing and then I can copy those files into a new project delete any old ones that I don't want and just change the directories and it's like a really nice way of getting reuse out of my go files cuz before when I had big ones everything would just become messy it'd be hard to maintain or understand like where problems were whereas when I've got them in multiple files everything just sort of becomes much easier to manage and maintain and share you've been demoted from colleague to desk occupant H um this approach is actually pretty legit if um if if you're finding that you've got a really really long G file splitting them out totally makes sense the reason we haven't done it in some of our boiler Play Projects is that you know for beginners you don't want them to have to like think about one other thing and it also gets a little bit trickier to debug if you've got you know multiple tasks and different files that depend on each other it's not a whole lot more but it's just another thing you got to think about yeah like this is where I always get to a we point of like best practice versus like ease of use yeah and I always tend to go for best practice cuz like you ever look at um any of the Native platforms they always just say this is the right way of doing something for this platform or this IDE or library or whatever there's no like Middle Ground where you could do something because it's easier so no that's I'm not say you're wrong but it's totally fair I remember when we were like a little while ago you gave me um a rundown of one of your your presentations and it was one of the bits was on build processes and you were like everyone should just use grunt actually gulp is going out it's new kid on the Block it's kind of cool everyone should just use gulp actually there's this new thing that's kind of coming out called broccoli that's also a bill process then again mpm scripts is also coming maybe use that yep and in my head I realized this was at the time where I just learned Grunt and I was switching over to gulp because it seemed like that that was getting used a lot and I realized that basically all of the web tooling ecosystem is basically a Game of Thrones where the minute I fall in love with one it's going to die and be replaced so there's a bit of me that feels like I should just never get attached to any of my tools because Sooner or Later by getting attached I'm almost dooming it [Music]