Schedule: Build and automation sessions

Starting a new JavaScript project from scratch is overwhelming. Cory House provides a playbook outlining the key decisions you need to make to build a robust development environment that handles bundling, linting, transpiling, testing, and much more. Read more.

The US Digital Service is building a suite of tools to replace a large legacy application at the Department of Veteran Affairs. Knowing the complexity of the end state and enamored with microservices, the team was much too aggressive in breaking up the product. Shane Russell reflects on this experience, sharing advice and lessons learned on how and when to break up your web app. Read more.

Elijah Manor explains how to use npm scripts to handle your various build needs, covering running scripts in series or parallel, using lifecycle hooks, passing arguments, piping data, using environment variables, running scripts on file change or when Git hooks are triggered, and organizing our scripts in external files—as well as how to modify your scripts to run across Mac, Linux, and Windows. Read more.

You're probably familiar with source maps. They let you debug your original, unminified, and untranspiled code in the browser. But have you ever wondered how they actually work? Ben Vinegar takes a deep dive into the source map format to see what's under the hood, exploring source map generation tools, parsers, and how to manipulate source maps directly for fun and profit. Read more.

The worst time to learn that a business-critical performance metric got worse is once a release is in production. The earlier you can detect a problem, the easier it is to resolve. Billy Hoffman explains how to integrate open source performance testing tools like Lighthouse, WebPagetest, and others into your build/CI systems, stopping performance regressions and providing transparency. Read more.