Schedule: Tools 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.

Between race conditions, object references, and async stack traces, JavaScript can be hard to sift through. Modern browsers offer many tools for debugging, so why not use them? And now that Node works out of the box with DevTools, you can step through your Node stack too. Wayne Elgin illustrates the latest ways to masterfully march up and down your stack and solve your code’s greatest mysteries. Read more.

Kevin Old explores the principles of serverless architecture as he walks you through building and deploying a service on AWS Lambda that retrieves data from DynamoDB via GraphQL. Along the way, you'll learn how to use the Serverless Framework to ease the burdens of managing the lifecycle and deploying services in a serverless architecture. Read more.

If you've used Git for any amount of time, you've probably gotten yourself into some confusing, frustrating, or downright terrifying situations. You are not alone. Katie Sylor-Miller explains how to avoid getting into Git messes in the first place and how to leverage Git's powerful features to save yourself when everything seems to go wrong. 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.

One of the wonderful things about building for the web is the ability to stand on the shoulders of our fellow developers, who release new frameworks and libraries to make our job easier. But nothing is free. We constantly make trade-offs, whether we know it or not. Tim Kadlec explains how to evaluate third-party tools to identify these trade-offs—a requirement for the health of your site. 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.