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Automated frontend tools

2 Min. ReadDevelopment

Howdy, perfers! This week I’ve got some awesome resources for those of you looking to automate ALL the things! While you don’t have to use automation to achieve great performance on your website or webapp, it sure does help to keep things running smoothly and consistently. So have a look!

Frontend Ops

Back in June Alex Sexton wrote a great piece on how he perceives the not-yet-common position of frontend operations. He goes in depth about what he envisions when he says this, touching on deployment, builds, page load performance, rendering performance, developer workflows, and (of course) automating all of this stuff when possible. It’s a great, inspirational article that should get you thinking about how to handle the complex world of modern frontend development.

Automating Frontend Workflow

Addy Osmani recently posted this excellent, comprehensive overview of automated frontend workflows. It is jam-packed with tools, and even if you’re used to following this area of web development, there’s sure to be a few tool combos that you haven’t seen yet. Definitely worth a read for everyone who does frontend development. It goes from the basics of Grunt to scaffolding generators like Yeoman, and includes everything in between. While there aren’t as many in-depth examples, the breadth of tools covered will give everyone, designers and developers alike, something to chew on.

Intro to Frontend Ops

This is a slide deck of my own creation, presented at both DrupalCon Prague and BADCamp. In contrast to Addy’s all-encompassing overview, it is intro level and aimed specifically at people who build Drupal sites. However, the slides are accompanied by working code samples that you can install instantly after cloning the slides (and after installing ruby, homebrew, node.js, and npm :p). My hope is that you can start using these tools today, rather than “getting around to it” eventually.