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Use & Abuse of Node 4 Devops

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Updated 20-Sep-2023

With apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche.1

  1. The title of one of Nietsche's early essays is On the use and abuse of history for life As an occasional developer, generally just scripting, hacks, and sysadmin stuff, and of course troubleshooting WordPress js/css/php, Node has entered my daily life in the form of the Atom editor, and now Nylas N1 email client. This is interesting and healthy. I've given up on Node as a tool for web apps, basically I don't have the time to spend getting up to speed, and of course keeping up to speed. That said, I'm needing more and more the Node-based tools that were developed by and for developers, namely Grunt, Gulp, Browserify, etc. Now these all are basically build (and maintain) tools. Then again, there is an argument that these are actually not needed so much as NPM plus scripts (but hardcore will always make that argument).

    Contents
    Webpack Browser Build Tool
    Less CSS Preprocessor
    Necessarily Conservative Adoption

    Webpack Browser Build Tool

    Back to the comparisons, it is hard to know what to pick up as a tool, they are all so popular! But, then again, an up-and-coming all-in-one is probably the best approach, when time is limited and some kind of Node build tool is needed. - Webpack - Webpack How To - Webpack

    Less CSS Preprocessor

    Of course there are lots of options, but if I just want to run Bootstrap 3, without the Javascript library, then Less makes more sense.

    Necessarily Conservative Adoption

    My tools have to be conservative, since I don't have the luxury of time and energy to relearn and rebuild everything each time I use it, and I need documentation on the web for most things. So there you go. ↩︎