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Treating JavaScript
Like a Real Language
Or:
What Zelda taught me about Front
End Engineering
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Matt Steele
•@mattdsteele
•http://matthew-steele.com
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JavaScript is
Fraught With
Peril
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Anti-Patterns Everywhere
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The browser is the most hostile
software engineering environment
imaginable.
- Douglas Crockford
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Its famous difficulty demanded so much, not just from
my hands but from my entire ragged nervous system,
even from my temper, my character.
It never explained itself and so conjured, via ingenious
online components, a community as helpful and
treacherous as any group of humans.
Tevis Thompson
http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/
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To win at JavaScript,
we have to treat it like
a real language.
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Learn the language
Use appropriate tooling
Unit test
Use build tools
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Learn the Language
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“JavaScript is the only language
that I’m aware of that people feel
they don’t need to learn before
they start using it.”
Douglas Crockford
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js-assessment
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Code Katas
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Tools
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As an engineer, there is a short list
of tools that you must be rabid
about. Rabid. Foaming at the
mouth crazy.
Rands
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/11/02/
the_foamy_rules_for_rabid_tools.html
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Learn your editor
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Emmet (zen coding)
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Arguments over style are pointless.
There should be a style guide, and you should
follow it.
Rebecca Murphy
https://github.com/rwldrn/idiomatic.js/
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“use strict”;
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;
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jsHint
Your First Unit Test
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http://nicknisi.com/blog/blog/2012/11/12/lint-javascript-on-commit/
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Watch other people’s
workflow
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Testing
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⌘+R
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Lincoln
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Omaha
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Jasmine
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Use a Build Tool
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•Run tests
•Apply linting
•Concatenate & Minify
•Compile
•Remove debugging statements
•Precompile templates
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http://gruntjs.com/
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•CSS linting
•Compress images
•auto-watching
•Create documentation
•Download & maintain dependencies
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http://yeoman.io/
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http://jenkins-ci.org
Continuous Integration
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CoffeeScript