Running to keep up with web development 5/9/14

By Chris Johnson

Scott Williams laments the ever changing field of web development:

Oh cool you want to be a web developer? Just go and learn any or all of these:

  • HTML 5
  • CSS 3
  • JavaScript
  • CoffeeScript
  • SASS
  • Less
  • jQuery
  • Angular
  • Ember
  • Grunt
  • Gulp
  • Bower
  • Yeoman
  • node.js
  • Bourbon
  • Bitters
  • Compass
  • Bootstrap
  • Foundation
  • Handlebars
  • Mustache

I feel Scott’s pain. I just finished integrating Grunt into my workflow, and now I’ve found out I’m supposed to switch to Gulp1. While I may be a late adopter of Grunt, it’s still only about two years old. Gulp has been around for less than a year.

Keeping up with the latest standards and tools in web development takes a significant amount of effort, and it can be tough to carve out the time to stay current while dealing with project deadlines. However, the flip side is that web development hasn’t stagnated, and it’s far from boring. That’s a tradeoff I’m happy to make.

  1. Grunt and Gulp are both great tools for automating your front-end build process. I can’t imagine using SASS or CoffeeScript without one of them.