Meta Refresh 2012

A workshop on the front-end build process.

Outline

The last mile - a rant filled with demos

The objective of this talk is to show how to package all the nice front end code you’ve written, for optimal and speedy delivery to the browser.
Secondly, we’ll discuss how this fits in with the development workflow, and how to catch possible deployment errors before even commiting code.

Topics I’ll try to cover are -

• what you’re doing wrong right now
• why the front end build process is important to your bottom line (with numbers!)
• compressing and minifying javascript, stylesheets
• further avenues for reducing number of requests for one page load
• optimizing images, and possible multiple device strategies for images
• validating output markup/css/js
• unit tests: how to write, how to use, how to test on multiple targets, continuous integration and monitoring
• strategies for integrating ALL of the above into your workflow

Requirements

• your laptop + your favorite text editor/IDE
• to be anal about page load speeds and program ‘correctness’
• optional: your favorite web framework, if you’d like to see how it mixes with your tech of choice

Speaker bio

My friends call me Pi. I obsess over the front end development workflow, and dream about code. I love graphs, javascript, and the dosas at vidyarthi bhavan.

Links

• code - https://github.com/threepointone/metarefresh

Slides

http://speakerdeck.com/u/threepointone/p/the-last-mile