Fundamentals of Front-End Ops

Front-end paradigms are shifting fast, and among the trends singled out are task automation, painless dependency management, and quicker testing. Front-end ops, a term promulgated by Alex Sexton, deals with the synthesis of all of these responsibilities and others that front-end developers today face. We'll talk about a variety of different options available for FEDs to work efficiently and iteratively, such as Yeoman, Grunt, Gulp, Bower, and other lesser-known projects.

Here's what we'll cover:

• Why ops? Automation generates consistency
• Why front-end ops? Roles, rationales, workflow
• Getting started: Scaffolding and setup
• Automation: Grunt and Gulp
• Linting: Coding standards
• CSS: Preprocessing and aggregation
• JavaScript: Minification and concatenation
• CSS regressions
• Testing rendering engines and devices (GhostLab)
• Performance testing
• Developer tools for debugging

This session assumes some familiarity with the command line.

This is an updated version of a session presented at DrupalCamp New Jersey 2015.