Developing a Front-End CLI for fun and profit

GOTO Chicago 2017

The burden put on front-end developers today has never been higher. Often expected to design user experiences, evaluate JavaScript libraries, develop applications, configure web servers, have intimate knowledge of browser compatibility, HTTP, security measures, and trans-piled modern web languages. The responsibility of Front-End developers is growing at a rapid pace and there appears to be no end in sight as the web continues to graduate into a first-class platform.

As the web is used for wider spectrum of applications the variety of development libraries has increased dramatically. This has introduced unique new challenges when evaluating suitable libraries or context switching from one project to another. Managing development stacks across a variety of projects is a serious challenge for todays developer.

Fortunately, the number of mature libraries have improved significantly in recent years which leaves us more suitable options when developing applications. So how to we keep a consistent development workforces without standardizing on specific development libraries? Is is possible to get both consistency while still choosing the best tool for the job? Fortunately there are patters in our behavior when we create, develop, and publish applications that we can embrace to create development work-flows that feel familiar regardless of problem we are solving and the libraries we use.

In this talk, we will be exploring the power of muscle memory by creating unified CLIs that will optimize our work-flow across all our projects Presented by the lead architect of surge.sh, Brock Whitten will walk us through some techniques and tools that will turn any front-end developer into a web publishing powerhouse. We'll explore CLIs, pre-compilers, provisioning SSL, CDN deployment, and having fun with our tools.