While I was doing all my revolutionary Git changes at work, I also decided to look into updating some things about my projects, namely addressing my apparently out-of-date dependencies!
My big project at work for the past 4 months has been a ReactJS project. To be perfectly honest, it was my second ever React project. My first React project, a rewrite of Lexiconga in InfernoJS (a “React-like” library that’s much more efficient than React), actually isn’t even done yet! Anyway, for my work project, I’ve been using React and Webpack to produce a really nice, scaleable project with a single file output for users to load, and it’s been absolutely lovely.
After running all the Git changes and updates, I decided to take the next step in my professional web developer life and learn to use Gulp to automate some of my workflow. I was able to get everything figured out, and it was wonderful, but I soon discovered that there’s a new, almost finished version of Gulp (version 4.0) that a lot of people are recommending newcomers start using instead of the current version! So I learned the differences between the official version (3.9.1) and v4.0 and updated my gulpfile script to comply with the new requirements. The new Gulp setup is a little bit less beautiful than the old one, but the extra control that it provides definitely makes up for it.
While I was figuring out Gulp, I also discovered that Webpack had officially upped its version to 2.x! So I decided to go ahead and upgrade Webpack and all the loaders I was using for it as well! That required a minor rewrite/restructure of the Webpack configuration file to utilize the new, more efficient use structure for loaders. I ended up liking the new structure more than the old one, because it allows you to specify options for specific loaders in a much more readable way, which I’m always in favor of! Now I don’t need extra configuration files for my separate loaders because I can include the configuration inside of the loader specification itself!
There’s not much more fulfilling to me than getting code to work properly, and after all that, I am a very happy camper.