12 months of workflow optimisation... notes

gistfile1.md

Day 0

• CSS preprocessor
• PHPCS
• In house tool
• Maintained by ourselves and new features had to be compiled built and run

Month 1

• Adding linting of JS
• Added minifiction of assets

Month 2

• Introduced Grunt: hardcoded paths, hardcoded modules
• Migrated existing tasks
• Adding CSS linting with RECESS
• Added watching for CSS, PHP and JS

Month 3

• Developed Grunt plugin to run our cukes
• Added cucumber tests

Month 4

• Added JS test runner for Mocha with PhantomJS
• Added PHP Documentation generation with Sami
• Added JS complexity analysis with Plato

Month 5

• Added RequireJS optimiser
• Lots more paths requires to map modules to file system
• Generation of fixtures with grunt-contrib-replace

Month 7

• Image minification
• JS Templates moved out of HTML and into JS - compiled as part of RequireJS using grunt-contrib-jst
• Migrated to use matchdep - no more hardcoded grunt plugins!

Month 8

• Removing all paths and using variables instead
• Extracted all paths to configuration objects to allow easier mondification in the future
• Migrated our CI build to use Grunt to build static assets

Month 12

• Introduction of Bower to manager our external front-end assets
• Adding SourceMaps
• Adding LiveReload
• Migration of Mocha to standalone server - reduced configuration