The modern web developer's workflow is growing in complexity. This complexity is the partly the result of a growing ecosystem of codebases, tools and resources created to make writing code faster, cleaner, and less error-prone. In addition, market forces are pushing developers to get more done with less.
The solution to some of these problems can be found in automation. Automation is now a driving force in the development landscape. Using modern development tools, tasks that once took hundreds or thousands of lines of code or several hours of manual work to accomplish can now be reduced to a few terminal commands.
A modern web developer might use a task runner to accomplish the following:
- Compile CSS into SASS/LESS
- Check JavaScript files for errors
- Concatenate all JS or CSS files into one big file for more efficient serving to a browser