And a lot can stay the same.
A little over five years have come and gone since I wrote Questions About Tooling, and as I was paging through my site — handling my quarterly SSL certificate reissuance, because it’s easier spending five minutes re-running the same certbot command every three months than 20 minutes figuring out how to automate it — I found this post pretty interesting to look back on.
I completely switched to Yarn shortly after writing the post, and I loved the experience. But I’ve recently come back to npm after the yarn 2.0 release and the sheer number of steps required to migrate legacy codebases — of which I maintain many — to their PnP architecture. I keep forgetting to add run to my commands, but other than that npm is just fine.
Well, webpack definitely won this one. I still maintain a few repos with browserify-based scripting, but any new project will have webpack enabled from the start. The experience with webpack is a lot better now too, as this will typically be abstracted away from you via create-react-app, create-next-app, create-remix, or whatever scripts you’re using to bootstrap your platform of choice. All of the advantages of webpack with none — well, less — of the googling to figure out what packages you need to install for your code to compile.
I’m still very happy with VS Code — to the point that we’re now using it’s core architecture to power the SuperHi Editor — though I no longer put as much effort into theming as I once did. I’ll set the typeface to 16px IBMPlexMono-Regular, choose a nice theme with light and dark modes and leave everything else. Once I’ve added Prettier, GitLens and ESLint of course.
Another resounding win in the column, this time for Typescript. The tooling’s gotten even better and the team are constantly adding new features and various improvements to the way that it works. At this point I’m uncomfortable whenever I have to write vanilla JavaScript, as I need all of the various safeties and niceties of Typescript to protect me from myself.
Personally, I’m still here at SuperHi, though in a slightly different role from five years ago. Most of my days are now spent in research, support, management and meetings, though I still have the opportunity to write code here and there. Over the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing our tech stack as we start to ramp up hiring for a load of new projects that’re close to kicking off.