Talks Jacob has given at conferences, user group meetups, and other venues.
Talks Jacob has given at conferences, user group meetups, and other venues.
There's one part of building a Django app I hate: setting up handling of assets and media. There are so many moving pieces — static assets, asset compilation and compression, file uploads, storage engines, etc. etc. I can never remember how it all fits together. I wrote this talk for one very selfish reason: to document how this all works, in one place, once and for all. This talk is primarily intended for Django developers who want to build an asset pipeline that Just Works. The bulk of the talk covers front-end tooling (Webpack, PostCSS, Babel, etc.), so full-stack developers of any stripe will find something here, too.
Web development sucks. It’s true: web development, at its worst, is difficult, repetitive, and boring. The tools we have suck. At best, they make web development slightly less painful, but we’re a long way from making web development awesome. The history of web development tools is a history of trying to solve this problem. It’s a history of asking, “how can we make this suck less?” It’s important to understand this history, because we can look at past trends and use them to predict the future.