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Discussion on: Invest in building custom tools

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Antonio Radovcic

3 years ago while learning a bit C I build a small templating-tool, which just included files into other files with a special inclusion-syntax, and piped the result to STDOUT.

I wanted to use it to use it for building static HTML-pages for a project at work. I tried to build the front-end without npm and any bundlers. I set up some command-line-scripts for building JS, CSS and asset-files to a dist-folder.

And wooooosh it was quick! And a great learning-experience, too.

BUT: Then the need for some convenience arose. Modern JS-syntax? Babel is needed. Snippets and Layouts for the templates? Would have been pretty much work. SCSS? Have to introduce SassC. Sourcemaps? Local server with file-watcher? All of that supporting Steve, Bill and Linus? 😩

I wanted to get started with the project ASAP, not working days and days on the darn toolchain. I bit the bullet, added Yarn and replaced my custom toolchain with Node-Sass, Assemble and Babel/Webpack. No more cross-platform-headaches. All the features.

Yes the build-time wasn't sub-second anymore, but still around 5 seconds after 3 years, so I can cope.

That's why Angular-CLI, CRA etc. are so good: You get started quicker. They are battle-tested and cross-platform.

I want to work on the product. Others will rather do tools for developers, which is awesome! I'm not that person.