Hipster Dev Stack

CoffeeScript? That’s so 2012. We’re already porting our stuff to Six the ECMAScript 6 pre-processor. I guess you wouldn’t have heard of it yet but you will soon because we’ll be making sure everyone can overhear us affecting blasé detachment whilst discussing it in the latest pop-up dirty food joint.

With a name like that we can hardly ignore it… Fixie saves you the trouble of copy ‘n pasting from hipster ipsum by automatically injecting classy ethical 8bit locavore filler text into your site.

I like the way different length content is generated for article, p, a & img elements and can merge with ‘real’ content.

Pro-tip: use placekitten for images by adding this:

fixie.setImagePlaceholder('http://placekitten.com/g/${w}/${h}').init();

You! Yes, you! You’re the kind of hipster that still thinks Williamsburg or Dalston are cool, aren’t you? You’re still using Underscore.js aren’t you? LOSER!

Stop it immediately. You’ll get at least 10 milliseconds page load performance if you use Lo-Dash, a drop-in replacement for Underscore.js with a few added features. I’m almost reluctant to tell you about it in case you tell your Pabst-drinking loser friends about it.

lodash.com

End-to-end testing web apps can be trickier than doing trackstands on your fixie without spilling your flat white. Tools are often a pain to get running, test suites awkward to organise. Do you test in-browser with JS or using something like Selenium? Ugh, total drag.

Casper JS on the other hand is crazy simple to set up and use. It sits on top of Phantom JS (oh, you really haven’t heard of that? It’s a pretty cool headless WebKit implementation). Casper provides a friendly API layer in much the way that Geb complements Selenium.

Casper can run individual Java/Coffeescript files or directory trees, interact with the file system to upload or save, can output JUnit-compatible reports & grab screenshots.

It will be interesting to try to work up a complex page object model & really put it through its paces with richer interactions but the simple stuff I’ve tried so far has been promising.

Some nice ideas in Angular; plain objects for models, automated event handling & extensible HTML for building components.

I was initially put off by the non-standard ng-* attributes but apparently those of us who are pedantic enough to care about HTML validity can use data-ng-* instead.

As Mex puts it:

Finally a front-end tech from Google that doesn’t suck.