Hipster Dev Stack

We’ve been off grid for the second half of 2014, mostly because everyone seemed to have toned down the hipster nonsense. However, Glen Maddern roars into 2015 with beatmatching gifs, ES6, and YAJSML (Yet Another JavaScript Module Loader).

No sign of our prediction for the biggest trend of 2015 yet: the return of document.write with streaming. You heard it here first.

If you thought a backcall-style continuation was a particularly tricky move to pull off on a razor-thin single-speed bicycle, you need to spend more time collecting new languages that you totally intend to learn properly, but somehow forget that it exists until it enters the mainstream and becomes terrible.

We’ve just tried out ki, and managed to re-write yo in a single line of beautiful, functional, single-origin code. It includes ‘lazyness’ (sic) and 'atoms’ as features, which sums up this authors approach to existence generally. You had me at immutable.

Everything we write has been a microservice since before writing everything as a microservice was cool. But since we’re craftsmen we demand something cleaner than a big jumble of stringly-typed REST calls. Retrofit is the answer. Write an interface describing the REST service you’re connecting to, add some Retrofit annotations and you’re done.

Since we’re siding with the beardy guys in the TDD is dead debate it’s worth pointing out that Retrofit also makes it ridiculously easy to unit test the code that interacts with the REST service.

Since one contributor to this blog has sold out and works for a large streaming content corporation now it’s also nice that Retrofit supports returning RxJava Observables from annotated methods so we can mainline the company Kool-aid whilst using it.

Want to use Angular but troubled by Google’s questionable ethics (not to mention their ubiquity)? Over Handlebars (these days it’s all about mountain man beards)? Try Ractive – a templating library that aims to combine the elegance of Mustache with high performance DOM manipulation and 2-way binding. Even better it comes from The Guardian so your code can wear its ethical credentials on its sleeve.

Are you:

1. Completely over the CoffeeScript hype like 2 years ago?
2. Secretly missing some of the features of CoffeeScript?
3. Willing to abuse introspective features of JavaScript?

If all three of the above is true, then you should check out Sindre Sorhus’ somewhat icky-feeling multiline library.

Another day another Node-based build tool. This one has a nice retro vibe in that it aims to be Make-like using pre-existing command line tools rather than requiring plugins. Hopefully that doesn’t extend to emulating Make’s “I’ll break your build because you used a tab in the wrong place” policy.

What with upgrading our startup’s build from Grunt to Gulp to Broccoli to Bud I’m not quite sure where February went. One more shiny new build tool this quarter and investors are going to start asking questions.

Imagine this likely scenario: you work on your ceramic burr grinder drop ship store at nights and your organic cat saliva bike decal glue formula at weekends.

One may have to pay for all this real work with a troublesome day job of some kind. The paymasters at this particular day job don’t share your own passion to make things The Right Way using Hapi and Om, and in fact may even claim their ‘hands are tied’ and you find yourself having to work with, ugh, Java. Like the whole coffee tie-in isn’t an obvious attempt to pander to urban 'trendies’ by enterprise douches. Guys, this is 20th Century technology.

Still, all is not lost. Just as jRuby saved us back in the day (2009), you can now hide the ugly stepchild under the (original, untreated) floorboards by using Nodyn. Yes, write ClojureScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs on Node.js that compiles to the JVM. Simple! Elegant! I think so, anyway. I mentioned this to my work colleague and he grumbled something about 'nth generation language silliness’ that I didn’t understand. But he’s also 20th Century technology.

Erlang feeling played out? Go too mainstream? Too many people assuming you must code in Haskell just because you’re sporting those same high-waisted pants as Joaquin Phoenix in Her

One word… Julia.

Imagine the reaction you could get by saying this:

Oh, you’re still using Grunt? Personally I’ve moved on from the declarative paradigm.

Who wouldn’t want to be able to casually drop phrases like “functional reactive” and “streaming” when talking about their work? Even when said work is just building a static marketing website using Twitter Bootstrap? Gulp.js allows you to do just that.