↗ Materials and tools

I was lucky enough to see Jeremy Keith speak at the inaugural edition of Full Stack Europe. He did a keynote on building on/for the web. I'm not going to distill the talk's content to a few paragraphs as that wouldn't do it justice, hopefully the talk will come online at some point.

One thing I'd like to mention he talked about is the difference between materials and tools for the web. Jeremy written about this in the past, and I believe his journal entry is an article worth sharing.

On the one hand, you’ve got the raw materials of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is what users will ultimately interact with.

On the other hand, you’ve got all the tools and technologies that help you produce the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: pre-processors, post-processors, transpilers, bundlers, and other build tools.

And a bit further:

I have opinions on the quality of the materials that get served up to users; the output should be accessible and performant. But I don’t particularly care about the tools that produced those materials on the back of the front end. Use whatever works for you (or whatever works for your team).

Read the full article on adactio.com.