ReactiveConf Special Edition

There are plenty of ways to get information on and access to the latest trends and technologies, but going to conferences is sure one with great benefits. You can not only get top experts giving you hints and tools to improve your workflow, but you can further build your network and get hands-on experience on the spot. Fortunately, there are numerous quality events within and beyond our borders and ReactiveConf is most certainly one of them. It takes place in the beautiful city of Prague and is the ultimate spot for the European tech community to get the latest global insights in web & mobile development through meaningful connections and shared experiences. We were among last year’s attendees and we even went backstage to interview some of the speakers, so that we could share all the great information on their hands with you too.

In this episode of the Special Edition TechTalk series two members of Webpack’s core team Sean Larkin Technical Program Manager at Microsoft for Microsoft Edge and Johannes Ewald Co-Founder of Peerigon sit with Balázs Komár Co-Founder of IseeQ and xLabs and talk all about the great things Webpack has to offer, while our guests give a couple of tips to improve your ways in this module bundler and share some insights into the challenges they are yet to tackle.

Sean was actually in college for his bachelor’s degree in music, became a church musician but then he moved and got a stable job in tech support and that’s where he started to teach himself how to program and eventually his company promoted him to software engineer. Ever since he had this title, a whole new world opened up for him and he was able to smoothly maneuver in the job market, which he marks as something amazing about the tech industry. When he found out about Webpack, he became obsessed with it instantly and he’s still humbled when asked about the whole experience because he says he’d not be here without open sourcing at Webpack. He is actually a member of the core team, he’s given numerous talks at conferences educating other open source contributors and has admittedly landed his current position thanks to the JS module bundler. “They came to me and they were like ‘hey, we love your talks, we love your writing, we love your open source code, we want you to work for Microsoft’” he adds.

Our other guest Johannes, is also a member of Webpack’s core team. He’s always loved playing around with the computer, he studied interactive media and wanted to become a UX Designer but then he found out about programming in university and it was something he didn’t understand and that frustrated but also motivated him to dig deep into it and then one day, without even realising it, he became a programmer. He first got familiarised with Browserify, where – as he recalls – they weren’t too open to new ideas, their mission was to bring node modules into the browser meaning JavaScript, CommonJS and no code splitting etc. This experience made him look for other options and that’s how he became involved in Webpack in 2012, it was based on a completely different method and it did exactly what Johannes was interested in, so he joined and he’s been an active member of it ever since.

As we live in a world, in which everything is changing rapidly, we always have to consider the current state and the future of certain technologies and trends, whether they even have a chance to stand the test of time. In the case of Webpack, not only the present but the upcoming times look wide and bright too. As Sean puts it, “what Webpack represents is the reflection of the current state of the ecosystem” and we sure see that too. It’s incredibly flexible, can be used in a variety of different scenarios, by different people and in different ways. No wonder it’s so popular, and this type of flexibility and configuration is certainly of its key features. Sean tells us that Webpack is actually the 3rd most used open source project at Microsoft, it’s used by 80% of web applications created today, with almost over 30 million downloads a month – “every major framework uses Webpack as a default bundling tool”. Therefore, it’s no doubt that if the web stays the way it is right now, then Webpack will remain just as popular, but even if it was to merge into 2-3 formats, that would still give Sean, Johannes and the rest of the team at Webpack an opportunity to do great things. Johannes further tells us that he’s asked himself whether bundles will be used in the future at all, considering the fact that “there are ECMAscript modules in the browser now, so some people say we don’t need a bundle anymore and technically they’re right”. Also, it’s now possible to import HTML or CSS into JS, which means this will soon become standardised. However, Johannes believes that we’ll still need bundles to make sure it all runs fast and smooth because there are still so many more things that developers would want to do in build time and not in run time. Of course, some proper performance measurements still have to be made but clearly the more things get standardised, the better for Webpack. As Sean sums it up “the more defaults we have, the more accessible it becomes to people”.

To those who are yet to or just have joined Webpack, our guests give the following tips:

1  Start with nothing first to understand Webpack’s capabilities and don’t use config.

2  Hold your build infrastructure, your build configs and settings to the same standard that you hold your other development practices, your everyday code and then you’ll have a maintainable build system.

3  Use webpack-merge, a library that lets you compose pieces of your configuration just like you’d compose different pieces of your code, making it easier to isolate and incapsulate different build settings.

They also tell us about the challenges they yet to tackle and give tips on what makes the perfect candidate in their eyes during a hiring process, all of which you can hear in the full version of this Special Edition TechTalk podcast episode at any of the links above.

If you are interested in other topics as well, you should keep following our BLOG where we are coming with new professional content every week.

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