As the new year starts to unfold, it’s time to take a quick look at the things our team at SitePen resolves to do this year.
Eliminate the Department of Redundancy Department
Too often, we see large enterprise customers who have multiple teams creating the same features, without having a simple way to share and maintain code over time. They might start out with good intentions, but through a lack of ownership, testing, and other factors, code quickly forks, or is rewritten because it doesn’t quite meet the exact needs of another team. With tools like Git and philosophies like InnerSource, enterprise organizations can save so much time and money by sharing code within their organization.
Resolution #1: Help our customers eliminate redundant source code with InnerSource
Improve Large-Scale JavaScript Development
Creating JavaScript applications with shared features across large teams can be particularly challenging, in part because traditional JavaScript lacks interfaces, the contracts that define exactly how source code should work and should be used. TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript, does really well with providing type definitions and interfaces.
Resolution #2: Help our customers scale structured development with TypeScript expertise
Wherefore Art Thou Dojo 2?
We started talking about Dojo 2 in 2011. Much has changed in the world of JavaScript over the past few years, which led us to waiting for things to settle a bit before finalizing our plans for rebuilding Dojo. Now in 2017, Dojo 2 is a completely rethought approach to building web apps that leverages modern best practices using ES6+ and TypeScript, including key patterns such as reactive programming and Observables, virtual DOM, Custom Elements, and much more.
Resolution #3: Help ship Dojo 2
Share More of What We Learn
As passionate JavaScript and TypeScript engineers, we’re constantly learning new best practices and patterns. We place some of these in our open source work, share them with our customer engagements, and blog about them. For example, this week we’re finishing a feature to provide type definitions for CSS classes for theming Dojo 2 applications!
Resolution #4: Share more of what we learn in this rapidly evolving world of JavaScript
Better ESM and ES6+ support for Intern
Intern is a popular and powerful JavaScript testing automation stack for unit and functional testing, code coverage analysis, CI integration, performance benchmarking, visual regression and accessibility testing. This year we’re rewriting Intern in TypeScript to make it easier to test ES6+ and ESM (ES Module) code even when you do not need a transpilation step.
Resolution #5: Release Intern 4; share techniques for better testing with ES6+ features
Reduce the Mayhem in Development
We’re constantly looking for better ways to build applications. We’ve seen a lot of Mayhem over the years, so much so that we created a card game called Milestone Mayhem to talk about our experiences. Whenever we’re building software for our customers or for our open source endeavors, we’re looking for ways to make things work the way they should, to reduce the Mayhem in building modern applications.
Resolution #6: Reduce Mayhem & increase Momentum in all projects
Your Resolutions?
If you’ve got a resolution we can help you achieve, let’s get started before 2018 is upon us!