When I talk to people about tools for web development they say things like: "we have some old backbone stuff, did a few projects in Angular and Jerry wants to re-write everything in something called Ohm or Elm or Bazinga.js. We hate SASS, but we use it because we hate CSS more. We looked at gulp but we have too much magic in our Grunt files to convert! And I hate all debuggers because the framework we use has it's own ideas of what objects are. The tools are no help!"
What if you could create your own tools, and it was as simple as writing a web app using the tools and frameworks you're already using?
This talk is a dive-in session on how I wrote my own Firefox developer tools extension called ‘Rooibos’ to run my unit tests automatically for me. The use case for Rooibos is simple: I’m looking at the site I’m working on and I want to run my tests and see what failed. Without switching to another app or anything. Turns out, it’s pretty easy these days to extend browsers to help with your development workflow, and all you need to know is HTML, JS, and CSS.
There are two levels to this talk. First off I’ll provide an overview of how I did this, what it looks like to embed a web app as a developer tool inside a browser and how people can get started writing their own tools. Next, I’m going to step back and look at how tooling for web developers by web developers in web technologies isn’t just an efficiency or a trend.