Stefan Baumgartner [Stefan Baumgartner] - Front-End Tooling with Gulp, Bower, and Yeoman

I fell in love with the web way back in my teenage years. And like every teenage love, this one had an enduring impact on me. The idea of having the web as this almost anarchic way of publishing, carrying open thoughts and free speech and allowing everybody to raise their voice (for good and for bad) fascinated me. And it allowed me to transform from a consumer into a producer.

Digging the video game series Dragon Quest led me to spend around 11 years publishing over 1,500 pages of strategy guides online. A passion for literature and films prompted me to publish my thoughts in podcasts over the course of four years. And rumor has it that there are prototypes of unfinished video projects somewhere on my hard disk backups that thankfully never saw the light of day. Any hobby, any obsession of mine found a way onto the web. And the web was always kind enough to show great acceptance of my work.

It was not until 2010the day Nintendo called (literally)that I realized my biggest hobby was actually not one of the several topics I had created content for. I was offered the chance to extend my writing on video games for a variety of products. While I was flattered, honored, and highly motivated to do so, I quickly realized that I would never be able to provide the same quality for projects that I didnt care as much about. But I could enable others by focusing on the common denominator for all the projects Id worked on: the technologies running these websitesHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I quit my day job as a scientist in the field of image processingwhich I never actually likedand called myself a web developer from that day on. I was lucky enough to get hired by a local web agency and finally get paid for the work I loved so much. That was by far the best decision Ive ever made. Shortly after, I had the opportunity to lead some of the best front-end development teams you can find on the planet. The thing that I found the most challenging with all of them was bringing code conventions, project structure, and automation to every team member in the most efficient and unobtrusive manner. These technologies should be a joy to use, not a chore. We tried many things, but had the first real breakthrough when tools like Yeoman came on the scene. From then on, every new project needed a good setup with a JavaScript build tool, a dependency manager, and a scaffolding tool.

With this book, my long relationship with the web has come full circle. It takes my love for publishing on the web to a meta level by publishing about web technologiesnot only on the web, but in print, a thing that was unimaginable for me years ago.

The webs impact on me continues to this day. Through it, Ive found friends all over the world. It has given me the chance to travel to other cities and countries. And it was even the way I found my wife. I look forward to the things to come.