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Frontend build tooling is crucial to the workflow of the modern frontend developer for a host of reasons classified under improved developer and user experiences. From the developer’s perspective, frontend tooling gives us: the ability to author modules, a dev server for local development, Hot Module Replacement (HMR) for a shorter feedback loop in development mode, the ability to target legacy browsers with polyfills, processing a host of filetypes apart from JavaScript, the list goes on.
As a result, users can enjoy more capable and feature-rich applications that remain performant through techniques like code-splitting, caching, prefetching, and other resource optimization techniques — with some applications that are even able to work offline.
Frontend tooling gives us so much today that it is hard to imagine that there was a time when it was not even needed at all. A trip down memory lane could help us understand how we got here.