
How I learned to stop worrying and love task runners
A year ago I wrote an article on how I didn't see the point in tools like Gulp and Grunt. One year later and I have to admit, the old me was an idiot.

The inane mutterings of Alexander Foxleigh

Alex Foxleigh is a Senior Front-End Developer and Tech Lead who spends his days making the web friendlier, faster, and easier to use. He’s big on clean code, clever automations, and advocating for accessibility so everyone can enjoy tech - not just those who find it easy. Being neurodivergent himself, Alex actively speaks up for more inclusive workplaces and designs that welcome all kinds of minds.
Off the clock, Alex is a proud nerd who loves losing himself in video games, watching sci-fi, or tweaking his ever-evolving smart home setup until it’s borderline sentient. He’s also a passionate cat person, because life’s just better when you share it with furry chaos machines.

A year ago I wrote an article on how I didn't see the point in tools like Gulp and Grunt. One year later and I have to admit, the old me was an idiot.

Today is the day. Today the people of the United Kingdom can vote to change the future of the country for the better (hopefully) but unlike elections of the past, the outcome of this one is being considered too close to call. We have the Internet to thank for that.

During the life of a developer, the tools of the job will change many times over. This is especially true of the text editor; which is often like a comfortable home for the seasoned developer. Some prefer pure text editors, some prefer an IDE, some (like myself) prefer a more hybrid approach, a text editor that is highly extensible and will provide most of the benefits of an IDE without the overhead. For me, Sublime Text 3 is the editor of choice, a decision which was confirmed when I discovered Zen coding.

Front end developers make a lot of changes during builds, especially once the codebase starts to get integrated with backend code. Rather than delete or comment out old code, why not put it in a graveyard file?

Now, this is the story, all about how my data got flipped, turned upside down so I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you why I moved my storage into the air.

A few years ago, shortly after moving from Windows to Mac (no regrets!) I discovered an amazing app called CodeKit. This wonderful app runs tasks which are things we UI developers have to do on a regular basis.

This time last year, I had just moved to Portsmouth from Leeds. I didn’t know this at the time but 2014 was about to be one of the worst years of my life for health.

I'm officially a Londoner!

If you have spent any amount of time in the media industry, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term coined by Bill Gates back in 1996 “Content is King”