Meta-research

[18f]

Meta-research

[meiqimichelle]

/cc @carodew @colinpmacarthur

[msecret]

I think a good place to start is to get acquainted with the conversation going on in front end in the Federal government. I just joined the content-managers list serve and that's been a great way to see what other devs are thinking.

[shawnbot]

Most recently we came across Ashley Nolan's 2015 State of Front-End Tooling, last updated with over 2,000 responses on October 12. The takeaways:

• Sass is by far the most popular CSS preprocessor, with 64% of respondents listing it.
• Gulp (43%) and Grunt (27%) were the most popular task runners; npm score an abysmal 3.16%, and nearly 20% of respondents didn't use one at all.
• However, 68% of respondents were comfortable using npm, which suggests some potential for growth as a task runner in its own right. 45% were comfortable with Bower, and 20% with Yeoman.
• Regarding frameworks, the most interesting data points for me were:
  • 91% of respondents were comfortable with jQuery
  • 35% were comfortable with Underscore, but just as many had only heard of or read about it
  • 29% were comfortable with Angular, and 33% had used it a little
  • 16% were comfortable with Backbone, and 21% had used it a little
  • 14% were comfortable with React, and 20% had used it a little. This may seem small, but React is much newer than Angular and Backbone, which suggests that it's getting good traction.
• When asked, "Which JavaScript library or framework do you use on the majority of your projects?", respondents overwhelmingly listed jQuery (56%), but Angular was surprisingly (for me, at least) high at 18%.
• Almost half of respondents said they use a module bundler, with Browserify (16%) and RequireJS (13%) in practically a dead heat, and Webpack (10%) trailing just behind. I've anecdotally seen a lot more Webpack usage lately, and I think its popularity in this survey relative to its age suggests that it's also gaining traction.
• Nearly 60% of respondents don't test their JavaScript, and 30% used either Jasmine (16%) or Mocha (15%).

[maya]

Great! I'm interested in 18F and digital service teams bc there's much overlap in our work.

[carodew]

We have research! Not sure how relevant all of this is to you guys but it's here for the mining.

Happy to answer any questions you may have.