Tools

Tangent's front end is constantly experimenting with new tools and approaches to improve our development process. The main tools we use across our projects our Gulp, Bower and Less CSS, and these act as a large part of the foundation of all our projects.

Gulp is our task runner of choice and is used to automate regular development tasks in order to save time and energy. Our standard installation handles tasks such as optimisation and minification of assets, linting and hinting, watching for changes to run tasks and a load more. It also comes complete with an installation of Browser Sync which enables instant refreshing on file saves, activity mirroring across browsers and, in our mind, is just about the greatest thing ever.

In our newer projects, we use Bower to manage our development dependencies. It helps us take care of third party code, it's dependencies and handling it's versions, and ensuring that it is optimised to reduce page load.

We use LESS as our CSS pre-processor and it is present in all of our projects. We make use of it's standard features for inheritance, mixins, variables and importing,and we've even taken advantage of LESS' looping abilities to create our own dynamic grid creator. For loops in CSS, crazy stuff.