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Async.js is nearing its official 2.0.0 release. The biggest new feature (and frequently requested feature) is modularization. Async has grown significantly from its initial release of 20 or so methods to a large library of over 70 functions that make working with callback-style asynchronous JavaScript easier. If in a small project, you just want async.series or async.waterfall, you typically don't want to bring in the entire kitchen sink into your project, especially if building for the browser. It would be convenient if you could require a single method. (e.g. require("async/waterfall") or similar.) We formulated a plan to make this possible, and in the process learned a lot about the current module landscape for JavaScript.

I've spent a good deal of the past year working with React. I've written, refactored, and re-written many components in that time, and I've seen some best practices and anti-patterns emerge.

Iterate over a collection. For side effects

I've written a lot about front-end build tools over the past year, and I have one more build-related topic to write about before I go back to talking about functional programming and javascript: Make.

One of the things that inevitably happens as your Browserify project gets large is that your build starts becoming slow. What starts out as a one-second build starts taking four to five to ten to fifteen seconds to build as you add more libraries and modules. This really can slow down your development process, as the edit → save → rebuild → livereload → debug → edit cycle starts taking longer and longer.

Much has changed with Grunt and Browserify over the past several months. Unfortuantely, at the time of my last Grunt/Browserify guide, the versions of the plugins I was using were already out of date. Since then, Browserify, grunt-browserify, and browserify-shim have all gone through major version updates, and as the semantic version implies, there are many backwards-incompatible changes. This guide will go over the changes needed to get something like what is described in the previous guide working. It is targeting browserify@3.44.2, grunt-browserify@2.0.3 and browserify-shim@3.4.1, although newer versions will likely work.

NOTE: this guide is out of date. It is only vaild for grunt-browserify@~1.3.0 and its included versions of browserify and browserify-shim. An updated guide is here.

After my last article, I've done some more research on what monads are. They seem to be one of the last core concepts of functional programming that is still a bit elusive to me. This is a good introductory video that finally made things start to click for me. Also, this article titled You Could Have Invented Monads made me realize that they really are not that complicated.