Understanding the Complexity of Modern Web Dev Stack (Webpack, Babel, TypeScript, React)

A look back on ye old days, where we came from, and how we ended up in this mess. Few mistakes, can you really blame me? 😇 TIMESTAMPS:
1:00 In the beginning
3:00 JS all the things
5:28 Babel
9:00 Introducing Webpack
14:20 Babel with Webpack
16:00 React (no JSX)
19:00 JSX all the things
21:50 TypeScript and TSX
24:17 Bundle all the things... CSS imports
🐦 Twitter: / lachlan19900
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[@lotharmohlala851]

This is absolutely brilliant. Attaching a storyline to this was genius. This is how everyone learns; through context and use cases. Keep to this style of tutorials and this channel will sky rocket. Well done 💯

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks Lothar!

[@_SoundByte_]

History in tech is important. Someone needs to do a video of the history of the internet (from a network point of view)

[@menglin7432]

Now this is something I'd highly recommend any JS developer to watch

[@brentleemans]

Amazing video! With every part you explained WHY something was needed. This is missing in most of explanation videos on the internet. Thank you!

[@marianrys316]

Great stuff! Thank you ! In less than 30 min you fast-forwarded me from the 90's to modern era :)

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks ⚡️

[@narayan1509]

One of the best video I come across while searching for basics

[@johnphillips8600]

This is the best explanation I've come across... Most videos are too long and too minified. Thank you for this ❤️

[@LachlanMiller]

Glad you found it useful!

[@pkproductions1623]

This video is awesome. In just 25 minutes you explained the whole modern javascript paradox. How a simple button click in JavaScript is evolved to be so complex. Thanks a lot it made me understand concepts that are very confusing.

[@paperC_CSGO]

The video I have been looking for as a junior developer - to actually try and understand the bigger picture and fundementals. Please make more of these type of videos! You are hitting a much neglected part of the web development KZbin tutorial/course/explainer videos market!

[@LachlanMiller]

Thank you! I'l do my best, glad it helped you, good luck!!

[@Speglritz]

We transpile typescript to javascript then transpile javascript to older versions of javasript for wider browser support and then the browers JIT compile the javascript it loads to run the actual code. Even without webpack, different loaders, webassembly and the other stuff going on it's complex enough.

[@jfsimard2]

Rare you can have a history Today. Big picture is always forgotten making if difficult to get clarity. Thank you for taking the time to do it.

[@XpressBits]

Best tutorial watched in the recent days.. Precise and no BS... you got a great teaching skills, mate! Please keep doing the videos..

[@LachlanMiller]

thanks!!

[@michaelhashimoto1650]

This is amazing.. front end is so crazy…. Thanks for bridging the gap!

[@LachlanMiller]

Give m a like/sub, announcement soon but I'm going to be making a course/book going way deeper on frontend tooling!

[@soumyasagar2305]

Never had I understood babel soo deeply. Kudos to you man!!

[@uchihai_a_h4871]

now finally all the dots got connected... brilliant mate !

[@AkshyatChapagain]

Just amazing, every new person getting into web dev should watch this video. I can't believe you don't have more subscribers.

[@LachlanMiller]

thanks!

[@karanuday6803]

THIS IS AMAZING!!! I've been looking for a way to trace and understand the journey to our current setup and there's just so many different parts to it that I've just never managed to understand how all fell into place. This video explains all of that in almost an ELI5 way and covers almost everything needed! Thank you so much for this!

[@贺彦文]

This video is really helpful to me. When I dive into Huge numbers of libraries from single page with HTML CSS JS. it really drive me crazy. But thank your sharing. I understand a lot and get a clearness feel.

[@Usmankhaled]

Absolutely brilliant. Seems like you witnessed everything as if you yourself was a kernel routing and directing every piece to work together just like that :)

[@okamianimes8190]

this is just beautiful, i had a lot of troubles understanding what webpack, babel were, and where are they exactly used, but this video just puts everything together in a brilliant way, thank you for the video

[@LachlanMiller]

No problem, glad you found it useful!

[@aashisrimal7379]

Great video on how modern web development has evolved.

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks :D

[@reralt]

This was so good. All the confusion regarding modern web cleared in one video ! Thanks a lot.

[@LachlanMiller]

thanks glad you liked it!!

[@vitaliyd23]

What a gem! Love that you included the error solving parts and the "single take" nature of the video. Liked, subscribed, and added to a playlist)

[@ДаниелДианов]

Thank you for sharing this. I find it very informative for every new developer to understand where all things came from and why it evolved that way.

[@MoizAli-eh9gv]

a beginner learning this. Honestly great video

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks!

[@wattsfield1889]

Great vid! Love how you went on the whole journey from just html to more.

[@opsJson_]

Congratulations from Brazil. content like this is very rare, i'm subscribing.

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks for the support!

[@michaelvigato3228]

Man this content is plain and simply amazing

[@LachlanMiller]

thanks for the praise Michael, I appreciate it. also, the comments help me know what kind of content people like to see.

[@chubbycat9212]

This is the best explanation I've come across

[@LachlanMiller]

Glad you found it useful!

I'm honestly impressed with how good this was to give and idea about how we ended up using all of these tools in the modern web development. Thanks for your effort!

[@user-tt6nc6mo7k]

This really confused me too when I started learning web development. Now I have a great resource to refer to other people thanks! On another note, I see you have a few videos on testing using Jest, Cypress, etc. I personally am quite new to testing I understand there are different types of tests like unit testing, integration testing and end to end tests. I know what each of them are but I do not understand how they all come together in one project? Would be great if you could do a similar overview type video on how all these are implemented in a production application.

[@LachlanMiller]

Yeah this stuff is confusing - there is way more tools in the average project too, but this is the general idea. Sure, I will definitely do more content around all the different types of testing... great suggestion. One of my favorite topics.

[@davevids95]

This is the explanation I've been looking for!! Subscribed!

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks! I'll try to make more videos about tooling in the future.

[@jordantseng8330]

god tier explanation

[@LachlanMiller]

Thank you!

[@gionatha3747]

Fantastic video!

[@taaaaaaay]

Thanks for the 20 minute headache :) No but really, this made it so much easier to understand what tf is going on.

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks, glad you found it useful!

[@deveshprasad6418]

This is amazing. You're a genius. You made it so easy to understand.

[@senayb3]

Great run through!! Helps wrap my head around things.

[@johnas3]

Bro you are now my new history teacher. Great work and thanks for the explanation🔥

[@thequang9234]

with a bit of luck, this is one of the coolest video i've ever watched :)

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks! What did you like about it?

[@shinobi1975]

Finally someone that explains the problem that is being solved by these stupid installs lol. 10/10 vid.

[@fogguy3838]

exactly what I was looking for, Thanks, great job

[@LachlanMiller]

Glad it helped!

[@abuzarbaig3116]

Great & short Video that explains what's going behind the scenes with modern web dev, Thanks 😊

[@kerimzunic]

I'm glad this video exists

[@LachlanMiller]

thanks I am glad you exist and watched it!

[@jhonyortiz5]

This entertaining and very eye opening when it comes to the past couple decades of web development. I hate when people use simple examples that have been simplified so much that they don't represent reality anymore. But your example was as simple as it needed to be but no more. It's really cool to see how it all really works and how it came together.

[@mmkvhornet7522]

I like your methodology , it's a very great and enjoyable learning experience !

[@rajeev2127]

You nailed it!!! Finally I understood, Thank you so much from the heart, you're awesome

[@siddharthnayak4448]

Excellent video explaining the history and transition to modern js libraries.Superb!!!!!!

[@micahtonning7967]

Thank you for creating this video. It was extremely helpful.

[@zalabhaskar9795]

You have nicely explained in simple way with good example. Thank you.😊

[@roronoa_d_law1075]

10:37 I don't understand why webpack is needed here if the improvement is to export createElement and import it in index.js. It's impossible to to do this without webpack?

[@rioredwards]

This was awesome! Thank you for making this!

[@NoName-tt9ye]

Great video, I really like the flow of it

[@longb1913]

3k views wtf... u need to be recognised

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks for the motivation!

[@needtubes121]

thanks for explaining all this from basics.

[@slahomar1497]

that is the best video I watched in my life

[@bhavyabansal1143]

I became your fan in just 26 minutes and 41 seconds....

[@LachlanMiller]

Hey, thanks for the praise! Any other kind of videos you would like to see? Trying to find a good direction for my content and channel 🤔

[@bhavyabansal1143]

@@LachlanMiller if you ask me, I will say that given there are lot of tools out there like your video has explained, it will be good if you can make individual in depth videos of each tool and explain different configurations and what they are used for. I am happy to help as I am also learning these things and there is lot to learn out there.

[@bhavyabansal1143]

@@LachlanMiller just sent you request on LinkedIn. Let’s connect.

[@apereiracv]

Amazing explanation, love the approach and evolution of the code, great stuff

[@almuhanadal-nihmy7452]

Great explanation. Thanks I hope you do more videos about tooling. It's really helpful

[@GoatCS]

This is why WordPress is so popular. Running SQL HTML PHP and sometimes JavaScript and you don't even know it.

[@CyberCass2000]

This is just amazing, hat off to you!

[@kashnigahbaruda]

As a newbie this was great. Struggled today with some jest testing presets and had absolutely no idea what was going on. I think I solved it because the error went away but I am worried the test was just skipped. Luckily I have no idea how to check which tests was skipped or not so I can go to bed without worry.

[@LachlanMiller]

Glad you got it working - skipping a test is never ideal, might be good to find out why it's failing lol. Sleep tight

[@kashnigahbaruda]

@@LachlanMiller turns out it was marked with test.skip(...). All greens.

[@KousayJebir]

awesome video man ! i do have a quick question tho , when you reached the part of using react and imported React from 'react' what tool was responsible to resolve the location of 'react' or to be more precise the actual location of the file that contains the React object

[@LachlanMiller]

Whatever runtime you are using will resolve modules using its own pre-determined rules. In this video the runtime is Node.js. You can google "node.js module resolution algorithm" or read here. nodejs.org/api/modules.html#loading-from-node_modules-folders In Node.js if the import is not a relative path, it will look in `node_modules` and then find the `package.json` for the module. In there it looks at specific fields like "main", etc.

[@KousayJebir]

@@LachlanMiller thank you very much

[@AnthonyObi-wr6ro]

All your tutorials are always fast pace that it becomes hard for one to follow your pace

[@DjSeymur]

Superb explanation! Thanks a lot for this 🙌

[@LachlanMiller]

thanks!

[@austincodes]

And this is just the top of the iceberg

[@LachlanMiller]

Damn straight, below lies dragons Maybe I should make an iceberg video on JS tooling!

[@universalkittii]

This was very helpful thank you for making this!

[@makealemonade]

My brain is thanking you.

[@andriopratama6587]

Awesome! Thank you for the explanation and case study

[@marcialabrahantes3369]

webpack was built FOR react. aside from that, great content we've been building on complicated frontends for a while before webpack

[@theisaacmoses]

Pure awesomeness 😍

[@YoussefAdelWahba]

thank you, this is extremely helpful and clear.

[@bakaleisanich]

Thank you! More course React!!!

[@LachlanMiller]

Main focus is around Vue, but definitely could look into some more generic tutorials on concepts that apply to both React and Vue.

[@dimitriborgers9800]

One question: if webpack bundles everything (including third party modules) into bundle.js, doesn't that ever get too big for the browser? The Gatsby library has 1200+ modules; I would assume the bundle.js would be absolutely massive.

[@LachlanMiller]

You can load modules async, so the initial bundle isn't huge. But yes, some libs have really huge bundles - I do not think there is any upper limit, I have worked on apps with 20mb of JS. This takes a long time to parse in the browser. Things like gzip, minify, etc can make it a lot smaller.

[@imheretohelp2075]

very good content, pedagogically supreme

[@jimbrannlund4677]

This was AWESOME! Thank you!

[@aidanwelch4763]

There's so much worse it can be with SASS, handlebars, WASM, and so much extra complexity you can add on top lol

[@letscode4277]

any updates with the book? I've been waiting for it since i subscribed

[@LachlanMiller]

I'm sorry I haven't been active in this regard. I ended up going back to study part-time and content creation, my hobby, has taken a bit of a back seat. I might just aim for some more videos in the interim... any particular topic that fascinates you, that'd you like to know more about?

[@alextonev4145]

Simply amazing. Thank you so much.

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.

[@oscardasilva971]

This is just one of the web development tutorials I have ever seen, Why don't everybody create tutorials like that?

[@LachlanMiller]

Many people don't understand it all haha

[@slahomar1497]

in babel.config, how wepback knows the order to use ? in case of tsx, which loader is gonna run first ?

[@LachlanMiller]

It goes in the order of the array. I think it goes last to first (weirdly enough).

[@udonjijiwaiwai935]

This is great and very helpful! Thank you!

[@oleksandraokhotnykova8672]

"We're not sane, we're INSANE, we're modern web developers" LMAOOO

[@naveedalirehmani4135]

legacy code be like : Look what they need just to mimic a fraction of our power. 😃

[@dipanshuikey6650]

great video 🔥

[@NomanKhan-pi2dc]

When i see a guy using vim, I just assume that he is a godly tier developer. Once more I was proved right

[@squarerootof2]

hilarious and brilliant!!!

[@webb-developer]

this is amazing . thank you

[@fnfal113]

welcome to js land where people over engineer stuffs for convenience

[@mr_bolnik7534]

Briliant video . Thnx

[@edwinquinonespardo4768]

Amazing

[@codybontecou]

If given the choice, would you support ES5? It seems a lot of this complexity comes from supporting old browsers.

[@LachlanMiller]

Depends, last job I worked we had a lot of users on IE11 (hospitals) so we just used babel to target es5. Nowdays browsers can actually load es modules natively via , so depending on your project you might not even need webpack, just a simple typescript build that exports modules, but I think a pre-configured setup (vue cli, create react app) is probbly the way to go.

[@RikThePixel]

I would like to see how server-side JavaScript comes into play with this 😂

[@LachlanMiller]

Another can of worms, maybe soon!

[@RikThePixel]

@@LachlanMiller ooh 👀

[@AiwwwA]

Best explanation

[@learncodeinbangla9181]

It's really awesome things to me. Thanks a lot.

[@LachlanMiller]

Glad you found it useful!!

[@topsy_kreds]

Excellent

[@LachlanMiller]

Thanks so much 😀

[@laithdrebaty6709]

Great video, thanks a lot!

[@anudeepreddy1027]

Bro casually flexing his VIM skills

[@LachlanMiller]

I'm very much an average Vim user - always learning new things! Although nowadays I'm using VS Code with the Vim plugin.

[@LachlanMiller]

Why? I am tired of configuring Vim!

[@StandardLoop]

Really great video

[@LachlanMiller]

thanks!

[@HejaBibani-u9z]

thank you sir

[@rossli8621]

This is treasure!

[@jpmohan96]

Incredible 👌

[@LachlanMiller]

thanks JP