Given the choice between making something my problem, and making something the user’s problem, I’ll choose to make it my problem every time.
faucet has two primary goals: reducing accidental complexity and promoting sustainable source code. As such, we designed it around intentional constraints and a set of core beliefs.
The idea grew out of two conflicting insights: Modern front-end development provides immense the potential to reduce cognitive load for developers, thus making code both more enjoyable and maintainable – thanks to CSS pre-processors and newly standardized JavaScript modules and syntax. Yet, at the same time, these very advances significantly increase complexity, frequently resulting in fatigue and wariness:
I’d like to use ES6 but haven’t set up a transpiler yet
This sentiment was shared among friends and colleagues. While some of that complexity is inherent – compiling introduces a layer of indirection – the primary hurdle turned out to be tooling complexity. faucet tries to shield users from tooling-specific low-level details for both configuration and dependency management.
faucet tries hard to be replaceable and stay out of your way: We believe that source code should not rely on any particular build tool but rather be standards-compliant and portable across build systems. Naturally, this means that project-specific customization is limited, which we consider a useful constraint – though it means that faucet might not be for everyone.
In practice, this means we’ve preselected established tools and libraries and wrapped them in a shell that’s easy to understand and operate – without abstracting away the underlying concepts, such as module bundling or transpiling. We don’t expect to change the underlying tooling frequently, but we’ll be able to if something better comes along – without burdening users with the details.
To simplify preparing assets for delivery, faucet takes care of all the minutiae, providing the underlying infrastructure and reducing configuration to the bare minimum required. With all that out of the way, we can focus on actually writing the code. Thus we can easily recommend it to friends and colleagues and get them started in less than a minute.
Of course, faucet wouldn’t be possible without relying on fantastic work by many people; we merely provide a bit of glue code on top. The work on this project is sponsored by INNOQ & fejo.dk. It is used both in production and internal applications by both companies.