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I'm curious, who here has a development workflow such that compressing/minifying code via an ad-hoc web tool makes sense? I've always just included it as part o

I'm curious, who here has a development workflow such that compressing/minifying code via an ad-hoc web tool makes sense? I've always just included it as part of a build process, or at the very least would pipe it into uglifyjs command line. I'm sure everyone's got their own needs but I just don't understand how that would be useful.

derimagia 9y ago
Online tools that minify and touch code always scare me. It would be so easy for them to put stuff in there, like a crypto miner for example.
themodelplumber 9y ago
You're touching up an old website for your old client and have just a few minutes to...ah, I wonder if there's a quick minimizer out there somewhere? That might be fun to try, and we did just add a bit more overhead to the site. I haven't done this exact thing, but I've done similar things many times. Not every project has or should have a build process. And unfortunately not all of them even have a command line...
- reificator 9y ago
  If you don't have an established build process, I would consider a one-time minification of an established codebase to be a pretty poor decision. Either setup a trivial build script, or don't do it at all. EDIT: Clearly HN disagrees with me. Tell me, what does being a cowboy get you here? If it's a measurable performance boost, then as soon as you patch it again your site will seem slower. Unless you then manually minifiy again. And again. Until you setup a build script. If it's not a measurable performance boost, (And I doubt that you know either way because if you're not setting up a trivial build script then I highly doubt you're putting in the time to profile) then what do you get? The next person to come along gets to have a harder time debugging because you don't have source maps?
  - Mandatum 9y ago
    I agree. Minify once it's released and you can test it quickly once to make sure there's no reference screw-ups, but as part of your development process - don't touch that file. I'd say most web developers follow this process though, I'd be interested to see statistics on minified sources. I'd say at least half of the websites I right-click view-source don't minify.
    - stevenicr 9y ago
      and stats on how many times these minify and unminify sites have been used would be interesting. I've used them more than a dozen times. Some sites get the minification just to ramp up a google pagespeed number - not really for the end users - so why bother with a build process? Write some html, ftp. Then pagespeed numbers matter to some people and in some competitive industries - view source, web minify, ftp. done.
      - reificator 9y ago
        But again, if it's so important, then why leave it a manual process? If it's critical to the business needs, script it. If you need to do it every time you fix a bug, make it automatic.
flukus 9y ago
There's a whole world of developers out their that can't automate anything their IDE doesn't support. For many hitting F5 is their build process: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-f5-key-is-not-a-build-process/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-f5-key-is-not-a-build-proc...

derimagia 9y ago

Online tools that minify and touch code always scare me. It would be so easy for them to put stuff in there, like a crypto miner for example.

themodelplumber 9y ago

You're touching up an old website for your old client and have just a few minutes to...ah, I wonder if there's a quick minimizer out there somewhere? That might be fun to try, and we did just add a bit more overhead to the site. I haven't done this exact thing, but I've done similar things many times. Not every project has or should have a build process. And unfortunately not all of them even have a command line...

reificator 9y ago
If you don't have an established build process, I would consider a one-time minification of an established codebase to be a pretty poor decision. Either setup a trivial build script, or don't do it at all. EDIT: Clearly HN disagrees with me. Tell me, what does being a cowboy get you here? If it's a measurable performance boost, then as soon as you patch it again your site will seem slower. Unless you then manually minifiy again. And again. Until you setup a build script. If it's not a measurable performance boost, (And I doubt that you know either way because if you're not setting up a trivial build script then I highly doubt you're putting in the time to profile) then what do you get? The next person to come along gets to have a harder time debugging because you don't have source maps?
- Mandatum 9y ago
  I agree. Minify once it's released and you can test it quickly once to make sure there's no reference screw-ups, but as part of your development process - don't touch that file. I'd say most web developers follow this process though, I'd be interested to see statistics on minified sources. I'd say at least half of the websites I right-click view-source don't minify.
  - stevenicr 9y ago
    and stats on how many times these minify and unminify sites have been used would be interesting. I've used them more than a dozen times. Some sites get the minification just to ramp up a google pagespeed number - not really for the end users - so why bother with a build process? Write some html, ftp. Then pagespeed numbers matter to some people and in some competitive industries - view source, web minify, ftp. done.
    - reificator 9y ago
      But again, if it's so important, then why leave it a manual process? If it's critical to the business needs, script it. If you need to do it every time you fix a bug, make it automatic.

flukus 9y ago

There's a whole world of developers out their that can't automate anything their IDE doesn't support. For many hitting F5 is their build process: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-f5-key-is-not-a-build-process/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-f5-key-is-not-a-build-proc...