Piecing libraries together to quickly produce a result can be one thing; building maintainable applications and test suites around them however, can be quite another.

The former approach leads in spending endless hours of frustration and mismanagement, while the latter in the freedom or mastery of “bending” tools and abstractions to serve business requirements in a precise way, an ability that can be discerned in skilled engineers.

While the quick approach can be our only choice in certain situations, one will eventually need to incorporate testing in the development process, sooner or later, if there's any hope of achieving anything beyond a mere prototype.

A client-side workflow plays a significant part in creating optimized and maintainable websites. Here's a small overview of the client-side stack I have recently been using.

Semantic markup

I use Twig, a powerful templating engine and I keep my HTML documents as pure and semantic as I can. I often remind myself to keep things simple and try to separate the content from its styling or presentation, the former belonging to the HTML document, while the latter in the CSS file.

My blog is finally live, and I am very excited! Sculpin is very simple to use and I find the way of creating blog posts simply by editing a markdown file and pushing changes to a repository, really convenient.

At this point I can only think of this blog and website as way of “leaving a trail behind” in the form of blog posts, both for myself by having a handy way to collect or revise information for future reference and for anyone else that might find something useful in these.