Mark is currently the tech lead for the BBC News Frameworks team; the author of Pro Vim (published by Apress) and Programming in Clojure (self published with LeanPub)
Mark’s technical interests are wide and varied: *nix tools, Clojure, Go, Rust, JRuby and functional programming. Along with promoting solid object-oriented principles, microservices architecture, AWS services and distributed/concurrent systems design.
Outside of the tech world Mark plays guitar, practices a myriad of martial arts (jiu-jitsu, ishinryu karate and kickboxing) and is a pretty mean ballroom dancer.
Most web developers use a build tool of some sort nowadays. I’m not refering to continuous integration software like Jenkins CI (a very popular build system), but the lower-level software it uses to actually acquire dependencies and construct your applications with.
There is a dizzying array of options to choose from: Apache Ant (XML-based), Rake (Ruby-based), Grunt (JS-based), Gulp (JS-based), Broccoli (JS-based), NPM (JS-based), Good ol’ shell scripts (although no real orchestration around it). The build tool I want to look at in more detail here though is the granddaddy of them all: Make.
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Ruby is a great language. It was designed to foster happiness and productivity in developers, all the while providing tools that are effective and yet focused on simplicity.
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In this article, we’ll go over the concepts and techniques required to build a command line tool using Node.js and PhantomJS. Building a command line tool enables you to automate a process that would otherwise take a lot longer.
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