The World's Most Boring Build System

On October 12th I gave a talk at the Falsy Values developer conference in Warsaw, Poland. In the talk I discussed the idea of abandoning convoluted JavaScript build systems and instead falling back to the tried-and-true original Make utility.

I think the important point to take away from this talk is that most day-to-day programming work can be solved elegantly with simple tools, and that adopting the latest shiny thing from the Hacker News and Twitter echo chambers is often not a wise idea.

This is my first real conference talk, and I learned that programmers are shy and reluctant to laugh at nerd humour. Or perhaps my jokes just aren’t that funny. Either way, several developers approached me after the talk and were filled with excitement that they could ditch so much code.