I learn by doing. Since I started with my new role I have been using Marionette properly.

I wanted to practise using it to feel more comfortable using it.

So, I decided to spend sometime and create my own Hacker News Reader using their API.

MyHN

Check out the source.

Marionette

Marionette is a welcome addition to backbone. I would definitely recommend moving to it for most crud apps if you are already using backbone.

It removes so much boilerplate which is great.

I would still like to do a deeper dive into all of the different abstractions. The rule of thumb I have found that is if you feel like you are writing something generic then there probably will be a shorthand. Things like render, el, events, ui are all taken care of and you can just assume that they are setup as expected. The views are so much cleaner which means that you can be much more productive.

Gulp & Browserify

I wanted to setup my gulp and browserify pipeline from scratch to learn it further. It turns out that isn’t the best idea when you just want to get started and can be quite frustrating.

Luckily there are some good templates to get started I would recommend this one. It allow you to dive straight in and not worry about configuring everything initially.