You Might Not Need Webpack - With Ryan Lanciaux

Webpack is an excellent tool for bundling web applications for the browser. The advancements that bundling a web application unlocked propelled frontend applications to where they are today. If you’re building a production application with JavaScript, it’s very likely you’re using Webpack. But what if you could ship your applications without using a bundler? What if you could write applications with better performance and less developer overhead?

In this talk we’ll Explore Snowpack — an exciting tool that lets web developers "Bundle because you want to, not because you need to.” We’ll see how we can write applications using modern, ECMAScript Modules (ESM) natively in the web without a build step. From there, we’ll add more advanced tooling like TypeScript and light bundle step. At the end of this talk, you’ll be a bit more familiar with some of the native browser capabilities for modern JavaScript and some of the performance implications that bundlers can have on our apps.

Ryan Lanciaux is a professional software developer based out of Ann Arbor, MI. Although he programs in several languages, his current area of focus is front-end development. He helps companies and teams build awesome React and React Native applications through his company Spaceship Studio, LLC. He attempts to contribute to the development community through his (often-neglected) blog.