The first webpack 4 beta dropped on Friday. Very exciting! Following hot on the heels of those announcements, I've some news to share too. Can you guess what it is?

Most applications I write have some need for authentication and perhaps authorisation too. In fact, most apps most people write fall into that bracket. Here's the thing: Auth done well is a *big* chunk of work. And the minute you start thinking about that you almost invariably lose focus on the thing you actually want to build and ship.

2017 is drawing to a close, and it's been a big, big year in webpack-land. It's been a big year for ts-loader too. At the start of the year v1.3.3 was the latest version available, officially supporting webpack 1. (Old school!) We end the year with ts-loader sitting pretty at v3.2.0 and supporting webpack 2 and 3.

So, there you sit, conflicted. You've got a lovely build setup; it's a thing of beauty. Precious, polished like a diamond, sharpened like a circular saw. There at the core of your carefully crafted setup sits webpack. Heaving, mysterious... powerful.

A funny thing happened on the way to the registry the other day. Something changed in an npm package I was using and confusion arose. You can read my unfiltered confusion here but here's the slightly clearer explanation.

I'm quite proud of this: https://www.extrahop.com/company/blog/2017/extrahop-webpack-accelerating-build-times/

If you didn't know, I spend a good amount of my spare time hacking on open source software. You may not know what that is. I would describe OSS as software made with ❤ by people, for other people to use.

You are currently reading this on a platform that was built using OSS. It's all around you, every day. It's on your phone, on your computer, on your TV. It's everywhere.

It's my hobby, it's part of my work. This specifically was one of those tremendously rare occasions when I got paid directly to work on my hobby, with people much brighter than me. It was brilliant. I loved it; it was a privilege.

Here's to Open Source!

My name is John Reilly and I'm a VS Code addict. There I said it. I'm also a big fan of TypeScript and webpack. I've recently switched to using the awesome fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin to speed up my builds.

This post also featured as a webpack Medium publication.

Here's how my life panned out in the early hours of Wednesday 30th September 2017:

Like pretty much everyone else I've been using PhantomJS to run my JavaScript (or compiled-to-JS) unit tests. It's been great. So when I heard the news that PhantomJS was dead I was genuinely sad. However, the King is dead.... Long live the King! For there is a new hope; it's called Chrome Headless . It's not a separate version of Chrome; rather the ability to run Chrome without a UI is now baked into Google's favourite browser as of v59. (For those history buffs I might as well be clear: the main reason PhantomJS died is because Chrome Headless was in the works.)

Version numbers wrong We release breaking changes We don't know we do

One of the most exciting features to ship with TypeScript 2.4 was support for the dynamic import expression. To quote the release blog post:

Updated 18/06/2017​

Whilst things did improve by fiddling with Windows Defender it wasn't a 100% fix which makes me wary. Interestingly, VS Code was always open when I did experience the issue and I haven't experienced it when it's been closed. So it may be the cause. I've opened an issue for this against the VS Code repo - it sounds like other people may be affected as I was. Perhaps this is VS Code and not Windows Defender. Watch that space...

Updated 12/07/2017​

The issue was VS Code. The bug has now been fixed and shipped last night with VS Code 1.14.0. Yay!

I've recently started a new role. Perhaps unsurprisingly, part of the technology stack is TypeScript. A couple of days into the new codebase I found a bug. Well, I say I found a bug, TypeScript and VS Code found the bug - I just let everyone else know.

AppVeyor has support for setting the version of a binary during a build. However - this deals with the classic ASP.Net world of AssemblyInfo. I didn't find any reference to support for doing the same with dot net core. Remember, dot net core relies upon a <Version> or a <VersionPrefix> setting in the .csproj file. Personally, <Version> is my jam.

My name is John Reilly. I'm a full stack developer based in London, UK. I'm just coming to the end of a contract (due to finish in April 2017) and I'm starting to look for my next role.

I've been using Visual Studio for a long time. Very good it is too. However, it is heavyweight; it does far more than I need. What I really want when I'm working is a fast snappy editor, with intellisense and debugging. What I've basically described is VS Code. It rocks and has long become my go-to editor for TypeScript.

Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes of open source projects? One that I'm involved with is ts-loader; a TypeScript loader for webpack. Yesterday was an interesting day in the life of ts-loader and webpack; things unexpectedly broke. Oh and don't worry, they're fixed now.

Or perhaps I should call this "@types and repeatable builds"....

I have had a *great* week. You? Take a look at this blog. Can you see what I can see? Here's a clue: