I gave this talk at WordCamp London 2018 in London, United Kingdom.
This was a lightning talk in a shared session at WordCamp London — mine was the Grunt one, alongside talks on XDebug and on finding your agency’s story.
The pitch: a developer’s day is full of small repetitive jobs — compiling assets, minifying, generating translation files, linting, packaging a release. Grunt is a task runner that does them for you, and its plugin ecosystem covers most of what WordPress plugin and theme work needs. Set it up once and stop thinking about it.
What I covered
- What a task runner actually does, for people who have never used one
- A realistic Gruntfile for a WordPress plugin: assets, i18n, linting, release packaging
- Where automation pays for itself immediately, and where it is not worth the setup
- Why “lazy” is the right instinct here — the work you automate is work you stop getting wrong
Slides and recording
- Slides (Google Slides)
- Recording on WordPress.tv
- Session page on the WordCamp London 2018 site