Exciting News
In case you missed it -- last week Wednesday was HubSpot Developer Day, that exciting time of the year for devlopers to come together and hear about all the exciting new HubSpot features coming down the pipeline. If you were unable to attend -- fret not -- for the whole thing was recorded and will soon be available online.
That being said -- This year's dev day was particularly ecxciting for me because HubSpot asked if me and my team were working on "anything cool" that we would want to present during a lightning talk. My response was an astounding "This is SpinGroup... When aren't we pushing the envelope with hubspot?"
The only trick was deciding which project we wanted to spend our time presenting.
Parachute
Parachute is a webpack plugin that we built which allows developers to create JSON files that they can import and bundle together in order to create module field.json files.
At a high level -- this means that you can have a single source of truth for maintaining all of your theme's modules. This helps create a much more cohesive UI experience for content editors and a much more streamlined developer experience when it comes time to building and maintaining a theme.
Anyway -- I didnt come here today to chat about my project.
If youre interested in learning more about parachute feel free to check out this blog Post I wrote for SpinGroup. Or just go and check out the Dev Day Recordings for the full scoop!
The Real Juice
After my presentation I received an outpoor of great feedback from the HubSpot Developer community. And quite bit of interest in not only Parachute, but also postcss/hubl, a postcss/hubl parser that I built which allows hubl to be used in conjunction with postcss!
Amongst those reaching out were a handul of folks who said that they too were working on projects of a similar scope and nature. One of them in particular really blew me away, in terms of how it was written and the net benefits that it provides to the developers using it. As it currently stands, it is actually much further along the development pipeline, as a tool, that it really doesnt make sense to continue working on and maintaining Parachute, when such a helpful tool already exists. It makes far more sense, instead, to contribute to iGoMoon's wonderful "HubSpot Field JS" Project.
And that is the beauty of Open Source. That is the beauty of a community of like minded individuals coming together and sharing their experiences and knowledge.
From my point of view -- before developer day I thought that my team was the only team pioneering a tool like this. And as it turns out other teams had been working on similar tools for much longer with much more progress than us. An idea that seems quite obvious, yet, it's far too easy to let the ego and excitement of a new project make you think youre cool.
Yet, had we not presented and showcased our tool, we all might still be working in our own silos -- doing our own things. I guess the point that I am trying to get after is thus:
Simply sharing your ideas/projets -- at whatever stage they come in -- can really open up the doors to collaboration and push your idea/projects to places that you never expected. Open Source projects with a community of folks who care about and celebrate the work of that community makes a huge difference.
Death of Parachute
While on one hand it is sad to see Parachute become obsolete so quickly after pouring so much time and effort into it (learning about webpack, building parchute, connecting webpack to HubSpot) -- it is also a happy moment because of what came out of its creation and existence.
An opportunity to present it to the community. The learning process of making it work. The path it led me down to create a postcss parser. The individuals it connected me with along the way. The programming chops I picked up. etc.
All of these things really make me want to stress to all of you how important and fulfilling going the extra mile in this community really is. Have an issue that doesnt come with the tools you work with? Try to build something to solve it. Think you can speed up your workflow? Try it.
Most of all share what you have - share your ideas - share your problems - share your projects.
"If you want to go fast, go alone; If you want to go far, go together." -Im not sure what the actual origin of the quote is, I've always just heard it referenced as an African Proverb. But I feel that it applies here.