Refactoring the Disaster No One Is Talking About How We’re Handling JavaScript Tech Debt in WP Mig

An issue a lot of WordPress teams are facing (including the current Gutenberg discussions) is how do you implement new and shiny JavaScript into an existing WordPress application?

JavaScript technical debt can be a disaster, but working with legacy code doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. WP Migrate DB Pro has a *lot* of JavaScript tech debt in our existing codebase but how much time should our team be devoting to it versus adding new features?

This talk is very much a show-and-tell, you should walk away from this talk knowing some of the pitfalls to avoid (don’t make the same mistakes as us!) and some tricks you can implement today to help you balance this in your own JavaScript development. Peter (the WP Migrate DB Pro team lead), will talk through how to balance solving new problems while refactoring an old codebase.

What You’ll Learn

• How to update your build tooling from Grunt to Webpack/npm scripts
• How to avoid rewriting your jQuery soup but still use the latest shiny JavaScript
• Switching to ES2015 syntax and modules