Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve prioritized some sustaining product goals to polish the codebase and update some big ticket dependencies. Among those updates were: React, Redux, and Webpack - the biggies. The first two were pretty painless and inspired the confidence to approach updating Webpack from v2 to v4 like maybe no big deal! Though confidence level was on high, I felt a slight chill and a twinge of doubt by the prospect of making changes to our build configs.

My career as a software engineer started in 2007 at Purdue University. I was working in the Linux kernel and researching how data was shuffled between the kernel and the user application layers. This was happening in huge clusters of machines that all talked to each other using OpenMPI — how supercomputers, like those at Los Alamos National Labs, operate to perform their enormous calculations around meteorology, physics, chemistry, etc.