Developer tools influence the daily process of writing software, yet the most effective tools tend to become invisible once they prove successful. Tools for formatting, linting, and building can either lead to friction and debates or seamlessly eliminate certain problems from a team’s workflow. Over the past ten years, the JavaScript ecosystem has encountered both ends of this spectrum, growing rapidly in complexity.
Prettier was created to address the unexpectedly human issue of developers arguing over code style instead of focusing on building software. It provides a deterministic, opinionated formatter that integrates automation into daily development.
James Long, a design and product engineer who has worked at Mozilla and Stripe, created Prettier. Together with Josh Goldberg, he discusses the beginnings of Prettier, the reasons formatting debates can become heated, the technical challenges of developing formatters, the realities of maintaining popular open-source tools, and how JavaScript tooling continues to evolve.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full-time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that simplify writing TypeScript, especially focusing on typescript-eslint, which allows ESLint and Prettier to function with TypeScript code. Josh is a frequent contributor to open source projects like ESLint and TypeScript, a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies, and the author of the well-regarded Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly). His contributions include talks and workshops on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and frontend and web development at various events.
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