Development Methodology and Philosophy

Even though most of us work on projects where the source code is not publicly available, we can all benefit from following open-source best practices, many of which still apply in closed-source project development. Pretending all of our code is going to be open-source results in better configuration and secret management, better documentation, better interfaces, and more maintainable codebases overall.

In this chapter we’ll explore open-source principles and look at ways in which we can adapt a methodology and set of robustness principles known as "The Twelve-Factor App"^[1] — generally devised for back-end development — to modern JavaScript application development, front-end and back-end alike.