A Sip of Gulp

Meet the Task Runner

At some point, developers stopped asking:

“How do I remember to do all this?”

And started asking:

“Why am I doing this by hand at all?”

That question gave rise to task runners.

Gulp is a task runner.

It doesn’t change your code.
It doesn’t understand your app.

It simply automates steps you already know how to do.

You define tasks.
Gulp runs them.
Every time.
The same way.

At the heart of Gulp is a simple model:

files → transformations → output

Each task is a pipeline:

Nothing magical.
Just automation.

In its time, Gulp solved very real problems:

Instead of doing these steps manually, you ran one command.

That was a huge win.

Gulp felt:

You could open a gulpfile.js and see the entire build process.

No mystery.
No hidden behavior.

For a while, this was exactly what the web needed.

Let’s be very clear:

This is context.

Understanding Gulp helps you understand what came next.

We’re going to take a very small sip:

Just enough to understand the model.

Then we move on.

Let’s wire up a simple pipeline and see what “automation” looked like before modern platforms took over.