Plus Symbol, Symbol, Gulp

1. The Plus Symbol

The plus symbol + comes from the letter t in Latin word et meaning and.

2. Symbol

The word symbol comes from the Greek word for token or token of identity. This word is made up from two Greek words sum (together) and ballo (to throw). In ancient times, a stick or bone was broken into two and each party took a piece. The pieces were a symbol of the relationship, confirmed by the two pieces fitting perfectly together.

3. Gulp

I've just started the edX TypeScript course. So far I'm enjoying it although it's quite challenging. In the second lesson, there's a rather large jump with some missing information, but with the help of a link in the forums to a blog post I was able to set up a typeScript workflow using gulp.

What is significant about this for me is that two months ago I have no idea how build scripts worked. They were in the scary mystery bucket. To make a small change to some code, I needed to understand the build process, and so I'd worked my way through the project's grunt file. Grunt is, like gulp, a build task runner. Because of their similarity, I understood, at least on a surface level, what the gulp file was doing. I'd learnt more than I thought I had!