Sometimes the front-end ecosystem may seem, like riding a wild hog in a pitch black forest: it can be disorienting, full of nasty surprises, and even seasoned veterans may find it challenging to hang on. You may think, that if you don't check your twitter feed for a few days, you won't understand what everybody's talking about, but even worse, you may miss out on juicy opportunities to make your website better, faster, easier to maintain and so on. I'll talk about the basic set of technologies and techniques one needs to be able to deal with the onslaught of other technologies and ideas you're constantly being bombarded with as a front-end engineer.