The rise of modern development practices has brought significant improvements to speed, security, and scalability, but also introduced complexity in building websites. Build tools aim to automate the process of optimizing website size, speed, and streamlining 3rd party dependencies, while being dense and challenging to learn. Scripting tools like Gulp provide a powerful way to chain multiple scripts together, leveraging community-created plugins to automate tasks such as converting CSS to SCSS or transpiling ESNext features. Automation tools like CircleCi, Travis, and Jenkins can run JavaScript tests using gulp test or npm test, while Netlify's automation feature allows for build scripts to be started on deployment to a CDN without the need for local builds. Build tools have solved common problems around optimizations, reducing JavaScript bloat through module bundling, tree shaking, minification, and de-duplication, making it easier for developers to focus on building rather than optimizing.