I recently released two web-based products, RightNow and HTML5 Fridgemagnets, both of which exist to showcase some of my skills as a front-end web developer.  The biggest lessons of both products was simple: continual integration works.

I like Makefiles.  This probably comes from my time as a server developer for CompuServe back in the 1990s, when I was actually writing a variety of back-end servers in C and C++.   Coffeescript, HAML, and Less are all compiled languages, but their compilation phases are usually quite quick.  I also like Fabric (Fabric is a deployment script manager written in Python, much like Capistrano for Ruby).   So for me, the lesson has become:

watch:
    while inotifywait src/*.less src/*.haml src/*.coffee ; do make all && fab deploy; done

This Makefile recipe watches my source tree, and whenever a source file changes it builds the executables and pushes them out to the server. Instant gratification just got more instant.