Earlier this month a survey was built by Ashley Nolan that showed some really cool stats about the state of front end developers and their tool kits. I find these types of surveys to be really good indicators of things that are worth learning, and tools that may be going the way of the buffalo.
A couple cool things I learned:
SASS is significantly more popular then LESS, and less then 15% use no preprocessor at all.
PostCSS seems to be coming in strong, but I still hold onto the idea that its to early to call for sure.
Grunt is no longer big dog on the block, and some people are using NPM as a task runner... didn\‘t know that was a thing...
Ember is the friend everyone knows, but no one hangs out with... 76.8% have heard of it, 4.6% are comfortable using it.
On Q5 I was a bit surprised this was a single select as apposed to check boxes. some libraries like backbone, and knockout pair REALLY well with other tools on the list... General consensus is that jQuery is still an industry standard.
Over half of the population is not using a bundler or testing. Although kinda sad, its probably fair to assume that most people are just using the client to render code, not handling logic, so componentization or testing isn\‘t on the top of their todo list.
Over all its a cool study, my favorite bit of FED meta conversation is in the comments. It looks like jQuery has transitioned itself into a tool that everyone uses, and everyone fights over if they should be using it.