Introduction to Tree Shaking

At Coursera, we’re constantly modernizing our code base. Whether it’s the programming language or third-party dependencies, our tools do the most for us when we keep them up to date, helping improve developer productivity and application performance. In this blog post, we’ll discuss our approach to improving site performance with ES6 modules and tree shaking.

One of the best ways to improve application performance is to get it for free with the right tooling. This method has long-term benefits since it is automated and less likely to regress. One common example is Javascript minification, which can be enabled with a build tool like Webpack. …