How Instagram.com Works
This talk really excited me.
I've spent a lot of time considering module systems, dependency graph optimisations etc.
Asset-graph [0] excited me previously, because it generated a dependency graph, implied by HTML/CSS/JS structure (e.g. script tags, link tags, image tags etc). This sounds great, but i can imagine it would be fragile. I'd been holding off on it until it matured, but I think now i'll skip that completely...
WebPack [1] adopts a similar approach. Generate a dependency graph of all assets for a web page/app and optimise from there. However, WebPack goes further, by pumping everything through the CommonJS module system. That way you have explicit dependencies between CSS, images and your JS. This will surely be less fragile and can be done without firing up a browser (headless or not).
This feels like the future.
[0] https://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph [1] http://webpack.github.io/