Breakdown of Dev Env stuff:

Bower

Some client-side dependencies do not exist on CDNs (react-player, primarily)
You'll want to run bower install on any fresh run

NPM

Pretty routine stuff here: plenty of node dependencies. run npm install before any fresh run
There are a number of dependencies you'll want installed GLOBALLY to run the app:
- node (duh =P)
- nodemon (for auto-updating stuff)
- grunt-cli (more on this later)
- babel
  - babel (by itself)
  - babel-core (for running babel-based stuff)
  - babel-runtime (not always necessary, but helps to clear up some errors. would recommend)
- bower (for dependencies mentioned above)

Grunt

Default

Just running grunt will compile all the files, start up the server, and spin up some watchers:
- it will watch for any changes serverside and restart the server (nodemon)
- it will also watch for any JS/JSX changes in client/src and recompile prior to restarting the server via nodemon

Compile

Only compiles all the ES6 and JSX stuff, for React

start

Starts the server via nodemon. Will not compile, and will not watch for non JS changes in order to recompile