Today I launched a newsletter, called Tech That Rocks. It is meant to be a short weekly article to introduce you to something amazing I found in the tech space so hopefully it makes your life easier too! I would love it if you Subscribe to my newsletter
To give you an idea of what it is like, here is the first edition, enjoy!
Welcome to Tech That Rocks, a weekly newsletter by me who is YABWGWAO (yet another bearded white guy with an opinion). The idea of this newsletter is simple, I keep finding amazing tech and it should be shared with more people, so that is what this is. It won’t ever be a long post, and it won’t always be about software development (though today is) - but any amazing tech… and if you find tech that rocks, let me know! You could be the author of one of these in the future!
Today’s TTR is Bun, a drop-in replacement for Node.JS - you know the thing that is probably powering the backend of all your favourite things. Node.JS is awesome, but it is 15 years old and these last 15 years have seen amazing low-level and high-performance languages come along. It also has seen how we have changed our approach to large-scale JavaScript development.
Bun attempts to use that to make a drop in high-performance replacement for Node.js and it does that so well thanks to being coded in Zig (worth a quick search if you haven’t heard of it). It also bakes in TypeScript support, so no more tsc pain! You can be up and running so fast with new projects too thanks to templates.
I took a few projects and just dropped Bun in and they all just worked. I got major performance improvements FROM DAY 1. Bun has some additional APIs you can switch to, which will replace the Node.js ones and give you even more perf… but that is optional. It is not just runtime either, it is package management. I went from 30+ seconds for npm i to sub-2 seconds with bun i. It is really tech that rocks.
The short view summary for me is, that while Deno (another TTR) is what Node.js would be if it was built today, Bun is what Node.js would be if it was built 15 years ago with the tech of today. If you are building from scratch today consider Deno or Bun over Node.js… but if you have solutions today on Node.js, add a Bun migration ticket to your next sprint!