Tech that rocks
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—that’s what this is. It won’t ever be a long post, and it won’t always be about software development (though today’s topic 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’s probably powering the backend of all your favorite things. Node.js is awesome, but it’s 15 years old, and these last 15 years have seen amazing low-level and high-performance languages emerge. It has also reflected how we’ve changed our approach to large-scale JavaScript development.
Bun attempts to leverage that to create 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 with new projects in no time, thanks to templates.
I took a few projects and just dropped in Bun—and they all just worked. I got major performance improvements from day one. Bun has additional APIs you can switch to, which replace the Node.js ones and give you even more performance—but that’s optional.
It’s not just the runtime, either; it’s package management. I went from 30+ seconds for npm i to sub-2 seconds with bun i. It is truly tech that rocks.
The short summary for me: While Deno (another TTR) is what Node.js would be if built today, Bun is what Node.js would be if built 15 years ago with today’s tech. If you’re building from scratch today, consider Deno or Bun over Node.js—but if you have solutions running on Node.js, add a Bun migration ticket to your next sprint!