As the JavaScript community continues to focus on performance, we're seeing a shift towards improving the Developer Experience (DX). This newsletter highlights several new projects that aim to enhance your DX with minimal effort.
Meet our curator of the month
Wojciech Maj is an experienced developer with a deep focus on JavaScript, TypeScript, and React. Over the course of his decade long career, he has made significant contributions to the open source community, including maintaining popular packages such as React-PDF and React-Calendar. His open-source repositories have reached over 860 million downloads. Known for his expertise in React, React Native, Node.js, and Accessibility, Wojciech also harbors a unique superpower: folding rubber band sheets đ
Developed by the creator of NPM, tsimp offers a remarkable performance improvement of up to 80% in Node.js TypeScript projects. By leveraging basic caching and work-skipping mechanisms, tsimp has made my app start 75% faster while retaining all the benefits of ts-node. Plus, tsimp switches to the --import Node.js flag, thereby resolving the deprecation warning associated with --loader in ts-node.
A $22.5k reward challenge ignited the Twitter community when it called for a Rust-written project passing most of Prettier tests. The Biome team emerged victorious, offering a tool that formats your code in a Prettier-compatible way, but at a significantly faster pace. But formatting code isn't the only thing Biome can do - it can replace many more tools in your toolbox, including ESLint!
If you're managing a legacy project that heavily relies on Webpack's advanced features, Rspack is worth considering. This new project aims to replace Webpack while offering Vite-like, if not better, performance. Still in its early stages, Rspack has shown promising results: I have successfully migrated my largest Webpack project (120,000 LoC) to Rspack with minimal code changes and observed an 8.5x speed increase. Not bad!
Use Yarn? Try Plug'n'Play! Despite some early negative press, both Yarn PnP and NPM ecosystem improved significantly since. While DX issues persist, Yarn PnP can become a viable performance booster in CI environments due to the reduced amount of I/O operations, making it even faster than PNPM at times. I've seen my project's CI install time shrinking from 2 minutes to less than 30 seconds by adopting Yarn PnP. How can you still use node_modules during development, but PnP in CI? Simple: environment variables! Just setYARN_NODE_LINKERtopnpand shave off some precious CI time!
How do you stay updated on the latest industry trends and technologies?
While I use multiple sources like Reddit, I keep coming back to Twitter (I still refuse to call it X) for the latest tech news. GitHubâs recently revamped home page is increasingly relevant, too. I guess itâs as close to âwhere stuff happensâ as it can get.
Any tips for maintaining a healthy work-life balance?
Keep your work bite-sized. Found a bug while working on a thing? Fix it on a separate branch. Need a new feature? Youâve guessed it, implement it first, use it second. Ability to close each of my work days with no work-in-progress tickets, and consequently a clear head, each day immensely helps me to relax.
What emerging technologies or trends youâre particularly excited about?
Staying on topic, I closely watch how Bunâs development progresses. While I donât consider it production-ready just yet for serious commercial projects, working with it on side projects was nothing but pure joy.
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