Under-engineering: less dependencies, more features and performance

I also published a new open source package 💁🏼‍♂️

Here is everything that I shipped this week 👇

Tech stack

Effect: new core dependency that runs my website, everything is implemented starting from Effect
NextJs: the website uses nextjs (since a long time ago)
Dart: new open source package released on pub.dev (ITrie)

Setup

Every once in a while I take some time to review and improve my stack.

On the web nowadays, if your codebase was implemented 6 months ago, today it would be completely outdated 🗑️

The same can be said for open source projects: they require continuos improvements and support 🛠️

In preparation for a strong 2024, my goal was:

Add features to the blog, while at the same time reducing dependencies and improving performance
Organize and plan a roadmap for my open source projects

TLDR: I made it 🚀👇

Get started

This was the situation of the blog before the improvements:

Local mdx articles powered by contentlayer
NextJs version 13 (outdated)
Effect (without a proper structure)

This is the the situation after the improvements:

Local mdx articles served without external dependencies
Newest version of NextJs, all the articles generated at build time (performance 🚀)
Effect everywhere 💁🏼‍♂️

Replying to @SandroMaglione

This level of performance 🚀

6:01 AM · Jan 20, 2024

There is more 🤩

Timeless coding principles, practices, and tools that make a difference, regardless of your language or framework, delivered in your inbox every week.

Implementation

How many dependencies can I remove while still having the same (and more) features? 🤔

Every external dependency has a (significant) maintenance cost, especially on the web ☝️

My blog was based on contentlayer. Nonetheless, the library wasn't getting any update for a while now:

contentlayer is still based on an older version of nextjs. This dependency was starting to cause some update problems on my blog

Back to the basics: Node

Last week I read a blog post from Lee Robinson (@leeerob) on his 2023 blog update:

This is how to remove dependencies and come back to plain node

I did the same using Effect (of course 💁🏼‍♂️)

💡 How I use @EffectTS_ with @nextjs 💡 1️⃣ Implement all the logic using Effect (Services) 2️⃣ Execute a single main function in a server component 3️⃣ Return possible errors and success value Clear separation logic/UI ✅

5:59 PM · Jan 23, 2024

Adding features and improve performance

At the same time I updated some styling and added some features:

ℹ️ Project update ℹ️ You can now copy code snippets on my blog 💡 This was definitely a missing features, but now it's there to stay 💁🏼‍♂️

Watch on X

6:15 AM · Jan 21, 2024

Another idea I implemented is to generate all the article pages at build time using nextjs:

export async function generateStaticParams() { 
  return await mainAll.pipe(Effect.runPromise); 
} 

export default async function Page({
  params: { slug },
}: {
  params: { slug: string };
}) {
  const { source, tableOfContents, frontmatter, readingTime } = await main(
    slug
  ).pipe(
    Effect.catchAll(() => Effect.sync(() => redirect("/articles"))),
    Effect.runPromise
  );

  return ( /** */ );
}

💡 Win-Win: Less dependencies, more features, better performance

New open source package: `itrie`

I ported my Trie implementation from typescript to dart and published a new package: ITrie

Replying to @SandroMaglione

All open source and available on pub 🔥 Check it out 👇 pub.dev/packages/itrie

5:16 AM · Jan 22, 2024

A Trie is ideal when working with String and words in general (more examples coming 🔜).

Yuval Datner

@Datnerr